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

[JarMan]

12 minutes ago, bdouglas said:

Well there might have been someone circa 1500-1600 who translated the gold plates into Early Modern English, and that this is the translation Joseph Smith was reading from his seer-stone——since it does appear, from the work of Skousen et al, that JS was reading off an existing translation to Oliver Cowdery. But I have no idea who this person might be.

I think it's much more likely it was created in the 1600's since the Book of Mormon echoes with early modern issues throughout the entire book. There were a lot of brilliant people that lived during that time.

[bdouglas]

16 minutes ago, JarMan said:

I think it's much more likely it was created in the 1600's since the Book of Mormon echoes with early modern issues throughout the entire book. There were a lot of brilliant people that lived during that time.

But none, I doubt, who could've created 1 Nephi or the book of Ether ... not to mention all the rest.

P.S. - There are apparent interpolations in bits of the BOM, which seem modern. It is possible these apparent (I emphasize the word "apparent") interpolations were the work of whoever translated the gold plates into EME ... if such a person actually existed. But these are questions scholars deal with, and I am not a scholar.

Edited October 14, 2019 by bdouglas

[JarMan]

15 minutes ago, bdouglas said:

But none, I doubt, who could've created 1 Nephi or the book of Ether ... not to mention all the rest.

I've read quite a bit of early modern religious writing. There's a lot in 1 Nephi that resembles early modern writing. Take Nephi's Apocalypse, for example. The themes are very much early modern. And apocalyptic literature was developed hundreds of years after Lehi left Jerusalem so it's anachronistic in the Book of Mormon. There are also several early modern tells in the Book of Ether. The description of the vessels built to reach the new world, for example, seem to rely on Galileo's 1612 Discourse on Bodies in Water. I've yet to find anything in the Book of Mormon that doesn't have an early modern antecedent.

24 minutes ago, bdouglas said:

P.S. - There are apparent interpolations in bits of the BOM, which seem modern. It is possible these apparent (I emphasize the word "apparent") interpolations were the work of whoever translated the gold plates into EME ... if such a person actually existed. But these are questions scholars deal with, and I am not a scholar.

 I am only aware of a single instance that appears to be a 19th century interpolation in the text. What did you have in mind?

[Robert F. Smith]

6 hours ago, Gervin said:

I think some Early Modern English might have slipped into the country without your knowledge.  

"In 1751, the London Company of Comedians , under the direction of Lewis Hallam, landed in Virginia where the ban on the immigration of actors had recently been lifted. Their first production was The Merchant of Venice , which played to mixed groups of settlers and Native Americans, and over the next ten years they added Richard III, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Hamlet to their repertory . By 1754, the company had toured prosperous cities like Fredericksburg, Williamsburg, and Annapolis. They spent four years in Jamaica and returned to Philadelphia and New York in 1758 with new productions of Cymbeline, The Taming of the Shrew, and Macbeth . Despite the continuing animosity towards anything British, citizens of the new nation continued to love Shakespeare who was now equally fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 19th century travelling companies spread the plays into every corner of the United States. The American public now had the opportunity to see most of the plays. Shakespeare served as a unifying force throughout the century: his works were one of the few things that were constant while the country and its people were expanding. No other writer was so quickly assimilated into the wilderness, perhaps because his works could be presented in the easily accessible form of drama. The blood and violence, passion and basic comedy must have had a strong appeal to frontiersmen. As early as 1810 there were theater companies established from Montreal to the Gulf of Mexico; from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the western tip of the Great Lakes; from the northern Ohio territory down the Ohio River, through Kentucky and St. Louis. These companies produced their own plays, as well as welcomed-primarily British-touring stars. Charles Kean began his tour in 1831 in New York and eventually returned 15 years later through the Mississippi Valley.

https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare-and-america/

We still have Shakespeare being widely played all over America.  There is even an annual Shakespeare festival in Cedar City, Utah.  Lots of people still enjoy Shakespeare nationwide, and some fabulous film versions have been shot of Taming of the Shrew, Romeo & Juliet, etc.  But that does in no sense mean that listeners become speakers or writers of EModEnglish.  We have no indication whatsoever that that has been the case.  There is no evidence for it.  Indeed,. we have no evidence that the plays incorporate any of the types of grammar and syntax of EModE which appear in the BofM.  As I indicated, for example, the KJV Bible (never used by Shakespeare) does not have the same EModE style of the BofM.

If what you say had been true, and that Joseph went to many Shakespeare plays (we have no indication that he ever did) along with all other Americans, why is that we find no one ever producing a book, article,  or speech in EModE in early 19th century America?  According to you, they should be quite common.  You are grasping at straws, Gervin.  Nest you'll be advocating for a Flat Earth.  

[Robert F. Smith]

8 hours ago, Meadowchik said:

I'm not talking about a paper. I'm saying scientists can make objective, scientific decisions about what lines of deep research to pursue and what avenues to dismiss. Of course some can dismiss a question arbitrarily. But dismissal can also be scientific, given enough accuracy. 

Of course you should know that law enforcement can dismiss witness claims or hearsay or second hand accounts. They could do so arbitrarily, sure, but some can also make the choice to filter information and leads in an organised, reasonable way.

You're reading alot into Coe's motivations and intentions, and you're making personal assumptions about him. Perhaps step back and realise that your resentment could be based more on your own disappointment than a nontrivial error on Coe's part.

I am disappointed that Coe lied.  There was so much potential for meaningful, scientific discussion there, but he dismissed the entire question with a wave of his hand instead of engaging the facts.  He refused to apply his actual knowledge-base (readily available in his books and articles on Mesoamerica).  Instead he opted to pretend to apply his knowledge.  The difference is only apparent to those who actually know the facts and who have also learned the disciplines of archeology and anthropology.  The man in the street has no idea that he has been shnookered.

[Robert F. Smith]

6 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Once you take off the rose colored glasses of faith, it doesn’t look nearly as extraordinary. It’s amazing to me that you think it is such a work of genius. How many people have LDS apologetics converted? 

The problem with that is that the number of scholars who have actually looked closely at the BofM could be crowded together on the head of a pin (with all the angels already there and dancing).  "Apologetics" gets no respect because it is usually no more than excuse-mongering by non-scholars.  They are possibly less obnoxious than the anti-Mormon polemicists, but equally tendentious and ignorant.

[Robert F. Smith]

6 hours ago, JarMan said:

At one time I would have completely agreed with this. Eventually I came to realize the Book of Mormon could be explained naturalistically. Joseph just needed to read a manuscript that was created by someone who did have the knowledge required to produce it. No great leaps of faith are required for this view.  

 

5 hours ago, JarMan said:

People can create remarkable literary works. 

You seem to be dodging the issue - which you raised and I am responding to - which is that there is an explanation for the Book of Mormon that doesn’t require a leap of faith. 

I have no problem with anyone who seeks to find a naturalistic explanation for the BofM.  Indeed, I agree that there is an entirely rational and naturalistic explanation for the BofM.  The issue to be addressed is What sort of explanation can explain the contents of the BofM?  The answer can be (1) a 16th century fictional one, or (2) an ancient historical one which played out in actual time & space and was translated into English in the 16th century.  The second answer assumes a naturalistic God who uses techniques which many of us ignorantly see as "magical."

Richard Dawkins had no problem at all believing in advanced, sentient beings in the universe who are so far ahead of us that they are literally godlike.  That is a completely naturalistic assumption, which many astrophysicists accept.

[smac97]

On 10/12/2019 at 1:19 PM, Meadowchik said:

Boothe is an example of someone who we "know" committed murder, and I am saying I would still favor a trial for someone like that, unless they pled guilty. So I am arguing for trials to work the rigor of the judicial process. I support the rigorous process. Yet as you and I both know, the trial is not the first stage of rigor. Accusations of guilt should be supported to some extent before arrest and before a trial.

So it would not be a miscarriage of justice to dismiss a claim that a person born in 1900 killed President Lincoln. Such a rejection of an idea is indeed dismissiveness, but legitimately and scientifically dismissive. 

In other words, it would not be illegitimate or unscientific to dismiss the claim of Book of Mormon historicity based on a shallow understanding of its claims.

I have been following the exchange you have been having with Robert.  It has been interesting to see you attempt to develop what appears to be an apologetic for not applying scientific principles to evaluate The Book of Mormon, and instead for an a priori, out-of-hand dismissal of it.

A few thoughts:

1. Earlier in this thread I made some observations about how The Book of Mormon is "dangerous" for someone like Michael Coe.  I can't help but wonder if your apologetic efforts reflect the presence of this same "danger."  It seems like you are working very hard to justify not applying scientific/scholarly rigor to The Book of Mormon, and to instead argue that its purported historicity/provenance (as a translation/transmission of an ancient text) can be summarily rejected.

2. I have no problem with anyone who rejects that position out-of-hand, with no real effort to study or understand it.  Life is short, after all.  Interest in the subject matter is not something that can be compelled.  Either it's there, or it's not. 

For example, a while back I had this exchange with another poster:

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Just so I'm clear, do you take similar exception to books and shows (like Leah Remini's) that "tear down" Scientology? 

I am not looking for things about which to take exception.  I am generally indifferent to Scientology, so I have not given Leah Remini's oppositional efforts much thought.  My general sense is that her grievances are more about the conduct of the Church leaders and members.  I think the alleged misbehavior and controversies in that group substantially serious and offensive to personal liberty and lawful society.  So I do not object to substantive critiques of that religion.

When it comes to "the reactive mind," auditing, engrams, Xenu, and so on, I just don't care enough about those things to bother with examining them closely.  If pressed, I suppose it could be said that I do not accept most of the claims of Scientology out-of-hand.  However, I don't pretend that this non-acceptance/rejection is based on a systematic, rigorous, substantive assessment.  Rather, it's borne of a lack of interest.

3. I think the situation changes where a person claims to have examined the position of the Church (on, say, origins of The Book of Mormon), rejects it, and offers an alternative explanation.  Daniel Peterson has previously addressed the position of those who reject the Church's position on The Book of Mormon, which I have commented on here:

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Those who don't believe the Book of Mormon is historical simply don't have any responsibility or incumbency to present a counter-theory. 

As a general rule, I agree with you.  However, I think those who have "present[ed] a counter-theory," or who affirmativey seek out and argue with Latter-day Saints about the truth claims of their faith, do have an obligation to defend such counter-theories.   As Daniel Peterson put it:

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I remember my friend Bill Hamblin once being in communication with a one-time, fairly prominent, ex-member critic of the Church and of the Book of Mormon. And he said, “Look, let’s assume for a moment that you’re right and that Joseph Smith did not have plates. Did he know that he didn’t have plates or did he think that he had the plates? In other words, was he a conscious deceiver, or was he in some sense mad?”

To which this critic responded: “I don’t have to lower myself to your simplistic little dichotomies.”

Well, see, I think it’s intellectually incumbent upon people like that to, come on, give us an answer to this. Otherwise it’s like guerrilla warfare. You attack and attack and attack, you always withdraw, you never defend territory. You never have to stake out your own explanation, which then will be subject to criticism and attack.

 

And here:

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Daniel Peterson and Bill Hamblin are addressing the evidence.  They are addressing the ramifications of divergent opinions about the origins of The Book of Mormon.  The LDS Church is that Joseph Smith was telling the truth.  That explanation, while audacious, is nevertheless "simple and elegant."  In contrast, alternative naturalistic explanations "just don't work and they get more and more complex," to the point of implausibility (and operating well beyond any notions of supporting evidence).  Dr. Peterson, noting this implausibility to a critic, got a response of "I don’t have to lower myself to your simplistic little dichotomies.”

Here's we're getting a response ("I'm not sure we're even speaking the same language") that is saying pretty much the same thing.  It's a refusal to address the evidence.  A refusal to explore and acknowledge the ramifications (and, frankly, the flaws) in the alternative naturalistic explanations for The Book of Mormon.  

Of course, the critics/opponents of the Church are not obligated to provide a coherent counter-explanation for The Book of Mormon.  But the point is, they have not been able to.  We're coming up on nearly 200 years since the original publication of the text, and yet when the chips are down, and when a well-informed person like Daniel Peterson (or Ryan Dahle) argues for the plausibility of the LDS position, we don't get reasoned responses and rebuttals.  We get glib sarcasm.  We get curt dismissals.  We get anything but an engagement of the evidence.

This is part of why Daniel Peterson "can't manage to disbelieve," and why he suggests to critics (correctly, in my view) that "it’s intellectually incumbent upon people like that to, come on, give us an answer to this. Otherwise it’s like guerrilla warfare. You attack and attack and attack, you always withdraw, you never defend territory. You never have to stake out your own explanation, which then will be subject to criticism and attack."
...
See also here (also by Dr. Peterson) (emphasis added):

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The most serious contemporary criticisms of the Book of Mormon and of Mormonism more broadly tend to come not from self-proclaimed orthodox (i.e., usually Evangelical) Christians, but from self-identified atheistic materialists or naturalists. The Utah-based historian Dale Morgan, largely forgotten today but still much admired in certain small contemporary circles, wrote a 1945 letter to the believing Latter-day Saint historian Juanita Brooks. In it, he identifies the fundamental issue with unusual candor:

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With my point of view on God, I am incapable of accepting the claims of Joseph Smith and the Mormons, be they however so convincing. If God does not exist, how can Joseph Smith’s story have any possible validity? I will look everywhere for explanations except to the ONE explanation that is the position of the church.

 

In Risen Indeed, Stephen Davis remarks that 

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believers point to something of an embarrassment in the position of those who do not believe in the resurrection: their inability to offer an acceptable alternative explanation of the known facts surrounding the resurrection of Jesus. The old nineteenth-century rationalistic explanations (hallucination, swoon theory, stolen body, wrong tomb, etc.) all seem to collapse of their own weight once spelled out, and no strong new theory has emerged as the consensus of scholars who deny that the resurrection occurred.

A similar situation obtains, in my judgment, with regard to the Book of Mormon and certain other elements of the Restoration. While, for instance, this or that aspect of the Book of Mormon can, hypothetically, be accounted for by means of something within Joseph Smith’s early nineteenth-century information environment, a fully comprehensive counterexplanation for Joseph’s claims remains promised but manifestly unprovided. Critics have disagreed over the nearly two centuries since the First Vision about whether Joseph was brilliant or stupid, whether he was sincerely hallucinating or cunningly conscious of his fraud, whether he concocted the Book of Mormon alone or with co-conspirators (their own identity either hotly debated or completely unknown), whether he was a cynical atheist or a pious fraud defending Christianity, and so forth.

I can't help but wonder if you are taking the "'Dale Morgan' approach" ("I will look everywhere for explanations except to the ONE explanation that is the position of the church").  It is, of course, your prerogative to do so (the same goes for Michael Coe).  But we cannot say that it fairly addresses the evidence and scholarship at hand.  It doesn't.

4. Nobody here appears to dispute Michael Coe's competency as a Mesoamericanist.  Instead, the issue is his presumption to speak publicly about The Book of Mormon without knowing much at all about it, and to use his "street cred" as a Mesoamericanist to bolster his manifestly uninformed opinion about it.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Meadowchik]

10 hours ago, JarMan said:

Not even a traditional believer thinks God did it. Mormon and Moroni did it. They may have been inspired by God. But a third party, such as an early modern writer, could also have been inspired. If you allow that an ancient, inspired prophet could have produced the Book of Mormon, then you have to allow that a prophet of a different age could have, as well.

And if a prophet of a different age could have produced it, it's not a stretch to say people in other times could have, productions to which Smith could have accessed without divine help.

[Meadowchik]

14 hours ago, bdouglas said:

Almost as arrogant as someone like Michael Coe opining on the BOM without ever having actually read it.

Yet he did read it.

[Meadowchik]

13 hours ago, Calm said:

Unless one does not believe angels exist.  If something is viewed as impossible, it can never be even slightly probable.

Believing in angels doesn't verify the BOM. If an angel could have helped Smith, a fallen angel could have. And if one evaluates for example polygamy as bad fruit, the argument for unGodly but supernatural influence could be consistent.

[smac97]

54 minutes ago, Meadowchik said:

And if a prophet of a different age could have produced it, it's not a stretch to say people in other times could have, productions to which Smith could have accessed without divine help.

And the evidence for these productions-to-which-Joseph-Smith-could-have-had-access-without-divine-help is . . . what?

Meanwhile, how does your theory account for the Three and Eight Witnesses?

You aren't the first one to present such a conspiracy theory.  See these remarks by Daniel Peterson:

Quote

Now, years ago I had a fellow who was arguing for a thesis of an unknown conspiracy that had created the plates … the Book of Mormon, rather, not the plates; he didn’t think there were any plates. But this group had created the Book of Mormon at some time. I asked him if he could specify the time. No he couldn’t; it could have been any time within the previous three hundred years. Was there any particular place that they had done it? No he didn’t know that. I said, well, you know, of course you don’t because there’s no evidence for this. You’re just making this up. I called them the Illuminati. Because it’s the idea that there is a conspiracy out there that is so secret that there is no evidence for it at all. We don’t who they are. We don’t know when they did it. We don’t know why they did it. We don’t know how they did it, why they chose Joseph Smith, nothing. You just assume they’re out there. This is a case of being thesis-driven to the point of absurdity, that you need somebody else to do it because you know Joseph Smith didn’t do it, so some mythical person did it, or persons. How many? He didn’t know.

Anyway, it, to me, is on the level of Harvey the invisible rabbit. Although in Harvey it turned out there was one. I’m not expecting to find the Illuminati any time soon.

So there’s no evidence for contemporaries. We just don’t have any evidence for the plates coming from anybody else.

So your position, on the one hand, emphasizes the application of "scientific" rigor and analysis, and on the other hand includes entirely evidence-free speculation about a shadowy conspiracy.  Isn't that a bit inconsistent?

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited October 14, 2019 by smac97

[Meadowchik]

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

Nobody here appears to dispute Michael Coe's competency as a Mesoamericanist.  Instead, the issue is his presumption to speak publicly about The Book of Mormon without knowing much at all about it, and to use his "street cred" as a Mesoamericanist to bolster his manifestly uninformed opinion about it.

Thanks,

-Smac

I've been arguing that a dismissal can be scientific without going through a comprehensive summary of the subject matter, and thus still be scientifically robust. This would be like rejecting the idea that s person born in 1900 killed President Lincoln. I wouldn't care about weapon, motive, or even a confession because I'd know enough to form a legitimate, scientific dismissal.

These days I study and write mathematics proofs all day long ((cue your hilarious grumpy math cat meme)) and I constantly encounter moments like this. Science continually uses more general protocols to evaluate information without slogging through all things people might have to say about it. 

[smac97]

Just now, Meadowchik said:

I've been arguing that a dismissal can be scientific without going through a comprehensive summary of the subject matter, and thus still be scientifically robust.

I question the accuracy of this notion.

"Comprehensive summary of the subject matter" sounds like a fancy replacement for the word "knowledge."

If so, you are advocating for science without knowledge.  

"Science" is derived from the Latin scire, meaning "to know."

I don't think ignorant guesswork can, in any meaningful sense, be characterized as "scientifically robust."

Just now, Meadowchik said:

This would be like rejecting the idea that s person born in 1900 killed President Lincoln.

No, it wouldn't.  You are speaking of an impossibility.  We are not.

Just now, Meadowchik said:

I wouldn't care about weapon, motive, or even a confession because I'd know enough to form a legitimate, scientific dismissal.

How is this "scientifically robust?"  What "science" did you deploy?

Just now, Meadowchik said:

These days I study and write mathematics proofs all day long ((cue your hilarious grumpy math cat meme)) and I constantly encounter moments like this. Science continually uses more general protocols to evaluate information without slogging through all things people might have to say about it. 

So "science" utterly precludes the existence of God?  That's your position?

Thanks,

-Smac

[Meadowchik]

45 minutes ago, smac97 said:

I question the accuracy of this notion.

"Comprehensive summary of the subject matter" sounds like a fancy replacement for the word "knowledge."

If so, you are advocating for science without knowledge.  

"Science" is derived from the Latin scire, meaning "to know."

I don't think ignorant guesswork can, in any meaningful sense, be characterized as "scientifically robust."

No, it wouldn't.  You are speaking of an impossibility.  We are not.

How is this "scientifically robust?"  What "science" did you deploy?

So "science" utterly precludes the existence of God?  That's your position?

Thanks,

-Smac

Just quickly to your last question: I don't think so. The existence of God does not imply a divine transmission of the Book of Mormon through Joseph Smith, and I'm not arguing against the existence of God.

[smac97]

10 minutes ago, Meadowchik said:

Just quickly to your last question: I don't think so. The existence of God does not imply a divine transmission of the Book of Mormon through Joseph Smith, and I'm not arguing against the existence of God.

So for you, "science" does not provide grounds for an a priori dismissal of the existence of God, but it does provide grounds for an a priori dismissal of "a divine transmission of the Book of Mormon through Joseph Smith?"

How does that work?

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited October 14, 2019 by smac97

[Meadowchik]

 

 

15 hours ago, bdouglas said:

But really, the BOM is just the beginning. You also have to account for the staggeringly original and profound Book of Moses, which JS produced shortly after the BOM was published ... not to mention over a hundred revelations, previous to the publication of the BOM and after, revelations produced on the fly, dictated in the presence of witnesses, revelations in which God speaks in the first person in language not seen outside of the Bible ...

One could go on an on. If there is such a thing as a prophet who speaks in the name of God, then Joseph Smith was such a prophet. If there is no God and therefore no prophets — well then, we must account for Joseph Smith in some other way.

Bottom line for me is: if there is a God and there are prophets, Joseph Smith was one of them. If there is no God ... well then, Joseph Smith is a huge anomaly in the history of the world, an anomaly that no materialist has even come close to accounting for.

Joseph Smith seeming extraordinary and materialistically unaccountable to you, or him resolving your cosmological questions is about you and maybe God, but not about anyone else and God.

Furthermore, it seems to me that you are limiting/defining God to be a function of Joseph Smith. That seems inconsistent to me.

[Meadowchik]

3 minutes ago, smac97 said:

So for you, "science" does not provide grounds for an a priori dismissal of the existence of God, but it does provide grounds for an a priori dismissal of "a divine transmission of the Book of Mormon through Joseph Smith?"

How does that work?

Thanks,

-Smac

When speaking to Robert Smith, I steered clear of the preposterous provenance of the Book of Mormon but instead addressed disprovability if one ignores the provenance. 

[smac97]

2 minutes ago, Meadowchik said:

When speaking to Robert Smith, I steered clear of the preposterous provenance of the Book of Mormon but instead addressed disprovability if one ignores the provenance. 

"Disprovability if one ignores the provenance."  Not sure what that means.  What are you proposing can be "disprov{ed}" about The Book of Mormon (since it seems its provenance is off the table)?

Thanks,

-Smac

[SeekingUnderstanding]

13 hours ago, bdouglas said:

Well this is the conclusion Darwin came to (by looking at wasps). But other people have come to a different conclusion——Isaac Newton, for example. Belief, or non-belief, comes down to choice.

A cliche comes to mind—— We see things not as they are, but as we are. The atheist looks out on creation and fixates on wasps (which have no apparent purpose in the Great Chain of Being), while a believer (Isaac Newton, or C S Lewis) looks at the same creation and sees God's handiwork.

It all comes down to choice.

Evidence like the beauty of creation does certainly come down to a choice in the same way that all non-falsifiable arguments do (there is a magical teapot orbiting Jupiter that controls Donald Trump's tweets!). The argument seems to boil down to: if the world is beautiful, there must be a creator. Or, I don't understand this thing therefore there must be a Creator. This belief carries no weight, that is, it has no predictive or explanatory power. It doesn't explain the world, and is not falsifiable. I can see it as nothing more than wishful thinking. I want there to be a God, therefore I choose to believe. 

Edited October 14, 2019 by SeekingUnderstanding

[SeekingUnderstanding]

10 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

The problem with that is that the number of scholars who have actually looked closely at the BofM could be crowded together on the head of a pin (with all the angels already there and dancing).  "Apologetics" gets no respect because it is usually no more than excuse-mongering by non-scholars.  They are possibly less obnoxious than the anti-Mormon polemicists, but equally tendentious and ignorant.

So if we paid more attention to "true" apologetics and ignored "excuse-mongering" apologetics, we'd get further? How can you tell the difference? Is there a stamped seal of approval at the top from the leadership of the church? Do Gee and Muehlstein represent the former or the latter? Or perhaps a third "abhorrent" category?

[Robert F. Smith]

21 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

So if we paid more attention to "true" apologetics and ignored "excuse-mongering" apologetics, we'd get further? How can you tell the difference? Is there a stamped seal of approval at the top from the leadership of the church? Do Gee and Muehlstein represent the former or the latter? Or perhaps a third "abhorrent" category?

Scholarship is a communal endeavor which is planet-wide and has nothing to do with apologetics/polemics, even though apologists and polemicists attempt to use the results of scholarship for their partisan purposes.  Think of attorneys (the master apologists/polemicists) arguing on behalf of their clients: It really makes no difference which position one takes, the arguments need to be well-crafted and convincing for whatever jury is being addressed.  Naturally, that jury can be believers, inquiring fence-sitters, or non-believers.  Since the jurors are non-scholars, the effort is primarily to convince based on very little sophisticated evidence.  Often, both sides try to do a con-job on the ignorant jury.  Anything goes.

One can side-step all of that by going for either apriori judgment, or for a declaration that only the Holy Spirit is reliable in such circumstances -- that logic and reason are simply not adequate to find ultimate answers to religious questions.  Does that help?

[JarMan]

10 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

 

I have no problem with anyone who seeks to find a naturalistic explanation for the BofM.  Indeed, I agree that there is an entirely rational and naturalistic explanation for the BofM.  The issue to be addressed is What sort of explanation can explain the contents of the BofM?  The answer can be (1) a 16th century fictional one, or (2) an ancient historical one which played out in actual time & space and was translated into English in the 16th century.  The second answer assumes a naturalistic God who uses techniques which many of us ignorantly see as "magical."

Richard Dawkins had no problem at all believing in advanced, sentient beings in the universe who are so far ahead of us that they are literally godlike.  That is a completely naturalistic assumption, which many astrophysicists accept.

I started off seeing the Book of Mormon as an ancient work with 19th Century expansion. I think this is more or less the view of most apologists and faithful members aware of the apparent anachronistic elements and scholarship addressing these issues. I figured that if the Book of Mormon was really an early modern translation (rather than a 19th Century translation) then we should be able to spot early modern expansions in the text. My idea was essentially that God had chosen an early modern prophet to translate the Book of Mormon and that Joseph merely needed to transmit this translation through the seer stone a couple of centuries later. I didn't know , exactly, how this early modern translation was supposed to have occurred. Did the translator actually learn reformed Egyptian? Did he possess the actual plates at some point? Did he simply get general ideas conveyed to his mind and convert those to an English text? I finally decided those were things that I couldn't really know so I concentrated on finding early modern expansions.

At some point I realized that almost everything (if not everything) in the Book of Mormon has early modern antecedents meaning that it's not an ancient document at all. Perhaps, then, it was written by an early modern who had received through revelation some general ideas about the ancient inhabitants of the new world and was inspired to write them down in the form of the Book of Mormon. This type of scenario would be a sort of hybrid between your number 1 and number 2, above. The problem with this approach, though, is that it could only appeal to those who start out with a belief of some sort in the Book of Mormon, a belief in divine revelation, and a belief in Joseph as a prophet. I want the Book of Mormon to appeal to a much larger cross-section because I think it is a very important book that should be studied by the secular world. So I'm looking for an explanation that doesn't require a belief in prophets or revelation or even God, for that matter. Meanwhile, I don't care if traditional believers or non-traditional believers have an explanation for the Book of Mormon that works for them. The bible is simultaneously studied by secular scholars (both believing and non-believing) and by lay people who believe it is God's word. My vision of the Book of Mormon is that it eventually be treated in a similar way as the bible is by secular scholars. I think this is more likely to happen if there is a naturalistic explanation of the Book of Mormon that secular scholars can accept. I also think the Book of Mormon would be more interesting to secular scholars if they believed it to be an early modern document, rather than merely a 19th Century one.

[JarMan]

4 hours ago, Meadowchik said:

And if a prophet of a different age could have produced it, it's not a stretch to say people in other times could have, productions to which Smith could have accessed without divine help.

It's possible someone in the 19th Century produced the Book of Mormon. I feel pretty confident, though, that Joseph didn't have the ability. If it was somebody else we have to account for not only the early modern English but also all of the early modern themes. There is very little evidence, both contextually and linguistically, that dates it later than about 1650.

[Robert F. Smith]

1 hour ago, JarMan said:

I started off seeing the Book of Mormon as an ancient work with 19th Century expansion. I think this is more or less the view of most apologists and faithful members aware of the apparent anachronistic elements and scholarship addressing these issues. I figured that if the Book of Mormon was really an early modern translation (rather than a 19th Century translation) then we should be able to spot early modern expansions in the text. My idea was essentially that God had chosen an early modern prophet to translate the Book of Mormon and that Joseph merely needed to transmit this translation through the seer stone a couple of centuries later. I didn't know , exactly, how this early modern translation was supposed to have occurred. Did the translator actually learn reformed Egyptian? Did he possess the actual plates at some point? Did he simply get general ideas conveyed to his mind and convert those to an English text? I finally decided those were things that I couldn't really know so I concentrated on finding early modern expansions.

At some point I realized that almost everything (if not everything) in the Book of Mormon has early modern antecedents meaning that it's not an ancient document at all. Perhaps, then, it was written by an early modern who had received through revelation some general ideas about the ancient inhabitants of the new world and was inspired to write them down in the form of the Book of Mormon. This type of scenario would be a sort of hybrid between your number 1 and number 2, above. The problem with this approach, though, is that it could only appeal to those who start out with a belief of some sort in the Book of Mormon, a belief in divine revelation, and a belief in Joseph as a prophet. I want the Book of Mormon to appeal to a much larger cross-section because I think it is a very important book that should be studied by the secular world. So I'm looking for an explanation that doesn't require a belief in prophets or revelation or even God, for that matter. Meanwhile, I don't care if traditional believers or non-traditional believers have an explanation for the Book of Mormon that works for them. The bible is simultaneously studied by secular scholars (both believing and non-believing) and by lay people who believe it is God's word. My vision of the Book of Mormon is that it eventually be treated in a similar way as the bible is by secular scholars. I think this is more likely to happen if there is a naturalistic explanation of the Book of Mormon that secular scholars can accept. I also think the Book of Mormon would be more interesting to secular scholars if they believed it to be an early modern document, rather than merely a 19th Century one.

The problem with that theory (BofM qua Bible) is that the BofM got to us by a series of astonishingly preposterous events, the EModE mode being almost the last straw.  Even the Bible, flawed as it is with thousands of anachronisms, as least got to us by easily understood secular historical means (scribal copying and redaction).  The evangelical belief that it is free from error, and that God has kept it pure all these years, is just childish twaddle.

Moreover, why would secular scholars be at all interested in a 16th century BofM, except as a curiosity?  Even Dan Vogel would only need to shift his claims to the 16th century (after reading your forthcoming book).