The Latest Schryver "debate" at MAD.
Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2011 5:57 pm
I've been asked by several people here to post what I posted at the MAD forum yesterday.
Two of my posts were locked and I was asked by the moderator to redo them without the "personal" stuff, and so I did. Although I have not resubmitted the post responding to Schryver's "primary thesis," I will do so here on this thread.
For those interested in this subject I provided what I believe to be a devastating critique of the "missing scroll" theorists here:
http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/563 ... ll-theory/
Wade Englund is the guy in that thread who is trying to ignore the implications of the evidence and he is constantly trying to recreate my argument.
The other post I sent this morning which is a refutation of Schryver's cipher theory, and although the mods locked the previous version, I'm confident this one will stand:
http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/564 ... the-water/
And so here is my original post responding to Schryver's "primary thesis" about a preexistent text:
===============================================
Regarding his "primary thesis", the most important thing to note is that his methodology for determining a preexistent text is one of his own making. Yes, that's right, he just made it up. The "substantial word" analysis, as he likes to call it, is something he came up with on his own, and so there is absolutely no reason to believe it could be used to reach the conclusions he does. What William needs to do, for once, is explain to us why we should accept his methodology as one that could ever hope to establish what he claims to have established. I've asked him a dozen times, and he continues to ignore the question. Until he justifies his method, there is really no reason to take it or him seriously.
His method relies on a subjective collection of words which he then arbitrarily categorizes as "generic" or "unique," using a mysterious system alien to all known scholarship. Once he inputs the data into his model (which hasn't been fully explained either), he leaps to the illicit conclusions that all this stuff was based on a preexistent text. So this "study" as he likes to call it, essentially produces results that he doesn't even pretend to explain in logical terms.
(These are my notes taken a year ago while listening to his online presentation. It ends with the first video, and I'll probably post my notes on the second video later on.)
So he goes on to point out how a certain list of words are attested in certain Abraham verses, and then informs us that it is "intuitively evident" (not just to William, but to everyone, apparently; more sales talk) that the Alphabet is based on a "preexistent text." So Schryver lowers his hand and reveals the fact that the primary driving force behind his thesis amounts to "intuition." This is hardly an objective tool by which rigorous scholarly analyses are formed, but William appears confident that his intuition provides fertile ground for a healthy thesis.
He then goes on to show a graph that illustrates the frequency of word attestation in each chapter of the Book of Abraham. What jumped out at me is that the very beginning of Abraham chapter one you see the graph skyrocket to over 80 words, and then immediately plummet to under ten and then fluctate with an occasional spike upwards to around 30 words for the rest of the chapters.
William never explains this phenomenon in his graph, but to the critics the spike is understandable and expected. If William had properly understood the critical argument presented by Chris Smith, then he would have known that he just proved his point. Chris argued that the GAEL was used to shape the first three verses of the Book of Abraham. But like so much of William's presentation, he moved quickly, threw up graphs and images and made numerous baseless assertions without explication. He went on to point out that there is no significant attestation of words in the later chapters, and the critics are sitting here going, "DUH!" That's because the later chapters were produced later on, contrary to William's baseless claim that the entire Book of Abraham preexisted the GAEL. But he doesn't even acknowledge, let alone explain how this graph undermines that fundamental assumption in his thesis.
William doesn't even understand the significance of his own findings and how they pertain to what the critics have actually argued. All he did here was observe the degree to which some Alphabet words correspond to the Book of Abraham chapters, but then he leaps to the unwarranted conclusion that this somehow proves the former is dependent on the latter. Yet, he did nothing to show direction of dependency. Nothing. It was just something he asserted as "intuitively evident," but he never explains why the direction of dependency couldn't go the other way.
He then explains why chapter two showed little correlation with the Alphabet. He notes that the "Grammar" explanations are attested throughout chapter two, but he then makes the same illicit conclusion and asserts that the former is dependent on the latter. But the assertions get even bolder, as he claims the Grammar is attested in chapters 4 and 5, but he produces nothing (not even a graph) to illustrate the degree of attestation. He just keeps asserting that the preexistent translation of all the chapters provided all the data found in the GAEL.
He then goes on to "demonstrate dependency" by using the first three verses of the Book of Abraham, which is precisely the portion of the Book of Abraham which the critics have used to make their case. So obviously we're expecting to see a lot of correlation between the GAEL and Abr 1:1-3. But Schryver doesn't mention any of this to his audience. Instead, whenever he alludes to the critical argument he makes it sound like we've been arguing all along that the GAEL was used to produce the entire Book of Abraham, providing him with a convenient straw man to knock over. So he goes on to unwittingly make our case for a high degree of correlation between the GAEL and Abr 1:1-3. He then leaps to Abraham 1:22-26 to show further correlation and then later on he leaps to an example in Facsimile #2.
So why is he skipping around ike this? If this attestation is consistent throughout the entire Book of Abraham, then why not go in sequence from beginning to end? Why is he skipping around? Well, the answer is hilarious and it is something only the critics would have understood. It is because both of these sections were already explained by Chris Smith in his previously published paper! However, William attributes none of this to Chris. But the point here isn't plagiarism. The point is that William is using the two areas with a high degree of correspondence to make the case that the entire Book of Abraham preexisted the GAEL. In fact, that's essentially what he says after showing these slides. He claims, with a stern and intense voice, that all five chapters are "substantially attested" in the Alphabet. Well if this is true, then why did he produce only those examples which had already been demonstrated and explicated by that "anti-Mormon," Chris Smith? William was counting on the fact that not a single person in his audience had read Smith's essay and he clearly presented his argument as if all these things he mentioned, he discovered via his own "studies."
We saw the same thing with William's misuse of the Phelps letter. He only found out about this when reading Chris' paper, but made no mention of this fact in his presentation. Instead, he kept up the perception that the apologists were the ones constantly uncovering new data that sheds light on the subject. In reality, Smith already dealt with the letter explaining that Phelps was living with Joseph Smith at the time, and that the letter in context tells us that Phelps would reveal things from the Lord as they received them. This strongly indicates that the "pure language" translation an example of this "new thing" and that it was Joseph Smith who provided it. Joseph Smith even appended a message to Sally in the same letter, so to suppose this was something Phelps was doing on his own is absurd. And as we explained later, this was clearly based on an 1832 revelation by the Prophet. Of course, William neglects to tell his audience about any of this because it is crucial to the success of his presentation that he share only carefully selected tid-bits of information, which he strings together in a way that would drive home the conclusion he is trying to support. All other evidence that undermines his thesis is either ignored or downplayed. But mostly ignored. Sam Brown is an LDS scholar who has researched this matter extensively and he believes the evidence suggests that Joseph Smith, at the very least, supervised the project.
Having said all that...
This business about another missing Q documents that the apologists keep proposing, really misses the point. In reality there could very well be a missing Q document from which all these things were copied, and the problems facing the apologists still exist. That's what's so funny about this. Even if everything William says is true, what has he really accomplished? At best - and this is assuming, for the sake of argument, that he has properly understood three "critics" (though he hasn't) - all he has done is correct three brief comments from Ed Ashment, Chris Smith and an obscure RLDS historian. That's all his "primary thesis" claims to do. It doesn't justify Joseph Smith's incorrect translations. It doesn't explain why virtually all these men, Joseph Smith included, believed the Book of Abraham derived from something beside the "missing" scroll. And as I explained to wade, I have always believed that the narrative preexisted these documents. What he and wade have to do is show evidence that this narrative was presented on a document from which these KEP documents were supposedly copied. But again, this is irrelevant to virtually everything the critics have been saying. So imagine our reaction when William declared that he had rendered forty years of criticisms moot.
Two of my posts were locked and I was asked by the moderator to redo them without the "personal" stuff, and so I did. Although I have not resubmitted the post responding to Schryver's "primary thesis," I will do so here on this thread.
For those interested in this subject I provided what I believe to be a devastating critique of the "missing scroll" theorists here:
http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/563 ... ll-theory/
Wade Englund is the guy in that thread who is trying to ignore the implications of the evidence and he is constantly trying to recreate my argument.
The other post I sent this morning which is a refutation of Schryver's cipher theory, and although the mods locked the previous version, I'm confident this one will stand:
http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/564 ... the-water/
And so here is my original post responding to Schryver's "primary thesis" about a preexistent text:
===============================================
Regarding his "primary thesis", the most important thing to note is that his methodology for determining a preexistent text is one of his own making. Yes, that's right, he just made it up. The "substantial word" analysis, as he likes to call it, is something he came up with on his own, and so there is absolutely no reason to believe it could be used to reach the conclusions he does. What William needs to do, for once, is explain to us why we should accept his methodology as one that could ever hope to establish what he claims to have established. I've asked him a dozen times, and he continues to ignore the question. Until he justifies his method, there is really no reason to take it or him seriously.
His method relies on a subjective collection of words which he then arbitrarily categorizes as "generic" or "unique," using a mysterious system alien to all known scholarship. Once he inputs the data into his model (which hasn't been fully explained either), he leaps to the illicit conclusions that all this stuff was based on a preexistent text. So this "study" as he likes to call it, essentially produces results that he doesn't even pretend to explain in logical terms.
(These are my notes taken a year ago while listening to his online presentation. It ends with the first video, and I'll probably post my notes on the second video later on.)
So he goes on to point out how a certain list of words are attested in certain Abraham verses, and then informs us that it is "intuitively evident" (not just to William, but to everyone, apparently; more sales talk) that the Alphabet is based on a "preexistent text." So Schryver lowers his hand and reveals the fact that the primary driving force behind his thesis amounts to "intuition." This is hardly an objective tool by which rigorous scholarly analyses are formed, but William appears confident that his intuition provides fertile ground for a healthy thesis.
He then goes on to show a graph that illustrates the frequency of word attestation in each chapter of the Book of Abraham. What jumped out at me is that the very beginning of Abraham chapter one you see the graph skyrocket to over 80 words, and then immediately plummet to under ten and then fluctate with an occasional spike upwards to around 30 words for the rest of the chapters.
William never explains this phenomenon in his graph, but to the critics the spike is understandable and expected. If William had properly understood the critical argument presented by Chris Smith, then he would have known that he just proved his point. Chris argued that the GAEL was used to shape the first three verses of the Book of Abraham. But like so much of William's presentation, he moved quickly, threw up graphs and images and made numerous baseless assertions without explication. He went on to point out that there is no significant attestation of words in the later chapters, and the critics are sitting here going, "DUH!" That's because the later chapters were produced later on, contrary to William's baseless claim that the entire Book of Abraham preexisted the GAEL. But he doesn't even acknowledge, let alone explain how this graph undermines that fundamental assumption in his thesis.
William doesn't even understand the significance of his own findings and how they pertain to what the critics have actually argued. All he did here was observe the degree to which some Alphabet words correspond to the Book of Abraham chapters, but then he leaps to the unwarranted conclusion that this somehow proves the former is dependent on the latter. Yet, he did nothing to show direction of dependency. Nothing. It was just something he asserted as "intuitively evident," but he never explains why the direction of dependency couldn't go the other way.
He then explains why chapter two showed little correlation with the Alphabet. He notes that the "Grammar" explanations are attested throughout chapter two, but he then makes the same illicit conclusion and asserts that the former is dependent on the latter. But the assertions get even bolder, as he claims the Grammar is attested in chapters 4 and 5, but he produces nothing (not even a graph) to illustrate the degree of attestation. He just keeps asserting that the preexistent translation of all the chapters provided all the data found in the GAEL.
He then goes on to "demonstrate dependency" by using the first three verses of the Book of Abraham, which is precisely the portion of the Book of Abraham which the critics have used to make their case. So obviously we're expecting to see a lot of correlation between the GAEL and Abr 1:1-3. But Schryver doesn't mention any of this to his audience. Instead, whenever he alludes to the critical argument he makes it sound like we've been arguing all along that the GAEL was used to produce the entire Book of Abraham, providing him with a convenient straw man to knock over. So he goes on to unwittingly make our case for a high degree of correlation between the GAEL and Abr 1:1-3. He then leaps to Abraham 1:22-26 to show further correlation and then later on he leaps to an example in Facsimile #2.
So why is he skipping around ike this? If this attestation is consistent throughout the entire Book of Abraham, then why not go in sequence from beginning to end? Why is he skipping around? Well, the answer is hilarious and it is something only the critics would have understood. It is because both of these sections were already explained by Chris Smith in his previously published paper! However, William attributes none of this to Chris. But the point here isn't plagiarism. The point is that William is using the two areas with a high degree of correspondence to make the case that the entire Book of Abraham preexisted the GAEL. In fact, that's essentially what he says after showing these slides. He claims, with a stern and intense voice, that all five chapters are "substantially attested" in the Alphabet. Well if this is true, then why did he produce only those examples which had already been demonstrated and explicated by that "anti-Mormon," Chris Smith? William was counting on the fact that not a single person in his audience had read Smith's essay and he clearly presented his argument as if all these things he mentioned, he discovered via his own "studies."
We saw the same thing with William's misuse of the Phelps letter. He only found out about this when reading Chris' paper, but made no mention of this fact in his presentation. Instead, he kept up the perception that the apologists were the ones constantly uncovering new data that sheds light on the subject. In reality, Smith already dealt with the letter explaining that Phelps was living with Joseph Smith at the time, and that the letter in context tells us that Phelps would reveal things from the Lord as they received them. This strongly indicates that the "pure language" translation an example of this "new thing" and that it was Joseph Smith who provided it. Joseph Smith even appended a message to Sally in the same letter, so to suppose this was something Phelps was doing on his own is absurd. And as we explained later, this was clearly based on an 1832 revelation by the Prophet. Of course, William neglects to tell his audience about any of this because it is crucial to the success of his presentation that he share only carefully selected tid-bits of information, which he strings together in a way that would drive home the conclusion he is trying to support. All other evidence that undermines his thesis is either ignored or downplayed. But mostly ignored. Sam Brown is an LDS scholar who has researched this matter extensively and he believes the evidence suggests that Joseph Smith, at the very least, supervised the project.
Having said all that...
This business about another missing Q documents that the apologists keep proposing, really misses the point. In reality there could very well be a missing Q document from which all these things were copied, and the problems facing the apologists still exist. That's what's so funny about this. Even if everything William says is true, what has he really accomplished? At best - and this is assuming, for the sake of argument, that he has properly understood three "critics" (though he hasn't) - all he has done is correct three brief comments from Ed Ashment, Chris Smith and an obscure RLDS historian. That's all his "primary thesis" claims to do. It doesn't justify Joseph Smith's incorrect translations. It doesn't explain why virtually all these men, Joseph Smith included, believed the Book of Abraham derived from something beside the "missing" scroll. And as I explained to wade, I have always believed that the narrative preexisted these documents. What he and wade have to do is show evidence that this narrative was presented on a document from which these KEP documents were supposedly copied. But again, this is irrelevant to virtually everything the critics have been saying. So imagine our reaction when William declared that he had rendered forty years of criticisms moot.