What?? Holding “firmed up conclusions” held against all the evidence appears to be an LDS preserve. If it were true archaeology, anthropology, linguistics and DNA would have provided ample evidence by now. Science has provided not one iota of evidence for the BoM - only reasonable conclusion - it is untrue. A conclusion also reached by the many objective ex-Mormons.
StevieD,
When I read such comments, what it says to me is that the person doesn’t really believe God is omnipotent or omniscient or that His purposes of sending humankind to earth include helping them learn that their greatest source of truths from God will be from God, not from human methods of knowledge–however good those methods may be for scholastic pursuits or for people learning from each other and from experience how best to live their lives in harmony and happiness (which are good ends for scholastic research).
Archeology and anthropology questions of finding “conclusive evidence” for the Book of Mormon remind me of the following verses in the Book of Mormon:
Helaman 13:31 And behold, the time cometh that he curseth your riches, that they become slippery, that ye cannot hold them; and in the days of your poverty ye cannot retain them.
32 And in the days of your poverty ye shall cry unto the Lord; and in vain shall ye cry, for your desolation is already come upon you, and your destruction is made sure; and then shall ye weep and howl in that day, saith the Lord of Hosts. And then shall ye lament, and say:
33 O that I had repented, and had not killed the prophets, and stoned them, and cast them out. Yea, in that day ye shall say: O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches, and then they would not have become slippery that we should lose them; for behold, our riches are gone from us.
34 Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle.
35 Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land.
36 O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them.
Mormon 1:18 And these Gadianton robbers, who were among the Lamanites, did infest the land, insomuch that the inhabitants thereof began to hide up their treasures in the earth; and they became slippery, because the Lord had cursed the land, that they could not hold them, nor retain them again.
If God is omnipotent, and created the earth and is still involved with it, then He can be involved in “cursing the land” such that those looking to build their own faith using physical means of proof (archeology), simply will not be able to do so. They can try, and think perhaps that God has “inspired” them to look to prove to others or themselves, but it is leaning their ladder against the wrong wall, and even if they were to find an evidence, it is completely predictable that their faith would one day wane and they would fall away if that was the basis of their “faith”.
DNA and linguistics studies have not dealt with every single tribal group in the New World nor traced every origin of every tribal group in the New World, nor would there be any logical expectation that DNA matches–either through the maternal lines or the paternal lines of ancestry–would be similar to Middle Eastern DNA sources. There are too many variables, including that Joseph’s children would have mostly non-Israelite blood lines, particularly their maternal line.
