"Finger Lakes" Theory of Book of Mormon Geography

[Shulem]

Joseph Smith is telling a Bible-inspired story of the Americas, including explanations not only for Native Americans existence after the Flood, but also the existence of animals after the Flood.

It's Ripley's Believe it or not! Horses and elephants and God only knows what those other silly animals were. Could be that Joseph dreamed up those names while sipping his favorite strong beverage. Who knows?

Smith was no scientist. He couldn't read Egyptian hieroglyphics for the life of him. Certainly not a King's name in Facsimile No. 3. Smith's silly animal names in the Book of Mormon are just as dumb as the name of a King and Prince in the hieroglyphic writing of Facsimile No. No. 3 in which he pretended to interpret -- as published in the Times and Seasons, 1842.

[Shulem]

Like most people prior to the widespread availability of maps, Joseph Smith is keeping track of things in his mind based on an itinerary. To get from A to Z, you travel from A to B to C and then X and Y and finally Z.

• Lehi sailed from the coast of Arabia to the Promised Land.

• Jared migrated from Babylon to the New World.

I can see it clearly in my mind just as Joseph did. Can you? You see, in a way, I'm a seer, just like Joseph.

[Shulem]

So first inheritance is next to Lehi-Nephi which is separated from Zarahemla from a narrow strip of wilderness. Zarahemla is next to Bountiful which is next to the narrow neck of land which is next to Desolation and so forth.

That pesky narrow neck. What to do about that narrow neck?

[John Hamer]

I appreciate that you're taken with these ideas, which have no explanatory value vis-à-vis Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon.

[Physics Guy]

What do you mean by “explanatory value”?

A difference between Delmarva and other models I’ve seen is that the land is a peninsula rather than an isthmus. There is a large land mass north of the narrow neck, but nothing south.

This is a pretty big detail, which might either conflict with things the Book of Mormon says or implies, or make sense of them when they seemed obscure otherwise. Or perhaps not; I don’t know how much implied or explicit southern landscape appears in the Book. At least potentially, though, I see an opportunity for this model to explain some things.

For instance, the curious specification of the journey length across the narrow neck as being the time it would take "for a Nephite"—in contrast to, say, a Zulu who would make the same trip in one-and-a-quarter days flat? That's another of these tells of fraud, I think. What Nephite author would go out of their way to qualify a journey length as being the time it would take for one of their own people? It only makes sense to mention who would be doing that day-and-a-half of walking if you have in mind that different groups of people travel at significantly different rates. It's just conceivable that the Nephites prided themselves on their hiking speed and took every chance they could to remind each other how fast they could travel through wilderness. Unless the rest of the Book of Mormon is full of examples of this, though, we'd have to call it unlikely.

A more likely-seeming reason to me for this "for a Nephite" qualification is that Smith was giving himself wiggle room to cover a factor of up to two or so. He might not have been doing that as a careful conscious plan, but he might have had a worry in the back of his mind that his travel times might be off by a bit, and in the flow of dictation this excuse just slipped out—the Nephites were mighty trekkers, y'all, they might go faster than you. Practised liars get used to slipping in potential excuses like this, I expect. They might well not be able to help doing it even when it doesn't quite make sense.

That's the kind of worry you have, and the kind of excuse that you make, when (a) you're pretty sure your travel times aren't going to be off by, like, a factor of ten, and (b) you have a fear, at least in the back of your mind, that somebody in your audience might be able to catch a mistake on your part, because they might actually know the land that you have in mind.

[MG 2.0]

What do you mean by “explanatory value”?

A difference between Delmarva and other models I’ve seen is that the land is a peninsula rather than an isthmus. There is a large land mass north of the narrow neck, but nothing south.

This is a pretty big detail, which might either conflict with things the Book of Mormon says or implies, or make sense of them when they seemed obscure otherwise. Or perhaps not; I don’t know how much implied or explicit southern landscape appears in the Book. At least potentially, though, I see an opportunity for this model to explain some things.

You need to open your Book of Mormon.

1 Nephi 12:5; 19:11 and 3 Nephi 8-9 don’t fit.

Go back and read these chapters/verses.

Research has shown that there are no volcanoes east of the Rocky Mountains in North America, aside from four extremely ancient ones: one in Mississippi dating to 65 million years ago; two in New Hampshire that last erupted 400 million years ago, and one in Missouri, the last eruption of which was one-and-a-half billion years ago.

Mesoamerica (emphasis added) is quite active seismically, and large areas are covered by lava flows and volcanic ash. With this background, let us formulate a hypothesis that might explain all the events described in Helaman and in 3 Nephi.

The hypothesis is composed of the following:

1. The basic cause of the destruction was a tremendous seismic upheaval.

2. Numerous destructive mechanisms were involved, . . . .

3. The accompanying period of darkness was caused by an immense local cloud of volcanic ash.

4. The unprecedented lightning was due to electrical discharges within the ash cloud.

5. The intense thunder was due both to the lightning and to the rumbling of the earth due to seismic movements.

6. The vapor of darkness (1 Nephi 12:5; 19:11) and the mist of darkness (3 Nephi 8:20) were volcanic ash and dust stirred up by the quaking of the ground.

http://www.bmaf.org/articles/volcanism_ ... akes__carr

If Joseph made up the Book of Mormon and Delmarva is the geographic location it’s borderline ludicrous…and just quite silly…that we’d find this event described in this detail, etc. Or in the narrative AT ALL.

Like I mentioned over on the other thread, you’re pretty much pressed into starting out with the presupposition that the Book of Mormon is fiction at the outset. And then you can force your geography to work.

Regards,
MG

[Physics Guy]

And it came to pass that I saw a mist of darkness on the face of the land of promise; and I saw lightnings, and I heard thunderings, and earthquakes, and all manner of tumultuous noises; and I saw the earth and the rocks, that they rent; and I saw mountains tumbling into pieces; and I saw the plains of the earth, that they were broken up; and I saw many cities that they were dsunk; and I saw many that they were burned with fire; and I saw many that did tumble to the earth, because of the quaking thereof.

For thus spake the prophet: The Lord God surely shall visit all the house of Israel at that day, some with his voice, because of their righteousness, unto their great joy and salvation, and others with the thunderings and the lightnings of his power, by tempest, by fire, and by smoke, and vapor of darkness, and by the opening of the earth, and by mountains which shall be carried up.

For thus spake the prophet: The Lord God surely shall visit all the house of Israel at that day, some with his voice, because of their righteousness, unto their great joy and salvation, and others with the thunderings and the lightnings of his power, by tempest, by fire, and by smoke, and vapor of darkness, and by the opening of the earth, and by mountains which shall be carried up.

Only Mormon apologists need a naturalistic explanation for the Book of Mormon events. For skeptics the logic is that Smith wrote what he thought would sound good, based on what he knew. He thought that a spectacular divine judgement would sound good, so he threw in all the special effects that he had ever heard associated with great disasters. Some of the elements fit with volcanic eruptions, because volcanic eruptions have long been paradigms of disaster. Some of the elements do not fit, in particular the whirlwinds and the "opening of the earth" to bury cities, not under a layer of lava or ash but "in the depths of the earth". Some elements of volcanic eruptions are not present, like lava flows or heavy falls of ash from the sky.

In particular the famous episode of darkness in 3 Nephi 8, where people survived but could not light fires for three days, absolutely does not fit with any volcanic activity. A CO2 layer below head height, so that people could breathe oxygen above it but not light fires within it, could only exist if a volcano somehow emitted a smooth pool of CO2 onto a dead level plane. With any slope to the ground at all, CO2 flows like the fluid it is. It does not stick to the ground at even thickness like peanut butter. It pools in the valleys to much more than head height, and leaves the hills free of CO2. So a flow of CO2 from a volcano would produce the story, "Everyone in the valley suffocated before they could even think about lighting fires, and the people up on the hillsides noticed no ill effects." It would not lead anyone to report problems with lighting.

Smith wasn't trying to describe a volcanic eruption at all, so he had no reason to place his story in a place with volcanoes.

[Physics Guy]

Since the Book of Mormon is a fantasy, probably by Joseph Smith working at least mostly alone, its setting clearly doesn't have to have a perfect correspondence with any real place. And Smith would surely have wanted to leave the location of his story as ambiguous as possible, so that people couldn't pin him for fraud. But he also had to work within two constraints, I think, which together would have made him want to have at least one real place in mind as a model.

The first constraint is that his story did have to include a fair amount of geography. Journeys have been staple plot features in fiction since time immemorial, and I don't think either Smith or his audience were ready for drawing room drama in which everything takes place in one room. He was going to have to describe journeys and landscapes to some fair extent, just to tell something that he and his peers would consider a story.

The second constraint is that Smith had to avoid the disaster of writing geographical details into his story which someone could prove could not possibly fit any place at all in the Americas. If he had put Zarahemla on an island in a crater lake in a dead volcano in the middle of a coastal swamp fed by a huge waterfall, he'd have been toast. It shouldn't be too hard to avoid such a total disaster, but to be really sure that you're not going to screw up with something like that, when you know that you don't know too much about the geography of the whole Western Hemisphere, the safest course is to imitate at least one place that you know is real.

If you can make your story details vague enough to fit equally well with several different places, so much the better. I'm not sure Joseph Smith had enough geographical knowledge for that kind of luxury, though. He might well have had to settle for one primary model, and just not sweat exact correspondence too much.

[Moksha]

Mesoamerica (emphasis added) is quite active seismically, ...

Regards,
MG

Las Cumbres erupting in 3950 BCE would be a perfect Book of Mormon fit, and 5000 years before that there was a pygmy mammoth on Rangel Island in Alaska. The hits keep coming.

[Shulem]

If Joseph made up the Book of Mormon and Delmarva is the geographic location it’s borderline ludicrous…and just quite silly…that we’d find this event described in this detail, etc. Or in the narrative AT ALL.

There is no "IF" about it. Joseph Smith "made up" the Book of Mormon and everything in it with his head buried in a hat. That's a fact. Every single word of the Book of Mormon came from Joseph's imagination as he formulated thoughts in his mind about how to make the story work according to his vision and foresight. And, with that said, I can think of lots of ludicrous and silly things in the Book of Mormon such as horses, elephants, and barges lit with magic rocks, etc.

The Book of Mormon is a rather childish novel in my view. So many red flags and so much plagiarism. I bear you my solemn testimony and witness that I know it is pure fiction and that it is not based on historical fact. I know that absolutely as I know that I live and breathe air. No amount of apologetic twists and turns can change that or make the book true. Only in the fantasy of your mind!