Dr Moore wrote: ↑Mon Jul 11, 2022 11:59 pm
It's rather breathtaking just how much of the scientific corpus the Heartlanders tackle in the name of reconciling this basic proposition -- Joseph Smith's most fundamental proposition -- that all of the various scriptural accounts are literally true,
including many literal historical representations made by Book of Mormon authors in their narrative. Such as, the flood, the tower of Babel, Adam & Eve, social & military technology in the Americas, DNA evidence, etc etc etc.
I mean, it's so much more than LGT vs Heartland. But for some reason, that one piece ends up being the pet objection? I don't get it. Joseph Smith literally dictated "revelations" from God about where, exactly, the Lamanites lived before and contemporaneously. It's not a mystery. Neville & Meldrum embrace it and what's the problem with that?
Now I do not side with the Heartlanders at all. I think their ideas are mostly nuts. They've done the equivalent of developing a novel, non-testable grand unified theory of fundamental physics in order to assert the truth of a fictional biology novel. It's bananas.
But here's the rub. Smoot et all can't just attack the bad science, because doing so would expose their own bad science. They're defending an equally fictional geology novel while attacking Neville for defending his biological fiction. So to speak. They're both on shaky ground. But at least, as you point out, Neville is nice about it.
Which is worse? Being wrong? Or being an asshole about it? Actually, the answer matters. I think, Doctor, herein we find the most irreducible theorem of Mopologetics --
a double negative is positive. If you are nice and wrong, you're wrong. If you're an asshole and wrong, 'tis all good.
In the quotes attributed to Neville he comes across as relatively polite, but he has a long history of ridiculing and attacking BYU and the LGT. I think Greg Smith's hit piece on Meldrum and the Heartlanders is largely responsible for this.
I think the anger that drives Smoot also comes from the fact that the LGT has largely failed to enter mainstream Mormonism. This is in spite of the church funding BYU Mesoamerican apologists for decades. Meldrum runs a couple of conferences a year, reaching over 10,000 people. His message appeals to a huge swath of Mormons who believe what the church has always taught them.
Meldrum's audience are no nonsense (typically US) Mormons whose beliefs can be found on the current church website. They are Young Earth Creationists and rigidly anti-evolution. The earth is 7,000 years old, we all descend from Adam and Eve, there was a global flood 4,500 years ago which killed all animals not on the ark, and the United States (location of Garden of Eden) is God's chosen country. This is the Mormonism I was raised on back in the 70s and 80s.
DNA has done far more damage to the church than expose the true origin of Indigenous Americans. Smoot knows this. In order to defend the Book of Mormon on the DNA front, BYU apologists were forced to recruit DNA scientists (Perego, Woodward, Parr, Whiting, Crandall etc) into the apologists ranks. But these same life scientists have opened up a whole can of worms for the apologists because they brought with them uncomfortable beliefs in other areas of science that are troubling for lots of Mormons.
Most life scientists at BYU do not believe we descend from a pair of humans who lived 6,000 years ago. There is far more DNA variation in humans than you would expect if we descended from 2 people who lived just 6,000 years ago. We now have DNA being isolated from hundreds of human fossils as old as 40,000 years. We even carry traces of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA, two hominid species that went extinct over 30,000 years ago. DNA has also shown, beyond a doubt, that we descend from a common ancestor with Chimpanzees (and thus all living things). We carry thousands of viral DNA scars in our genomes from past infection with retroviruses. Chimpanzees carry almost all of the same scars in exactly the same locations in our genomes. Why? Because our ancestors got infected by the same bug. We are related!
BYU scientists also do not believe there was massive global drowning event 4,500 years ago. We would see abundant evidence of such a dramatic bottleneck in the DNA of every animal species on the earth, including humans. Life scientists and geologists at BYU know for a fact that there was no global flood.
BYU life scientists are firm believers in evolution. The church likes to pretend that it doesn't have a position either way but this is bollocks. The church has a long history of leaders loudly condemning evolution in front of large church audiences and then ocassionally allowing a scientist to say something timid in support of evolution to a restricted audience. A belief in evolution is not reconcilable with the belief that we all descend from Adam or that there was a global flood.
In the last 20 years BYU and its LGT apologists have been forced to get in bed with a bunch of scientists who know for a fact that Darwinian evolution is true. In their haste to defend a 19th century fraud (Book of Mormon) they have been exposed to a lot more science than they intended. They discovered these same scientists believed humans had been in the Americas for at least 15,000 years. What Flood? Just recently Ugo Perego spoke of his belief that the human family is 200,000 years old. How do you reconcile this with the human family descending from one man who lived 6,000 year ago, then Noah 4,500 years ago? You cannot. And many BYU scholars are keenly aware of this problem.
I suspect Smoot is keenly aware of the larger battle going on here and that BYU is losing. It looks like Mormonism is heading down the fundamentalist road and Neville, Meldrum and the rest of the Heartland band are leading the charge. Most BYU scientists and apologists utterly reject young earth creationism but it is almost impossible for them to stem the tide. Why? Because the church now refuses to take their side.
