As I expected, Boylan issued a hasty “response” to the previous post in which he failed to address any of the substantive issues I presented there. Instead, he engaged in a poorly done tu quoque (“you too”) fallacious argument. First, once again, he quoted me out of context, this time in order to avoid addressing my criticism of his earlier post, which was that he had dismissed my whole book on the basis of two sentences in it that made a tangential point without my having engaged a particular Mormon scholar’s treatment of it. He then accused me (without even a hint of justification) of being “intellectually deceptive”!
Next came the tu quoque fallacy: Supposedly I am being hypocritical or something along those lines for excusing myself from addressing Sorenson’s defense of Moroni’s journey in my book, because in a review of a book by Jehovah’s Witness author Rolf Furuli I had pointed out that Furuli had not engaged one of my books. Boylan missed, or ignored, the salient difference: my book that Furuli had failed to engage addressed “many of the issues raised in his book,” which of course is not true with regard to Sorenson’s books in relation to Jesus’ Resurrection and Joseph’s Visions. Furuli’s book was a defense of the New World Translation and of Watchtower interpretation of the Bible; my book, which he did not mention, was a critique of Watchtower interpretation of the Bible including the New World Translation.
Missing from Boylan’s rushed response: (1) any reference to what I explained was the main point of the paragraph he had criticized, (2) any mention of (let alone response to) the lengthy treatment I presented here regarding the plausibility of Moroni’s journey and Sorenson’s defense (the very thing Boylan complained about me not doing in the book!).
Yet Boylan entitled his non-responsive post “Double Standards and Intellectual Laziness.”[1]
NOTE
[1] Robert Boylan, “Double Standards and Intellectual Laziness,” Scriptural Mormonism (blog), May 30, 2020.