So, forget your "banalesian" whatever and consider this from the internet:

"We [Hugh Nibley, this guy with a calculator, and God] have presented:

"41 Dead Sea Scrolls/Book of Mormon parallels
"1 basket of domesticated New World barley
"1 authenticated non-Biblical ancient ceremony recorded in the Book of Mormon.
"1 An ancient Book of Enoch text quoted in Book of Mormon.
"1 counter-intuitive ancient Arabian geographical naming convention
"1 ancient non-Biblical Hebrew poetic style used in the Book of Mormon.
"1 ancient non-Biblical Hebrew idiom used in Book of Mormon (there are many)
"1 Biblical literary form, undiscovered until late 1800s, found in the Book of Mormon
"20+ exact or near-exact names, non-Biblical, yet confirmed by finds in this century
"1 statistical analysis of "wordprints"
"1 Mesoamerican archeology paraphrase (but who is paraphrasing whom?)
"1 verification of ancient religious writing on gold plates
"1 verification of non-Jerusalem Temple building by ancient Hebrews
...
"1 consecutive guess at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 2
"2 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 4
"3 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 8
"4 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 16
"5 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 32
"6 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 64
"7 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 128
"8 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 256
"9 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 512
"10 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 1024
"11 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 2048
"12 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 4096
"13 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 8192
"14 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 16,000+
"15 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 32,000+
"16 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 64,000+
"17 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 128,000+
"18 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 256,000+
"19 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 512,000+
"20 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 1 million+
"21 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 2 million+
"22 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 4 million+
"23 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 8 million+
"24 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 16 million+
"25 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 32 million+
"26 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 64 million+
"27 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 128 million+
"28 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 256 million+
"29 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 512 million+
"30 consecutive guesses at 50/50 odds has a probability of 1 out of 1 billion+

http://www.comevisit.com/lds/bom-evid.htm


And this was almost twenty years ago, so think about just how much *more* evidence there must be now!

Can anyone convince me it's not time to grab my toilet brush and head back to church 7:00 a.m. this Saturday?

If that's all it takes, call for your Uber car!! Your remarkable method of calculating odds may well also explain your so called one off happenstances in your primary list.

I love the "in a row."

Kerry Muhlestein does this in one of his videos. He points out
the three things that are somewhat similar in JS's explanations
of the facsimilies and ignores the scores of pitiful misses and
then says, "three bulls-eyes IN A ROW."

ASSUMING that these things are at all valid (a HUGE assumption)
this is the perfect example of cherry-picking the evidence.
The things that are similar are presented as if they were
randomly selected areas that, once looked into, just happened
to fall on the side of the Book of Mormon.

No mention in this list of lack of horses, lack of steel, lack
of Oxen, lack of asses, lack of silk, wrong genetic markers,
wrong languages, lack of one identifiable BOM site, anywhere in
the Americas, King James translation errors, yadda, yadda.

In the end it's the old "parallelomania" idea that if I search
enough places hard enough and phrase things right, I can find
things that are similar to things in the BOM. Then you list
those things and ignore the gazillions of things that don't fit
and say "IN A ROW."

This is called intellectual dishonesty.

Why did the church change the beginning of the ancient book recently?

"Among" the inhabitants vs primary inhabitants.

They changed who the entire book is about-due to pesky DNA, and zero evidence for their racist book of genocide...

Scrub, if you're still impressed and bedazzled.

Do the reverse calculation based on the errors etc. of the BoM and it is trillions to one - proving it false. The reasoning set forth in the OP fails completely to consider that the listed items are not independent events. For example, say that a handwriting exemplar of a printed note has a distinctive characteristic of the o's being very small and the letter "a" being as one see's in this typeface and that the letter u is made small. Now assume that only one person in 20 has the small o and only one in 20 has the small u and only one in 20 prints with the typeface. This does not mean that you can multiply the odd and say that only one in 8000 has does all three. The three quirks are not independent. Why? Because the person who makes one small is likely to do both. The same goes for the claims but even more telling in the errors is the leaving out of the OTHER events which prove the BoM a fraud! Remember that the OP's cite assumed the events were independent and consecutive. A third error is that ANY of the claimed events were "twoo".



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/28/2015 04:55AM by rhgc.

If you are really wondering about the BOM origins please Youtube the video called "How the Book of Mormon destroyed Mormonism". It is a great video and it answers a lot of these issues. To sum up, the BOM was an amalgam of several other books and the names in the book of mormon came from another source. Please watch the video and let us know what you think.

Here's the video:

https://youtu.be/GAGasQ7j_ZI

Yah, well, BEFORE you get all taken up in MORmON style mathematics and MORmON style proof, just consider that Nibley can not tell the difference between 1 and 4 ( and it should be pointed out that 1 can be infinitely exponentiated and it never gets any larger),
a Jew and a Muslim, and / or he has ZERO ( which can also be infinitely exponentiated and it never gets any larger ) credibility because he is a LIAR, and that MORmONS under the influence of MORmONISM suck at math.

So factor THAT back into the MORmON odds for the POS BOM being what MORmONS claim / veritable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuKb2HbiihI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVqr0SgKTck

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiZn_fXBwtg

Most of this is stuff I like to call fake evidence.

Methinks you have it backwards. An aside is that plagiarizing multiple works with ancient origins - or patterned after ancient narratives themselves - does not make it 'ancient' in its own origins.

One of the most important evidences (or lack if you can't produce any) of the Book of Mormon are the literal descendants of Father Lehi. If its the "most correct of any book on earth" then surely the Americas are flooded with descendants of this holy prophet. Years ago I put up an offer (that still stands and has been matched by 2 people so its triple) of $1K scholarship money for college tuition assistance for the first literal descendant of Father Lehi to come forward to claim. Plenty of apologists know about my offer and have had ample opportunity to spread the word around the Stakes of Zion. All they'd really need is for their LDS Stake President to declare in writing that the person is a literal descendant of Father Lehi. So far no takers.

Ahh, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy

+1

41 weak pareallels. You can find them in anything (it is also a Tu Quo Que argument). None of the pareallels are really impressive (check them out if you want.
Wow. The barely isn't even near where they say the nephites were.
I haven't heard anything about this ancient ceremony by apologists. Probably isn't very impressive considering how I bet it's more apologetic “pareallels”.
The next four are things that have been shown to be so easy to find it's laughable.
The word prints have been debunked. They are now strong evidence against the BofM.
I don't really know what this mesoamerican thing means. I'll do more research.
This was speculated at the time of Joe smith. It's obvious how that got in there.
So? When Joe wrote the thing about Solomon's temple he wrote about something that was being speculated. Dan Vogel covered this.

I have shown how most of these don't hold any water at all and I bet it'll get less impressive when I research more.

Multiply the possibility by 0 if there's even a single thing wrong in a book alleged to be the 'most correct' word of an omniscient deity. This guy needs to study how probability is actually calculated.

absolute bullshit' × 'well, this bit's 50:50' = 'absolute bullshit'

Nibley is quite famous, or infamous, for providing his own Mormonesque translation of an ancient text, and then announcing the "remarkable parallel" to the Book of Mormon. In the process he completely ignores context, which often undermines the so-called parallel entirely.

Now, when someone then attempts to turn this process into a statistical argument, they first create the false binary dichotomy of "hit" or "miss," and give JS credit in each case for a "hit" further amplifying the illusion of confirmation.

Now, to do this right, you need to take each example, and provide an independent translation(s) of the comparable BoM text, along with context. Then, you can see if indeed there is an apparent parallel to the BoM. Moreover, if you think such a parallel survives such scrutiny, you can make an intuitive probability assessment as to whether such parallel could have occurred by chance, a lucky guess, or perhaps by an appeal to a secondary source that was available to JS, or whoever else wrote the BoM.

If you adopt the above suggestion, and of course Hugh Nibley never does, you may end up with something substantively interesting that might have evidential value to perhaps offset by some degree the otherwise overwhelming improbability of BoM authenticity, as I discussed in detail in my post. But, again, as I stated there, the factual cards involved in a prior probability assessment are so deeply stacked against BoM authenticity, it is doubtful that your results, even if cumulative, will raise the probability of BoM authenticity to any level close to justifying rational belief.

Finally, I think that Hugh Nibley, despite his overall apologetic disingenuousness, was capable of making the detailed assessment that I suggest above, but for some reason chose to keep the discussion in the form of manipulated facts and rhetorical pronouncements. Given the passion of his message, and the volume of his writing, it is fair to ask why he was not interested in presenting his material in a manner that would be convincing to people other than his TBM audience.

Henry Bemis Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> Finally, I think that Hugh Nibley, despite his
> overall apologetic disingenuousness, was capable
> of making the detailed assessment that I suggest
> above, but for some reason chose to keep the
> discussion in the form of manipulated facts and
> rhetorical pronouncements. Given the passion of
> his message, and the volume of his writing, it is
> fair to ask why he was not interested in
> presenting his material in a manner that would be
> convincing to people other than his TBM audience.

That said, then as Nibley has the capacity that you attribute to him, and I believe that he did, then Nibley had to know that Joe Smith was an utter fraud and a laughable one at that.

Nibley's historically accurate statement, made in BYU class to BYU students, that Joe Smith had declared Muhammad to be a veritable prophet of god, is also a de facto admission by Nibley, going right over the MORmON heads of his MORmON students, given the utterly damning implications of that statement from a christian and MORmON doctrinal standpoint which Nibley would have to be aware of given his capabilities, that Joseph SMith was a fraud and making up stupid stuff just about as fast as Joe could.

This kind of statistical probability argument is also popular with Christian apologists.

Peter Stoner, for example, in his book "Science Speaks" uses it to prove the inerrancy of the Bible.

My rebuttal, using the same method to prove that the Bible is NOT inerrant, is at http://packham.n4m.org/probably.htm "Probabilities"

link didn't work for me.

Try this one

http://packham.n4m.org/probable.htm

Proving a negative is easy: one needs a single item to prove something wrong. The falsity of the BoM is, similarly, provable by many single errors alone. If you were to put them in a series the chance of the BoM being true is probably less than one in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.....
Simply put the Bible is not inerrant (as least as we have it) and the BoM is a fraud.

BTW, I don't think the errors in the Bible eliminate its use, but the baloney of the BoM does preclude its use.

Nice try Tapir Dan.

Statistics! How do they work?

The chance that 30 50/50 guesses in a row are right is very low. But the chance that out of a couple hundred 50/50 guesses, you can find at least 30 right, is nearly 100%.

Even if the guesses are much less likely than 50/50, the way that apologists mine for evidence effectively makes the Book of Mormon make millions of guesses.

The short list of weak Mormon hits is actually so unimpressive, it's really damning evidence that the Book is fake. A real ancient record would be sure to have much better evidence than that.

Of course it's ancient. Damn near 200 years old!

So let's look at the daily weather for the last 100 years in,
say, Death Valley. Then let's pick every day that it rained and
give the chance of rain as 50-50. Then let's multiply all those
days together just like the guy in question did.

Then we can PROVE that there's less than 1-in-a-billion chance
that Death Valley is not a rainforest.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/28/2015 08:55PM by baura.

And most of the times it "rained," it was actually a hallucination--or at most, a very light mist.

The only way that the Book of Mormon parallels the Dead Sea scrolls is by copying the King James Bible Translation word for word. Not very original or even an "evidence" since the King James Bible was already published.

It is more of an "evidence" of fraud that Joseph Smith's seer stone came up with the exact same word for word English translation that the King James scholars did.