Billy Shears wrote:Since you asked, I’ve read the Book of Mormon cover to cover about a dozen times.
Hi Bruce,
Let’s take a step back. According to The Maya, we know a lot about Lamanai. For example, it lies next to a river and has 718 structures. It was a very important Mayan city in terms of trade and was “occupied from earliest times right into the post-Conquest period.”
According to the Book of Mormon, all we know for sure about the city of Laman is that it and its inhabitants were destroyed by fire in AD 34, and then may have been rebuilt and repopulated about 35 years later, near the pinnacle of the 4th Nephi Christian Utopia when the people were all converted upon all the face of the land, and there were no Lamanites nor any other type of -ite.
Analysis:
1- A city being completely destroyed and abandoned for 25 years doesn’t fit Coe’s implication that it was continuously inhabited from earliest times. Thus, this doesn’t fit.
2- After it was rebuilt in AD 59, it would no longer have been a Lamanite city—it would have been a Christian city enjoying Utopia under the law of consecration.
3- If we are now assuming that there is a strong tendency to change the names of cities when new inhabitants with different views take over, shouldn’t we assume that when the explicitly Christian and non-Lamanites rebuilt the city of Laman, they would have changed the name to something that wasn’t associated with an infamous murmurer? I think the chances are poor that the name of this city survived its destruction.
Be all that as it may, let’s return to the lesson on Bayesian reasoning. My a priori probability of a Book of Mormon name surviving was only 10%, and was intended to be conservative and account for most names not surviving. But if we are changing our expectations and thought that if the Book of Mormon were true, we would expect not to see hardly any Nephite names still around and maybe only one explicitly Lamanite name survive (e.g. finding a Mesoamerican city called “Zarahemlo,” and a river called “Xidon” and a “Land of Nefee” would all count against Book of Mormon’s authenticity), we could change our expectations of matches from 10% down to 1%. If those were our expectations, the probability of exactly one city matching would be (100 * 0.99^99 * .01 = 37%). Thus, under this revised assumption the likelihood ratio would be 0.22 / 0.37 = 0.59.
It doesn't really matter what values he's using, he's running circles around Dale, as Dale has no idea himself how to come up with any of the calculations. Billy shows in every post how Dale's expectations don't follow through the way he thinks they will, that's the take-home.
Lemmie wrote:So many comments have been made about the inappropriateness of assigning likelihood ratio values equal to the guessing probability only
Right, so Billy is creatively showing why it's going to be impossible for Dale to guestimate his way through LR assignment. Basically, he'll have to have a 12 part conversation with Billy for each one and pull out justifications to get the numbers dialed in.
I wasn't aware of the apologetic for justifying the destroyed city, talk about the pinnacle of desperation. I mean, it's obvious the entire verse that has a bunch of Lamanite cities destroyed outside the narrative is just for effect. And to underscore they are really bad, they are named after the bad guys - "Gad" "Kishkuman" "Laman".