Michael D. Coe, Mesoamericanist and Book of Mormon skeptic, recently died

[Bob Crockett]

13 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

You are here echoing everything I just said about the preposterous nature of the origins of the BofM, and the consequent reason for Coe never taking it seriously enough to use his own knowledge-base to analyze it.  I bolded your own admission of that.  That is the point I have repeatedly made.  Indeed, I am not insisting that Coe had to actually do a real, scientific analysis.  He was free not to do so, but it is unacceptable for him to try to pass off "a relatively shallow look" (as you put it) as the real thing.  That is not science, but just bias, pure and simple.

You can contrast Coe's diffident response to that of the late David Noel Freedman, the great Near Eastern scholar when discussing the Book of Mormon with me in early 1984:   https://www.quora.com/What-story-in-the-Bible-proves-the-validity-of-the-Book-of-Mormon/answer/Bob-Smith-3106.  He was not afraid to fully utilize his knowledge-base.

Dr. Sorenson's approach to the Book of Mormon is about as unscientific as it gets.   His "open" letter starts with the proposition that the vast amount of undiscovered and unexcavated Mesoamerican product implies that there is something there -- steel, etc.    Not so.  That isn't science.  

His Codex work is a religious tome unworthy of scientific study. 

His 1976 BYU Studies article attacking competing models of the Book of Mormon geography as inimical to the Church was particularly problematic to me. 

But, to come about full circle here, he did not do any favors to the Church with his open letter to Dr. Coe.

I've read much of Dr. Coe's more popular works.  He is, indeed, a controversialist and had lots of conflicts with his fellow social scientists.  There is no doubt about that.  I didn't consider his attack on the Book of Mormon very meaningful.

[cacheman]

What Bob says about Dr. Sorenson's work rings true with the little bit of his work that I've looked into.  It can be tricky to evaluate information that falls outside of your own area of experience or expertise.  But, I did come across one piece of writing from his Mormon's Codex book that was discussing something within my area of knowledge and interest.  When I looked into the particular claim that he was making, I found that he was at best making an egregious error.  I've posted about it elsewhere on this forum. Likewise, when I opened up the link for his response to Coe, I came across this (Bolded portion is Coe; Sorenson's response is below it):

Quote

Joseph Smith “sees the incredible people like the Comanche and the Sioux and Cheyenne and people like that. . . . That probably would have influenced him a lot. He had to have horses.” [Part 1, 37:30]

Quote

Patently impossible. Nothing was known in the eastern United States about horse-using Plains Indians in Joseph’s day, the 1820s. In any case, the Book of Mormon never suggests that horses were ridden by anybody.

When a scholar uses language such as 'patently impossible' to discuss what someone may have known historically..... that makes me wonder if their confidence level is calibrated correctly.  So, I did a quick 5 minute google books search and found 3 books published in the US prior to 1820 that discussed the use of horses by the Comanche and Sioux.  I'm no historian, but that quick little bit of research that I did makes me think that Joseph 'may' have heard or read something about Native American horsemanship prior to the BoM.  Based on the two examples that I've looked into, I'm not sure why I should place trust in the things he says which are outside my area such as archaeology, anthropology, etc.

cacheman

[ksfisher]

17 minutes ago, cacheman said:

I did a quick 5 minute google books search and found 3 books published in the US prior to 1820 that discussed the use of horses by the Comanche and Sioux. 

Could you link to your search results?

[cacheman]

1 hour ago, ksfisher said:

Could you link to your search results?

I did the search back when the link was first posted.  I just looked again and found some...

https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Topographical_Description_of_the_State/fXlNAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

 

https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_journal_of_the_voyages_and_travels_of/-GJZAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

 

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Prairie_Scout_Or_Agatone_the_Renegad/_gwTAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

 

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Winning_of_the_West_Louisiana_and_th/QHcOAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=comanche

 

 

[Robert F. Smith]

2 hours ago, cacheman said:

What Bob says about Dr. Sorenson's work rings true with the little bit of his work that I've looked into.  It can be tricky to evaluate information that falls outside of your own area of experience or expertise.  But, I did come across one piece of writing from his Mormon's Codex book that was discussing something within my area of knowledge and interest.  When I looked into the particular claim that he was making, I found that he was at best making an egregious error.  I've posted about it elsewhere on this forum. Likewise, when I opened up the link for his response to Coe, I came across this (Bolded portion is Coe; Sorenson's response is below it):

When a scholar uses language such as 'patently impossible' to discuss what someone may have known historically..... that makes me wonder if their confidence level is calibrated correctly.  So, I did a quick 5 minute google books search and found 3 books published in the US prior to 1820 that discussed the use of horses by the Comanche and Sioux.  I'm no historian, but that quick little bit of research that I did makes me think that Joseph 'may' have heard or read something about Native American horsemanship prior to the BoM.  Based on the two examples that I've looked into, I'm not sure why I should place trust in the things he says which are outside my area such as archaeology, anthropology, etc............................

If we do a full-scale analysis of the work of Sorenson, the question should not be whether we can find an error (even an egregious error) here or there, but whether his overall work holds up.  No dynamic scholar in any field is going to be free from problems or errors.  All of us in his field admired the work of the late William F. Albright in biblical archeology, but even his own students came to realize that some of his claims and ideas had been mistaken.  Among LDS scholars this applies equally well to Hugh Nibley.  Along with all the brilliant insights, there are going to be some mistakes or dead ends.  Yet their overall work does hold up remarkably well, the main point being that Sorenson's primary work demonstrating the Mesoamerican focus of the Book of Mormon has been solidly established.  Nitpicking does nothing to displace what must be seen as the strongest possible case.

It would be equally absurd to ignore all of the scientific work of Michael Coe as to ignore that of John Sorenson just based on an error here or there.

What is worse, demanding that Joseph Smith must have read virtually every book in the Harvard College Library ultimately makes no sense at all.  Yet that is exactly what we must do to accommodate the claims of Dan Vogel and others who imagine that anything published anywhere must have been immediately available to Joseph Smith.

Edited October 4, 2019 by Robert F. Smith

[strappinglad]

That library at Palmyra must have been huge and also have had the best inter-library loan system going in order to acquire any book Joseph wanted, no matter how obscure . 

 

( as R.Smith has just now said )

Edited October 4, 2019 by strappinglad

[ksfisher]

42 minutes ago, cacheman said:

I did the search back when the link was first posted.  I just looked again and found some...

https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Topographical_Description_of_the_State/fXlNAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

 

 

 

https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_journal_of_the_voyages_and_travels_of/-GJZAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

 

 

 

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Prairie_Scout_Or_Agatone_the_Renegad/_gwTAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

 

 

 

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Winning_of_the_West_Louisiana_and_th/QHcOAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=comanche

 

 

 

Thank you.

The last book was written by Theodore Roosevelt and published in 1896, so you may want to edit that one out.

[Calm]

22 minutes ago, strappinglad said:

That library at Palmyra must have been huge and also have had the best inter-library loan system going in order to acquire any book Joseph wanted, no matter how obscure . 

 

( as R.Smith has just now said )

It doesn't have to be in a book to be in people's knowledge....people talk about what's in books all the time without reading them.  The information may even get completely separated from the book even ( bet there are people out there who aren't aware that Lord of the Rings is a book first, movie second).

The problem is only having the written word to figure out what they were talking about.

Edited October 4, 2019 by Calm

[Robert F. Smith]

3 hours ago, Bob Crockett said:

Dr. Sorenson's approach to the Book of Mormon is about as unscientific as it gets.   His "open" letter starts with the proposition that the vast amount of undiscovered and unexcavated Mesoamerican product implies that there is something there -- steel, etc.    Not so.  That isn't science.  

His Codex work is a religious tome unworthy of scientific study. 

His 1976 BYU Studies article attacking competing models of the Book of Mormon geography as inimical to the Church was particularly problematic to me. 

But, to come about full circle here, he did not do any favors to the Church with his open letter to Dr. Coe.

I've read much of Dr. Coe's more popular works.  He is, indeed, a controversialist and had lots of conflicts with his fellow social scientists.  There is no doubt about that.  I didn't consider his attack on the Book of Mormon very meaningful.

I try a somewhat different approach than you, Bob.  I try to find the positive value in such scholarly sources.  For example, "What is the Strangest Archaeological Find in History?" Quora, Mar 27, 2019, online at https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-strangest-archaeological-find-in-history/answer/Bob-Smith-3106 .

[CA Steve]

1 hour ago, Robert F. Smith said:

What is worse, demanding that Joseph Smith must have read virtually every book in the Harvard College Library ultimately makes no sense at all.  Yet that is exactly what we must do to accommodate the claims of Dan Vogel and others who imagine that anything published anywhere must have been immediately available to Joseph Smith

The thing that struck me most about Sorenson's response is exactly what Bob C. pointed out. Arguing that there is still a lot to discover does not give us license to support our own beliefs in anyway. Defending claims of divine assistance in the production of the Book of Mormon by depending on what has not yet been discovered or on what we think Joseph Smith could not of known is a very poor defense. And attacking critics by saying they are afraid to consider the evidence is just hubris. The world at large is no more concerned with Book of Mormon archeology or it's perceived threat than they are with Hubbard's claims of engrams and the reactive mind. We are not ignored because we are a threat, we are ignored because of the extraordinary nature of our claims and the lack of what the rest of the world sees as hard evidence for those claims.

It does seem quite ironic. On the one hand are those critics who paint Joseph as this brilliant creative genius and on the other, his followers keep trying to make him look as uninformed as possible. I think he knew a lot more than believers give him credit and a lot less than the critic who demands he knew it all.

Edited October 4, 2019 by CA Steve

[cacheman]

35 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

If we do a full-scale analysis of the work of Sorenson, the question should not be whether we can find an error (even an egregious error) here or there, but whether his overall work holds up.  No dynamic scholar in any field is going to be free from problems or errors.  All of us in his field admired the work of the late William F. Albright in biblical archeology, but even his own students came to realize that some of his claims and ideas had been mistaken.  Among LDS scholars this applies equally well to Hugh Nibley.  Along with all the brilliant insights, there are going to be some mistakes or dead ends.  Yet their overall work does hold up remarkably well, the main point being that Sorenson's primary work demonstrating the Mesoamerican focus of the Book of Mormon has been solidly established.  Nitpicking does nothing to displace what must be seen as the strongest possible case.

It would be equally absurd to ignore all of the scientific work of Michael Coe as to ignore that of John Sorenson just based on an error here or there.

What is worse, demanding that Joseph Smith must have read virtually every book in the Harvard College Library ultimately makes no sense at all.  Yet that is exactly what we must do to accommodate the claims of Dan Vogel and others who imagine that anything published anywhere must have been immediately available to Joseph Smith.

The problem is that I am not qualified to judge the breadth of his work.  The one thing I've seen that he's written in my area of expertise caught my eye because the claim was contrary to what others have written.  That piqued my interest enough to look into it, and I found his methodology lacking in that particular situation. I'm not dismissing the rest of the work.  But, based on my first impressions, I'm not likely to read more of his writings.  How would I evaluate the soundness of the information he presents when I am unfamiliar with the standard methodology in those disciplines.

Your last two sentences are ridiculous.  If Dan Vogel thought and wrote in such black and white terms, then of course I wouldn't put much stock into what he says.  But, as far as I know, he doesn't..... and I believe you know that.  If you have a reference where he says something like 'it's patently impossible that Joseph Smith wasn't aware of the Comanches riding horses', then please share it.  I would agree with you that the statement would be at best, irresponsible. 

[CA Steve]

21 minutes ago, Calm said:

bet there are people out there who aren't aware that Lord of the Rings is a book first, movie second).

I didn't know Peter Jackson had written a book?

😉

[cacheman]

43 minutes ago, strappinglad said:

That library at Palmyra must have been huge and also have had the best inter-library loan system going in order to acquire any book Joseph wanted, no matter how obscure . 

 

( as R.Smith has just now said )

Why?  Has anyone stated that he had access to the books? 

[cacheman]

45 minutes ago, ksfisher said:

Thank you.

The last book was written by Theodore Roosevelt and published in 1896, so you may want to edit that one out.

Good catch!  I will. 

Actually, I can't now.  Maybe I missed the time-frame for editing.

Edited October 4, 2019 by cacheman

[strappinglad]

If JS was the soul writer of the BoM he didn't need to know that the Indians rode horses. Horses were all around him, and yet for all that horse culture he only mentioned horses a few times. My question is, where did all the boats go? Boats were a big part of the transportation in Joseph's time but aside from using them to cross oceans during Jaredite and Nephite times , it's like they had no value after. Many waters are mentioned often in the BoM , canoes not much. 

[Robert F. Smith]

1 hour ago, cacheman said:

The problem is that I am not qualified to judge the breadth of his work.  The one thing I've seen that he's written in my area of expertise caught my eye because the claim was contrary to what others have written.  That piqued my interest enough to look into it, and I found his methodology lacking in that particular situation. I'm not dismissing the rest of the work.  But, based on my first impressions, I'm not likely to read more of his writings.  How would I evaluate the soundness of the information he presents when I am unfamiliar with the standard methodology in those disciplines.

Your last two sentences are ridiculous.  If Dan Vogel thought and wrote in such black and white terms, then of course I wouldn't put much stock into what he says.  But, as far as I know, he doesn't..... and I believe you know that.  If you have a reference where he says something like 'it's patently impossible that Joseph Smith wasn't aware of the Comanches riding horses', then please share it.  I would agree with you that the statement would be at best, irresponsible. 

I have known Dan since the late 1970s and have corresponded with him on the very issues in question -- making helpful suggestions on his early work on Amerinds.  I have conversed with him in  person and on this board, and you probably have read him on this board as well.  I think that ferreting out everything available is a good thing.  However, Dan has built his entire case on those sources, leading Bill Hamblin to joke about Joseph Smith's "Harvard years."  This is not because of one absurd statement, but an entire working assumption that Joseph's credibility can die the death of a thousand cuts -- based on the unworkable and impractical suggestion that he had read virtually everything and correlated it by the time he wrote the BofM.  Or, indeed, that someone else had done that work for him (Sidney Rigdon, Oliver Cowdery, et al.).  Matthew Jockers, D. Witten, and Craig Criddle, “Reassessing authorship of the Book of Mormon using delta and nearest shrunken centroid classification,” Literary and Linguistic Computing, 28 (Dec 2008):465-491, online at http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/fqn040v2 , and at https://www.academia.edu/23762049/Reassessing_authorship_of_the_Book_of_Mormon_using_delta_and_nearest_shrunken_centroid_classification?auto=download .

Of course, the 16th century origin of the Early Modern English text of the BofM throws all that into a cocked hat.

[Robert F. Smith]

1 hour ago, CA Steve said:

The thing that struck me most about Sorenson's response is exactly what Bob C. pointed out. Arguing that there is still a lot to discover does not give us license to support our own beliefs in anyway.   Defending claims of divine assistance in the production of the Book of Mormon by depending on what has not yet been discovered

Sorenson's case has never rested on the standard archeological assumption that more will be discovered, even though that is a correct assumption.  In fact, I know of no LDS or non-LDS professional who makes that case as a major defense of the BofM.  There are probably plenty of yokels who use that as a last ditch effort to defend their shallow assumptions about a flat Earth, the Bible, or the BofM.  Sorenson himself has been critical of that kind of nonsense.  A careful and balanced appraisal is always best, rather than simply carping at extraneous issues and mistakes.

1 hour ago, CA Steve said:

 or on what we think Joseph Smith could not of known is a very poor defense. And attacking critics by saying they are afraid to consider the evidence is just hubris. The world at large is no more concerned with Book of Mormon archeology or it's perceived threat than they are with Hubbard's claims of engrams and the reactive mind. We are not ignored because we are a threat, we are ignored because of the extraordinary nature of our claims and the lack of what the rest of the world sees as hard evidence for those claims.

It is quite reasonable for scholars to examine what in fact was known at the time the BofM came forth.  Why would you call that method (the critical method) into question?  Moreover, it is not hubris to demand that those who make substantive claims (you, me, or anyone else) be held to a CFR.  Why is that bad practice?  It is simple honesty.  At the same time, you may be correct that "the world at large is no more concerned with Book of Mormon archeology or it's perceived threat than they are with [L. Ron] Hubbard's claims of engrams and the reactive mind" [Scientology/Dianetics].  Are we that widely held in contempt?  Really?!

1 hour ago, CA Steve said:

It does seem quite ironic. On the one hand are those critics who paint Joseph as this brilliant creative genius and on the other, his followers keep trying to make him look as uninformed as possible. I think he knew a lot more than believers give him credit and a lot less than the critic who demands he knew it all.

Perhaps so, but simply rejecting the extremes does not give us a real world appraisal.  It merely begs the question.  We need less speculation and more hard science.

[Ahab]

6 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

We need less speculation and more hard science.

Do we really?  I'd like you to speculate on that for a while.  I think all we need is a revelation from God to let us know what is true.  A real, true, honest to goodness revelation from God to each one of us, personally.

Yeah, that would do it.  His word is all we really need.

[Robert F. Smith]

9 hours ago, Ahab said:

Do we really?  I'd like you to speculate on that for a while.  I think all we need is a revelation from God to let us know what is true.  A real, true, honest to goodness revelation from God to each one of us, personally.

Yeah, that would do it.  His word is all we really need.

If that satisfies you, fine.  However, that old noggin you got must be good for something other than just faith-based emotion.  In fact, D&C 88:118 says "seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith."  Pres Dallin Oaks said:

Quote

The three-fold sources of truth about man and the universe: science, the scriptures, and continuing revelation, and how we can know them.  http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/fundamental-premises-of-our-faith-talk-given-by-elder-dallin-h-oaks-at-harvard-law-school  

A well balanced man uses all available sources of knowledge.
 

[Dan Vogel]

21 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

What is worse, demanding that Joseph Smith must have read virtually every book in the Harvard College Library ultimately makes no sense at all.  Yet that is exactly what we must do to accommodate the claims of Dan Vogel and others who imagine that anything published anywhere must have been immediately available to Joseph Smith.

Bob, you must know better. This is merely polemical. It would be like me saying Mormon apologists must believe Lehi was carrying the entire library of Alexandria since they quote anything ancient (including things not even written yet) to prove the Book of Mormon's antiquity. No one believes that's what they are doing. We are using the literature as a way of reconstructing the mindset and culture in a comparative way, not as a source.

[Dan Vogel]

19 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

I have known Dan since the late 1970s and have corresponded with him on the very issues in question -- making helpful suggestions on his early work on Amerinds.  I have conversed with him in  person and on this board, and you probably have read him on this board as well.  I think that ferreting out everything available is a good thing.  However, Dan has built his entire case on those sources, leading Bill Hamblin to joke about Joseph Smith's "Harvard years."  This is not because of one absurd statement, but an entire working assumption that Joseph's credibility can die the death of a thousand cuts -- based on the unworkable and impractical suggestion that he had read virtually everything and correlated it by the time he wrote the BofM. 

Again, this is nonsense. You are creating a straw man, the same as Hamblin did. 

 

[Dan Vogel]

Michael Coe was a great Mesoamericanist, but in his interviews he was responding to the Book of Mormon as he understood it, not as the apologists have come to interpret it. It was obvious he was unaware of the apologetic literature. 

[Bob Crockett]

On 10/4/2019 at 10:14 AM, cacheman said:

What Bob says about Dr. Sorenson's work rings true with the little bit of his work that I've looked into.  It can be tricky to evaluate information that falls outside of your own area of experience or expertise.  But, I did come across one piece of writing from his Mormon's Codex book that was discussing something within my area of knowledge and interest.  When I looked into the particular claim that he was making, I found that he was at best making an egregious error.  I've posted about it elsewhere on this forum. Likewise, when I opened up the link for his response to Coe, I came across this (Bolded portion is Coe; Sorenson's response is below it):

When a scholar uses language such as 'patently impossible' to discuss what someone may have known historically..... that makes me wonder if their confidence level is calibrated correctly.  So, I did a quick 5 minute google books search and found 3 books published in the US prior to 1820 that discussed the use of horses by the Comanche and Sioux.  I'm no historian, but that quick little bit of research that I did makes me think that Joseph 'may' have heard or read something about Native American horsemanship prior to the BoM.  Based on the two examples that I've looked into, I'm not sure why I should place trust in the things he says which are outside my area such as archaeology, anthropology, etc.

cacheman

The whole horse thing is absurdly anachronistic.  The Yucatan cave findings clearly indicate that the American version of the horse was present in the Yucatan within a couple of hundred of years prior to Columbus.  That find was excavated using modern archaeological methods.  I did a very deep dive into these findings with the objective of writing a paper, but got lost in my focus.  I went deep into the libraries at the Bancroft and the Huntington on this subject.  Critics of the Yucatan findings suggest with no evidence whatsoever that the excavation was salted.

I also came across a book published by a masters holder, a woman educated under Barry Fell of Harvard (or maybe Cyrus Gordon of Brandeis; I can't recall today which).  She published a book of indigenous wall drawings and argued that they showed evidence of PreColumbian horses.  But, because her name was associated with Barry Fell/Cryus Gordon, her findings were ignored.  Plus, her book had no discussion of dating techniques.  Surely, there is lots of evidence of man in connection with the American horse at the La Brea pits, but they extend back to the days of the mammoth.  There is a horse in the La Brea museum, a creature about half the size of the European horse. 

And then, I studied the writings of scientific writer Charles Mann.  He argued in his book 1491, with much greater detail on his website (which I cannot now find), that the Appaloosa herds of the Nez Perce predated Columbus.  He theorizes they were brought by the Chinese, as the breed was very prevalent there.  There seems to be some traction with this theory.  The Lewis & Clark expedition bought their horses from the Nez Perce, who had an established horse culture for many centuries.  However, the Spanish were known to have brought that breed to America.  

So, I don't really get it much. 

Edited October 5, 2019 by Bob Crockett

[Robert F. Smith]

4 hours ago, Dan Vogel said:

Again, this is nonsense. You are creating a straw man, the same as Hamblin did. 

Yet that is the consequence of your overall case, Dan.  You have repeatedly suggested "the presence of nineteenth-century ideas and sources in the Book of Mormon" (your 2002 response to Christensen), and have listed published sources for that claim.  Why is that fact "nonsense"? 

4 hours ago, Dan Vogel said:

Michael Coe was a great Mesoamericanist, but in his interviews he was responding to the Book of Mormon as he understood it, not as the apologists have come to interpret it. It was obvious he was unaware of the apologetic literature. 

It isn't so much apologetic literature that he was unaware of, but he had not done a close reading of the BofM text and so made outlandish assumptions about its content.  I am claiming that a fair and impartial scholarly reading of the BofM text and a deliberate comparison with what he knew about Mesoamerican archeology would have at least given  him pause.  Instead, as you suggest, he took a cavalier approach.

[Robert F. Smith]

6 hours ago, Dan Vogel said:

Bob, you must know better. This is merely polemical. It would be like me saying Mormon apologists must believe Lehi was carrying the entire library of Alexandria since they quote anything ancient (including things not even written yet) to prove the Book of Mormon's antiquity. No one believes that's what they are doing. We are using the literature as a way of reconstructing the mindset and culture in a comparative way, not as a source.

So you are claiming that you only refer to published sources to indicate that this or that idea was "in the air"?  Joseph didn't read a thing.   Instead, Joseph merely heard people talking about things and absorbed it all in that way, then combined that with his creative imagination?  Sounds like "you want to have your cake and eat it too," Dan.  Try telling that to Grant Hardy, whose Reader's Guide makes that theory just plain silly.  We are talking about vast complexity and coherence in the BofM which would be inexplicable by that means.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-XC05DHH2w .

 

.