Duwayne R. Anderson, a former Latter-day Saint, authored a book entitled, Farewell to Eden: Coming to Terms with Mormonism and Science (AuthorHouse: 2003). In this volume, there is an appendix on pp.328-37, "Analysis of month days in the Book of Mormon." An online version of this appendix can be found on Al Case's Website:
For this blog post, I will focus on the online version of the paper.
Initial Criticisms
There are a number of problems with Anderson's analysis, not the least is that the sample size for the Book of Mormon is hopelessly small. The author points to his inspiration for this essay where 60(!) dates were used while the Book of Mormon contains a meagre 8. Such will result in many statistical outliers.
Further, another initial criticism one has with the paper is that the author makes the claim that the Book of Mormon fails "badly virtually on all accounts" in relation to archaeology, and even plugs Stan Larson's Quest for the Gold Plates. In reality, this criticism is false and the arguments by Thomas S. Ferguson and Stan Larson are grossly outdated and misinformed. To see this, see the following reviews of Larson's book:
Daniel C. Peterson and Matthew Roper, Ein Heldenleben? On Thomas Stuart Ferguson as an Elias for Cultural Mormons
John Gee, The Hagiography of Doubting Thomas
What the Website is saying is that eight precise (i.e., those indicating month/day/year) dates, which could be considered statistically unlikely, destroys the credibility of the rest of the thousand years covered by the Book of Mormon. Let's take a look at those dates: 1) They cover a time period less than 115 years (81 BC to AD 34) 2) They are, as previously mentioned, the only 8 times in the Book of Mormon in which a precise date is noted. 3) The author uses other randomly drawn dates to build the foundation of his argument. 4) Those dates mention widely different memorable occasions, i.e. conversions, wars, etc. 5) the sample is really small, too small in fact to draw conclusions from. What the above actually shows is that the author of the article is trying to use statistical outliers to prove the Book of Mormon is wrong. All he has actually done is show that over a 100-year span of time a Book of Mormon writer saw fit to record exact dates and that Mormon when he condensed the record into what we now have, felt it was a good idea to include the dates mentioned. This is like saying that the existence of three people living in my town of Tralee in Ireland whose surname is mine is evidence that there are no people in Ireland with the name of "Boylan." Statisticians usually ignore statistical outliers. An outlier offers information, but when one is trying to show a statistical trend, outliers are only a bump, an aberration in the numbers that may require a separate study. The article does not prove what it claims to prove; it is a simple as that.
A friend of mine, Christopher Davis, offered the following comment on Anderson's appeal to the dates of statehood in his article:
A friend of mine, Christopher Davis, offered the following comment on Anderson's appeal to the dates of statehood in his article:
Clever data manipulation. Notice that he provides a "sample" of dates of statehood of 8 states. These are of course selected carefully to show a wide variance for his argument to work. In large sample of data, it does works, but you are correct, when the data is limited to 8 entries, it's a joke to analyze that small amount of information in any meaningful way. For example, if I chose eight other states as the example, let's say I pick 8 states in the midwest (Texas, Michigan, Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana) I would get the following dates of statehood respectively (29, 26, 28, 29, 29, 15, 16, 30). That mean is 25.3 and by his logic we would conclude that the history of those states was fictional. Or we could choose the 9 states in chronologocal order from #37 (Nebraska) to #45 (Utah) and or dates would be (1, 1, 2, 2, 8, 11, 3, 10, 4) and our mean now becomes 4.7, and our histories of those states are just as fictional.
Examining the book of Ezra using this methodology
Many may feel (such as Al Case, the proprietor of the Website hosting this version of Anderson's paper) that by simply claiming that the sample in the Book of Mormon provides is too minute to draw any conclusions whatsoever is just simply a ploy to dismiss an apparently impressive argument against the historicity of the Book of Mormon, it is for this reason I shall demonstrate that this claim is correct by using an example from the book of Ezra, one of the historical works in the Old Testament, that lists a comparable amount of these dates:
Day
|
Month
|
Verse
|
1
|
7
|
3:6
|
3
|
Month not given but ‘month’ mentioned
|
6:15
|
14
|
1
|
6:19
|
1
|
1
|
7:9
|
1
|
5
|
7:9
|
12
|
1
|
8:31
|
20
|
9
|
10:9
|
1
|
10
|
10:16
|
1
|
1
|
10:17
|
Let me pretend to be a critic of the historicity of the book of Ezra to show the weakness of this “argument” against the Book of Mormon:
The total adds to 54 while one would expect a statistically sound months-date total of a purported historical record to reach close to139.5 (15.5 by 9). If the Book of Ezra’s Months-dates were averaged out to total eight (matching the Book of Mormon), one would arrive at a total of 48 (54/9 by 8) while the mean would be 124 (15.5 by 8). From a casual reading of the above, anyone can figure out that the author of the Book of Ezra had a tendency to pick days within the first week or two of a month as if it was a fabrication. Indeed, according to statistical analyses, the probability that the Book of Ezra is represented of true history with the dates being random (i.e. historical) is less than a tenth of one percent (i.e. 1 in 1,000)!
In reality, the Book of Mormon cannot be fairly examined historically through statistical analyses of Months-dates (and neither can the book of Ezra!), as the samples presented in both are far too minute to draw any conclusions from. Notwithstanding, I must give the author credit for coming up with a novel criticism of the Book of Mormon. It is truly a pity that, after 186 years as of writing, the majority of critics have failed to come up with anything convincing and original.
Interestingly, many of the dates mentioned in the Book of Mormon, instead of refuting the historicity of the Book of Mormon, greatly adds to its verisimilitude as an ancient text. As one example, see the video (and corresponding article) from Book of Mormon Central on Alma 51:37: