While arguing that Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery may have received their inspiration for the internal geography of the Book of Mormon from school book maps of Central America (e.g., Daniel Adams with Hazen Morse, engraver, School Atlas to Adams Geography [Boston: Lincoln and Edmonds, 1825]), Arthur Chris Eccel, a former Latter-day Saint who is now an atheist, made the following admissions about the complexity and internal consistency of Book of Mormon geography:
This study has been assiduously based on the geographical references in the BOM narrative. Each of these consists of mentions of a feature in connection with one or more other features. The approach has tried to follow a strictly literal reading of each passage. [Two] salient observations should be noted:
1) BOM geography is relatively complex, at least to the extent that it cannot be the result of casual composition or extemporaneous dictation. It is highly probable that a Nephite/Lamanite setting map was drawn up, most probably based on the school boys map (Map 4), with which teachers such as Joseph Smith Sr. and Oliver Cowdery must have been familiar.
2) One is hard-pressed to find significant and clear-cut contradictions in the geographical references. This effects a studied effort. Even the geographical references in the Jaredite record are consistent with those in the Nephite record, such as Cumorah/Ramah, the narrow neck of land separating two lands, a large Jaredite city near it probably being the ruins found by the Nephite party sent out by King Limhi, and a region bountiful in game, at the entrance from the narrow neck of land into the land south. (Arthur Chris Eccel, Mormon Genesis [Hilo, Hawaii: GP Touchstone, 2018], 74-75)
