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OGHoosier

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Everything posted by OGHoosier

  1. You know, I'm starting to believe that "likelihood" is a really bad tool for assessing God. "Likelihood" implies a persistent set of rules that govern interactions, a standard by which you can measure how often things can be expected to happen. But we're talking about God here, we're talking about a Being that makes the rules, what hath "likelihood" to do with Him? Seems like invoking the concept of "likelihood" just begs the question. It's not for nothing that Pascal, himself the father of probability theory, opined that "Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it." It's a good tool but a poor substitute for God.
  2. You listed these as two separate points but they are from the same source (I can't speak for the Greehalgh book, but I would suspect that its source is the Johnson poem until corrected.) That singular source is an 1841 poem written for the Times and Seasons by Joel H. Johnson. Read it here: https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/NCMP1820-1846/id/8982. It is not a news report, firsthand source, or even report of a rumor. The poem does not clearly state that Oliver's denial has happened as a matter of record, and no other evidence exists to establish it. Richard Lloyd Andersen addressed it in the Ensign in April 1987, as well as directly in Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses. Ensign article here: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1987/04/i-have-a-question/i-have-a-question.html?lang=eng Robert Boylan addresses it here: https://scripturalmormonism.blogspot.com/2016/09/did-oliver-cowdery-deny-his-witness-of.html I will quote the most relevant portion from both responses: I have a life to live, which I'm going to go back to for a few hours, but I shall be back with further notes. You may be quite assured of that.
  3. I went to the Millennial Star volume cited, which has been digitized by BYU: https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/MStar/id/27175 Whitmer's account of seeing the table and other artifacts is found in there, but there is no reference to finding the plates lying in a field. Do you have an additional citation for that?
  4. Hold on. Hold up hold up hold up. So qualia have been external in your worldview this whole time? For whatever reason I had not realized that, I can't parse the implications right now but rest assured I shall come back to this.
  5. This is actually a good opportunity for me to put down some thoughts I've been simmering. The Witnesses, I think, do away with any variety of "innocent hallucination" or mystical transfixation or any such hypotheses with regard to Joseph Smith. Likewise, I think stylometry and ancient literary forms render his authorship of the Book of Mormon exceedingly unlikely. We know by experience that these evidences are not universally compelling, because they abut the edge of the "impossible." Or rather, they put one to the "which is more likely, X or Y" question that often comes up around these quarters. Here comes the old Sherlock Holmes chestnut: "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." After all, perhaps the analyses suffer from hidden methodological flaws. Perhaps the literary techniques are accidents. Or perhaps the Witnesses, against incentive or inclination, maintained the lie their whole lives. Maybe they duped themselves into actually believing it in later years. When one takes as one's doctrine the idea that religious and spiritual conviction stem ultimately from biologically-programmed hallucinations, or when one views God as so-improbable-as-to-be-impossible, the solution space is basically endless because the exact capabilities/constraints of the mind cannot be plumbed by us - even in principle. It is an endless explanatory playground which defies Bayesianism, admitting no authority but intuition, hinging all on one concept - the impossible. "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." In a sense we're running up on the same problem that doomed the infamous Dale Interpreter Article - the subjectivity of probability assessment. I've mentioned elsewhere that I'm waiting on a copy of They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Yale historian Carlos Eire. Here is a review for those interested. The subject of the book is not, as I understand it, the experiences themselves - rather it is an exploration of how our concepts of the "impossible" are culturally contingent. As I'm reading it - or perhaps I'll wait until I'm done - I intend to post excerpts and the thoughts that accompany them. The question of our intuitions and their connection with the world is, in my opinion, the great question underlying all religious epistemology. Worse, it underlies the epistemology of all value by attacking what C.S. Lewis called "the Tao" - the concept of binding value itself. Perhaps @mfbukowski can tell us what awaits on the other side of that question. And, having blown off all that steam, I'm going back to my Iain McGilchrist.
  6. @Calm This is going to be off-topic and I do not want to threadjack so I apologize, but are you still involved with FAIR? I wanted to volunteer my services to transcribe the remaining talks from this last conference, if it would be convenient, because I've noticed that most of them are not up yet and I would like to have them on hand as references. I tried to send you a private message about it but that didn't work, unfortunately, so this is the best I got. Apologies, all, for the threadjack.
  7. This is from D&C 46's discussion of spiritual gifts; one should note that verses 13 and 14 include the crucial elements of what we call a testimony: From these verses I consider a testimony to be a spiritual gift on par with the rest of them, and "sign-seeking" is therefore the request for a spiritual gift for illegitimate motives. What are these illegitimate motives? You will note that the "consume it upon their lusts" language associates D&C 46 with James 4: I think the critical difference between Moroni's promise and sign-seeking is that sign-seeking is predominantly other-oriented; to justify our positions to others or compel them to believe. It attempts to make God's self-disclosure into a means of control or pride. Sign-seeking is an attitude that seeks to befriend us with the world, via its epistemology or public acclaim or whatever. Reminds me a lot of Iain McGilchrist's thoughts about the pathology and ultimate downfall of left-brain dominance:
  8. "LoudmouthMormon, I fear that thy joy doth carry thee away into boasting." - Aaron, son of Mosiah, if he were here (probably) Still, I'm rejoicing too. Another notch on the Trajectory of Truth.
  9. You might be very interested in Carlos Eire's book They Flew: A History of the Impossible. An look at a) well-attested "impossible events" from the early modern era and b) how the definition of "impossible" is culturally contingent. I'm waiting for my interlibrary loan to get it to me, I have not looked forward to a book as much in a long time.
  10. Ancient Near East is the term of art I think. At least that's what my BYU class covering the period used, not sure if the term has changed in the past few years. FWIW I think @BlueDreams is right, especially about the Book's text being inconsistent with a straightforward racialism. But I have an assignment to write and must stop procrastinating using this board. Good night all.
  11. A thorough presentation of this school of thought can be found here: "Skins as Garments in the Book of Mormon: A Textual Exegesis" by Ethan Sproat, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 24 (2015): 138-165. It's not a bad case imo.
  12. I have a relapsing/remitting pattern of activity on this board, so I think I'll be back for a bit. I can't deny, on a gut level my solution above feels like cope. It feels like cheating to a certain extent. The dichotomy between "fiction vs. history" is SO deeply ingrained in LDS culture and the "solution space" for thinking about the Book of Mormon that deviating from it feels like special pleading or composing a "just-so story." However, it's not clear to me rationally why this would be the case. I still have the Spirit, which I believe is epistemically permissible (thanks to Philip Wiebe, Iain McGilchrist, and Roberto di Ceglie) and my convictions regarding the testimonies of the Witnesses, as well as my understanding of Joseph Smith (much in line with Richard Bushman and Don Bradley.) These are all observable points of evidence which a theory should account for (and I think mine does). A good theory accounts for evidence, it doesn't just get rid of it. Yet the "fiction v. history" monopolization of the BoM solution space is so total that any other theory feels like cheating. Or rather, both critic and Church have said that "'fiction" or "history" are the two choices for so long that no other theory has the same level of "legitimacy", so to speak. I would like to change that.
  13. "Inspired Fiction" vs. "Historical" seems like an unnecessary dichotomy, which Ostler's expansion theory was supposed to blow open. For me, I can't make sense of the BoM geographically. I curse the existence of Alma 22. I've never found a model that fit neatly, and it annoys me even though I'm aware that a) my assessment of various models is often very "gut"-oriented, and ancient maps were not great (see here for how Roman maps looked: https://www.historyhit.com/ancient-maps-how-did-the-romans-see-the-world/) Can't rule out the idea that Mormon was working with a similarly rough map, but idk. So I can't say that I confidently think the Book of Mormon happened in any place. However, I think the people were real, I think the literary features indicate antiquity, and I note that the point of the Book of Mormon is to record the doings of particular prophets and saintly figures. For all that Mormon talks about preserving the memory of his fallen people, his record zooms over hundreds of years of that people with ease and only focuses on the doings of particular prophets. It's more of a hagiographic compilation than anything else. So I think God might have let the Book of Mormon take form in the mound-builder genre (for ease of initial impact) while preserving the hagiographies of prophets from a different place. Is that view "Inspired Fiction?" It's not up-and-down historicity, but it's not exactly fiction either. EDIT: Random geekery on ancient maps for those who choose not to click the link: The following is Strabo's map of Europe from the Geographica. He composed this around the time of Christ. Notice how France, though totally owned by Rome at this time and traversed by Roman infrastructure, is shrunk, which distorts the entire map. Italy is massively oversized and at the wrong angle to Greece. Or this 1898 reproduction of Pomponius Mela's map:
  14. Geez, Ballard and Russon need to read 1 Samuel 28 again. Shortcutting revelation by summoning dead prophets has a real bad track record.
  15. That's a trick question. I already don't think I have the vocabulary to describe it, primarily because the language I have access to is primarily derived from the physical, but my insufficient thesaurus need not constrain the ontological status of mathematics. Hume's view of causation negates the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which I regard as critical to the exercise of human reason and indeed science itself. So I reject it. I do confess a certain uneasy pragmatism in that rejection, though, so you may have the last word yet. This feels off to me - a little question-beggy - but I won't contest it now. I will instead grant the point about triangles and propose that we consider hexagons. The ones that bees make, because of Hales Theorem. Or whatever reality is described by Hales Theorem. They were making them before humanity had the concept of "hexagon" or of Hales Theorem. The reality described by Hales Theorem therefore cannot be mind-dependent in the way you suggest a triangle is mind-dependent.
  16. @manol, this is a topic of some interest to you if I recall. The New Testament definitely suggests that multiple spirits can exist in one body. Could be. It could also be the result of some form of memory sharing from the other side. I do expect that our Spirit-world education involves experience-sharing with others the way Christ did on Gethsemane. Perhaps Lugdi was called upon to share some experiences with Shanti before her birth and the memories remained. Or perhaps this is an elaborate put-up, I really couldn't say.
  17. The problem is that there isn't a better explanation. I don't think there could even in principle be one. Bees make hexagonal cells because hexagons are the best way to capitalize on their Euclidean plane space while minimizing perimeter. Magicicadas have prime-number cycles because prime numbers maximize the lowest common multiple, therefore interactions with other periodically-active predators is minimized. Sunflowers produce their seeds at an irrational fraction of 360 degrees because it allows them to pack in the most seeds. The math is indispensable to explaining why these things happen. It is prior to evolution, even...evolution could in theory only aim at best performance. The math is the reason why this is the best performance, therefore it is prior to every other variety of inquiry. You could dissect the sunflower seed down to its last atom, catalogue its entire material structure, and you will find a chain of proximate physical causes (until you get down to quantum and causality becomes muddled lol), but you will never find anything which replaces math's role in the total explanation...and you will be utterly dependent on math at that point anyway! There's a problem of definition here. Specifically, on what it means to "do anything." Does math physically do anything? Depends. Can you pinpoint an exact moment on the instant replay where the math "does something?" No. But does "doing something" have to be a discrete point in time? Wouldn't that just be another artifact of language? Do the laws of nature "do something?" What even are they? One thing I can tell you. The laws of nature supervene on material on every scale, existing everywhere and nowhere. They cannot be material...but they are real. I'd say math does something - or rather, what we describe using math does something. The laws of nature make things the way they are - that is "doing something" by definition. And yet they are not physical - they are instantiated in physical things, but you cannot materially define a law of nature. Which means that "physically doing things" cannot be the only mode of causal influence. How do I say it clearer? One could say that math is just descriptive, but the question then rises: descriptive of what? What is the real thing it describes? - and it clearly describes something real, since math is indispensable in the explanation of the cosmos on all scales. In fact, outside of natural-sense observation, math is all we have! Observation and theoretical necessity are the two modes by which science declares things to exist. And the real existence of mathematics - the symbolic language corresponding to something real - can be clearly seen to underlie natural phenomena on all scales. Mathematics might be a symbolic language (like all language) but it does describe something real, or else what are we even doing here? The only other response, as I see it, is to give up causation at all. If the laws of nature do not exert a causal influence on reality, if the immaterial does not influence the material, then what we call the "laws of nature" are not laws at all. They're all just brute facts, with no possible explanation. Such a universe could not be explained, only described, predicted, and manipulated. Everything is a brute fact, nothing causes anything else, not even deeper laws or unifying theories. If we are willing to shlup even the very existence of causation out of doors to defend materialism, then we have decided that this position is dogmatically superior to even our most deeply ingrained intuitions. This makes no sense to me, since reason is merely the articulation of our intuitions! I've had enough of eliminative materialists telling me that my very existence is in fact an illusion. Who, exactly, is there to illude? I honestly find panpsychism more compelling than materialism - it's a theory that would actually allow explanation in the first place.
  18. I don't think measurability is a necessary condition for "having occurred." That is the central tenet of logical positivism, a school of thought which is ultimately incompatible with the existence of intentionality (the property of "being about something") as experienced by conscious beings. Being incompatible with a fundamental aspect of reality, positivism must be regarded as false. I would say that "measurability" is a epistemological issue, not an ontological one. Which is, of course, the underlying intuition behind your next question. Good question. Jonas gives three case studies in which mathematical concepts are indispensable in a causal explanation of a natural phenomenon. In this case, the math is not merely descriptive, as it is when talking about quantities. The bees, the cicadas, and the sunflowers do what they do because of the things we call "irrational numbers," "the Golden Ratio," "prime numbers," etc. An explanation for these phenomena cannot be accomplished without the mathematics. Since it's explanatorily indispensable, we have to conclude that the math is describing an underlying something that is involved in causing things. However, the math itself is not material. You have an immaterial thing exerting causal influence on material things. I would generalize this to the whole laws of nature, the observable regularities of our world. Or specifically, the regular changes we observe in our world. What is it that makes atoms bond with each other when they were not previously bonded? Can it be something intrinsic to them? What makes objects do things? From whence cometh change? It seems that the universe is absolutely infused with semantic content, causal (even forceful) yet immaterial, pure information, the code commanding the sparks and silicon. Intelligence, light, and truth...this is all sounding rather familiar to me. If you'd like another line of argument, you can review Jackson and Pettit's proof which I had in my last post. The conclusion is that, if only physical causes are allowed, then the special sciences do not provide causal explanations, which kinda murders most of modernity. That's too high a price to pay for me - a cleanly material universe is not worth that much (in fact it isn't worth anything at all.)
  19. Are they? And if they are not, why would @smac97's attitude matter? A "logical fallacy" is merely a formalized description of a common reasoning error. Is it wrong to identify reasoning errors in arguments with which you disagree? Especially when those errors are in fact there?
  20. Yeah. By attacking the reasoning on which the conclusion is based. What's the problem? The fallacy fallacy is when someone uses the presence of a fallacy to say that the presence of said fallacy affirmatively demonstrates that the conclusion is false. It is not the fallacy fallacy to use the presence of a fallacy to demonstrate that the argument fails to establish its conclusion. Therefore, the fallacy fallacy cannot be ascribed to a critique of reasoning. I hope that made things more clear. I am not kidding in the slightest.
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