All of it marg; all the tired, old, hoary warn out canards the critics have been using for decades, most of which have been answered adequately or plausibly so many times before.
I'd be happy to look at any particular points you have in mind in order.
All of it marg; all the tired, old, hoary warn out canards the critics have been using for decades, most of which have been answered adequately or plausibly so many times before.
I guess it all depends on what you accept for an answer to be considered 'plausible'.
If someone doesn't find the answers plausible, can you really consider them "tired, old, hoary warn out canards"?
And can you only find the answers 'plausible', if you first accept that the Book of Mormon was the product of 'god'?
WK: "Joseph Smith asserted that the Book of Mormon peoples were the original inhabitants of the americas"
Will Schryver: "No, he didn’t." 3/19/08
Still waiting for Will to back this up...
I thought this quote from Dr. Whiting (professor of systematics in the biology department at BYU) was interesting:
The first point that should be clarified is that those persons who state that DNA evidence falsifies the authenticity of the Book of Mormon are not themselves performing genetic research to test this claim. This conclusion is not coming from the scientists studying human population genetics. It is not the result of a formal scientific investigation specifically designed to test the authenticity of the Book of Mormon by means of genetic evidence, nor has it been published in any reputable scientific journal open to scientific peer review. Rather, it has come from outside persons who have interpreted the conclusions of an array of population genetic studies and forced the applicability of these results onto the Book of Mormon. The studies cited by these critics were never formulated by their original authors as a specific test of the veracity of the Book of Mormon. To my knowledge there is no reputable researcher who is specifically attempting to test the authenticity of the Book of Mormon with DNA evidence.
I took a phylogenetics class from Dr. Whiting at BYU. He studies insect phylogenetics and is a well-respected researcher. He is a proponent of parsimony in phylogenetic studies. Parsimony is the idea that phylogenies are best represented by the simplest explanation--given a number of proposed phylogenetic trees, the tree or trees with the fewest number of changes is/are the best fit for the data. Another school of thought in this field is Maximum Liklihood. ML uses statistical evolutionary models to find the best fit for the data, often requiring a number of ad hoc hypotheses to explain the resulting phylogenies. In some situations, both models will yield the same result. When they don't, the researcher has to make a case for choosing one postion over the other. Many of the explanations given by apologists to explain the lack of the Israelite haplotype in the native american population come down to ad hoc hypotheses (LGT, gene flow swamping the orignal signal, etc.). I find it odd that Dr. Whiting is such an adamant proponent of parsimony in his professional work, but changes his approach when dealing with Book of Mormon apologetics.
All of it marg; all the tired, old, hoary warn out canards the critics have been using for decades, most of which have been answered adequately or plausibly so many times before.
I'd be happy to look at any particular points you have in mind in order.
Since you find fault with all of it, and since I haven't found fault with any of it, perhaps you could point out a few points you disagree with.
Coggins7 wrote:Scratch, mercury, Schmo...We're all out of High School I assume...
Name one. ONE!
Did you even listen to it?
I'm still curious as to who these "other folks" are who are supposedly on his side, nodding along with him as he doles out his hyperbolic condemnations.
I'm still curious as to who these "other folks" are who are supposedly on his side, nodding along with him as he doles out his hyperbolic condemnations.
As LSD used to say, start reading the posts Scratch.