“‘Among the ancestors of the American Indian’: Not a new idea”

It’s a dogmatic certainty among some critics of Mormonism — especially, in my experience, among certain secularist former believers — that the Church and its defenders are in panicked retreat, desperately shrinking the claims of the Book of Mormon down in the face of overwhelmingly coercive evidence that it’s a fraud.

A main example of this, they imagine, is the Limited Geographical Theory, which — although its history and actual evidentiary motivations, which long predate Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA’s double helix, are on public, unambiguous, and open display — is said to have been cobbled together in a rather pathetic attempt to deal with unfavorable recent archaeological and genetic advances.

Related to that supposed retreat is the allegedly recent shift in the thinking of both church and apologists, whereby the Book of Mormon’s peoples are said only to be among the ancestors of today’s American Indians, rather than being identified as the sole ancestors of America’s indigenous peoples.  This change, some critics claim, has been forced upon us only in very recent years by rapidly developing scientific studies of Amerindian genetics.  And, they say, the “Magic Shrinking Book of Mormon,” continuing its current headlong trajectory, will soon be reduced to pure metaphor, having no footprint whatever in the Americas of the real Pre-Columbian world.

My friend and former Maxwell Institute colleague Matt Roper demonstrates this dogmatic certainty of the critics to be . . .  well, false:

http://etherscave.blogspot.com/2015/07/among-ancestors-of-american-indian-not.html