Saturday, January 20, 2018

Jeff Lindsay on Science's article on Thomas Stuart Ferguson

Fellow LDS apologist Jeff Lindsay has a good blog post addressing the journal Science and their recent piece on Thomas Stuart Ferguson:

Science: "How a Mormon Lawyer Transformed Mesoamerican Archaeology—and Ended Up Losing His Faith"


Lindsay also links to a number of excellent pieces on Ferguson, including John Gee and Daniel Peterson & Matt Roper's reviews of Quest for the Gold Plates by Stan Larson:

Related resources:


John Gee reproduced the following from John L. Sorenson, author of Mormon's Codex and other excellent volumes on the Book of Mormon, in his review of Charles Larson's By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus (1992)

Addendum
John L. Sorenson

A recently published book by Charles M. Larson, . . . By His Own Hand upon Papyrus: A New Look at the Joseph Smith Papyri, contains references to Thomas Stuart Ferguson (p. 180) which demand that I correct the record.
In the first place, the writer makes a number of errors which show, at least, lack of rigor in preparation of this book:

1. Ferguson established the New World Archaeological Foundation as a private organization, not "at Brigham Young University." After problems arose in administering its work, under funding from the Latter-day Saint Church, the Church insisted that the Foundation be brought under the administrative and financial cognizance of Brigham Young University if support was to continue, whereupon Ferguson's role became advisory and limited.
2. The Society for Early Historic Archaeology was independent, not "BYU's." Ferguson briefly had a nominal connection with the SEHA but in fact opposed most of what the SEHA undertook.
3. Milton R. Hunter, coauthor with Ferguson of the book Ancient America and the Book of Mormon, was not an apostle but one of the First Council of Seventy.
4. Ferguson himself never "received substantial grants from the LDS Church." The Foundation he originated did, but the money was to fund professional archaeologists, about half of them non-Mormons, and was never for his individual use.

The early history of the Foundation has been sketched by J. Alden Mason, non-LDS professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, in his Foreword to "Research in Chiapas, Mexico." Dr. Mason referred to the Latter-day Saint Church's funding of the work this way: "The world is much indebted to this Church for its outstanding contribution to the advancement of archeological [sic] research and the increase of scientific knowledge," and "The stated purpose of this Foundation is not to seek corroboration of the Book of Mormon account, but to help to resolve the problem of whether civilization in Middle America developed autochthonously or as a result of diffused or migrated influence from some area of the Old World, and to shed light on the culture and way of life of the ancients during the formative period." (J. Alden Mason, foreword to "Research in Chiapas, Mexico," Papers of the NWAF, No. 1 (1959), iii, the first of a distinguished series of professional monographs now running through No. 65.)

Larson implies that Ferguson was one of the "scholars and intellectuals in the Church" and that "his study" was conducted along the lines of reliable scholarship in the "field of archaeology." Those of us with personal experience with Ferguson and his thinking knew differently. He held an undergraduate law degree but never studied archaeology or related disciplines at a professional level, although he was self-educated in some of the literature of American archaeology. He held a naive view of "proof," perhaps related to his law practice where one either "proved" his case or lost the decision; compare the approach he used in his simplistic lawyerly book One Fold and One Shepherd. (Thomas S. Ferguson, One Fold and One Shepherd, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City: Olympus, 1962), 230ff.) His associates with scientific training and thus more sophistication in the pitfalls involving intellectual matters could never draw him away from his narrow view of "research." (For example, in April 1953, when he and I did the first archaeological reconnaissance of central Chiapas, which defined the Foundation's work for the next twenty years, his concern was to ask if local people had found any figurines of "horses," rather than to document the scores of sites we discovered and put on record for the first time.) His role in "Mormon scholarship" was largely that of enthusiast and publicist, for which we can be grateful, but he was neither scholar nor analyst.

Ferguson was never an expert on archaeology and the Book of Mormon (let alone on the book of Abraham, about which his knowledge was superficial). He was not one whose careful "study" led him to see greater light, light that would free him from Latter-day Saint dogma, as Larson represents. Instead he was just a layman, initially enthusiastic and hopeful but eventually trapped by his unjustified expectations, flawed logic, limited information, perhaps offended pride, and lack of faith in the tedious research that real scholarship requires. The negative arguments he used against the Latter-day Saint scriptures in his last years display all these weaknesses.

Larson, like others who now wave Ferguson's example before us as a case of emancipation from benighted Mormon thinking, never faces the question of which Tom Ferguson was the real one. Ought we to respect the hard-driving younger man whose faith-filled efforts led to a valuable major research program, or should we admire the double-acting cynic of later years, embittered because he never hit the jackpot on, as he seems to have considered it, the slot-machine of archaeological research? I personally prefer to recall my bright-eyed, believing friend, not the aging figure Larson recommends as somehow wiser.






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