Dr Moore wrote: ↑Tue Aug 31, 2021 3:30 pm
This
episode 8 considers the historical probability of an internal story within the Book of Mormon, Lehi's boat ride to the Americas. Notably, KR's analysis excludes the "miracle" explanation about the construction of the ship and the success of Lehi's voyage (safely arrived, no death at sea). He arrives at roughly 1 in 100 odds against such a voyage succeeding, and therefore this counts as 2 orders of magnitude, or a -2 "evidence score" against the Book of Mormon being historical.
Now think about this for a minute... even if you are willing to accept the -2 evidence score at face value, what has Kyler done?
Well, I'd say by including this episode, KR has shot himself solidly in the other foot. Why?
Episode 8 considers an unusual, or hard to believe, story that is both entirely internal to the Book of Mormon and yet essential to its "truth" narrative.
Ah, well then. KR has opened the door wide open for
ALL unusual, or hard to believe, or discomfortingly unverified, Book of Mormon stories to be likewise considered as contra-evidence, exclusive of "miracle" explanations.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of similarly long-odds or contra-science stories in the Book of Mormon. What about the Jaredite boats? The Mulekite boats? The Tower of Babel? The millions of well-armed soldiers felled in wars? The 2,000 stripling sons? The meteoric population growth? The existence of fully-developed Christianity in the Americas before Jesus' birth? Nephi fooling Zoram? Deutero- and Tritio-Isaiah? A headless man doing pushups and gasping for breath? This isn't to say those are even the best examples. There are many.
It won't take very many of those stories being properly considered before the whole analysis falls into the abyss. If he started with 1 in 10^40 against, it might be that the internal evidence from the book itself -- being so focused on miracles -- drops the odds to 1 in 10^100 or 1 in 10^200 against by the time all of the internal miracle stories are properly adjudicated. But all of those other difficult internal evidences, Kyler chooses to ignore. Why ignore them, when he's included one? How is the Lehite voyage as one evidence against a valid dice roll to count, but all of the others are not? It's another fatally inconsistent process flaw in Kyler's Mopologetic pornography project.
He's painted himself into a corner on this Lehite voyage episode. Arguably, the smart move would have been to exclude all "internal" evidence from the Book of Mormon text because
the Book of Mormon is book about miracles, and miracles are by definition the least likely things to have happened. But he didn't go that route, so now he's got to explain why he chose to count just one out of a veritable sea of internal evidences that count against historicity. His chosen path is literally no different from excluding the dice rolls he doesn't want, leaving the dice rolls he does want standing out with higher reported frequency.
So anyway, now Kyler has to choose one of three doors, if he's an honest statistical hobbyist.
(1) conduct the same Bayesian analysis on ALL unusual Book of Mormon stories (dozens, if not hundreds)
--or--
(2) rescind episode 8, backtrack his process to exclude internal evidence from the Book of Mormon (because it's a book about miracles) and address the consequences to the remainder of his 22 episode analysis
--or--
(3) admit to the project being an amateur cherry-picking production (and apologize for wasting the time of his readers)