Those of us who have read Whitsitt:

http://sidneyrigdon.com/wht/1891WhtB.htm

have known for a long time that Spalding and Rigdon wrote The Book of Mormon:

http://www.fairblog.org/2008/12/14/lies-expletive-deleted-lies-and-statistics/comment-page-1/

The problem is, Byron, Sidney Rigdon didn’t meet Joseph Smith until December 1830–two years AFTER the Book of Mormon’s publication.

While it is certainly possible for Ridgon, Smith, and Parley P. Pratt to be lying about the post-publication meeting (and true that they lived not too far from each other!), the burden of proof is on those who make the claim–not on Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints.

http://sidneyrigdon.com/wht/1891WhtB.htm

have known for a long time that Spalding and Rigdon wrote The Book of Mormon:

http://www.fairblog.org/2008/12/14/lies-expletive-deleted-lies-and-statistics/comment-page-1/

Byron

First, let me say that I REALLY like your analogy of the obstetrics paper!

Second, you’re right that Grandin or Harris or Anthon could have written the Book of Mormon.

Third, I must, however, defend the Criddle study (I never though that I would do that! ) from one of your points. While Criddle, et al., gather samples from too few people, the sample size from each author they did test appears to be adequate. After all, in his book, “The Signature of God,” Dr. Robert Hamsom was able to differentiate the Saviour from the Apostle Matthew with one 500-word block from each. Moreover, one 300-word block from the Saviour and Luke enabled me to distinguish the two. (Note that I am NOT saying that such a small sample size would be definitive, nor am I advocating using such a small sample!!)

Moreover, the sample need not be random for the results to be valid. All that is required is for the sample to be representative. It is just that, usually, large random samples are the best way to get valid results.

In the case of Book of Mormon authorship, it is unnecessary to get samples from the entire population of the USA, or even the whole of Manchester and/or Palmyra, NY. When Professor Don Foster of Vassar College correctly identified Joe Klein as the author of “Primary Colors,” he obviously didn’t test every one of the literally thousands of peole at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, let alone the millions who lived in New York City. Since the author knew things only “insiders” could know, Foster only needed to test a dozen or so people–or fewer.

It is the same with the Book of Mormon. It is not needful to test everybody; only the ones who had opportunity.

Do I make sense?

I really appreciate your kind words on your blog. You are right about the sad fact that, the more one looks, the more problems one should have with the Criddle “study” (Professor Joskers and Ms Witten were merely led by the nose by Professor Criddle–which is a problem there!).

This looks too much like the global warming hysteria hyped by environmental extremmists. Yes, earth’s temperatures are higher than thirty years ago, and yes, cities are heat sinks, and yes, pollutants have a positive corellation with temperatures, but, by overstaing the actual threat, and by rigging the evidence, people could be led either to hold science itself in contempt, or to do stupid things advocated by the extremists–neither of which would make us any better off! Indeed, such pseudo-research makes us WORSE off–MUCH worse!

You said, “Picking probabilities as done in the Jockers study is not rolling the dice to see who the ‘winner’ is, but rather should be thought of as a method of constructing meaningful dice for such a determination.”

Normally, that is true. However, Professor Criddle’s biases inform that construction, which distort that determination. By not giving us a p level (or at least a significance level, which would give us a ball park figure for that p level), we are left with only subjective research, at best. This, I think may explain why we Latter-day Saints who know some statistics are unimpressed by the conclusions of Professor Criddle and his fellows.

Moreover, Professor Criddle’s biases lead directly to bad history, which is the cause of the inverted null and alternate hypotheses. And yes, Zax, Professor Criddle DOES have the burden of proof, since HE is the one asserting a thesis that is NOT generally accepted.

A parallel, I think, is Fawn Brodie’s scandalous accusation that our nation’s third President, Thomas Jefferson, fathered children with his slave, Sally Hemmings. While that thesis may be true, it was up to Ms Brodie to prove that thesis, since she made it. Since, of course, Several of Jefferson’s near-relatives had access to Ms Hemmings (and others had access to other slaves who, in turn, had access to Ms Hemmings), proving that thesis may be less possible than one might think.

You are right, Zax, that in wordprint analysis, relative probabilities may be more relevant than absolute ones, especially if one is exhaustive in the pool of alleged authors, and confident beyond a reasonable doubt that at least one of them actually did write the Book of Mormon. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes telling Dr. Watson, “When you eliminate the impossible, the remainder, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

The problem is, though, that Professor Criddle and company were NOT exhaustive in testing alleged authors. Thus, beyond telling us that Messrs Lonfellow, Verne, and others didn’t write the Book of Mormon, we have nothing that tells us who did write it.

To be fair, while Solomon Spaulding and/or Sidney Rigdon may have written the Book of Mormon, until we can be exhaustive in testing all possible alleged authors, my reading of the data (which show that the probability of either man being the author is less than 50%, let alone the roughly 90% which would overcome reasonable doubt!) compels me to be extremely skeptical, if not dismissive of that thesis.

As Dr. Lindsay points out, the more one looks, the more one is distressed by the shoddy scholarship shown by Professor Criddle and his fellows. And I am NOT saying this because I am a Mormon who doesn’t like contrary evidence. I would think that the disdain that I have for Rodney Meldrum’s unauthorised revelation masquerading as research [See http://www.fairblog.org/2008/10/05/usingand-misusing-scholarship-and-revelation/ would indicate that I dislike faux-scholarship, no matter what the source.

First I’ll disclose my bias upfront. I’m a faithful Mormon. I’m not a professor of statistics or linguistics, I’m just a simple Ob-Gyn doc. So bear with me and my admittedly rudimentary understanding of statistics and linguistics.

However, with my medical background, I do have a pretty decent understanding of the requirements necessary to construct and conduct a quality study.

So, here’s my first comment:

1. The authors glibly state:

“Our findings support the hypothesis that Rigdon was the main architect of the Book of Mormon and are consistent with historical evidence suggesting that he fabricated the book by adding theology to the unpublished writings of Spalding (then deceased).”

Unfortunately their study simply can’t say that. Their sample size is far too small to confer that much conclusive power.

Even if, for the sake of argument, we presume that Joseph Smith’s story is false, how do the Stanford authors know that some unknown person whom they DIDN’T test wasn’t really the author?

For example, if they had tested writing from, say, E. B. Grandin how do they know they wouldn’t have found an even better match than what they found with Rigdon’s writing?

Perhaps Martin Harris would have been a better match than Rigdon – but they didn’t include him in the study. How about Professor Anthon? But again, they didn’t include him in the study either.

In fact, in their study they didn’t include literally thousands of people in the Eastern United States at Joseph Smith’s time who, for all we know, might have revealed a better match than Rigdon did!

And since there is a virtually limitless pool of people in Joseph Smith’s time and vicinity that they DIDN’T test, it’s impossible for them to state, with any degree of certainty at all, that Rigdon “was the main architect?”

Any number of people may have matched better than Rigdon.

In medical studies, this is known as a sample size so small as to be worthless. Any medical researcher would be embarrassed to publish a paper with a control group of 2 and a study group of 5.

Here’s an analogy of this weakness in the study:

Let’s say that I claim to be a doctor, and I write a paper on Obstetrics. An observor is not convinced that I am truly a doctor – and disputes that I actually wrote the paper.

So he collects 5 people from my neighborhood and subjects them to a rigorous test of their knowledge of obstetrics and medical terminology. He also includes another 2 people who are known airline pilots as his “control group.”

Then, after completing his rigorous and exhaustive testing, he finds one person among the 5 who has a somewhat better knowledge of obstetrics and a somewhat better command of medical terminology than the other 4 – and promptly ordains him as the true doctor and author of the paper. And does so without even testing me!

2. I also find it very interesting as to the 5 specific members of the study group the authors chose. Not exactly what we in medicine would term a random sample.

Their interesting selection has the flavor of, “Well, we’re pretty sure the real author of the Book of Mormon was one of these 5 people, so they’re the only ones we’re going to test.”

The mere selection of the individuals to comprise the study group bespeaks massive bias upfront.

3. And finally, even if their conclusion is 100% correct, we are still left to explain the impressive number of ancient Hebrew linguistic “bullseyes” in the Book of Mormon.

These include such ancient Hebrew literary conventions as merismus, exquisite chiasmus, simile curses, authentic ancient Middle Eastern proper names for people and places, synonymous parallelism, antithetic parallelism, repeated alternate, the prophetic perfect tense, poetic climax, compound prepositions, plural amplification, the construct state, repetition of the definite article, use of the cognate accusative, the use of many “ands” in serial, and repetition of the possessive pronoun.

I find it highly doubtful that even Sidney Rigdon was sufficiently conversant in ancient Hebrew to craftily include all of these remarkable linguistic “footprints” within the Book of Mormon.

So even if they manage to shift attention to an allegedly different “author,” they are still left to explain the many and varied evidences of the Book of Mormon’s fundamental antiquity.

But perhaps Sidney Rigdon was just a spectacularly good guesser of future information unknown at his time.

http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/fqn040

Beyond the hyperbole of duping and rigging, most of Jeff’s criticism above lies in the statement, “the test guarantees that each chapter of the Book of Mormon will be assigned to a ‘winner’ from the tiny set of candidates provided”, which is turning a blind eye to what the statistics are really saying. While it is true that one author will necessarily get the top spot for any particular chapter, the statistics themselves guide us in how much stock to put in that ‘winner’, particularly in how far the probabilities deviate from a flat spectrum. IOW, there will always be some variation across the spectrum, but as long as all authors are listed at probabilities of less than ~2/N (where N is the number of authors in the target list), they can be considered statistically flat.

Picking probabilities as done in the Jockers study is not rolling the dice to see who the ‘winner’ is, but rather should be thought of as a method of constructing meaningful dice for such a determination. A flat spectrum means constructing a die that assigns all target authors as equally [im]probable. We do in fact see that for many chapters. These ‘flat’ probabilities could be interpreted in a number of ways. 1) all authors contributed equally to the chapter (no one will actually take this position – but it is allowed by the results) 2) the actual author is not present in the target author list, so the method can do no better than rolling a equally weighted die in determining authorship for that chapter. 3) The correct author is present, but the signal is too weak to detect because of poorly constructed centroids, improper chapter cuts, or anything that will degrade the signal or sharpness of the centroid, so again the signal is not much stronger for any particular one over the others.

Note that the majority of the most prescient criticisms (Joseph Smith missing, bad chapter cuts, centroids that should have had a different word in its list, etc), to the extent they are valid mean that the results have been biased towards flat – i.e., far easier to have false negatives, that to have false positives at statistically significant levels (not just ‘winning’ by a small amount).

The argument that the probabilities are ‘just relative’ also seems to have far more traction than it deserves. Relative probabilities are scientifically stronger in a study like this than absolute probabilities, because we know exactly what they are normalized against (the other authors in the target list). That Rigdon and/or Spalding have such huge signals across the board relative to the other authors is saying something very strongly about the level of input they had on BoM origins. If Rigdon had little input, his centroid would fare statistically no better (or worse) than the others.

It would be interesting to see Jeff’s writings included as a control, though. Given the statistically low level of Barlow (even for a control), Jeff probably would have been a better control centroid.