It’s apparent that none of you have taken the time to fully read this paper since you’re debating things that are already firmly settled within it. The following is found in its "Premises" section:
The Nephites used a 12-month calendar, each month containing 30 days – a [more than] reasonable assumption since:
- They considered the 11th month to be “in the latter end of the… year” (Alma 48:2, 21, 49:1).
- They observed the Law of Moses (Alma 25:15-16), which would have required such a calendar since many of its commandments were specific to particular months and days of the month (as we pointed out earlier), and this was the type of calendar used by the Israelites. To be exact, the months on the Hebrew calendar alternate between 29 and 30 days in length. While it’s true that an additional month is added to leap years, these years are in the minority and no 13th month is mentioned in the Bible.
Even if a 260-day calendar were somehow in use, one would need to explain why all dates given in the book appear in the first 11 months of the year as the odds of this happening by chance are less than 1%.
To settle the issue for good, if Nephite years were only 260 days, then the B.O.M would have reported that ~840 years passed between Lehi and Christ, not 600. The Lehites reported having left Jerusalem 1) right before the Babylonian captivity, which began in 597 BC, and 2) 600 years before Christ’s coming, which means they must have had ~365-day years.
To beat a dead horse (and for fun), let me also note this: the paper shows that even if Nephite months were only 15 days long, the odds of the month/day proximity phenomenon occuring would be 1 in 1,750 (see the “What if Events Were Far from Randomly Distributed?” section). If we assume a 260-day Mesoamerican calendar and change “15 days” to “13 days”, the figure only comes down to 1 in 665 (I just ran the numbers by slightly modifying the source code of the B.O.M Date Simulator, a link to which is provided in the paper). This figure uses the months found in the B.O.M’s dates and holds them constant, letting only the days vary. If we instead let the months vary as well (from 1 to 20), the odds of 8 dates having months and days that are so consistently close together by chance drops to 1 in 3,700.
mackay11 wrote:He's observed one "finding" in the 8-date set (that the month number and date number are always close) and then described this single (low probability) "finding" three different ways and then multiplied the probability to make the probability even lower.
Read the section in question (“Trend #1 – Month/Day Proximity”) and you’ll see that this is nothing close to what the analysis actually does. While it does quantify the strangeness of the month/day proximity phenomenon with three different metrics, it does NOT multiply any of them together (or any other such grade-school level shenanigans) as claimed. It soundly shows that the likelihood of the days of the B.O.M’s dates being so consistently close to their corresponding months (holding the months constant so that randomness of the months is irrelevant) by chance is 1 in 440,000. A retraction is in order from Mr. Mackay.
mackay11 wrote:[Apologists] can also argue that if there is any human influence on the dates selected then it could just as well be attributed to Mormon.
The paper addresses this notion with a few points, one of which is that not all of the dates can be attributed to Mormon since a couple of them were given by Amulek (Alma 56:42) and Helaman (Alma 10:6) (see the section “Objections & Alternative Explanations”).
In conclusion, many long hours of careful thought and tedious work went into this paper, so if someone carelessly skims through it and thinks they're equipped to refute it, they need to try actually reading it.
P.S. Why does this forum automatically change every instance of “B.O.M” (without periods) to “Book of Mormon”? That’s awfully obnoxious.
