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Often its basic argument (where it even has one) can be reduced to this: 1. Archaeological investigations have turned up artifacts indicating a high degree of Native American civilization and bearing a vague resemblance to items mentioned in the Book of Mormon. 2. Ergo, the science of archaeology supports the claims made by the Book of Mormon.

Cheesman concludes with the familiar Mormon claim that "The ruins of the ancient Americans stand as monuments to a people who had once known God and had rejected him." Yet his book demonstrates nothing of the sort. The best he can really claim, as he admits, is that "nothing has ever been found to disprove" the claims made by the BOM.

Of course, noting that available evidence fails to disprove a proposition is not at all the same as proving the proposition. If it were, I could easily prove to you that little green men live on the surface of Alpha Centauri.

What makes me sad is not that there's a man like Cheesman out there whose religious convictions have blinded him to logic. What's sad is that there's an institution out there like Brigham Young University, which can have a guy like Cheesman on its faculty and still expect to be taken seriously.