{"id":3748,"date":"2016-04-07T08:00:55","date_gmt":"2016-04-07T14:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/?p=3748"},"modified":"2026-07-01T12:40:01","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T18:40:01","slug":"ces-reply-dna-and-book-of-mormon-anachronisms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/ces-reply-dna-and-book-of-mormon-anachronisms\/","title":{"rendered":"CES Reply: DNA and Book of Mormon anachronisms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>This is an excerpt from &#8220;A Reply from a Former CES Employee.&#8221; The entire document can be downloaded for free.<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"\"><a href=\"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/CESReply.pdf\" target=\"_self\" class=\"emd_dl_red_darker\" download>Download CES Reply<\/a><\/div>    <style>            \r\n    .emd_dl_red_darker {\r\n        -moz-box-shadow:inset 0px 1px 0px 0px #f5978e;\r\n        -webkit-box-shadow:inset 0px 1px 0px 0px #f5978e;\r\n        box-shadow:inset 0px 1px 0px 0px #f5978e;\r\n        background:-webkit-gradient( linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0.05, #f24537), color-stop(1, #c62d1f) );\r\n        background:-moz-linear-gradient( center top, #f24537 5%, #c62d1f 100% );\r\n        filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#f24537', endColorstr='#c62d1f');\r\n        background-color:#f24537;\r\n        -webkit-border-top-left-radius:0px;\r\n        -moz-border-radius-topleft:0px;\r\n        border-top-left-radius:0px;\r\n        -webkit-border-top-right-radius:0px;\r\n        -moz-border-radius-topright:0px;\r\n        border-top-right-radius:0px;\r\n        -webkit-border-bottom-right-radius:0px;\r\n        -moz-border-radius-bottomright:0px;\r\n        border-bottom-right-radius:0px;\r\n        -webkit-border-bottom-left-radius:0px;\r\n        -moz-border-radius-bottomleft:0px;\r\n        border-bottom-left-radius:0px;\r\n        text-indent:0;\r\n        border:1px solid #d02718;\r\n        display:inline-block;\r\n        color:#ffffff !important;\r\n        font-family:Georgia;\r\n        font-size:15px;\r\n        font-weight:bold;\r\n        font-style:normal;\r\n        height:41px;\r\n        line-height:41px;\r\n        width:200px;\r\n        text-decoration:none;\r\n        text-align:center;\r\n        text-shadow:1px 1px 0px #810e05;\r\n    }\r\n    .emd_dl_red_darker:hover {\r\n        background:-webkit-gradient( linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0.05, #c62d1f), color-stop(1, #f24537) );\r\n        background:-moz-linear-gradient( center top, #c62d1f 5%, #f24537 100% );\r\n        filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#c62d1f', endColorstr='#f24537');\r\n        background-color:#c62d1f;\r\n    }.emd_dl_red_darker:active {\r\n        position:relative;\r\n        top:1px;\r\n    }<\/style>\n<p>This is a line-by-line response to Jeremy Runnells&#8217; &#8220;Letter to a CES Director: Why I Lost My Testimony.&#8221;\u00a0<span style=\"color: #008000;\">Jeremy&#8217;s words are in green, the color of life,<\/span>\u00a0while mine are in black, the color of darkness.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s move on to number 4:<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #008000;\">4. DNA analysis has concluded that Native American Indians do not originate from the Middle East or from Israelites but rather from Asia.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Nonsense. It has \u201cconcluded\u201d no such thing. Science rarely, if ever, reaches definitive conclusions. It is always open to new information, some of which it received in 2013 when a <a href=\"http:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/news\/2013\/11\/131120-science-native-american-people-migration-siberia-genetics\/\">study determined<\/a> that some Native Americans do, in fact, have Middle Eastern and European DNA. That study in no way proves the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, as the genes in question come from specimens well before Lehi, but it does demonstrate that there is plenty of room for more information. Most scientists, Mormon or non-Mormon, would scoff at the idea that an absence of evidence is proof of anything.<\/p>\n<p>The Church has been remarkably open on this subject and offers <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lds.org\/topics\/book-of-mormon-and-dna-studies?lang=eng\">a comprehensive analysis on LDS.org.<\/a> Would you be willing to concede that this essay constitutes the work of \u201cofficial\u201d apologists?<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #008000;\">Why did the Church change the following section of the introduction page in the 2006 edition Book of Mormon shortly after the DNA results were released?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #008000;\">\u201c&#8230;the Lamanites, and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians\u201d to<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #008000;\">\u201c&#8230;the Lamanites, and they are among the ancestors of the American Indians\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Because the second version is likely more accurate than the first.<\/p>\n<p>If the translated text of the Book of Mormon concedes that it contains errors, surely we shouldn\u2019t expect a non-revelatory introduction written well over a century after Joseph Smith\u2019s death to be infallible, should we?<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #008000;\">Anachronisms: Horses, cattle, oxen, sheep, swine, goats, elephants, wheels, chariots, wheat, silk, steel, and iron did not exist in pre-Columbian America during Book of Mormon times. Why are these things mentioned in the Book of Mormon as being made available in the Americas between 2200 BC &#8211; 421 AD?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Once again, you\u2019re overstating your case here. It cannot be said conclusively that such things \u201cdid not exist,\u201d only that we have no independent record outside the Book of Mormon for their existence. You\u2019ve probably heard the clich\u00e9 \u201cabsence of evidence is not evidence of absence\u201d too many times to count, but clich\u00e9s usually become clich\u00e9s because they\u2019re true. If you apply that standard, the Israelites were never enslaved in Egypt, and Attila the Hun never rode a horse, either \u2013 no ancient horse bones have been found across the path he used to sweep through Europe, despite the fact that we have written records of his invasion on horseback.<\/p>\n<p>That said, I cannot deny that such things are, indeed, anachronisms, and I find some of the apologetic explanations for them to be more persuasive than others. Critics chuckle at FAIR\u2019s attempt to attribute the anachronisms to the translator process of \u201cloan-shifting\u201d and say that all the horses were really tapirs, and I don\u2019t really blame them. But the most interesting description of loan-shifting comes from Orson Scott Card\u2019s genius essay <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nauvoo.com\/library\/card-bookofmormon.html\">\u201cThe Book of Mormon &#8211; Artifact or Artifice?\u201d<\/a> where he points out that even the best authors can\u2019t help but betray the time and place in which they are writing. He had this to say about horses \u2013 or the possible absence thereof:<\/p>\n<p><i>Nobody rides anywhere [in the Book of Mormon.] Think about it. I don&#8217;t have to explain to you about airplanes when I say I flew here, but I would certainly say that I flew here. People in Joseph Smith&#8217;s day rode everywhere they could &#8212; either a horse or a wagon. When they took a long journey on foot, they said so, because it was remarkable. But no one in the Book of Mormon rides anywhere. How did Joseph Smith know to keep his made-up Nephites and Lamanites on foot &#8212; and how did he keep himself from ever pointing out the fact?<\/i><\/p>\n<p>So whatever the horses were in the Book of Mormon, people didn\u2019t ride them. The horses didn\u2019t pull anything \u2013 even the anachronistic chariots, whatever they were, weren\u2019t pulled by horses. Why not? Why would a forger put horses in the Book of Mormon and then not give them any of their modern uses? To me, that makes the arguments favoring a loanshifting explanation seem far less ridiculous.<\/p>\n<p>The other remarkable thing about the anachronisms in the Book of Mormon is that there are actually <i>less<\/i> of them now than there were when it was first published 186 years ago. My father tested the waters of unofficial apologetics when he wrote a book a few years ago titled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Leap-Faith-Confronting-Origins-Mormon\/dp\/1606410539\"><i>Leap of Faith: Confronting the Origins of the Book of Mormon<\/i><\/a> which was published by Deseret Book. I quote from him liberally here, beginning on page 216:<\/p>\n<p><i>Picture a ledger sheet with the arguments of believers on the right side and of the critics on the left. Label it 1830.<\/p>\n<p>In 1830, all the external evidence was on the left side of the ledger, in favor of the critics. Writing on metal plates? Ridiculous; an obvious invention. Large cities in America, inhabited by the ancestors of the Indians? Nonsense; the Indians are nomadic tribesmen who live in tents\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>Think of the same ledger sheet, labeled 2009. Metal plates with writing on them, hidden in the ground for later generations to find? Joseph was right on that one; move it from the left side of the ledger to the right, as a mark in the book\u2019s favor. Big cities among the Indians? Whether they were Nephite cities or not, there were clearly big cities with large populations in Meso-America before Columbus\u2026Add to those items the others we have covered in the previous chapters that have come to light in just the last half century, and it is clear that the passage of time has put a good many new items on the right side of the ledger (in favor of the book) and removed some of the old ones on the left (against it).<\/p>\n<p>Such a trend is significant, because truth is the daughter of time. With most forgeries, the farther you get from its date of production, the clumsier it looks. In the case of the Book of Mormon, the farther we get from the date of its production, the better it looks.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>With regard to forgeries, my father\u2019s book provides some firsthand accounts of modern frauds that are really fascinating and probably aren\u2019t anything you\u2019ll read from any other apologist, official or otherwise. He worked for Howard Hughes back when Clifford Irving forged Hughes\u2019 supposed \u201cautobiography\u201d and when Melvin Dummar plopped a forged Hughes will onto the front desk of the Church Office Building. Those forgeries were initially persuasive, but the passage of time has made them appear to be obvious frauds. The idea that the Book of Mormon is actually more plausible now than it was almost two centuries ago ought to give pause to anyone who insists that these anachronisms deal a death blow to its claims of authenticity.<\/p>\n<p><em>Tomorrow: Book of Mormon archaeology!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"page\" title=\"Page 17\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"page\" title=\"Page 19\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<em>Thisis an excerpt from \"A Reply from a Former CES Employee.\" The entire document can be downloaded for free.<\/em>This is a line-by-line response to Jeremy Runnells' \"Letter to a CES Director: Why I Lost My Testimony.\"\u00a0<span style=\"color: #008000;\">Jeremy's words are in green, the color of life,<\/span>\u00a0while mine are in black, the color of darkness.Let\u2019s  ... <a title=\"CES Reply: DNA and Book of Mormon anachronisms\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/ces-reply-dna-and-book-of-mormon-anachronisms\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about CES Reply: DNA and Book of Mormon anachronisms\">Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3748"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5144,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3748\/revisions\/5144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}