Book of Mormon Criticism of Calvin

mfbukowski · February 1, 2023

2 hours ago, Navidad said:

All too often we find that for which we are looking.

Some people call that "success".

Navidad · February 1, 2023

6 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

In this case, identifying as an apologist is irrelevant.

JarMan is proposing that the Book of Mormon was written by Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). I don't believe that to be the case. We are discussing ways that the argument could be falsified so that the theory becomes testable in some way.

I am not sure that the proposals he is making (the ways to falsify his argument) are useful tools to do this. He is arguing that the Book of Mormon is unique in the context of an 1830 publication time frame in that it's vocabulary drawn entirely from EModE, that its component short phrases can all be found in EModE literature, and that its syntax can all be found in the EModE period. That second point has issues, but I am taking it largely for what it is meant to say (that is - any time we engage in proper names/nouns it can create unique readings if those names are unique - and some of the ones in the Book of Mormon are relatively unique).

The way I see it, there are two ways to falsify these arguments. One is to show that there is vocabulary that is post-EModE (from 1650-1830). Another is to show that the Book of Mormon isn't particularly unique in this regard (that there are other volumes with similar vocabularies). To try and work through any of this will take a fair amount of time though ... so it may be a while before I have something to spit out. I have some homegrown lexical tools which I use for text processing, but finding texts, putting them into an appropriate form, evaluating the vocabulary lists, and then determining placement in EModE (which isn't always easy since the same word can have an EModE usage and a post-EModE usage) can take a lot of effort.

So, while it's about the argument, the discussion is really about how you can test the argument.

Now you have curious. I never heard of Hugo Grotius. I love to learn. So you have opened the door for that. Thanks. In my time of learning about Mormonism (inclusive of all the variants) sicne around 1989, I have read and re-read all the LDS Scriptures to try and understand them. I see the Book of Mormon as the archetype, the landmark of the LDS faith. It seems that in all but an archetypal sense, the D&C has far surpassed it as the repository of late 20th and early 21st century LDS doctrine. I don't see any way that anyone could read the Book of Mormon only and come away with anything but a modicum of understanding of the beliefs and doctrine of the current Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I enjoy watching my LDS friends to see how their faith is lived out in their lives day to day. I sincerely keep looking for something as extraordinary as their extraordinary claims. I think they keep their eye on me too, possibly in the same way. I keep looking for that something tangible to tell me "Yep, the LDS Christians of the world are no kidding different from all the other non-LDS Christians I have known and interacted with over my long life as an Evangelical." But they aren't. To borrow a term from my deceased good friend John Stott, I think Basic Christianity is the same wherever it is found, in or out of whichever institutional church group is considered. Ok. Now I have to learn more about Mr. Grotius. Thanks for the new quest. Edited- I just discovered that Hugo Grotius is the same Arminian theologian who I know of as Hugo de Groot. Mennonites tend to be Arminian as well. I think de Groot or Grotius had some dealings with Mennonite theologians, but I don't remember the details.

Edited February 1, 2023 by Navidad

Benjamin McGuire · February 1, 2023

16 hours ago, JarMan said:

It's possible to determine the percentage of words or phrases in the BOM that existed in EModE. For individual words I believe it's 100%.

So let's start with the word 'alarming'. Used in Alma 2:3 -

"Now this was alarming to the people of the church, and also to all those who had not been drawn away after the persuasions of Amlici;"

The OED puts this in the English language in 1680 (which matches up reasonably well with my searching).

JarMan · February 2, 2023

10 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Ok.

So, to falsify the theory, I only need to find a word in the Book of Mormon that doesn't exist in EModE, is that right?

On the other side of the coin, if I find other books written around the time of the Book of Mormon where I can find every word and every phrase in them in EModE period books, that would also falsify the theory, right?

Just to be clear here, how long should the phrase be? Would 3 word n-gram be sufficient?

The first issue is pretty easy. I have a list someplace, I just need to find it and review it. The second part is a little more difficult (proving a negative is always more of a challenge, right?). But, all I need to do to meet your terms is find another text published around 1830 in which I can find virtually 100% of the phrases in the text in early modern sources. That is also manageable if a bit time consuming. I will have to dig out my analysis tools, but they are reasonably well suited to the task.

Does this sound right?

There are very few words or phrases in the Book of Mormon that haven't been found in EModE. Skousen published a list of ones he couldn't find. I did a search and was able to find two or three of those words on his list and cross them off. But even undeniably modern words wouldn't falsify this argument because they could be attributed to a later redactor. I don't think there are any modern words or phrases, but you're free to look for some.

10 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

So provide with me some metrics I can use in my search.

Do you have examples? My experience with Carmack on this particular point is that his searches aren't very good. I have little problem finding late examples. But, give me some specific examples to work with.

I am going to disagree with you (and Carmack) that texts written 'biblically' are those which should have the highest overlap. I don't find any reason to accept this particular assumption. My experience has been different. Actual translations of older texts tend to have much higher levels of archaic forms. There is a rhetorical value to this (even if it results in bad translations). The Book of Mormon claims to be a translation and not a history written in 'biblical language'.

At any rate, your last set of comments about syntax are all rather vague. If I am to falsify your argument, I will need some metrics, or I will need some specific examples with which to work.

It doesn't sound like you've read Carmack's papers dealing with syntax. Syntactical use is learned from speakers around you, generated unconsciously, and not always used consistently. For example, I often hear people say, "I already ate." I normally say, "I've already eaten" because that's what I learned growing up. But I'm not consistent with this. Sometimes I'll blurt out, "I already ate." or "I've already ate." If you had a large enough corpus of my writing you could identify the frequency of use of all forms. (I realize spoken and written syntax aren't necessarily identical, but let's just assume for this case that it is.) You could also look at how I use other similar verbs like drove/driven, gave/given, etc. You would then be able to quantify how many verbs I treat this way, and you could calculate my usage rates. With those two metrics you could do the same analysis on somebody else and compare them to me.

This is essentially what Carmack has done using several different syntactical forms. He's found that the Book of Mormon has a high usage rate of several syntactical forms that are highly irregular for the 1800s. He knows they're irregular because he's tracked the usage rates over time using EEBO and ECCO. If a certain form essentially disappears from the corpus by 1750, but is found in the BOM at a rate similar to its heyday in the late 1500s, then that's compelling evidence. Well, he's found dozens of examples of this in the Book of Mormon. And since syntax is learned from your environment and generated unconsciously, if someone in JS's environment produced the BOM, we should see these archaic syntactical forms showing up in the written record of those around him, including his own writing at rates similar to the Book of Mormon. But it doesn't. Many don't even show up at all. Given that some of these forms seem to have been completely obsolete, how could somebody unaware that they even exist reproduce them? The only logical explanation for why they are in the BOM is that they were put there by an early modern writer.

11 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I wanted to make a final comment for JarMan this morning -

I would like your take on this issue. Carmack and Skousen have an apologetic agenda. They believe that the text of the Book of Mormon was delivered through divine means to Joseph Smith, and they also believe in what has been labeled as a tight model of transmission of the text (I assume that you know what I am referring to). These beliefs are reflected in some of their approaches to the text of the Book of Mormon and their EModE theory. A good example is the use of the phrase "them days". They argue that this occurs in the original manuscript. It was used in EModE. And so it is likely that this was not an error (it was later edited in the Book of Mormon to "those days".). There are a couple of other options here -

It took me only 5 minutes to identify more than 100 English texts from the 19th and 20th centuries that use this phrase. Most of them appear to use it in dialogue (no, I didn't look at more than they first handful). This may well have been an error created by the reading and writing process the Book of Mormon is alleged to have gone through. Many of Skousen's suggested emendations are based on this principle - do you think that this is an appropriate way to build evidence for the EModE situation? Should we prefer original text readings that could simply be errors stemming from the dictation process?

You seem to be assuming the same thing about Carmack and Skousen that you've been assuming about me--that our agendas are driving our results. We are all probably guilty of this to some degree. It's human nature. But you really ought to look inward on this.

Benjamin McGuire · February 2, 2023

7 minutes ago, JarMan said:

There are very few words or phrases in the Book of Mormon that haven't been found in EModE. Skousen published a list of ones he couldn't find. I did a search and was able to find two or three of those words on his list and cross them off. But even undeniably modern words wouldn't falsify this argument because they could be attributed to a later redactor. I don't think there are any modern words or phrases, but you're free to look for some.

So we are back to square one. You put this forward, but it isn't actually able to falsify the argument as far as you are concerned.

8 minutes ago, JarMan said:

This is essentially what Carmack has done using several different syntactical forms. He's found that the Book of Mormon has a high usage rate of several syntactical forms that are highly irregular for the 1800s. He knows they're irregular because he's tracked the usage rates over time using EEBO and ECCO. If a certain form essentially disappears from the corpus by 1750, but is found in the BOM at a rate similar to its heyday in the late 1500s, then that's compelling evidence. Well, he's found dozens of examples of this in the Book of Mormon. And since syntax is learned from your environment and generated unconsciously, if someone in JS's environment produced the BOM, we should see these archaic syntactical forms showing up in the written record of those around him, including his own writing at rates similar to the Book of Mormon. But it doesn't. Many don't even show up at all. Given that some of these forms seem to have been completely obsolete, how could somebody unaware that they even exist reproduce them? The only logical explanation for why they are in the BOM is that they were put there by an early modern writer.

It's like a moving target with you. We don't care about Joseph Smith's environment at the moment. It is completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the text could have been written by Grotius. That theory should be testable on its own. Part of the problem with Skousen and Carmack (and your use of them) is that they are focused on the question of Joseph Smith, and so they (as you do here) want to look at the texts in Joseph's environment. What happens when we compare the Book of Mormon to, say, a 1640 translation of one of Grotius's known works? How does the Book of Mormon syntax align with that text? I have a couple of them. Would you like to quote sections of them for comparison? As a side note, I know of no examples by Skousen and Carmack that were completely obsolete in 1830. I can find them all in later publications.

One of the challenges that you have in all of this (about the syntax) is that EModE syntax is not all that different from later Modern English. This is why, for the most part, we have no problem reading the text. The comparisons that Skousen and Carmack make are interesting in part because there was no standard in the EModE period. So, they get to sort through all sorts of known syntax examples to find things that match. In reality, it is a relatively small portion of the Book of Mormon that contains uniquely EModE syntax (that is, syntax which isn't also found in our current Modern English). And whether or not these kinds of syntax (poor syntax by our modern standards) can be found rarely in Modern English, they can generally all be found - it just takes a little effort.

Your comments bring up another really interesting issue related to all of this though. You learn syntax from your environment. So, if the EModE period ends around 1650, we still have people who learned that syntax living well into the 18th century. The EModE period is quite short - it begins in the late 15th century. But in that brief period of time we get the printing press and we get incredibly influential authors like Chaucer. The language of the EModE doesn't change or shift that quickly because of these printed texts (like the King James Bible). We can discuss how many individuals read the King James bible as children - and learned some of this EModE syntax. This stuff lingers - so it shouldn't be a surprise that I can find examples of Carmack's EModE syntax in the late 19th and even early 20th centuries. And because the syntax is, for the most part, quite similar to late Modern English, I expect that I can find texts with the same density of EModE syntax in the first part of the 19th century. Carmack's look at books written to emulate the Biblical style presents a problematic category - they are largely history texts, and generally they are re-writing 19th century histories written by others into this pseudo-biblical language. The Book of Mormon doesn't follow this trend. You claim that it is fiction - so we are far better off looking at fiction. Which could be a relevant place to look - after all, the EModE period gives rise to the modern novel.

Finally, when I look at early translations of Grotius, I see a fair amount of stuff that could be labeled as Middle English, not EModE. Given what I point out above, this also shouldn't be surprising. What is surprising is to find so much on the late end of EModE in the Book of Mormon and so little on the front end if the text really was written in the 1600s. Our labels are not hard limits. They are just identifiers for trends. Individual bits in the language change faster or slower.

At any rate, you still haven't come up with a way to falsify your argument. You suggest something, and then when I respond, you just point out (once more) that we can blame everything on later redactions ... which is not a falsifiable

38 minutes ago, JarMan said:

You seem to be assuming the same thing about Carmack and Skousen that you've been assuming about me--that our agendas are driving our results. We are all probably guilty of this to some degree. It's human nature. But you really ought to look inward on this.

argument. For the record, the Book of Mormon has a very small vocabulary (a bit over 5,000 unique words). Of those, only a little more than 1,600 cannot be found in the King James Bible. The shift in language between 1650 and 1830 is relatively small. There isn't a huge number of words added to the language. To have even a relatively small number of them show up in the Book of Mormon is statistically quite significant - because they represent a significant representation of that newer language. And while it is true that in your thinking, they can all be attributed to a modern redactor, how would you distinguish between a modern word that ought to be attributed to that modern redactor and when a modern word should be considered anachronistic in the text in a way that can't be attributed to a modern redactor?

In other words, how do we falsify the argument?

38 minutes ago, JarMan said:

You seem to be assuming the same thing about Carmack and Skousen that you've been assuming about me--that our agendas are driving our results. We are all probably guilty of this to some degree. It's human nature. But you really ought to look inward on this.

And what do you think my agenda is? I only have one concern here - and that is to show that your process is a complete mess that isn't capable of delivering the conclusions that you say it provides. No more, no less. You might say that the inappropriate use of parallels has become something of a hobby for me.

JarMan · February 2, 2023

29 minutes ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

So we are back to square one. You put this forward, but it isn't actually able to falsify the argument as far as you are concerned.

It's like a moving target with you. We don't care about Joseph Smith's environment at the moment. It is completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the text could have been written by Grotius. That theory should be testable on its own. Part of the problem with Skousen and Carmack (and your use of them) is that they are focused on the question of Joseph Smith, and so they (as you do here) want to look at the texts in Joseph's environment. What happens when we compare the Book of Mormon to, say, a 1640 translation of one of Grotius's known works? How does the Book of Mormon syntax align with that text? I have a couple of them. Would you like to quote sections of them for comparison? As a side note, I know of no examples by Skousen and Carmack that were completely obsolete in 1830. I can find them all in later publications.

One of the challenges that you have in all of this (about the syntax) is that EModE syntax is not all that different from later Modern English. This is why, for the most part, we have no problem reading the text. The comparisons that Skousen and Carmack make are interesting in part because there was no standard in the EModE period. So, they get to sort through all sorts of known syntax examples to find things that match. In reality, it is a relatively small portion of the Book of Mormon that contains uniquely EModE syntax (that is, syntax which isn't also found in our current Modern English). And whether or not these kinds of syntax (poor syntax by our modern standards) can be found rarely in Modern English, they can generally all be found - it just takes a little effort.

Your comments bring up another really interesting issue related to all of this though. You learn syntax from your environment. So, if the EModE period ends around 1650, we still have people who learned that syntax living well into the 18th century. The EModE period is quite short - it begins in the late 15th century. But in that brief period of time we get the printing press and we get incredibly influential authors like Chaucer. The language of the EModE doesn't change or shift that quickly because of these printed texts (like the King James Bible). We can discuss how many individuals read the King James bible as children - and learned some of this EModE syntax. This stuff lingers - so it shouldn't be a surprise that I can find examples of Carmack's EModE syntax in the late 19th and even early 20th centuries. And because the syntax is, for the most part, quite similar to late Modern English, I expect that I can find texts with the same density of EModE syntax in the first part of the 19th century. Carmack's look at books written to emulate the Biblical style presents a problematic category - they are largely history texts, and generally they are re-writing 19th century histories written by others into this pseudo-biblical language. The Book of Mormon doesn't follow this trend. You claim that it is fiction - so we are far better off looking at fiction. Which could be a relevant place to look - after all, the EModE period gives rise to the modern novel.

Finally, when I look at early translations of Grotius, I see a fair amount of stuff that could be labeled as Middle English, not EModE. Given what I point out above, this also shouldn't be surprising. What is surprising is to find so much on the late end of EModE in the Book of Mormon and so little on the front end if the text really was written in the 1600s. Our labels are not hard limits. They are just identifiers for trends. Individual bits in the language change faster or slower.

At any rate, you still haven't come up with a way to falsify your argument. You suggest something, and then when I respond, you just point out (once more) that we can blame everything on later redactions ... which is not a falsifiable

argument. For the record, the Book of Mormon has a very small vocabulary (a bit over 5,000 unique words). Of those, only a little more than 1,600 cannot be found in the King James Bible. The shift in language between 1650 and 1830 is relatively small. There isn't a huge number of words added to the language. To have even a relatively small number of them show up in the Book of Mormon is statistically quite significant - because they represent a significant representation of that newer language. And while it is true that in your thinking, they can all be attributed to a modern redactor, how would you distinguish between a modern word that ought to be attributed to that modern redactor and when a modern word should be considered anachronistic in the text in a way that can't be attributed to a modern redactor?

In other words, how do we falsify the argument?

And what do you think my agenda is? I only have one concern here - and that is to show that your process is a complete mess that isn't capable of delivering the conclusions that you say it provides. No more, no less. You might say that the inappropriate use of parallels has become something of a hobby for me.

You're conflating a couple of things, here: 1) linguistic evidence, and 2) contextual evidence. The linguistic evidence is what suggests a modern redactor. For example, there isn't any obsolete vocabulary in the BOM. I don't believe any of the content in the BOM was redacted except for one sentence, which I've discussed. I'm not relying on redaction to explain content. I'm relying on it to explain the linguistics.

You're not addressing the linguistic evidence at all. You seem to think you can falsify Carmack/Skousen by identifying BOM linguistic elements in 19th Century writing. Even if you could find every single syntactical structure in the BOM in the 19th Century (you can't, by the way) it wouldn't necessarily mean anything. The question of obsolescence is just one metric. Usage rate and syntactical variety are important metrics that you are ignoring. For example, Carmack shows a usage rate of 6.9 times per 10,000 words for subordinate that in the BOM. His control texts showed an average of 1.2, with a maximum of 2.6. The KJB is about 2.3. He also showed that the BOM contained 8 different types and 5 subtypes of subordinate that. The KJB came in at 7 types and 3 subtypes. Individually, the control texts contained at most 2 types and 2 subtypes. Taken together, the control texts contained 4 types and 2 subtypes. But let's pretend we kept analyzing 19th Century texts one after another until the total number of types found was comparable to the BOM. This wouldn't mean anything scattered among dozens or hundreds of authors, unless we're going to argue that dozens or hundreds of authors wrote the BOM.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. There are many other archaic syntactical constructions in the BOM that don't show up in the control texts at all or at comparable rates. You can posit that the control texts aren't the best ones to be looking at, if you want. But you need evidence. You need to come up with a 19th Century text that is comparable to the BOM using the metrics Skousen used.

JarMan · February 2, 2023

6 hours ago, Navidad said:

Now you have curious. I never heard of Hugo Grotius. I love to learn. So you have opened the door for that. Thanks. In my time of learning about Mormonism (inclusive of all the variants) sicne around 1989, I have read and re-read all the LDS Scriptures to try and understand them. I see the Book of Mormon as the archetype, the landmark of the LDS faith. It seems that in all but an archetypal sense, the D&C has far surpassed it as the repository of late 20th and early 21st century LDS doctrine. I don't see any way that anyone could read the Book of Mormon only and come away with anything but a modicum of understanding of the beliefs and doctrine of the current Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I enjoy watching my LDS friends to see how their faith is lived out in their lives day to day. I sincerely keep looking for something as extraordinary as their extraordinary claims. I think they keep their eye on me too, possibly in the same way. I keep looking for that something tangible to tell me "Yep, the LDS Christians of the world are no kidding different from all the other non-LDS Christians I have known and interacted with over my long life as an Evangelical." But they aren't. To borrow a term from my deceased good friend John Stott, I think Basic Christianity is the same wherever it is found, in or out of whichever institutional church group is considered. Ok. Now I have to learn more about Mr. Grotius. Thanks for the new quest. Edited- I just discovered that Hugo Grotius is the same Arminian theologian who I know of as Hugo de Groot. Mennonites tend to be Arminian as well. I think de Groot or Grotius had some dealings with Mennonite theologians, but I don't remember the details.

Grotius did find common ground with the Anabaptists. As you well know, Anabaptists were pacifists. Grotius believed that as long as they paid to support those who protected them, that they didn't need to pick up arms. We see this same idea with the pacifist Anti-Nephi Lehies in the BOM who paid to support their Nephite guardians (Alma 27:24).

The Nehor · February 2, 2023

5 minutes ago, JarMan said:

Grotius did find common ground with the Anabaptists. As you well know, Anabaptists were pacifists. Grotius believed that as long as they paid to support those who protected them, that they didn't need to pick up arms. We see this same idea with the pacifist Anti-Nephi Lehies in the BOM who paid to support their Nephite guardians (Alma 27:24).

Ummmm…..this isn’t analogous. It wasn’t a moral or religious devotion to pacifism. It was an oath due to their past actions. It was an oath that they seriously considered breaking when the war was going poorly before their religious leaders talked them out of it.

JarMan · February 2, 2023

1 hour ago, The Nehor said:

Ummmm…..this isn’t analogous. It wasn’t a moral or religious devotion to pacifism. It was an oath due to their past actions. It was an oath that they seriously considered breaking when the war was going poorly before their religious leaders talked them out of it.

Right. We're not necessarily supposed to be pacifists. But we also shouldn't reject pacificists if they are willing to pay for their own defense. The text cleverly manages to demonstrate this without, at the same time, endorsing pacifism per se.

JarMan · February 2, 2023

3 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

And what do you think my agenda is? I only have one concern here - and that is to show that your process is a complete mess that isn't capable of delivering the conclusions that you say it provides. No more, no less. You might say that the inappropriate use of parallels has become something of a hobby for me.

As the self-proclaimed parallel-appropriateness hall monitor, tell me what your method is for determining parallels. You pointed one out already with the kingship code in Deuteronomy, so you obviously recognize some of them. And while you're at it, you have to tell me how I can falsify your approach. So far all I've gotten is that an appropriate parallel is one that you agree with and an inappropriate parallel is one you don't. And you should state your assumptions about the text, like I did, so we can watch for signs of confirmation bias.

JarMan · February 2, 2023

16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

The Book of Mormon's theology is really quite alien to Servetus. It's discussions on war are alien to Grotius.

First sentence is partially true, but so what? I don't claim BOM and Servetus theology to be a match.

Second sentence is incorrect. There is a lot about BOM warfare among the righteous Nephites that would look ideal to Grotius.

Nephite warfare is anachronistic. This is easy to see when we compare it to OT warfare and other ancient cultures. Where is all of the brutality in the name of God? Why don't the Nephites take slaves from their defeated enemies like virtually all other ancient societies did? And why did the righteous Nephites only fight defensive wars? It's almost like they are demonstrating an idealized way to wage warfare. But ideal to who? Ancient authors would have seen them as weak and inopportunistic. From Grotius' perspective, which parts of the BOM discussion on warfare are alien? What would he have thought about BOM warfare?

JarMan · February 2, 2023

16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I am challenging you on this. Autocrat does not equal king. This is one of those 'vices' of parallelomania, where you interpret and shift meaning to make your case. On the one hand, we have a very clear case where the Book of Mormon invokes the Old Testament discussions of kingship in what might be considered a fairly traditional fashion. On the other hand, you are arguing that some people might have considered Calvin a king, and so a discussion about a king could be read as suggesting Calvin. This is much more of a stretch than you seem to be willing to admit. We don't care so much about contemporaries who may have considered Calvin to be autocratic. Did Grotius ever label Calvin as a king? And it is a problem within the Book of Mormon which generally differentiates between religious and political leaders. Calvin was a religious leader. Yes, he had a lot of power. But he wasn't a king. And Calvin's job wasn't hereditary. Now, if the bad guy in the Book of Mormon was the high priest, you would have more of a case. It just isn't there. I went back and looked through the thread briefly - I saw no sources mentioned for this.

Now hold on. Don't misstate my argument. I said Calvin was a "king." Notice the quotation marks. His critics considered him to be an autocratic tyrant. Some called him the "Pope of Geneva." Here's a secondary source that talks about some of Calvin's contemporaries:

Quote

The image of Calvin as either a sex maniac (astonishingly) or ruthless dictator originates chiefly in French Catholic reception of him in the sixteenth century

And here's a modern biography that repeatedly calls Calvin a dictator with a few examples:

Quote

Never suspecting that the French refugee whom they appointed preacher at their church had determined from the outset to become lord of the city and State, they gave him office and salary and dignity. Thenceforward their own powers were at an end, for, thanks to his resistless energy, Calvin would grasp the reins, would ruthlessly realize his totalitarian ambitions, and thus transform a democratic republic into a theocratic dictatorship.

Quote

Calvin's first attempt to take Geneva by storm had failed. But in the life of a dictator reverses are of small moment. Indeed, it is almost essential that the ascent to a position which will give such a man uncontrolled power should be marked at the outset by dramatic defeat.

JarMan · February 2, 2023

17 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Abinadi's view of God is not modalistic at all. It is, in fact, quite similar to the Statement of Faith produced at Chalcedon. I will try and make this brief. The Statement of Faith from Chalcedon reads in part:

So, let's substitute the language from this statement into the Book of Mormon in Mosiah 15. Instead of 'Fathe', I will substitute 'truly God' or 'true God'. Instead of Son, I will substitute 'truly man' or 'true man'. When I do this, Abinadi's sermon becomes this (verses 1-8 bolding where I made the changes:

One thing should be clear - whether I make the substitution or not - this was never Modalism. But, in re-framing this passage in this way, it becomes clear that Abinadi is explaining the two natures of Jesus Christ - the divine and the human nature - and pointing out (an important idea in the theology of the Book of Mormon that comes up again in Alma) that it is the human nature that allows Jesus Christ to act as an intercessor for humanity and not the divine nature. And this doctrine by Abinadi isn't modalistic. Although I am willing to have you convince me by explaining what you mean ...

Right - an idea that doesn't exist on its own in the Book of Mormon ...

But Modalism isn't really there ... and now we end up with your overlapping hot spots being something completely unreliable.

I'm not the first to see modalism in the BOM, particularly with Abinadi. See, for example: https://bib.irr.org/joseph-smiths-modalism-sabellian-sequentialism-or-swedenborgian-expansionism. It's interesting that this article notes similarities between Abinadi's and Swedenborg's modalism. What makes this interesting is this modern biography of Servetus that talks quite a bit about his theology. It claims that Servetus and Swedenborg had the same anti-trinitarian, modalist views. So, I have two different sources--one that says Abinadi resembles Swedenborg on this issue--and another that says Swedenborg resembles Servetus. This is some pretty good independent evidence that Abinadi and Servetus can be seen as similar, which means I've made a plausible argument despite what your own opinion is.

Navidad · February 2, 2023

9 hours ago, JarMan said:

Grotius did find common ground with the Anabaptists. As you well know, Anabaptists were pacifists. Grotius believed that as long as they paid to support those who protected them, that they didn't need to pick up arms. We see this same idea with the pacifist Anti-Nephi Lehies in the BOM who paid to support their Nephite guardians (Alma 27:24).

Very interesting. I live in Mexico. Here, in the early 1930s the Mennonite immigrants were under tremendous threat of violence because they were, as the Mormons before them, provided special privileges and terms for moving here to rebuild the economy and provide more Anglo blood for a whiter mestizo race (the goal of many in leadership in revolutionary Mexico). This was in direct conflict with the revolutionary ideal of land for the campesinos. Also, as with the Mormons that last goal was never realized.

The endogamous nature of both groups prevented their assimilation (to this day). Back to the point, in the early 1930s, the Mexican federal government provided federal troops to protect the Mennonites after threats turned to violence against them. State officials here in Chihuahua didn't like it, but there was nothing they could do. There were several clashes where Mexican troops were killed and in turn, killed Mexican nationals to protect foreigners.

Similarly federal General Jose de la Luz Blanco (a Baptist by the way) in July 1912 offered to protect the Mormon colonies from the rebels. Instead of accepting this protection (even though they thought General Blanco was "clean" and "intelligent"), they left in the Exodus of 1912 a few days later. At any rate, the Mennonites were grateful for the military support in the 1930s. Ever since however, Mennonite scholars of pacifism have debated the propriety of Mennonite pacifists accepting armed protection in Mexico from the English (a term used by Mennonites like the LDS use the term gentile) in the 1930s. A principle tenet of our doctrine is that God will protect us - no need to rely on either humans or especially on arms.

I believe de Groot or Grotius had a real interest in maritime travel, sea charts, and the like. If I remember right (which I often don't), Dutch Mennonites owned ships which got caught up in the several wars between Spain, Holland, England, and Portugal. I believe de Groot took a position in those conflicts, but I couldn't tell you how it all worked out. I do know that up until the late 1940s and 1950s, Mennonites were historically Arminian. With the onslaught of the Presbyterian premillennial preaching coming out of Philadelphia (Donald Grey Barnhouse), many Mennonites became premillennial and were graciously given the right foot of fellowship out of the Mennonite church. A whole group of culturally Mennonite but premillenial churches sprang up around Philly. That is the environment in which I grew up. Best wishes in your quest.

Benjamin McGuire · February 2, 2023

8 hours ago, JarMan said:

You're conflating a couple of things, here: 1) linguistic evidence, and 2) contextual evidence. The linguistic evidence is what suggests a modern redactor. For example, there isn't any obsolete vocabulary in the BOM. I don't believe any of the content in the BOM was redacted except for one sentence, which I've discussed. I'm not relying on redaction to explain content. I'm relying on it to explain the linguistics.

No, you have been kicking out a lot of nonsense.

The linguistic evidence doesn't suggest a modern redactor. The linguistic evidence doesn't suggest an early 17th century authorship. There isn't any need to move outside of the period contemporary with the book's publication. You suggested a series of claims about this linguistic evidence that you said could be used to falsify the claim. The moment I agreed to it, you backpedaled on it. I am certain I can find other texts that display similar linguistic circumstances - books with identifiable authors and identifiable publication contexts. Wouldn't this disprove your notion of what the linguistic evidence illustrates?

8 hours ago, JarMan said:

You're not addressing the linguistic evidence at all. You seem to think you can falsify Carmack/Skousen by identifying BOM linguistic elements in 19th Century writing. Even if you could find every single syntactical structure in the BOM in the 19th Century (you can't, by the way) it wouldn't necessarily mean anything.

I can do this. If you think that I can't, then you provide me with your best example, and I will replicate it the syntax in another 19th century work. I have done this in the past. There is this really flawed view that you have, that somehow EModE is a well defined segment with no overlap outside the period (on either side). Not only is this not true, it is something we would expect to be true. You have put all of this weight on the Skousen/Carmack research - but your understanding of it is flawed (not mine), and you are taking positions that they would themselves never take.

8 hours ago, JarMan said:

The question of obsolescence is just one metric. Usage rate and syntactical variety are important metrics that you are ignoring.

I'm not ignoring it. For the moment, I am just trying to get a clear statement from you as to how to test your theory in a way that can be falsified. And so far - absolutely nothing. I am not going to simply take your assurance that this is proof or evidence of anything when it is absolutely clear to me that you have never done any of this research yourself, and you don't really understand what it means.

8 hours ago, JarMan said:

For example, Carmack shows a usage rate of 6.9 times per 10,000 words for subordinate that in the BOM. His control texts showed an average of 1.2, with a maximum of 2.6. The KJB is about 2.3. He also showed that the BOM contained 8 different types and 5 subtypes of subordinate that. The KJB came in at 7 types and 3 subtypes. Individually, the control texts contained at most 2 types and 2 subtypes. Taken together, the control texts contained 4 types and 2 subtypes.

Let me offer some insights into this - Carmack's control texts were late, not early. The King James text was published in 1611. This means that the Book of Mormon's usage is likely an outlier even in the 16th-17th century and certainly by the time Grotius would have written the text and it would have been translated. This doesn't help your argument. It suggests that the Book of Mormon text goes out of its way to sound archaic - even in an early 1600s setting. You seem to be arguing that it should be seen as typical in some way of EModE context - but this is based on what evidence? Certainly not Carmack's. As I noted, this is in part because your objectives are not the same as Carmack's objectives. His research doesn't help you identify a particular author of the Book of Mormon. It doesn't even help put a context on when it was written/translated/redacted. And certainly not in the way that you think it does. Further, and I have said this before, Carmack's control group is limited to the kinds of texts that he believes the Book of Mormon to be - religious literature and history. You are claiming that the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction that uses it fictional narratives to build allegorical retelling of contemporary events. This means that as far as you are concerned, Carmack is looking in the wrong place for his control group. They are completely different kinds of literature. So what am I supposed to think here? That somehow what you are doing is using Carmack exactly the way he thinks you should be using it, and coming up with conclusions that he would agree with? I don't think so.

8 hours ago, JarMan said:

But let's pretend we kept analyzing 19th Century texts one after another until the total number of types found was comparable to the BOM. This wouldn't mean anything scattered among dozens or hundreds of authors, unless we're going to argue that dozens or hundreds of authors wrote the BOM.

This completely ignores what is represented by chance. If we were looking for a target percentage of a text, for example, my control group wouldn't have to come up with the exact same breakdown of EModE syntax that the Book of Mormon has. It would just need to have the same percentage to show that it isn't out of the realm of the expected to find those levels of EModE usage in the 19th century. Statistically, the argument you are suggesting is also nonsensical. This is because it isn't predictive (an all important part of these kinds of statistical arguments). To use the old example, it is a rare event for a particular person to win the lottery. It is an even rarer event for a particular person to win it twice. We might think that for someone to win it twice they would have to be cheating. But, give the number of people who play, not only is it not a rare event for someone to win the lottery (we have winners regularly, don't we), it isn't really all that rare for someone to win it twice. It is only a problem if we take the winner and pretend that this is exactly what we predicted would happen. This is analogous to what you are doing here. You start with a position. You find your evidence - and then you pretend that you predicted this all along. But this isn't how this kind of problem actually works.

9 hours ago, JarMan said:

This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. There are many other archaic syntactical constructions in the BOM that don't show up in the control texts at all or at comparable rates. You can posit that the control texts aren't the best ones to be looking at, if you want. But you need evidence. You need to come up with a 19th Century text that is comparable to the BOM using the metrics Skousen used.

This is easier than you think - because I don't need to come up with the exact same syntax examples that Carmack produces - I just need to come up with the same kinds of syntax examples at the same relative rates. That would be comparable use of EModE in 19th century texts.

The point of finding specific examples of all of the different types of syntax examples that Carmack identifies is merely to show that this syntax hasn't yet fully left the English language in the 19th century - meaning that a text which is deliberately written in archaic language can use them without too much risk of being misunderstood.

Benjamin McGuire · February 2, 2023

6 hours ago, JarMan said:

As the self-proclaimed parallel-appropriateness hall monitor, tell me what your method is for determining parallels. You pointed one out already with the kingship code in Deuteronomy, so you obviously recognize some of them. And while you're at it, you have to tell me how I can falsify your approach. So far all I've gotten is that an appropriate parallel is one that you agree with and an inappropriate parallel is one you don't. And you should state your assumptions about the text, like I did, so we can watch for signs of confirmation bias.

You can start here and here

7 hours ago, JarMan said:

Second sentence is incorrect. There is a lot about BOM warfare among the righteous Nephites that would look ideal to Grotius.

This is absolutely true - the problem is that these same principles aren't unique to Grotius and are widely recognized (have you read any Hobbes recently?). Grotius himself constantly appeals to earlier sources in his discussions of these points. But it is precisely because these ideas are so common that they are uninteresting. That has been one of my themes of parallels from the beginning, if you remember. I am curious what you think that Grotius would think of Nephi's killing of Laban and the justification the text offers for it. How would Grotius relate to the letter in Alma 60. On a more macro level, how should we understand the sort of pacifist approach that we see, its described high costs in the Amlicite conflict, leading up to a new approach under Moroni, which then results in absolute disaster during the Gadianton conflict. What is the larger narrative here supposed to be about in terms of Grotius's thought? Or is this just merely part of the historical novel?

7 hours ago, JarMan said:

Nephite warfare is anachronistic. This is easy to see when we compare it to OT warfare and other ancient cultures. Where is all of the brutality in the name of God? Why don't the Nephites take slaves from their defeated enemies like virtually all other ancient societies did? And why did the righteous Nephites only fight defensive wars? It's almost like they are demonstrating an idealized way to wage warfare. But ideal to who? Ancient authors would have seen them as weak and inopportunistic. From Grotius' perspective, which parts of the BOM discussion on warfare are alien? What would he have thought about BOM warfare?

What does this have to do with anything? Anachronisms only occur with a context. And your argument here seems to be that the warfare describe would be anachronistic in an Ancient Near East context. This may be true, but it isn't evidence that Grotius wrote the text. On the other hand, the Book of Mormon does contain slavery created by warfare (it happens on the part of the Lamanites).

Grotius's arguments about war come out of the world view that he was immersed in. The two fundamental laws of nature that Grotius offers are that it is acceptable to defend your own life, and that it was acceptable to take the things that you need to survive - which are necessary for life.

The Book of Mormon deals with these issues. But not in a clear sort of good versus evil fashion. How would Grotius apply these two principles in the Gadianton conflict? Are these two principles set against each other in that conflict? Grotius eventually terms this second principle a right of innocent profit - "where I seek only my own Advantage without damaging any Body else". This is an adjustment that he makes - based on two laws that he articulates: 1) Let no one inflict injury upon his fellows, and 2) Let no one seize possession of that which has been taken into the possession of another. So much for the Brass Plates.

But then we get something else that is relevant to this side discussion. in De Iure Praedae I.II.6.2 he points out that the natural law is supreme. "The Christian religion commands, that we should lay down our Lives one for another; but who will pretend to say, that we are obliged to this by the Law of Nature?" To hammer this point home, Grotius went so far as to suggest that this was the case whether or not we believe that God exists and orders creation. This personal approach that Grotius bases the foundations for his views on war on are tied at least in part to the notion of the agency of man. But, the Book of Mormon makes it very clear that the agency of mankind is limited. It does not take this idea to the point that Grotius does, that mankind has a right to act and not be acted on - the Book of Mormon argues that this state of existence only occurs for humanity in the resurrection. And this challenges Grotius's arguments from the perspective of Natural Law - it presents a different set of fundamental beliefs on which to hang a potential natural law theory - one that is far more supportive of some of the events that we see in the text.

At any rate, I am getting to far off track.

The Book of Mormon is fascinating with regards to warfare - not because it describes warfare, but because it also discusses the motivations that drive it, it describes changes in the warfare as well as changes in those motivations, and it contains a later of discussion about the ethics and morality of warfare and the justification of warfare. I have no doubts that anyone can find parallels between the Book of Mormon and Grotius on warfare in the middle of all of this material. But, those parallels represent a relatively small portion of the Book of Mormon's discussion.

Benjamin McGuire · February 2, 2023

7 hours ago, JarMan said:

Now hold on. Don't misstate my argument. I said Calvin was a "king." Notice the quotation marks. His critics considered him to be an autocratic tyrant. Some called him the "Pope of Geneva." Here's a secondary source that talks about some of Calvin's contemporaries:

Do you know why the call them quotation marks? It is because they reflect an actual quotation. When you write that "Calvin was a "king"," with king in quotation marks, it indicates that you are actually quoting someone.

On the other hand, there is a significant difference between being an autocratic tyrant and being a king. And if Calvin wasn't considered a king, then you are manipulating the parallel in a way that I described early on in this thread. If the author of this text wanted to draw a better connection, he would have created an autocratic high priest in the court of Noah as the bad guy, and everyone would have had a much easier time making the connection. But, kingship is itself a really important theme here. And again, I continue to assert that your shift represents an inappropriate comparison.

7 hours ago, JarMan said:

And here's a modern biography that repeatedly calls Calvin a dictator with a few examples:

Who cares. It's not relevant. But, especially since you are trying to emphasize the language (of a modern translation no less).

Benjamin McGuire · February 2, 2023

7 hours ago, JarMan said:

I'm not the first to see modalism in the BOM, particularly with Abinadi. See, for example: https://bib.irr.org/joseph-smiths-modalism-sabellian-sequentialism-or-swedenborgian-expansionism. It's interesting that this article notes similarities between Abinadi's and Swedenborg's modalism. What makes this interesting is this modern biography of Servetus that talks quite a bit about his theology. It claims that Servetus and Swedenborg had the same anti-trinitarian, modalist views. So, I have two different sources--one that says Abinadi resembles Swedenborg on this issue--and another that says Swedenborg resembles Servetus. This is some pretty good independent evidence that Abinadi and Servetus can be seen as similar, which means I've made a plausible argument despite what your own opinion is.

Ronald Huggins has no credibility for me. My favorite essay of his in terms of nonsense is his piece in which he discusses Joseph Smith's reliance on the story of Captain Kidd, and the relationship between the city Moroni and the Comoros islands. The idea didn't originate with Huggins, it came from Fred Buchanan in 1989, and Buchanan offers some credit to his encounter with the Hoffman forgeries. But you can read all about my response to this in the links I provided earlier today.

We can have this discussion about modalism if you want, but you are going to have to do far better than Ronald Huggins.

I am less interested in Biographies in this particular case than I am in the original texts. I am beginning to think you have only read commentaries - and perhaps this is why your parallels come across as such generalizations. What do you think Modalism is?

At any rate, you have now (again) ignored my argument completely and shifted to a different (even if related) topic. The Book of Mormon does not teach modalism - and this is true no matter how similar Swedenborg is to Servetus. The Book of Mormon doesn't directly claim to be anti-trinitarian (as both Swedenborg and Servetus did do). Your argument isn't all that plausible because you are interpreting all of this stuff to somehow be related on the basis of some very generalized and sweeping ideas. I am going to repeat something I quoted early on - the vices of the parallel hunter:

Quote

1. Any method of comparison which lists and underscores similarities and suppresses or minimizes differences is necessarily misleading.
2. Parallels are too readily susceptible of manipulation. Superficial resemblances may be made to appear as of the essence.
3. Parallel-hunters do not, as a rule, set out to be truthful and impartial. They are hell-bent on proving a point.
4. Parallel-hunting is predicated on the use of lowest common denominators. Virtually all literature, even the most original, can be reduced to such terms, and thereby shown to be unoriginal. So viewed, Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper plagiarizes ****ens’ David Copperfield. Both deal with England, both describe the slums of London, both see their hero exalted beyond his original station. To regard any two books in this light, however, is to ignore every factor that differentiates one man’s thoughts, reactions and literary expression from another’s.
5. Parallel columns operate piecemeal. They wrench phrases and passages out of context. A product of the imagination is indivisible. It depends on totality of effect. To remove details from their setting is to falsify them.
6. Parallels fail to indicate the proportion which the purportedly borrowed material bears to the sum total of the source, or to the whole of the new work. Without such information a just appraisal is impossible.
7. The practitioners of the technique resort too often to sleight of hand. They employ language, not to record facts or to describe things accurately, but as props in a rhetorical hocus-pocus which, by describing different things in identical words, appears to make them magically alike.
8. A double-column analysis is a dissection. An autopsy will reveal a great deal about a cadaver, but very little about the spirit of the man who once inhabited it.
9. Most parallels rest on the assumption that if two successive things are similar, the second one was copied from the first. This assumption disregards all the other possible causes of similarity.
Whatever his vices or virtues, the parallel-hunter is a hardy species. He is destined, as someone had said, to persist until Judgment Day, when he will doubtless find resemblances in the very warrant that consigns him to the nether regions.

This is what I see here - you are emphasizing similarities, you are minimizing differences. You are taking a superficial approach to the texts. You are using such broad terms (the most general ideas) - that there can only be similarity (but you are doing so without recognizing how this affects the specific argument you make of specific authorship). You are still pulling things out of context - you are reducing the entirety of this long and complex text to the few sections of interest to you. And so on. Is it plausible? To the extent that monkeys could type out the complete works of Shakespeare, sure. It just isn't at all likely. Plausibility doesn't mean that you have a good argument or even a reasonable one. And your argument isn't either.

JarMan · February 3, 2023

11 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

No, you have been kicking out a lot of nonsense.

The linguistic evidence doesn't suggest a modern redactor. The linguistic evidence doesn't suggest an early 17th century authorship. There isn't any need to move outside of the period contemporary with the book's publication. You suggested a series of claims about this linguistic evidence that you said could be used to falsify the claim. The moment I agreed to it, you backpedaled on it. I am certain I can find other texts that display similar linguistic circumstances - books with identifiable authors and identifiable publication contexts. Wouldn't this disprove your notion of what the linguistic evidence illustrates?

I can do this. If you think that I can't, then you provide me with your best example, and I will replicate it the syntax in another 19th century work. I have done this in the past. There is this really flawed view that you have, that somehow EModE is a well defined segment with no overlap outside the period (on either side). Not only is this not true, it is something we would expect to be true. You have put all of this weight on the Skousen/Carmack research - but your understanding of it is flawed (not mine), and you are taking positions that they would themselves never take.

Provide my best example of what? A single syntactical type found in the BOM? Most probably could be found in the 19th Century, but that's not the point. The BOM has a large clustering of persistent archaic syntax. So you need to show multiple types (and subtypes) of archaisms comparable to the BOM and you need them to appear regularly, also comparable to the BOM. And this all has to be found within the corpus of a single author. Choose any author you'd like whose work extends into the 1800s. I don't think you can do this.

11 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I'm not ignoring it. For the moment, I am just trying to get a clear statement from you as to how to test your theory in a way that can be falsified. And so far - absolutely nothing. I am not going to simply take your assurance that this is proof or evidence of anything when it is absolutely clear to me that you have never done any of this research yourself, and you don't really understand what it means.

Let me offer some insights into this - Carmack's control texts were late, not early. The King James text was published in 1611. This means that the Book of Mormon's usage is likely an outlier even in the 16th-17th century and certainly by the time Grotius would have written the text and it would have been translated. This doesn't help your argument. It suggests that the Book of Mormon text goes out of its way to sound archaic - even in an early 1600s setting. You seem to be arguing that it should be seen as typical in some way of EModE context - but this is based on what evidence? Certainly not Carmack's. As I noted, this is in part because your objectives are not the same as Carmack's objectives. His research doesn't help you identify a particular author of the Book of Mormon. It doesn't even help put a context on when it was written/translated/redacted. And certainly not in the way that you think it does. Further, and I have said this before, Carmack's control group is limited to the kinds of texts that he believes the Book of Mormon to be - religious literature and history. You are claiming that the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction that uses it fictional narratives to build allegorical retelling of contemporary events. This means that as far as you are concerned, Carmack is looking in the wrong place for his control group. They are completely different kinds of literature. So what am I supposed to think here? That somehow what you are doing is using Carmack exactly the way he thinks you should be using it, and coming up with conclusions that he would agree with? I don't think so.

This completely ignores what is represented by chance. If we were looking for a target percentage of a text, for example, my control group wouldn't have to come up with the exact same breakdown of EModE syntax that the Book of Mormon has. It would just need to have the same percentage to show that it isn't out of the realm of the expected to find those levels of EModE usage in the 19th century. Statistically, the argument you are suggesting is also nonsensical. This is because it isn't predictive (an all important part of these kinds of statistical arguments). To use the old example, it is a rare event for a particular person to win the lottery. It is an even rarer event for a particular person to win it twice. We might think that for someone to win it twice they would have to be cheating. But, give the number of people who play, not only is it not a rare event for someone to win the lottery (we have winners regularly, don't we), it isn't really all that rare for someone to win it twice. It is only a problem if we take the winner and pretend that this is exactly what we predicted would happen. This is analogous to what you are doing here. You start with a position. You find your evidence - and then you pretend that you predicted this all along. But this isn't how this kind of problem actually works.

This is easier than you think - because I don't need to come up with the exact same syntax examples that Carmack produces - I just need to come up with the same kinds of syntax examples at the same relative rates. That would be comparable use of EModE in 19th century texts.

The point of finding specific examples of all of the different types of syntax examples that Carmack identifies is merely to show that this syntax hasn't yet fully left the English language in the 19th century - meaning that a text which is deliberately written in archaic language can use them without too much risk of being misunderstood.

This is the problem with your approach. You want to look at the entirety of the English language instead of a single author. The whole English language can't tell you much about a single author. You need to look at a particular author's work to know what subset of the English language he uses.

9 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

You can start here and here

This is absolutely true - the problem is that these same principles aren't unique to Grotius and are widely recognized (have you read any Hobbes recently?). Grotius himself constantly appeals to earlier sources in his discussions of these points. But it is precisely because these ideas are so common that they are uninteresting. That has been one of my themes of parallels from the beginning, if you remember. I am curious what you think that Grotius would think of Nephi's killing of Laban and the justification the text offers for it. How would Grotius relate to the letter in Alma 60. On a more macro level, how should we understand the sort of pacifist approach that we see, its described high costs in the Amlicite conflict, leading up to a new approach under Moroni, which then results in absolute disaster during the Gadianton conflict. What is the larger narrative here supposed to be about in terms of Grotius's thought? Or is this just merely part of the historical novel?

What does this have to do with anything? Anachronisms only occur with a context. And your argument here seems to be that the warfare describe would be anachronistic in an Ancient Near East context. This may be true, but it isn't evidence that Grotius wrote the text. On the other hand, the Book of Mormon does contain slavery created by warfare (it happens on the part of the Lamanites).

Grotius's arguments about war come out of the world view that he was immersed in. The two fundamental laws of nature that Grotius offers are that it is acceptable to defend your own life, and that it was acceptable to take the things that you need to survive - which are necessary for life.

The Book of Mormon deals with these issues. But not in a clear sort of good versus evil fashion. How would Grotius apply these two principles in the Gadianton conflict? Are these two principles set against each other in that conflict? Grotius eventually terms this second principle a right of innocent profit - "where I seek only my own Advantage without damaging any Body else". This is an adjustment that he makes - based on two laws that he articulates: 1) Let no one inflict injury upon his fellows, and 2) Let no one seize possession of that which has been taken into the possession of another. So much for the Brass Plates.

But then we get something else that is relevant to this side discussion. in De Iure Praedae I.II.6.2 he points out that the natural law is supreme. "The Christian religion commands, that we should lay down our Lives one for another; but who will pretend to say, that we are obliged to this by the Law of Nature?" To hammer this point home, Grotius went so far as to suggest that this was the case whether or not we believe that God exists and orders creation. This personal approach that Grotius bases the foundations for his views on war on are tied at least in part to the notion of the agency of man. But, the Book of Mormon makes it very clear that the agency of mankind is limited. It does not take this idea to the point that Grotius does, that mankind has a right to act and not be acted on - the Book of Mormon argues that this state of existence only occurs for humanity in the resurrection. And this challenges Grotius's arguments from the perspective of Natural Law - it presents a different set of fundamental beliefs on which to hang a potential natural law theory - one that is far more supportive of some of the events that we see in the text.

At any rate, I am getting to far off track.

The Book of Mormon is fascinating with regards to warfare - not because it describes warfare, but because it also discusses the motivations that drive it, it describes changes in the warfare as well as changes in those motivations, and it contains a later of discussion about the ethics and morality of warfare and the justification of warfare. I have no doubts that anyone can find parallels between the Book of Mormon and Grotius on warfare in the middle of all of this material. But, those parallels represent a relatively small portion of the Book of Mormon's discussion.

Look, it would be fascinating to go into Grotius and the Book of Mormon on warfare. Or Nephi/Laban or kingship or government or theology or a whole host of things. A lot of his work is available in English and there are tons of secondary sources. But right now you are just cherry-picking things in some of his work that you think don't harmonize with the Book of Mormon. If you want to spend the next several months to a year studying Grotius we could probably have a good discussion.

9 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Do you know why the call them quotation marks? It is because they reflect an actual quotation. When you write that "Calvin was a "king"," with king in quotation marks, it indicates that you are actually quoting someone.

On the other hand, there is a significant difference between being an autocratic tyrant and being a king. And if Calvin wasn't considered a king, then you are manipulating the parallel in a way that I described early on in this thread. If the author of this text wanted to draw a better connection, he would have created an autocratic high priest in the court of Noah as the bad guy, and everyone would have had a much easier time making the connection. But, kingship is itself a really important theme here. And again, I continue to assert that your shift represents an inappropriate comparison.

Who cares. It's not relevant. But, especially since you are trying to emphasize the language (of a modern translation no less).

Here you are again telling me how the author would have written the text if he wanted to convey X. Literature isn't created according to your rules. I am reading the BOM from the perspective of someone familiar with the Mirrors for Princes genre. From that perspective, it doesn't matter what the noble or government title of a person is. The Prince wasn't even written for a prince. The specific title "king" isn't important here. What's important are the functions he performs, because that's what the genre is all about. It's advice about how to govern. Noah governed badly when he executed Abinadi on the pretext of heresy when his motivation was really personal animus. Ditto for Calvin/Servetus.

9 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Ronald Huggins has no credibility for me. My favorite essay of his in terms of nonsense is his piece in which he discusses Joseph Smith's reliance on the story of Captain Kidd, and the relationship between the city Moroni and the Comoros islands. The idea didn't originate with Huggins, it came from Fred Buchanan in 1989, and Buchanan offers some credit to his encounter with the Hoffman forgeries. But you can read all about my response to this in the links I provided earlier today.

We can have this discussion about modalism if you want, but you are going to have to do far better than Ronald Huggins.

I am less interested in Biographies in this particular case than I am in the original texts. I am beginning to think you have only read commentaries - and perhaps this is why your parallels come across as such generalizations. What do you think Modalism is?

At any rate, you have now (again) ignored my argument completely and shifted to a different (even if related) topic. The Book of Mormon does not teach modalism - and this is true no matter how similar Swedenborg is to Servetus. The Book of Mormon doesn't directly claim to be anti-trinitarian (as both Swedenborg and Servetus did do). Your argument isn't all that plausible because you are interpreting all of this stuff to somehow be related on the basis of some very generalized and sweeping ideas. I am going to repeat something I quoted early on - the vices of the parallel hunter:

This is what I see here - you are emphasizing similarities, you are minimizing differences. You are taking a superficial approach to the texts. You are using such broad terms (the most general ideas) - that there can only be similarity (but you are doing so without recognizing how this affects the specific argument you make of specific authorship). You are still pulling things out of context - you are reducing the entirety of this long and complex text to the few sections of interest to you. And so on. Is it plausible? To the extent that monkeys could type out the complete works of Shakespeare, sure. It just isn't at all likely. Plausibility doesn't mean that you have a good argument or even a reasonable one. And your argument isn't either.

It really doesn't matter if you don't see modalism in Abinadi or what you think about Huggins. The point is that independent people have made the connection, which makes this argument plausible.

And I'm not taking the text out of context. I'm very consistent in reading it from an early modern perspective. That's what the context is. You are the one taking the BOM out of context by refusing to read it from that same perspective. If you want to evaluate my hypothesis that the BOM has an early modern origin, you can't assume the conclusion. Instead, you have to have to allow that it could be early modern and then show where the text conflicts with that idea. Everything else is noise.

Navidad · February 3, 2023

On 2/1/2023 at 5:51 PM, Benjamin McGuire said:

So we are back to square one. You put this forward, but it isn't actually able to falsify the argument as far as you are concerned.

It's like a moving target with you. We don't care about Joseph Smith's environment at the moment. It is completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the text could have been written by Grotius. That theory should be testable on its own. Part of the problem with Skousen and Carmack (and your use of them) is that they are focused on the question of Joseph Smith, and so they (as you do here) want to look at the texts in Joseph's environment. What happens when we compare the Book of Mormon to, say, a 1640 translation of one of Grotius's known works? How does the Book of Mormon syntax align with that text? I have a couple of them. Would you like to quote sections of them for comparison? As a side note, I know of no examples by Skousen and Carmack that were completely obsolete in 1830. I can find them all in later publications.

One of the challenges that you have in all of this (about the syntax) is that EModE syntax is not all that different from later Modern English. This is why, for the most part, we have no problem reading the text. The comparisons that Skousen and Carmack make are interesting in part because there was no standard in the EModE period. So, they get to sort through all sorts of known syntax examples to find things that match. In reality, it is a relatively small portion of the Book of Mormon that contains uniquely EModE syntax (that is, syntax which isn't also found in our current Modern English). And whether or not these kinds of syntax (poor syntax by our modern standards) can be found rarely in Modern English, they can generally all be found - it just takes a little effort.

Your comments bring up another really interesting issue related to all of this though. You learn syntax from your environment. So, if the EModE period ends around 1650, we still have people who learned that syntax living well into the 18th century. The EModE period is quite short - it begins in the late 15th century. But in that brief period of time we get the printing press and we get incredibly influential authors like Chaucer. The language of the EModE doesn't change or shift that quickly because of these printed texts (like the King James Bible). We can discuss how many individuals read the King James bible as children - and learned some of this EModE syntax. This stuff lingers - so it shouldn't be a surprise that I can find examples of Carmack's EModE syntax in the late 19th and even early 20th centuries. And because the syntax is, for the most part, quite similar to late Modern English, I expect that I can find texts with the same density of EModE syntax in the first part of the 19th century. Carmack's look at books written to emulate the Biblical style presents a problematic category - they are largely history texts, and generally they are re-writing 19th century histories written by others into this pseudo-biblical language. The Book of Mormon doesn't follow this trend. You claim that it is fiction - so we are far better off looking at fiction. Which could be a relevant place to look - after all, the EModE period gives rise to the modern novel.

Finally, when I look at early translations of Grotius, I see a fair amount of stuff that could be labeled as Middle English, not EModE. Given what I point out above, this also shouldn't be surprising. What is surprising is to find so much on the late end of EModE in the Book of Mormon and so little on the front end if the text really was written in the 1600s. Our labels are not hard limits. They are just identifiers for trends. Individual bits in the language change faster or slower.

At any rate, you still haven't come up with a way to falsify your argument. You suggest something, and then when I respond, you just point out (once more) that we can blame everything on later redactions ... which is not a falsifiable

argument. For the record, the Book of Mormon has a very small vocabulary (a bit over 5,000 unique words). Of those, only a little more than 1,600 cannot be found in the King James Bible. The shift in language between 1650 and 1830 is relatively small. There isn't a huge number of words added to the language. To have even a relatively small number of them show up in the Book of Mormon is statistically quite significant - because they represent a significant representation of that newer language. And while it is true that in your thinking, they can all be attributed to a modern redactor, how would you distinguish between a modern word that ought to be attributed to that modern redactor and when a modern word should be considered anachronistic in the text in a way that can't be attributed to a modern redactor?

In other words, how do we falsify the argument?

And what do you think my agenda is? I only have one concern here - and that is to show that your process is a complete mess that isn't capable of delivering the conclusions that you say it provides. No more, no less. You might say that the inappropriate use of parallels has become something of a hobby for me.

I am going to have to plead ignorance as I read your collective back and forths. Could one or both of you please define or clarify your use and the end goal of the word "falsify" in the context of the discussions you are having? If you "falsify an argument" what are you exactly doing? Thanks so much.

Benjamin McGuire · February 3, 2023

18 minutes ago, Navidad said:

I am going to have to plead ignorance as I read your collective back and forths. Could one or both of you please define or clarify your use and the end goal of the word "falsify" in the context of the discussions you are having? If you "falsify an argument" what are you exactly doing? Thanks so much.

You can read about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Falsifiability is a standard component of scientific investigation. When we develop a theory or hypothesis, we also have to understand how that theory can be proven false. This allows us to test the theory so that we can accept it, discard it, or modify it until the theory is able to answer the questions we are asking.

In this discussion, the theory that Grotius was the substantial author of the Book of Mormon represents a proposal that might be testable. We may not be able to prove it, but we can certainly start by looking at ways that the argument could be falsified (proven wrong) and testing the theory against those ideas that would prove it wrong. On the most fundamental level, JarMan's theory is built on the idea that the Book of Mormon is a Early Modern English text. I disagree with that idea. I believe that the Book of Mormon is a 19th century text that deliberately includes archaic language. The question is, how could we disprove the idea that the Book of Mormon is an Early Modern text. One way would be to identify language and ideas in the text that would create anachronisms. For example, I raised the word 'alarming' used in Alma 2:3. This word doesn't enter the English language until around 1680 - which sits outside of the Early Modern period. JarMan suggests that in this isn't evidence of anything, since he argues that whatever the original text that Grotius wrote looked like, it was not in English, it needed to be translated into English, and then was redacted at least once after that (by Joseph Smith) when Smith produced the 1829 text of the Book of Mormon. My request has been that, with the ambiguity that these textual layers create (in the proposed complex history of the text), what would be a testable notion for falsifiability in this case. How could we differentiate between an anachronism caused by the alleged history of the text and an anachronism that would have to be attributed to Grotius and would disprove the theory that Grotius wrote the text. And, if there is no testable model that would allow us to falsify the theory, then we would need to recognize that the idea, as interesting as it is, is unprovable.

This is the idea behind the falsifiability principle applied here.

Benjamin McGuire · February 3, 2023

11 hours ago, JarMan said:

Provide my best example of what? A single syntactical type found in the BOM? Most probably could be found in the 19th Century, but that's not the point. The BOM has a large clustering of persistent archaic syntax. So you need to show multiple types (and subtypes) of archaisms comparable to the BOM and you need them to appear regularly, also comparable to the BOM. And this all has to be found within the corpus of a single author. Choose any author you'd like whose work extends into the 1800s. I don't think you can do this.

And I am sure that I can show a large clustering of persistent archaic syntax in a such a text. All I need from you is an actual metric I can use by which to gauge my success. That is, provide me with an actual target number, and I will do what I can to demonstrate it. We can do this in number of instances per 1,000 words (since that is a metric you used earlier).

This can't ever really be conclusive because there isn't a baseline. I have mentioned this in other ways before. EModE has a lot of syntax that survives in late Modern English (the language that becomes the predominant form of English after 1650). And we realize that this is true because while we may occasionally find difficult passages in EModE texts, they aren't, broadly speaking, so far removed from our language that we cannot read them with a high level of understanding. According to Carmack, the Book of Mormon has a higher than expected incidence of certain kinds of syntax than does the typical EModE text. So the Book of Mormon shouldn't be used as the benchmark when discussing whether or not this sort of syntax is a useful marker for indicating EModE authorship. If the Book of Mormon really does have a larger amount of exclusively EModE syntax than typical EModE texts, then using the standard of the Book of Mormon we could only conclude that these other EModE texts were not written in the EModE period. This would falsify your premise that this is a viable indicator, right? This is why I suggest that the Book of Mormon has a higher usage of some of this syntax because it is deliberately using archaic language, rather than naturally using naturally using language that is later viewed as archaic.

But, I am certainly willing to go your route. Would you concede that the EModE theory is flawed if I can find a text that fits your description? This is a lot of work. I am not going to go through the process without some sort of commitment.

11 hours ago, JarMan said:

This is the problem with your approach. You want to look at the entirety of the English language instead of a single author. The whole English language can't tell you much about a single author. You need to look at a particular author's work to know what subset of the English language he uses.

And when I look at Grotius ... what subset of English did he use?

11 hours ago, JarMan said:

Look, it would be fascinating to go into Grotius and the Book of Mormon on warfare. Or Nephi/Laban or kingship or government or theology or a whole host of things. A lot of his work is available in English and there are tons of secondary sources. But right now you are just cherry-picking things in some of his work that you think don't harmonize with the Book of Mormon. If you want to spend the next several months to a year studying Grotius we could probably have a good discussion.

Do you see the irony in your comments here? Give me some credit for having more access to Grotius than you think. Start producing actual content from his work. And let's look at translations made before 1829.

11 hours ago, JarMan said:

Here you are again telling me how the author would have written the text if he wanted to convey X. Literature isn't created according to your rules. I am reading the BOM from the perspective of someone familiar with the Mirrors for Princes genre. From that perspective, it doesn't matter what the noble or government title of a person is. The Prince wasn't even written for a prince. The specific title "king" isn't important here. What's important are the functions he performs, because that's what the genre is all about. It's advice about how to govern. Noah governed badly when he executed Abinadi on the pretext of heresy when his motivation was really personal animus. Ditto for Calvin/Servetus.

You aren't doing what you claim to be doing. And you are committing one of the vices of parallelomania: "Parallel-hunting is predicated on the use of lowest common denominators. Virtually all literature, even the most original, can be reduced to such terms, and thereby shown to be unoriginal. So viewed, Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper plagiarizes ****ens’ David Copperfield. Both deal with England, both describe the slums of London, both see their hero exalted beyond his original station. To regard any two books in this light, however, is to ignore every factor that differentiates one man’s thoughts, reactions and literary expression from another’s." This is exactly what I see when you suggest that "X executed Y on the pretext of heresy when his motivation was really personal animus." Is this a story I can find in other places besides the real world history of Calvin and Servetus? If so, then your argument isn't really just this issue (and I want to point out that as far as I can tell, it has never actually been just this issue).

11 hours ago, JarMan said:

It really doesn't matter if you don't see modalism in Abinadi or what you think about Huggins. The point is that independent people have made the connection, which makes this argument plausible.

It doesn't make it plausible. That is like saying that because a bunch of people have claimed that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election that it is plausible that he did. Or that (to provide something closer to this thread), the fact that there is an entire society of people who believe that the works of Shakespeare were really written by Edward de Vere. That fact that a bunch of people believe something (and we could make a long, long list) has no real impact on whether something is realistic or plausible. You actually have to make the argument - and it has to be an appropriate argument.

We have been having debates over authorship for about as long as we have recognized authors. Authorship attribution is an area with a lot of academically published studies. You should try looking for a few good ones to use as a model. You have argued that the Book of Mormon is substantially untouched in the redaction process (one sentence you claim). But, I suspect that every time I provide another word that cannot be EModE, you will add to that list. Rather than going through this route, what you need to do is to build a predictive analysis. Create a language model for Grotius. Compare this with the Book of Mormon.

We have, so far, been discussing your EModE conclusions from the perspective provided by Skousen and Carmack. I have a different approach. Tell me what you think - rather than dealing with the syntax (which hasn't been shown to be a strong indicator for authorship attribution), what if we use reliable indicators to compare the Book of Mormon text to a spectrum of EModE literature. Word function n-grams and parts-of-speech n-grams could be a couple of these metrics. We could use a broad selection of texts and see how well the Book of Mormon fits in with early 17th century literature and how it fits in with early 19th century literature. This would also tell us how representative the text is for those two periods of time, right? It wouldn't be conclusive - but it would be just as conclusive as the kind of suggestions you made earlier in trying to determine when the Book of Mormon might have been written (in its current form).

11 hours ago, JarMan said:

And I'm not taking the text out of context. I'm very consistent in reading it from an early modern perspective. That's what the context is. You are the one taking the BOM out of context by refusing to read it from that same perspective. If you want to evaluate my hypothesis that the BOM has an early modern origin, you can't assume the conclusion. Instead, you have to have to allow that it could be early modern and then show where the text conflicts with that idea. Everything else is noise.

The context of the text is a book published in 1830. This isn't what I have been referring to - I am referring to your process of using parts of the text in isolation from the text as a whole. But in addressing this directly, I have access (as do you) to a historical process which creates the Book of Mormon - including an original hand written manuscript, and details of every printed edition and hand written edition subsequent to that original document. The text isn't an EModE text. It doesn't matter how much you keep repeating this, it doesn't change that fact. And for you, you yourself recognize that this text isn't the Early Modern English of your fantasy (which includes at least two non-existent hypothetical texts). Your earliest hypothetical text wouldn't even have been in English. It would have been translated into EModE (although this creates some problems if we stay within the dating framework, since the translation into EModE would have had to occurred in the brief window between Grotius's authorship of the original text and the end of the EModE period in 1650). This isn't a context, it is a theory. I don't have to assume that the Book of Mormon is EModE and then show that theory to be false. My theory is built on the facts that no one contests.

One of the problems that also occurs here is that (as I have pointed out several times), Skousen's and Carmack's arguments aren't aimed at your position. They don't have the hypothetical texts that you do. When I pull out a word list 'alarming,' it doesn't cause the same kinds of difficulties for them as it does for you because they aren't actually arguing for an EModE text of the Book of Mormon. Their entire position is that the Book of Mormon uses this EModE language that would not have been understood by Joseph Smith, so Joseph Smith could not have been its author. It must have been authored (for them this means translated) by someone who understood EModE. But it could have been authored in 1829 for all practical purposes. At any rate, I still see this discussion going around in circles ...

Navidad · February 3, 2023

3 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

You can read about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Falsifiability is a standard component of scientific investigation. When we develop a theory or hypothesis, we also have to understand how that theory can be proven false. This allows us to test the theory so that we can accept it, discard it, or modify it until the theory is able to answer the questions we are asking.

In this discussion, the theory that Grotius was the substantial author of the Book of Mormon represents a proposal that might be testable. We may not be able to prove it, but we can certainly start by looking at ways that the argument could be falsified (proven wrong) and testing the theory against those ideas that would prove it wrong. On the most fundamental level, JarMan's theory is built on the idea that the Book of Mormon is a Early Modern English text. I disagree with that idea. I believe that the Book of Mormon is a 19th century text that deliberately includes archaic language. The question is, how could we disprove the idea that the Book of Mormon is an Early Modern text. One way would be to identify language and ideas in the text that would create anachronisms. For example, I raised the word 'alarming' used in Alma 2:3. This word doesn't enter the English language until around 1680 - which sits outside of the Early Modern period. JarMan suggests that in this isn't evidence of anything, since he argues that whatever the original text that Grotius wrote looked like, it was not in English, it needed to be translated into English, and then was redacted at least once after that (by Joseph Smith) when Smith produced the 1829 text of the Book of Mormon. My request has been that, with the ambiguity that these textual layers create (in the proposed complex history of the text), what would be a testable notion for falsifiability in this case. How could we differentiate between an anachronism caused by the alleged history of the text and an anachronism that would have to be attributed to Grotius and would disprove the theory that Grotius wrote the text. And, if there is no testable model that would allow us to falsify the theory, then we would need to recognize that the idea, as interesting as it is, is unprovable.

This is the idea behind the falsifiability principle applied here.

Great thanks a lot. Is the burden of revealing the falsifiability of a theory, belief, or doctrine on the initiator or proponent of the theory, or the person taking the negative? If something cannot be proven, then the advocate may still continue to advocate, but has to acknowledge that their theory is not provable. Do I have that right? I would assume that the vast majority of beliefs and doctrines (religious hypotheses) are not provable, so they are fail the falsifiability test. One would have to shake one's head and simply assert, "Well, that is what I believe anyway!" Or as Mark would say -(I think! I dare not speak for him) the Holy Spirit told me and that's enough proof for me! Just hang in there until the Spirit tells you too! Are you aware of anything that has been written on the idea of the falsifiability of religious or philosophical truths? Thanks so much.

Navidad · February 3, 2023

3 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

You can read about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Falsifiability is a standard component of scientific investigation. When we develop a theory or hypothesis, we also have to understand how that theory can be proven false. This allows us to test the theory so that we can accept it, discard it, or modify it until the theory is able to answer the questions we are asking.

In this discussion, the theory that Grotius was the substantial author of the Book of Mormon represents a proposal that might be testable. We may not be able to prove it, but we can certainly start by looking at ways that the argument could be falsified (proven wrong) and testing the theory against those ideas that would prove it wrong. On the most fundamental level, JarMan's theory is built on the idea that the Book of Mormon is a Early Modern English text. I disagree with that idea. I believe that the Book of Mormon is a 19th century text that deliberately includes archaic language. The question is, how could we disprove the idea that the Book of Mormon is an Early Modern text. One way would be to identify language and ideas in the text that would create anachronisms. For example, I raised the word 'alarming' used in Alma 2:3. This word doesn't enter the English language until around 1680 - which sits outside of the Early Modern period. JarMan suggests that in this isn't evidence of anything, since he argues that whatever the original text that Grotius wrote looked like, it was not in English, it needed to be translated into English, and then was redacted at least once after that (by Joseph Smith) when Smith produced the 1829 text of the Book of Mormon. My request has been that, with the ambiguity that these textual layers create (in the proposed complex history of the text), what would be a testable notion for falsifiability in this case. How could we differentiate between an anachronism caused by the alleged history of the text and an anachronism that would have to be attributed to Grotius and would disprove the theory that Grotius wrote the text. And, if there is no testable model that would allow us to falsify the theory, then we would need to recognize that the idea, as interesting as it is, is unprovable.

This is the idea behind the falsifiability principle applied here.

Great

Edited February 3, 2023 by Navidad
Somehow I created a duplicate post!

Benjamin McGuire · February 3, 2023

53 minutes ago, Navidad said:

Great thanks a lot. Is the burden of revealing the falsifiability of a theory, belief, or doctrine on the initiator or proponent of the theory, or the person taking the negative? If something cannot be proven, then the advocate may still continue to advocate, but has to acknowledge that their theory is not provable. Do I have that right? I would assume that the vast majority of beliefs and doctrines (religious hypotheses) are not provable, so they are fail the falsifiability test. One would have to shake one's head and simply assert, "Well, that is what I believe anyway!" Or as Mark would say -(I think! I dare not speak for him) the Holy Spirit told me and that's enough proof for me! Just hang in there until the Spirit tells you too! Are you aware of anything that has been written on the idea of the falsifiability of religious or philosophical truths? Thanks so much.

Yes, if you cannot falsify a theory, you can certainly keep advocating for it. The challenge is that these kinds of theories are usually given a back seat. There isn't a way to promote one such theory over another (even if individuals are convinced that they are right). In the realm of hard sciences, often theories are limited - because the tests that we envision that can prove or disprove a theory can't be performed. A good example of this is the Higgs Bosun - a sub atomic particle theorized in The Standard Model. It was described along with its function several decades before the technology existed that could perform the tests necessary to prove its existence. Those tests were successfully completed only in 2013. The predictive nature of the theory (and the subsequent tests) adds credibility to the model and the hypothesis.

You are right, that the vast majority of religious questions cannot be falsified - but these issues are rarely raised in this sort of fashion (other than, perhaps, questions like the existence of God, which individuals have tried to prove or disprove for a very long time). That being said, these kinds of tools are scientific tools - and they don't work well to evaluate religious or philosophical truths. They can work well at evaluating beliefs. For example, the beliefs about vaccination (and there is a huge range of those beliefs right now) could be tested by using the scientific method - forming a hypothesis, developing a test, and then seeing if the test results confirm or deny the hypothesis.

Rarely do tests confirm or deny complex theories entirely. Instead they evaluate one approach at a time. And depending on the outcome of the test, the hypothesis can be altered to match the new information (or tossed, or accepted, or whatever the results warrant).

It would seem that the claim that Grotius is the primary author of the Book of Mormon is a claim that can be tested. The idea of the parallels and the comparison of material that JarMan raises are all part of the inductive argument. They help him get to the hypothesis. But, in order to determine the validity of the evidence, we have to perform some sort of test. Further, since we are dealing with literature, the kinds of principles that are brought forward to test the claims here should be usable to test similar claims in other contexts. That is, if we create a set of criteria using syntax in the text as a way of determining EModE authorship, then that test should be applicable to most (if not all) texts written in this period. In other words, we should be able to use the same set of criteria to evaluate known texts in the same way. This creates that falisfiability that we are looking for - and it comes as we expand from the specific to the more general principle. If it doesn't work in the larger context, it doesn't deny the original hypothesis - it simply points out that what we thought was evidence may not really be evidence. If we can use the same principles of parallels to argue that a book with a known author was actually written by another known author, then we know that the process of using parallels in this way is flawed and not usable as evidence.

In agreement with your other remarks, I think that we should be very skeptical of attempts to conflate these kinds of investigations with the confirmation of the Spirit or, as you note, even with philosophical or religious truths.

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