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No evidence for the Book of Mormon, or the Exodus?

Have you ever played 20 questions with one of those "stories with holes"? I remember as a kid I had a teacher pull some of us aside to challenge us with these while the rest of the class worked on something we had already mastered. The idea was to tell a story with seemingly neutral facts and with a key part of the narrative missing so that by asking 20 or less yes/no questions you could deduce the key to the narrative. Almost always, the seemingly neutral description contained a critical clue that triggered the game-players' assumptions in a way that led them down a false path, and hindered their deductive process until they could hone in on the assumption, question it, and break out of the consequences of the assumption. Maybe a few concrete examples, if I can remember some:

  1. A man is driving in his car and is killed by a gunshot, but there's no hole in his vehicle. Most people start asking about whether the windows were open (nope, all closed up), and about passengers (he was alone), and get all elaborate thinking of scenarios of how such a thing could be rigged and hidden inside a car before they realize that not all cars have roofs (convertibles).
  2. Tom and Liza both lie dead on the floor with a small amount of broken glass and water mixing with their blood. Some people start with trying to figure out the murder weapon (yes the glass killed Tom, but not Liza), from there they try to figure out motive, or who killed who first (Tom was trying to kill Liza, but died in the attempt), and what relevance the water has to anything. It's not until they learn to think past the assumption that named beings are necessarily human that they discover that Tom is a cat and Liza a goldfish, and the rest is easily surmised.
  3. A man wants desperately to go home, but is afraid of the man in the mask waiting for him there. Again, people try to figure out why the men seem to be enemies and are stymied until they release their assumptions and it is discovered that the masked man is neither criminal, nor evil intentioned, but rather an umpire, and that the going home refers not to a place of residence, but rather home plate.

    I bring these up because they each illustrate a common mistake even the most learned of scientists are known to make. I'm sure the logical fallacy I'm referring to must have a name that a logician can enlighten me on at some point, but for now I'll just try to describe it: Given a binary hypothesis, I can choose A, and observe that evidence X, Y, and Z support the hypothesis, but if I choose B then X and Y support it, but Z must have some other explanation.

    These stories with holes follow essentially that pattern, except that you essentially make hypotheses without realizing you've chosen them until the explanation for that evidence Z gets its proper context.

    So, a historian cited by PBS claims that there's no evidence supporting the Book of Mormon's central claims. I've heard this many times before, usually from people whose pastors have told them that. But does that even hold up to common sense? I mean really: NO evidence? None? The Book of Mormon claims, quite centrally, that a civilization was here on the American continent before the Europeans came. Isn't that claim pretty well borne out? "Well duh", you might respond, "but the question is more about the unique things that the Book of Mormon claims, beyond what we already know of history". OK, fair enough, but now you better back off of your claim that there's NO evidence for the Book of Mormon, then, right? Just because you already think you have an explanation that makes sense of the facts at hand doesn't mean there's no other explanation possible (for that Z evidence) or that your explanation is complete and exhaustive (maybe you don't have Z yet). Of course if I have an alternative explanation it shouldn't contradict any of the observable facts (the X and Y), but my explanation (for X, Y and Z) can INCLUDE yours (be more exhaustive than yours) because of extra facts (Z) I know without you being aware that yours is included (so you can feel like we're contradictory, but only from your point of view which ignores that Z fact).

    Now what if I told you that there are features of many of the Mayan temples which appear to have no other purpose than immersion baptism? It's a lost tradition, but at one time the builders practiced it. It is evidence, not one way or the other, just evidence. From the hypothesis (A) that the Book of Mormon is true this archeological evidence is fully predicted: the early builders were Christians who practiced the ordinance as we know it today in the Christian world. From the hypothesis that the Book of Mormon cannot possibly be true (B) this archeological evidence can be explained away, but must be fitted into some other explanatory apparatus so as to maintain the integrity of the hypothesis which is seemingly corroborated by it. Once explained away, can you say that this particular fact is not evidence FOR the truth of the Book of Mormon? Sure--you may be wrong, but you aren't dishonest to say that. What you are is simply (willingly or unwittingly) blind to your own assumptions which discard evidence before it arrives at you. In other words: it is ONLY NOT evidence of THAT from YOUR point of view. (The "from your point of view" part is what these intellectuals almost always consistently leave out of the sentence which would otherwise make it quite accurate.) From another point of view (i.e. mine) the same evidence can be most emphatically corroborative.

    Do you want another one? How about the well documented welcoming of Cortès by the Aztecs who mistakenly assumed, due to their traditions, that a white bearded god who promised to return was in fact Cortès? This is factual evidence which, from the hypothesis (A) that the Book of Mormon is true makes complete sense: Christ visited the Americas in the record, and promised to return. From the perspective (B) that the BoM is impossible, this evidence can be explained as belonging to some other tradition. Does it disprove the BoM's claim to veracity by itself: of course not--but if you claim it's not evidence FOR the BoM then you can stick to your hypothesis that there is no evidence--from YOUR perspective.

    Now let's get really specific. A short documentary reel film entitled Ancient America Speaks which was produced and distributed through official church channels sometime in the 70s or early 80s notes the discovery in Central America of a stone fresco fragment containing somewhere close to 100 similarities to a detailed vision or dream recited in the BoM, commonly known as Lehi's dream. This is evidence which, unless proven to be a post-1820s forgery, corroborates so strongly the hypothesis of the BoM's truth that proponents of the opposite hypothesis would be hard-pressed to explain away such detail. But I'm sure it can and has been done. If it hasn't, maybe those who claim that there's no evidence supporting the BoM are simply unaware or ignorant of this fact and will quickly open their minds to the possibility of its truth once they learn of it. My experience has been, to the contrary, that they will seek all the harder to explain how it could not possibly be supportive of the BoM—because they're not REALLY scientifically curious, and are unwilling to even try to see things from a perspective that might threaten the cozy explanations they've created in their own mind, however "reality-based" or "scientific" these explanations purport to be.

    Did you note in each of these discussions of the two interpretive hypotheses seeking to explain a (neutral until interpreted) piece of evidence that I always made the pro-BoM (A) side out to flow most easily and logically with the evidence? (It explains the X, Y and Z) That's no accident, but I invite you to re-read and decide for yourselves, thinking as critically as you can, if they really aren't fairly smooth and straightforward. If you need more information about what the BoM claims, I can certainly oblige, just leave a comment and tell me where I've failed you. Did you also notice that I never actually GAVE the explanation of the contra-BoM (B) side? (I never actually said HOW they interpret the Z evidence differently) This also was no accident: that would take research which I am not willing to do right now, and it's also completely unnecessary. I'm not trying to refute anything specific, I'm just trying to open up your imagination to the possibility that an interpretive framework, based on assumptions, may lead a sound mind to a false conclusion, especially by discarding (or being blinded to) evidence that should be taken into account. If anyone has any serious objections to this procedure, and needs a real-life example to help them imagine how some facts are explained as no longer belonging to the category of evidence FOR the BoM, I will happily consider doing the necessary research. But I hope, without having actually completed that step, that I've demonstrated how the contra side takes considerably more effort to imagine explanations for (the Z piece of evidence that doesn't seem to fit in). This difference in effort required for proving is proof of nothing in and of itself, but from the pro-BoM side it looks quite suspicious, (like you have to go a lot further out of your way to believe the contras) wouldn't you agree?

    The PBS historian who made the claim that there was no archeological evidence for the BoM in the very same sentence argued that there was similarly no evidence for the Exodus. Although there IS serious debate among experts on the matter, I hope it seems quite obvious to any thinking individual that the very existence of an ancient people claiming the story of Exodus as their own IS in fact EVIDENCE that it happened. You can reject the evidence, but then you'd have to explain how they came to claim it even though it's false, right? Lawrence H Schiffman writes a fantastic article on the matter clearly demonstrating that although evidence doesn't PROVE the Exodus account, there IS evidence supporting it out there that analysts ignore at the peril of the truth, and that, in the very least, NO EVIDENCE is NOT proof that it DIDN'T happen.

    This PBS historian is quite correct in branding belief in the veracity of the BoM AND in the Bible (by extension from his questioning of the Exodus account) as based in faith. His mistake, however, is to assume that his own belief that truths arrived at by the scientific method are not equally objects of a kind of faith. Just because I choose the hypothesis that the BoM is true BEFORE I interpret the data doesn't mean my faith in the book is any less scientific than the faith he puts in his hypothesis that such books are metaphysical and are therefore not true in the same sense that he believes archeology demonstrates truths. In fact, even from the more neutral point of view I've outlined in this post, the "BoM is true" hypothesis is actually much more plausible to believe than not.

    He almost snickers as he asserts a lack of evidence for the exodus, as if his core meaning really was: Bible believers and Mormons are really just superstitious, illogical fools who love their own delusions in the face of all real science. No sir, and I resent your condescension, it is rather you who cannot seem to admit evidence that doesn't pass the filter of the very hypothesis you are claiming to test. Your assertions are question-begging tautologies. There is a wealth of evidence both for the exodus and for the Book of Mormon. Any rigorous scientist will tell you that your curiosity (which MUST include a healthy skepticism, of course) must lead you to ask the right questions—make the correct hypotheses—without which you will not have the apparatus of assumptions it takes to see TRUE evidence for what it is. So I invite you: Take off your mind-forged manacles of disbelief enough to entertain even the smallest desire that it be true, and your experiments will then provide the evidence you need to strengthen your newfound faith, propelling you to greater curiosity, more experimentation, more positive corroborating evidence, and soon you too will come to know that the Book of Mormon IS the word of God, just as the Bible is; does testify of Christ, just as the Bible does. It will make a Christian out of you if you'll let it.

Comments

Scott said…
While attending a religion class at BYU I had an interesting experience. My proffesor, whose name escapes me, had studied several engravings in south american temples including the one you mentioned linked to Lehi's dream. He gave a 55 minute demenstration showing slides of several such engravings. The presentation left little doubt in my mind of the veracity of the Book of Mormon. Then, in the last five minutes, he bore solumn testimony that this physical evidence in and of itself would never be able to convince anyone that the Book of Mormon is what it purports be, the word of God. The only way anyone would ever be able to know of its truthfulness would be to pray and receive a spiritual manifestation in the affirmative. This is how it has always been. Just as you stated, try the experiment. Without spiritual confirmation, nothing else will ever be enough.

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