Stake President Response Part 2

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Introduction
Part 1

Here is the audio clip for part 2, and here is its transcript.

Joseph reports that the angel says his name will be had for good and bad, and we see that the prophecy has come true. It’s actually not that impressive of a prophecy if you think about it. Let’s say I want to start a business that will be helpful to certain members of humanity at the expense of others. At the start, I tell my employees that there will be both critics and proponents of our endeavors. Years later, it comes true, so I look somewhat foresighted. But any church has both nay-sayers and supporters. So does any movie, TV show, business, and political candidate. No big deal.

He lists a bunch of reasons that opponents of the church have for not believing in it, such as problems with the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith’s character, polygamy, etc. This list is by no means exhaustive; in fact, it’s a rather short list of the problems the church has in supporting its claims (if  you want a fairly exhaustive list, check out what's known as the CES Letter). One of the interesting ones is that he says the church is run like a big business. That came pretty much verbatim from Anne’s post on her blog months earlier.

What he's doing here is adding to the church's persecution complex. It's one of the things that I used to believe was evidence that the church was true. Why else would so many people rail against the church if it weren't true? A YouTube user has created a series of videos that are all excellent, but in this one he shows that it's not just the LDS church who is "persecuted." It's not unique at all. In a lot of cases, it's the church and its members seeing persecution where none was intended. If you train people to look for it, they will find it everywhere. I think Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best:

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

The Stake President then asks if the BoM is true, and everyone apparently already agrees it is. I realize that he’s not here to definitively prove it to be true based on evidence, but he starts off with the conclusion: that the BoM is true! That’s what’s known in logic as begging the question or circular reasoning.

He gives his own testimony about the BoM being true, but to his credit, he admits that he’s biased. In fairness, he then proposes that the BoM is on trial (something he may have planned before hand, or maybe he got the idea after he received my letter, I don’t know) and there are witnesses and decides to call Hugh Nibley to the stand. The Stake President talks about how smart Nibley was and how he must have heard every argument against the BoM, and yet he is firmly on “this side of the fence,” meaning on the side that believes the BoM to be true.

This is what’s known as an appeal to authority.

Of course, all court cases rely on the opinions of experts. The defense will call in a psychologist to explain why, according to the latest research, the defendant was unable to control him/herself because of an impulse control issue. Then the prosecution will call in a different one saying that other research shows differently, and the jury has to decide who is more credible. So he’s not doing anything out of the ordinary here. But here’s the problem I have with it: he presents the experts who are apologists, without giving due time to those who disagree with them. It’s totally a one-sided show and so the jurors (the members of the congregation present) don’t hear both sides.

Then he brings up Joseph L. Adams, and shows a book written by Dr. Adams. He says that Dr. Adams claims that Meso-American archaeology seems to match with what’s in the Book of Mormon, but doesn't really expound on this, so he’s expecting everyone to just believe that what Dr. Adams has to say must be the truth. One of the things that humans love is to find information that confirms what they already believe to solidify that their constructed paradigm of the world is correct. This is known as Confirmation Bias.

It’s tough for the brain to accept that what it has believed and the lifestyle it has been living is in some way flawed or incorrect, so it accepts anything that seems to bolster up its opinions, and reject anything that contradicts it.

One example of this is a Mayan stone carving that appears to show an elephant’s trunk, which would confirm the presence of elephants in the Book of Mormon. Some other archaeologists have said that it’s a carving of a macaw (what most people might call a parrot). One argument against it being an elephant is that in cultures where elephants existed (like India) the presence of elephants in artwork is ubiquitous, and that this would be the only example in the Mayan culture. The debate went on for a while, but later deciphering of the glyphs on the stone confirms it to be a macaw. However, people who want to confirm what they already believe will hang on to the belief that the Mayans carved an elephant.

Here is a great Carl Sagan quote that applies: “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”


Then he brings up the DNA issue, and then introduces John Butler, and basically pulls the same stunt that he’s smart so we should just believe what Butler says. Again, he uses an appeal to authority without giving due time to the opposition. I know of another guy, Simon Southerton, who is also a DNA expert who pulls apart Butler’s claims.

Besides Dr. Southerton, there are a host of other scientists and experts who disagree with John Butler. In fact, I wager that for every apologist that agrees with him, I can come up with at least ten who vehemently disagree. I specifically asked Dr. Southerton about what he thought of Dr. Butler. Here is his reply to me.

Here’s the truth about DNA: geneticists know enough about DNA that they would be able to recognize Hebrew DNA in a group of people many, many hundreds of years later. In fact, there has been one case where exactly that happened.

The fact that they haven’t been able to detect ANY Hebrew DNA in Native Americans is pretty telling. To be fair, the LDS church recently released an essay about this issue where they try to muddy the waters with their own spin on things.

Anyway, what’s interesting is that he says that John Butler is on this side of the ledger (meaning he believes), but doesn't actually tell anything about his claims – he just says that here’s a really smart guy and he believes, so you should too.

Finally, he brings Truman Madsen into the conversation and pulls the same stunt. He has studied the life of Joseph Smith extensively and has wrote a book and given talks promoting Joseph Smith. So most of what he’s done up to this point is appeal to authority and conduct a court trial where only the defense gets to testify. Can you imagine what would happen if the judge only let one side’s witnesses testify? But since he’s preaching to the choir in a manner of speaking, nobody probably noticed that the prosecution didn’t get a turn to state its case. Never once does the jury [audience] get to hear the actual arguments these men make – just that you should trust them explicitly.

(Authored by Joseph)

Continued in Part 3