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.