Science and the Book of Mormon
Gary Stradling
When the 531-page Book of Mormon was published in 1830, it embodied a glaring set of apparent absurdities and anachronisms. Comparable to the Bible, but with prophetic Christianity predating the Babylonian captivity, it is purportedly a real thousand year history of an ancient civilization, transplanted by God from Jerusalem to the Americas, full of details of people, places, and events, translated from an ancient language, set within that culture, and correlated with the Biblical record, all of which were then well known quantities. Even more shocking was the origin story of gold plates, buried in a hillside, delivered by a luminous angel, and then translated using a “seer stone”, within a 60-working day period, by an young unschooled farmhand. Immediately, exposes’ were written by knowledgeable scholars declaring these incongruities to be fraudulent. Within an few years, 200+ specific anachronisms and objections were detailed, challenging the authenticity of the book, the vast majority of which went unanswered for more than a hundred years. This talk will review the current status of these critical questions and the scholastic and scientific work that has been done over the last 50 years examining this overabundance of detailed specifics contained in the Book of Mormon.
Gary L. Stradling, PhD
Dr. Stradling has served the United States national security for 40 years, since June 1977, when he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Laser Fusion Program. He completed five years of federal civil service in the R&D Directorate of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, in the Nuclear Technologies Department. He served as Chief of the Monitoring and Verification Technologies Office, where he led the advanced nuclear test monitoring technologies and Nuclear Arms Control Technologies (NACT) portfolios. Prior to joining DoD, Dr. Stradling served at Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1981. During his career at LANL, he served as a program manager of the AngelFire program providing tactical wide-area-surveillance intelligence technology for the DoD/USMC from 2004-2011. Prior to that he was a member of the Office of Military Applications under the LANL Associate Director for Weapons Engineering and Manufacturing where he led the nascent Reliable Replacement Warhead development program. From 1994-2000, he was detailed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. From 1997 to 2000 he served as Special Assistant to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Missile Defense Policy, advising OSD on NNSA’s new Stockpile Stewardship Program, supporting the nuclear Tomahawk program, and addressing missile defense questions. In 1996 he was Science Advisor to the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Chemical and Biological Programs in the Counterproliferation Office. Prior to that, from 1994, he served three years as Science Advisor to the OSD Director-Arms Control, Implementation and Compliance office (ACI&C), partially concurrent with the Counterproliferation assignment. During that assignment, he was Chairman of the 26-nation (NATO and Warsaw Pact) Open Skies Treaty implementation negotiation group In Vienna, AU, the International Working Group on Sensors. He brought that negotiation to a successful completion, eliminating one barrier to the Treaty entering into force. Dr. Stradling conducted experimental physics from 1981 to 1994 in the Physics Division of Los Alamos, serving the nuclear weapons testing program, the Strategic Defense Initiative (hypervelocity Impact), and the Laser Fusion Program. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Physics from Brigham Young University in 1976 and 1981 and M.S. and PhD degrees in Applied Science/Plasma Physics from the University of California/Davis in 1979 and 1982. He is the recipient of: the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service, the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence, and the German Physical Society Hubert Schardin Gold Medal for leadership in the high-speed photonics community. He is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, having served the Church in many assignments, including as a two year full-time missionary in a Cantonese-speaking mission in Hong Kong, frequently as a youth and scouting leader, as a teacher, and as an administrator. He is a believer, having received many evidences of God’s existence, His active involvement with mankind, His will, guidance, and purposes. He is very familiar with the Bible and more so with the Book of Mormon, as well as other scripture. He is the husband of Rebecca, the enthusiastic father and grandfather of 9 children and 20 grandchildren. While ready to discuss the foundations of theology, he recognizes that all religion is built on essential truths, and seeks to understand those truths, distributed in different ways through mankind over their history.