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I'm trying to follow the logic here and I'm genuinely confused about what you're arguing. Your table shows the Book of Mormon has 16 instances of "did have" while all of Early English Books Online together have 12. If I'm reading this correctly, a single 19th-century dictated text uses this supposedly rare Early Modern English construction 33% more than the entire surviving corpus of actual Early Modern English writing. Doesn't that make the Book of Mormon an outlier on the high end and that Joseph used this feature more than genuine EModE authors did? How does that authenticate anything? If anything, it looks like overcorrection. Second, the 12 instances in EEBO represents written Early Modern English. But language doesn't spread through writing, it spreads through speech. If "did have" appeared in the spoken English of that era with any regularity, it would have descended to later speakers through oral transmission, not through the 12 people who happened to write it down. The paucity of written examples doesn't tell us how frequently it appeared in speech. So when you say Joseph Smith used a "rare" construction, you're really saying it rarely appeared in books, which is a much weaker claim than saying it was rare in the language itself. I'm genuinely asking: are you arguing the Book of Mormon uses these features at the right frequency, or just that it uses them at all? Because your own table suggests it uses them more than the period it's supposedly reflecting.

This isn't obvious to me. The plates the three witnesses saw in a vision may have been spectacular, but that doesn't mean the ones Joseph kept hidden were impressive. My own experience in seminary proves that you can honestly describe something in a way that will make people think it is more impressive than it really is. This testimony absolutely must be discounted significantly because of how it was curated and how the person who had the most to gain refused to allow them to be examined by anyone independent or qualified. My implication is that Joseph Smith led a conspiracy where he was less than 100% forthright about these details, and was able to manipulate others to support him in this dishonesty. This is a bold claim and it raises a serious question. Did Joseph Smith have flexible ethics so that he would be willing to deceive others if it were for a good cause? And did he have the ability to get others to go along with his conspiracy? What it brings to mind is something Joseph Smith said. A little over a week before the Nauvoo Expositor printed its first and last edition, Joseph Smith told the Saints he could conclusively prove that Emma was his only wife and that he wasn't involved in polygamy. He told the Saints: "For the last three years I have a record of all my acts and proceedings, for I have kept several good, faithful, and efficient clerks in constant employ: they have accompanied me everywhere, and carefully kept my history, and they have written down what I have done, where I have been, and what I have said; therefore my enemies cannot charge me with any day, time, or place, but what I have written testimony to prove my actions; and my enemies cannot prove anything against me....What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one." What I find fascinating about this is that none of this is an outright lie. He did have several clerks that made a record of everything he said and did over the last three years of his life, and this can serve as an alibi that he never taught the doctrines in what is now known as D&C 132 and never engaged in polygamy. He didn't specifically deny having more than 30 wives (we don't know, because he had made sure the Church didn't record these "marriages"). If we applied normal evidentiary standards under the presumption that Joseph Smith, the other top leaders of the time, and his "several good, faithful, and efficient clerks," and the women he "married" were all honest, there would be overwhelming conclusive proof that Joseph Smith had one and only one wife, and was guilty neither of adultry, spiritual wivery, polygamy, or secretly being sealed to other women behind his wife's back--however you want to put it. Of coursewhile we don't know the specifics of who he "married", but we do know that it happened dozens of times. And this is in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Latter-day Saints will rationalize his behavior. They'll say he was deceiving the Saints and his wife for their own good. But this brings back the ethics Joseph Smith wrote in Moroni 7, and how he said this stuff should be judged. Does the Book of Mormon "inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ"? If so, we can know with 100% perfect knowledge it is "from God." A misleading statement by eight witnesses doesn't change this. Since we know Joseph Smith was able to lead a giant conspiracy about polygamy, why is it crazy to suspect he led a conspiracy about the exact nature of the plates he had hidden under a cloth that he refusled to let be independently examined?

The problem is that asking for an “alternative explanation for the Book of Mormon” is hopelessly vague. The existence of the some object has almost no bearing on whether or not the object is of authentic ancient origin. The witnesses were hand-picked as if they were experts, but an attorney would have a field day having them disqualified as having no independence and no expertise to determine any of the things they claim. And while I grant that what they claim is well-defined in a religious context, they are not well-defined in a real-world context. If somebody were to seriously testify in court that they saw a magic elf, I’d demand that “magic elf” be precisely defined in real world terms so that I could determine whether or not any given individual or thing was a “magic elf” or not. It’s painfully clear to me that the visionary object the 3 were shown is different than the physical object the 8 were shown. And none of this has any bearing on whether the alleged object contained authentic ancient writing, nor does it have any bearing on whether this alleged ancient writing was correctly translated. The weakest and most problematic data points are the witness testimonies and the writing process. I can speculate on those ideas, but we don’t have the data to say anything for sure because the data that would settle the issue was deliberately withheld. Me not having a theory on these things supported with empirical rigor is Joseph Smith’s fault and isn’t evidence of authenticity. Quite the opposite. I can give you my own speculations on what I think most likely happened, but this being speculative on my part is not evidence that the religious explanation is the strongest one. Repeating how I see this: First Issue: were there plates? If so, what were they? Second Issue: What was the process for writing down the words? Third Issue: Is it an accurate translation of an authentic ancient document? Issues 2 and 3 are totally different. Issue 2 is about how the words came to be. Even if words magically appeared on Joseph Smith’s seer stone and all Joseph Smith did was read them does not give us any indication whatsoever that these words had anything to do with an ancient record, nor with whether or not such an ancient record was translated correctly. Even if we granted that Joseph’s words were miraculous, that just puts him in the same category as Keats, Conrad, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Melville, Dostoevsky, Austen, or Crane. The words being amazingly written doesn’t mean Nephi really existed. Issue 3 is about historicity. Were the events and people depicted in the Book of Mormon real people and events? Was it really written in ancient times? This issue is totally independent of whether plates existed or whether the writing process was miraculous. They are great questions. There are two things to keep in mind: First, we don’t know the answer to them because Joseph Smith chose to hide from view the evidence that would allow us to definitively answer them. Me not having non-speculative answers isn’t an indication that Joseph’s story is probable--it’s an indication that he had something to hide. Second, we must keep in mind Joseph Smith’s ethical standard here, which I presume was shared by the witnesses. According to Joseph Smith: For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God. (Moroni 7:16) This seems like an awfully convenient way to rationalize being less than forthright about things like whether he literally had the real plates in his possession, or merely had a facsimile to help persuade others to believe in Christ. Does the Book of Mormon inviteth to do good? Does it persuade to believe in Christ? If so, we can know “with perfect knowledge it is from God” and is “sent forth by the power and gift of Christ.” That’s true even if the exact nature of the plates were different than what you imagine. So what was Joseph Smith's point? Was it to be 100% honest? Or was it to persuade people to believe in Christ? Moroni 7:16 suggests there could be a conflict between those two things, which is precisely the problem. Keeping this in mind, here are my answers: Q: Assuming the "Plates" were a 19th-century hoax or something comparable (and not, as Joseph claimed, an ancient and authentic artifact), what were the plates made of? We already know what the Church and apologists have to say. What do you have to say? Tin, probably. We don’t know because Joseph Smith didn’t allow a qualified expert to examine them. Q: Proceeding on the same foregoing assumption, when was this sham object made/fabricated? Using what materials and resources? My best guess is that they were slowly made over the 4+/- years between Joseph Smith announcing he was going to translate golden plates and when he actually claimed he had them in his possession. But we don’t know because Joseph Smith didn’t allow a qualified expert to examine them. Q: Proceeding on the same foregoing assumption, who was involved in the procuring of materials and the fabrication of the object, and when? Was it just Joseph (per Vogel), or were others involved? If others, who were they? What was their motive? Why did they never publicly disclose the hoax? I don’t know. Regarding motive, I think Joseph Smith was trying to make money and persuade people to believe in Christ. Q: Proceeding on the same foregoing assumption, how do you square your alternative explanation with the statements of the Three Witnesses, the Three Witnesses and the informal witnesses (Emma, Mary Whitmer, etc.)? I find the witness statements vague, curated, and insufficient to establish ancient origins. My story of witnessing fake “plates” in Brother Brandt’s seminary class in the 85-86 school year at Hillcrest High in Midvale Utah is 100% true. All of the above is 100% consistent with what the informal witnesses said (there was something), and without a thorough deposition made by a skilled cross examiner so we could understand in exhaustive specificity what, exactly, they are claiming, it isn’t inconsistent with the testimony of the 8 witnesses, either. Whatever the three witnesses saw in their vision is a religious experience that has no bearing on the physical plates. Q: Proceeding on the same foregoing assumption, how do you square your alternative explanation with historical information and evidence we have regarding the character and credibility of the witnesses (both official and unofficial)? I don't know exactly what they saw or why they said what they did. Perhaps they were being honest but not completely transparent, just as Brother Brandt was simultaneously telling the truth, misleading the students, and doing it all for the higher cause of bringing his students to Christ. I don't need to know exactly how it worked. You don't need to know who painted the tilma to know it is a painting. Q: What evidence do you have to support your answers to the preceding paragraphs? As I've said over and over, we don't have the evidence that would conclusively answer these questions because Joseph Smith chose to withhold it. The plates were never independently examined. No neutral party was permitted to handle them. They were shown to selected witnesses under controlled conditions and then conveniently disappeared from the world. My answers are speculative—but notice whose choice that was. In law, when a party controls evidence and withholds it, the adverse inference runs against them, not against the people they excluded. I am speculating because Joseph made sure that speculation is all any of us would ever be able to do. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the only evidence we have about the plates is extraordinarily questionable. And it is also extraordinarily irrelevant. The exact nature of the plates has no bearing on whether the words Joseph Smith dictated to his scribes were translations of anything anybody in antiquity actually wrote. Smac, I think you're conflating several things that need to stay separate. I have already conceded Issue 1: a physical object probably existed. The eight witnesses probably saw and handled something. On that narrow question, I'll grant that the testimonial record is reasonably strong. Fine. You're right that I accept Caesar's assassination as historical fact. But notice what kind of claim that is. Caesar's death is not a freestanding assertion--it is woven into an extraordinarily dense web of interconnected history. The political consequences, the civil wars, the rise of Augustus, the restructuring of the Roman world--all of it ramifies outward and forward in ways that interlock with countless independent lines of evidence. Caesar's assassination fits. It coheres. It isn’t merely exactly the sort of thing that happened in Roman politics requiring no mechanism beyond the ordinary. It’s the kind of thing that if it didn’t happen, nothing else we know about the Roman empire would make sense. The plates are a categorically different kind of claim, and the difference matters. Authentic ancient plates don't merely lack corroboration. They contradict what we know. The archaeological and genetic record of pre-Columbian America does not contain a thread that could be pulled to produce a thick book of golden plates containing a detailed history. Nobody in antiquity ever wrote a long history book on metal plates because doing so is hopelessly impractical. Anyone who has seen or heard of paper disintegrating over time knows that is a weakness, but metal plates isn’t the answer because making a record on that medium is too expensive and impractical to be done in the real world. It’s never been done. It couldn’t be done. This is a known reality that the claim has to swim against. Caesar swims with the current. The plates swim against it. Then there is the structure of the testimony itself. You keep describing the witnesses as if their number and sincerity are what matter. But they were curated--selected by Joseph, embedded in a community with every incentive to align with his narrative, never cross-examined by anyone with an interest in falsification. And critically: the evidence that would have settled the question conclusively--independent examination of the plates by a trained expert with no stake in the outcome--was deliberately withheld. Permanently. The plates were removed from the world before anyone outside Joseph's circle could verify them. When a party controls the decisive evidence and withholds it, honest analysis does not treat that as a neutral fact. It discounts the remaining testimony accordingly. If this body of evidence, with this context, was shown to a judge, the judge would rightly throw it out. I know this fact is inconvenient for you, but it must be front and center if we want to evaluate the witness testimony honestly. I didn’t know that. You had said without qualification that the witness testimony should be believed. They did say that the plates contain this record "which is a record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites, their brethren, and also of the people of Jared, who came from the tower of which hath been spoken.” If historians should believe the witness statements at face value like you think they should, I would think they’d believe this part of the statement, too.

The extant evidence of what? If we want to be serious about this, I believe there are three claims we are talking about. Issue 1: Did Joseph Smith have Plates? What was the nature of these plates? Did Joseph Smith have in his possession an actual artifact consisting of “plates"? If so, what was it made of, when was it made, and who made it? Issue 2: How was the BoM Written?: How did Joseph Smith write the Book of Mormon? Was he reading off of words that magically appeared on a rock in a hat? Was he reading off of a manuscript he secretly had within his hat? Was he reciting words he had memorized? Had he worked out an outline before hand? Was he making it up as he went along? Issue 3: What is the Book of Mormon? Is it 19th century Bible fan fiction, or is it an accurate translation of an authentic ancient manuscript? Or is it something else? These are three distinct issues that need to be kept separated. On Issue 1, I don’t have strong opinions and we don’t have very good evidence. The fact that the evidence we have was deliberately curated by the person making the extraordinary claim, and that the basket of evidence he produces deliberately excludes the artifact that would conclusively settle the matter is extraordinarily suspicious. If a magician does a trick for James Randi in a scientifically controlled environment, if he said it was real magic, I’d take that very seriously. But if the magician refuses to do the trick for James Randi and instead hands us a document signed by eleven of his closest friends, I would consider that evidence so unimpressive I wouldn’t feel the need to explain how the alleged trick was done. On Issue 2, I don’t know. I’m again suspicious of the official narrative because it was so performative in nature. It was staged. In general, I don’t know how far superior books were written, and I don’t see why it is any more incumbent on me to explain the details of how the BoM was written than it is incumbent on you to explain how, exactly, the tilma was painted. I realize you haven’t spent any time thinking about the tilma. That doesn’t change the fact that like the BoM, you can tell it is man made without knowing the details of how. On Issue 3, the evidence is overwhelming that the BoM is 19th century fan fiction and not an accurate translation of an accurate ancient manuscript. In my opinion this is the most important issue, it is the one I’ve spent the most time thinking about, and it is the one that has the clearest answer. Can you clarify what you mean here? Are you really saying we have far more reliable evidence of what, exactly? That the Book of Mormon really is an accurate translation of some golden plates that contain the real history of a real people that were called Nephites, Lamanites, etc.? Are you claiming that a competent historian would believe in the assassination of Abinadi by King Noah with more certitude than he’d believe in the assassination of Caesar by Brutus? I’d love the opportunity to tell you why the evidence for Caesar really is incredibly strong, but first I need some clarification on what, exactly, you are comparing it to.

Objection. Badgering the witness. As I have explained many times, I don’t have a positive explanation for specifically what happened that is based on empirical rigor and not heavy speculation. As I’ve explained over and over, the reason I don’t have this positive explanation is because the evidence doesn’t exist. And as I’ve explained over and over, the reason the evidence doesn’t exist is because the person who had the most to gain from proving his claims true is the one who made sure the evidence that would have settled the matter was not made available for independent examination. I don’t know what that means. What are “the plates” he’s talking about? The concept is ill-defined. For example, is he talking about the same plates the 8 witnesses saw? Explain to me what you are claiming here. Are you saying that Moroni gave some plates to Joseph, Joseph had them hidden in a box or something for several years while translating, and then Moroni went, retrieved the plates from the box, showed them to the 3 witnesses, and then put them back in the box? Then Joseph showed them to the eight, then Moroni came and retrieved them? If I were allowed to speculate I’d speculate that the magical “plates" that Moroni showed are not the same “plates” that Joseph showed. He is talking about a ton of ill-defined, fantastical things. I can’t form an opinion on these claims until I know what in the heck he is talking about. If you claimed Brutus stabbed Caesar on March 15, 44 B.C. with a dagger on the senate floor in Rome, I know exactly what you’re talking about. Brutus, Caesar, daggers, the Senate floor, March 15, 44 B.C., etc. are all well-defined things. In contrast, angels, plates, God, the power of God, etc., are not well-defined things. Do you really need me to explain why historians believe Caesar was assassinated on the Senate floor in 44 B.C. but don't believe that Moroni, an ancient Central American, buried a golden book in upstate New York for Joseph Smith to find?

In this thread's OP, I leveraged AI to create "a plausible counter-explanation that fairly considers all of the data." Smac wasn't impressed with mere speculation and wants a "positive, coherent alternative explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation, while claiming empirical rigor." Is his request reasonable? Because if you want to be intellectually honest, the fact that I've told you about the Tilma forces you to make a decision. You can either take the faithful story at face value, or presume that it is fake. Despite knowing very little about the tilma, I'm presuming you think it is a fake. In order to refrain from believing in the tilma with intellectual honesty, do you need to have a robust, evidence-supported explanation of who painted it, when, where, and why? Or can you just look at the claim, recognize the pattern, and draw a reasonable conclusion?

No, they're not. If you were responding to what I said, you'd ask about my a priori beliefs first, then how I concluded from the text itself that the BoM is 19th century fiction, and then about how I don't know the specifics of the witness statements because the evidence was curated. In December 1531, an Aztec peasant named Juan Diego was walking to Mass near Tepeyac Hill in what is now Mexico City when the Virgin Mary appeared to him. She told him to ask Bishop Juan de Zumárraga to build a church in her honor. The bishop didn't believe Juan Diego really saw the Virgin. Juan Diego returned to the hill, and the Virgin told him to gather roses, roses that had no business blooming in December, and carry them in his tilma (a tilma is a rectangular apron cloth he had, made of cactus fiber). He brought them to the bishop, opened the cloak, and the roses fell to the floor. Imprinted on the rough cactus-fiber cloth was a full-color image of the Virgin Mary. That tilma hangs today in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Ten million people visit it every year. The image has survived nearly 500 years on fabric that should have disintegrated within decades. Believers point to studies claiming no brushstrokes are detectable. Here is a photograph of the tilma. Smac, I presume you don't believe this is a genuine miracle. And I presume you reached that conclusion without first constructing a positive, coherent alternative explanation that accounts for the key data points (the tilma's survival, the witness statements, the image's origin), without heavy speculation, while claiming empirical rigor. You don't know who painted it, when, where, with what materials, or why Juan Diego and the bishop said what they said. You just look at the totality of the evidence and draw a reasonable conclusion. That said, you asked me questions, and I told you I'd answer them. So here goes. 1. Nature and Fabrication of the Plates Q: Who manufactured the alleged sham plates? Where? When? By what means? Using what materials? How many people were involved? What evidence exists for any of this? A: I don't know. The one artifact that would have answered all of these questions was deliberately removed from examination. Q: Was Joseph Smith involved in making or procuring the plates? If not, how did the fabricators connect with him? A: Almost certainly yes. Beyond that, I don't know the specifics. The artifact that would have told us was removed. Q: If Joseph was involved, was he a dupe or a deliberate conniver? A: I don't know. I suspect some combination of sincere belief and deliberate showmanship, but I'd be speculating, and you've told me you don't want speculation. Q: If a dupe, who else was involved, and why did none of them ever come forward? A: I don't know. Q: If a conniver, did he act alone? Where was his smithy? How did he acquire metallurgical skills? How did he afford materials? A: I don't know. The artifact that would have answered this was removed. Q: How did Joseph make the plates appear to be gold? What engravings were applied, and by what means? A: I don't know. If the plates were available for examination, we'd know. Q: How was the prop sophisticated enough to fool the Eight Witnesses into describing them as having "the appearance of gold," "engravings," and "the appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship"? A: The Eight Witnesses signed a joint statement prepared by Joseph Smith using the language Joseph Smith led with. As I described with my seminary story, curated witnesses using curated language can create impressions far beyond what the underlying evidence supports. I handled a comically cheap prop and truthfully testified that it had the appearance of gold, had engravings, and could be hefted and handled. The class imagined something miraculous. A skilled deposition would have revealed the truth; the joint statement format precluded that. Q: Was the prop sloppy or sophisticated? A: I don't know. Either is possible. If sloppy, the joint statement format and the language Joseph led with would have been sufficient to obscure that. If sophisticated, someone with skills was involved. Either way, the artifact that would have settled this was removed. 2. Credibility of the Witnesses Q: What is your assessment of David Whitmer? What evidence do you have that he was insane, deluded, or tricked? A: I have no evidence he was insane. I take him at his word that he had a powerful religious experience. He said he saw the plates "in a vision or in the spirit." I believe him. I don't believe that a vision or spiritual experience constitutes empirical evidence of a physical artifact's ancient provenance. Q: David Whitmer spent decades despising Joseph Smith and declaring his testimony. How do you square this? A: I don't doubt Whitmer's sincerity. Sincerity is not the issue. The issue is that sincere belief in a curated religious experience is not the same as independent empirical verification. Whitmer never had the opportunity to examine the plates under conditions that would satisfy basic evidentiary standards — and that was by Joseph's design, not Whitmer's. Q: How do you account for Martin Harris? A: Same answer. Sincere believer, powerful religious experience, curated conditions. Harris also described seeing the plates "with the eye of faith," which he later clarified and reframed over the years. His sincerity isn't in question. The evidentiary value of his testimony is. Q: If the witnesses were duped, why did none of them recant? A: I don't think "duped" is the right word. I think they had genuine religious experiences under curated conditions and described those experiences using language Joseph led with. People don't recant sincere religious experiences. The seminary students in my story wouldn't recant either — they told the truth about what they saw. The problem isn't that the witnesses lied. The problem is that curated testimony under controlled conditions doesn't tell us what we need to know. Q: Are you familiar with Richard Lloyd Anderson's work? A: I'm broadly familiar with it. Anderson demonstrates that the witnesses were sincere, consistent, and of generally good character. I don't dispute any of that. Sincerity and good character don't resolve the structural problems with curated evidence. 3. Broader Evidentiary and Logical Issues Q: Do you have any evidence that Joseph Smith intentionally destroyed or altered the plates? A: Joseph's own narrative says the plates were returned to an angel and permanently removed from the possibility of examination. Whether you attribute this to Joseph or to God, the result is the same: the single artifact that would have conclusively settled every question on your list is not available. That matters. Q: How did Joseph "curate the evidence" relative to the Eight Witnesses? A: He selected who would see the plates, when they would see them, under what conditions, and then prepared the joint statement they signed. That is the definition of curation. Q: How did Joseph "curate the evidence" relative to Emma? A: Emma handled a heavy object wrapped in cloth. She never saw the plates uncovered. She described the experience in terms consistent with what Joseph allowed her to experience. Q: How did Joseph "curate the evidence" relative to Mary Whitmer and the other informal witnesses? A: I don't have detailed knowledge of each informal witness's experience. In general, these are second- and third-hand accounts, reported years after the fact, through the lens of a believing community. They are interesting but do not constitute independent empirical verification. Q: What is your alternative explanation for the Plates/Witnesses/Text? A: Some physical object existed. The witnesses had genuine experiences under curated conditions. The text was authored in the 19th century, most likely by Joseph Smith, possibly with input from his immediate circle. I don't need to know the precise mechanics of production to reach this conclusion, any more than you need to know who painted the Guadalupe tilma to conclude it isn't a miracle. Q: What actual evidence do you have to support your alternative explanation? A: The Book of Mormon reads as a product of 19th-century American theology, drawing on contemporaneous religious concerns (anti-universalism, infant baptism, the mound-builder myth, Protestant revivalism). The language is an inconsistent blend of EModE and 19th-century English, all perfectly understandable to Joseph Smith. The physical evidence was curated and then permanently removed. The witness testimony was curated rather than independent. The institutional incentives for producing and promoting the book were enormous. Taken together, this points overwhelmingly to 19th-century human origin. Q: What rules of evidence do you apply to the witnesses' statements? Are these rules different from those you apply to Suetonius? A: We accept Caesar's assassination because of multiple independent sources with conflicting loyalties, no shared motive, falsifiability, and physical evidence that was available for examination. The plates evidence has none of these structural features. It's not a double standard — it's the difference between independent and curated evidence. Closing Smac, I've answered every question on your list. You'll notice a pattern: the answer to most of them is "I don't know," and the reason I don't know is the same every time. The one artifact that would have answered all of these questions was permanently removed from examination, by the very person who had the most to gain from us believing his story. You're a litigator. You know what happens in your courtroom when one party deliberately conceals the evidence that would have resolved the dispute. The adverse inference goes against the party who concealed it, not against the party who can't reconstruct what was hidden. Every unanswerable question on your list is unanswerable by Joseph Smith's design. That isn't my problem. It's his.

Hi Ryan, Your piano analogy actually illustrates my point better than yours. If Joseph Smith literally did not have the capacity to say things like "save it were," then sure: that would preclude him from being the author. But if he had the capacity to say those words, then we need to look at the likelihood he said them and compare that to the likelihood that somebody else would have said them. Saying God had “more capacity” to say them doesn’t mean that it’s more likely that God did. To see this, allow me to adjust your analogy. The first son might know a few dozen songs and could play the piece we're hearing, even if it is a stretch. The second son could easily play this song too, but could also play millions of other songs, all with the touch of a master. If he had that range of things he could play, what are the chances the one song he'd choose on this occasion is this particular uneven, inconsistent piece and not one of the other millions of songs he could play?

If God removed the conclusive evidence and left us with weak curated evidence because he didn't want the evidence to be compelling, then he succeeded. The evidence isn't compelling. So why are you arguing with me about how compelling it is?

The language in the Book of Mormon is an inconsistent blend of multiple EModE dialects mingled with 19th-century English, all perfectly understandable to Joseph Smith, using the KJV as a crutch even where it contained bad translations. If you’d like to evaluate the question of who is more capable of pulling off such a feat, God or Joseph Smith, knock yourself out. But if you want to use proper Bayesian reasoning to see what this implies about the probability that the BoM is genuine or a hoax, then you have to formulate it properly. I’m not making stuff up here. Wikipedia’s article on Bayesian inference has an entire section called"Inference over exclusive and exhaustive possibilities.” It says: If evidence is simultaneously used to update belief over a set of exclusive and exhaustive propositions, Bayesian inference may be thought of as acting on this belief distribution as a whole. You can do whatever you want in your own analysis, but my approach is to keep this setup logically coherent according to the math. I grant the difference between a passive and active vocabulary. Clearly. The problem is in this question: Why is it considered a god-like hit to an inconsistent blend of multiple EModE dialects mingled with 19th-century English, all perfectly understandable to Joseph Smith, using the KJV as a crutch even where it contained bad translations? If I shoehorn your arguments into a mathematically valid rendition of Bayesian thinking, here is your logic: If the book is a hoax, then it is extremely unlikely the language would be an inconsistent blend of multiple EModE dialects mingled with 19th-century English, all perfectly understandable to Joseph Smith, using the KJV as a crutch even where it contained bad translations. But if the book is a genuine ancient book translated by the gift and power of God, then it is much more likely to be an inconsistent blend of multiple EModE dialects mingled with 19th-century English, all perfectly understandable to Joseph Smith, using the KJV as a crutch even where it contained bad translations. Since we do actually find an inconsistent blend of multiple EModE dialects mingled with 19th-century English, all perfectly understandable to Joseph Smith, using the KJV as a crutch even where it contained bad translations, this serves as pretty strong evidence that the Book is a genuine ancient book translated by the power of God. When expressed with the mathematical rigor that sound Bayesian reasoning demands, that is your argument. The problem with the argument is that you are assuming, without any evidence whatsoever, that it is relatively very likely for authentic books translated by the gift and power of God to be translated into an inconsistent blend of multiple EModE dialects mingled with 19th-century English, all perfectly understandable to Joseph Smith, using the KJV as a crutch even where it contained bad translations. And I’m suggesting that the only reason you assume this is relatively likely is because that’s the assumption that leads you to the conclusion you want. I realize you don’t frame it that way, but by departing from this framing, you are doing something other than logically correct Bayesian inference. I could understand an argument that we’d have powerful evidence of authenticity if it were exclusively in pristine EModE, featuring obscure and correctly-used details of the language that were foreign to Joseph Smith. But why does the muddled, inconsistent mingling point to God? You keep ignoring this element of the data. I know this is how you frame the issue. It is flawed thinking. Here's the problem: your candidate (divine beings) has infinite capacity. God could have produced the Book of Mormon in flawless classical Hebrew. Or in perfect Elizabethan English. Or in pristine EModE from a single consistent dialect. Or in a language no human has ever spoken. When your candidate can do literally anything, the prediction isn't "this specific outcome,” it's "any outcome is possible." And a prediction of "anything is possible" spreads its probability across every conceivable outcome. That means the probability assigned to any specific outcome--including this particular inconsistent hodgepodge--is actually very low. You don't get a high likelihood just because your candidate could have produced the data. You need to show your candidate would have produced the data, and you've admitted you can't. Meanwhile, my candidate has limited capacity. But that isn’t a weakness. Limiting capacity actually concentrates the probability distribution. If Joseph Smith could only produce language within a certain range, and the Book of Mormon falls within that range, then the probability of this specific outcome under my theory may actually be higher than under yours, precisely because my candidate had fewer options. The way to salvage this is to articulate specifically why God would strongly prefer books with a blend of multiple EModE dialects mingled with 19th-century English, all perfectly understandable to Joseph Smith, using the KJV as a crutch even where it contained bad translations over anything else. But you already conceded that we have no idea why God would prefer this over anything else He could do.

Didn't God say, “By my own hand or by the hand of my servants, it is the same?" The deliberately curated nature of the evidence makes it look deeply suspicious, regardless of who is ultimately responsible.› Thank you for admitting that you aren’t interested in discussing my views. I told the truth and I misled. The teacher’s point was to illustrate the strength of witness testimony by making them believe something absolutely fantastic based on the testimony of only eight witnesses. What did the teacher say? Only things that were true. He called the painted plywood “plates.” He said they have “the appearance of gold.” He said you could “handle them with hour hands” He said you could “turn the leaves." He said they had symbols on them that “had the appearance of ancient work.” He said it was made of “curious workmanship”. He said that he literally saw them with his own eyes. He said that he hefted them. He said that despite how extraordinary this sounded, they were right there. Underneath the lectern. Only feet away from us. Then eight of us got to see this miraculous thing. With our own eyes! We could even touch it! Lift it up! Answer questions about it! An attorney who was skilled at giving depositions would ask questions that would clarify what, exactly, we were testifying to. The students in the class weren’t attorneys skilled at giving depositions. They asked questions like, “Really! You really saw it! Did you really pick it up? Did you really turn the pages? Did it really have the appearance of gold? No way!” From my perspective, I was just answering the questions they asked and going along with it. I thought it was funny what the non-witnesses were imagining, and I didn’t want to blow the teacher’s lesson by offering the whole truth that the miraculous “plates” he wanted people to believe in based on witness testimony actually looked like a shoddy middle school art project. I have evidence that Joseph Smith led the witness testimony in the same way the teacher led my testimony. The evidence is that they signed a joint statement and didn’t offer detailed, independent, contemporaneous accounts. Beyond that, I don’t have evidence that the witness lied, prevaricated, spoke with intent to mislead, mischaracterize, or obscure. So what is the point? The point is that this curated evidence is weak. Independent, contemporaneous accounts would be stronger. Exhaustive depositions by a skilled cross examiner would make it much clearer to exactly what they were claiming. And not making the choice to deliberately take away the extant evidence that would have conclusively settled the issue would have made this all irrelevant. But as it is, we are stuck with weak curated evidence. As Mark Twain said: Some people have to have a world of evidence before they can come anywhere in the neighborhood of believing anything; but for me, when a man tells me that he has "seen the engravings which are upon the plates," and not only that, but an angel was there at the time, and saw him see them, and probably took his receipt for it, I am very far on the road to conviction, no matter whether I ever heard of that man before or not, and even if I do not know the name of the angel, or his nationality either. And when I am far on the road to conviction, and eight men, be they grammatical or otherwise, come forward and tell me that they have seen the plates too; and not only seen those plates but "hefted" them, I am convinced. I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire Whitmer family had testified.

Quite frankly, I don’t believe you. You don’t care what I have to say. At all. I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time explaining to you what I believe and why, and you dismiss all of it without comment, insisting that I am “prevaricating.” If you were the least bit interested in what I have to say, you’d at least try to understand why I think the witness “evidence” is weak. You’d at least try to understand how I’ve come to the conclusions I’ve come to, despite not having a detailed, comprehensive, bullet-proof theory explanation for precisely how the Book of Mormon was written. That simply isn’t true. I’ve repeatedly explained that while I did in fact begin with a strong a priori for a naturalistic world view, I then used Bayesian likelihood ratios to see in what direction the needle moved. I clearly articulated why I think looking at the evidence moves the needle even further away from the “it’s genuine” theory. But you ignore the nuances of my evaluation of the evidence and insist explaining how I view the evidence is prevarication. You do this by ignoring everything I talk about and asking me obscenely long lists of questions that have nothing to do with my position. The internet has not produced a marketplace where strong evidence flourishes and weak evidence dies. It has produced a carnival where people retreat into echo chambers and gorge themselves on whatever conclusions flatter their biases. You can believe whatever you want, but don’t mistake your ability to believe something as evidence that what you believe is necessarily true.

In my model, the space is broken down into two exhaustive, mutually exclusive theories. Either the Book of Mormon is a basically accurate translation of actual ancient plates, or the whole thing is a 19th century hoax. That is what we are comparing. If we want to talk about what the EModE language says about the likelihood of which theory is true, then we must talk about the likelihood that the evidence would emerge under each hypothesis. It isn't necessarily unreasonable to break down likelihood into components of "capable" and "motivated," but at the end of the day, it needs to aggregate back up to likelihood in order to form a likelihood ratio and so that we can see which theory the evidence points to. Your infant analogy doesn't apply here. An infant literally cannot commit murder—the capacity question eliminates the infant before the analysis begins. But Joseph Smith literally could say "save it were." He was a native English speaker who grew up saturated in biblical language that descended directly from EModE. Other people in his time and place said those words. He knew what they meant. The capacity question is settled. Was Joseph Smith capable of writing words that consisted of an inconsistent blend of his native 19th century dialect mingled with EModE that he was fully capable of understanding? The answer is definitely yes. The claim that he was capable of understanding and dictating EModE phrases but somehow incapable of coing up with this inconsistent hodgepodge on his own is the assertion that needs defending, and I haven't seen it defended, only asserted. What remains is likelihood. And that's the question you keep redirecting away from. Your theory doesn't predict this specific hodgepodge of dialects any better than mine does. It can accommodate it after the fact (God can do anything), but accommodation isn't prediction. That distinction is the entire point of the analysis.

I'm not making any of those assumptions. I'm simply noting the undisputed fact that that whether authentic or fake, Joseph Smith did have in his possession the artifact that would have definitively answered the question. Under the "it's true" hypothesis, you can come up with any rationalization you want to for why the angel took the physical plates and floated away to another realm with them. That doesn't change the fact that what we are left with is a basket of curated evidence that is designed to prove it true while the definitive evidence was deliberately withheld. Here is a true story that may help you understand why I'm a bit skeptical. This is 100% true. Back in the day I attended release-time seminary in Utah. One day, the teacher said he had a special artifact hidden behind his lectern: a set of golden plates. He said it was made of curious workmanship. He said it had the appearance of gold. Some of the plates were "sealed". They had strange writing on them. They were bound together by rings. The class was very intrigued by this. He then randomly selected 8 students to go up and look at this amazing artifact. By luck of the draw, I was chosen. I went to the front of the class. I touched the plates. I saw the writing. I saw the rings. I flipped a page. I then witnessed all of this to the rest of the class. They all asked us questions about it. We answered them. They really had writing on them. They were really of gold color. They really had rings. There really was a sealed section. The point of the lesson was made: the students who didn't see the plates were forced to believe they were real. They could imagine a seminary teacher lying, but not 8 fellow students. We must have really seen and touched what we said we did. And the teacher never showed the artifact to the rest of the class. They had to believe it was real based on what we said. When the class ended, one girl asked if she could see the plates. The teacher said no. She begged, and the teacher held his ground. She needed to believe the plates under the lectern were real based on our testimony. She was left dying to see this amazing artifact under the lectern that, as far as she knew, was indistinguishable from the authentic plates that the BoM witnesses saw and just maybe somehow were the very same plates the witnesses saw. But if an attorney skilled in deposition would have been there, he would have quickly figured out that the artifact we saw and handled was made out of balsa plywood painted gold, some common binder rings, and cartoonish writing written with a sharpie. The sealed portion was just a few pieces of wood glued together. It was comically cheap and fake. This never came out because the witnesses just used the language to describe the plates that the teacher and religion lead with, and the high schoolers didn't know how to perform an effective deposition. Yet I told the truth about what I saw. And the students in the class imagined something totally different.

A few points. By "sacred language," I just mean to descriptively call the language people use when talking about things they consider sacred. Whether I personally believe something really is sacred has no bearing on this usage. I freely admit that I know nothing at all about linguistics. It would be impossible to exaggerate how little I know. I am fully relying on you to relay what the evidence is. But what I do know something about is statistical inference. I have advanced training and do this professionally at a high level in a context where my opinion has massive real-world implications and is highly scrutinized by auditors and regulators. My knowledge and sensibilities about statistical inference are what I bring to the table in this conversation. I fully accept everything you say about the underlying facts of language, and I fully acknowledge that, as far as I can tell, your way of looking at this is way more nuanced and interesting than "word print" studies of years past. Despite my best efforts, I just can't see how the data implies what you think it does about the likelihood of the divine translation theory vs. the hoax theory. For example, while I accept your analysis that according to what has been preserved in the databases you've searched, Joseph Smith was only one of three people in early-mid 19th century New England to write the phrase "save it were". Does that mean it was *unlikely* that Joseph Smith would write "save it were" when he was groping for words in the language style he was writing in? Sure. I accept that this would be unlikely. However, is that evidence of divine help? That is a statistical inference question that I'm qualified to analyze. The truth is that when analyzed in a logical coherent way, the prevalence of "save it were" (and the rest of EModE) is only evidence of authenticity if you can somehow demonstrate that this phrasing is more likely in the "authentic" scenario than in the "fraud" scenario. If you hypothetically showed that this was written from beginning to end in the language of, say, Chaucer, and that it contained some nuanced theological insights that Joseph Smith wouldn't have understood because the phrasing was that archaic, that would be impressive. But rather than that, we have a theory about a hodgepodge of different dialects that transpire over centuries, and contains phrases that Joseph Smith allegedly wouldn't say, but clearly understood. Maybe that is the best explanation of the data under the "it's valid" hypothesis, but this ad hoc rationalization isn't evidence of authenticity. Regarding David Wright, what is your basis for saying his analysis was so sloppy and superficial it should be dismissed as mere "pseudoscience"? Has he told you he hasn't looked at the things you say he hasn't looked at? Granted, it would be fascinating if the dictated BoM manuscript actually fixed all of the problems in the KJV translation and that subsequent BoM revisions screwed them back up. I would expect genuine scholarship to address this issue and publish the results, regardless of whether the results are faith-promoting or not. And that type of dedication to analyzing the evidence and articulating what it implies is what really matters.

You are cherry-picking what evidence you label as being "unlikely" vs not being unlikely. It is unlikely that a book would begin with the exact phrase, "I Nephi, having been born of goodly parents." We it's vanishingly unlikely that any book will began than way because out of the millions of books that have been written, only about one starts that way.That is the data. You're right that it isn't evidence of anything, but you are wrong about the nuance as to why. It isn't evidence of anything because from an a priori basis, it is equally as unlikely under the "genuine" theory as it is under the "fake" theory. That equal unlikeliness under both theories is why it isn't evidence for or against being genuine. And that is a hill I will die on. Understanding this nuance matters. That's because while I readily grant that the specific language in the Book of Mormon is unlikely under the "fake" theory, I'm claiming it is also unlikely under the "genuine" theory. The hits for EModE are certainly interesting and even unlikely, but on an a priori basis, the "authentic" theory doesn't predict that the language would be in a hodgepodge of EModE mingled with other English dialects that would all be perfectly understandable to Joseph Smith. Claiming that Joseph Smith *understands* this hodgepodge of language from different eras but couldn't articulate it is mere assertion on your part, and just isn't persuasive. You say your candidate author has the capacity to produce this language. I agree: God can do anything. But capacity isn't prediction. Your theory doesn't predict sporadic EModE mixed with 19th-century English any more than it predicts flawless classical Hebrew or perfect King James English or modern American English. The fact that your theory can accommodate the data after seeing it is not the same as your theory predicting the data before seeing it. That's the distinction I keep making, and it's the distinction that keeps getting collapsed.

It looks like I was making a second reply to what you said above while you were writing this post. Please let me know if you really want me to talk about the evidence we have for Caesar's assassination. There is a reason why, as far as I know, exactly 100% of historians believe Caesar existed and was assassinated on the senate floor. In one of the quotes you provided, David Whitmer said, "there in a vision or in the spirit, we saw and heard just as it is stated in my testimony in the Book of Mormon." I take him at his word; he had a religious experience. It isn't the least bit obvious to me that the thing he saw "in a vision or in the spirit" was a physical object. This doesn't tell us anything about the nature and provenance of the physical object that Joseph Smith showed to the eight witnesses, and it doesn't change the fact that we can be confident that the Book of Mormon is 19th-century American fiction. It's clear that I frame these issues differently than you do. I frame them the way I do because I believe it is the most logically coherent way to do so. It isn't prevarication. But I'll tell you what. If you give me a list of questions, I'll answer them honestly and directly, just like I did in my prior post.

Your story about the deposition reminds me of a couple of professional experiences I've had. Since you keep making this about me, I'll tell you where I'm coming from. Less than 10 years ago, a Dow-Jones 30 company announced that it was reviewing its actuarial assumptions for a particular block of insurance on its books. Wall Street freaked out--according to the company's SEC and GAAP filings over the years, they had no idea this company was in this particular business. Six months later, they announced that they were going to increase the reserves for this block by 18 billion dollars and dramatically reduce the company's dividends. The market cap of the company fell by over $90 billion. Subsequently there was a high profile SEC investigation and a massive class action lawsuit by the stockholders against the company. This particular insurance product was relatively niche, and there were a grand total of about 4 top-tier consulting firms that could provide a suitable expert witness for this, and all of those firms had done consulting or auditing for this firm, so they were conflicted out. Basically all of the high-profile independent consultants had done consulting for this company, too. So they were all conflicted out. The plaintiffs and defendants were scrambling to find independent expert witnesses who were qualified for this and didn't have conflicts of interest, and they got so desperate they actually called me. I had my choice, and chose to pursue the gig with the defendants. Over a couple of days my resume was scrutinized at multiple levels and I had multiple phone interviews with expert recruitment agencies and lawyers, and I was acing it. One of the recruiters said I only gave one answer to the attorneys that raised an issue--my billable rate was way too low. The company being sued was sparing now expense on their legal representation and was represented by a giant team of outside counsel, mainly from Latham Watkins and Gibson Dunn. A couple days later, I found myself sitting at the end of a huge boardroom table in the lavish offices of Gibson Dunn, high over midtown manhattan. About a dozen attorneys grilled me for nearly 3 hours. I had never been an expert witness before and didn't know the ins out of the game. At all. I had no idea what a Daubert motion was. I didn't understand the nuances of the difference between being an expert witness and a fact witness. I didn't understand the fine line between discoverable communications and privileged communication when experts are talking to their clients. By the end of the conversation I felt like I was buddies with a couple of the most elite litigators in the country, and I had successfully proven that I really knew my stuff. But they didn't select me for the gig for some other reasons. I was too eager to speculate about things I didn't know. They determined that I was susceptible to being manipulated by skilled attorney asking me questions in a cross examination or deposition. They determined I was biased. And they determined that the other side could have me disqualified as an expert witness by calling me as a fact witness to testify about what I'd heard about this company. That day was a very, very expensive education for me. What your deposition reminded me of is something that happened to me 7 years later. I found myself being deposed as an expert in another billion-dollar lawsuit. Lightly paraphrasing, the conversation went like this: Q: I think it's fair to say that what you've been thinking about and what your opinion goes to regarding aggregate calculations, and you haven't thought about these individual scenarios that I've been asking you about, nor have you thought about how the aggregate damages number would actually be apportioned to specific individuals; is that right? Attorney: Form. A: You asked two questions there together. Can you ask them one at a time? Q: Actually, we've been going for about an hour and 15 minutes. Do you mind taking a break for 10 minutes? A: I'm not an attorney but as I understand it, I need to answer the question that's on the table before we take a break. Q: I withdraw the question. Videographer: This will mark the end of Media No. 4. We will go off the record, the time is 3:29 p.m. I thought that exchange was hilarious. I'm still a novice testifying, but I feel like I'm getting a lot better at understanding the nuances. While I'm certainly not an expert in any of this, least of all in linguistics, I still try to answer questions the way I would if I were an expert. Like an expert, I don't personally have anything to lose or gain if you prove what you are trying to prove. I really am trying to answer your questions clearly and directly. So I'll play ball. Here are your questions. Q: Who was involved with the production of the Plates? Just Joseph? A: I don't know. Q: If others were involved, who were they? Why were they involved? What did they stand to gain? A: I don't know. Q: Were these others pulling Joseph's strings, or vice versa? If the former, why did none of them ever come forward? If the latter, how was he persuaded to spin a fantastic yarn as to the Plates' origins, and then keep to that yarn even when his life was at stake? A: I don't know. Q: Was Joseph deluded or conniving? If deluded, then how did her persuade so many others to join him in his delusion, including the several Witnesses who were later estranged from him and yet stuck to their testimonies? If conniving, how do you account for his personal writings in the many years subsequent, which to my mind are altogether indicative of someone who sincerely believed that what he was saying was real and authentic? A: I don't know. Would you like me to speculate? Q: What are the particulars of the production process for the sham artifact? When? Where? How? What materials? A: I don't know. Q: Do you favor the Painted Tin / Joseph Working Alone theory espoused by Vogel? A: I don't have an opinion on that. Q: If something else was involved, what are the particulars? Who did what? Where was the work done? The smithy? The tools? The materials? Between when and when? By what means? Who procured the materials? Who had the metallurgical skills? A: I don't know. Q: If painted tin, was the prop a sloppy, cobbled-together joke (per Vogel, as he posits that Joseph obscured the Plates in darkness or under a cloth because they would not stand up to close examination)? A: I don't know. Q: How do you deal with the Eight Witnesses? Were all eight just really dumb? They all handled the Plates (literally with their "hands"), hefted them, saw them as having "the appearance of gold," and "saw the engravings" on the Plates, and viewed them as having "the appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship." So the Eight Witnesses were familiar with common tin, but they did not recognize the prop - as Vogel would have us believe - as being made of tin? And they spent the rest of their lives - including those who fell out with Joseph - attesting to what they had seen, with nary a one of them saying "Hey, in hindsight I think the Plates were just made of tin and painted yellow"? How do you account for that? A: I don't trust the testimony of the eight witnesses because it is part of the curated evidence package that Joseph Smith chose to present in lieu of presenting the evidence that was in his possession that would have conclusively settled the matter. Q: Alternatively, do you think the prop was a really sophisticated and well-crafted sham? That could explain how he tricked the Witnesses, but then how did Joseph make it? Or did someone else more skilled make it? If so, whom, under what conditions, for what purpose, etc.? And why was the sham never discovered? Who stood to gain by taking the secrets of such a fantastic hoax to the grave? A: I don't know. Would you like me to speculate? Q: Most important of all: What actual evidence do you have to marshal support your alternative explanation as to these matters? A: I don't have an alternative explanation to these matters. This is because there isn't enough evidence to know exactly what happened. Joseph Smith had in his possession a package of evidence that would have conclusively answered these questions. He chose not to provide the world with this evidence, and instead gave us the problematic evidence that he did. This isn't prevarication. It is transparent, forthright honesty. Notice that the reason I can't answer most of these questions is not because I haven't thought about them. It's because Joseph Smith had in his possession the one piece of evidence that would have answered all of them — and he chose to conceal it from our consideration. Every one of your unanswerable questions is unanswerable by his design.

My argument is that it’s the former. Rather than offering my own analysis of why so much of this can’t be taken seriously, I’d pose the issue to ChatGPT and see if it sees the same patterns I do. It is more charitable than I would be, but it sees the same things I would. Read the below and tell me what you think. Should open-minded scholars who are interested in ancient Egypt or ancient Mesoamerica be interested in what apologists are saying in their apologetic writings? For your consideration: Prompt Write an approximately 1,000-word analytical essay comparing the epistemic progress of mainstream science over the past 40 years with the development of Mormon apologetics over roughly the same period. Begin by identifying several concrete advances in mainstream science from the last 40 years. These should be specific cases in which theories generated testable predictions, faced meaningful risk of disconfirmation, were refined or rejected in light of evidence, and led to increased explanatory power, consensus, or confidence about reality. Then identify several concrete developments in Mormon apologetics, especially in work associated with FARMS, the Maxwell Institute, Interpreter, and similar venues. Focus on specific arguments, theories, or lines of inquiry rather than general impressions. Evaluate whether Mormon apologetics functions as a truth-seeking research program or primarily as a protective and reassuring enterprise for prior belief. In particular, test the following hypothesis: Hypothesis: Mormon apologetics often does not operate by generating bold, falsifiable claims that are later tested and either strengthened or abandoned. Instead, it tends to respond to criticism by retreating toward narrower, less testable, less detectable, and more unfalsifiable formulations of Mormon truth claims, while also reassuring believers that intellectually sophisticated defenses still exist. Do not assume this hypothesis is true. Assess it critically and fairly against the evidence. Address questions such as: • What are the clearest examples of scientific progress from the last 40 years, and what made them progressive? • What are the clearest examples of “progress” claimed within Mormon apologetics over the same period? • Has Mormon apologetics produced specific hypotheses that were genuinely vulnerable to being falsified? • When apologetic claims have faced serious criticism or contrary evidence, have they typically been abandoned, revised in a truth-conducive way, or reformulated so that they become harder to test? • Does the overall pattern resemble a progressive research program that increases contact with reality, or a defensive one that preserves belief by reducing empirical exposure? • Are there examples where apologetic scholarship has genuinely clarified, strengthened, or corrected understanding of Mormon truth claims? • What would count as real progress in Mormon apologetics if it were functioning as a legitimate truth-seeking discipline? Conclude by giving a clear judgment: does the historical trajectory of Mormon apologetics more closely resemble legitimate scholarship that converges toward truth, or a system of intellectual reassurance that protects belief by making its core claims increasingly difficult to test? Write in clear prose, not bullet points. Be analytically fair, concrete, and specific. Use examples rather than abstractions, and do not simply tell either believers or critics what they want to hear. ChatGPT 5.4 Pro Thought for 30m 59s The clearest mark of epistemic progress is not that a community becomes more sophisticated at defending itself. It is that it becomes better at discriminating between what is true and what is false. In mainstream science, at its best, theories make risky claims, those claims are exposed to evidence that could embarrass their proponents, and the result is either stronger confidence or genuine revision. That pattern has been conspicuous over the last roughly four decades. Consider a few concrete cases. In medicine, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proposed that peptic ulcer disease was primarily infectious rather than a product of stress and lifestyle. That was not a merely comforting reinterpretation of old beliefs: it directly challenged the prevailing view, and treatment studies showed that ulcers were cured only when H. pylori was eradicated. A dominant model gave way to a better one. In physics, the Higgs boson moved from theoretical posit to experimental target. CERN’s ATLAS and CMS collaborations did not simply announce a vaguely compatible particle; they went on to test whether it had the properties the Standard Model required, including zero spin and the predicted mass-giving interactions with W and Z bosons and with heavy fermions such as the top quark, bottom quark, and tau lepton. That is what progress looks like: risky prediction, exposure to data, and then narrower uncertainty about reality. (NobelPrize.org) The same pattern appears elsewhere. LIGO’s first direct detection of gravitational waves confirmed a major prediction of general relativity and opened a new observational window on the universe. The later detection of a neutron-star merger in both gravitational waves and light did more than repeat the success: it connected theory with independent lines of evidence and helped explain where many heavy elements, including gold and platinum, are produced. Climate science shows perhaps the broadest form of convergence. The IPCC now states that it is “unequivocal” that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and part of the reason that conclusion is so robust is that specific fingerprints long expected from physical theory—such as greenhouse-gas-driven warming below and cooling in the stratosphere—have been tested repeatedly and with increasing confidence. (LIGO Lab | Caltech) The comparison with Mormon apologetics is not perfect, because apologetics is not particle physics. Much of it belongs more to history, philology, and theology than to laboratory science. But the underlying question is still fair. A truth-seeking historical discipline can make vulnerable claims, distinguish stronger from weaker hypotheses, and sometimes admit that cherished interpretations have failed. It is therefore revealing that the apologetic institutions in question have often described their own purpose in frankly protective terms. When FARMS was invited into BYU, Gordon B. Hinckley praised it for providing “strong support and defense of the Church” and for bolstering wavering members. Interpreter’s founding statement says it will publish articles “advocating the authenticity and historicity” of LDS scripture and scholarly responses to critics. The Maxwell Institute, even after moderating its style, explicitly said it had not abandoned apologetics so much as asked “what kind of apologetics” it should do, while acknowledging that some earlier work had an uneven quality and a more aggressive tone. (BYU ScholarsArchive) One major development in Mormon apologetics has been the shift from broad hemispheric readings of the Book of Mormon toward limited-geography models, usually centered in Mesoamerica. Matthew Roper notes that many early Latter-day Saints imagined Book of Mormon events across all the Americas, whereas many modern LDS scholars restrict them to a relatively small region. FAIR argues, plausibly, that limited-geography ideas predate modern DNA criticism and were discussed long before genetics became central. The Church’s own DNA essay similarly says the Book of Mormon does not claim that its peoples were the exclusive or predominant inhabitants of the Americas, notes that most Native Americans carry largely Asian DNA, says Book of Mormon peoples were “among the ancestors” of American Indians, and concludes that DNA cannot decisively affirm or reject historicity; it even says some apologetic DNA arguments are speculative. Fairly judged, some of this is genuine clarification: earlier folk assumptions were stronger than the scriptural text itself required. But the net effect is also to reduce empirical exposure. A small colony in a limited area, heavily mixed into larger preexisting populations, is far harder to detect or falsify than a hemispheric founder narrative. (Scripture Central) The Book of Abraham is an even sharper test case. The Church’s Gospel Topics essay concedes that the surviving papyrus fragments are standard funerary texts dating long after Abraham and that Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists agree the characters on those fragments do not match Joseph Smith’s published translation. The same essay then preserves the scripture’s status by moving to two fallback positions: first, that much of the source papyri may be missing, and second, that Joseph’s study of the papyri may have functioned as a catalyst for revelation rather than as a literal translation. John Gee’s work exemplifies the missing-scroll defense by treating the Book of Abraham as possibly derived from papyri no longer extant. None of this is logically impossible. But epistemically it is a retreat from a bold and testable claim—translation of identifiable Egyptian material—to claims that are progressively less tied to publicly testable evidence. (The Church of Jesus Christ) Critics, though, overstate matters if they say Mormon apologetics never produces anything vulnerable or illuminating. Nahom is the best counterexample. BYU Studies points to inscriptions and altars bearing NHM in Yemen, dated before Lehi’s time, and argues that the geography of an eastward turn from the Nihm region toward Oman fits Nephi’s narrative strikingly well. That is not nothing; it is one of the few apologetic arguments that looks like genuine external corroboration rather than mere rhetorical ingenuity. Chiasmus research also shows some methodological maturation. Rather than merely announcing patterns everywhere, BYU scholars proposed statistical tests intended to distinguish intentional chiasmus from accidental symmetry. And Royal Skousen’s Critical Text Project is plainly real scholarship: it aims to restore the Book of Mormon’s earliest text by scholarly means, has documented about 2,250 textual errors, and introduced hundreds of corrections with semantic significance. Skousen’s linguistic work is also noteworthy because it is, at least in principle, revisable; he explicitly says that if clearer evidence emerges for later English usage, the dating of the text’s language may have to be adjusted. (BYU Studies) Still, those positive examples underline the larger problem. Nahom is suggestive, not decisive. Chiasmus and textual criticism mostly illuminate literary structure and English transmission, not the ancient historicity of Nephites and Lamanites. Even Skousen’s work, valuable as it is, often shifts attention from straightforward historical claims to increasingly complex models of translation and textual mediation. On the central contested claims—Book of Mormon population history, geography, and especially the Book of Abraham—the recurring pattern is not bold hypothesis, risky test, and clear abandonment upon failure. It is challenge, reinterpretation, auxiliary hypothesis, and reduced vulnerability. In that sense, Mormon apologetics often aims less to show that a claim is probably true than to show that it could still be true. That is a very different epistemic posture. (The Church of Jesus Christ) If Mormon apologetics were functioning as a robust truth-seeking discipline, real progress would look different. It would specify in advance what kinds of evidence would count against favored models. It would retire failed explanations rather than preserve them indefinitely through new qualifications. It would distinguish sharply between claims that have independent positive support and claims that have merely been rendered harder to falsify. And it would treat disconfirming evidence with the same seriousness it brings to small corroborative details. Some LDS scholarship does move in that direction, especially in textual work and in the Maxwell Institute’s partial acknowledgment of the weaknesses of earlier apologetic styles. But that is not the dominant pattern. (Maxwell Institute) My judgment, then, is that Mormon apologetics is neither sheer fraud nor a genuinely progressive research program in the scientific sense. It contains islands of legitimate scholarship, and occasionally it produces arguments that deserve serious attention. But its overall historical trajectory more closely resembles a system of intellectual reassurance that uses scholarly tools to protect prior belief. The characteristic move has not been convergence through risky testing. It has been preservation through narrowing, reinterpretation, and lowered empirical exposure. On balance, that places Mormon apologetics closer to protective apologetics than to truth-seeking scholarship that steadily increases contact with reality. (BYU ScholarsArchive)

In another long post, you completely ignore my detailed analysis of why the witness statements are problematic and weak, and why this "evidence" is in no way like the evidence for Caesar's assassination. I notice you didn't address any of my specific points about why the witness testimony is structurally weak. Instead you wrote thousands of words asking me to do something different. I'll take that as it is. On your other points: Caesar was assassinated over 2,000 years ago, and the original autographs and forensic evidence have all been lost to the normal processes of time. Nevertheless, we can be confident of what happened because of the abundant evidence we do have—not just Suetonius, but Plutarch, Appian, Cassius Dio, Cicero (a contemporary), Nicolaus of Damascus (a near-contemporary), and others, all independent sources with conflicting loyalties corroborating the same core event. This isn't controversial. In contrast, the evidence for the BoM plates and translation is weak not because of the normal processes of time, but rather because the person who had a vested interest in us believing his story deliberately curated the evidence in such a way that the evidence that would definitively answer the questions is not here. That is completely different in every way from the Caesar evidence. The truth is we have very, very little reliable evidence of what the witnesses really saw and why they signed the witness statements. Again, this dearth of evidence is because Joseph Smith curated it that way. With little evidence the best we can do is speculate or say "I don't know." This is honesty and epistemic humility. But just because we don't know the specifics of these questions doesn't mean we can't be confident that it is of 19th century American origin. The evidence for that is abundant. If this were in a courtroom, I'd make a motion that the witness testimonies be excluded from evidence, and in all likelihood the judge would grant my motion. My position is that the curated evidence is intrinsically flawed because of how it was curated. I could argue strenuously and convincingly as to why we should be confident that it is of 19th century origin. And I'm agnostic about your specific questions about how it was produced. Being agnostic about that doesn't diminish or negate the fact that we have extremely strong evidence that it is of 19th century origin and is not an authentic translation of an authentic ancient manuscript.

Sure. To be clear, general logical inference is Bayesian in nature. Calling it Bayesian and trying to formalize it in this structure just helps us better understand what's really going on and get past certain fallacies. I enthusiastically agree that it isn't logical, but my point is that it is perfectly analogous to your argument. Claiming P(sporadic EModE|supernatural) is relatively high and therefore supernatural is likely is exactly like claiming P("I Nephi, having been born of goodly parents"|supernatural) is relatively high and therefore supernatural is likely. You said this in response to my "I Nephi" analogy, which demonstrated the exact same logical structure. From what I've seen so far, Carmack's underlying data and observations are genuinely fascinating and insightful. It is really interesting to find out that many things that look like "bad" 19th century actually have their roots in acceptable EModE grammar. Where you lose me is how any of this is evidence that the BoM is genuine. Here is how I summarize the data we're talking about. If I'm missing or misrepresenting anything in a material way, please feel free to clarify. The Book of Mormon's EModE language evidence: is a loose translation of the original document into a language that is a hodgepodge of an inconsistent variety secular and sacred English dialects that existed between the 1500s and early 1800s 100% of the specific wording and phrases that were used were completely understandable to Joseph Smith, but allegedly wouldn't be the words he as translator would choose to use, even if speaking in the sacred register of early 19th century New England Perhaps for reasons of economical usage of the power of God, the KJV bible was used as a crutch for the related passages, even if it contained bad translations In general, for the stuff taken from the Bible the BoM translation didn't fix anything that was broken in the KJV, but instead broke many things that were translated fine Allegedly had a very tight transfer of the specific words from this loose, mediocre translation into what Joseph Smith subsequently dictated You seem to be telling me that when viewed it its entirety, this is pretty-much exactly what we'd expect if the Book of Mormon is genuine, but that this would be impossibly unlikely if the book wasn't genuine. Therefore, this constitutes very strong evidence that the book is genuine. From my perspective, that is drawing the bulls eye after the bullets hit the barn. I grant that in absolute terms, all of this is as unlikely, but it's unlikely in the same way that a book starting with the words "I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents" is unlikely. From my perspective, the EModE evidence is about as unlikely in the "it's true" scenario as it is in the "it's false" scenario.

Yes and no. There are many incredibly smart and educated people researching and writing on apologetic topics, and regarding the number of participants and qualifications of the people who engage with them, the apologists win by numbers. I agree with him up to that point. However, I think there are some big and valid reasons that mainstream scholars politely ignore Mormon apologetics. Perhaps 10 or 15 years ago on this forum, I got into a deep discussion with Brant Gardner about this. He's a pretty reasonable guy and I like him, and he was talking about how his team had a consortium of very respected people like Sorenson and how their work, in aggregate, supported BoM authenticity. But he claimed that despite their work that proved this, the wider scholarly community just wasn't interested. I then asked him a question like this: if there were a long, pristine manuscript that was written by authentic ancient Mesoamericans that described their culture, religion, and history, and if this manuscript were correctly translated into English, would the scholarly community be interested? His answer was revealing. He said something like, "Yes! They'd be extraordinarily interested! Scholars LOVE texts!" I then asked a totally valid question: if mainstream scholars have so much respect for Sorenson et al., and if they "love texts" as much as you say they do, then why don't they listen to Sorenson et al. when they claim that the BoM is exactly the type of thing they say they love? He didn't answer. About 25 years ago, I lived in New England and had the opportunity to spend a day with David P. Wright. I asked him the same question and we discussed it quite a bit. I won't put words in his mouth, but his position informed what I now believe: Mormon apologetics is best categorized as pseudoscience, and mainstream scholars ignore it for the same reason they ignore pseudoscience in general: it is boring, irrelevant, and so fundamentally unpersuasive that they see no reason to engage with it. Mormon apologetics exists in its own silo that is a form of macro mental-compartmentalizaton apart from mainstream scholarship. As Michael Shermer explained in Scientific American, smart people believe weird things. Apologetics is an example of this. "Weird" beliefs are formed for psychological and sociological reasons, and then smart people leverage their intellect to rationalize them. There ends up being a big compromise with the broader scholarly community--apologists will keep their weird siloed in their pseudoscientific venues and only publish real research in real venues, and the mainstream will politely ignore the apologetics.

I think it's pretty subjective regardless, and that's actually part of my point. Writers from my time and place might use, for example, "infinite causatives" 90% of the time or whatever, but that doesn't mean that there is some sort of random number generator in my brain that forces me to select infinitive 90% of the time and finite 10% of the time and that if my usage varies too much from that, it is statistical evidence that I'm from Mars. The truth is I can choose any words that I want, and if I happen to choose words different from the pattern Carmack expects, all it means is that I chose words different than the pattern he expects. The way I see it, Joseph Smith (or whoever the author was), was deeply emerged in the religious world of New England in the early 1800's. In this world, there was in fact a sacred register of English that had many elements of EModE that were taken both from the Bible and from the verbal sacred traditions that descended from EModE. We would expect this sacred register would include multiple dialects of EModE, with influences from secular registers over that same time period. And that is exactly what we see in the Book of Mormon. It is clear to me that this pattern of sporadic EModE mingled with secular registers is best explained as a description of the 19th century author's sacred register and is much harder to explain by saying it must have come from some sort of ghost committee with heterogeneous dialects that were nevertheless all understandable to Joseph Smith. I wouldn't say this is evidence in favor of the BoM being a fake, because I'd expect the BoM to be in Joseph Smith's sacred register regardless of whether it is fiction or whether it is something he translated. The real insight here isn't evidence for whether the book is authentic. The insight is in the nature of what his verbal sacred register actually was.

To clarify, when I say “before” I’m talking logically, not chronologically. If a “ray gun” is in the body of evidence, then we need to estimate what is the probability of that being in the evidence under both scenarios from the idealized logical footing of theoretically not knowing before hand this would show up. But if we can’t at least say that the probability of a space-traveling alien leaving us with "weird technology" is something like x% and the probability of a fake alien leaving us with "weird technology" is y%, then we have no logical basis of weighing the implications of the evidence on whether it indicates the alien is real or fake. Let me make the point in a different way. Imagine that I was a budding apologist and I was about to post something on the Internet to prove the Church was true, and I asked for your feedback before posting. Here is my proposed apologetics: It is extraordinarily unlikely that a book written by a human being would begin with the exact phrase, “I Nephi, having been born of goodly parents.” We’ve searched every book ever written in any language, and nobody has ever started a book with those eight words in that order. In contrast, if the Book of Mormon is exactly what it claims to be, then the book starting with “I Nephi, having been born of goodly parents” is exactly what we’d expect. Since these eight words are exactly what we’d predict under the “it’s true” hypothesis but are almost impossible under the “it’s a fake” hypothesis, this is extraordinarily strong evidence that the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be. What would you think of this argument? I would say the problem with this is that the expectation that a genuine book would start with “I Nephi, having been born of goodly parents” is an expectation that was made after it was noted that is how the BoM actually starts. The correct way to evaluate this is to say that a book starting with those eight words is extraordinarily unlikely under both theories, and thus isn’t evidence one way or the other. I think this is the mistake you are making. You came to the conclusion that P(sporadic EModE|supernatural) is high after noting that the Book of Mormon contains sporadic EModE.

I do think Joseph Smith is the most likely candidate, although I can’t help but imagine that his mother and brother were co-conspirators on some level. My point here is structural--the scenarios being tested need to be exhaustive. If you somehow demonstrated that the Book of Mormon is full of words and phrases that Joseph Smith wouldn’t ever say, that doesn’t necessarily point to a divine origin--it could also point to another modern author.