Heavy Dragonplate or Extra Thin Tissue Paper?

[Chap]

... the actual Book of Mormon language really isn't unlikely at all, if Smith clumsily overdid his archaism.

Yes, yes and yes.

My upbringing and tastes ensured that I often read the KJV as a child, and often heard it read . As soon as I met the Book of Mormon, I thought "This is an attempt by a person of not very high educational level to write 'Bible English', and he simply isn't very good at it."

I have never seen any reason to change my mind on that point.

[Lem]

Consider what this means. It means that if Joseph Smith did NOT write the Book of Mormon, it is an absolute certainty, with a probability of 1, that it is a type of Early Modern English text. No other options. It can't be a direct hebrew or Reformed Egyptian or mesoamerican translation, or anything else. It MUST be a "filtered and managed" text that is mostly Early Modern English, but written so that 19th century readers understand the Early Modern English. Without exception.

I didn't appreciate this until recently, but this is indeed exactly how the Sharpshooter Fallacy often appears in (bad) Bayesian inference. My example from a few weeks ago here was my claim to be a prophet based on my producing exactly the long string of random characters that was God's specific message (according to my sect's doctrine).

The sharpshooter declares that the probability of the data, given his hypothesis, is one. That's precisely the Sharpshooter fallacy. The accurate analysis, in contrast, has to be accurate about how likely the data really are, given the hypothesis.

Excellent point, physics guy. I got a kick out of your example you linked to when you wrote it; it was quite interesting to review it again in this new 'episode 9' context.

And in addition to the sharpshooter fallacy, KR continues to not understand the idea of independence. Here's the latest, from this Early Modern English episode:

Summary.

Taken together, the syntactic and semantic evidence of Early Modern English provide two strong, independent lines of evidence against Joseph authoring the Book of Mormon.

The probability of seeing both kinds of evidence by chance would be the product of their respective probabilities, or p = 5.24 x 10-24.

So KR is multiplying the two probabilities, because he considers that observing both syntactic Early Modern English and semantic Early Modern English, in an Early Modern English text, to be INDEPENDENT pieces of evidence.

That would be like arguing that you saw the attached right leg of a two-legged alien in a motion-activated video, and then you ALSO saw the attached LEFT leg of a two-legged alien, right next to the right leg, IN THE SAME VIDEO, and therefore, you conclude that the right leg sighting and the left leg sighting are independent of each other in a two-legged alien, therefore you have two completely INDEPENDENT sightings of a two-legged alien.

Do you sense some irritation? if a student presented this in their group project, it would get an F. That's why I require at least two meetings with me before presentations, so I can help them avoid such egregious errors. (and Fs.)

How could the statistician who reviewed Rasmussen's work, on behalf of the Interpreter, let something like this go? I'm getting the sense that the statistical review was about the same quality as the Interpreter's usual playground peer review.

[Dr Moore]

Why is Early Modern English such a sacred cow for apologists anyway? Is it one of those things that either proves mystical origin, or else has to be an automatically disqualifying anachronism?

[drumdude]

Why is Early Modern English such a sacred cow for apologists anyway? Is it one of those things that either proves mystical origin, or else has to be an automatically disqualifying anachronism?

It's not nearly as important as the many anachronistic discussions of uniquely 19th century theological debates contained in the Book of Mormon. in my opinion.

It's as jarring as if there were a discussion on the benefits of mRNA vaccines in the middle of 1st Nephi.

[Lem]

Why is Early Modern English such a sacred cow for apologists anyway? Is it one of those things that either proves mystical origin, or else has to be an automatically disqualifying anachronism?

It's possible Rasmussen let slip a clue to that in the comments:

Kyler Rasmussen on September 2, 2021 at 8:53 pm

... my understanding is that much of the Early Modern English evidence pushes the language back further than your hundred years (or less) scenario. There are pieces as recent as that, but a lot of it can only be found two or three hundred years down the road. I find that variety interesting in itself, but regardless, it’s important to appreciate that scale. It’s not just a matter of a few decades.

Second, strictly speaking, I’d say that Early Modern English doesn’t necessarily denote a timeframe for translation/composition. All it confirms is the language used by whoever it was who did so.

From a naturalistic perspective the only way to realistically get those speakers would be to look to that timeframe. From a faithful perspective, our options are somewhat broader.

That’s obviously useful from an apologetic perspective. If critics were forced everywhere and always to argue for a 16th century origin that would dampen the effectiveness of their message considerably.

[bolding added]

So... make one's theory so outlandish that no one takes it seriously enough to comment?

[Dr Moore]

Why is Early Modern English such a sacred cow for apologists anyway? Is it one of those things that either proves mystical origin, or else has to be an automatically disqualifying anachronism?

It's possible Rasmussen let slip a clue to that in the comments:

Kyler Rasmussen on September 2, 2021 at 8:53 pm

... my understanding is that much of the Early Modern English evidence pushes the language back further than your hundred years (or less) scenario. There are pieces as recent as that, but a lot of it can only be found two or three hundred years down the road. I find that variety interesting in itself, but regardless, it’s important to appreciate that scale. It’s not just a matter of a few decades.

Second, strictly speaking, I’d say that Early Modern English doesn’t necessarily denote a timeframe for translation/composition. All it confirms is the language used by whoever it was who did so.

From a naturalistic perspective the only way to realistically get those speakers would be to look to that timeframe. From a faithful perspective, our options are somewhat broader.

That’s obviously useful from an apologetic perspective. If critics were forced everywhere and always to argue for a 16th century origin that would dampen the effectiveness of their message considerably.

[bolding added]

So... make one's theory so outlandish that no one takes it seriously enough to comment?

Thanks. It's still unclear why it would have been impossible for someone to have picked out the old ways of speaking and deployed that to effect. That is a naturalistic explanation and I'm not sure any more explanation than that is necessary. Certainly not that there are "those speakers" to account for. There are no "those speakers" in the simpler explanation. Most importantly, Joseph NEVER claimed to have the aid of authors who spoke in 16th century dialects. Critics don't owe the theory any consideration because the theory offers nothing predictable whatsoever.

[Gadianton]

The same exercise was done for four pseudo-biblical books, and the numbers for these four books were totaled. In aggregate, the pseudo-biblical authors had 713 opportunities to choose between archaic syntax or modern syntax. The pseudo-biblical authors chose the archaic syntax only 5.75% of the time.

Thanks again, Billy. If he didn't have the Dales to compare himself to, he'd be in real trouble.

There are so many things to laugh at here, but I think first on my list is: why would he assume that other pseudo-biblical authors would shoot for a 15th century text?

Granting several benefits to several doubts, there is no reason to believe a pseudo-Bible text isn't authentic if not 15th century. It could, for instance, be KJV English.

[Lem]

Kyler is revealing quite a bit in the comments. Here he tells Billy Shears that if the consequent probability =1 is too high, he can lower that one, and then all he has to do is tweak other values and he can still get the result he wants:

If a 1-in-a-million or 1-in-a-quadrillion consequent strikes your fancy, all I’d have to do is assume somewhat fewer missing characteristics or a marginally more reasonable mean for the Poisson, and I’d have a couple dozen more orders of magnitude to play with.

In that context, I feel fine using the consequent for rhetorical purposes–in this case, socializing the idea that Early Modern English isn’t necessarily weird from a faithful perspective….

If the math’s unreasonable or inappropriate, please tell me so…

He is assigning probabilities “for rhetorical purposes”? As in, he is making them up.

This tells me we are dealing with a person who already has a result he wants, and even as fake as the numbers already are, he has no problem sacrificing his integrity to artificially manipulate them even further to maintain that result. And the Interpreter is publishing this farce.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

And it really underscores what kind of academic the blog’s owner was. Publishing this trash because it's interesting’ is bananas if one were worried about one’s professional reputation. If an academic from a relatively respectable university started posting flat earth and lizard people articles on their personal vanity blog I’d imagine they wouldn’t be taken seriously in their given field of study as a result. Crazy stains you.

- Doc

[drumdude]

You can easily peruse the Maxwell Institute's current website and see what actual scholarship looks like. Even if you disagree with their views, at least their scholars aren't publishing straight up lies. Kicking DCP to the curb was the best thing to happen to that organization.

https://mi.BYU.edu/