Exploring Mormonism

Often, when I begin discussing Mesoamerican details with members of the church, they say something similar to the following:

“We haven’t found gold in Mesoamerica…yet!”

“Lack of evidence doesn’t mean an evidence of lack.We could still find horses in Pre-Columbian America.”

“The obsidian laced wooden swords may have come too late for the Book of Mormon people, but maybe there is more evidence to find.”

All of these arguments hinge upon the concept of a very good logical argument that states, “Simply because there isn’t any evidence right now, doesn’t mean there never will be evidence.” This is true. We haven’t found any evidence of alien life, but it would be a logical fallacy to imply that this means there isn’t any life form on any other planet.

However, this fallacy is talking about black box scenarios where we have no information.  When it comes to the points above, it turns out we have quite a bit of evidence, it just doesn’t point in the direction the apologist wants it to.

• The obsidian laced wooden swords may have come too late for the Book of Mormon people, but maybe there is more evidence to find.

The issue with this claim is that we have lots of evidence of the weapons used by the Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures. It isn’t that we don’t know, it’s that none of the weapons are steel based or sword-like.

The sword the apologists claim is the sword in the Book of Mormon is the Macuahuitl:

A wooden club with obsidian on the sides that cuts like a sword.

The issues instantly arise when one reads the actual text in the Book of Mormon which claims that the Jaredites (From the tower of Babel, about 2000 B.C.) had steel swords:

…he did molten out of the hill, and made swords out of steel for those whom he had drawn away with him (Ether 7:9)

Not a wooden sword. To further complicate things, the Macuahuitl was an Aztec weapon, not a Mayan weapon. Unless the Nephites were really into human sacrifice and were founded and built in the wrong era, the Aztec empire doesn’t match.

But even more to the point, the Tepoztopilli (a spear with a paddle) can be seen over the years growing shorter in the handle, and longer in the blade. In short, we have lots of evidence of where the Macuahuitl came from, and none of it points to an introduction of advanced metallic technology which was later lost.

No lack of evidence.

Having a steel sword show up in 600 B.C. Mesoamerica would be something akin to this. Although fiction, the idea of the transformative nature of high technology suddenly appearing in a lower technology culture is well portrayed. The owner of the technology becomes suddenly dominant, and he rallies all the surrounding people into his cause.

• We haven’t found gold in Mesoamerica… yet!

Gold working did not come to Mesoamerica until about 700 A.D.  That’s 300 years after Moroni buried the gold plates, 800 or so years after Amulek was offered ontis and senums of gold and silver, and about a thousand years after Noah made a throne of gold. See the issue?

This is Aztec gold with Mayan writing. Still way too late to apply to Book of Mormon people. Too bad the book wasn’t written on plates of jade.

The progression of gold working and metallurgy has been well documented. The age of various sites, locations, and how the technology impacted the social setting of the areas as it was passed along isn’t lacking in evidence. In fact, the evidence is abundant:

Metallurgy first appeared in Mesoamerica at about A.D. 800, introduced via a maritime route from Central and South America into West Mexico. During the initial period of the establishment of the technology (approximately A.D. 800 to between A.D. 1200 and 1300) technical links were closest with the metallurgies of Ecuador, Colombia, and lower Central America. During the second period of West Mexican metallurgy (A.D. 1200–1300 to the Spanish invasion) new elements from these same regional metallurgies were introduced, in addition to technical components from the metallurgy of southern Peru. Although the roots of West Mexican metallurgy lay in the metallurgies to the south, the elements that had been introduced from those areas were reinterpreted and transformed, resulting in the development of a technically original, highly inventive regional technology in West Mexico (Ancient West Mexican Metallurgy: South and Central American Origins and West Mexican Transformations).

I’ll say it in plain English: Gold working started in Peru, moved up the west coast to Ecuador, and didn’t show up in Mayan (or other cultures that the apologists tie to the Book of Mormon) until A.D. 700. From there it went into Mexico. No lack of evidence, as we can trace it from spot to spot over a very large time frame.

Just to be clear, all that gold that the Spaniards melted down came from long after the time of the Nephites. It was not Satan destroying the true records, or that God wanted all the other records hidden, or anything like that. Everything melted would have been apostate doctrines by that time anyway because the first writings possible on gold would have been 600 years after Moroni died.

• Lack of evidence doesn’t mean an evidence of lack. We could still find horses in Pre-Columbian America.

This is where “bad ideas” turn into “outright fraud” or “gross negligence,” in my humble opinion.

For example, in this interview, Daniel C. Peterson says that the text of the Book of Mormon says nothing more than that they had horses, and that they fed them:

And they said unto him: Behold, he is feeding thy horses. Now the king had commanded his servants, previous to the time of the watering of their flocks, that they should prepare his horses and chariots, and conduct him forth to the land of Nephi… [emphasis added] (Alma 18:9).

And they also had horses, and asses, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man… [emphasis added] (Ether 9:19).

…the proclamation of Lachoneus had gone forth throughout all the face of the land, and they had taken their horses, and their chariots, and their cattle, and all their flocks, and their herds, and their grain, and all their substance, and did march forth by thousands and by tens of thousands, until they had all gone forth to the place which had been appointed… [emphasis added] (3 Nephi 3:22).

I kid you not, FAIR actually has this as a possible interpretation for “Horses and Chariots.”

Every time “horses” are mentioned in the text, their usefulness or chariots and movement of people are mentioned. It just seems dishonest to imply the text in no way implies the horses do things more than “be fed and owned.”

But that’s not the worst of it. In 2005, FARMS posted a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkydMSmv1Zo&feature=player_embedded

In this video it mentions a particular horse skull that was found at Spencer Lake. Now, this horse skull was a hoax, and the man responsible came forward and apologized. Why would FARMS use a skull that was a known hoax? Maybe they didn’t know it was a hoax?

This is the infamous horse skull.

In this case those conclusions are testable. In 2002, I was contacted by Dr. Stephen Jones of Brigham Young University, a researcher conducting a project on the antiquity of New World horses. He was willing to provide funds for dating the skull using accelerator mass spectrometery (AMS) in order to settle questions regarding the skull’s antiquity. A single sample was removed by MPM staff from the aboral margin of the jaw near the gonion caudale. It was separated into three subsamples, one held as a voucher and the others independently submitted to different radiocarbon labs (Beta Analytic and Stafford Research Laboratories) for AMS dating. The samples were of approximately the same size and yielded results in close agreement. Beta 167209 yielded an uncalibrated date of 110 +- 40 BP; Stafford SR6189 yielded an uncalibrated date of 190 +- 35 BP.

Wait… so Dr. Stephen Jones of BYU was the one who conclusively proved in 2002 that the skull wasn’t ancient? Three years before the religion department of BYU produced this video?

Mormons did not notice this book and the people involved in requesting the testing did not print the results for other Mormons to see. Science worked, a theory was proven wrong but the results were not published by those who had hoped for a different outcome.

Maybe the video was already made by 2002, and they just didn’t talk to the Physics department of BYU?

In 2008, a non LDS post graduate student informed FAIR of the error and provided them with the source for the 2004 radiocarbon results.

Ah, so they know this video is wrong, misleading, and based on a hoax, and yet they haven’t pulled the video, nor corrected it, let alone produce an apology for accepting bad evidence.

That pretty much indicates fraud.

So you see, it isn’t just a lack of evidence for the Book of Mormon. It is the scores of counter  evidence that apologists choose to ignore when they publish their arguments (and that the average member is unaware of).

Next time someone says something like the above statements, you are now well armed to say, “There is evidence, it just doesn’t agree with your conclusions. Can you tell me why I should dismiss any of the evidence that exists?”

Because really, we can’t let the use of logical fallacy stand, and if you can point out that the people who use these sort of claims are fraudulently lying to the person… then all the better.

http://mormonstories.org/ryan-cragun/

User takingstock challenged me to review Ryan Cragun’s podcast with John Dehlin about his book: What You Don’t Know About Religion (but should).

Now, I’ve been trained as an economist, and part of that were statistic classes. Part of that was reviewing “happiness” studies. I’m going to give a set of predictions before listening that will include a list of things that are going to make this “junk science,” and then I will listen and write out my thought processes. At the end, I’ll give a summary for anyone who wants to have a “fast version” and doesn’t care how I think, but just wants to see if I was right.

PREDICTIONS:

• He’s going to rely heavily on survey data, asking people if they are happy in their religion.

Why this is bad: If you ask people in China if they are happy, they are going to tell you, “Yes,” whether or not they really are, because you might be a government spy. Similarly, if religious people believe that God can see their every move, they are very unlikely to say “Religion makes me miserable.”

Another way to see this is that an alcoholic will tell you he/she needs another drink to make him/her happy, even if it is killing him.

• He is going to count every charitable dollar as a dollar well spent.

Why this is bad: Religions like the Mormon church take billions of dollars and don’t actually use but .7% (by the apologist, “everything including the kitchen sink” calculation) to actually help people. This kind of thinking is faulty. You might as well count all of Walmart’s profits as making people happy, or perhaps the investments of Howard Hughes and Hugh Hefner combined. It’s a meaningless number because it isn’t actually charity.

• He is going to group “all religion” together.

Why this is bad: Let’s take, for example, every person who ever watched a cartoon, as a group.  Can you see how they would be an amazingly diverse group that really didn’t have anything in common? Sure, you could tease out some correlations that if a person watched more cartoons, they were likely to grow up in developed nations, or that they, as a group, tended to like to eat and breathe, but it’s really an amazingly diverse group that won’t tell anyone much of anything by analyzing it.

Buddhists, Daoists and such shouldn’t be classified together with Christians. Hell, anyone that the Christians would have tortured and killed in the Middle Ages should not be in the same grouping. Protestants and Catholics once wanted to kill each other; they should be in separate groupings as well. The LDS hate to be grouped with “all religions that believe in polygamy,” so why not split them out on that…

Not that you need to split out groups who hate each other, but you should at LEAST do that. You see, this appears, from the outside, that the author began with trying to show which religion made people the MOST happy, but when the data didn’t go the way he wanted, he expanded the data set until the dot fit. Throw in everyone but atheists (and perhaps agnostics), and maybe it”ll match my thesis.

I mean, at that point, why not throw in the much smaller groups of non-religions and just say, “Being human makes people happy.”

• He’ll try to mask all of this by showing that degrees of religious belief are correlated to his thesis.

Why this is bad: I can hear someone in the back say, “Correlation is not causation,” and that’s true and a good point, but more so, if you throw enough variables into a soup, you can often show all kinds of crazy things with regression analysis. For example, you show that religious people give more, but you don’t explain why (they believe they will go to hell if they don’t, or some other punishment such as denial of temple attendance), and that “why” might actually remove what you are looking at from the definition of “charity.”

Or you show that religious people have more children, and then graft in a study that claims, “Having children makes people happy,” and conclude that religion makes people happy. The problem is that having someone control one’s sex life is negatively correlated with happiness, and ergo, “having children on command” is not necessarily the same thing as “having children”– confusing the actual “what makes people happy” with “what religion does” even though the trends are in the data.

Actually listening to the podcast

Enough predictions… let’s see what he has to say.

His divisions of religion

(Page 183) There’s not a lot of detail on it, but I like the divisions off hand. I’m not sure why the religion even matters. It seems like you can divide people into “Moderate, Liberal, Conservative, Neutral” without religion being included. I think he’s confounding religion with just how people are, but it might be the reverse that religion defines people to be liberal or conservative… so this isn’t terribly invalid.

Religion make you happier or not:  Mike Nelson- right to a degree. A lot of nuance, he says, and I like that. I find it interesting that only the U.S. shows a correlation between religion and happiness. See my cartoon example above to explain this.

Why might the non-religious be unhappy? He explains it might be prejudice. I can see this, and I like it, but I’ll give my own idea why the non-religious might be unhappy in the conclusion.

Most people don’t choose their religion

Booh-yah. Well said. Love this bit. He’s spot on. The numbers he quotes, what he’s stating, and so forth… excellent.

Denmark – Happy with no religion

“Religion can facilitate, but is not required.” Again, he’s removing lurking variables and splitting out details that most researchers skip over. Well said, and well done.

Progress of humanity includes religion/religion is part of evolution/non-religion is a luxury

Okay, if you blink you might have missed that he said, “I think.” This whole section doesn’t have data, but he gives some great anecdotal evidence that I think applies to show that religion probably held mankind back (although he doesn’t say that) rather that pushed it forward. I like his method of approaching it, and he does say, “I think,” or, “I like,” throughout. Well done on his part.

Old killings/evils are not useful to discuss with religion

I disagree a bit with this, but I like how he approaches it. He finds that liberals have killed as many as fundamentalists and non-religious. I have to wonder about his methods, but I’m impressed with the rest of his approaches so he may be on to something.

As John Dehlin says, “Religion is the cart that people are carried off to war in,” with need for resources being the horse. I like the metaphor, but I think something is wrong that finds that religion is not more or less likely to drive people to war. We can see that religion’s drum beat motivates people to action, and that action often is used by military/political powers. I’m not sure what drum beat would work the same on atheism.

I think he’s probably pretty good on this, but my research brain is screaming that there is a thesis-worthy PhD paper here that would show that religion drives more people and eases their consciousness to kill more than non-religion. The use of the chaplains by Bush in the Iraq War would probably have plenty of data and be a great starting place.

Religion and Education

He tears apart the Albrecht study in a very pleasant way. I think his point about blue collar workers not being bishops is fascinating and well stated. Also, the people’s approach to the social scientists in wards… great anecdotal story.

CONCLUSION

Okay, I’ll admit it, I was wrong. My predictions match up very well with what John Dehlin believed and put forward, but not terribly well with Ryan Cragun’s. He actually nailed his correction of several of my complaints, and did a great job of separating his own thoughts and anecdotal data from the actual research.

I am impressed.

Okay, my final shot… he says a bit about, “Why would non-religions be less happy,” and I think that someone needs to do a study of people who invested with Bernie Madoff and other 401k investors. I think you’ll find that they are slightly less happy, those who invested with Madoff. In fact, I think we could look at all people who pulled out of 401k’s early, compared to all 401k investors, and see a similar “happiness” score with religious and non-religious.

People who did not get what was promised, or realized that they were going to be cheated in future promises, may be less happy, but I think you’ll find that they prefer their choices and would make the choice again, even though it made them “less happy.”

That’s, at least, the experience I’ve seen from the people I deal with.

RECOMMENDATION: In short, I think this book is definitely worth getting, both for the religious and the non-religious. I’m convinced it is real science and that it puts forth some serious thoughts. No, it isn’t perfect, but it gets one’s brain working, and to me that is far more important.