The amazing thing about some of the arguments from the critics is that it's so apparent none of their proponents has thought about them for more than five seconds. "The plates would have been too heavy for Joseph to carry them while running." Just find 40-60 pounds of stuff and run around with it for a bit! If someone was even mildly interested in testing the theory, they could have done it in a few minutes. But if one is more interested in lobbing fireballs from an armchair, then all a theory needs is a vague whiff of plausibility for it to become gospel truth.
The historical evidence that they existed is overwhelming. But gemli disdains historical evidence, and his dogmatic assertions have never been slowed down by that disdain in the least.
That Peterson here claims the evidence is "overwhelming" is interesting when put alongside what he says on the new website 'Witnesses Undaunted'...
“Beyond the testimony of the Holy Ghost, the Witnesses represent the only evidence for the Book of Mormon provided by the Lord himself. Candidly examining all substantial arguments, pro and con, this project will argue powerfully for their credibility.”
Daniel C. Peterson
The Interpreter Foundation
With this project Peterson is seeking to drag critics into the weeds. The reality is that the story of the plates and the witnesses to the plates are irrelevant. They weren't used in the production of the Book of Mormon. To test the veracity of the claims about the Book of Mormon one should not examine what a few people said about an object that wasn't used, nor speculate about where the book came from. One need only test the claims against the book itself, as it is objective evidence which can be tested.
Was the book the most correct? From the plethora of amendments and changes, clearly not.
Was the book written at the time it is claimed to have been written? As it contains KJV Bible content verbatim, clearly not.
Nothing anyone else says about the book and where it came from is relevant. On those two points alone it simply and objectively isn't what it is claimed to be. No need to spend $1.2 million on a film that is simply an attempt to get people to look at the weeds. The end.
I'm not a historian but it seems to me that the evidence for the plates may well be strong, if not overwhelming, by the usual standards of historical evidence. It further seems to me, though, that this must be a case where the usual standards of historical evidence do not and should not apply.
Suppose three witnesses all left independent written claims that they had seen a note lying on Otto von Bismarck's desk, in Bismarck's handwriting, saying, "Wilhelm II is butthead." I think that most historians would probably accept that the Iron Chancellor might indeed have scribbled a frustrated note at some point about his young Kaiser and left the note exposed on his desk for a while.
But why would historians accept three witness statements like that as evidence? Just because it's a fixed rule of history that three witness statements always have to count as overwhelming evidence? No, I'm pretty sure that's not why historians would give some credence to the evidence for a Bismarck butthead note. I think it's because it's perfectly plausible that Bismarck might have scribbled a note like that—or at least something along those lines—and there's no plausible reason why any witnesses would make a claim like that, other than that it was true. Nobody was going to gain anything from deliberately lying about this and it would be weird for three people to make the same wild mistake independently.
Even then I doubt historians would be firmly convinced about the butthead note. Maybe one of the witnesses misread a respectful note, told the others, and years later the other two misremembered the episode as something they had seen for themselves. Or maybe someone trying to get Bismarck in trouble either planted the note or made up the story and got two other people in on the lie. The witness statements might be enough to make the reality of the butthead note a respectable theory but they probably still wouldn't make it an accepted historical fact.
My point is that I don't really think historians use any different standards of evidence from plain common sense. I don't think it's any kind of anti-historical sacrilege to call a witness unreliable or to object that a claim is too extraordinary to be accepted on ordinary evidence. I gather that historians don't usually do either of those things, but I'm pretty sure that's just because historians don't spend much time fretting over unlikely possibilities, but rather focus on plausible alternatives for which modest pieces of evidence can tip the balance of probability. Any impression that history is about believing all witnesses is an illusion, I'm pretty sure, induced by only tuning in to historical debates after the unlikely stuff has been filtered out.
Even those who accept that real prophets exist put their incidence in the human population at a few parts per billion. Religious con artists, in contrast, occur hundreds of times more often. So without any firm anti-religious bias at all, one has to consider it plausible that Smith may have been a con artist rather than a prophet. And as soon as deliberate deception is a plausible issue, the standards of evidence that historians normally use become completely irrelevant—not because in this case we should ignore the historians but because the historians would be the first people to tell us that their usual standards don't apply in this case.
I don't think I'm being an anti-historical Philistine in saying that; on the contrary I feel I'm only assuming that historians are intelligent people. There's plenty of pseudo-science out there which applies some parts of scientific thinking—and slams the table hard about how well it does that—but is actually taking those scientific ideas wildly out of context and applying them in ways that no real scientist ever would. The touted rigour is the bamboo radar dish of what Feynman called Cargo Cult science, aping a form without crucial substance. I think there's Cargo Cult history as well.
Well said, Physics Guy. It seems to me that Dr. Peterson is in full-blown Mopologist mode, doing everything he can to insist to his readers that the "Witnesses" are believable (and by extension, and this movie is a "must-see" event). His claims are pretty silly, though. If the "historical evidence" for the plates is "overwhelming," then what about evidence for UFOs? Or Bigfoot? At least with these latter two things, we have photographic and filmic evidence--and you can't say that for the witnesses. Moreover, there are just a handful of people who claimed to have seen the Gold Plates, whereas there are tens of thousands of people who claim to have seen UFOs. Is Dr. Peterson going to start donating 10% of his income to UFO worshippers? Does he concede that the evidence for them is "overwhelming"?
Essentially, his argument with Gemli is little more than petty semantics.
"If, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
I'm not a historian but it seems to me that the evidence for the plates may well be strong, if not overwhelming, by the usual standards of historical evidence....
The rest of your post seems to directly contradict your conclusion that there is 'strong' 'evidence for the plates,' so I am curious why you include that first statement. Do you mean 'plates' as in...a prop in a fraud? If so, there is really not that much evidence, even of a realistic prop, as grindael and others have demonstrated. At most, evidence of a brick or sand masquerading as the prop is all there is. If you mean 'plates' the way the LDS church means it, there is even less evidence. (As in, NONE. In case I am not being clear enough.)
Telling people they can only handle an artifact under a cloth, or aren't allowed to view it with their eyes is a magician's trick. There is absolutely no real reason for behavior like other than fraud. It is evidence of trickery, yes, but hardly evidence that what the magician said was 'under the cloth' actually exists.
...If the "historical evidence" for the plates is "overwhelming," then what about evidence for UFOs? Or Bigfoot? At least with these latter two things, we have photographic and filmic evidence--and you can't say that for the witnesses. Moreover, there are just a handful of people who claimed to have seen the Gold Plates, whereas there are tens of thousands of people who claim to have seen UFOs. Is Dr. Peterson going to start donating 10% of his income to UFO worshippers? Does he concede that the evidence for them is "overwhelming"?
The historical evidence for the existence of Joseph Smith’s plates is overwhelming. Numerous witnesses saw them, felt them, “hefted” them, examined them plate by plate, heard them scrape with a metallic sound against one another. Dozens and dozens of extant statements to that effect, from multiple sources in many venues, are available and easily accessible.
Numerous witnesses you say? Examined you say? Hears them, uh, scrape you say?
In his doubling down, it seems that he is likening the existence of the gold plates to Einstein's theory of relativity. Or maybe a Law and Order episode.
DCP wrote:
Moreover, at any given moment there may be inadequate evidence to prove a true proposition beyond a reasonable doubt.
People who watch Law and Order should be well aware of this: Sometimes there isn’t enough evidence, at least at first, to convict a criminal whom the police “know” to be guilty. And there are plenty of examples in the sciences: Albert Einstein, for instance, published his general theory of relativity in full mathematical detail in 1916, but it wasn’t “proven” until Arthur Stanley Eddington’s observations of a total solar eclipse three years later, in 1919.
I'm only interested in things that comport with reality and that can be demonstrated to be true. Yet the theological claims of all religions are similar, in that they can't be demonstrated to be true while they assert the existence beings and phenomena for which there is no evidence other than stories.
Fortunately for religious leaders, many people don't understand why that's important. If a story is told with vigor and a grim expression, many folks will get big eyes and nod along.
UFO movies haven't done so well, ether.