True Philosophical Defenses of Mormonism

[_Philo Sofee]

Bob to DrW

Since your signature line rightly speaks with praise of NOVA, you may want to again take a gander & listen to Brian Greene's four-hour series, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/fa ... bric-space. Or read his book on which the series is based. Then ask yourself whether the Book of Abraham (and by extension the Book of Mormon) is really as odd as you assume. There are a host of secular reasons why both the Book of Abraham and Book of Mormon are authentic accounts. Have you come to grips with such claims, and are you willing to address "true philosophical defenses of Mormonism"? That is what this thread is about.

It's not about oddness that gives authenticity, its about matching reality as we now understand the cosmos.

Correct, Philo. Oddness is relative, and our understanding of the cosmos is now seen to be rather infantile and preliminary -- even though astronomers had thought that they were making great strides. That was why I recommended a second look at Brian Greene's fine series.

The Mormon scriptures don't hold up. There is no hierarchy out in the cosmos as the Book of Abraham assumes. The Book of Abraham has nothing to contribute to the reality of the cosmos as understood because of relativity and quantum physics understands today. But it certainly does have the unsophisticated and early man thinking about things, such as a hierarchy supposedly reflecting truth as hierarchies on earth are supposed to do. We now know that is just wrong, and is from an adaption of the Biblical Ancient Near Eastern thinking.

Celestial mechanics Book of Abraham style certainly has no parallel in the Bible:

Abraham 3:3-10,16, Facsimile 2:1,5
Where would one celestial day pass while a thousand years passed here on Earth? What principle would allow time to be so relatively slow in one place and so fast at another? Does astrophysics know of such a phenomenon? What of the time-dilation principle of Einsteinian mechanics at very high speeds?

How might planets & stars exist in a hierarchy, some controlled by others? Listen to Brian Greene describe the nature of the fabric of the cosmos in the first hour. Then hear what he has to say about black holes and dark energy and the far reaching influence each has. Standard astrophysics is meaningless by this measure. As Greene explains, we have only come to understand the nature of the problem (with no solution) within the past 20 years.

Abraham Fac 2:1 “which celestial time signifies one day to a cubit”
Where is celestial time measured by the cubit? Marvin A. Powell has noted how the Sumero-Akkadian cubit was used “in the calculation of celestial distances” as late as the Seleucid period.[1] And he presents some interesting tables of such measures.[2]

Abraham 3:7,10, “set time”
This matches the Old Babylonian concept of adannu "set time," which is applied to seasons, cycles, and astronomical periods (ATRA-HASĪS W, 5; DT 42).[3]

1. Powell, Reallexikon der Assyriologie, VII:458, citing Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 21 (1969), 201:17-20; see Chicago Assyrian Dictionary "A" I:74 (j).
2. Powell, RLA, VII:458,461,467-468 (Tables V & VIII), continuing the discussion of celestial distance measures on 462-463; CAD, "A" I:75.
3. Chicago Assyrian Dictionary "A" I:97-101, citing Bab. 6, 99:9.

Our knowledge today of the cosmos is infantile?!? Well what does this do to the ancient knowledge who could not possibly have even imagine Relativity, the Quantum, electricity, rockets to space, world wide instantaneous communication via satellite, and computer? Is anything they thought, let alone knew even close to our mathematics thanks to Newton, Leibnitz, Descartes, Euler, Pascal, Gauss, Cauchy, which has led to the discovery of quasars, black holes, telescopes, radio astronomy, spectroscopy, etc.? We have billions of times the knowledge (in our miserably pathetic state according to your bland assertion) than the ancients could even possibly imagine! All they knew, more or less, is how to slaughter animals for religious rituals and splatter blood all over the place. We now know the size of the universe, the chemical composition of millions of stars, etc.

And I could care less what ancient authorities you cite, nothing there correlates to our modern knowledge vastly increased even within the mere last 100 years. Who cares if they knew the cubit? We have the light year, calculus, algebra, trigonometry, set theory, infinity, the space telescope and radio astronomy, and we know the real proportions of the cosmos these days. You aren't seriously trying to compare the caveman mentality of ancient desert rug rats in Sinai splattering blood all over altars for God knows why with our Newtons, , Riemanns, Lagranges, Weierstrausses, Einsteins, Bohrs, Heisenbergs, Hawkings, Guths and Susskinds are you?

The fact that we understand things like black holes and time dilation is precisely my point. Can you show how anciently the Hebrews could even fathom these advances in our knowledge? They certainly could not have possibly imagine relativity, let alone atomic structure of chemical bonds, medicine, etc. Though perhaps, if we accept some Mormon apologetic, perhaps they did try the laying on of hands for healing, though we don't know what percentage of success they may have enjoyed. Reading our modern understanding back onto the ancients is a Mormon apologetic trick, and it's not acceptable.

[_Robert F Smith]

Wrong, here's the Free Masonic relationship to the Bible:
. . . .
It is very likely that Joseph Smith said, "Oh 1 cubit = 7 handbreadths ... and there are 7 days in a week, so 1 cubit is one day!!!"
. . . .
See that? And Joseph Smith's Free Masonic stupidity persists.

Abraham facsimile 2:1 on Kolob time, "The measurement according to celestial time, which celestial time signifies one day to a cubit" = one thousand years on Earth.

Your equation of 1 cubit = 7 handbreadths, and 7 days in a week = 1 cubit for each day, doesn't work mathematically. In addition, you will not be able to find a biblical scholar who will go along with your "1 cubit is one day!!!" With or without the exclamations.

[_Robert F Smith]

There are a host of secular reasons why both the Book of Abraham and Book of Mormon are authentic accounts.

Could you provide one of the better ones?

Sure, Themis,
I'll mention four:
In the Fall of 1969, while a student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I was sitting at the living room table in our LDS Branch President's home examining his wife's introduction to cuneiform Akkadian (she was taking a class at the univ., while her husband was completing his PhD there). Anyhow, while looking over the list of cuneiform signs or characters, the transliterations, and translations, I noticed one sign which was transliterated as she'um, which was translated as "grain; barley." I immediately recognized that the same word occurred in the Book of Mormon, and quickly found it at Mosiah 9:9 in a list of food plants. I surmised that the generic term was applied to a form of grain (like Amaranth) not familiar to Joseph Smith, and that it was a carryover from the Jaredite period (the -um ending was lost centuries before Lehi, who would not likely have encountered that Mesopotamian term anyhow). There are many such direct linguistic parallels which Joseph could not have known.

However, even more interesting are phenomena which are grouped in a system:
The short description of part of the Nephite weights & measures system in Alma 11 is an excellent example. Only within the past half-century have scholars discovered that (a) Classical Israelites used Egyptian hieratic numerals on their weights, and that (b) the Israelite weights are taken from the ancient Egyptian system of weights. You can read Bill Dever's description of this, and see the hieratic numerals, in Harper's Bible Dictionary (1985), 1128-1129, and tables B & C. The late Anson Rainey concluded from this and other evidence that professional Israelite scribes knew ancient Egyptian. Beyond that, we have the even more astonishing fact that the Book of Mormon limnah (Alma 11:10) reaches the same mathematical total as the Hebrew maneh. Note the tight phonemic similarity of those two key terms.

You will note that the Tower of Babel story in the Bible includes the anachronistic word "Babel," which is late (scholars see it as a glosse on the text from the Exilic or Post-Exilic period). Ether 1:33 includes the same basic story, but does not include the word "Babel" (cf. Omni 22, Helaman 6:28).

A similar anachronism is left out of Book of Abraham 5:10-11 -- the names of the four rivers in Genesis 2:11-14, which biblical scholars see as a glosse on the text.

[_Robert F Smith]

Our knowledge today of the cosmos is infantile?!? Well what does this do to the ancient knowledge who could not possibly have even imagine Relativity, the Quantum, electricity, rockets to space, world wide instantaneous communication via satellite, and computer? Is anything they thought, let alone knew even close to our mathematics thanks to Newton, Leibnitz, Descartes, Euler, Pascal, Gauss, Cauchy, which has led to the discovery of quasars, black holes, telescopes, radio astronomy, spectroscopy, etc.? We have billions of times the knowledge (in our miserably pathetic state according to your bland assertion) than the ancients could even possibly imagine! All they knew, more or less, is how to slaughter animals for religious rituals and splatter blood all over the place. We now know the size of the universe, the chemical composition of millions of stars, etc.

And I could care less what ancient authorities you cite, nothing there correlates to our modern knowledge vastly increased even within the mere last 100 years. Who cares if they knew the cubit? We have the light year, calculus, algebra, trigonometry, set theory, infinity, the space telescope and radio astronomy, and we know the real proportions of the cosmos these days. You aren't seriously trying to compare the caveman mentality of ancient desert rug rats in Sinai splattering blood all over altars for God knows why with our Newtons, , Riemanns, Lagranges, Weierstrausses, Einsteins, Bohrs, Heisenbergs, Hawkings, Guths and Susskinds are you?

The fact that we understand things like black holes and time dilation is precisely my point. Can you show how anciently the Hebrews could even fathom these advances in our knowledge? They certainly could not have possibly imagine relativity, let alone atomic structure of chemical bonds, medicine, etc. Though perhaps, if we accept some Mormon apologetic, perhaps they did try the laying on of hands for healing, though we don't know what percentage of success they may have enjoyed. Reading our modern understanding back onto the ancients is a Mormon apologetic trick, and it's not acceptable.

Well, of course, if you studiously ignore Brian Greene's humbling perspective on "modern" astrophysics and simultaneously arrogate to "modern" science all knowledge and mastery of the cosmos, you may very well say all that. However, bear in mind during your very expansive and polemic declarations that Sir Isaac Newton once lived in and was at the pinnacle of "modern times." Yet here is what he had to say:

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
(Isaac Newton)

Although Newton had a correct sense of perspective, your perspective is sadly presentist and faulty on several major grounds:

1. You confuse the ancient and modern perspectives. I demonstrated in a couple of instances ways in which Abraham fitted rather well into his Mesopotamian environment (in ways singularly absent from the Bible). The Book of Abraham correctly reflects that ancient perspective in ways which could not be derived from the Bible or any other 19th century source.

2. Aside from the fact that your desert "rug rats" kept high civilization alive and made major advances while the West went through the Dark Ages, there have been other periods of regression: In Abraham's world, the Akkadians were doing algebra (including quadratic equations), which was lost until the Hindus and Arabs restored it. The great geocentrist Claudius Ptolemy dominated celestial mechanics for 1500 years. Yet he was preceded by such heliocentrists as Aristarchus of Samos and by Eratosthenes (who correctly measured the circumference of the Earth in 240 B.C.).

3. A century from now, "modern" scientists will look back on our very backward, barbaric, and ill-informed culture and wonder why we substituted arrogance for action in the face of such obvious existential threats as global warming and constant warfare. "Modern" humans are arrogant all right, but quite incapable of dealing with even simple problems.

[_Philo Sofee]

Bob:

Although Newton had a correct sense of perspective, your perspective is sadly presentist and faulty on several major grounds:

1. You confuse the ancient and modern perspectives. I demonstrated in a couple of instances ways in which Abraham fitted rather well into his Mesopotamian environment (in ways singularly absent from the Bible). The Book of Abraham correctly reflects that ancient perspective in ways which could not be derived from the Bible or any other 19th century source.

And you claimed our knowledge of the cosmos is infantile, yet you want to implicitly assume and wish we also would assume that the ancients knowledge is far more accurate and better than ours. Utterly unconvincing. You need to present evidence that any of the ancient civilizations (ESPECIALLY THE HEBREWS of the Bible) knew Relativity, or Quantum Physics, or were aware of black holes, time dilation etc. You claim OUR knowledge is meager......I see nothing even close to it in any ancient civilization. We are simply so far beyond them its not even comparable.

2. Aside from the fact that your desert "rug rats" kept high civilization alive and made major advances while the West went through the Dark Ages, there have been other periods of regression: In Abraham's world, the Akkadians were doing algebra (including quadratic equations), which was lost until the Hindus and Arabs restored it. The great geocentrist Claudius Ptolemy dominated celestial mechanics for 1500 years. Yet he was preceded by such heliocentrists as Aristarchus of Samos and by Eratosthenes (who correctly measured the circumference of the Earth in 240 B.C.).

I SPECIFICALLY SAID ANCIENT HEBREWS, as in the Bible, as in the Book of Abraham which mimics the ancient Hebrews. I specified the culture. I already know OTHER great and mighty civilizations had SOME mathematics and meager understandings of the cosmos, but absolutely NOTHING like what we have now. They were all geocentric for instance. Stay on topic here and keep the context.

3. A century from now, "modern" scientists will look back on our very backward, barbaric, and ill-informed culture and wonder why we substituted arrogance for action in the face of such obvious existential threats as global warming and constant warfare. "Modern" humans are arrogant all right, but quite incapable of dealing with even simple problems.

PRECISELY. So, um, pray tell, why are you supposedly so impressed with the ancients of over dozens of centuries ago, if all it takes is one meager century to completely show us what imbeciles we are? Just where does that leave the Old Testament cultures? Totally irrelevant.

[_lance peters]

Wrong, here's the Free Masonic relationship to the Bible:
. . . .
It is very likely that Joseph Smith said, "Oh 1 cubit = 7 handbreadths ... and there are 7 days in a week, so 1 cubit is one day!!!"
. . . .
See that? And Joseph Smith's Free Masonic stupidity persists.

Abraham facsimile 2:1 on Kolob time, "The measurement according to celestial time, which celestial time signifies one day to a cubit" = one thousand years on Earth.

Your equation of 1 cubit = 7 handbreadths, and 7 days in a week = 1 cubit for each day, doesn't work mathematically. In addition, you will not be able to find a biblical scholar who will go along with your "1 cubit is one day!!!" With or without the exclamations.

I'm not sure if you know how to read, so let me make myself as clear as possible:

THIS IS NOT MY EQUATION: "Your equation of 1 cubit = 7 handbreadths, and 7 days in a week = 1 cubit for each day, doesn't work mathematically. In addition, you will not be able to find a biblical scholar who will go along with your "1 cubit is one day!!!" With or without the exclamations."

In fact, I even sourced this material. I never stated the mathematics is/was/could be accurate, I merely posted the beliefs of the "Free Masons". Also, if no biblical scholar will accept the equation that IS NOT MINE, then so be it, because THIS IS A FREE MASON BELIEF.

Quite literally, I'm not sure whether I should laugh or cry right now, your inability to read the "source material" of the comments that I've posted is, to say the least, quite baffling.

Again, THESE ARE THE BELIEFS OF THE FREE MASONS! WOW!!

[_Philo Sofee]

Wrong, here's the Free Masonic relationship to the Bible:
. . . .
It is very likely that Joseph Smith said, "Oh 1 cubit = 7 handbreadths ... and there are 7 days in a week, so 1 cubit is one day!!!"
. . . .
See that? And Joseph Smith's Free Masonic stupidity persists.

Abraham facsimile 2:1 on Kolob time, "The measurement according to celestial time, which celestial time signifies one day to a cubit" = one thousand years on Earth.

Your equation of 1 cubit = 7 handbreadths, and 7 days in a week = 1 cubit for each day, doesn't work mathematically. In addition, you will not be able to find a biblical scholar who will go along with your "1 cubit is one day!!!" With or without the exclamations.

I'm not sure if you know how to read, so let me make myself as clear as possible:

THIS IS NOT MY EQUATION: "Your equation of 1 cubit = 7 handbreadths, and 7 days in a week = 1 cubit for each day, doesn't work mathematically. In addition, you will not be able to find a biblical scholar who will go along with your "1 cubit is one day!!!" With or without the exclamations."

In fact, I even sourced this material. I never stated the mathematics is/was/could be accurate, I merely posted the beliefs of the "Free Masons". Also, if no biblical scholar will accept the equation that IS NOT MINE, then so be it, because THIS IS A FREE MASON BELIEF.

Quite literally, I'm not sure whether I should laugh or cry right now, your inability to read the "source material" of the comments that I've posted is, to say the least, quite baffling.

Again, THESE ARE THE BELIEFS OF THE FREE MASONS! WOW!!

You have to understand something......it is far more impressive to apologists themselves to quote the ancient stuff than give any nod to obvious modern sources. If they lubricate their ideas with a source or two of ancient Akkadian or Egyptian, they pride themselves on being irrefutable scholars of antiquity, without even regarding the silliness of continuing to try and make the obvious ancient materials relevant. And they pooh pooh today's understandings and science because, of course, it's blatantly obvious for all to see that compared to the prattling dust eating cavemen of antiquity hanging out in the deserts and caves of Sinai, they know nothing compared to our vast understanding and knowledge. And, of course, tomorrow we shall learn more..... and of course in a hundred years what we know then will certainly dwarf what we know now. But one absolute fact is for ever certain and irrefutable. We will always know vastly more than the ancients could have even conceived of, let alone actually learned, considering their primitive cultures and worthless assumptions about what was and is real.

[_lance peters]

Yes, you are correct. I guess this is where the Book of Mormon really does come into play:

Jacob 4:14 - "But behold, the [Mormon Apologists] were a stiffnecked people; and they despised the words of plainness ... and sought for things that they could not understand. Wherefore, because of their blindness, which blindness came by looking beyond the mark, they must needs [fail]; for God hath taken away his plainness from them, and delivered unto them many things which they cannot understand, because they desired it. And because they desired it God hath done it, that they may stumble."

Searching for the roots of Mormonism by disregarding Free Masonry, or any other books/texts/beliefs available during Joseph Smith's time, is very much "looking beyond the mark".

[_Franktalk]

In fact, although it claims to be a record of Gods dealings with ancient inhabitants of the Americas, there is not one scintilla of historical fact or truth in it.

God knowing that the peoples would wipe each other out, knowing that the Europeans would wipe out Indian culture, knowing that all the physical evidence would be plowed under, brought forth a second witness to scripture. Almost like He wants us to use faith.

But if you truly wish to know what the Indians were like before the waves of Europeans swept through read this.

The History of the American Indians by James Adair 1775

A man that unlike an armchair critic spent 40 years with the Indians.

And let me add; God knowing that men would think them self wise did those things which the wise of the world would see as foolish. Like unto a stick in the eye of physical proof.

[_Franktalk]

I am not one that cares a hoot about physical proof. But I do like to read history and happen to come across a book about Indian culture. It is not proof of the Book of Mormon. But it is a good history book in that it has first hand accounts of the beliefs and customs of the American Indians. I recommend it to Mormons and critics alike.

The History of the American Indians by James Adair 1775

You can get it from Kessinger Legacy Reprints - a photocopy - hard to read but well worth the effort.