Meridian Magazine: “Why I Can’t Manage to Disbelieve”

I hadn’t realized that this article was up (or that it was coming):

http://ldsmag.com/why-i-cant-manage-to-disbelieve/

The critical responses that I’ve seen to my FairMormon remarks have been fairly predictable.  One such response simply declines to engage what I said, on the grounds that I’m simply irrational (or some such thing).  Another asserts that unbelievers are not obliged to propose a counterexplanation for the Book of Mormon.

I understand that.  Certainly, the typical Buddhist in Sri Lanka, who has probably never even heard of Mormonism, has no strong obligation to account for the book.  Nor does an apathetic and uncurious person who simply dismisses the book, knows essentially nothing about it, and has little or nothing to say about it.

But people who insistently assert the falsehood of the Book of Mormon do, I think, have such an obligation.  At least to some substantial degree.  Or, to put it another way, if they insist that the book is the product of either hallucination or fraud, they haven’t fully fulfilled their intellectual responsibility on the topic until they explain how fraud or hallucination produced it.  Its very existence poses a challenge.