Impressive Evidence for the Book of Mormon
Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 8:41 am
For those who believe in the Book of Mormon, that belief is based on a personal witness from the Holy Spirit. We do not need physical evidence to beleive in it. We have spiritual evidence. However, because the world we live in demands physical evidence, our natures incline us to search for it. The Book of Mormon has an overwhelming amount of non-spiritual evidence for it's case. Hopefully I can address a few that I find most interesting.
One thing to keep in mind is the possibility of Joseph Smith purposefully including these evidences in the Book of Mormon text. For the majority of these items, it seems extremely unlikely that he could have known about them. It has been been demonstrated that when Joseph believed he had discovered evidence for his case, he was not slow to proclaim it. Most of these evidences were not detected until over a hundred years after the publication of the book, and were never boasted of by a knowing Joseph Smith.
Daniel C. Peterson has identified a perfect example within the Book of Mormon of textbook guerilla warfare. It is highly unlikely that Joseph Smith would have been able to produce such a scene. The bolded headings were inserted by me.
One thing to keep in mind is the possibility of Joseph Smith purposefully including these evidences in the Book of Mormon text. For the majority of these items, it seems extremely unlikely that he could have known about them. It has been been demonstrated that when Joseph believed he had discovered evidence for his case, he was not slow to proclaim it. Most of these evidences were not detected until over a hundred years after the publication of the book, and were never boasted of by a knowing Joseph Smith.
Daniel C. Peterson has identified a perfect example within the Book of Mormon of textbook guerilla warfare. It is highly unlikely that Joseph Smith would have been able to produce such a scene. The bolded headings were inserted by me.
SargonIntroduction
There is more that can be said. One area that I have worked on is the Gadianton robbers. They are some of my very favorite people in the Book of Mormon, a cheery lot, who did a great deal for Nephite and Lamanite history. One of my disreputable hobbies that I had as a teenager in high school, is that I was very interested in guerilla warfare. I don't know why. But I began reading a great deal about it. The foremost theorist of guerilla warfare in the twentieth century, which is the only time anyone has actually written about the theory of guerilla warfare, have been Marxists: Mao Tse-tung in China, Vao Neuin Giap in North Vietnam, Che Guevara in Cuba, who is associated with Castro. I certainly don't endorse their political views, but on guerilla warfare they were authorities, because they'd practiced it successfully and they wrote about it. And so, I spent a fair amount of time reading their books about guerilla warfare theory, for no particular purpose. Years later it clicked for me, though. I was teaching a Gospel Doctrine class in the Jerusalem branch in Israel, and we were reading Helaman and 3 Nephi. Suddenly, I realized that what I was seeing there in the Gadianton robbers was a textbook instance of both success and failure according to the rules that Giap, and Guevara, and Mao Tse-tung had outlined.
Guerilla Warfare in the Book of Mormon
And let me just tell you something about those rules. Particularly if you look at the end of Helaman and the beginning of 3 Nephi, you see very clearly, the very kinds of things that the theorists were talking about. When the Gadianton robbers start off, they start off as an urban terrorist group really, involved in assassinations. But they eventually have to flee into the mountains and this is typical of guerilla groups in our own century. And they'll talk at length about how the best places to work are in cities, where you can hide among the urban masses. Or if that doesn't work—as it didn't work for the Gadianton robbers—they then flee into inaccessible territory, almost always mountains. It was, in all three cases (in China, Vietnam and in Cuba), the mountains into which the guerillas fled. Then they make lightning raids out of the mountains to attack settled civilizations. But they choose only those times when they can win. They can make a lightning strike, do some damage, then get away. This, of course, irritates the authorities to no end. And the authorities then will send troops into the mountains after the guerillas, but the mountains are the guerilla's native territory. The guerilla then chooses the place to fight from. He ambushes the regular troops that come after him. He causes them immense casualties.
In the Book of Mormon you read that the commanders come back and report overwhelming numbers of Gadianton robbers. Well, this is probably not true; the very reason they were hiding in the mountains is that they didn't have overwhelming numbers. But they wanted it to seem like overwhelming numbers, a little bit the way some of our own LDS ancestors behaved during the Utah war when they were trying to slow down the advance of the federal columns. They hid out in the mountains and masqueraded as having many more people than they had, in order to give the federal troops something to think about. This is a time-honored practice.
Now, fortunately, the Latter-day Saints weren't actually shooting anybody; they were just trying to slow things down for negotiations. The Gadiantons were not quite so nice. They caused great casualties to the Nephite troops. Eventually the point comes when a guerilla army needs to start to hold territory though, and this is the really sensitive time in any guerilla war. Mao Tse-tung called it regularization, turning a guerilla army into a regular army, one that holds territory. Guerillas don't hold territory—they'll strike and then flee. The object is not to have any casualties or to keep them to a minimum. They want to harass and demoralize, but not to hold territory yet. When they feel themselves strong enough, then they decide to occupy cities, to occupy territory, and hold it. But that, of course, exposes them to direct attack. It means that they can't retreat and withdraw; they can't maneuver quite as freely. Here's a problem now identified as "premature regularization," which is when a commander too soon thinks that he's ready to stand up to a regular army. He makes the transition too soon. This can be disastrous, and it was in the case of the Gadianton robbers.
At a certain point (you read this in the Book of Mormon in 3 Nephi 4), the Gadianton robbers come down out of the mountains; they issue an ultimatum to the leaders of the Nephites and tell them to surrender, but the Nephites don't surrender. What they do, under the leadership of a governor named Lachoneus, is withdraw into their cities. They declare a kind of "scorched earth" policy. They destroy or carry away all of the food down in the agricultural areas and they take it and hole up in their fortified cities.
This actually reverses the situation, which is what guerillas should not allow themselves to be trapped into. What happens now is that the Nephites are in their strongholds. It's the guerillas, the Gadianton robbers in this case, who are out exposed on the plain, and they can't find any food, because none has been left and the crops have been destroyed. So they are forced, at times that are not suitable to them, to attack the Nephites to try to get food, or they are forced to disperse themselves to look for game. But every time they disperse or scatter themselves, the Nephites make lightning raids out of the fortress, out of the city, and attack them. The Nephites now choose the time of attack. What they've done is reversed the situation so the Nephites become, in effect, the guerillas, and the Gadianton robbers are trying to hold territory. It's a disaster for the Gadianton robbers, and they lose.
And this all behaves (I've tried to show this in some detail in a published article) as a text book illustration. You could not pick a better illustration of the virtues, if you will, and the problems of a guerilla army—the mistakes they can make and the successes they can have.
Conclusion- Joseph Smith?
All this written by a young man, supposedly, as critics would say, who knew nothing about guerilla warfare and whose idea of military activity was, at least later on in his life, to get on his black horse Charley and parade in a nice uniform, romanticizing the wars of American history: the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812. This would have been typical of his period. I think many people had these same attitudes. What's striking about the Book of Mormon is how utterly absent those attitudes are. From the account given of the Gadianton robbers, or indeed of the Nephite wars that take place in the Book of Mormon and are recorded there, there's no dressing up in fancy uniforms, there are no parades, there are no reviews of the troops, or anything like that. It's a very different atmosphere, and guerilla warfare, particularly, is rather unromantic. This is something that Mao and others had to defend themselves against. Some people fighting in their forces were a little bit disappointed with this idea of hitting and running; it wasn't heroic, it wasn't romantic. But it was extremely effective, and it's effective for the Gadianton robbers too, as long as they obey those rules that were first formulated really in this century—but rules that we now know went back into the ancient world. So it's very striking to me how very foreign the Book of Mormon accounts are from what we would expect if Joseph Smith had written the book. It's a quite different world indeed.
My challenge to you was to present scholarly references in support of the animal evidence. I could give you plenty of references stating the history of fossil evidence (since it was the prevailing view, didn't think this was necessary). Your response was to provide Mormon references , which, for obvious reasons, would be in support of your case. YOur sources either bring "tentative" evidence or simply say that they "didn't really mean" horses or donkey, but were confused. You also like to distract the discussion by simply accusing me of ignorance , not a very good argument. NOt a very convincing line of arguement. Address my challenge. 
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), provide me with those other scholars. Easy enough...I found your articles before you posted them within 5 minutes on google. 