Another Nail in the Book of Mormon's Coffin

[_Craig Paxton]

As if it needed any more damaging information to undercut the truth claims of the Book of Mormon...

Building on the work of Duane Anderson and Landon Lamborn a new statistical study has been released with a detailed analysis of the lack of randomness to the dates found in the Book of Mormon and the probabilities that those exact dates could randomly occur within the Book of Mormon timeline without some human bias a.k.a. a sole author...

Odds are about 1 in 1.5 Billion chance of these dates occurring randomly...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/246182776/How ... OM-Origins

[_robuchan]

I love this stuff. I skimmed through the article. I'll read more later. I'm a little skeptical that such low probability could be calculated from just eight dates, but I like the idea here. Reminds me of this analysis I put together.

Request for previously published material on this subject or your thoughts.

If I'm doing the math correctly, I get the following.

There were six generations from Jacob down to Amaleki, covering the time about 590 BC to 130 BC. This is six generations in 460 years, or 77 years per generation.

Then you have six generations from Alma Sr to Nephi, son of Nephi, son of Helaman that spanned 240 years. About 40 years per generation.

Then at the end of the Book of Mormon you have longer generations again with the same Nephi to Ammaron going about 350 years in just four generations.

You also have some men living to very old ages: Ammaron and Amos 130 and 131 years old.

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/58299-bom-and-ages/

Answers I got from these guys: "you don't know what words like years, father, son, etc, mean to a Mesamerican" or "you don't know what word Joseph Smith was struggling to translate when he chose words like year, father, son, etc." Gotta love Mopologist Book of Mormon defenses.

[_Craig Paxton]

I love this stuff. I skimmed through the article. I'll read more later. I'm a little skeptical that such low probability could be calculated from just eight dates, but I like the idea here. Reminds me of this analysis I put together.

Request for previously published material on this subject or your thoughts.

If I'm doing the math correctly, I get the following.

There were six generations from Jacob down to Amaleki, covering the time about 590 BC to 130 BC. This is six generations in 460 years, or 77 years per generation.

Then you have six generations from Alma Sr to Nephi, son of Nephi, son of Helaman that spanned 240 years. About 40 years per generation.

Then at the end of the Book of Mormon you have longer generations again with the same Nephi to Ammaron going about 350 years in just four generations.

You also have some men living to very old ages: Ammaron and Amos 130 and 131 years old.

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/58299-bom-and-ages/

Answers I got from these guys: "you don't know what words like years, father, son, etc, mean to a Mesamerican" or "you don't know what word Joseph Smith was struggling to translate when he chose words like year, father, son, etc." Gotta love Mopologist Book of Mormon defenses.

The author of this study addresses the low number of dates available. Even with only 8 dates stated in the Book of Mormon the probability of even those 8 dates being random is 1 in 1.5 billion

[_Arrakis]

This is over my head....can anyone break it down and use small words to explain the study?

[_Craig Paxton]

This is over my head....can anyone break it down and use small words to explain the study?

Study shows that Book of Mormon is a man made fiction....does that break it down enough?

[_sock puppet]

As if it needed any more damaging information to undercut the truth claims of the Book of Mormon...

Building on the work of Duane Anderson and Landon Lamborn a new statistical study has been released with a detailed analysis of the lack of randomness to the dates found in the Book of Mormon and the probabilities that those exact dates could randomly occur within the Book of Mormon timeline without some human bias a.k.a. a sole author...

Odds are about 1 in 1.5 Billion chance of these dates occurring randomly...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/246182776/How ... OM-Origins

It's becoming rather leadened.

[_mackay11]

Interesting, I'll have a proper read later.

Initial thoughts...

- I was surprised that the Book of Mormon only has 8 dates in it. It feels like there are more
- An 8-date cluster will "feel" small to most people. The dates are all first half of the month, but they "look" random. This is important for it to ever have any real weight in the discussion. The statistical analysis of The Late War is impressive, but reading the text is even more impactful and was among the final nails in the coffin. While I agree that the probabilities are high here, the source just doesn't look very impressive
- This is probably easily dismissed by apologists. There has been a lot written about the dates and their relationship to Mesoamerica. They can also argue that is there is any human influence on the dates selected then it could just as well be attributed to Mormon. Having said that, a 90% correlation with Bible dates is more interesting. I'll have a look for that in the essay.

[_Bazooka]

Answers I got from these guys:"you don't know what words like years, father, son, etc, mean to a Mesamerican"

We kind of do....

Among the various calendar systems in use, two were particularly central and widespread across Mesoamerica. Common to all recorded Mesoamerican cultures, and the most important, was the 260-day calendar, a ritual calendar with no confirmed correlation to astronomical or agricultural cycles.[2] Apparently the earliest Mesoamerican calendar to be developed, it was known by a variety of local terms, and its named components and the glyphs used to depict them were similarly culture-specific. However, it is clear that this calendar functioned in essentially the same way across cultures, and down through the chronological periods it was maintained. The second of the major calendars was one representing a 365-day period approximating the tropical year, known sometimes as the "vague year".[3] Because it was an approximation, over time the seasons and the true tropical year gradually "wandered" with respect to this calendar, owing to the accumulation of the differences in length. There is little hard evidence to suggest that the ancient Mesoamericans used any intercalary days to bring their calendar back into alignment. However there is evidence to show Mesoamericans were aware of this gradual shifting, which they accounted for in other ways without amending the calendar itself.

These two 260- and 365-day calendars could also be synchronised to generate the Calendar Round, a period of 18980 days or approximately 52 years. The completion and observance of this Calendar Round sequence was of ritual significance to a number of Mesoamerican cultures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_calendars

Although that Wiki article does seem to remove the controversy of dates being in the low numbers and in doing so, rebuts the study completely:

Trecenas[edit]
The 260-day period was divided into periods of 13 days called in Spanish a trecena (no indigenous word for this period is known). The days of a trecena were usually numbered from 1 to 13. There were some exceptions, such as in the Tlapanec area where they were counted from 2 to 14.[8] The first day of the trecena, and the god who was its patron, ruled the following thirteen days. If the first day of a trecena was auspicious then so were the next twelve days.

This actually adds historical credibility to the Book of Mormon because, genuinely, how could Joseph possibly have known?

[_DrW]

Answers I got from these guys:"you don't know what words like years, father, son, etc, mean to a Mesamerican"

We kind of do....

Among the various calendar systems in use, two were particularly central and widespread across Mesoamerica. Common to all recorded Mesoamerican cultures, and the most important, was the 260-day calendar, a ritual calendar with no confirmed correlation to astronomical or agricultural cycles.[2] Apparently the earliest Mesoamerican calendar to be developed, it was known by a variety of local terms, and its named components and the glyphs used to depict them were similarly culture-specific. However, it is clear that this calendar functioned in essentially the same way across cultures, and down through the chronological periods it was maintained. The second of the major calendars was one representing a 365-day period approximating the tropical year, known sometimes as the "vague year".[3] Because it was an approximation, over time the seasons and the true tropical year gradually "wandered" with respect to this calendar, owing to the accumulation of the differences in length. There is little hard evidence to suggest that the ancient Mesoamericans used any intercalary days to bring their calendar back into alignment. However there is evidence to show Mesoamericans were aware of this gradual shifting, which they accounted for in other ways without amending the calendar itself.

These two 260- and 365-day calendars could also be synchronised to generate the Calendar Round, a period of 18980 days or approximately 52 years. The completion and observance of this Calendar Round sequence was of ritual significance to a number of Mesoamerican cultures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_calendars

Although that Wiki article does seem to remove the controversy of dates being in the low numbers and in doing so, rebuts the study completely:

Trecenas[edit]
The 260-day period was divided into periods of 13 days called in Spanish a trecena (no indigenous word for this period is known). The days of a trecena were usually numbered from 1 to 13. There were some exceptions, such as in the Tlapanec area where they were counted from 2 to 14.[8] The first day of the trecena, and the god who was its patron, ruled the following thirteen days. If the first day of a trecena was auspicious then so were the next twelve days.

This actually adds historical credibility to the Book of Mormon because, genuinely, how could Joseph possibly have known?

Very interesting. Nice work.

This kind of post makes it a lot more difficult for the faithful to dismiss you as a completely biased anti-Mormon critic.

[_mackay11]

As if it needed any more damaging information to undercut the truth claims of the Book of Mormon...

Building on the work of Duane Anderson and Landon Lamborn a new statistical study has been released with a detailed analysis of the lack of randomness to the dates found in the Book of Mormon and the probabilities that those exact dates could randomly occur within the Book of Mormon timeline without some human bias a.k.a. a sole author...

Odds are about 1 in 1.5 Billion chance of these dates occurring randomly...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/246182776/How ... OM-Origins

OK, here's my take on the article. In the interests of full disclosure, I think there is strong evidence against the Book of Mormon being historical. Having said that, the TL;DR for this long post is: lots of assumptions, I don't think this is much of a "nail."

The writer says early on:

"Our analysis of Book of Mormon dates is predicated on the fact that the events associated with the dates apparently could have happened on any day of the month and in any month of the year... nothing inherent in their circumstances that should cause us to expect any of them to have occurred on any particular day or month."

I'll come back to this, but it's a easily refuted assumption by an apologist if they chose to.

Of the 106 dates available in the Bible, only 20 are examined for randomness. These are the 20 that have no "significance" for being there and are simply XYZ happened on XYZ date. He's taken out a lot of dates that are "small" (1 or 7) as they are of symbolic importance. He has also taken out dates for events that historically probably didn't happen (e.g. Noah) because these dates, he suggest, are not historical and made up.

There's also another issue. IF the Book of Mormon is historical, how do we know that a month had 30 days in it? Is there anything in Book of Mormon to say it does? He says: "Given that there are 30 days in a month..." - first false assumption. There are 30 days in a Western month. That's not true everywhere. If a Book of Mormon month had fewer days then the whole probability exercise falls over.

E.g.:
"Like other Mesoamerican cultures, the Mixtec used a 260-day sacred calendar. A day is a combination of a number, called the coefficient, and a day sign. The coefficient ranges from 1 to 13, while the day sign is any of the following 20 glyphs: (see link)"
http://www.ancientscripts.com/mixtec.html

On that basis, if Book of Mormon people were using a similar calendar, then the maximum day number would be 13. The days of the month mentioned in the Book of Mormon range from 1 to 12. A perfectly random set of dates in that range!

The Maya calendars have all sorts of permutations, but in at one, Haab, there are 20 days. Another (Tzolkin) has 13 days in a week. We simply can't say that "there are 30 days in a month." Trend #1 (see below) has already fallen over with this assumption before it even starts.

Trend #1 (Small gap between the month number and the day number)
He says that discovering that the gap between day number and month number is always small is "...strange..." He shows that small gaps (between the month number and date number) are statistically unlikely. But then he runs the same thing 3 times over (average day gap, std dev, max gap). He comes up with the probability score by multiplying the same data 2 (or and then 3 times over). This is like saying: If you're flipping a coin... the following three statements are all correct:

- you have a 50% chance of heads
- a 50% chance of not getting tails
- a 50% chance of getting tails

You can't then say that .5 x .5 x .5 means you only have a 12.5% (or 1 in 8) chance of predicting the right side of a coin. It's still 50%. But this is what he's done. He's observed one "finding" in the 8-date set (that the month number and date number are always close) and then described this single (low probability) "finding" three different ways and then multiplied the probability to make the probability even lower.

Trend #2 (0.90 correlation between the Bible dates and Book of Mormon dates).

First: he's put all of the "not really random" Bible dates back in. They do this because they want to show that what Joseph had read in the Bible was a driver for the months he chose.
Trend #2 is more interesting and compelling than #1. Having said that, a riposte could focus on Mesoamerican war seasons (I can't find it, but remember reading one apologetic article saying Mayan/Meso wars only happened in certain months to avoid certain key seasons). He says the odds of getting this level of correlation at random is 1/3,400. Having said that, his analysis excluded three Book of Mormon dates where the month is mentioned but the day number is. If those months are added the correlation drops to 0.71. Besides which... everyone knows... correlation is not causality.

New Year’s Week
This section is poor. There are lots of reasons why a culture might mention the first few days of the year more than others. In fact several apologists have listed this as an evidence in favour of a historical book. Google "1st January" vs any other random date in the year and you'll see what I mean.

He finishes with a flourish. He takes the over-assumed Trend #1 and multiplies it by Trend #2 to come up with 1 in 1.5billion. Massive exaggeration.