Testimony of Dianne Ormond

It Started With Science

My journey out of the LDS church started with science. I have always had a deep fascination and love for good science, including watching science programs, avid reading, and visiting scores of science museums (even in Peru). Science is the best method for determining truth, as it is evidence based, reproducible, peer reviewed, works to control bias, and has brought us the marvels of the modern age.

I was born-in-the-covenant, four years of seminary, returned missionary to England, B.S. and M.Ed. degrees from BYU where I was Young Women President twice, married in the Provo temple, multiple Relief Society, Primary, and Young Women Presidencies amongst a myriad of other callings, and true-believing LDS member, obedient, and never rebelling.

Beginning in seminary and throughout the years, I was taught that “someday science will find proof for the Book of Mormon”, and so I put it on a shelf and waited. However, as science progressed, my dissonance grew. After watching a dozen archaeology shows on PBS where nothing in the Book of Mormon was ever mentioned, I called a faithful BYU science professor and asked if there was any archaeological evidence for the Book of Mormon, and how did he handle the dissonance between science and religion? I could tell by his carefully worded responses that there were major problems in the LDS narrative.

That started my reading frenzy through about 100 science and religion books in about 6 months. It became undeniably clear that science proved the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham to be fakes, and that Church history continues to be whitewashed, e.g., Joseph’s magic stone and face-in-the-hat translation, his marrying 14 year olds and polyandry with married women, multiple contradictory versions of the First Vision, superstitious witnesses, fabricated priesthood, and more.

In many conversations with apologists and scientists, I have yet to see any credible scientific evidence of Book of Mormon civilizations. These are not events that occurred in the realm of the metaphysical, as these civilizations supposedly took place in the real world, and as such, there would be evidence to support these claims, yet there is none.

If the LDS church were what it claims to be, there would be scientifically sourced evidence for:

• Nephite/Lamanite civilizations numbering in the millions, including ruins of Book of Mormon cities
• Lamanites, including Semitic DNA in pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere
• Nephite artifacts in Western Hemisphere (if the BoM happened in Mesoamerica, why the "inspired" Indian Placement program in North America?)
• Linguistic evidence of Hebrew or Reformed Egyptian in the Western Hemisphere
• Pollen grains of wheat, barley, and flax in Western Hemisphere during BofM times, along with silk
• Slag heaps of pre-Columbian steel making and other metallurgical evidence
• Horse, elephant, and cattle evidence during BoM times
• Evidence for the global Noachian flood, Tower of Babel, and the Exodus out of Egypt
• Egyptologists would accept the veracity of the Book of Abraham translation

Since none of this evidence exists, I then did research on the brain, belief, and spiritual experiences and testimonies, and science again explained how these experiences occurred within a person’s own brain, without association to outside reality, e.g. Religous Tolerance.

Indeed, all humankind has spiritual experiences and feelings, believing their own mutually exclusive faith is true, which is an impossibility. I learned that spiritual experiences and feelings are unreliable and insufficient as valid tests of truth. As stated by Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

My testimony is based on evidence, facts, and historical research, and I know the church is not true, Joseph Smith was not a prophet, and The Book of Mormon is not the word of God. My integrity demanded that I no longer participate, and I resigned, which can be found here: MormonThink/Science

Sincerely,

Dianne Ormond