Analytics

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.

Hi Smac, This is a mammoth post, even for you. It's frustrating, because while it is purportedly a response to what I said, it doesn't address most of my underlying points. This conversation is weird because you keep pestering me with questions about why I believe what I do, and when I finally answer them you berate me as being an anti-Mormon for doing so. If you don't want to know why I believe what I do, stop asking. I'll restate my underlying points and give you another opportunity to actually address them. I'm 100% in favor of carefully examining all of the evidence. I simply insist that it be done with the appropriate amount of skepticism and in a logically coherent way. I used the courtroom analogy to help illustrate why the witness testimony really is fundamentally problematic and weak. The analogy is especially apt because the evidence we have was submitted by an interested party that wanted people to believe it. Joseph Smith wanted people to take the book seriously, purchase it from him, join his church, give him 10% of their lifetime income, follow him, help him build his utopia, and in many cases, allow him to marry their wives and daughters. Like a trial attorney, he submitted the witness testimony to the world so that he could make this case and achieve these results. As you said, there is nothing inherently wrong with family members and friends serving as fact witnesses for things they happened to see. But in this case, they didn't just happen to witness something--they were selected to witness something, not based on expertise, but on being loyal followers of Joseph. They were selected by Joseph Smith, prepared by Joseph Smith, experienced whatever they did under conditions controlled by Joseph Smith, and then signed joint statements prepared by Joseph Smith. This is not how ordinary witness testimony works. This is how curated religious experience works. The issue is further complicated by how impossible it is to independently verify any physical characteristic of the implausible artifact they claim to have seen. Joseph needed curated witnesses because he ensured the plates were permanently removed from independent examination. Saying this was an angel's decision and not Joseph's doesn't change the fact that this is an act of deliberately going to extraordinary lengths to conceal from experts and from the public the evidence that would conclusively settle the issue. Discovery is a fundamental element of our court system so that all of the evidence can be examined by both sides. But here, the side with the most to gain from proving the plates authentic is the one who deliberately chose to remove from consideration the evidence that would conclusively settle the matter. This screams the question: why? You invoked Caesar. Let's look at Caesar carefully, because I think that comparison actually illustrates my point. We accept that Caesar was assassinated--not because we trust Mark Antony's testimony, not because twenty-three senators swore they did it, but because of structural features of the evidence. The body existed and was examined by Antony's physician. The wound locations were documented. Dozens of people present in the Senate that day told versions consistent with each other and inconsistent with any cover story that would have served them. Many of the witnesses were enemies of each other with no shared motive. None of them had anything to gain by fabricating the story. Fabricating Caesar's death when Caesar was manifestly not dead would have been immediately falsifiable. The wound locations didn't disappear. The body didn't get "returned to the gods" before a physician could examine it. The plates evidence has none of these structural features. The question "would they lie?" isn't the right question. First, because what they are attesting to is so fundamentally weird and unlike anything that we know of that happens in the real world, I don't feel obligated to pass judgment until I know exactly what they are attesting to, which wouldn't come to light without a full deposition. That detail aside, we are left not understanding whether this was driven primarily by sincere belief, a mixture of white lies and the BoM rationalization that "whatsoever causes people to believe" is of God (Moroni 7), coordinated social pressure, or oaths. At the end of the day, we are left with curated religious experiences--not fact-based testimony consistent with real-world testimony. The plates evidence doesn't fail because the witnesses were liars. It fails because Joseph controlled who saw the evidence, when they saw it, how they saw it, and then permanently removed it from any possibility of independent verification. And this was done because the evidence that would have conclusively settled the matter was deliberately withheld. That matters.

That's the problem -- the way you frame it is not valid. In a general form, it must be of this structure: What are the chances of seeing the totality of the evidence under theory A? What are the chances of seeing the totality of the evidence under theory B? For logical induction to be valid, you need to engage with all the evidence -- not just the subset that supports the position you are committed to defending. One more important note: the competing theories need to be exhaustive and non-overlapping. By limiting the second theory to "if Joseph Smith worded the text himself," you are ignoring the possibility that he had help from others. A better formulation would be "if somebody in the 19th century worded the text without divine help." So what is "the totality of the evidence" in this case? The totality of the evidence regarding BoM language is that it is a blend of English dialects ranging from EModE--including both KJV English and non-KJV EModE--and other words, phrases, and structures that entered the language after that period. Furthermore, when evaluating the likelihood of seeing the totality of the evidence, you need to make that estimate before looking at the evidence, not after. Whether a divine being has the capacity to produce a hodgepodge of archaic, pseudo-archaic, and 19th-century language in a single document is irrelevant. What matters is the likelihood that this evidence would emerge under the theory that it is genuine. So before looking at Carmack’s evidence and looking under the hypothesis that the Church is true, what should we expect the language of the Book of Mormon to look like? Would we expect it to be a hodgepodge of misunderstood and dead archaisms mingled with KJV English and 19th-century American dialect? Consider: For my soul delighteth in plainness; for after this manner doth the Lord God work among the children of men. For the Lord God giveth light unto the understanding; for he speaketh unto men according to their language, unto their understanding. (2 Nephi 31:3) Behold, I am God and have spoken it; these commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding. (D&C 1:24) For it shall come to pass in that day, that every man shall hear the fulness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language. (D&C 90:11) Under the hypothesis that the Book of Mormon is true, I would expect its language to be "in the language of Joseph Smith, according to his understanding." The hypothesis that the Book of Mormon was partially and inconsistently given in the language of dead Englishmen is not something I would have predicted. This theory contradicts the very message of the book it is trying to defend. So to the extent that phrases like "save it were" are genuinely archaic and were not in the register of 19th-century New Englanders, then sure: their appearance is extremely unlikely. But it is unlikely in both the theory that the book is genuine and in the theory that it is not. Having said that, Nathaniel Hawthorne used the phrase in The Scarlet Letter (1850). Jones Very--a poet born in Salem, Massachusetts--used it in his 1837 poem "Beauty." Both were New Englanders, as was Joseph Smith's family before they moved to upstate New York. The phrase was apparently available in the literary and sacred register of 19th-century New England. So while I’ll grant this phrase might be “unlikely”, it certainly wasn’t impossible. Evidence that is equally unlikely under both theories doesn't favor either one.

I understand this is your point. But you continue to miss mine, so I'll ask the question again: an extraordinary improbability compared to what? Here is the evidence we are talking about: The Book of Mormon was written in a blend of English dialects that range from EModE, including both KJV English and non-KJV EModE, and other words, phrases, and structures that entered the language after that period. That is the evidence. I believe the correct way to evaluate it is by answering two questions in relationship to each other so that a likelihood ratio can be developed: What are the chances of seeing this evidence if the Book is authentic? What are the chances of seeing this evidence if the Book is not authentic? You need both. You can't evaluate the strength of evidence with only one of these. This is the key Bayesian insight that I keep coming back to, and it's the point I think you keep missing. Your argument, as I understand it, is that P(EModE|naturalistic) is very low, and that P(EModE|supernatural) is unknowable because we don't know how God goes about translating ancient texts. You then conclude that EModE is strong evidence of authenticity. But that doesn't follow. If P(EModE|supernatural) is unknowable, then you don't have a likelihood ratio, and without a likelihood ratio you have no basis for claiming this evidence favors authenticity. You're treating "unknowable" as though it means "favorable," and that is not the same thing. Furthermore, there was no a priori reason the Book couldn't have been translated into straightforward KJV English--the sacred register of Joseph Smith's time and place. The fact that it wasn't--that instead we get this heterogeneous blend spanning centuries of English--is at least as unexpected under divine translation as it is under naturalistic authorship. A divine translator choosing to produce a linguistic patchwork needs explaining too. So again, here is my point as straightforward as I can make it: If we can't evaluate the likelihood of seeing the data under the authentic hypothesis, then we can't evaluate the implications this data has on the BoM being authentic.

Great. Do you want make a serious examination of the evidence? Let’s look at the witness statements, not as an apologist, but as a jurist. How would the evidence be evaluated if this were being tried in court? Smac, you're the lawyer here and I'm not, so push back if I get the legal framework wrong. But I think the framework is useful even for a lay audience because the rules of evidence aren't arbitrary technicalities--they evolved over centuries specifically to help us figure out when testimony is trustworthy and when it isn't. Let's start with the basics. In a legal proceeding, witnesses generally fall into two categories: fact witnesses and expert witnesses. A fact witness testifies about what they personally observed. An expert witness is qualified by training and experience to offer opinions in a specialized domain--metallurgy, ancient languages, archaeology, etc. So which are the Book of Mormon witnesses? They aren't expert witnesses. None of them had expertise in metallurgy, ancient languages, archaeology, or any other field that would qualify them to authenticate an ancient artifact. They couldn't evaluate whether the plates were gold, tumbaga, or tin. They couldn't read the inscriptions. They couldn't assess whether the artifact was consistent with ancient American metalworking traditions. If a party tried to offer them as expert witnesses in a proceeding, they would be excluded under what are now the Daubert standards--they simply lacked the qualifications to render the opinions being attributed to them. So they're fact witnesses. Fine. But here is where things get really interesting, because the manner in which this "testimony" was produced violates almost every principle we use to evaluate the reliability of fact testimony. They were hand-picked. In a legal proceeding, the credibility of testimony is strengthened when witnesses are independent--people who happened to be present and can corroborate what occurred. These witnesses were selected by Joseph Smith himself. They were family members (the Smiths, the Whitmers) and financial stakeholders (Martin Harris, who mortgaged his farm to finance the publication). A judge evaluating this testimony would immediately flag the selection bias. If I'm on trial and I get to choose which 11 people testify on my behalf, and I choose my brothers, my business partners, and my in-laws--how much weight does that testimony carry? They didn't write their own accounts. The two formal witness statements--the Testimony of the Three Witnesses and the Testimony of the Eight Witnesses--were drafted in consultation with Joseph Smith. The witnesses signed them, but they didn't independently compose them. In legal terms, this is closer to a party drafting testimony for its own witnesses than to independent corroboration. In a deposition, one of the first things opposing counsel establishes is whether the witness wrote their own statement or whether someone else prepared it for them. If someone else prepared it, the testimony is significantly discounted. There are no contemporaneous independent accounts. We don't have journals, letters, or other contemporaneous documents from the witnesses describing their experiences in their own words at the time they occurred. What we have are the two prepared statements and later recollections, often decades after the fact. Contemporaneous accounts are given far more weight than retroactive ones for good reason--memory is reconstructive, and people unconsciously harmonize their recollections with the narrative they've committed to. Skeptical witnesses were excluded by design. The entire evidentiary structure was set up so that only believers had access to the evidence. The plates were never subjected to independent examination. No skeptic, no scholar, no expert in any relevant field was permitted to examine them. And then the plates conveniently disappeared. In a courtroom, if one side possessed the single most important piece of physical evidence and refused to let the other side examine it, and then that evidence was destroyed or removed, the judge would issue an adverse inference instruction--telling the jury they may assume the evidence was unfavorable to the party that withheld it. That is how seriously the legal system takes deliberate concealment of evidence. No cross-examination occurred. This might be the most important point. In our legal system, testimony that hasn't been tested by cross-examination is given very little weight, and for good reason. Cross-examination is how we distinguish between "I saw gold plates with ancient writing" and "I saw an object that Joseph told me was gold plates with ancient writing" and "I saw the plates with my spiritual eyes in a vision" and "I was in a heightened emotional state during a religious ceremony and I experienced something I interpreted as seeing plates." These are very different claims, and a skilled attorney conducting a six-hour deposition of each witness would likely reveal significant variation in what the witnesses actually experienced versus what the prepared statement says they experienced. We know from later accounts that there was significant variation. Martin Harris reportedly said he saw the plates "with the eye of faith" and "as one sees a city through a mountain." Some of the Eight Witnesses may have handled an object wrapped in cloth without ever seeing the plates directly. A thorough deposition would have explored all of this. Now, I want to be clear about why I'm raising this. I'm not arguing that the witness testimony should be dismissed on a technicality based on arbitrary rules. The rules of evidence aren't arbitrary--they represent centuries of hard-won wisdom about how testimony becomes unreliable. The point isn't that the testimony violates some procedural checkbox. The point is that the testimony was deliberately structured to be unverifiable. The evidence was managed, the witnesses were selected, the statements were prepared, the physical artifact was withheld from examination, and then it was removed entirely. This pattern--extraordinary claims supported by carefully managed, unverifiable testimony from hand-picked, financially and emotionally invested witnesses, with the key physical evidence withheld and then destroyed--is not the pattern of authentic historical events. It is the pattern of a magic show. And when I look at the totality of how this evidence was produced, I don't see a reason to give it significant evidentiary weight. Smac, you have urged me to take the evidence seriously. I am taking it seriously--seriously enough to notice that it was designed from the ground up to resist exactly the kind of scrutiny that would tell us whether it's trustworthy.

What is your theory about how the 1837 poem and 1850 novel had access to the exceedingly unlikely phrase "save it were"? Is this proof that the respective authors had read the Book of Mormon and picked it up from there? Or is it evidence that these literary works are actually ancient documents translated with the help of English ghosts? Or is it evidence that 19th century New Englanders had access to this phrasing through spoken language, language that wasn't captured in your database, reading older books, or otherwise recreating features of the language that make sense and sound good even though they weren’t frequently used? I would suggest there is a naturalistic explanation for why the 1837 poem and Nathaniel Hawthorne had access to this phrase, despite the gaps of its appearances in your database. Is it really that crazy to think the author of the Book of Mormon could come up with it in the same way? This is your area of expertise and not mine, but I would expect the early 18th-century English of New England (expanded to include upstate New York) would be closer to English English than to the English spoken in, say, Georgia. And I'll go out on a limb here. My hypothesis is that one of the reasons "save it were" is *rare* in your database is because this usage was generally limited to New England. If I'm right, then I'd expect the 1837 poem to be from there and not, say, from South Carolina. Am I right? Where was the 1837 poet from? Could you explain why using "save it were" over 70 times is evidence of ancient American authenticity? If this were in the lexicon of the 19th-century author and it sounded old to his ears, why wouldn't he use it over and over for the same reason he used "and it came to pass" over and over?

Sigh. You fundamentally misunderstand the nuances of Bayesian reasoning and why I keep lecturing about it. Bayesian reasoning actually has two components. First and most importantly, it informs us as to what constitutes evidence and why. As Steven Pinker explains it: "Bayes' rule or Bayes' theorem is the law of probability governing the strength of evidence--the rule saying how much to revise our probabilities (change our minds) when we learn a new fact or observe new evidence." Pinker, Steven. Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (p. 149). Kindle Edition. This is why I've been repeating the steps of Bayesian analysis over and over. You can't correctly interpret "the strength of evidence" without at least implicitly formulating the questions in the correct Bayesian structure. The correct way to understand the strength of evidence--and really what evidence even is -- comes down to two questions, asked either explicitly or implicitly: What is the probability of seeing the basket of evidence if the theory is true? What is the probability of seeing the basket of evidence if the theory is false? To correctly interpret the evidence, you need to consider both in relation to each other. If you don't, you can dramatically misrepresent what the evidence implies. Note that so far I have not invoked my prior at all--I've only talked about how to weigh the strength of the evidence. A priori beliefs are a different discussion, and surprisingly it's logically required: you cannot make a decision about the likelihood of something without having an a priori belief about it. I start with a low prior for the BoM being true based on general scientific literacy, and then lower it significantly based on the evidence of what the text actually contains. @Ryan Dahle's assertions aside, I believe an unbiased evaluation of the evidence clearly indicates it is 19th century biblical fan fiction--not an accurate translation of an authentic ancient manuscript. Newly considered evidence should generally be expected to further support already well-supported a priori beliefs, and in this case it does. As Nate Silver said, "One property of Bayes's theorem, in fact, is that our beliefs should converge toward one another--and toward the truth--as we are presented with more evidence over time." Silver, Nate. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't (p. 259). Kindle Edition.

Taking your hypothetical seriously, if you pulled out a shrink-ray gun and demonstrated that it worked on your mailbox, my first thought would be that there was a hidden camera and I was secretly being recorded on The Carbonaro Effect. If that possibility were ruled out, I wouldn’t start by asking why you were abducted, why you were given the gun, or how the aliens built it. Instead, I would want to examine the evidence. Specifically, I’d want a qualified expert to evaluate the device under controlled conditions. I’d ask a physicist to determine what the “shrink ray gun” actually does in the real world. Does it compress matter? Alter particle structure? Cause matter to disappear? If so, where does it go? Once we understood the mechanism, I would ask whether the device appears consistent with known materials and technology available on Earth. If experts concluded that the device genuinely performs phenomena that cannot plausibly be produced by known terrestrial technology, that would be extremely strong evidence, and I would update my credences accordingly. But to evaluate the alien-abduction claim coherently, I’d need to consider: • the prior probability that you were abducted by aliens • the probability of observing such a device if aliens really had abducted you • the probability of observing such a device if aliens had not abducted you If the device strongly disfavors terrestrial explanations, the likelihood ratio would heavily favor the alien-abduction hypothesis. But if you said something like, "The alien really wanted me to prove to the world that he was real, so he commanded me to show the shrink-ray gun to eleven close friends who then jointly signed a statement saying it was real—and then the alien who wanted to prove his existence took the gun away before any qualified physicist could examine it," I would be far less impressed.

This concept that there are multiple “types” of English translations that would be made by the power of God and that one of them involves a heterogeneous array of speakers with English dialects that span from the 1500s through the 1800s is an example of Texas sharpshooting because this idea didn’t come about until after the evidence came out. Originally, there were only two types of translations: correct translations and incorrect translations. Implausible compared to what?

Let’s back up and put this into perspective. My Bayesian reasoning has three stages, and the order matters. Stage 1 is the prior. The base rate of genuine miracles in all of recorded human history is extraordinarily low. This isn't dogma. It's an empirical observation. As I've repeatedly hammered, multiple lines of science converge on the point that not only is the supernatural not observed, it isn't even possible (and in this context "supernatural" entails "spirit matter" and the alleged higher laws of nature that Mormonism posits). My prior probability for the BoM being authentically what it claims is therefore very low before I examine a single piece of BoM-specific evidence. Stage 2 is what the Book of Mormon actually is. Before asking who wrote it or how, I look at the text itself. This is the most important question and the one you spend the least time on. The text addresses 19th century theological debates. It contains material from Deutero-Isaiah--chapters written centuries after Lehi would have left Jerusalem. It has no credible archaeological, genetic, or linguistic corroboration as an authentic ancient record. Rather, it is full of anachronisms. The text itself is primary evidence, and it looks like 19th century composition. Stage 3 is mechanism. Only after establishing what the BoM is do I ask who wrote it and how. On this I am and always have been agnostic, and appropriately so. We don't have enough evidence to reconstruct the precise mechanism. You asked me to speculate and I did. But agnosticism about mechanism is not weakness. It's epistemic honesty. You are conflating two separate questions: whether the BoM is authentic versus how it was produced. I am highly confident on the first and appropriately uncertain on the second. Those are not contradictory positions. Now on your Bayesian critique: you say I'm not being rigorously Bayesian because I don't show explicit priors and likelihood ratios. But it is okay to be informal and not quantify terms like "unlikely" and "very unlikely." The key Bayesian insight in this context isn't that we need to make up probabilities and do math. The key insight is that we need to ask the right questions: What is the a priori probability? What is the probability of seeing the evidence under one theory? What is the probability of seeing the evidence under the competing theory? It's fine to discuss these probabilities qualitatively, but it is a logical fallacy to evaluate the probability of the BoM being "true" without addressing all three components. On the witnesses: they were chosen by Joseph Smith and their testimonies were first drafted by hin and then signed. That is not independent testimony. It's managed testimony. A judge probably wouldn't admit evidence managed this way, and if she did, she wouldn't give it much weight. I don't either, for the same reasons. It isn’t about arbitrary rules of evidence. It’s about the evidence being suspicious because it is managed. On the plates: performative evidence that was deliberately kept from independent examination and then conveniently removed is the structure of a magic show, not an authentic historical artifact. This pattern continues for most of the evidence we have about how it was produced. The "evidence" was tightly managed with the objective of proving it is miraculous while going to extraordinary lengths to prevent genuine authentication. When you don't have enough evidence to know exactly how something was done, the honest thing to do is say "I don't know." That’s why I hold the position that I do.

We need to remember that likelihood is a relative term. Say I flipped a coin 100 times and got the following string of values: T,T,H,T,H,T,T,T,H,T,H,T,H,T,T,H,H,H,H,H,T,T,T,T,H,T,T,H,T,T,T,T,H,T,H,H,H,H,T,H,H,H,H,T,H,H,T,H,T,H,T,T,H,H,H,H,T,H,H,T,T,T,H,T,T,H,T,T,T,T,T,H,T,H,T,T,H,H,T,T,H,T,H,T,H,T,H,T,H,T,H,T,T,H,T,T,T,H,H,T Under the hypothesis that the probability of getting a heads is exactly 50%, the likelihood of getting that specific set of results with 100 flips is 7.89x10^(-31). In absolute terms, that is extraordinarily unlikely. But it is also extraordinarily unlikely that any other probability of getting a heads would result in that data. If we wanted to evaluate the likelihood that the coin is fair based on the data, we can’t look at the likelihood in absolute terms--we need to evaluate it compared to the likelihood of other hypotheses. So yea. The probability of “save it were” showing up in a 19th century text that is trying to use the verbal sacred language of the time and place is low in absolute terms. But virtually everything involving stochastic processes is low in absolute terms.To determine what bearing this has on the probability that the Book of Mormon is true, you need to show how and why “save it were” is more likely under the competing hypothesis. You seem to be claiming that using “save it were” is more likely under the “it’s true” hypothesis, but you didn’t determine this until after you saw it there. That is classic Texas sharpshooting. I tip my hat to Skousen and Carmack for acknowledging this, and I have no problem whatsoever with them describing the language of the Book of Mormon. If they want to assume the BoM has a divine origin, then explaining this data seems to require the “tightly controlled transcription of a loosely translated document created by a committee of angels who had heterogeneous English dialects that spanned over 300 years,” or whatever their specific hypothesis is. But it is a different question to ask what this implies about the likelihood of the Book of Mormon being authentic. If you define the authentic hypothesis as "whatever divine process produced exactly the text we observe," then you are Texas sharpshooting, not seriously evaluating the likelihood of authenticity. A mixed linguistic profile spanning three centuries of English is precisely what you'd expect from a 19th century author steeped in biblical register and trying to sound biblical. And that’s precisely what demands the most creative explaining under divine translation. I disagree, but we can save this for another day.

In context, I offered two items of support. As an example, "save it were” is a phrase that, if I understand the argument correctly, Joseph Smith in all likelihood wouldn’t have used because that specific phrase isn’t in the Bible and isn’t in the body of digitized 19th century literature that Carmack searched. However, there are two reasons to believe that the phrase was in his lexicon. First and most importantly, everybody understood that wording--it was their language. Second, he used it. We already know from other evidence that the BoM is of 19th century origin. The Book of Mormon is part of the enormous limited dataset we have of 19th century usage. And equally importantly, we have an eminently plausible theory of how “save it were” entered his lexicon. After all, his lexicon is a descendant of EModE. Spoken english is different from written English, and Joseph Smith’s particular dialect of oral sacred English could have retained elements of EModE that weren’t written in the limited datasets that Carmack looked at. And the fact that it is there is strong evidence that this is in fact what happened. I’m not making a far-fetched claim here. I’m following the data. To be clear, this isn’t evidence in favor of 19th century authorship. Rather, it’s showing how this is not a silver bullet against a naturalistic explanation. "Enormous" is relative. Written corpora don't capture spoken language, and the sacred oral vernacular of Bible-reading frontier communities isn't well-represented in the databases Carmack searched. Absence from the databases Carmack searched doesn’t prove absence from the living religious speech of Joseph Smith's milieu. We are evaluating the claim “what does the evidence say about the likelihood that the Book of Mormon is true?” The (only) logically coherent way to do this is with Bayesian reasoning. To do this, we need to do the following: Create at least two broad, non-overlapping, well-defined theories of Book of Mormon origins that we are evaluating. Select an a priori likelihood of each theory being true Collect the evidence Determine the likelihood of seeing the totality of the evidence under each scenario Do the math Your argument is basically, “we don’t know anything about the supernatural, so we have no basis for evaluating the likelihood of the evidence under the supernatural hypothesis.” If that is your position, then fine--we don’t have a well-defined theory to evaluate and no analysis should be done or can be done on the “is the Book true” question. Stated in a non-Bayesian framework, this is functionally the same thing as making an unfalsifiable claim. An unfalsifiable claim really isn’t claiming anything at all. But if you want to say the data is overwhelming against the theory that the Book of Mormon was written in the 19th century, you must propose an alternative theory that is more consistent with the data than the one you are arguing against. It depends on which supernatural theory we’re talking about. The supernatural theory you seem to favor has something to do with a ghost committee of individuals with different English dialects spanning from the 1500s to the 1800s, providing some sort of text that is primarily 19th-century Bible fan fiction, but also may or may not have a few elements loosely based on something that happened in Mesoamerica--it’s impossible to know the specifics because we know so little about God and angels. You can make that your theory if you want to, but when you carefully draw your theory around the bullet holes after you shoot the gun, an honest a priori probability gets commensurately smaller.

That is an assumption that in all likelihood isn’t true. To prove that this assumption is true, you’d need to comprehensively provide transcripts of everything that was ever said or read in his environment. We don’t have that. You are fundamentally misunderstanding the Bayesian approach. The correct approach is to address the totality of the evidence under two scenarios: What are the chances this basket of evidence would show up if the Book of Mormon were true? What are the chances this basket of evidence would show up if the Book of Mormon were false? EModE linguistic forms are highly unlikely under both scenarios. Because of that, it isn’t strong evidence of authenticity either way. I want to be careful here because while I know a bit about statistics (e.g. I know what the Yates Chi-squared test is), I haven’t read his research--I’ve only read a few things about it. On the one hand, “save it were” might not have been the most common way to say “unless” in the 1820’s, but everyone knew exactly what it meant, and it’s eminently plausible--even likely--that this phrasing was not completely extinct in Joseph Smith’s universe--that is how they knew what it meant. On the other hand, the BoM contains words that didn’t exist in the EModE period (e.g. “transpire”, “derangement”), and religious debates that hadn’t started yet (e.g. things like infant baptism, trinitarian v. non-trinitarian theology, predestination vs. free will, anti-masonry rhetoric) all fit in Joseph Smith’s time and place and not in the EModE period. What is more likely? Somebody in the 19th century writing a 19th century book in KJV English had mental access to a few remnants of EModE that haven’t shown up in other 19th century documents? Or whatever Carmack’s theory is about a ghost committee that spoke multiple dialects of English depending upon the verse? The way I account for it seems a lot more likely and clean than the way he does.

The “more recent findings” don’t alter the validity of Wright’s analysis. Does champatsch have a theory on why Deutero-Isaiah is in the BoM? As background: How do you account for Isaiah chapters in the Book of Mormon that weren’t written until long after Lehi left Jerusalem? It isn’t a matter of hypothetical precedent. It’s about evaluating the claims of the Book of Mormon. We don’t need to speculate about what God would do in this or that hypothetical situation. We can evaluate the Book of Mormon’s own claims. Have you read 1 Nephi 13? The Bible was corrupted by the great and abominable church. That is why we have the Book of Mormon, including the Isaiah chapters. It is also why Joseph Smith saw the need to create a new “translation” of the Bible. I’m not evaluating the hypothesis that God would do whatever random thing in whatever random way. I’m evaluating the Book of Mormon on its own terms.

Fair enough. I'm generally agnostic about the specific details of the mechanism of production, but since you've asked repeatedly, here are the scenarios I find most plausible, offered as my best current assessment. On the text: Joseph Smith is the most likely primary author, possibly with help from people in his immediate circle who were deeply steeped in biblical language. I can imagine his mother Lucy and brother Hyrum being involved. They had over five years between the time they said the book was forthcoming until the dictation to scribes began. The "tight translation" elements Carmack identifies are consistent with someone who had deeply internalized archaic KJV language and was reading from a pre-prepared manuscript, first behind the curtain during the 116-page period, then from the hat. The EModE patterns don't require a miracle. They require immersion in sacred language traditions, which Joseph's family had in abundance. On the plates: some physical object probably existed. It was never subjected to independent examination, was deliberately concealed, and then conveniently removed before anyone outside the inner circle could evaluate it. This would have been constructed during the 5-year period before they were shown to witnesses. On the witnesses: I think the most plausible explanation combines sincere belief in the project with solemn religious oaths to stand by what they signed. These were not dispassionate observers. They were family members, financial stakeholders, and true believers in a sacred undertaking. Several maintained their testimonies even after leaving the church, which I take as evidence of genuine belief in the original project, not necessarily evidence that the production was exactly what it was claimed to be. People can sincerely believe in something while using guile (e.g. missionaries who are told to find their testimony by telling people they know the Church is true). The witnesses may have believed they were serving God's purposes even while participating in a production that was partly staged. Moroni 7:16 explains their motivation--even if they weren’t being totally transparent and guileless, they were still persuading people to believe in Christ and do good; that is the yardstick for whether they were doing God’s work--not whether they were telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. On Space Aliens and demons: I never sincerely posited these as explanations. My point was logical: if the production was so extraordinary that naturalistic explanations are ruled out entirely, then all supernatural explanations need to be considered. And when choosing among supernatural explanations, it still matters that the text reads like 19th century biblical fan fiction rather than an authentic ancient record. But Space Aliens and demons are extraordinarily unlikely explanations and I never meant to suggest otherwise. On Penn & Teller: As a more on-point example, between 1964 and 2015, hundreds of people applied to win James Randi’s million-dollar prize for having purported supernatural abilities. All claimed real magic. Some were probably sincere. None could prove they had real powers under controlled conditions. Claiming supernatural powers is irrelevant to the point; I don’t need to know how the trick to know there is one.

My understanding is that your theory is that the translation process was very tight, to the extent where if the underlying reformed Egyptian had different frequencies of subordinating conjunctions after certain words, those patterns would be manifest in the translated text. Is that basically right? Could we use the Isaiah chapters to test this theory? If the Isaiah chapters were really a tight translation of a pristine Isaiah manuscript that was written on metal plates before 600 B.C., what would we expect to see? Do we see that? Here you don’t seem to be arguing that the Isaiah chapters are a better translation of Isaiah's actual words. Rather, you seem to be arguing that even though it is clearly derived from the KJV, it was done so in a miraculous way. This gets back to my point about the logical order of the analysis, and to the need to be clear about what the competing theories are. Is the theory that the Book of Mormon was produced in a miraculous way? Or is the theory that it is an accurate translation of an authentic ancient manuscript? Evidence of the first thing isn’t necessarily evidence of the second.

Hi @smac97, I appreciate your patience in my response. I’ve had a crazy couple of weeks IRL. Trying to respond to your main points as I understand them, you frame this as though I owe you a complete theory of the crime before I'm permitted to conclude that a crime occurred. That's not how epistemology works, and it's not how Bayesian reasoning works. The correct order of questions matters enormously, and you have it exactly backwards. First: What is the prior? The BoM being a genuine ancient record translated by divine power is an extraordinary claim--extraordinary precisely because it requires the causal mechanisms that Effective Quantum Field Theory rules out. Revelation. Spirits communicating information to a physical brain. Angelic delivery of gold plates. The prior probability of this hypothesis is therefore very low. Not zero, but very low. This is my point with the implications of physics that Carroll has articulated, and the exact same conclusion is robustly reached from multiple lines of science using completely independent methodologies. This is where any honest Bayesian analysis begins, before examining a single piece of evidence. Second: What IS the Book of Mormon? When you read it, this question answers itself. It is saturated with 19th century American theological concerns--evangelical Protestant disputes, anti-Masonry, the question of Native American origins. It reads like King James English filtered through frontier American religious sensibility, not like an authentic ancient document. It contains systematic anachronisms for which there is zero archaeological corroboration. David P. Wright’s analysis of the Isaiah chapters (Dr. Wright is a full professor at Brandeis--arguably America’s most prestigious Jewish university--where he specializes in teaching the Hebrew Old Testament at the graduate level. His exhaustive analysis of the Isaiah chapters has not been refuted--they were based on copying and reworking the KJV English translation--not a fresh translation of an authentic ancient manuscript). The DNA evidence provides completely independent confirmation that the population history the text describes didn't happen. The text accounts for itself. On the witnesses and plates: You want these "accounted for." The correct Bayesian question is: how likely is this evidence under each hypothesis? Under the authentic hypothesis, you'd expect witnesses. Under the "19th century American religious movement with a charismatic founder" hypothesis, you'd also expect witnesses--fervent, socially embedded, financially and spiritually invested witnesses whose accounts evolved over time and explicitly included "spiritual" rather than physical sight in several cases. Which is exactly what we have. Perhaps you’d expect witnesses more under the authentic hypothesis, but not necessarily, and certainly not enough to put a dent in the evidence against authenticity. The evidence of the plates is thin and entirely testimonial--and not innocently so. The alleged plates weren't lost in a fire or destroyed by accident. They were deliberately hidden from mainstream view and then vanished in a deliberate and miraculous way. Consider what that looks like from an evidentiary standpoint. Imagine you were involved in complex litigation with extraordinarily important physical evidence. You show that evidence exclusively to eleven of your client's closest friends and family members, obtain brief signed statements from them, and then deliberately destroy the evidence before the other side can examine it. No judge would treat that witness testimony as strong corroboration. Every judge would treat the deliberate destruction of the underlying evidence as deeply suspicious--suspicious enough to substantially discount the testimony built around it. You don't need a theory of why the witnesses signed the statements they did to draw that inference. The destruction itself does the work. One question for you: do you have a detailed, evidence-supported hypothesis for how God and/or Moroni made the plates disappear? If you don't need that hypothesis to believe the plates are a real ancient artifact, why do I need a detailed hypothesis for how they were created to believe they are of 19th century origin? Third: How was it produced? This is the question you insist I answer first. It is actually the last question, and I'm largely agnostic about the specific mechanism. I don't know, and I don't need to know. My inability to name the specific mechanism doesn't make accurate-translation-of-ancient-plates the more probable hypothesis. If Penn & Teller's audiences can't explain how the trick works, that isn’t evidence that it was done with real magic.

My specific claim wasn’t that there was anything in JS’s specific background that screams he was capable of writing this. My claim is that if you look at the book, you can tell that it was written by an 18th or 19th Century English-speaking American protestant. Hold on. I thought the hypothesis was that it was written by a Mesoamerican. Now you are claiming it was written by somebody from the ancient Near East? Sure, Mormon was allegedly a descendent of people from the ancient Near East. But that was a thousand years earlier. If you trace my ancestry back a thousand years, you’d see I’m a descendent of Celts, Anglos, Saxons, Germans, and Scandinavian Vikings. But like Mormon, those are people from different cultures, from a thousand years earlier, on the opposite side of the world. If you were trying to figure out if I’m an authentic 21st century American, why would you look for clues of me being an 11th century Britain? Let’s get real here. Joseph Smith claimed that the Bible should only be believed to the extent it was translated correctly, but that the Book of Mormon can be believed without that qualification. Wasn’t the point of the Isaiah chapters being included to show how they were translated better than the KJV? Joseph Smith was right that there were translation (which in this context includes errors introduced by copying old manuscripts). But isn’t the issue now settled that whoever wrote the BoM not only failed to fix the errors that were in the KJV, but he also broke things that were translated just fine? And isn’t it clear that whoever wrote it was relying on the KJV with particular distrust of the italicized words. Doesn’t that scream something to you about when it was written? Here’s an obvious example. After the Roman Empire fell, a monk by the name of Dionysius Exiguus lived in the city of Rome. Dionysius was trying to calculate when Easter was when he had a radical idea. Wouldn’t it be helpful if a calendar was created that started with the first year as the year Jesus was born? He did the calculations, and decided to name that year Anno Domini 525. Over the next 500 years, this way of numbering solar years gradually spread throughout the Latin Church, and over the next 500 years after that, the idea spread to the Eastern church as well. That is how such ideas spread in the real world. Meanwhile, in Mesoamerica they had a calendar based on cycles with 260 days, 20 days, and such. This Mayan calendar spread across the region, was widely adopted, and was used for 2000 years. You see where I’m going with this. The Nephites not only used the old-world 7-day week, lunar month, and solar year without influencing or being influenced by the local calendars, they also adopted the Anno Domini calendar literally on the day Jesus was born, a full 525 years before Dionysius invented it, and a full thousand years before it was widely adapted in the old world. Doesn’t that scream something to you? More fundamentally, real religions evolve over time. We could talk about how Judaism evolved or Christianity evolved as examples. But a clear one is how Mormonism has evolved over just 200 years. It started out as something very similar to Protestant Christianity, then had Kirtland-style temple worship, Nauvoo-style temple worship, Brigham Young-style temple worship, and all of the variations in temple covenants and styles since then. The second anointing and calling and election made sure were added. Polygamy was added and then removed. Blacks not being eligible for the priesthood was added and removed. The need of gathering the Saints was important and then not. Other than several spinoff groups, nobody thinks about returning to suburban Kansas City to fulfill the prophesy that the Church’s HQ is supposed to be there. The word of wisdom was revealed not as commandment and then became a commandment. Lorenzo Snow popularized his couplet, and then the Church decided is was just a couplet and abandoned the first half of it as something we don’t know much about. My point of all that is that real religion evolves. But in the Book of Mormon, the religion doesn’t evolve. Not only is the religion static for 1,000 years, the static religion is 19th-century American Christianity. Doesn’t that scream something to you? Would you like to talk about the Book of Ether? Joseph Smith (or whoever wrote it in the 19th century) was steeped in Bible culture, and when he wrote a book that deliberately tried to sound like the Bible, to some extent he succeeded and included things like “poetic parallelism” and “the prophetic call formula.” That’s all great. But it isn’t evidence that the Book of Mormon was written in the 5th century in America, and it whatever it’s evidence for, it’s evidentiary force is orders of magnitude less powerful than what I described above. The Book of Mormon is full of specific prophesies about Columbus, the American Revolution, and a choice seer named Joseph, son of Joseph. But after that, the prophesy becomes vague and disappears--it doesn’t prophesy that a prophet named Spencer would extend the blessings of the priesthood and temple to everybody, regardless of race. Doesn’t that scream something to you? I disagree.

I used that vague phrase deliberately, hoping that it would bias the GPT against my own position. I thought it did a pretty good job of defining what that meant. I included the following phrase in the prompt to guard against the bias you are describing here. Treat arguments for authenticity with the same seriousness as arguments against it. Do not assume at the outset that naturalistic explanations are inherently more probable. We are practicing methodological empiricism, not methodological naturalism. I'm doing so by making very detailed prompts that are intended to constrain how it approaches the question. If I were having a conversational chat with it, I'd expect it to use some latitude to please me. But if I really lock down what I'm asking it to do, I'm moderately hopeful that it will answer the question as asked, using the constraints I give it. You can also go into what ChatGPT calls “temporary chat” which will generate a response in a silo and not archive the solution. Frustratingly, this doesn’t work with the “pro” mode I’ve been using. I guess the idea is that with pro-mode, it’s intended to generate research-grade answers that will be based upon research-grade prompts and not biases from past chats. No problem. I like meta conversations about AI. It's easy to create a ton of low-value words with GPT if you use it that way. I'm hoping that if somebody happens to be interested in what I think, they'll be able to see that in the prompts I ask.