Daniel Peterson wrote:There was never an official "doctrine" that the last Nephite battle occurred in upstate New York.
There was, for obvious reasons, a widespread commonsense assumption that it did.
When examined, that assumption is found to rest upon less than compelling grounds. (It finds no support, for example, in the text of the Book of Mormon.)
A major contribution in any field of scholarship is when commonsense assumptions are revised or when the evidence leads them to be abandoned.
The sun doesn't actually rise and set, diseases are often caused by essentially invisible little creatures, the earth is not flat, the MIddle Ages were not a time of cultural and intellectual stagnation, maggots don't appear via spontaneous generation, time is not abolute, government management of the economy doesn't actually lead to more rational allocation of resources, matter is not solid, Sanskrit and Scots Gaelic are related, light is both particle and wave, etc.
I'm perfectly happy if and to the extent that LDS scholarship is leading us to be more careful and precise in our claims and in distinguishing between what we know and what we don't know. That's exactly what it should do. But there is no basis to any suppositon that Bill Hamblin somehow compelled Michael Watson to retract the statement in his first letter, or that the Maxwell Institute has some sort of leverage over the First Presidency.
Apparently, Dan, several generations of Prophets and apostles, including Joseph Smith who learned first hand from angelic visitors, find that the assumption rests on quite compelling grounds. The current batch of 'inspired' Prophet and apostles also find that the assumption rests on compelling grounds. The vast majority of Mormon rank and file membership also find that the assumption rests on compelling grounds.
So, I am wondering, Dan, can you please explain to us why you understand this so much better than all of them? Why do you posses greater insight than God's elect, including one who spoke directly to God and to ancients inhabitants of the land described in the Book of Mormon?
Why, nearly 200 years after the fact, do you understand that nature of what Moroni told Joseph Smith about the Book of Mormon lands and peoples better than Joseph Smith did at the time he conversed with this angelic messenger of God?
That said, I am willing to accept your claim that modern scholarship can call into question other widespread commonsense assumptions long held by Mormon prophets and apostles and rank and file membership. But how committed are you really to this proposition? Are you willing to allow modern scholarship to call into question the veracity of the First Vision, the origin of the Book of Mormon, the roots of polygamy, the character of Joseph Smith, etc.? My sense is that you are not. Your avowed dedication to modern scholarship is phony.
God . . . "who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, . . . and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him ..."