Forensically proving the profoundly Christian Book of Mormon is not a fraud
Mankind has been presented with deception, forgeries, and counterfeits again and again throughout our history. These are items that are carefully constructed to look authentic but are fake. We have been fooled, deceived, cheated, and defrauded by smart people who prey, with skill and sophistication, upon our innocence and gullibility. These charlatans, thieves, and counterfeiters have been generally motivated by profit, power, influence, or misdirection.
Countering such frauds has led to a long history of forensic science development to detect fraud and to authenticate truth. Scientific forensic methods are varied, but generally look below the surface of the object, into embedded information that should exist within an authentic object. For example, a painting by a Renascence master might contain unique chemical characteristics of paint, or canvass, or the technique used in brush strokes, etc. For a document it might be a signature, a format, contemporaneous language, a watermark, a signet seal, the age and composition of the substrate (e.g. paper). For a modern financial document, it might be a serial number, a holographic seal, unique paper composition, embedded fibers, embedded electronic seals, very fine printing of patterns, pictures, and inscriptions. These might include embedded chemicals which will only respond to UV or IR light, or to a chemical swipe. Likewise, many other high value/high consequence manufactured products have unique chemical, radiological, holographic, or electronic signatures embedded within them to prevent counterfeiting.
The history of religion has also been fraught with frauds. There are numerous examples of people claiming prophecy or claiming to have a scriptural record that was counterfeit, made up, pseudographic. There are many examples of people who claimed authorization from Heaven for some great work, whose authenticity was doubted during their ministry, including Moses, Isaiah, Jesus Christ, Peter, Paul, etc. Their authority was validated from God by miraculous evidences. The Bible itself is two Testaments-Witnesses-, including accounts of these miraculous events, intended to authenticate the authority of these individuals. In spite of that, critical analysis of the Bible, by scientific-minded skeptics beginning in the Enlightenment from the mid-1600’s AD have cast significant doubt among many today on the timing and authenticity of authorship of numerous Biblical books. Many Christians still revere the Bible and the teachings of the various Christian Churches.
And so when the Book of Mormon, another Testament of Christ, was presented as the revealed word of God to the world in 1830, it was embraced with rejoicing by some, and viewed with great suspicion by many others.
The Latter-day Saints, who received the Book of Mormon from Joseph Smith with faith, did not need science to be convinced of its authenticity. They found that the content, the spirit, and the presentation of this testament of Jesus Christ in the Book of Mormon to be consistent with the Bible. The promise contained in Moroni 10:3-5, telling them to read, pray sincerely, and ask God, and promising that He would give them an answer to its authenticity, was acted upon by many of them, and they were satisfied that they had received confirmation from heaven. Antagonists considered these people to be deluded, and were not convinced by the fervor and commitment of the faithful.
Immediately upon publication of the Book of Mormon, scientifically minded skeptics examined it, both for its religious message and for its context and underpinning content. As with counterfeits which had been successfully unmasked by scientific analysis in other areas, they thought that they had positively identified false contextual information in the Book of Mormon that proved it to be a fraud. They have have successfully persuaded many believers and investigators to disbelieve it.
These scientific skeptics identified numerous apparent errors of context, according to the contemporary science of 1830. As many as 229 science-based challenges, claiming contextual incongruities and anachronisms, to the authenticity of the Book of Mormon have been published. However, as time has passed and science has advanced our knowledge in relevant areas, the vast majority of those initial criticisms have been shown to be plausible.
The authenticity of the Book of Mormon is of more consequence than for individual religious beliefs. Legacy Christian religions; Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and derivative Protestant sects; all rise from the historical evolution of Christian Orthodoxy, and purport authority and true doctrine through those paths. That is 2.6 billion people today!
The advent of the Book of Mormon challenges these, saying that Heaven speaks today through a living prophet. For 2000 years of these institutions have claimed the heavens to be closed and the time of prophecy and revelation to be past. The Book of Mormon asserts that plain and precious truths have been left out of the Biblical canon and that false teachings and worldly philosophies have been inserted into legacy Christian religions. So there is a lot at stake, and many advocates of these churches, from 1830 to today, in defense of their interests, have put great effort into debunking the Book of Mormon.
Among the historical criticisms were that the technologies portrayed in the Book of Mormon are inconsistent with 1830’s knowledge of technology and cultural development: the use of steel, writing on metal plates, the use of Egyptian characters, the language and phraseology it used, the agricultural and warfare methods, etc., etc. There is a long list which I enumerate later.
The purpose of this talk is to examine the Book of Mormon as any forensic scientist would do of a questionable object: examining its underlying fabric, not its religious content. The Book of Mormon is a thousand-year history recorded using specific methodologies: writing scripts and language, vocabulary, names, complexity, terminology, geographic reference points, and events that should relate to the purported world of that history. All of these constituent parts exist within their own context: historical, language, culture, technological development, geological and geographical history and location, etc. Those underlying contexts are the legitimate subject of forensic scrutiny.
Ironically, this use of forensic science to examine the Book of Mormon not only debunks most of the earlier criticisms, and neutralizes the remainder, but as you will see, it authenticates the Book of Mormon as a genuine historical account, filled with meaningful contextual detail, with a resounding finality.
In this talk about the Book of Mormon we are going to examine details of the context of the Book of Mormon.
There are actually more than a dozen technical areas which could be forensically examined. I will limit this talk to five well-established areas of forensic evidence, published by recognized experts:
- Content and complexity of the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Smith’s preparation,
- Lehi’s recorded journey across Arabia, matching contemporary landscape across 15 specific locations,
- Recording methods- historical records, metal media, metallurgy, and ancient scripts,
- Linguistic details: language artifacts and signatures, names, structures, wordplays, consistent with an original Hebrew text,
- Correspondence of a recorded ancient cataclysm with modern understandings of volcanism, seismic events, geography, and geology of the specific regions discussed.
In this talk about the Book of Mormon we are going to examine details of the context of the Book of Mormon and compare that with what one would expect today of an authentic document that is what it claims to be. Note that this presentation does not take on the analysis or proof of the religious material within the Book of Mormon, though I also declare it to be true, proved by the testimony of the Holy Ghost to me.
————————————————————————
June 30 7:00 PM MST (9 PM EST)
New presentation- will be web-cast-
Dr. Gary Stradling will present: “Science Authenticates The Book Of Mormon” Sunday June 30 at 7pm at the LDS chapel, 366 Grand Canyon Dr., White Rock, NM, 87547 – Also to be web-cast via ZOOM link below.
“After 200 years since Joseph Smith received knowledge of this ancient Book (given to him by an angel from God, written on gold plates) and translated them from an ancient language through the gift and power of God, we can now say with very high technical confidence: “Science authenticates the Book of Mormon, using validation signatures embedded within the text!”
The Book of Mormon, Another Testament of Jesus Christ, in addition to being a deeply Christian book of scripture, is embedded in a matrix of contextual material that testifies forensically, across many areas of correlation, to it’s authenticity. The Book contains a wide range of details representing the experiences, culture, history, technology, literature, geography, geology, writing styles, environment, etc. of the purported ancient authors. These may be examined for alignment with the current wealth of knowledge of the period, locations, cultures, and archeological remnants of these times and places. These details were very obscure at the time of the Book’s publication in 1830, but have since been discovered by scientific studies. I will show that these embedded details, across five separate areas of evidence, match what is now known to a very-high level of confidence, far exceeding legal and scientific standards for authentication.
Following the presentation, I will post my slides here.
Faith Illuminating Science--Science Illuminating Faith 