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From the r/Mormon subreddit:

“Generally, you can avoid saying "well, this is a forest," if you spend all your time staring at bark through a microscope and telling yourself that the pattern in bark is similar to the pattern in an elephant's hide.” (self.Mormon)

— John Hamer (Community of Christ) when asked his thoughts on FairMormon apologetics

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mormon/comment ... this_is_a/

I spotted that this morning too. Absolutely perfect, if you ask me.

So much perfection.

Love it!

I can't help but wonder if the Mopologists will even comprehend its significance....

Philo Sofee wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 12, 2020 11:52 pm

I can't help but wonder if the Mopologists will even comprehend its significance....

They would see it as an opportunity to hammer Hamer.

It would be interesting if some thoughtful Mormon would discuss this suggestion of Hamer's. Do Mormons think about whether their scholarly investigations of details might be distracting them from a bigger picture that really doesn't support their faith? Do they recognize that not-seeing-the-forest could in principle happen, that it's something for which they should be watching out because it's a real hazard?

Mormon apologists do often think about some related tree-versus-forest-like issues. For example they like to suggest that skeptics of Mormonism set up questions in biased ways that effectively rule out Mormon answers from the start. Since skeptics typically don't acknowledge that their questions are unfair like that, the Mormon apologists are implying that skeptical bias is a forest that skeptics aren't seeing when they focus on particular issues. At least I think that's what people like Hamblin or Christensen were doing when they tried to meet Jenkins's demand for concrete evidence with complaints about Jenkins's standards of evidence in general. If you can't get your king out of check you can argue that chess is just the wrong game. To me that's an effort to zoom the scale out from tree to forest.

Another forest-like Mormon approach is to argue that the cumulative weight of a lot circumstantial correspondences ought to count as substantial evidence even if no single piece of evidence is strong. That's about as close as possible to explicitly saying, "The trees are all iffy but the forest is impressive, so make sure you see the forest and not just any one tree." Similar to this is to seek warrant in the philosophy of science for treating seemingly grave counter-evidence as mere puzzles that can be resolved within an unchanged paradigm by ingenuity. Beautiful forests are bound to have a few ugly trees.

It seems as though appeals to forests over trees, or trees over forests, are often made by both believers and skeptics. If anyone thinks they have a great tree they want to hug that great tree; if the tree looks shaky they look around at the forest. But maybe what I'm missing from the Mormon side is more recognition of the possibility that the forest might not actually be beautiful. It seems as though Mormon forest/tree arguments always assume that the bigger picture is favorable to Mormonism, so that Mormons who are momentarily perturbed by any hostile fact can always safely withdraw into the big picture like the Russian armies avoiding Napoleon, knowing that winter is coming.

What if it's the other way round? What if the Mormons are only seeing an illusory forest and the real big picture is anything but favorable to Mormonism? Isn't that at least a possibility in principle? Why are Mormons sure that it's not so?

How do Mormons think that one should in general go about trying to tell whether a bigger picture to which one is appealing is illusory? Are there any rules or guidelines for how to do that kind of checking? Why should we expect those rules or guidelines to work?

I'd like to hear some Mormon answers to those questions. Because I'm interested in anybody's answers to those questions.

To give my own answer, I think that a genuine big picture ought to be big and it ought to be a picture.

By being big I mean that the same big picture should fit well as a context around a lot of different specific cases. There might be a few ugly or iffy trees in the forest, but there should be a lot of fine healthy trees that fit into your picture of the forest as typical specimens.

They shouldn't be cherry trees, either—that is, you shouldn't have to rely on cherry-picked examples fetched from all over a wide range of circumstances in order to gather a decent-looking number of individual cases to which your big-picture set of assumptions applies well. Instead you should be surrounded with loads of cases that fit into your big picture as typical examples—enough cases that you can well afford to just let anybody else select them for you at random, without constantly having to argue away awkward cases. There may be apparent exceptions and puzzles but these will really be few compared to the typical cases, even when people who don't agree with you a priori pick the cases at random.

And then by saying that a big picture should be a picture I mean that it should be something reasonably simple and coherent, and not just a huge cobbled-together collection of arbitrary ad-hoc rules.

The big picture should be something that, if you show it to people first of all before getting into specific cases, then it dramatically reduces the amount of effort you have to spend describing each individual case. It does this first of all because it does accurately tell you a lot of things that are common to most of the individual cases, so you can say it once for all of them and then not have to repeat it for each of them. That's the "big" part. And then secondly the big picture saves effort in describing individual cases because the big picture is dramatically briefer than simply listing all the individual cases. It's a short executive summary of common themes, not a six-hunded-page book that is simply billed as a summary. That's the "picture" part.

So for instance the idea that Joseph Smith was a con man is a viable big picture for Mormonism by my standards. You can articulate the idea of Smith being a con man quite briefly, and then you find that it makes a ton of details about early Mormonism fall into place and make sense naturally. So many things that Smith said and did make immediate sense if you think of him as a fraud.

The idea that Smith was a genuine prophet does not work nearly so well as a big picture for Mormonism, it seems to me, because the concept of prophethood that is easy to communicate to most people keeps jarringly failing to fit lots of details about early Mormonism. If you want to maintain that Smith was nonetheless a true prophet, I think you have to keep revising what you mean by "prophet" in increasingly convoluted ways. You have to keep saying, "Well he wasn't that kind of prophet," and refining your definition of the unfamiliar kind of prophet that he was, until your notion of Smith as a prophet is nothing more than attaching the arbitrary label of "prophet" to the full account of every particular thing that Joseph Smith said or did. So Smith as prophet either fails to be big or it fails to be a picture.

How do you defend an unsavory character like Joseph Smith or Brigham Young? Isolate the problems one by one and claim you conquered them with a cheerleading section of mopologist PhD's who will say anything, like Early Modern English or LGT or disappearing DNA. Just having any answer will do for some. Being able to point to a 900 page book or a nonsense site like Fairmormon works some of the time. This is why Jeremy Runnells had to go. He made a big list of problems that was readable and understandable that showed the big picture of how false the literal Mormon claims are.

Dr Exiled wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 13, 2020 6:21 pm

How do you defend an unsavory character like Joseph Smith or Brigham Young? Isolate the problems one by one and claim you conquered them with a cheerleading section of mopologist Ph.D.'s who will say anything, like Early Modern English or LGT or disappearing DNA. Just having any answer will do for some. Being able to point to a 900 page book or a nonsense site like Fairmormon works some of the time. This is why Jeremy Runnells had to go. He made a big list of problems that was readable and understandable that showed the big picture of how false the literal Mormon claims are.

It's interesting to look at the piechart that FAIRmormon uses to illustrate the big picture of their response to the CES Letter:



56% of the letter, by their own analysis (not likely to be unbiased ) consists of material that they cannot say is error or falsehood.
They criticise Runnells for not producing a scholarly work, but even then they, the "professionals", are forced to concede that over half of what he says is true or at least arguable.

Seems to me that the "amateur" has them beaten.