Simon Southerton wrote:The two-faced apologists are in a bind. If they do nothing then Meldrum and Sessions take over the airwaves and the Church goes full nutjob creationist. If the apologists fight back it will only add fuel to the fire by exposing them as evil evolutionists. I guess that's the price the church pays for its deceitful backdoor approach.
Nicely put in a nutshell.
There are certainly plenty of crackpots, and fans of crackpots, having all kinds of different religious beliefs—or none. I still have a feeling that Mormonism is a bit more susceptible to this kind of thing than other viewpoints, though. I see a lot of similarity in behavior between Joseph Smith and pseudoscientists.
Other religious leaders that spring to my mind may have had the chutzpah to declare new teachings but it seems to me that at least they were forthright about it. Whatever it was they had to say, it seems to me that they tried to make it as clear as possible, so that everyone could understand it and judge it for themselves on whatever merit they saw in it. If you need to take something on faith, they ask you openly to decide for yourself that you will take it on faith. Real scientific innovators are similarly forthright, I think, just at another end of the evidence spectrum where there's less need for faith—and all the supporting evidence is readily accessible. You can check for yourself.
The mark of a crackpot, in contrast, seems to me to be a certain reliance on invisible props. Instead of appealing directly to your own judgement of their case on its merits, or depending on evidence that you can check for yourself, they appeal to a supporting authority that isn't really accessible.
Perhaps the crackpot's evidence includes no single completely convincing example, but it is convincing by virtue of its sheer volume—which is conveniently too large for anyone to actually check. So this vast weight of evidence that supports the crackpot so firmly is in practical terms out of sight.
Or perhaps there was this lab test that was done a few years ago, in some remote lab. It was absolutely rigorous; it established the crackpot's theory beyond any question; the crackpot cites it again and again. No-one is ever going to be competent to replicate the procedure and none of the original equipment or data is available for inspection. It's an invisible prop.
It seems to me that there's almost always something like that, with a crackpot; something that supports the crackpot's claim but that cannot be checked.
Joseph Smith could have said something like, "Folks, I've had this most awesome dream. There were these Israelites here in America, and their religion was this upgraded Christianity that I really think we should all adopt. Here's how it goes." To me that would have been more in the style of Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed, letting the message speak for itself without relying on props. Instead Smith had to lean on golden plates and a visible angel and a quasi-translation from Reformed Egyptian, all of which supposedly established Smith's role as prophet but all of which were inaccessible. He's propped up with invisible props, in way that smells crackpot to me.