Long lives of the antedeluvian patriarchs

[_Themis]

Again as per science, scientific theories can be falsified and religious theories can be falsified. My problem is that religion as a broad category just doesn't seem the sort of entity that is falsifiable. That might be all you mean - if so I apologize for misunderstanding you. However theories one could characterize as about religion certainly seem verifiable or falsifiable.

It depends on a the religious claim. Most LDS core truth claims have already been falsified. Apologia is just members who are aware of much of these evidences falsifying it, but cannot accept the result. Some of us can, even though for some it takes years to decades. Hopefully you are on the path.

[Guest]

It depends on a the religious claim. Most LDS core truth claims have already been falsified. Apologia is just members who are aware of much of these evidences falsifying it, but cannot accept the result. Some of us can, even though for some it takes years to decades. Hopefully you are on the path.

You've changed the subject.

(And as I think we've discussed before what I've noticed most here mean by "falsifying LDS claims" is taking a particular indefensible reading and then saying that is the only possible reading)

[_ClarkGoble]

It just logic, and most TBM's understand this.

Umm. No. Logic deals with the structure of an argument. The question here is typically with the premises.

[_Themis]

It depends on a the religious claim. Most LDS core truth claims have already been falsified. Apologia is just members who are aware of much of these evidences falsifying it, but cannot accept the result. Some of us can, even though for some it takes years to decades. Hopefully you are on the path.

You've changed the subject.

(And as I think we've discussed before what I've noticed most here mean by "falsifying LDS claims" is taking a particular indefensible reading and then saying that is the only possible reading)

You are the one trying to create the indefensible reading. I at least go by what Joseph and the church actually claim, which is the most sensible way. You are the one trying to make God into terrible translator. Why? Because of all the evidence supporting 19th century fiction. We don't see good evidence this God exists, so you create a new one. Not because of evidence this God exists, but because the Mormon God doesn't. This God is indistinguishable from no God. Why believe in a this God when no God is just the same?

[_ClarkGoble]

You are the one trying to create the indefensible reading. I at least go by what Joseph and the church actually claim, which is the most sensible way. You are the one trying to make God into terrible translator. Why? Because of all the evidence supporting 19th century fiction. We don't see good evidence this God exists, so you create a new one. Not because of evidence this God exists, but because the Mormon God doesn't. This God is indistinguishable from no God. Why believe in a this God when no God is just the same?

Some might even say I'm going where the evidence leads me. You don't want to admit that there are defensible readings because then that would throw into turmoil the conclusions you've come to. I'm not the one cutting off evidence here.

I'm certainly not saying people must believe what I believe. Far from it. I'm simply saying there's a defensible way to read the texts that's compatible with Mormonism, with public evidence, and then with the personal experiences I've had. In making that claim I'm certainly not saying I can explain everything. But I simply think my readings defensible. (Which of course is not to say they must be correct)

[_spotlight]

My problem is that religion as a broad category just doesn't seem the sort of entity that is falsifiable.

Then there is no way to know that any particular religious viewpoint is true or not, it is merely presumed to be so.
But that is not to say that we cannot yet come to conclusions why particular viewpoints are not tenable. Take last Thursdayism as an example. One might claim that a god created everything last Thursday, people with false memories etc. Most would shrug their shoulders and say well that position is unfalsifiable and so is of no interest. But that's not really the case when we consider that DNA which determines the physical characteristics of all lifeforms has the peculiar distinction that the form given to it in an arbitrary creation event happens to coincide with the form that it would have, had it evolved on its own over billions of years in a manner that all forms of life descend from a common ancester. That would be such a remarkeable coincidence that it would constitute evidence against Last Thursdayism or the Young Earth Creationists position in particular.

Again, I think you're making a category error not clearly distinguishing "religion" (whatever you mean by that) from particular theories about religion.

Only if we are miscommunicating which seems possible. Are you not defending the truth claims (at least some of them) that the LDS church is the restored ancient church in modern times? If not then I have misunderstood what I've read of your posts. By religion I am refering primarily to the truth claims of the LDS church but one could apply that to the truth claims of any particular church as well. So if a church claims that there was a global flood of Noah that actually historically happened that is the sort of thing that I say can be falsified and the church along with it. If however all you are going to do is prune your tree of faith and hold on to the stump and claim it is real or the truth when all that is wrong with the twigs and branches are removed then you have an unfalsifiable position and it is of little interest to engage with you if that is your strategy of defending your church.

(And as I think we've discussed before what I've noticed most here mean by "falsifying LDS claims" is taking a particular indefensible reading and then saying that is the only possible reading)

Some might even say I'm going where the evidence leads me.

Who would they be? And what evidence are you referring to? If you are merely speculating that there are other ways to view spiritual matters that don't conflict with science that does not constitute evidence.

You don't want to admit that there are defensible readings because then that would throw into turmoil the conclusions you've come to. I'm not the one cutting off evidence here.

Supposition and "what ifs" are not evidence. If you have evidence, present your evidence. I seem to have missed it.

[_Themis]

Some might even say I'm going where the evidence leads me. You don't want to admit that there are defensible readings because then that would throw into turmoil the conclusions you've come to. I'm not the one cutting off evidence here.

I'm certainly not saying people must believe what I believe. Far from it. I'm simply saying there's a defensible way to read the texts that's compatible with Mormonism, with public evidence, and then with the personal experiences I've had. In making that claim I'm certainly not saying I can explain everything. But I simply think my readings defensible. (Which of course is not to say they must be correct)

What evidence?

[_Physics Guy]

But how is revelation a natural process? It seems to me you're trying to avoid God in the picture unless you think there was no divine inspiration at all to say Isaiah.

There is inspiration in the content of the text, though not necessarily in its literal meaning. The production process is natural. The Tower of Babel is in the Bible because someone wrote down an ancient myth, not because an eyewitness account was preserved, or because God dictated the story to Moses. The Tower of Babel is also in the Bible because this particular myth has durable meaning which God wanted later generations to know. I thought this was the same kind of line you were taking in arguing that later editorial landlubbers must have garbled the Jaredite voyage. If not, what's the difference in your view?

So you don't believe the 10 commandments were really given by God?

I do; I'm just not sure they were really given in the form of divinely pre-engraved stone tablets that were dumped on Moses. That account reads to me like a myth.

An even better example would be the interpretation of dreams by a prophet. By your logic why didn't God just speak clearly?

I can perhaps see your point that a miraculous interpretation of an obscure dream would be a mixture of the kind I find weird, combining natural and miraculous channels. I don't really see prophetic interpretation as either miraculous or infallible, however. Interpreting dreams is as much a natural psychological process as having dreams, and expecting shamans to interpret weird dreams is a common social convention. Sigmund Freud could interpret dreams and he was no prophet. The inspiration of the prophet-interpreter consists in the fact that his interpretive shoe seemed to fit, at least in retrospect. Interpretation is not a miraculous channel like angel-delivered gold plates.

I just don't see the difference myself. I'm fine with Isaiah being inspired yet fallible just as I'm fine with Joseph Smith giving an inspired translation yet fallible in the process. To me the styles are exactly the same.

The two inspirations may be similar in their fallibility, but I see a world of difference between three sets of ancient writings being collated by later redactors, and a man in the 19th century receiving solid metal plates from an angel. The end results may be similar, but the means are radically different in style.

Do you really not see this?

[_Fence Sitter]

This thread has taken an interesting turn into the nature of religious evidence that reminded me of these passages from a letter I read the other night written in 1948 from Dale Morgan to S.A. Burgess who was a research assistant and staff member of the Historian's office of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ (RLDS) in Independence Missouri.

Morgan is trying to explain to Burgess how difficult it is for Morgan to interact with the different Mormon sects.

I received on Monday your letter of August 5, and since then I have been pondering how best to answer you. For it is not easy to answer you, just as it is not easy to answer any of the representatives of the several Mormon or L.D.S. churches with whom I have had discussions of one kind and another; it is not easy, because none of [p.161] you can even agree very far among yourselves, and yet all of you I give credit for being honest and sincere, men of integrity who hold to their beliefs and their ways of thinking for the best of reasons, yet who hold beliefs which cannot be reconciled with each other. If I accept any part of what one of these men says, I am immediately challenged by some other among them. Whether one is regarded as “friendly” or not by one of these men depends upon the extent to which one accepts his views. And if one attempts to steer an impartial course among them, all of them are likely to regard him as “unfriendly.”

Morgan then goes on to explain why he thinks that "facts" can be examined from religious claims and when that is appropriate.

You may say to me that religious experience is of such nature that it does not necessarily reflect itself in the kind of facts that I, as a materialistic historian, must deal with. You may say this and I will have no quarrel with you. But religious experience in general, certainly Mormonism as it is proselyted, is not content with a purely metaphysical existence and meaning. It begins to “prove” itself by “facts,” by material processes, correspondences, and relationships and to justify itself by these “facts.” When religion removes from the metaphysical to the material plane, however, it subjects itself to material criteria. As it lays claim to “facts,” so it becomes embodied in “facts,” and those facts may be taken up and individually evaluated by even the most materialistic of historians without legitimate objection by the religion or its adherents. If you tell me that you know God lives, I have no argument with you. If you tell me that religious experience is the most rewarding experience of humankind, I do not necessarily argue with you, though the question is open to debate. But if you tell me that the Book of Mormon is “proved” by modem archaeological findings, or that the Book of Mormon explains the material objects dug up by modern archaeology more satisfactorily than any other hypothesis that has been advanced, I have every right to bring materialistic disciplines to bear on what you tell me—in other words, to argue with you—and it will not satisfy me to have you say, for example, that you have evidence these things axe true because Joseph Smith once took up a human thigh bone from a mound and said that it was a part of a “prehistoric” man named Zelf.

[_ClarkGoble]

Then there is no way to know that any particular religious viewpoint is true or not, it is merely presumed to be so.

But that is not to say that we cannot yet come to conclusions why particular viewpoints are not tenable.

I think we can know in the sense of having justified belief if the belief is true. We might not have absolute access to truth of course, but the justification principle is important.

My sense is that we agree over a lot more than we disagree. Some positions seem to either not be able to explain evidence in a convincing fashion (say the variant on young earth creationism you mention). The question is always what do we need to explain and what are the competing theories are are judging. In a certain sense it is that judging between competing theories that matters most.

Again, I think you're making a category error not clearly distinguishing "religion" (whatever you mean by that) from particular theories about religion.

Only if we are miscommunicating which seems possible. Are you not defending the truth claims (at least some of them) that the LDS church is the restored ancient church in modern times?

I think thus far in all the discussions I've only either criticized some critiques of the Mormon view for not looking at the various ways of reading the texts - some that are much more compatible with the texts to be explained - and I've defended the view that one can rationally believe Mormonism. I don't think I've defended ultimate truth claims on any particular religious claim. At least not that I can recall.

The primary reason for that is that if we are judging claims just based upon the evidence we all agree upon, I don't think the Mormon view is the most defensible view. If we go only by public strongly established evidence then one ought be an unbeliever - at best a deist, atheist or agnostic of some sort. To my mind it's only when we expand past those agreed upon facts that one then starts seeing Mormonism as the correct view. However since we don't all share those facts, there's really no way in this forum we could even establish them. I've hopefully been fairly upfront about that.

The best I can do is either talk in more general philosophical terms of how in theory private experience could ground religious knowledge or simply point out that certain critiques are really not as strong as their proponents think.

So if a church claims that there was a global flood of Noah that actually historically happened that is the sort of thing that I say can be falsified and the church along with it.

If one accepts fallibilism and rejects de facto inerrancy though then I don't see how falsifying a global flood could possibly falsify the church. This is the point I've been getting at from the beginning. The critiques involve highly questionable premises. Premises I certainly don't share.

If however all you are going to do is prune your tree of faith and hold on to the stump and claim it is real or the truth when all that is wrong with the twigs and branches are removed then you have an unfalsifiable position and it is of little interest to engage with you if that is your strategy of defending your church.

I think you missed the point I was making with my analogy to science. If a scientific theory is discarded it doesn't mean science has been falsified. It's a category error to even think science is something falsifiable because science isn't a theory but something much broader. In the same way it's a category error to think we can falsify religion as if religion were only a collection of theories.

If you are merely speculating that there are other ways to view spiritual matters that don't conflict with science that does not constitute evidence.

Certainly not. But I've not made the claim I have evidence I can give you that Mormonism is true. Indeed I think I've been pretty forthright in arguing the opposite. I'll be completely up front and say Mormonism is not something one can know passively. That is you can't simply sit back and wait for people to give you evidence for you such that it'd be irrational to disbelieve.

But that's true of many things in life. Merely pointing out areas where that sort of passive knowledge is possible is ultimately beside the point.