stemelbow wrote:
This appears to be nothing more than sheer dogmatism it seems to me. The derivation is and will perhaps always be in question. While theories abound in regards to it all, nothing is so definitive, it seems.
I missed that in his comments. You might want to be careful of your own.
There are far too many examples of not knowing origins of peoples, like jews themselves, it is just unreasonable, it seems to me, to suggest such clear cut, white and black, thinking on this topic. Indeed as alluded to, even the idea of what could possibly be Lehite DNA is unknown. And as I understand, the assumption that we can understand ancient Israelite DNA based on modern Jewish studies is an absurdity, an assumption, in consideration of the data, that doesn't make much sense.
Then how do they keep doing it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemba_people
They claims some of their ancestor came from Jerusalem are about 2500 years ago, only a 100 years after Lehi and another group were to have left. We see both cultural evidence supporting their heritage as well as DNA. How do you suppose scientists know this?
In all this, its not the LGT alone that causes problems for the DNA critique of the religion, indeed that would only be a small part of it, but the assumption that we can define the DNA of ancient Israelites and the origins of the "Native" american peoles.
But yet they have been doing just that, and it's not being done by the3 critics, but by scientists, most of whom probably don't know anything about the Book of Mormon.
In the end, this really is a weak argument taken as a whole. Not much of anything but assumption and bias., it seems to me.
The only thing we are seeing is your own bias. The science is not perfect, but is pretty good, and they do know quite a bit, and so far none of it supports LDS claims of Israelites coming to America anciently.