Steve Smoot

[_Physics Guy]

Joseph Smith's whole revelation model has just never made sense to me. It's so roundabout.

1)
Ancient writers are inspired by God to write ancient texts. Along with whatever eternally relevant core meaning the texts may express, they include many details of ancient life that are only going to be puzzling to readers far in their futures.

2)
The ancient texts are all preserved for hundreds of years, until Joseph Smith gets his hands on them. Then they quickly disappear, one way or another. So the entirely natural transmission channel, of letting the ancient records survive into modern times and be deciphered by scholars, came THIS CLOSE to working perfectly, but at the last minute God realizes that that would just be too easy. The plates and papyri disappear, and we go to Plan B.

3)
A latter-day prophet gets word-for-word revelations direct from God, in English. This miraculous channel from God to Joseph Smith could have been used to convey perfectly correct new versions of anything God has ever wanted to tell the human race. Instead what it's used for is to re-transmit the ancient records that Smith had recently seen, including all their puzzling ancient details.

So there are two big puzzles.

A)
If God wanted us to have the ancient records of Nephi and Moses and Abraham and all, and if God was able to preserve those ancient records into the 1830s, why not just let some scholar discover and publish them, and skip Joseph Smith? The "preserved ancient records" model of divine revelation has worked fine for all kinds of religions.

B)
But then, if God wanted to reveal divine words directly to Joseph Smith in the 1830s, why not just tell him whatever message it was that we were supposed to extract from the writings of Nephi and all, and skip all the irrelevant ancient details? The direct channeled text model has also worked well for many religions; most of them have been small-scale modern cults, but the big one is Islam.

This all makes so little sense as actual divine revelation. So never even mind all the little glitches and contradictions that are there in the details of the Mormon texts. Step back and see the big picture, and it's simply absurd. The Mormon model of revelation is a clumsy slapping together of the two standard revelation models of ancient scripture and contemporary channeling.

Both kinds of revelation were well known in Smith's day; people were ready to respect either one. The two models are essentially incompatible with each other, however, and the fact that Mormonism sandwiches them together so crudely convinces me that Smith's scam was made up on the fly as he went along.

[_Physics Guy]

Back to the original topic of Mr Smoot and his future as a Mormon apologist after learning some real Egyptology.

I don't think I've ever even read anything by Smoot, nor do I plan to read any of what he has written up until now. Not even the most brilliant scholar is going to do anything worthwhile as an undergraduate; I have no desire to read Einstein's high school homework, either. I'm sure Stephen Smoot is a bright guy, but he is only now beginning to learn a real subject. If he has been made into the golden boy of Mormon intellectualism for his juvenilia, that's his misfortune, not his fault. I wish him well, and I expect he will do well.

I think the challenge to his faith will come not from any specific contradictions he discovers, but from discovering what real evidence looks like, and real understanding. Egyptology is one of those subjects where an intelligent outsider's first reaction has to be that it's all sheer crap, because there's no way on Earth that we can really tell anything about times so long ago, from the pitiful scraps of evidence that have survived. But then you look at what the careful work of all those scholars has done, and you think about their arguments, and after a while you have to say, Wow. Okay, we actually do know some things.

Once you've seen that kind of thing, it's probably pretty hard to go back to Mormon apologetics. John Gee somehow did it, but I'm not sure that most people can.

EDIT: Gee seems to be an unusual academic. As far as I can tell, he holds the only professorship in the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. That looks a bit as though he's a tame Egyptologist being kept for show by the Mormon church. On the other hand his publication record looks decent enough, at least to my inexpert eye. He seems to have put out roughly one substantial article in mainstream Egyptology journals or books every year. I may be way off because Egyptology is pretty far from physics, but for what it's worth my guess is that this is fair enough for an average professor with an average teaching load. If Gee is essentially doing Mormon apologetics instead of teaching, well, all right. A few professorial chairs are special deals like that, with teaching responsibilities replaced by some other academic pursuit, and I couldn't say that the Maxwell Institute was out of line for having one of them, or that Gee was suspect for holding it.

[_Physics Guy]

Further on John Gee. His "Mormon Scholars Testify" page is interesting. His explanation of how he manages to be an Egyptologist and a Mormon apologist is that in both his roles he relies on faith in a similar way.

Now, I hardly know Egyptology at all. As a kid I read gee-whiz books about ancient Egypt, and now I have a technical monograph about ancient Egyptian astronomy by Neugebauer (The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, a really eye-opening book) and a little coffee-table book about hieroglyphics by Zauzich. The gee-whiz books say nothing at all about Egyptology because they say nothing about how we have come to believe all those gee-whiz facts, but the other two books do give some explanation of how the ancient ways of life have been reconstructed. Between that minimal exposure to Egyptology and my own work in physics, I have a guess that Gee is both right and wrong.

In practice one does indeed use faith a lot, even in physics. There is too much for any one person to know, and so one relies on what other people have said. One takes their conclusions on faith. I'm a theoretician; I recently participated in a sort of physics game show in which my team had to do something with a laser, and I didn't even know what we were supposed to do, let alone how to do it. Somehow the glowing red light in the tube thing was bad, and we had to make it good, in five minutes, by shifting mirrors back and forth in a line.

The red light scared me. It looked like a death ray and I really didn't think we should mess with it. My contribution to the team effort was pretty much, "Whoa, so this is a laser." And yet for years I've been publishing papers with mathematical models introduced by blithe comments like, "By driving the atoms with off-resonant lasers one can induce the effective interaction ...". I know a lot about what lasers can do, but I had never before seen the inner guts of a laser. My belief in lasers had been almost pure faith.

I presume that professional Egyptologists have analogous experiences. Gee mentions on his Testify page that he has never visited many of the sites he has studied, and I doubt that this is any damning confession. So in a way I'm sure it's true that Egyptologists accept ancient texts as deciphered by other scholars in much the same way that a faithful Mormon can accept the accounts of Nephi as received via Smith.

The big difference I see, though, is that although it's impossible for any one scholar or scientist to check everything in their whole field themselves, it's perfectly possible for one person to check any particular thing they happen to choose. You can't avoid taking most things on faith, but you don't have to take any particular thing on faith. If anything bothers you, you can take a few hours, days, or weeks, and go check it. You can't do that for everything, because no-one has time for that, but you've got tenure and flexible hours. If something bothers you, check it. You've got time for that much. It's your job, after all.

Furthermore that's not just true for you. Everyone else in your field has that same opportunity to go check things that bother them. So when you take things on faith, it's with the awareness that some people haven't. Individuals take things on faith, but the field as a whole is really pretty hard-nosed.

In my case, there have been actual lasers only a short walk away from me throughout my career, and I could have gone at looked at them any time that I liked. My colleagues would have been tickled to show their workings to a poor ignorant theorist. My students had all done the laser-tuning task in their studies at some point, and they rolled their eyes at my hopeless performance in the game show. The thing is, I knew this. My faith that lasers really worked as they were supposed to work was heavily buttressed by the fact that lots of people around me had checked them out for themselves, even if I myself hadn't. Perhaps my faith was still faith, but it was faith at first hand.

That would be my testimony, anyway, if there were a website where "Mortal Scientists Testify" to explain how they still bother trying to do science when they know it's far too big for any one mortal mind. If you really care about trying to get the truth about physics, or ancient Egypt, as opposed to just getting through your own working day by the norms of the field, then the fact that any individual item is checkable is really important. It's in the front of your mind, and you can't just overlook it and say that faith in Nefertiti is just like faith in Nephi. If you allow yourself to get trapped in the details, though, and forget the bigger picture, then I'm sure it's perfectly true that real Egyptology involves a lot of taking on faith.

To me that's a clue to how John Gee may be reconciling his Egyptology with his apologetics. He resolutely closes his eyes to the larger scale premises of his scholarly discipline, and focuses only on his day-to-day work. There's a lot of faith there, all right; it feels just like working on the Book of Abraham, actually. No contrast here, so we're fine.

[_DoubtingThomas]

Not even the most brilliant scholar is going to do anything worthwhile as an undergraduate; I have no desire to read Einstein's high school homework, either.

I think he is going for his masters degree, but I don't think he is anywhere near his PhD yet.

I think the challenge to his faith will come not from any specific contradictions he discovers, but from discovering what real evidence looks like, and real understanding. Egyptology is one of those subjects where an intelligent outsider's first reaction has to be that it's all sheer crap, because there's no way on Earth that we can really tell anything about times so long ago, from the pitiful scraps of evidence that have survived. But then you look at what the careful work of all those scholars has done, and you think about their arguments, and after a while you have to say, Wow. Okay, we actually do know some things.

Once you've seen that kind of thing, it's probably pretty hard to go back to Mormon apologetics. John Gee somehow did it, but I'm not sure that most people can.

Yes Exactly! that is what I was trying to say! thanks for explaining

[_Physics Guy]

I don't know about Egyptology, but in natural sciences the Master's degree is obsolete now, in Canada and the United States. Sometimes people formally register in a Master's program at first but the expectation all round is that they will roll over into the PhD program after completing their course work, without ever writing a Master's thesis.

The Master's degree is still alive as an intermediate step in Europe. I don't have a strong opinion about which way is better in science. In the humanities I think you'd be crazy not to do a short thesis before starting a long one. I don't know how Egyptology does this.

[_churchistrue]

Steve is too smart to attempt an aggressive attempt at Book of Abraham apologetics using his Egyptology education and credentials. I see him in a Dan Peterson role, where he's bantering with critics and making very general, vaguish claims when it comes to actual apologetics. He might do some research that's two degrees off Book of Abraham in an academic setting, like research to support there was some offshoot in Egypt in the post Abraham timeline that taught something loosely related to something that if twisted appears to come from the Book of Abraham (like Peterson's Asherah article). And then in his online world outside of academics loosely imply it supports the Book of Abraham, or use his credentials in a vague way like "look at me I'm a PhD in Egyptology and I still believe the Book of Abraham".

[_Fence Sitter]

Great post Physics Guy.

I think the challenge to his faith will come not from any specific contradictions he discovers, but from discovering what real evidence looks like, and real understanding.

Which is exactly why there is no religious studies department at BYU.

[_Everybody Wang Chung]

Daniel C. Peterson is poison. Everything he's touched has withered and died. The LGT, FARMS, Mormon Scholars Testify, etc., etc.

His career has been a waste of tithing and filled with lies, corruption, ruined relationships and burned bridges.

Thanks to DCP, Young Smoot has chosen a path that will guarantee a life of poverty and irrelevance.

I guess if there is a silver lining to any of this, it's that DCP hasn't yet destroyed Smoot's marriage like he did with Bill Hamblin.

[_Maksutov]

Daniel C. Peterson is poison. Everything he's touched has withered and died. The LGT, FARMS, Mormon Scholars Testify, etc., etc.

His career has been a waste of tithing and filled with lies, corruption, ruined relationships and burned bridges.

Thanks to DCP, Young Smoot has chosen a path that will guarantee a life of poverty and irrelevance.

I guess if there is a silver lining to any of this, it's that DCP hasn't yet destroyed Smoot's marriage like he did with Bill Hamblin.

[_Jesse Pinkman]

Daniel C. Peterson is poison. Everything he's touched has withered and died. The LGT, FARMS, Mormon Scholars Testify, etc., etc.

His career has been a waste of tithing and filled with lies, corruption, ruined relationships and burned bridges.

Thanks to DCP, Young Smoot has chosen a path that will guarantee a life of poverty and irrelevance.

I guess if there is a silver lining to any of this, it's that DCP hasn't yet destroyed Smoot's marriage like he did with Bill Hamblin.

Please explain exactly how Dan is responsible for the destruction of Bill Hamblin's marriage.