There is no case to be made for a historical Book of Mormon

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_Res Ipsa
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Re: There is no case to be made for a historical Book of Mor

Post by _Res Ipsa »

Themis wrote:
Nevo wrote:Yes, it does. But I think it makes a solid theological point. If Christianity is true, we cannot rule out the possibility that God would reveal his plan of salvation for the human family to Nephite (and Lamanite) prophets.


I don't think that solves most of the problems. Like the sermon on the mount. Revelation does not explain how the sermon found in the Book of Mormon is essentially a word for word copy of the one found in the Bible.


If you assume an omnipotent God, as Christianity does, one cannot rule out anything. Maybe those Quakers on the moon are in cities camouflaged as craters.
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
_honorentheos
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Re: There is no case to be made for a historical Book of Mor

Post by _honorentheos »

EAllusion wrote:
honorentheos wrote:While I don't believe the Book of Mormon is history, I think you misunderstand Nevo. Or at least it seems that you're making a bad argument by attempting to argue the two claims are independent when the Book of Mormon's claims are dependent on the Resurrection of Christ. It matters that the particular religious figure is the same in both instances. As I read Nevo, he's claiming that if one grants the first condition of Christ's resurrection being an actual event, most of the critiques in the OP stop being impossible hurdles because of the newly available explanations. Most of which seem likely to be the same explanation: The atonement theology and understanding of the Christ as conveyed in the Book of Mormon is the most pure, having been revealed directly by God. What historians have gleaned from examining the evidence of history is simply wrong but given enough time and access to correct evidence it will move in the direction of the Book of Mormon. Is it a good argument? No. But it's not equivalent to saying camera phones make the existence of aliens who take people for probing adventures more probable. It's much closer to saying if extraterrestrial spacecraft are discovered, then alien abduction stories become much more plausible. It doesn't make the second point a fact, but that first step that's now been granted was the hardest one anyway.
Atonement theory attempts to understand the purpose of the execution of Jesus. As it appears in the Book of Mormon, it's anachronistic because it adopts intellectual developments in atonement theory that would be out of place in a proto-Christian mesoamerican society, but track perfectly with the theology of the 19th century American context in which the book appeared. Accepting that Jesus was resurrected doesn't do anything to resolve this.

While true to the point of how I think the world actual is, if the first hurdle is accepting that Christ was resurrected in the first place one is suddenly much more close to allowing for the supposed anachronisms to be the result of apostacy or whatever other explanation a Mormon may come up with. The two are dependent, though, with the Book of Mormon being dependent on the reality of the Resurrection. That's the problem with your argument against Nevo.

EA wrote:I think the error driving this reasoning is being promiscuous with a sense of, "if one seemingly implausible religious claim is true, why not others too?" More specifically, it turns on the idea that if you can invoke there is a force in the world that we don't understand that makes seemingly impossible things happen, than we can do that with anything. That's true as far as that goes, but that's a deficiency, not a virtue of "supernatural" accounts of the world.

It's more like, "If one seemingly impossible claim proves true, related improbable claims become less improbable." Again, the claims of the Book of Mormon are dependent on the basics of Christianity being factual. The OP takes on the origin of those beliefs and argues, correctly in my opinion, that they make the Book of Mormon significantly less likely to be historical before one even begins to ask if there is evidence for Nephites in the Americas. But were the discovery of the tomb and godly phenomena discovered that proved the gospel narratives true, one isn't the same distance away from the Book of Mormon being potentially factual. The Book of Mormon may still need to lift itself with it's own evidence for Nephites, etc., etc. But the debate has moved away from the argument in the OP at that point. Without an actual resurrection, atonement theory is derived from beliefs and rationalizations to help them cohere. With an actual resurrection, atonement theory can be corruptions of the original, divinely given reasons for Christ's mission.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
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_Themis
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Re: There is no case to be made for a historical Book of Mor

Post by _Themis »

Res Ipsa wrote:
If you assume an omnipotent God, as Christianity does, one cannot rule out anything. Maybe those Quakers on the moon are in cities camouflaged as craters.


I am not saying an omnipotent God could not do it, but then this God would have to be called Loki as you suggested earlier.
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_Nevo
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Re: There is no case to be made for a historical Book of Mor

Post by _Nevo »

EAllusion wrote:Let's say it's been definitively established that resurrection is a real, albeit extremely rare thing. Let's say, for sake of argument, we can even somehow peer deep into history and know Jesus is one such example. Maybe the only example. That's doubtless an intriguing fact about the world, but there are lots of amazing things that are true about the world that fill us with wonder and awe. A fact about the world that is dazzling doesn't make other dazzling claims plausible.
I agree that somebody simply coming back to life wouldn't do anything to establish the Book of Mormon as an ancient record. I haven't made that claim, though.

In my original post, I wrote: "If one grants the foundational premises of Christianity, a historical Book of Mormon is not out of the question."

That is to say, if one grants that God and angels and miracles are real, and that Jesus Christ has been central to the salvation of the human family from the foundation of the world, then it doesn't strike me as impossible that the Book of Mormon could be historical. Why not? I don't believe it is historical but I can imagine a possible world where it could be.
_Res Ipsa
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Re: There is no case to be made for a historical Book of Mor

Post by _Res Ipsa »

Themis wrote:
Res Ipsa wrote:
If you assume an omnipotent God, as Christianity does, one cannot rule out anything. Maybe those Quakers on the moon are in cities camouflaged as craters.


I am not saying an omnipotent God could not do it, but then this God would have to be called Loki as you suggested earlier.


Sorry, Themis. I meant that to be a response to Nevo.
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
_Nevo
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Re: There is no case to be made for a historical Book of Mor

Post by _Nevo »

Themis wrote:I don't think that solves most of the problems. Like the sermon on the mount. Revelation does not explain how the sermon found in the Book of Mormon is essentially a word for word copy of the one found in the Bible.

If Jesus is able to come back from the dead and fly through the air, I think there's an outside chance he would be able to deliver the Sermon on the Mount in the New World.
_Themis
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Re: There is no case to be made for a historical Book of Mor

Post by _Themis »

Nevo wrote:
Themis wrote:I don't think that solves most of the problems. Like the sermon on the mount. Revelation does not explain how the sermon found in the Book of Mormon is essentially a word for word copy of the one found in the Bible.

If Jesus is able to come back from the dead and fly through the air, I think there's an outside chance he would be able to deliver the Sermon on the Mount in the New World.


That's not the problem though Nevo. The problem is the word for word copy from the Bible which is highly unlikely to be very accurate account of what Jesus said in the old world. The word for word copy shows it was copied from the KJV of the Bible and not a sermon Jesus might have given to people in the new world.
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_EAllusion
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Re: There is no case to be made for a historical Book of Mor

Post by _EAllusion »

"Out of the question" is a bar so low that only logically self-contradictory things fail to meet it. You don't need to preface accepting various Christian beliefs to get to "not out of the question" for Book of Mormon historicity. At the same time, because that bar is so low, it's trite to say. Almost everything is not "out of the question."

You can say that an already converted Christian has fewer barriers to belief in Book of Mormon historicity than someone unconvinced of Christian theology, but that's not doing enough work to be interesting to say. It was not impossible before that and it was not impossible after. But does that move the probability of it in a significant way? No.

A person who believes in the historical existence of Jesus is closer to belief in the Book of Mormon as a historical document than someone who does not, but so? It's not like that carries over into outright plausibility.

So when you say,

"That is to say, if one grants that God and angels and miracles are real, and that Jesus Christ has been central to the salvation of the human family from the foundation of the world, then it doesn't strike me as impossible that the Book of Mormon could be historical. "

I can't help but think that the two clauses that precede the last are irrelevant. The last sentence remains true and uninteresting both if you already grant various aspects of Christian mythology and if you do not.
_honorentheos
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Re: There is no case to be made for a historical Book of Mor

Post by _honorentheos »

I think it's not a viable argument to say that the Christian myth being true makes it seem more likely that the Book of Mormon myth may also be true. That's saying something different than that the Book of Mormon myth is dependent on the Christian myth in such a way that proving the Christian myth is foundational to the Book of Mormon myth. The OP undermines the Book of Mormon's claim for being historical by showing this isn't compatible with what we understand regarding the evolution of the Christian myth. I agree with the OP.

That said, if for whatever reason one starts from the position of the Christian myth being true, it opens many different doors. Currently those doors are supernatural and outside the prevue of history but making them part of natural history, even if unexplained, changes the argument. In that context, the debate simply shifts from the ones made in the OP to the Book of Mormon having to support itself based on its evidence related to Nephites being a real people who lived in the Americas. But the argument does shift.
Last edited by Guest on Thu Jun 06, 2019 4:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
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_EAllusion
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Re: There is no case to be made for a historical Book of Mor

Post by _EAllusion »

Themis wrote:That's not the problem though Nevo. The problem is the word for word copy from the Bible which is highly unlikely to be very accurate account of what Jesus said in the old world. The word for word copy shows it was copied from the KJV of the Bible and not a sermon Jesus might have given to people in the new world.



But if you believe in God, all is possible. Of course, this is a problem, not a benefit with attempting to explain the world in terms of an all-powerful agent that can ad hoc plug any explanatory hole with an assertion of magic beyond human comprehension.

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