Is Mormonism so bad?

[Kishkumen]

Sure. We're forced in that way of thinking because there is otherwise very little for us to comfortably rely upon from older eras. And I realize this is just going to be disagreeable on your line of thinking...but...as we know in our modern era, items we'd call evidence from the ancient world, aren't as heavily reliable now because we expect more reliable evidence for claims today, because we have them. When we start to rely on those older types of evidence in our modern world, we come to realize those pieces of evidence, if you will or if we can call them such, aren't very strong and have all too often mislead. That is precisely why the claims of ancient history should be taken with less certainty. We don't need to change the expectation (weighting it as though we should expect less from ancient claims to reach certainty simply because we can't possibly have as much, or the quality of evidence isn't as good), we can instead admit, there is less evidence to substantiate a claim from the ancient world, thus we are less certain. And that is not a bad thing, I don't think. It simply is the most honest way to approach it.

or I think that's how we should view it.

It’s probably more the case that before this hyper-skeptical fad, people were generally not so eager to argue the non-existence of someone, and that was a better state of affairs. Jesus didn’t exist arguments, which make up the bulk of skeptical arguments of this kind, are silly. It is not the case that, thanks to some fringe weirdos, we are all asking whether all these people really existed in the past. No such era of hyper-skepticism has arrived, and it is not around the corner. The evidence we have always accepted for the mere existence of a person has been adequate and continues to be so.

[Philo Sofee]

Have any of us actually read how Carrier discussed Bayes and how it works? Or are we just assuming we know what he meant when using Bayes? I actually thought his book Proving History on the Bayes ideas was really good. True, it was technical, but then again, isn't history and figuring things out technical? I'm just askin is all. It isn't about eliminating subjectivity at all, it is about controlling it. Subjective is in everything we ever do, say or think. To let it go wildly out of control is silly. Bayes is supposed to help us out with that. I think that was how Carrier approached using it in historical sources. True even if we only have just one meager source, we HAVE to START somewhere, and it's going to be subjective automatically. So how to we control even that with meager sources? Using to the best of our ability whatever other evidence there is. That is what Bayes is about, I think.

[Res Ipsa]

As an example, I don't find this argument persuasive:

viewtopic.php?p=14416#p14416

We know that we ended up with a story about a real guy Jesus. The story had its origin at some point in time. It could have been during or shortly after the life of a real guy Jesus. Or it could have been, for example, an urban legend or tall tale that originated during the same period of time. In either case, it seems to me that there is little difference in the relative probabilities of the two hypotheses given that Pilate is part of the story.

Of course, that is not Carrier's argument. Carrier's argument is that there was a mythical being who was turned into a fake historical figure named Jesus.

In any case, I don't agree with you. If you can offer some reasonably close comparanda, that might help. The evidence for Pilate's dealings with Jesus are about as solid as, or solider than, the evidence for other Roman officials' dealings with charismatic Jewish leaders of the first century CE, so I don't know who we would exclude on the basis of this idea that anyone of the others who are not attested by other, more reliable authors or in physical evidence could also be urban legends.

Consider Theudas, who is mentioned in Josephus' Antiquities at 20.97-98:

It came to pass, while Cuspius Fadus was procurator of Judea, that a certain charlatan, whose name was Theudas, persuaded a great part of the people to take their effects with them, and follow him to the Jordan river; for he told them he was a prophet, and that he would, by his own command, divide the river, and afford them an easy passage over it. Many were deluded by his words. However, Fadus did not permit them to make any advantage of his wild attempt, but sent a troop of horsemen out against them. After falling upon them unexpectedly, they slew many of them, and took many of them alive. They also took Theudas alive, cut off his head, and carried it to Jerusalem.

The same character may have been mentioned in Acts 5.36-38:

Men of Israel, be cautious in deciding what to do with these men. Some time ago, Theudas came forward, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him. But he was killed and his whole following was broken up and disappeared. After him came Judas the Galilean at the time of the census; he induced some people to revolt under his leadership, but he too perished and his whole following was scattered.

The chronology of the report in Acts is off, as the speaker, Gamaliel, is making this statement ca. 37, whereas Fadus was procurator between 44 and 46 CE. Would we therefore dismiss Acts as evidence of Theudas, leaving us only Josephus, who might have been writing about an urban legend?

If we adopt the standard being championed here, we have no more reason to trust the reality of Theudas than we do Jesus.

Or perhaps Judas the Galilean (6 CE), mentioned by Josephus in Jewish War 2.8.1:

The territory of Archelaus was now reduced to a province, and Coponius, a Roman of the equestrian order, was sent out as procurator, entrusted by Augustus with full powers, including the infliction of capital punishment. Under his administration, a Galilean, named Judas, incited his countrymen to revolt, upbraiding them as cowards for consenting to pay tribute to the Romans and tolerating mortal masters, after having God for their lord. The man was a sophist who founded a sect of his own, having nothing in common with the others.

He, too, is mentioned in the same passage of Acts.

Right. I'm not trying to make Carrier's argument. I think I expressed doubts about his alternative theory upthread. But I, also, have not read his book, so I've only seen snippets of things he has said over time. I may read the lay person version of OHJ (the one with the terrible title) to try and understand why he thinks his hypothesis is a better fit than the real guy Jesus hypothesis.

I understand the argument from consequences, but it doesn't seem responsive to the point I was trying to make. We have a story about a guy named Jesus. Assume all we know is that he was a Messianic Jew and was sentenced to death by the governing Roman official. Now lets add the name of the Roman official. How does that change the likelihood that Jesus was real? I don't know enough about the relevant era to think of another good example, but historical fiction comes to mind. Stories about fictional characters can be located in real places and involve real people. I think there's a pretty good consensus that the Old Testament is full of stories about fictional people set in real locations. So how do you decide when you are dealing with a heavily mythologized person like Jesus? Or, say, Asclepius? Or Dionysus?

I don't know what to think about the passage from Acts. The story of Theudas appears to be an ordinary recounting of events. Theudas doesn't heal, doesn't raise from the dead, or come back from the dead. He's not a heavily mythologized character, so maybe that's what hangs me up. If I understand you, the story is consistent with the other accounts we have of how the Romans treated rabble rousers.

It's hard for me to account for the passage in Acts. Gamaliel talks about the Theudas as if it were in the past. But if our dating of of the passage is correct, the incident Josephus describes is still in the future. It seems to me that either the passage from Acts is misdated or there were two similar incidents involving rabble rousers named Theudas. He also gets the order of Theudas and Judas wrong, if our other dating is correct. Was Theudas a common name at that time? If so, it would make sense to me to tentatively conclude that there were two incidents involving people named Theudas.

But I don't see how this helps me figure out how to deal with a highly mythologized character. To get to a secular real guy Jesus, we have to discard tons of evidence from the Gospels other religious texts. At what point do we conclude there is likely no baby -- just bath water?

I find this fascinating, and I have no good answers.

[dastardly stem]

Sure. We're forced in that way of thinking because there is otherwise very little for us to comfortably rely upon from older eras. And I realize this is just going to be disagreeable on your line of thinking...but...as we know in our modern era, items we'd call evidence from the ancient world, aren't as heavily reliable now because we expect more reliable evidence for claims today, because we have them. When we start to rely on those older types of evidence in our modern world, we come to realize those pieces of evidence, if you will or if we can call them such, aren't very strong and have all too often mislead. That is precisely why the claims of ancient history should be taken with less certainty. We don't need to change the expectation (weighting it as though we should expect less from ancient claims to reach certainty simply because we can't possibly have as much, or the quality of evidence isn't as good), we can instead admit, there is less evidence to substantiate a claim from the ancient world, thus we are less certain. And that is not a bad thing, I don't think. It simply is the most honest way to approach it.

or I think that's how we should view it.

It’s probably more the case that before this hyper-skeptical fad, people were generally not so eager to argue the non-existence of someone, and that was a better state of affairs. Jesus didn’t exist arguments, which make up the bulk of skeptical arguments of this kind, are silly. It is not the case that, thanks to some fringe weirdos, we are all asking whether all these people really existed in the past. No such era of hyper-skepticism has arrived, and it is not around the corner. The evidence we have always accepted for the mere existence of a person has been adequate and continues to be so.

Yes challenging the status quo can be difficult. When T Thompson dared challenge the historicity of Abraham, it certainly wasn't just religion that took offense, but actual scholars who were upset that someone would offer the challenge, would upset the majority. Today though the existence of Abraham, if debated, isn't so contentious, even if disagreed upon because its grown a lot safer to say Abraham didn't live.

No doubt people will continue to be upset by those who dare dig deep enough into the question of whether Jesus lived because it really does impact the questions previously asked and assumptively agreed upon, or so it seems. It really does go back to people wanting the questions left untouched because the traditional approached worked. But as I see it, we can't seriously stay put and pretend. We have to push and challenge.

On the evidence question, as it pertains to those challenges, we are far better off in drawing one line as the standard goal for verifying and validating claims. We certainly should not set different expectations because older eras produced less data and thus less evidence to support the claims. We should instead accept that less support means less liklehoo, less certainty. And we ought to accept that that's not a bad thing. We simply don't know.

[Manetho]

We have a story about a guy named Jesus. Assume all we know is that he was a Messianic Jew and was sentenced to death by the governing Roman official. Now lets add the name of the Roman official. How does that change the likelihood that Jesus was real? I don't know enough about the relevant era to think of another good example, but historical fiction comes to mind. Stories about fictional characters can be located in real places and involve real people. I think there's a pretty good consensus that the Old Testament is full of stories about fictional people set in real locations. So how do you decide when you are dealing with a heavily mythologized person like Jesus? Or, say, Asclepius? Or Dionysus?

I saved some pieces of a previous discussion on this topic back in 2016, so I'll paste it here. I don't know enough about the analysis of ancient history myself, so I'm simply deferring to Symmachus' expertise:

The way people invent a story in one culture will not be the same that people invent it in another, so if we are claiming it was invented in culture X, the manner of its invention should match what we know of story invention in that culture. The process of inventing a story has to happen within certain acceptable parameters in order to establish a threshold of plausibility for that story. Those parameters and that threshold of plausibility are culturally specific. For example, if somebody today were going to invent a story set in antiquity, they would know that, in order to establish its plausibility, they would have to get the historical context right. If there were anachronisms, that would be a sign that it was made up and it would lose its plausibility. This is why I can't accept the Book of Mormon. But for many early readers of that book, the horizon of plausibility was very different, and for modern Mormons it's different still (basically, you just have to feel good about it while reading it).

Story invention in antiquity also had thresholds of plausibility that any story-inventor had to meet. Lack of anachronisms was not one of them. For one thing, the conception of massive cultural change over time is not something that existed as it does for us, and history was viewed cyclically rather than linearly, so anachronism did not pose problems and thus did not diminish plausibility. As a result, modern historians can detect when a story might be invented in an otherwise sober text from antiquity because they can track the anachronisms (Ammianus Marcellinus's Gallic excursus is a great example). We should therefore expect a made up story to contain a host of anachronisms, but the gospels contain very few and these are not wild anachronisms (which actually helps us date them relative to each other and relative to other events). Adding accurate historical details would not help meet the threshold of plausibility, since anachronism was irrelevant.

But a more fundamental fact is that these invented stories were derived deductively from a given set of premises. In that sense, there often were valid reasons for thinking gods had a human past, even if not sound reasons (to steal your distinction again). And even when, say, ancient historians are asserting that their account is true, they almost never use any kind of evidence in our sense to support that, and when they dispute with other historians, they do so like Plutarch does: they make some kind of moral or ethical argument, not an evidence-based one. There is nothing at all like a recourse to a body of evidence, the way historiography has functioned since the mid 19th century. That is an important point because, in order for the mythicist scenario to be plausible, they have to explain why the story-inventors went through all the trouble to compile and include accurate information for the first century context, especially when that information would have been out of context in the second century and in some cases quite inaccessible. Their scenario implies that whoever made up these stories was trying to meet a a modern threshold of probability.

So saying "made up" is not quite accurate; rather these stories were "thought up." Euhemerism (following the traditional definition of that philosophical position and not the idiosyncratic and tautological one used by Carrier) is basically deductive in that sense. So, for example, etymology, or more accurately pseudo-etymology, was a very common way of Euhemerizing divine beings or heroes (but always in the distant past). If the name of the divine or heroic being was similar to some mundane word, it was perfectly plausible that there was some connection. Etiological stories were another common one. The first chapters of Genesis are teeming with this stuff. When we turn to the Gospels, though, the only place we have material like that is in the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, both of which are the most obviously made up stories about Jesus—and both of which contain the most easily identifiable anachronisms. That's not a coincidence. But then both the anachronisms and the usual modes of story-invention diminish, and meanwhile the testable historical details increase in frequency. The way that it was invented matters, and a story invented to humanize a god in antiquity should have at the very least some etymology, etiology, and anachronism.

It is very curious that these elements (and others) are so little represented in the gospels, then, but on the other hand the amount of accurate detail in the gospels is astonishing for an invented text: about how the Roman government worked in Palestine in first century (which was radically different from how it worked in the second century!), the sheer existence of the synoptic problem, the nuances of the Jewish communities in the first century that didn't exist in the second—one could go on, but the basic point must be grasped that the amount and level of detail in the gospels would mean, if Carrier is right, there must have been at least one researcher (probably more) with a curiously anachronistic post-enlightenment sense of historiography who was endowed with philological skills unparalleled in antiquity. The closest match I can think is someone like Jerome, but even he lacks the kind of modern methodological rigor that this would require, not to mention a devotion to accuracy that most ancient historians didn't even have, let alone somebody of less than elite education.

[Res Ipsa]

Thanks, Manetho. That’s very helpful. I wondered if story invention itself had identifiable cultural characteristics.

[Gadianton]

But we're in a position to end the cycle of this repeated groundhog day. Religion anchored humans for millennia past, but thanks to past sacrifices we live in a world where human reason can triumph. It'd be humanity's greatest disrespect to squander the opportunities our fore-fathers gave us. I don't think we do it by focusing on one religion, or pretend that the child is worse for following the example of its parent. We do not win by cowering to the pain, however real it is, of ignorant offense. Religion does what religion does. Its part of our human world. The question we need to ask ourselves is do we let it persist

I'm just getting to this thread. I've been really busy lately with general matters of higher education that go on at a prestigious university.

I pretty much agree, especially with your point that religion is a subset of a greater problem, but there are a few details worth considering.

I had an ancient phil. teacher who did his Phd on the transition from revelation to reason as it happened, at or around 600 BC (IRC). He assured us that this was complete, yet, here we are, in 2021 CE and religion is retrenching in terms of right-wing propaganda and seems to be stronger than ever. WTF?

Consider this: the war between humans and Neanderthals waged for, apparently, 100,000 years. One possibility is far in the future, we look back and note that it took 10,000 years to squash religion and consider it a quick victory. And we really don't want to push the timetable too fast. my belief is:

higher probability of God --> lower probability of God's relevance to day-to-day life.
religion is better in the short term and increasingly bad in the long term, but atheism is questionable in the short term, and better in the long term.

secularism is a nice compromise for atheism. You know how Lou Midgley has ranted about the death of spirit within the Christian halls of Europe? He's right, and this is a good thing. We don't need unhinged fanatics like him running, exercising faith in stupid things and causing problems.

One possibility is a Star Trek world where we leave religion in the dust, albeit, without the religious elements that Star Trek accidentally infuses into its alleged advanced culture. Unfortunately, another possibility, the stronger in my mind, is that we never rid ourselves of religion.

Essentially: suppose we populate other worlds. At the very least, finite light speed will prevent humanity in the stars from staying in close contact, and we we'll be forced to be an emergent species much like a beehive (if we aren't already). In a beehive, each individual bee knows only the job its marked to do. this is kind of like it's religion. A bee's obsession with its individual duty might be irrational, but, it's very effective, and its rational when looking at from the perspective of the hive -- but no bee can understand the hive. If this holds true for humanity, then nobody can really say for sure what aspects of human society are irrational when considered from the perspective of the hive (a perspective that any of us are barred from ever having). And here's the thing: the most powerful kinds of processing is parallel processing. Keeping individual processors synchronized with global information is very costly. Ignorance is literally bliss. A.I. (as in neural networks) become powerful by tackling problems the way ants make ant hills.

[Kishkumen]

if Carrier is right, there must have been at least one researcher (probably more) with a curiously anachronistic post-enlightenment sense of historiography who was endowed with philological skills unparalleled in antiquity. The closest match I can think is someone like Jerome, but even he lacks the kind of modern methodological rigor that this would require, not to mention a devotion to accuracy that most ancient historians didn't even have, let alone somebody of less than elite education.

That is the heart of the matter, in my opinion, and it is exactly what makes Carrier’s entire enterprise look crazy.

[Physics Guy]

Now to clarify, though, even finding corroborating evidence for the stories Paul wrote, may not prove Josh lived, nor that any story he included about Josh were true. It could be we mount enough evidence to, for all intents and purposes, prove Josh lived. But it also may be we end up with snippets of evidence which on the sum doesn't rise to the level of proving Josh lived. We may end up with a high probability that he lived. And that may or may not provide evidence for the events in the stories.

I think it must be impossible ever to prove that Jesus lived. History doesn't really deal in proof, as far as I can tell. Even the most far-fetched conspiracy theory pseudo history is going to be impossible to rule out with certainty.

In different lines of work there are different standards of evidence for deciding to go with something as if it were known to be true, at least until something forces you to reconsider. In pure math the standards are pretty dang high; just how high they are I'm not even sure, but they're higher than they are in theoretical physics, where we're often content with stuff that strikes mathematicians as the merest hand-waving. We figure that it'll be okay if we're wrong—the experiment will catch our mistake and we'll fix it up then, when we have experimental clues about what might have gone wrong, rather than rack our brains forever trying to imagine in advance what we might have overlooked.

In criminal law they want things proved "beyond a reasonable doubt". I read a novel once in which a judge explained to a jury what "reasonable" doubt meant: the kind of doubt you would have over an ordinary matter of business, not the crazy what-ifs that come in the middle of the night. I guess it must really be something like that. In civil law I understand that the standard is lower, a mere "preponderance of evidence". Juries decide which side seems more likely to be true, even if it's not more likely by all that much.

I reckon history must be somewhere between the criminal and civil law standards, at least most of the time. So I don't think it's at all unlikely that the evidence for Jesus's existence is comfortably above the reasonable threshold in history.

That doesn't mean at all that there is historical evidence of any of Jesus's miracles. Or at least it doesn't mean that the evidence is anywhere near anybody's threshold for believing in miracles for practical purposes in the sense of taking them for granted as a working assumption. They might count as evidence in the technical Bayesian sense that it's more likely for a real miracle to leave a story than for a story to emerge out of nothing, though I think even that is debatable, but there's just no way that any old book can be convincing evidence of such extraordinary claims.

There are Christian apologists who try to claim that the gospels are authentic historical documents, which in a sense and up to a point they surely are, but then dot dot dot they somehow count as proof of the Resurrection or walking on water, because authentic historical evidence rah. The kind of historical dispute in which the gospels have substantial weight is not at all the kind of dispute involved in miracles, though. So this is real bait-and-switch. It's like saying that since we all have to agree this is a pretty good five-iron it's bound be good against an M16. In different lines of work there are different standards.

[Physics Guy]

Have any of us actually read how Carrier discussed Bayes and how it works? Or are we just assuming we know what he meant when using Bayes? I actually thought his book Proving History on the Bayes ideas was really good. True, it was technical, but then again, isn't history and figuring things out technical?

The problem for me is that there is one scripture whose authority I do not doubt: Ecclesiastes 12:12, "of the making of many books there is no end." There's too much stuff to read, so I just never plunge into anything longer than a few pages unless I'm convinced in advance that it's likely to be worthwhile.

What convinces me is a summary. Boil the gist of the longer work down into a few lucid lines, and if it sounds worthwhile at that level, I might consider reading the longer version, or at least skimming it. A lot of the time the summary alone will be enough to make me nod: it sounds good but it sounds as though I've already gotten most of the goodness just from the summary and it's not clear what more I'll gain from the book.

If the summary makes the book sound like a waste of time, I'm really not going to read. And I'm afraid I'm really not susceptible to assertions that it may not sound great in brief form but you have to engage with the material to appreciate it, read the whole book and you'll agree that it's great. Naw, I'm convinced that every good book, barring none, has to have a good summary. If the summary is bad then the book can't be good. It's just an axiom with me.

The only way that I can see for a long book to be better than its dumb-sounding summary is the way in which a magic act is better when the lights are low and you're sitting twenty yards from the stage and you've had a few beers. Given context control—the ability to direct the reader's or spectator's attention to what you want them to see—you can make almost anything look good. That's not what makes a really good book, though. There should be a clear takeaway message that you can repeat to someone else in a summary and it's a point that makes sense.

So with Carrier the summary I've heard is basically, "Bayesian history, and it seems thorough and careful." But I'm afraid I completely disregard how thorough and careful it seems. Any book can do that. I hear "Bayesian history" and it translates to me as "statistics with sample size one" and I can't see how it's worth reading. What might grab me would be something like this: "Bayesian history, which of course sounds absurd, but it's not, because X." Then if the X made me think, Hey, that's a point I hadn't considered, then I might read the book. At least skim it.