Bad Cavalry Apologetics - Part 2: Explain the existence of the Book of Mormon!

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More articles from this series:
Part 1

Argument:
"Theories that want to explain the Book of Mormon as a 19th century book, have to somehow account for not just the contents of the book, but the manner in which it was produced." - Stephen Smoot's summary of Richard Bushman's argument in Rough Stone Rolling.

Response:

It would be both fair & accurate to describe this as rhetorical sleight of hand that conflates the method of production with substantive validation of it's contents. It is fundamentally arbitrary and a clever attempt at shifting the burden of proof.

When employed, this argument creates an unattainably high evidentiary standard that amounts to a form of special pleading in order to sidestep well established standards of rigorous historical scrutiny with respect to ancient texts.


A far more appropriate and balanced question would be: 

'Does the text's content align with the historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence we have available?'

To that end, it has long been known that the Book of Mormon has already failed several fundamental archaeological tests in that not a single city, or person that isn't already named in the Bible (which antedates the Book of Mormon text) and has been found or verified archaeologically.

Additionally, there are a number of known unsolved anachronisms, geographic, historical & biblical inaccuracies that are characteristic of a 19th century production, that do not lend support to the premise that the Book of Mormon is ancient text.

In fact, even Mormon apologetic content creators acknowledge there are unsolved anachronisms and they brush them aside via Moroni 10, as seen here in this video:



To contrast, here is a solid presentation on what it looks like for ancient document to get the historical, geographical & linguistic details correct - beginning at the 26:00 mark:



To summarize:
As far as pretty much everyone else in the world but the Mormon people are concerned, the verdict of whether the Book of Mormon is historically authentic has been in for a long time. The preponderance of the evidence points to it being a contrived (fictional) work, not real history, and in the eyes of Christians at least, it's most certainly not divinely inspired Scripture. 

Bonus link:
This appears to be the most thorough attempt to 'map out' the datapoints in the Book of Mormon along with explaining potential sources utilized, but is not really well known or acknowledged by most faithful Mormons. Many will skim the link and disregard it, but at least they can't say serious thoughtful attempts haven't been made!

Part 3 (coming soon)

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