Category Archives: ‘Proof’ of God

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

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Sadly, we’ve failed to locate Jesus, the celestial super-being who is everything, everywhere, all at once yet nowhere at all. We’ve been presented with some possibilities, specifically that he exists in another dimension, which may or may not exist, from where he whispers directly into the brains of those who, over in this reality, call upon him. He even appears occasionally in visions, when the two dimensions ‘intersect’, which, as everyone knows, they’re capable of doing.

Unfortunately, all of this is undetectable by science but there’s no reason for concern because there is more to reality than that which science can observe. Equally regrettably, there’s no way of verifying this claim either; this is because science is deficient, limited as it is to investigating only ‘dirt and rocks’.

* * * *

It is far more likely that science can’t detect heaven and the eternal Jesus in precisely for the same reason it can’t detect Narnia, Valhalla and all the other fantasy worlds created over the millennia by human minds. Applying Occam’s razor, the imagination accounts for all these other ‘realities’ and the immortals that inhabit them.

No further explanation necessary.

 

 

Suffer, Little Children

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I recently wrote the post below for The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser and thought that if you missed it, you might like to read it here. 

I was reading Gary Marston’s latest post on Escaping Christian Fundamentalism God Is So Good! He Allowed Ten Thousand Children to Starve to Death Today.

Gary has his very own Christian troll (All atheist/agnostic bloggers have them) called Swordmanjr, who leapt to God’s defence, the mighty Creator Of All Things needing fallible, flawed human beings to do this for him. Swordmanjr accused Gary of scapegoating God who, apparently, is not really responsible for suffering, nor indeed anything horrible.

I guess God could be being scapegoated if it wasn’t for the fact, his Son, God Incarnate according to some, tells us he cares for human beings much more than he cares for sparrows (which is, admittedly, not much at all), that he is concerned to the extent that he numbers each and every hair on individuals’ heads (Matthew 10:29-30). This must be before he allows so many of them to die of starvation and in natural disasters.

The evidence is that God does not care. He doesn’t care if you’re a child born into poverty who then dies a slow, miserable, painful death through malnutrition. He doesn’t care if you’re caught up in a natural disaster like the recent earthquake in Turkey (which, according to some Christian nutjob, was God’s response to Sam Smith’s performance at the Grammies) in which your entire community and you yourself are wiped out. He doesn’t care if you die of a nasty virus, which ultimately he’s responsible for, as millions including Christians did during the pandemic. He doesn’t care that you die, when, or how horribly. He – just – doesn’t – care, period.

Jesus, as he was about so much, was plain wrong about his Father’s caring. The real world does not and will not match up with this early Christian fantasy.

Believers who leap to God’s defence invariably do it by launching vitriolic ad hominem attacks on non-theists who dare to criticise his shoddy performance. In doing so, they demonstrate yet another of Christianity’s disconnects; it’s promise that it makes new creatures of people, filled with love and compassion (2 Corinthians 5:17).

‘By their fruits shall ye know them,’ proclaims Jesus in Matthew 7:15-20. If the Christians who lurk around atheist blogs are anything to go by, those fruits are often pretty rotten: vitriol, spite, hatred… ‘evil’ Jesus calls it. These Christians frequently end their comments with a threat: one day the atheist will stand before God’s judgement throne and then they’ll be sorry: hell awaits!

God is not there in this kind of behaviour. He’s not there when humans suffer and die, frequently horribly. He’s not there in the Bible verses that promise he is there in such circumstances. God is not there.

 

 

It’s life, Don, but not as we know it

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Don wrote:

Here’s the deal. Present evidence, not validations, for the natural fine-tuning of the fundamental forces and for the natural origin of those forces and I’ll use that as a model for my evidence for the existence of God.

I assume a non-answer is because there is no answer.

While I’m under no obligation to respond to Don’s challenge ( a fact he seems unable to comprehend) he continues to badger me to do so.  So here is my response.

Like many of your comments, Don, I really don’t know what point you’re making here. Your challenging me, I think, to provide evidence that the fine-tuning of the universe arose by natural means. I declined to engage with this evasive irrelevancy but as it is preventing you from answering our questions about the evidence for God, I’ll reiterate points I’ve previously made here and here. God forbid you should search for these for yourself, or indeed that you should remember the one from last year, which you commented on.

You  presuppose the universe is fine-tuned for life. The evidence demonstrates quite conclusively that it is not.  With 99.9999% of it inanimate, it is evident that what the universe is ‘fine-tuned’ for is inanimacy.

Statistically, however, given there are billions of planets, the likelihood that at least one will have conditions capable of giving rise to life is good. Indeed, the sheer enormity of numbers makes it highly probable. This is not ‘fine-tuning’, which implies conditions were created in order for life to arise.  They weren’t. Conditions happened to be conducive for life’s emergence, though only after 3.7 billion years of inanimacy. That is all.

You come at this from the assumption that life is the most incredible thing the universe could possibly produce. We don’t know this. If the universe were conscious it might think stars or worm-holes much more impressive. Life is but one of the phenomena the universe has produced. We think it’s the most amazing achievement because we are it. This doesn’t mean it is. Indeed that same conscious universe might regard life as a bothersome infestation of one of its more insignificant planets.

No God is required to explain the phenomenon of life and therefore, applying Occam’s razor, we can safely conclude that no God had a hand in its creation or development here on Earth. Certainly not your small, man-made tribal deity, YHWH.

So, as you promised, let’s see you apply these same principles to demonstrate your God’s existence and/or that of a supernatural plane. You can make use of empirical evidence, probability theory and logic but you mustn’t appeal to myth, the Bible or ‘spiritual experiences’ that originate inside people’s heads. Have at it.

Show Me Heaven

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On the radio this Sunday, a couple of presenters were discussing a woman’s Near Death Experience. Lynda Cramer claimed that in 2021 she had been clinically dead for 14 minutes when she visited Heaven for five years. You can see her raving about it on YouTube, while the Amazon synopsis of her book, Five Years In Heaven (of course there’s a book; four in fact) reads:

In May 2001, Dr Lynda Cramer died. This is the story of her Near Death Experience, outlining the five years that she spent in Heaven. Starting when she found herself “floating” in the living room for over 45 minutes, she then went on a journey where she entered Heaven, she then processed her Life Review prior to meeting her great-great-great-great grandmother who explained what Life Lessons, Life Contracts and Reincarnation are all about. Backed up by Medical Records as well as diagrams she drew, this is her personal account for anyone intrigued by what happens in the afterlife…

So, is this real? Did Lynda Cramer visit Heaven while she was dead for 14 minutes? She’s a doctor, after all, so superficially at least, she has credible credentials. Until you see that her PhD was obtained researching Near Death Experiences  themselves. Vested interest or what?.

But, let’s not be cynical; she has diagrams too, for God’s sake. What more proof could we ask for? We know too, because our resident Christian tells us, that dreams and visions like this are most definitely from God. Lynda’s experience ticks all the boxes, no matter what we sceptics might think.

Except, no. Lynda was not dead for 14 minutes. We have only her word for it that she was declared clinically dead, while she describes her experience as a Near Death Experience. The clue is in the name. If she was near death, she was not dead; her brain was still alive, if only just. Her mind was still active, creating, if this happened at all, a reassuring experience for itself as it came close to shutting down. There is well documented evidence that this is what the brain is capable of doing when it is close to death (but not actually dead).

Significantly, the scenario her mind created was informed by cultural, quasi-Christian images of Heaven, just as believers’ dreams of God are informed by the same images and characters that occupy their waking minds. My own dreams, for example, are populated by people I know and places I’m familiar with (though sometimes only vaguely; my subconscious fills in the details often in bizarrely imaginative ways.)

Nonetheless, Lynda’s life-changing 5 years visit to Heaven (during which she seems to have done nothing except admire mountains and buildings while blue balls, hijacked from science-fiction, danced around her) is just as real, just as divine, just as valid as the God-given dreams and visions Christians claim they sometimes have. Naturally, we sceptics can’t possibly appreciate these until we’ve experienced them for ourselves.

Lynda’s experience was a subjective, emotional experience while she was unconscious. But such ‘spiritual’ inner experiences are ‘real’ according to at least some Christians, and we can’t argue with that which we have not experienced  for ourselves.

Right, Don?

 

 

Redemption Songs

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I was listening to some Bob Marley the other day and was struck by a line in his song ‘Get Up Stand Up’: ‘Almighty God is a living man’. He was not of course referring to Jesus but to Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia who was still alive when ‘Get Up Stand Up’ was recorded in 1973. Rastafarians like Marley believed the Emperor would redeem African-descended Jamaicans and restore them to Africa from where their ancestors had been taken.

Rastafarians saw and still see themselves as modern day Israelites, like those in the Bible stories of Egyptian slavery and Babylonian captivity. Their perspective is reflected in songs like ‘Exodus’, by Marley, ‘The Israelites’ (Desmond Dekker) and ‘Rivers Of Babylon’ (The Melodians). Selassie himself denied being divine (‘why do you call me good, when only God is good?’) but that didn’t stop those who believed in him from making a saviour god of him. When, inevitably, he died (in 1975), some Rastas left the movement while others reinterpreted his role:

Some Rastas believed that Selassie did not really die and that claims to the contrary were Western misinformation… Another perspective within Rastafari acknowledged that Haile Selassie’s body had perished, but claimed that his inner essence survived as a spiritual force. A third response within the Rastafari community was that Selassie’s death was inconsequential as he had only been a “personification” of Jah rather than Jah himself.

It all sounds rather familiar doesn’t it? The saviour didn’t really die/his inner essence survived/his death was inconsequential. Where have we heard all that before?

This put me in mind of a cult that for a long time rivalled that of Christianity. Indeed, in the early days of Jesus belief, it boasted more members, all of them men. Unlike Christianity and Rastafari, this cult believed in a saviour whom adherents knew had never existed as a human on Earth. Mithras was a celestial being whose salvific work, which involved the symbolic slaughter of a bull, was carried out in the heavenly realm:

Mithras is the guide of souls which he leads from the earthly life into which they had fallen back up to the light from which they issued… It was not only from the religions and the wisdom of Orientals and Egyptians, even less from Christianity, that the notion that life on earth was merely a transition to a higher life was derived by the Romans. Their own anguish and the awareness of senescence made it plain enough that earthly existence was all hardship and bitterness. Mithras-worship became one, and perhaps the most significant, of the religions of redemption in declining paganism. (Jacob Burckhkart)

Eventually, in the fourth century, Christians suppressed Mithraism to the extent that its adherents, along with its ritualistic texts, were wiped from history. Only its deserted, underground temples remained.

What both examples tell us – and their are hundreds more – is that people have always been willing and eager to make gods of revered figures, both real and imagined. They are ready to believe them capable of impossible feats and to trust in them for whatever form of redemption they feel in need of. There can be no doubt Jesus belief sprang from this same sort of wishful thinking; Jesus being cast as a divine figure with the power to lead believers into the light and/or the promised land of eternal life. It hardly matters whether he existed or not. Like Mithras, an imaginary/imagined figure could just as easily fulfil the role as a real person, like Selassie, who had others’ unrealistic expectations thrust upon him.

 

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 36: The Universe Is Fine-Tuned For Life.

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  1. The return of an old favourite(?)! Christians’ Favourite Delusions. The other 35 posts in this series start here. 

The vast universe, almost infinite in size, was created, according to Christians, with the sole purpose of bringing us humans and the other creatures who share this planet with us into existence. This fine-tuning argument is used to ‘prove’ that the God of the Bible really exists.

According to Ken Ham, we’re the only life forms in the universe, while other Christians speculate that there may be other intelligent creatures out there somewhere. If there are, then, so says the late Larry Norman, ‘(Jesus) has been there once already and has died to save their souls.’*

The fine-tuning argument proposes that the universe exists so that this minute, insignificant blue dot we live on, and possibly a few other tiny specks, could produce life of some sort. But what of the rest of the universe: the other 99.9999% that doesn’t have life, because it is entirely hostile to it; the vast bulk of the universe that is made up of nebulae, gas clouds, lethal radiation, black holes, anti-matter and lifeless planets?

Taken as a whole, the universe is cold and dead; not finely-tuned for anything, let alone life. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Richard Carrier debunking the whole fine-tuning argument:

‘[T]he only way we could exist without a God is by an extremely improbable chemical accident, and the only way an extremely improbable chemical accident is likely to occur is in a universe that’s vastly old and vastly large; so atheism predicts a vastly old and large universe; theism does not …

Likewise, if chance produced this universe, we should expect it to be only barely conducive to life, indeed almost entirely lethal to it (as in fact it is), since there are vastly more ways to get those universes by chance selection, than to get a universe perfectly suited to life throughout. … Design predicts exactly the opposite.’

And here, several more scientists, philosophers and other interested parties do the same thing:

https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/non-fine-tuned-universe/

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2011/01/18/260556/evidence-emerges-that-laws-of-physics-are-not-fine-tuned-for-life/amp/

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2015/12/31/sean-carroll-debunks-the-fine-tuning-argument-for-god/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9O5wXsgqrc

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/fine-tuning-argument-debunked

https://www.answers-in-reason.com/religion/christianity/fine-tuning-debunked-holy-koolaid/

Life is remarkable, it is true (but then we would think that, wouldn’t we, when we are it) but it is no more remarkable than any other of the phenomena the universe has produced in its 13.7 billion years of its current existence. No God has been required for any of it. No fine-tuning = no fine-tuner

*In his 1972 song ‘UFO’.

Assertions

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Don likes to take me to task for what he says are assertions in my arguments. I do make assertions, as do we all, because not all points in an argument need to be demonstrated every time they’re used. Indeed, not all assertions can be.

There are assertions that we all accept are likely to be true: the sun will ‘rise’ tomorrow; the Earth is a sphere; evidence is better than no evidence and so on. There are those who dispute these assertions but the onus is then on them to provide the evidence or argument that their counter-assertion is true. Yes, there may come a day when the sun doesn’t rise but it is statistically improbable; the Earth is demonstrably not flat; faith is not an reliable substitute for evidence. There is abundant evidence and sound argument why these things are not the case. But – and this is my point – this evidence does not have to be trotted out every time an argument relies on such probabilities; they can be asserted.

I write, and indeed live my life, on the basis of the fact (‘assertion’) that the supernatural does not exist. Over the last ten years, I’ve posted several arguments why this is the case. I frequently provide a link to these arguments when asserting that, outside of the human imagination, gods, spirits, angels, devils, demons, powers, principalities, ghosts, avatars, heaven and hell do not exist. These arguments form the backbone of any subsequent assertion that the supernatural is not real.

Nonetheless, the onus to ‘prove’ that this is the case does not rest with me. First, because it is impossible to prove a negative. Consider, for example, the Christians challenge to prove their God doesn’t exist. While there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that this is the case, there is no absolute ‘proof’ of God’s non-existence (as I’ve argued before, it all comes down to probability, or, in God’s case, improbability.) Absence of evidence is invariably evidence of absence.

The onus instead lies with the one making the incredible claim. Those who take it as fact that the supernatural and God are real need to demonstrate to the rest of us that this is the case. They have, in my long experience, failed to do this. The best they can do are the various arguments (the ontological, Kalam cosmological, teleological, fine-tuning and the argument from design) that suggest the possibility of the supernatural but fall far short of convincing evidence that the supernatural is real, and further still that the Christian God exists. They depend in the end on the feelings they have in their heads and the Bible (or some other holy book.) This is wholly inadequate. 

Consequently, I’ll continue to operate from and make my assertion that the supernatural does not exist until such time as Don or any other of his co-religionists demonstrate the probability that it does.

From my assertion, backed up, remember, by earlier arguments, a number of other facts follow:

With no supernatural, there are no gods; YHWH in all his incarnations is a God, therefore YHWH does not exist.

Much follows from this:

If YHWH does not exist, Jesus cannot have been either his avatar, Son or incarnation;

Jesus cannot have been raised from the dead by a being who doesn’t exist;

Stories that he did so must therefore be merely that: stories;

The celestial, eternal Jesus who sits at the right hand of God in heaven is not real;

Any experience people have of this being is entirely within their own imaginations;

The Bible is based on such imagined encounters with these imagined characters;

There is no after-life or judgment;

The Christian faith, including my own, cannot be explained in terms of the supernatural;

Only explanations that are rooted in naturalism, as in science, have any validity.

There are more implications that can be drawn from the premise that there is no supernatural, including the fact that the world makes much more sense (if it makes any sense at all) without drawing gods and demons into it.

Consequently, I shall continue to make my assertions, like those above, supported as always by previous argument. Any religious believer who wants to challenge them is welcome to do so, but must do more than point out the obvious, that they are assertions. They must provide the evidence for the supernatural, and all that follows from it, independent of the goings on in their heads and without reference to holy books written by those with similar subjective feelings.

Making Prophecy Work

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Recycled image and still no second coming

Never one to belabour a point, Don Camp has responded to my posts and comments about prophecy over on his own blog, Biblical Musing. This is a modified version of my response to that post.

What you seem to be saying, Don, is ‘leave a selected prophecy long enough and eventually it’ll appear to come true’. Perhaps, but then, if you take any selection of predictions from any source and you’ll find this to be the case. Why? Because:

1) You’ll have cherry-picked from the start so only those ‘prophecies’ that are vague enough or appear to have been fulfilled already will make up the bulk of your selection.

2) The vagueness of many that are chosen will make it relatively easy to scout around and alight on circumstances that seem to demonstrate some sort of fulfilment. You may even invent some that do, like the synoptic gospel writers do.

3) Some prophecies will indeed come true, but at no greater rate than chance allows. A prophecy you cite may say a particular city state will fall and return to the wilderness from which it was built. To claim that when, centuries later, it does so is not a fulfilment of this prophecy; it is a happy coincidence (for you and your so-called prophet, not so much for the denizens of the city state.) Just look at the number of ancient cities to which this has happened, without there being a preceding ‘prophecy’. It just happens.

4) You’ll ignore your own failure rate, or explain it away: i) discounting those prophecies that have never come to pass, even after millennia; ii) insisting ‘they could still occur! With God a day is like a thousand years!’; iii) reinterpreting them: ‘they’re metaphorical’ etc.

5) You invoke the get-out clause; the god says ‘if you don’t do ‘x’ then I’ll make ‘y’ happen.’ “Well, praise the god, everyone did ‘x’ and the calamity was averted! It’s a miracle!” This then counts, somehow or other, as a win for the ‘prophecy’.

These are your strategies, Don. You use them in combination to demonstrate the ‘fulfilment’ of biblical prophecy. You work really hard at nullifying your own cognitive dissonance, desperately attempting to demonstrate the truth of ancient fantasies. You conclude your post by saying Jesus will return as King soon. No, he won’t. You need to apply every one of your strategies to believe this is ever going to happen.

The ‘F’ Word

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Don Camp is defending Christians in the comments. They’re in the process of becoming ‘more like Jesus’, he says.

What does this even mean, Don? How can you know what Jesus was like when there are so many disparate versions of him in the Bible (as has been pointed out to you)? Does becoming more tempestuous, impatient, impossibly demanding and Jewish count? These are some of the traits his propagandists show him as having.

You then tell Jim not to measure Christians ‘by his (own) experience’. What other measure is there? Christians aggressively promote their beliefs on the internet, have infected politics and, at a lower level, are encountered as judgmental evangelicals and sanctimonious street preachers; these are the Christians of our experience and like it or not, the fragrance ain’ that sweet. As Jesus is supposed to have said, ‘by their fruits shall you know them’. We sure do.

Bottom line, Don: you Christians have had two thousand years now to make the world a better place by being ‘more like Jesus’. On balance, you’ve failed. Not surprising when Jesus himself failed even more. Where is he, Don? Following his ‘return’, the Righteous should have been living in peace and harmony for the past two millennia, tediously worshipping him and his Father in God’s Kingdom on Earth. They haven’t been, even though Jesus, Paul and several other NT writers said they would be ‘soon’, relative to their own lifetimes. 

Argue it how like, Don (and you will), Christianity merits one big ‘F‘.

Battle Of The Magic Books

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Don Camp replies (in blue) to my previous post. My responses are in black.

There are multiple reason for rejecting Mormonism. The primary reason is similar to discerning between a fake $20 bill and the real thing. The fake just doesn’t feel like the real thing. Of course, that test requires that one knows what a $20 bill feels like. Anyone who does not know is easily fooled.

In fact, if you don’t know what the real thing is like, it is impossible to identify a fake. You might notice an ink smudge and a difference in paper, but who is to say one is fake and the other is not?

This presupposes that your version of Christianity is ‘the real thing’. For a Jew, Judaism is the real thing and Christianity the Johnny-come-lately fake. All you’re saying here is that you ‘feel’ your version of Christianity is the real thing and you ‘feel’ Mormonism isn’t. This isn’t persuasive. I know, for reasons other than intuition, that Christianity isn’t the real thing. To use your analogy, it is the twenty dollar bill received in change when in the UK a twenty pound note is the ‘real thing’.

But since you have a knowledge of literature, Neil, why not apply those standards? Nice concession there, Don. The Bible is indeed literature and as such deserves to have the same standards applied to it as any other work of fiction.

Is the Bible and the narrative in the Bible coherent?? No. Its central character is ridiculously inconsistent. Described as an unchanging God, he changes from book to book and most noticeably between the Old and New Testaments. As someone commented on Debunking Christianity recently, it’s as if he ate a Snickers bar between the two. (He does get hungry again towards the end of the NT, when he reverts to being an omnipotent Putin.)

As the protagonist undergoes his major rewrite, the plot also suddenly deviates, becoming a completely different story. It starts by being about this poorly conceived character’s ‘everlasting covenant’ with his chosen people, but then two thirds of the way through, this everlasting covenant is scrapped and replaced with a new, largely incoherent deal involving a human sacrifice that the unchanging God has previously said he finds abhorrent.

Does it stick together and develop a single theme across the whole? No, it doesn’t ‘stick together’, not unless you ignore the gaping inconsistencies in character and plotting, and its overall implausibility.

Do you know what the theme of the Bible is, Neil? Yes, thank you, Don. Condescending of you to ask. Any apparent consistency is because the writers of the second part of the story had access to the first part. They plundered it for their own purposes, drastically altering it so that it suited their new theme. That is why much of the Jesus story appears to be foreshadowed in the Old Testament. The Jesus story – and it is a story – is built on events and episodes they found there.

Remember that the Mormons tell us that the Book of Mormon is an extension of the Bible and that the people of the Americas were related to the Jews and held to the basic truths of the Jews. (Remember also the Mormons believe that Jesus appeared to these people in the New World shortly after his resurrection.) So if you put the Torah and the Book of Mormon together, is the narrative coherent? Does it develop a single theme? The Old testament and the New Testament are a coherent whole, but I do not think the Old Testament and the Book of Mormon are. As you can tell, I dispute that the Old and New Testament are a coherent whole. The Old Testament and the Book of Mormon aren’t either. That lack of coherency becomes even more obvious when we compare God in the Old Testament with God in the Book of Mormon. The person of Jesus is also inconsistent in the Book of Mormon with the Bible.

But they’re inconsistent within the Bible too, Don. Compare John’s Jesus with Mark’s. Compare Paul’s beatific Christ with Revelation’s grotesquely super-powered warlord.

Of course, the standard explanation by Latter Day Saints is that the Bible has not been adequately translated, though I know of no place where they can demonstrate that claim. There are significant translation problems with the Bible, which mainstream scholars consider at length. Mormon desperation to resolve these conflicts is the same as that demonstrated by Christian theologians.

Finally, there is a matter of provenance. We know in very good detail where the Bible came from.

We do? We know who Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually were? No, we don’t nor do we know where they wrote or what their sources were. We don’t have the autographs (originals) of any of the New Testament documents but we do know some of them are forgeries and others have been tampered with.

There are many copies, especially for the New Testament, and there are many commentaries of both the OT and NT from very early in the their history. Proving what? Only that they were copied, frequently inaccurately. The copies are all much later than the probable time of composition. The commentaries are similarly far removed from them; there are commentaries on the Book of Mormon much closer to its composition.

What is the provenance of the Book of Mormon? It apparently appeared magically out of nowhere pretty recently. No mention in any other literature of its existence. It did appear magically! Oh ye of little faith! God sent an angel, like he does numerous times in the Bible, and told Joseph Smith to translate the golden tablets. The NT books were similarly created, with God breathing his word into cult followers as they wrote. God, angels, Holy Spirit, magic – all of a muchness, don’t you think?

No copy is available to examine. Nor of the original copies of anything in the Bible.

That is not to speak of the total lack of any archaeological evidence for the Mormon claims of Jews in the Americas. Mormons dispute this, of course. There are similar problems with some locations mentioned in the Bible. More fatally, most of what the Bible promises has proven false. For example: Jesus’ imminent return, his guarantee of miracles, believers becoming new creations. (Paul spends much of his time ticking off these ‘new creations’ who remain resolutely unreformed.)

So, I would say the Book of Mormon fails on all levels.

I would too. As does the Bible for the reasons I’ve outlined, and despite your special pleading. You don’t apply the same rigour in your consideration of the Bible that you do to Latter Day Saint fiction. Why is this, Don?