Evidentiary Stalemate

[_William Schryver]

I have three arguments against the evidentiary stalemate (which I think is rhetorical garbage cooked up by apologists like Terryl "Care Bear" Givens).

1) Let's assume for a moment that there is an exactly equal amount of evidence for and against. So what? You have to be suckered into Pascal's wager to leap from "evidentiary stalemate" to actual belief.

2) The notion of evidentiary stalemate subtly assumes that the apologetic and critical sides of the debate are trying to build separate cases built on evidence. But that is not so. The burden of proof is on the believers -- they are the ones who believe in a celestial teapot that's too small to be seen, that's full of mystery and illogical contradictions. If the evidentiary situation really is what apologists are saying, then they loose: the rational thing to do is not believe their outlandish claims.

3) There's actually a lot of evidence against LDS claims, or at least very fishy stuff that makes perfect sense once viewed from the critical standpoint. The Book of Mormon is the one thing, in my opinion, that apologists have going for them in that critics have a hard time explaining how the book came about. However, once you get past the existence of the book and examine its content, it stinks to high heaven and provides some of the best material for arguments against LDS claims. They would be better off with no evidence than with the burden of explaining how the Book of Mormon could possibly be history.

I think you fail (uncharitably so, I might add) to recognize that a great many believers (be they LDS or non-LDS Christians) are in fact able to perceive what they genuinely regard as evidence that supports their belief – whether that belief is in the Bible or in the Book of Mormon. Intelligent people all, they simply cultivate a side of themselves (the spiritual) that they consider to be as reliable in acquiring “truth” as is the naturalistic, scientific method – each in its own realm.

You want to automatically reduce the question vis-à-vis the Book of Mormon to one of historicity, but that is a term that is applicable only in the realm of the naturalistic/scientific. Very few, if any, believers in the Bible and Book of Mormon base their belief on whether or not archaeologists and anthropologists, in their respective disciplines, support that belief. In fact, millions of people have lived and died comfortable, confident, and comforted by their belief in these scriptures despite the fact that they never knew anything concerning “scientific” support for their faith.

Now, you will no doubt scoff, claiming that their faith is nothing more than entertaining belief in an invisible “celestial teapot.” They (and I) strongly dispute that facile conclusion. Quite simply, we feel that there is a different category of knowledge to which we believe we have access. We don’t pretend that this knowledge can be tested by just anyone; that we can submit our “data” to some “objective” third-party and appeal to them to “confirm” our faith. But that doesn’t make it any less real – at least to those of us who have accumulated a body of what we consider to be persuasive evidence to support our beliefs.

I know it is quite easy for you, coming as you do from an absolute commitment to a naturalistic world view, to dismiss our claims that there is substance to our faith. But I consider that to be a profoundly ignorant, perhaps even arrogant, stance for you to take given that we consider you to be uniquely unqualified to speak to the topic in the first place. You are certainly free to discount, dismiss, and even deride the rationality of those of us who proclaim a sincere faith in revealed scripture, but you do so at the expense of your stature as a true agnostic: you may not consider it possible to know such things, but it is hardly reasonable to authoritatively proclaim that no one else can know.

[_Chap]

I don't think you are hitting the non-believers' main points here.

Book of Mormon (and Book of Abraham and the rest) historicity bear centrally on the claim that we should pay attention to Joseph Smith's religious utterances, which appear to be the basis from which your particular 'spirituality' takes off (correct me if I am wrong). If these texts are not historically veridical, then Joseph Smith was either a deceiver of others or (in some ways sadder) a deceiver of himself. If that is the case, you might just as well base your 'spirituality' on the Lord of the Rings, which is a better read in my view, and forget the Palmyra farm-boy altogether. If they are veridical, then given their mode of production the universe turns upside down for many of us, and we have to seriously consider that there may be a god whose prophet Joseph Smith was.

You claim to have access to a special kind of 'truth', different from the truth accessible to the methods of the natural sciences. Yes, it certainly is different, and one way it is different is that if we set up your 'spiritual truth' against the 'spiritual truth' of a militant Sunni Moslem or the Dalai Lama we have absolutely no way of telling which one of you is right should you disagree about anything. Your kind of 'truth' may be nice and comforting to you in your privacy, but that is where its usefulness ends. It does not give us, as a community of human beings who need to decide in common how to run our world, any reliable basis for making decisions at all.

Frankly I don't see that this kind of thing deserves the name of 'truth' at all, since people other than you have no way of telling whether your 'truth' is true or not. Why don't we just call it your private speculative taste, and get on with more important questions? But somehow I don't think that would satisfy you, would it?

[_Runtu]

I don't think you are hitting the non-believers' main points here.

Book of Mormon (and Book of Abraham and the rest) historicity bear centrally on the claim that we should pay attention to Joseph Smith's religious utterances, which appear to be the basis from which your particular 'spirituality' takes off (correct me if I am wrong). If these texts are not historically veridical, then Joseph Smith was either a deceiver of others or (in some ways sadder) a deceiver of himself. If that is the case, you might just as well base your 'spirituality' on the Lord of the Rings, which is a better read in my view, and forget the Palmyra farm-boy altogether. If they are veridical, then given their mode of production the universe turns upside down for many of us, and we have to seriously consider that there may be a god whose prophet Joseph Smith was.

You claim to have access to a special kind of 'truth', different from the truth accessible to the methods of the natural sciences. Yes, it certainly is different, and one way it is different is that if we set up your 'spiritual truth' against the 'spiritual truth' of a militant Sunni Moslem or the Dalai Lama we have absolutely no way of telling which one of you is right should you disagree about anything. Your kind of 'truth' may be nice and comforting to you in your privacy, but that is where its usefulness ends. It does not give us, as a community of human beings who need to decide in common how to run our world, any reliable basis for making decisions at all.

Frankly I don't see that this kind of thing deserves the name of 'truth' at all, since people other than you have no way of telling whether your 'truth' is true or not. Why don't we just call it your private speculative taste, and get on with more important questions? But somehow I don't think that would satisfy you, would it?

Essentially what Will is saying is that spiritual perception of truth Trump's the naturalistic understanding of truth. It's not necessarily scoffing or arrogant to disagree with that statement.

[_The Dude]

Quite simply, we feel that there is a different category of knowledge to which we believe we have access. We don’t pretend that this knowledge can be tested by just anyone; that we can submit our “data” to some “objective” third-party and appeal to them to “confirm” our faith. But that doesn’t make it any less real – at least to those of us who have accumulated a body of what we consider to be persuasive evidence to support our beliefs.

I was responding to the idea, cooked up by Givens (he's the originator, right?) and now popular with a number of apologists, that there is an equal amount of evidence for and against LDS truth claims, creating a situation where one has to make a faith-based choice to break the stalemate. I wonder what are your thoughts on this? It appears that you see a different picture based on "a whole different category of knowledge". This doesn't suprise me since you are still a true blue chapel Mormon; what need would you have for a shifty rhetorical trick like "evidentiary stalemate"? Mormons just do not talk about their beliefs in such terms when they stand behind the pulpit. No, they talk the way you just did in your full post.

Why don't you get on the phone and bear your testimony to Terryl Givens and give him some support -- his testimony must be flagging if he really thinks there's an equal amount of evidence against his spiritual witness. Right?

[_Coggins7]

You're right, of course, if the Mormon in question rises above all the indoctrination.

My boyfriend began to lose faith just from studying the scriptures. He said it was ironic - the leaders kept pushing them to study the scriptures, and the more he did, the more it sounded like BS. I guess some people just never engage in the mental compartmentalization that some of the rest of us did.

This, of course, relies on a number of unspoken assumptions, not the least of which is the possibility that this boyfriend's perception of what the scriptures actually say, vis-a-vis Church doctrine, may itself be a good distance from what the scriptures actually, in point of fact, do say, or at least seem to say. One must also make an assumption that the person in question actually understands what the Church is saying.

Indeed, both may be the case, in which case his position at the end of his process of analysis, understanding poorly both the scriptures and Church teachings, will be even more muddled and confused than at the first.

[Guest]

For whatever reason, I keep hearing from apologists that there's equal evidence for and against the claims of Mormonism. For example, someone on the other board has quoted Terryl Givens thusly: "We are always provided with sufficient materials out of which to fashion of life of credible conviction or dismissive denial. What we choose to embrace, to be response to, is the purest reflection of who are and what we love." (Terryl Givens, "Lightning Out Of Heaven," BYU Studies (45:1) byustudies.BYU.edu.)

This statement tells us who Givens is and what he loves. That all. It's written from his point of view, from the assumption that conviction to Mormonism is a good thing, regardless of whether it's true or not. Who possesses the "credible conviction," or "dismissive denial" depends on one's point of view. As a critic, I might feel that I studied hard to gain my "credible conviction" that Joseph Smith was a deceiver and that apologists are the one's who respond with "dismissive denial." Why can't one possess a "credible denial" in Given's worldview? Givens's statement begs the question because it assumes that belief in positive and disbelief negative. Whereas if the critics are assumed to be right, that assumption changes the whole perception of who they are. I therefore deem Givens's statement as devoid of any coherent meaning. It's the kind of statement that one expects to hear in Sacrament meeting, not in a scholarly forum.

[_Coggins7]

I have three arguments against the evidentiary stalemate (which I think is rhetorical garbage cooked up by apologists like Terryl "Care Bear" Givens).

1) Let's assume for a moment that there is an exactly equal amount of evidence for and against. So what? You have to be suckered into Pascal's wager to leap from "evidentiary stalemate" to actual belief.

2) The notion of evidentiary stalemate subtly assumes that the apologetic and critical sides of the debate are trying to build separate cases built on evidence. But that is not so. The burden of proof is on the believers -- they are the ones who believe in a celestial teapot that's too small to be seen, that's full of mystery and illogical contradictions. If the evidentiary situation really is what apologists are saying, then they loose: the rational thing to do is not believe their outlandish claims.

3) There's actually a lot of evidence against LDS claims, or at least very fishy stuff that makes perfect sense once viewed from the critical standpoint. The Book of Mormon is the one thing, in my opinion, that apologists have going for them in that critics have a hard time explaining how the book came about. However, once you get past the existence of the book and examine its content, it stinks to high heaven and provides some of the best material for arguments against LDS claims. They would be better off with no evidence than with the burden of explaining how the Book of Mormon could possibly be history.

Left out here, as always, by the secular naturalist, are the positive fundamental assumptions he makes about the universe that are the ground from which he launches his attacks on theism or on the LDS Church proper. The primary reason for this, is, as I think has always been evident, is that the philosophical materialist, while claiming that his world view hails from the lofty realms of empirical science and the burden of scientific evidence, is using such general, broad brush claims about the nature of reliable evidence relative to religious truth claims to sugar coat what, upon closer inspection, is revealed as a number of central preassumptions about the world that, when analyzed a little more carefully, look more and more, not like conservative and careful inferential extrapolations from evidence, or deductive necessity, but philosophical axioms within which his understanding of science is embedded. Axioms are, of course, immune to scientific proof or evidentary analysis. They are a template, such as mathmatical axioms, within which the rest of the intellectual system functions, even though they cannot be demonstrated or validated by that intellectual system.

It is these axioms about the nature of the phenomenal world, and what is possible within it, that create the Dawkins-like hostility to claims to the truth of phenomena that cannot be directly apprehended by human sensory apparatus or through the scientific method, not any logically necessary or sufficient conclusions from scientific study itself.

The reason these axioms are never stated by the metaphysical naturalist is quite simple: were he to do so at the outset, his hostility to religion would be immediately understood to be philosophical, not scientific in nature, and based
on a set of metaphysical assumptions about what science is both saying about the universe and about what it is capable of saying about the universe, as over against what science has actually shown in any given area.

Those metaphysical assumptions may precede his knowledge of science, or they may have been formulated and consolidated as a response to the perceived implications of scientific knowledge. In any event, whenever we see science used as a club to beat religion qua religion, we are seeing scientism at work, not science per se, which has neither the tools nor the prerogative to pontificate upon things beyond its perceptual range, which range are the observable and repeatable mechanistic characteristics of the physical world.

Beyond this realm, and without the Gospel, science is as much cursing a darkness without a candle as any superstitious medieval peasant.

[_Runtu]

The primary reason for this, is, as I think has always been evident, is that the philosophical materialist, while claiming that his world view hails from the lofty realms of empirical science and the burden of scientific evidence, is using such general, broad brush claims about the nature of reliable evidence relative to religious truth claims to sugar coat what, upon closer inspection, is revealed as a number of central preassumptions about the world that, when analyzed a little more carefully, look more and more, not like conservative and careful inferential extrapolations from evidence, or deductive necessity, but philosophical axioms within which his understanding of science is embedded.

Wow, that's one long sentence, Loran.

[_Jersey Girl]

The primary reason for this, is, as I think has always been evident, is that the philosophical materialist, while claiming that his world view hails from the lofty realms of empirical science and the burden of scientific evidence, is using such general, broad brush claims about the nature of reliable evidence relative to religious truth claims to sugar coat what, upon closer inspection, is revealed as a number of central preassumptions about the world that, when analyzed a little more carefully, look more and more, not like conservative and careful inferential extrapolations from evidence, or deductive necessity, but philosophical axioms within which his understanding of science is embedded.

Wow, that's one long sentence, Loran.

Did you count the words? According to harmony I hold the current title of longest sentence on this board.

Jersey Girl
;-)

[_Coggins7]

You claim to have access to a special kind of 'truth', different from the truth accessible to the methods of the natural sciences. Yes, it certainly is different, and one way it is different is that if we set up your 'spiritual truth' against the 'spiritual truth' of a militant Sunni Moslem or the Dalai Lama we have absolutely no way of telling which one of you is right should you disagree about anything. Your kind of 'truth' may be nice and comforting to you in your privacy, but that is where its usefulness ends. It does not give us, as a community of human beings who need to decide in common how to run our world, any reliable basis for making decisions at all.

There are so many problems with this reasoning that its difficult to find an appropriate place to begin its dismemberment. The idea that there is no way to differential between the truth claims of the Dalai Lama, a Muslim fundamentalist, and the Gospel, deserves much more fleshing out that the simple bare assertion that it is so. In any case, LDS teachings, and the scriptures generally, deny the idea outright.

The idea that there is a "community of human beings" out there deciding how to "run our world" is well nigh unintelligible, since no such community exists and the attempt of any single community to "run the world" would be far less than ideal. I have no idea whatever how the teachings of Jesus Christ are not relevant to the "running of the world", or to the "running" any community whatever, beyond just the personal life of the individual.