We’re continuing our conversation with Dr. Brian Hales on Book of Mormon authorship. What are some naturalistic explanations are there to explain how Joseph Smith could have written the Book of Mormon? Brian will tackle a few more theories, such as automatic writing, as well as Bill Davis recent book, “Visions in a Seer Stone.” Are those good explanations?
Brian: The fourth theory is really interesting. We call it the automatic writing theory. Now, automatic writing, there’s actually two flavors. Psychologists, particularly around 1920, were doing experimenting where they would take a person and what the psychologist wants to do is find things that are in a person’s unconscious. They’ve been stuffed there because they’re too hard to deal with by the individual. And if you can get them out carefully and talk about them, you can increase a person’s mental health. They’ll feel better, less anxiety and things. So, they want to get stuff out of the unconscious part of their brain. They would isolate their arms and get them kind of really relaxed, and then their arm would just spontaneously write. That’s automatic writing. That’s the most clinical version. Then, the words that are written would be used in therapy to try to help the person with things that have been stuffed into their unconscious mind.
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Brian: The next one is a storyteller theory. I have an article coming out in Interpreter that compares Joseph Smith to professional storytellers. Now, they can tell stories day after day after day, or one big, long story that could take five or six days to put together. To make a long story short, Rick, all they’re doing is memorizing formulas that are sentences with words that can be plugged in here and there. So, they memorize these and as the story goes along, they just have to plug in a word here or a word there. The rest of it’s all memorized and comes out very much as a routine for them. They’re called formula patterns, formula systems. When you write down or make a transcript of the stories that are told this way, you can see the pattern right there in the text. We look at the Book of Mormon, there are no patterns like that. I mean, there’s chiasmus and things, but the whole book isn’t out of a chiasm. And honestly, trying to create a chiasm in real time, doesn’t necessarily make it easier, I think it makes it more difficult. So, the storytelling theory hasn’t gotten a lot of traction. Bill Davis mentioned it in his Ph.D. dissertation. I mention Bill Davis because he wrote the book of Visions in a Seer Stone.
GT: Right.
Brian: I admire what Bill is trying to do.
GT: Well, I was going to ask, is this pattern the same thing as laying down heads that Bill mentions in his book or is it different?
Brian: Well, it’s interesting. Bill is trying to give us an explanation of what’s going on in Joseph’s head. While he’s dictating the stream of words that become the Book of Mormon. Nobody else has done this. My friend, Dan Vogel, has published this 715-page biography.[1] He never once tries to tell us how Joseph was able to create all of these final draft sentences. He just assumed Joseph could do it. Bill is trying to go in and explain what is going on cognitively and what kind of thoughts Joseph was having, as he’s dictating. I admire Bill for that. In fact, in his Ph.D. dissertation, he gives us a couple of views because he does talk about professional storytellers right at the end of his book briefly, but the primary theory that he promotes—I’m sorry, in his Ph.D. dissertation. He briefly mentions professional storytellers. But, in his book, Visions in a Seer Stone, he focuses on an idea that laying down heads is how professionals, revivalist preachers, were able to tell their very long, two hour, if you will, sermons, but then they could come back the next day and give a two hour sermon and give another one, and they’re doing it by laying down heads. You know what that means, but it…
GT: Yeah, I’ve read some of Bill’s book. The idea here, I think, is you kind of have a little bit of an outline, and then the preacher refers back to that outline. Each of those points is called a head, and then he can just expound on a certain head until he gets to the next one, and then he follows. I know Bill, at least from what I’ve read, I’m about halfway through Bill’s book, said, basically, a lot of preachers did this. Also, with the Book of Mormon, if you look at the introduction, the original 1830 version, not our version, but it would give a summary of what was going to happen next. So, that summary was an outline that Joseph Smith followed. Am I saying that right?
Brian: Yeah. I think Bill brings up a pretty good point, except that he also insists in his book that this process was something that didn’t really exist until the 19th century. In a response that I wrote, a book review, it was published in Interpreter, I just went through and showed how Josephus did this. Aristotle talked about having a summary statement, and then going into the details after, which would be laying down a head and then going through. This is something that’s as old as oratory, and writing, as near as I could tell. It’s not an area of my expertise, but I just picked up my book of Josephus and then found the originals, the earliest versions of this. People were using heads anytime people were writing. Not everybody used them, but somebody would saying that it’s good to tell people what you’re going to tell them, and then you tell them, and then sometimes you go back and tell them what you told them. I mean, it’s just common oratory. So, I don’t think that’s a real strong argument. But, the real problem with this, and I call this the oral performance theory. It’s the idea that Joseph just became a really good orator, a really good revivalist preacher, kind of guy. Then he used those skills to produce the stream of words. The problem with this is that the revivalist preachers that could do that weren’t 23-year-old farmers. These were people who were well-seasoned. They’d been preaching on the circuit for a long time. They had immersed themselves in the material. They had nearly memorized the Bible, neither of which we can show Joseph having done, if we go to the historical record, and then having practiced for many times, they’re able to get up and just speak using the skills that a very well-established orator would use. We just can’t find that Joseph Smith had those skills. For that reason, this really, I don’t think, is a very strong argument. Whether somebody could just use those skills to create a 270,000-word book at all, is not something that’s been shown. But, even on a daily basis, it’s hard to say. Joseph wasn’t known to have even preached a single sermon prior to the Church being organized. This is not somebody who’s practicing in front of an audience, either using storytelling skills, or oratory skills.
GT: I’m just reminded of my interview with Michael Quinn. He said that, especially, Sidney Rigdon, was a much more eloquent speaker, especially in the early Church, than Joseph was and a lot of people have said that Joseph’s sermons were pathetic.
[1] The book is called “Making of a Prophet” and can be purchased at https://amzn.to/3wLDFec
What do you think of Bill Davis’ theory about laying down heads? Do you agree with Brian or Bill?
What skills were needed to write the Book of Mormon? Brian’s going to dig into Joseph Smith’s background. Did Joseph have the education and oral skills to write the Book of Mormon?
GT: One of the one of the things [Colby Townsend] mentioned was illiterate in Joseph Smith’s day didn’t have the same connotation that it has in our day. In our day, somebody who’s illiterate cannot read, cannot write. They’re illiterate. They have no reading or writing skills. Whereas, in Joseph Smith’s day, that’s not what illiterate meant. It meant more of, he was uncultured. He hadn’t read Shakespeare. He hadn’t read other things. But he had read the Bible and he clearly knew the Bible extremely well, and he could write. So, illiterate in Joseph Smith’s day doesn’t have the same connotation as it does in our day. Is that your understanding as well?
Brian: I think I read that same post or same paper.
GT: It was an interview with Colby.
Brian: Oh, or I listened to your interview. That’s what it was, so very good. I don’t think we need to get hung up on one word, illiterate. I imagine everything that Colby researches is accurate, but people weren’t just saying he’s illiterate. They’re saying he’s ignorant, that he was poorly educated, not were very well educated. If you look at what’s out there, you said Joseph knew the Bible very well. We have two eyewitnesses who said he didn’t. Now those eyewitnesses are just cast aside by the naturalists because they don’t like what they’re saying. But they were there. It’s Emma and David Whitmer who are telling us Joseph didn’t know the Bible that well. So, these claims—there’s contradictory evidence, except we really don’t have anybody saying he was very much knowledgeable of the Bible. It’s an assumption based upon the Book of Mormon, by the naturalists. You can’t go to the historical record and find somebody who said in 1829, Joseph was an expert on the Bible. There are no quotes that say that, so we have to be careful there.
Brian: But, there’s several who said Joseph didn’t go to school when he could have. He could write. We know that he wrote one letter. He dictated some revelations before the Book of Mormon was finished. But, as far as having any real experience with this, you cannot document it from the historical record. If we look at his oratory skills, then, one of the most popular quotations is that in 1823, Lucy Mack Smith remembered Joseph would have stories for the family. He occasionally would tell them about the ancient inhabitants of America. He would talk about the animals that they rode and their clothing, which unfortunately, those details aren’t in the Book of Mormon. She was remembering inaccurately, if he is in fact, talking about the Book of Mormon and what was going to be in it. But the problem is, nobody else remembers Joseph telling these stories. He wasn’t getting a Ph.D. in composition and rhetoric and working as a professional storyteller. He’s telling his family some stories that, in his context, and in Lucy’s context, came from the angel Moroni. So, to say that because he’s doing this, therefore, he could dictate the Book of Mormon six years later, is really not justified. It’s a leap of logic that deserves attention by anybody who wants to go there. And nobody really does. They just say he was telling stories in 1823, therefore, he could dictate the Book of Mormon. Again, [that’s] something that deserves attention.
Do you think Joseph had the skills to write the Book of Mormon without God’s help?
Wheat & Tares 
Isn’t the Book of Mormon the actual best evidence that Joseph Smith *could* in fact do this ;-)? I get what Brian is saying (looking for another example of JS doing this before the BoM) but seems funny to me that we are discounting the BoM itself as evidence of his abilities.
Elisa is 100% correct. We have the evidence before us. We have the source documents (KJV, View of the Hebrews, The Late War, etc.).
We also have evidence that Joseph Smith was skilled in many ways beyond writing. He invented a religion that is still relatively strong today. Indeed his name is known among millions of peoples in far away lands.
It’s one thing to disbelief the Church’s truth claims. But let’s give credit where credit is due. Joseph Smith was very very accomplished and his writing was just the beginning of that story.
Did Joseph have the skills (and resources) to write the book without God’s help? Yes, I think so. It reads as a 19th century book using a biblical style/prose, has 19th century assumptions and beliefs, seems to rely on 19th century sermons and issues of the day. Joseph had access to a library, hung out with other mystical and religious types, was in a family very wrapped up with religion and the conflicts of doctrine at that time. It makes perfect sense that a person who lives in this environment and has a propensity for seeking spiritual truths could bring himself to the point of authoring a book. Recall that the earliest editions of the BoM listed Joseph Smith as “Author.”
I often find it amazing that our entire religious foundation is based upon the creation of a single book. And the church itself (GBH, JRH, BoM Intro, to name just a few) has adopted an all-or-nothing approach. It’s the keystone of our religion, evidence that Joseph Smith was either God’s prophet on earth, or a “charlatan” (using Holland’s word).
I find that amazing because the book itself is not that remarkable. The doctrine it contained was not revolutionary for the time. The characters and stories were patterned after other scriptural motifs. There is a tremendous amount of content from the KJ Bible copied verbatim. I am not saying that the BoM does not or cannot inspire, or guide someone to the teachings of Jesus Christ. That seems to be beyond question given the effect it has had on its many readers through the years.
But it seems to me that if Joseph had not claimed to have translated the book from gold plates written by ancient prophets, and he just said, “This is my meditation on inhabitants of the Americas long ago,” probably no one would have cared, at least not to the point of establishing a church and propounding a restored gospel. Would his writing “skill” be studied at length? I tend to doubt it.
We do not give the book so much attention strictly because of WHAT it contains. We give it attention and scrutiny primarily because of claims on HOW it was created. Our religion’s beginning was not a result of the founding text in and of itself. We have always been a religion based on personalities, leaders, claims of being God’s people. Joseph’s greatest skill was not writing, it was attracting and keeping followers in his claims of restored Christianity.
Joseph Smith had the skills to dictate the Book of Mormon. Of course. He was an extraordinary human being who managed to pull off what very few in human history do: launch a religious movement that has lasted for nearly 200 years and has experienced incredible growth and amassed billions in wealth. Every so often these types of extraordinary human beings come about and do amazing things. Consider Srinavasa Ramanujan, born in a poor small Indian village who educated himself about math using old textbooks. In spite of no formal education, he came up with mathematical theorems in his teens that today’s mathematicians continue to use to study black holes. Joseph Smith was, in the words of Harold Bloom, “a religious genius.” What he did was extraordinary but not impossible.
I have yet to hear anything that appears in the Book of Mormon or the supposed Joseph Smith “revelations” that is so impressive tat Joseph Smith couldn’t have known about or can’t be explained as relatively insignificant coincidence. And yet so many of the apologists just grasp at straws when it comes to these couldn’t-have-known-about-isms. I remember apologists obsessing about how Joseph Smith couldn’t have possibly known about guerrilla warfare. Seriously? The American revolutionaries famously used guerrilla tactics against the British military during the Revolutionary War. The Native Americans in Joseph Smith’s environ used guerrilla tactics against white settlers. And I’m to believe that Joseph Smith couldn’t have possibly known about guerrilla warfare? Please.
Apologists also continue to obsess about the supposed Civil War prophecy in D&C. And yet a few days before JS dictates this “revelation” we find similar concerns of war coming out of South Carolina expressed in the local Painesville Telegraph published not far from Kirtland.
As it stands, the idea that ancient American Hebrews believed in and actually saw Jesus Christ and left a record about their Christian belief system that a 19th-century farm boy found and translated in spite of not knowing the language that it was written in is leaps and bounds more of an extraordinary claim than the idea that Joseph Smith just invented the Book of Mormon himself. On those grounds I stick with the latter claim.
Counselor and John W really get at the heart of the matter. The plain truth is that a lot of Mormon doctrine as expounded in the B of M, though it may be presented in a kind of spectacular way, isn’t really that new or original. Same goes for the temple and how heavily Smith (and others) appropriated the Masonic ceremonies.
As far as the B of M, I’ve always believed it to be a 19th century work. It’s clearly a work embedded in its time and, to me at least, simply doesn’t have the feel of a work of ancient scripture. Of course, that’s merely a subjective response on my part. The larger questions of who wrote it and how it came to be are interesting, but as John W notes, apologists are so desperate to “prove” what can’t actually be proven that they just end up muddying the water. I’m not current on theories about Book of Mormon composition, but someone (or a few someones, like, say Sidney Rigdon and Oliver Cowdery along with Joseph Smith) who’s familiar with the Bible and with the other books mentioned above and who’s reasonably sharp and literate, could probably come up with something like the B of M. It is in some ways a remarkable book, but it has still always seemed to me to be a product of its time. The mental gymnastics that some apologists go through to prove its “truth” are, to my mind, simply not credible.
@john w, yes. It’s almost funny – why is the burden of proof on the naysayers again? “You have to prove that JS could have written this WITHOUT a set of actual Golden plates and an actual angel Moroni and an actual urimm and thummim (whoops, we mean peepstone and hat) by showing us that he’d already done it, otherwise we’ll have to go with the angel theory.” Nope, proof doesn’t work that way.
The Qu’uran. The Kitab.. The Urantia Book. A Course In Miracles.
For a poorly educated contemporary: Samuel Clemens.
Ditto all of the above ~
I often marvel at the nature and magnitude of what Joseph brought out and built in a very short time.
But there is a qualitative element – much of the theology is an inch deep and often contradicts itself. It’s good for platitudes, but just don’t think about it too hard.
When considering Joseph’s genius, I’m also amazed at how many of the 30 or so professionally identified mind control techniques he taught, practiced, and included in the Mormon scriptures. Subsequent leaders have since perfected them and continually create new mechanisms for control (one can say opportunities for loyalty if it makes them feel better).
I think one thing that Joseph Smith was really good at, for which there is ample evidence, but which apologists are not willing to concede, was tricking people. I think JS deliberately fooled people into thinking that he was not as sharp as he actually was. And he wanted it that way, for it worked to his advantage in claiming that he was a prophet and had this amazing gift that could only be explained by divine revelation and not merit. For instance, Emma records in her journal how Joseph Smith didn’t even know that Jerusalem had walls around it. Of course he knew. He lived in an environment of people obsessed with Bible teachings and Biblical history. If Emma knew, JS most certainly knew. What happened is that JS tricked Emma into thinking that he wasn’t all that bright. This was a common pattern. I imagine Muhammad did a similar thing among his followers in the Arabian Peninsula to gain their approval and make them think that he was more amazing than he actually was. He claimed he was “ummi” (illiterate) and not capable through his own powers of bringing forth the Qur’an. In reality, Muhammad just had an above average imagination and could recite poetry at great length and rhythm in ways that the average person could not.
Bear in mind that JS came to fame/infamy by claiming he could detect where buried Spanish treasure was located by “glass-looking.” He persuaded the local Josiah Stowell that he possessed such powers, so much that Stowell hired him. Heck he persuaded his whole entire family that he had amazing powers. He feigned stupidity to his advantage. He probably also had a memory that was just far better than the average person’s. He didn’t need to read the Bible all the time to know what it said. He just needed to hear it read to him and he remembered what they were, sometimes verbatim. We know autistic savants such as Kim Peak (the Rainman) and others can memorize things just by a quick glance at them. There are humans who have amazing memories like this, but they are rare. I think JS was, while not autistic savant, capable of above average memory. And his brain’s ability to retain and process information far above the average person’s ability to do so made him appear to have these amazing powers. I wonder if JS’s amazing memory and preoccupation with things the average person is not preoccupied with also may have made him appear kind of dumb. Such is the case with autistic savants. They don’t act normal. And as such people assume they’re “stupid.” Far from it. They have among the most impressive minds in humanity. They just don’t think like the average person.
Nice discussion in the post. Guess I’ll have to find a copy of the Davis book and read it.
Ironic that it’s JS believers who talk as if Joseph is uneducated, unskilled, and unimaginative — so he couldn’t possibly write a book like the BoM. While it’s JS doubters who talk as if Joseph is, in fact, bright and skilled and quite capable of composing the BoM.
@Dave B, you could read the book, although I found that the some of the interviews he did (can’t remember if it was Mormon Stories or RFM) did as good a job covering the content as the book.
Dave, what’s interesting is that in the 19th century, Joseph’s critics all tried to say he plagiarized the Book of Mormon, because he was too dumb to do it himself. Critics of today now do a 180–“well of course he was smart enough to do this. Just Look at the BoM.” In a way, it’s changing the goalposts from a dumb JS, to a near-genius JS who is pulling in a multitude of sources (Bible, Spaulding, Ethan Smith, the Late War, 19th century Indian tales) and compiling them into a coherent narrative like he was using a tons of sources and a word processor and stealing from the likes of Adam Clarke and Ethan Smith. That’s a pretty interesting change. (Though to be sure, I still have Spalding Conspiracy theorists comment on my YouTube page.)
Rick B: That’s really not fair. We are talking about different critics, since none of the critics that accused JS of bad form in the 19th century are alive today. The critics of today have updated their analysis based on the evidence at hand.
But. I’ll bite. The Church (same church then as now) is changing the narrative. It’s not a translation, it’s a revelation. It’s not gold plates and a rosetta stone, it’s a magic stone in a hat. The plates are no longer required at all.
But hey, believers gotta believe, amiright?
I personally apply Occam’s razor. Which requires less fantasy to be plausible: angels and gold plates carried thousands of miles by the last Nephite whose DNA and civilization left no trace, or the work of an imaginative and smart young man (of which, there are other examples in the world of this very thing). I’m in the latter camp.
It is easy to assert that the Book of Mormon itself is the best evidence that Joseph could have done it. It is difficult to understand how he could have done it. None of the critics have really dealt with the evidence and scholarship that has been done on the Book of Mormon through the years. But that is really okay. Critics have got to disbelieve. They are in the Dale Morgan mold who said “I can accept any explanation except the one the Church gives.”
That belief that Joseph was somehow a genius does not explain any of the many features of the Book of Mormon that have been unearthed by scholars. But it does not matter. There is enough there to raise serious questions about Joseph’s ability to be able to write the Book of Mormon to for anyone looking for answers without an a priori set of beliefs. And there is enough that is not known or has not been found to raise serious questions as to the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.
That leaves the seeker to have to follow the advice that Moroni leaves us with: “I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.”
For those interested, there is an article on the Interpreter, “Notes on Book of Mormon Heads” by Stephen O. Smoot, that presents information on the Book of Mormon heads, which pretty much seems to agree with Brian Hales.
Glenn
Rick B, you’re generalizing critics of JS. They’re not all cut from the same cloth. Those who propose the Rigdon-Spaulding hypothesis and those who claim JS made it up have never quite fully gotten along.
Glenn, 1) there is a lot more money and job positions available to those defending the church’s truth claims to research and publish. The church has over $100 billion. Consequently, apologetic publications number in the hundreds of thousands of pages. There is no possible way that all that can be addressed. Nor is there enough money or interest to do so. What should be looked into is how convincing apologists have been about Book of Mormon historicity to their non-Mormon academic colleagues in their respective fields. I know of no non-Mormon academe in a relevant field (such as Mesoamerican history) who has accepted that Christianity existed in the pre-Columbian Americas. And apologetics has been a thing for over 70 years. You’d think there would some major discovery by now. Something that would gain traction outside Mormonism. But nope. Apologetics is and always has been about creating a smokescreen to slow attrition among the believing Mormon community due to historical issues. It has never been about making larger contributions to various academic disciplines, such as history or anthropology.
2) I’ve read Smoot. He seems to be just rehashing old stuff. A lot of the newer generation of apologists nowadays are either are the Adam Miller types who turn everything into a metaphor, or they’re the Book of Mormon Central guys (like Smoot) who haven’t actually done much on-ground original research or established any sort of reputation outside Mormonism and just say the same sort of stuff Nibley was saying. Also bear in mind that Smoot is employed at BYU, where his freedom to express the full range of ideas about the Book of Mormon are severely restricted. If he says anything that remotely suggests doubt in Joseph Smith’s prophethood, he’ll be axed.
The allusions without citing one example happens all the time and it drives me nuts. Glenn, what features of the BoM have scholars unearthed?
“Critics have got to disbelieve.” False. Critics believe all sorts of stuff that can be substantiated with evidence. They are critical to claims that aren’t supported by evidence. Hence why we call them critics and not disbelievers. It’s not that hard.
The Church apologists start with the notion that the Church is true and work backwards to build their case. Hence my comment that believers gotta believe. But critics start from the notion of “is claim X correct or incorrect?” That distinction is everything.
“That belief that Joseph was somehow a genius does not explain any of the many features of the Book of Mormon that have been unearthed by scholars.” Such as?
I thought Bill Davis’s interview on the “So You Want to Talk About Mormonism” podcast was a nice discussion on this subject: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/so-you-want-to-talk-about-mormonism/id1567709884?i=1000538920037
Hales’s response regarding automatic writing is ironic because he accuses naturalists of invoking it as “an explanation that is not an explanation” in an effort to “kick the can down the road,” but one could argue that this is exactly what Hales is doing by simply claiming that it isn’t an explanation and that naturalists must somehow have a psychological theory to explain the mechanics of the phenomenon of automatic writing in order to invoke it a a potential explanation for the production of the Book of Mormon. It’s not clear at all why Hales makes this assertion. The fact the automatic writing simple is a thing and that it is capable of rapidly producing lengthy works like the Book of Mormon is sufficient enough on its own without having to also account for how automatic writing occurs. It’s also ironic that Hales is readily willing to attribute automatic writing to Hiram Page’s revelations but assert that it in no way could account for Joseph Smith’s. The motivated double standard is glaring.
Hales has repeatedly shown that he either does not understand Davis’s thesis or is willing to intentionally mischaracterize it to serve as a strawman for his apologetic arguments. Hales claims that there is no evidence that Smith had been immersed in or had the opportunity to develop the oratory skills necessary to extemporarily produce the oral performance of the Book of Mormon from a skeletal outline of heads. Davis identifies in his book several examples that Hales apparently ignores, while also showing that the skills to engage in said activity were not particularly specialized. Davis also highlights the the general oral culture of the time was far more robust that ours today, which Hales simply ignores. Telling and listening to oral story telling, lectures, or debates was a common feature of 19th century America that we do not appreciate today because our culture as changed with the advent of radio, television, etc.
Hales also repeatedly asserts that there is not historical evidence that Smith was a sufficiently skilled orator or storyteller in order to produce the Book of Mormon. He references Lucy Mack Smith’s account and claims that because it is the only account of Smith’s storytelling ability that it is insufficient historical documentation. He says, “But the problem is, nobody else remembers Joseph telling these stories. He wasn’t getting a Ph.D. in composition and rhetoric and working as a professional storyteller.” What this reveals is the unrealistic standards of historical documentation or of individual experience that Hales demands in order for accept the possibility that Smith may have been sufficiently skilled as an orator or storyteller to produce the stories in the Book of Mormon. Hales seems to believe that unless numerous people very explicitly stated that Smith was a highly proficient orator who received highly specialized training in composition and rhetoric, then there is no possible way Smith could have been skilled enough to orally produce the Book of Mormon. There are many reasons why this is an unreasonable standard, and it’s telling that Hales does not apply this same standard of documentation to other areas of history that he wants to accept. Hales should know better given his interactions with the Joseph Fought Polygamy crowd and their equally implausibly demands of contemporary historical documentation.
There are numerous other problems with Hales’s comments on Davis’s book, but I think David addressed them best in his interview, linked at the top of this reply. I hope that Rick Bennett will consider having an interview with Bill Davis about his book and allow him a chance to respond to Brian Hales’s comments. I think it would be a very interesting and illuminating discussion.
Yes, I plan to have Bill Davis on the podcast in a few months.