If plates then God

[Res Ipsa]

Who?

[drumdude]

Oh come on he’s a famous Hollywood director and producer now!

[MG 2.0]

There are so many excellent thoughtful comments in this thread.

Well, thanks!

The last number of posts seem to bypass the factual testimony of Emma Smith.

https://rsc.BYU.edu/sites/default/files ... 0smith.pdf

After everything that Emma had been through, we still have this testimony from her later life.

It’s interesting that besides the three and the eight witnesses the only other witnesses that claimed to have actually seen the plates were women. Mary Whitmer, etc.

This isn’t unusual as one peruses the scriptures. It seems as though God may trust women more than men at certain times and under certain conditions.

One might ask the question why?

But that’s another discussion.

Was Emma a ‘one off’ and can comfortably be ignored while moving on…such has been done for the last couple of pages or so?

You suggested through your link earlier that the ‘plates’ may have been a tile brick. You seemed to have ignored Emma’s testimony.

Why?

And then others moved on after showing your link to be untrustworthy and yet, essentially, are making arguments that the plates weren’t real or that they were ‘materializations’.

Emma’s testimony doesn’t seem to allow for that.

Anyway, I agree, this has been an interesting thread with many interesting comments. Res Ipsa’s commentary on why Joseph would have gone to so much trouble to protect the plates doesn’t quite do it for me.

Gosh, the persecution became so intense he and Emma had to hide the plates in a barrel of beans and move to a different location where they were less likely to undergo constant surveillance.

Some of these ‘evidences’ seem to be overlooked and/or reinterpreted to steer away from the possibility that they might indeed be based in truth.

If the plates were real that opens up some possibilities that some folks would rather not entertain.

Regards,
MG

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

MG has a tile brick for a brain. Stupid hick.

- Doc

[drumdude]

There are so many excellent thoughtful comments in this thread.

Well, thanks!

The last number of posts seem to bypass the factual testimony of Emma Smith.

https://rsc.BYU.edu/sites/default/files ... 0smith.pdf

After everything that Emma had been through, we still have this testimony from her later life.

It’s interesting that besides the three and the eight witnesses the only other witnesses that claimed to have actually seen the plates were women. Mary Whitmer, etc.

This isn’t unusual as one peruses the scriptures. It seems as though God may trust women more than men at certain times and under certain conditions.

One might ask the question why?

But that’s another discussion.

Was Emma a ‘one off’ and can comfortably be ignored while moving on…such has been done for the last couple of pages or so?

You suggested through your link earlier that the ‘plates’ may have been a tile brick. You seemed to have ignored Emma’s testimony.

Why?

And then others moved on after showing your link to be untrustworthy and yet, essentially, are making arguments that the plates weren’t real or that they were ‘materializations’.

Emma’s testimony doesn’t seem to allow for that.

Anyway, I agree, this has been an interesting thread with many interesting comments. Res Ipsa’s commentary on why Joseph would have gone to so much trouble to protect the plates doesn’t quite do it for me.

Gosh, the persecution became so intense he and Emma had to hide the plates in a barrel of beans and move to a different location where they were less likely to undergo constant surveillance.

Some of these ‘evidences’ seem to be overlooked and/or reinterpreted to steer away from the possibility that they might indeed be based in truth.

If the plates were real that opens up some possibilities that some folks would rather not entertain.

Regards,
MG

Res Ipsa’s method of sorting evidence by the date it was created, rather than cherry picking and placing it into the convenient traditional church narrative, seems the most powerful form of separating truth and fiction.

When you step back and view it as a grand whole in that order, you do indeed get a religion that was fabricated ad-hoc. Just what a skeptic would expect.

It doesn’t convince your typical unbiased observer.

Just like the stories of L Ron Hubbard aren’t particularly convincing to you and other Mormons.

[Marcus]

There are so many excellent thoughtful comments in this thread.

Well, thanks!

The last number of posts seem to bypass the factual testimony of Emma Smith...

No they didn't. Her statement that she did not actually see what Smith had hidden was fully addressed.

[huckelberry]

On the one hand there is the large disparity between the Book of Mormon history and the historical information we have about the New World. There is the dense 19th century American quality of the book. These significantly suggest the book is a fictional creation. If so the plates are a theatrical creation.

On the other hand MG points out Emma believes the story. she rustled the plates under the cloth and her husband was uneducated so could not do the dictating from his own brain.

[Rivendale]

The plural of anecdote is not evidence. I find it amusing how apologists continues to point at testimony as evidence.

Wow. You should notify the thousands of judges around the world that are admitting testimony into evidence in court cases that they're doing it wrong.

Testimony is evidence, at least of some things. It depends on the testimony. Evidence is a relationship between two things -- not a single thing in isolation. First, you have to ask what what the testimony is claimed to be evidence of. Second, you have to ask whether the testimony's existence makes the fact or conclusion more or less likely.

What I think you're really trying to get out is the reliability or the weight that we should give specific testimony.

I am not a lawyer but isn't the least credible evidence eyewitness testimony?

[tagriffy]

And then others moved on after showing your link to be untrustworthy and yet, essentially, are making arguments that the plates weren’t real or that they were ‘materializations’.

Emma’s testimony doesn’t seem to allow for that.

Actually, the materialization thesis will accommodate Emma's story. After all, under the materialization thesis, there was something. Also remember that Emma never claimed to see the plates uncovered.

Some of these ‘evidences’ seem to be overlooked and/or reinterpreted to steer away from the possibility that they might indeed be based in truth.

The problem is the evidence can be rationally interpreted in a number of different ways, We can't take the evidence as a whole and say a) Joseph was telling the truth, b) what he described was objective physical reality (this seems to be your notion of "truth"), and c) that this is a justified true belief. There is just far too much room for skepticism, to the point you already have to be inclined to believe a) and b) are true to accept it.

Put another way: Res Ipsa pointed out in a previous post that Joseph "carefully controlled the context in which anyone was permitted to be exposed to the plates." If anyone else in any other context were to do something like that, wouldn't you at least be a little suspicious?

If the plates were real that opens up some possibilities that some folks would rather not entertain.

Regards,
MG

Luckily there is a nice, simple solution to that--produce the plates!

[Rivendale]

The plural of anecdote is not evidence.

That sounds good but it's not true. Every single anecdote is a bit of evidence.

For a general assertion like "all people are X", the set of "all people" is so large that it takes an awful lot of individual bits of evidence to tip the scales significantly. The chance that you might find a few unusual cases, even though the general rule is not true at all, is close to 1. For propositions about large sets, anecdotal evidence is too weak to bother considering, unless the number of anecdotes is so large that you can call it a survey.

For a single event, however, single anecdotes can be significant evidence. If the question is, "Did I eat an egg for breakfast this morning?" then my account of eating an egg for breakfast this morning is definitely substantial evidence. Even if you know nothing about me and my breakfast options, the bare fact that I testify to having eaten an egg should be enough to make you judge it highly probable that I indeed ate an egg.

My testimony is not completely decisive evidence for the egg. I might be lying about having eaten it; I might have forgotten details from this morning; or I might have been deceived by an egg substitute. Add a little bit of supporting evidence about the sensitivity of my palate, the available options for my breakfast, and my lack of motivations for lying about my breakfast; look for evidence that I have really bad short-term memory and fail to find it: now the objective likelihood that I did eat an egg has to rise from highly probable to nearly certain. My testimony will still be the main part of the evidence. If I had denied eating an egg, all the other evidence could be the same and the reasonably inferred probability that I did eat an egg would have been very low. If I had said nothing about whether or not I ate an egg, you could have confirmed that there were boiled eggs at the breakfast buffet and still had no idea whether or not I had eaten one—unless you had an anecdote from a witness claiming to have seen me eat one.

The reason why the Mormon accounts of plates and stuff are dubious is not that all testimony is worthless. It's that the Mormon testimony is sketchy, when you look at it closely, and the things being claimed are extraordinary.

Agree completely. Claiming I have dog is evidence that I have a dog. No further evidence is needed for the truth claim to be superficially believed. Claiming I have Roland the closet goblin in my room that eats subway sandwiches might need a little bit more tangible support. That is exactly what apologists are doing when they focus on the witnesses.