Thanks for posting the link to Taves' paper. I don't remember reading it before. It does something that I think is very important: places Joseph Smith in the context of the beliefs of his family. If you go broader, the zeitgeist of the time and locations where he grew up included supernatural ideas that most today would dismiss out of hand. Spiritualism as a major belief system was about to be launched in the U.S by, of all things, two girls who had learned how to make odd noises with their toes. I personally think that the term "presentism" has been generally overused to the point of becoming cliché, but this is one situation where I think it is critically important. When it comes to the supernatural, we simply cannot assume that the folks in that time and place thought about it the way we do today. I think it's certainly possible that Smith and the movement he started fall somewhere between "the truth" and "intentional con."tagriffy wrote: ↑Wed Sep 27, 2023 4:36 amIn the case of the Three and Eight Witnesses, I think it is more likely than not (in the case of the Three, far more likely than not) that their experiences were spiritual in nature. To my knowledge, no one has claimed to have seen the plates in natural circumstances. And yes, we have Emma's story of moving the plates around to do her housecleaning. So I'm inclined to believe Joseph had something, but have come to no firm conclusion what that was. Perhaps Vogel is right and Joseph fabricated the plates. Perhaps Joseph found something that he took to be the plates. Either way, perhaps something like Ann Taves' materialization thesis is going on. I'm not adverse to any of these explanations and in fact am rather drawn to Taves' theory.
One of the problems we have in evaluating the evidence we have is that it is rarely presented chronologically by the date of the evidence itself -- as opposed to the events the evidence describes. The first time I encountered the former was in one of Quinn's books, I think. I grew up learning the story of the origins of the church chronologically by event: the first vision, the persecution, the angel moroni, the finding of the gold plates, translating the Book of Mormon, the reservation of the priesthood, etc. But, in my opinion, when the evidence is arranged by the date of the evidence itself, the picture of the events is very, very different. What looks like the kind of orderly restoration of authority and structure comes a much more ad hoc, reactive set of events that is later revised into the coherent narrative I learned in the church.
The various stories about Joseph and the plates are not contemporaneous recollections of events as they happened. They are a mish mash of sometimes contradictory accounts recalled sometimes decades after the events. Remember how quickly Rusty Nelson's emergency landing on a flight to St. George transformed into a near-death experience? That's what our brains do with stories. There is no reliable way to sort through what actually did and did not happen -- especially given that almost all of the accounts come from highly biased sources (for and against Smith).
The main problem with MG 2.0's argument is that, approaching the issue as a good Bayesian, the facts we have are what we would expect to find in a con involving fake plates. The key fact is preventing third parties from examining the plates in detail. Joseph never simply brought the plates into a room where the plates were sitting on a table and said "take a look." Smith carefully controlled the context in which anyone was permitted to be exposed to the plates. Either there was some physical impediment to inspection, like a cloth or a container, or the plates were presented in a spiritual context that makes what was witnessed, at a minimum, highly ambiguous.
Whether Smith was telling the truth or lying through his teeth about the plates, he had the same strong incentive to keep the plates hidden from third parties. If the latter, close inspection of the plates would reveal concrete evidence that he was a liar and a con man. The efforts to prevent inspection of the plates is evidence that it was important to Smith that prevent such inspection -- not that the plates were genuine.
in my opinion, the whole argument about "supernatural evidence" is a red herring. The legal definition of evidence is pretty straightforward and common sense. I'm not going to quote from the rules, but the concept is this: Fact A is evidence of fact B if Fact A being true makes it more likely than not that Fact B is true. But evidence is not an on and off switch, and the weight of any given piece of evidence is critical. The quality of the evidence is much more important than its quantity. Piles of extremely weak evidence do not overcome one solid piece of evidence that goes the other way. That's why DNA evidence gets prisoners on death row released.
At any rate. no one in this thread has presented "supernatural evidence." Witness testimony is ordinary evidence and always has to be evaluated for credibility. All I see is "supernatural" being deployed as an ad hoc Trump card. Whatever that is, it isn't a serious attempt to evaluate evidence.
