Are you absolutely sure there is not one shred of evidence to support the Book of Mormon?

The claim is that the Book of Mormon is the most accurate, complete historical record of the events and culture of pre-Colombian America.

IF that were accurate, then scholars who do research on the people, events, culture, languages, etc. of pre-Colombian America would rely upon it in their studies. They would use it regardless of their personal religious views because it would be a valuable resource.

Yet, no non-Mormon scholar relies upon it.

But don't take my word for it. Listen to Dr. Michael Coe:

http://mormonstories.org/michael-coe-an-outsiders-view-of-book-of-mormon-archaeology/

Dr. Michael Coe is the Charles J. MacCurdy professor emeritus of Anthropology at Yale University and curator emeritus of the Division of Anthropology at the school’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. He is an expert on the Maya, who inhabited the same part of Mexico and Central American where Mormon scholars say the events of the Book of Mormon took place. In this interview, Coe discusses the challenges facing Mormon archaeologists attempting to prove the historical truth of their central scripture and his own views on Joseph Smith.

caedmon Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> But don't take my word for it. Listen to Dr.
> Michael Coe:
>
> http://mormonstories.org/michael-coe-an-outsiders-
> view-of-book-of-mormon-archaeology/

This x 1000!! This is an excellent installment of Mormon Stories.

WOW!!!!

This is a complete tearing down of any proof for The Book of Mormon.

Well, it depends on what you mean by evidence.

In 1955, Thomas Ferguson, was funded by the MORG to go and collect all the archeological evidence he could come up with in Mesoamerica. He didn't find anything.

Twenty years later, Ferguson admitted that "The real implication ...is that you can't set the Book-of-Mormon geography down anywhere — because it is fictional and will never meet the requirements of the dirt-archeology. I should say — what is in the ground will never conform to what is in the book."

However, if you want to talk about the nonsense kind of evidences, like Chiasmus, then you can fill your basket full. It's like UFO's, bigfoot, Loch Ness Nellie. If you want to believe hard enough, you can always find "something" to support your claim.

The church doesn't believe in real evidence anymore. They just tell you to pray about it and that's all the evidence you need.

I've heard that the LDS Church is one of the biggest latter-day scams to ever come around and there is plenty of evidence to prove it. You don't even need to poke your face in a hat and see these words magically appear "Use your brain, Joseph Smith is nothing but a bullshit artist."

Of course there is "evidence" for the Book of Mormon.

People who say there is "not a shred of evidence" for something are usually overstating the case.

Even the most obviously guilty criminal can present some "evidence" in his favor.

The question is not whether there is evidence, but whether the evidence is believable and sufficient to outweigh the contrary evidence.

In such a weighty matter as deciding whether the Book of Mormon is divinely inspired and thus requires you to be Mormon, the evidence for it should be "beyond a reasonable doubt."

See my discussion at http://packham.n4m.org/101.htm "101 Reasonable Doubts About Mormonism"

I have to regretfully disagree with Richard on this one.
There is no evidence to support the BoM or any of the claims about its origins.

There are *arguments* that believers make -- all of which are fallacious in some area, dishonest, or inapplicable. None of them presents any valid evidence.

I guess I still agree with Richard if you change it to "valid evidence." In my mind, though, "evidence" isn't "evidence" if it's not valid, or if its based on fallacies, or if its dishonest, or if it's opinion and not testable fact. :)

ificouldhietokolob Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I have to regretfully disagree with Richard on this one.
> There is no evidence to support the BoM or any of
> the claims about its origins.
>
> There are *arguments* that believers make -- all
> of which are fallacious in some area, dishonest,
> or inapplicable. None of them presents any valid
> evidence.

I am using the term "evidence" in a legal sense. There is "evidence" for all kinds of stupid and unbelievable things. There is "evidence" that the earth is flat: just look at it.

Yes, there is evidence for the Book of Mormon being what the Mormons claim it is, even though that "evidence" is easy to refute:
- the testimony of the eight witnesses that they saw and hefted the plates;
- it contains some accurate historical information (destruction of Jerusalem);
- Joseph Smith's testimony about the angel appearing to him;
- the characters on the Anthon Transcript and the testimony of Martin Harris about it.

Even though evidence is easily refuted, it is still evidence.

My only point is: do not overstate the case and say that there is "not a shred of evidence."

"Evidence" in the strict legal sense does not mean the same as "convincing evidence" or "proof." This is a misunderstanding by many people.

This is what I said when I spoke at the exmormon conference in 2002 in Arlington:

=================
Many people confuse the words "evidence" and "proof." Evidence is any fact that is offered to support a claim or proposition. There are very few claims, however absurd or unbelievable, for which there is not at least some evidence. There is evidence for a flat earth, there is evidence that the sun revolves around the earth: the evidence is how they appear to us. However, superior evidence has shown us that the evidence of our eyes is outweighed. There is evidence that Joseph Smith had a vision of God the Father and God the Son in 1820: his own testimony as the only eye-witness. That testimony IS evidence. Few of us here accept that evidence as convincing, since the overwhelming counter- evidence shows that he was lying.

"Proof," on the other hand, is evidence that is sufficient to convince any open-minded, rational person. That definition, of course, excludes many devout Mormons.

This point is important to prevent your being alarmed when Mormon apologists come up with "evidence for the Book of Mormon," as they do at FARMS - a regular evidence factory, there! Of course there is evidence. Every criminal who ever went to trial and condemned by a jury of his peers was able to present evidence in his defense. The question, of course, is whether that evidence amounts to proof.

OK, I understand your meaning.

The thing is, I have yet to see any claims of "evidence" on the part of TBMs that would meet even the legal standard of "evidence" ( http://www.insitelawmagazine.com/evidencech2.htm ). None of them meet the scientific standard (which is effectively more limited, since largely "eyewitness testimony" is excluded). Which to me means it's not evidence at all.
It's claims of there being evidence, which are easily refuted, meaning there's no evidence.

As an example, if I claim to have evidence for the hypothesis that leprechauns hide pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, and the evidence I claim to have is my eyewitness account of seeing a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you could (and should) rightly point out that I *haven't* actually presented any evidence for the hypothesis -- and that I've simple made a fallacious bare assertion. I claimed to have evidence, but my claim was invalid. There was no evidence presented -- only an unverifiable story.

We're on the same side here. :) Thanks for your clarification.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/29/2014 03:19PM by ificouldhietokolob.

Plus, we can't forget that Joseph Smith and his henchmen didn't live in a vacuum. They had whatever information was available about Native Americans and Central/South American civilizations that were available in their day. Palmyra had a library and Joseph liked to read. He'd tell stories about imaginary Natives to his family, making up details and complicated story lines, probably based on his reading.

Now granted, they didn't have the wealth of information then that they do now but there is probably enough that Joe was able to throw some correct or possibly correct evidences in. The problem is that there is a far greater preponderance of inaccurate information (horses, birth rates for ag societies in that time period, the wheel) and there is also some fatal omissions like not mentioning most of the traditional foods Nephi and his descendants would have eaten. The scientific proof of what went on in these pre-Columbian societies and what didn't go on overwhelmingly disproves Mormonism, even if Joseph and his henchmen made a few lucky guesses based on the information available in 1800.

Well... I have yet to see a shred of convincing evidence of the so called "truthfulness" of the BOM.

All of it was taken out of context, sometimes by hundreds if not thousands of years, based on emotional arguments rather than facts or were purely circumstantial at best.

If you have a shred of real, convincing evidence, I'm all ears and I think you'd find that a lot of people, especially those who are in the questioning phase of their exit from the church, would love to hear it.

That being said, assuming that you're a believer and you're trying to use this as some type of argument to get us to come back to the fold, and this may sound like bias, but I seriously doubt you have anything of substance. So, I ask you, if the church wasn't "true" would you want to know? Because we can help you out with that.

I'm not a laywer so I won't get into the finer points of the meaning of "evidence". I'm more of a generalist and I look at it this way:

We know a lot about the history of the Americas but none of that is found in the Book of Mormon. We know what people ate, how they lived, their technology, their cultures, their languages, the animals they bred and the ones they hunted, the food they cultivated and the food they gathered - none of that is found in the Book of Mormon.

The reverse is also true: nothing of what we do find in the Book of Mormon is corroborated by what we know about the history of the Americas. The BoM contains references to vegetation and crops, wild and domesticated animals, languages, cultures, technologies, etc., none of which is supported by any research.

By the way, did you notice the nested chiasmus I put in the paragraphs above? Does that mean that my writing is of Near-Eastern origin? Would prayer inform you in any way about this?

Forget all the unconnected tiny little details with which the church and its defenders try to muddy the waters. It's the big picture that is wrong and no amount of apologetic tinkering will ever change that. There is no chance in hell that the Book of Mormon could be true. I'm absolutely 100% sure of that.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 09/29/2014 03:34PM by rt.

The best evidence for the Book of Mormon suggests that it was a 19th Century forgery. It contains many ideas and "facts" about ancient America and the origins of Native Americans that were popular during Joseph Smith's day and that have long since been disproven by science. Its numerous anachronisms were not obvious to the early 19th Century reader, but loudly declare the fraud to educated modern readers.

Like any forgery, it will contain some elements of truth, but those elements were all knowable to Joseph Smith and therefore do not represent "evidence" in favor of its authenticity. To be authentic, the following would need to be true:

1. It cannot contain howling anachronisms like steel swords, horses & chariots, standardized gold and silver pieces of money, wheat and barley, elephants, donkeys, cows, etc.

2. It cannot contain popular 19th Century myths or misconceptions that have since been disproved by science (e.g. Native Americans being from the tribes of Israel, tower of Babel).

3. It cannot contain fantastically unrealistic stories, like the stripling warriors, the war of self-extermination fought by the Jaredites, or the poisonous serpents herding the Jaredite domesticated animals and then forming a 45-mile wide hedge to prevent humans from entering the land southward for a number of years.

4. It would need to contain positive evidence in the form of facts or history that could not be known to Joseph Smith and that have since been learned by science.


The Book of Mormon fails wildly on all four points.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/29/2014 03:45PM by Facsimile 3.

Old Joey would be lovin all of the money his church has been seperating people since Brigham took control.

Are you?

There is a chance :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX5jNnDMfxA

LOL!

Sorenson is the emeritus "anthropologist" (BYU, of course) who's credited with coming up with the Limited Geography Theory identifying Mesoamerica as the setting for BOM events. He's also a colleague of Daniel C. Peterson.

I wrote this for the old board and had Eric archive it. Sorenson is a shinola shipper, period. Incidentally, he's the individual who also suggested the "horses" in the BOM were actually tapirs.

http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon606.htm

What I see as critical to realizing the BOM is a fraud is recognizing the impossibility of a transoceanic voyage to the New World circa 600 B.C. It didn't happen unless "Heavenly Father's Magic" was involved, and if that's the case, He also nuked the skeletons of all those slain in the Nephite/Lamanite Wars, made sure no horse or elephant remains survived, zapped all evidence of steel smelting in the archaeological record, and removed knowledge of the use of the wheel from the descendants of BOM people.

(from the link; the slideshow consists of Sorenson's spurrious claims about "biological evidence" for Old World/New World contact).

>Before I dissect a number of the claims in this slideshow, however, I think it's important to establish what are some obvious axioms, historical and otherwise, on the subject of maritime technology and ocean-going navigation.

>1) The oceans are huge, and transoceanic crossings involve incredibly long distances. It's 2000 miles from London to New England, over 3500 miles from say, Gibraltar to Florida; well you get the idea. In the Pacific, the distance from Indonesia to Panama is around 9,000 miles; from San Francisco to Tokyo is over 5,000 miles.

>2) Human beings on ocean voyages require fresh water and other provisions such as food. The ocean's saltwater didn't qualify as a water source until desalination was developed in the 20th Century. Recovering freshwater from rainstorms and squalls is problematic because such storms eliminate or severely restrict navigational capabilities.

>3) Extended ocean crossings require considerable navigational aids that were likely the products of a seafaring history over many generations and hundreds of years. There's considerable mythology originating in "oral traditions," but nothing much in the way of maps, etc., and the maritime compass wasn't invented until around 1000 A.D. Before that time, sailing was confined to coastal fishing and exploration or "island hopping" in the case of the Polynesians, who could determine their location via ocean currents and the location of certain stars at sunrise and sunset (near the equator, no less). The Vikings were also magnificent sailors, but they stuck to coastal raiding down the coasts of Europe and Africa; their transatlantic explorations were confined to the north where the presence of Polaris in the night sky and the knowledge they would always encounter ice sooner or later permitted east-west voyages.

>4) There is a certain "romance" about ocean voyages (hey, ask the wife if she wants to go on a cruise and see how she answers that one) that doesn't translate into its presence in the historical record. Diffusionists make a huge deal about how Australia was settled by open water crossings from Indonesia; that one amounted to a relatively short shallow water crossing--approx. 100 miles in tropical seas--during the Ice Age when sea levels were much lower. The ancestors of the Polynesians managed the deep water crossing to settle the island of Taiwan (Formosa), but mainland Chinese were not able to displace them until the Middle Ages, despite the overall sea-worthiness of the Chinese junk. Chinese seafaring didn't begin until around the third century, A.D. Japanese maritime activities included contact with mainland Asia in the first millennium B.C., but Harvard anthropologist Betty Meggers's claims of contact between the ancient Jomon and South Americans in Peru have been roundly rejected by mainstream academia.

Richard Packham and I are good friends, and his linguistics and legal background far exceeds mine, but I'll suggest he speaks of "evidence" in the abstract sense.

As far as the "credible" or "concrete" variety, there is none.

Like the cheese, the BoM stands alone.