The Book of Mormon: Man-Made or God-Given?

[_Tator]

First of all, there is no such thing as an "archaeological claim". The fact that archaeological evidence for something has not yet been found, does not prove that it never existed. Absence of evidence for something is not the same as evidence against something. Secondly, archaeological evidence for horses in Pre-Columbian America have been found. Here are some examples for you to look at:

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdu ... story.html
http://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2017/02/01/h ... z4ecUM0lYb
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... orses.html

Holy crap zer, that has been rebunked and debunked and perfunked for years.

Best advice I can give you is to go to beastie's site and educate yourself.

http://www.mormonmesoamerica.com/

[_spotlight]

The fact that archaeological evidence for something has not yet been found, does not prove that it never existed. Absence of evidence for something is not the same as evidence against something.

If you will trouble yourself to read the article I linked you'll learn why that is not a valid argument in the case of the horse.

Secondly, archaeological evidence for horses in Pre-Columbian America have been found. Here are some examples for you to look at:

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdu ... story.html
http://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2017/02/01/h ... z4ecUM0lYb
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... orses.html

To be consistent you must accept the validity of your own link from which:

California's Prehistoric State Artifact, a stone that some believe is shaped like a bear, was found on the Kelly Ranch property on a nearby hill to the north. Radiocarbon dating of artifacts at that site suggest that humans occupied the area more than 9,000 years ago.

And:

Alternately, Mojado postulated that the horses may have been Spanish in origin, perhaps from an ill-fated exploration that never returned and so was lost to history. Perhaps the lost Spanish explorers offered the horses and donkey to the American Indians as a gift, Mojado said.

"There were no horses here then," he said. "They didn't know what a horse or a donkey was."

Your second link is down.
Your third link agrees with my post and is further proof that the Book of Mormon is false as the horses that existed in America along with those who hunted them to extinction lived before "Adam & Eve" or did you miss that part?

[_Lemmie]

No doubt he did an excellent job in making the students feel they could stop thinking about all the arguments and evidence that point to the Book of Mormon being early American Protestant pseudepigrapha. And it's fairly clear from the level and content of his talk that this is pretty well all he was bothered about.

Agreed, for the students who were satisfied with that. It's impossible to know what the entire audience was thinking, but given it is an institution of higher learning, odds are there were some logical thinkers there who came away as disturbed by his speech as most posters in this thread were. For those listeners, Callister's irrational and illogical stance may have been disturbing enough to motivate additional study.

That's really the problem about introducing a deity as an actor in a series of alleged events whose plausibility is to be evaluated. As I have said elsewhere, it is like dividing by zero in arithmetic: once you do that, you can get any answer you want, no matter what the starting conditions.

The fact that you can only make the Book of Mormon into anything other than an early 19th century American text by bringing a deity into the discussion shows how strongly that conclusion is indicated by the evidence.

Agreed. Not only that, but the deity brought into the discussion has to have some pretty significant human weaknesses in order to make it all work, such as vindictiveness (to make the learning an overwhelming challenge), plagiaristic tendencies (to get the KJV typesetting in there), and an abysmal failure to correctly describe the world (as evidenced by all the anachronisms).

You're right, these three areas of exploration are and will continue to be concerns for both the apologists and the critics. Not so much the critics since the physical evidence seems to be more in their favor in some respects.

?? That is a unique interpretation of that part of honorentheos' post. I don't want to put words in your mouth, honorentheos, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I saw your three authorship examples as a counter-point to Callister's 5 points, to demonstrate, flipping his technique back on him, how limiting the discussion to those three does NOT constitute what mentalgymnast defined as "the areas of exploration [that] are and will continue to be concerns for both the apologists and the critics."

You were quite clear, at least to me (see the sentences I bolded in your excerpt below), in what you see as potential elements of the type of discussion that would be fruitful for both believers and critics:

For fun, here is my critical version of Callister's treatment of the authorship question:
1 - Tight Translation.
[discussion by honor]
This can't be true.

2 - Loose Translation
[discussion by honor]
This can't be true.

3 - Those Darned Brits
[discussion by honor]
This can't be true. Though, it get's points for flipping the script on Calllister's 5 points.

Those are three off the top of my head, MG, and you probably finished reading them and were dismissing them as entirely misrepresenting the discussion. Authorship by Joseph Smith wasn't disproven by any of what I wrote, it just reduced the believing theories used to defend the content of the Book of Mormon into something easy to brush off, right?

So, what about authorship being primary if it's inaccessible to us?

....We're basically left looking to the content of the Book of Mormon itself to learn about who authored it, when, and possibly gain some insight into how though whether you are a believer or critic the question of how is honestly lost to us.

....I don't know if I can make it any more clear. Callister created strawmen that he knocked over for the entertainment of his audience. It failed to actually represent the arguments critics make when they debate the Book of Mormon, and they glossed over how inaccessible the authorship question is for LDS....

So, how about we agree that Callister's point was a pep rally for believers and when we get together as participants in discussion we approach the issues from the perspective of what is actually accessible to us?

[bolding added by me.]

Hopefully I'm understanding your key points in this excerpt from your post, honorentheos, please correct me if I'm wrong.

[_zerinus]

Oh goody!

A 'horses in the Book of Mormon' debate!

Form a circle round the combatants ...

Holy crap zer, that has been rebunked and debunked and perfunked for years.

Best advice I can give you is to go to beastie's site and educate yourself.

http://www.mormonmesoamerica.com/

What idiotic replies. No brains, no pains!

[_Themis]

I could assert that my preference is for video evidence of Smith being given the gold plates by the angel Moroni. Or, as a second choice the physical subjugation of the gold plates to scientific scrutiny.

Impossible? Probably in the second case and certainly in the former but it is a gold standard that would prove you were right about the origin of the Book of Mormon.

We're basically left looking to the content of the Book of Mormon itself to learn about who authored it, when, and possibly gain some insight into how though whether you are a believer or critic the question of how is honestly lost to us.

Some great points. What's interesting above is that we do have the equivalent of the gold plates with the Book of Abraham. Joseph gives us copies of iconography as well as a lot of papyri that he claimed was the Book of Abraham and BOJ. All of which have undergone subjugation of the scientific community. It really is the smoking gun.

[_Themis]

Tight translation. Loose translation. Group conference call. These efforts at explaining the Book of Mormon come up short individually but added together...the sum...they work.

Sure they work, but does it make sense? It certainly didn't as a believer or non-believer. It creates such a mess, and the only logical reason is to address the many problems of the Book of Mormon. Some sections you need tight translation to make it work, while other sections need very loose translation to get around other problems. As a believer I was fairly capable of looking at the other view point. It fit being made up without any need to create a mess. It explains things perfectly even if not all the evidence was available. If God is capable(don't know why a God capable of creating the earth would not) of doing a tight translation, which fits the witnesses, it makes logical sense you would want to do it that way throughout in order to avoid mistakes. This method should make an ancient document look like an ancient document.

[_Chap]

Which archaeological claims

Horses for one.

... Secondly, archaeological evidence for horses in Pre-Columbian America have been found. Here are some examples for you to look at:

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdu ... story.html
http://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2017/02/01/h ... z4ecUM0lYb
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... orses.html

Oh Lord, here we go. Look, I'll do one - that National Geographic link:

Prehistoric horses, which were much smaller than today's horses, standing about 4.5 feet (1.5 meters) high at the shoulder, became extinct about 10,000 years ago.

... European explorers reintroduced horses to the New World several thousand years after the ancient ones died out.

So the horses referred to have nothing to do with the alleged horses in 'Book of Mormon times' from around 600 BC onwards. Doesn't Zerinus even READ the links he posts?

Or does he think he is scoring some kind of point by wasting people's time like this?

[_Chap]

And this one isn't about Book of Mormon times horses either:

http://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2017/02/01/h ... z4ecUM0lYb

It's about evidence of people eating horses long before that:

The horse jaw specimen is dated at 19,650 radiocarbon years, which is equivalent to between 23,000 and 24,000 calendar years ago. The bone surface is a bit weathered and altered by root etching but the cut marks are well preserved; they are located on the side, under the third and second molars, and are believed to be associated with the removal of the tongue using a stone.

And there's a link:

Why did horses die out in North America?

The end of the Pleistocene epoch – the geological period roughly spanning 12,000 to 2.5 million years ago, coincided with a global cooling event and the extinction of many large mammals. Evidence suggests North America was hardest hit by extinctions.

This extinction event saw the demise of the horse in North America. It survived only because the Bering land bridge that once connected Alaska and Siberia had enabled animals to cross into Asia and spread west.

The end of the Pleistocene also saw the end of the woolly mammoth, American camels, dire wolves, short-faced bears, saber-toothed cats, stag-moose, woolly rhinos and giant ground sloths.

But we are supposed to be talking about the Book of Mormon, right?

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

It's almost as if the apologists do a quick Google search, and then link-and-run. You'll note Zerinus didn't expand on his thought, nor any of the content provided in the links. I suppose pointing out their incompetence creates the Backfire Effect, but I'm not really sure what one can do? People like Zerinus and Mental Gymnast are not only impervious to reason and fact, but are also devoid of shame. When they're embarrassed they literally don't feel anything other than a deep sense to keep throwing crap at the wall hoping something sticks. No apologies. Maybe a vague statement about any factual information presented. It's just dull, redundant, and incessant fanboy theory after fanboy theory.

- Doc

[_Gunnar]

Oh goody!

A 'horses in the Book of Mormon' debate!

Form a circle round the combatants ...

Holy crap zer, that has been rebunked and debunked and perfunked for years.

Best advice I can give you is to go to beastie's site and educate yourself.

http://www.mormonmesoamerica.com/

What idiotic replies. No brains, no pains!

No! What is truly idiotic is dismissing an argument or claim as idiotic, just because you don't like it, without making the slightest attempt to show why anyone should regard it as idiotic!