Apologetics - the new derogatory term

[readstoomuch]

FAIRMORMON handled the seerstone topic very well as they do most issues.  I do think it is a wonderful site for people with questions to go and get information.  I think Bushman would say that this is the type of information that needs to be added to the curriculum.  It is interesting that the urim and thummimm was a type of spectacle or device that had stones in it.  Right there in the bible it is spoken about.  Of course now the secular world doesn't see the need for the bible or religion in general.  The anti-mormon secular antagonists have definitely grown much faster than the evangelical countercult ministries.  They might use the same arguments.  The secular antagonist would turn the arguments against the LDS Church back onto the evangelical beliefs.  The LDS and the evangelicals have way more in common than the secular antagonists.  We need to join together with the evangelicals and other Christians to prepare the earth for the coming of Jesus.  

Physics Guy, I guess there is not a way of explaining seerstones that will work all of the time with a generation of people that grew of with smartphones.  Much of our technology is more advanced than the Star Trek episodes I watched in the 60s.  I think we should still try to explain the translation process.  If I understand correctly, we don`t always know all of the details.  For example, looking into the hat with a seerstone isn`t described by every witness.  It does come across that the LDS are damned if they do and damned if they don`t.  In this instance if we do talk about the seerstones, but not in a way to meet the tastes of the modern millennium, then we still risk being criticized.  I start understanding why it is a struggle knowing how much detail has to be added.  I think the most interesting face is that however and what he used, Joseph Smith produced quite a book for the world to see.  

[mfbukowski]

19 hours ago, Calm said:

It didn't.

Implication is if it meets our mission, lying is acceptable.  Our history doesn't have to be honest, after all.

Honestly I don't think he meant it that way.  I think he realizes that there is no such thing as an unprejudiced interpretation.  But yes, he made that point stronger than was called for, imo.

[mfbukowski]

19 hours ago, hope_for_things said:

I don't like using that term lying.  I earlier said hiding the evidence to various degrees or slanting the evidence towards a more favorable position.  Everybody knows this happens on both sides of arguments for religious, political and all kinds of topics.  I'm not uncovering some innovative new take on this.  It's pretty obvious this happens and I doubt anyone is surprised.  

It's not about "hiding evidence" - it's about not seeing it AS "evidence" in the first place.

The second sentence and the third sentences are a little contradictory  really.  If everybody sees evidence differently, as proven by thousands upon thousands of trials by jury, that doesn't mean that the evidence is "hidden" or "slanted".   It is simply perceived differently.

[mfbukowski]

16 hours ago, Scott Lloyd said:

I for one am surprised at the brazenness of your accusation with at least two of the FairMormon principals on this very thread. 

Yeah, he's a newbie and doesn't know who is really who.

[mfbukowski]

16 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

I'd rather not name names. For one thing, there are some apologists who sometimes annoy me by (as I see it) dumping details onto begged questions, but who also do other things that impress me a lot. On this particular issue I'd be attacking them, but in the bigger picture I don't really want to do that—and this board doesn't seem to me to be quite the academic kind of forum in which precise scope distinctions can be made to stick. For another thing, I don't actually know all that many Mormon apologists, so I can't claim to be making sound sociological analysis about everything that anyone has ever labelled "apologetics". I'm just talking about a pattern that has stood out for me, in my modest-sized sample.

I can give an example that is less tied to one person, because I read it a while ago and don't remember who wrote it. That means there's risk I'm misremembering the actual text, but for what it's worth, there was this article about chiasmus in the Book of Mormon. It was a longish article that I had seen cited several times in blog comments as an irrefutably rigorous demonstration that BofM chiasmus was far too elaborate to have been written by anyone who wasn't an expert Hebrew poet. I got flak in comments for criticizing claims about chiasmus without having read this conclusive article on the subject.

So I finally dug up the cited article, and found that although it had a bunch of quantitative detail in it, it made no effort at all to assess the likelihood of false positives in its method. And that likelihood seemed pretty high to me, because the article showed several examples of chiasmus that were identified by highlighting isolated phrases that kind of fit the inverted structure, while skipping over other stuff that didn't. If you allow yourself to do that, you can find chiasmus everywhere, and how elaborate it is will be limited only by your ingenuity.

This methodological issue was a basic one that could be raised (and should have been raised) before getting into any details of word frequencies in particular passages. The apologist blithely ignored the issue, however, and their claims of rigor rested solely on the volume of technical detail that they had piled on top of unexamined premises about method. It verged on what Richard Feynman called "cargo cult science", where crackpots go through some of the motions of scientific method while missing essentials, like the post-WW2 Pacific islanders who built bamboo radar dishes to try to lure back the cargo planes.

Yeah but at some point, as an engineer friend of mine used to say it's like "machining butter"

Some materials just cannot be made to fit closer tolerances.  I think chiasmus is like that.  It is useful to point out that it exists and parallels Hebrew poetry.  Interesting point.

But on the other hand, we can't expect this material to be able to be interpreted in the way you suggest.   This is literature in a different language and cultural context, far removed from ours

So on one hand I would agree with you that examples chiasmus have been pretty sloppily interpreted

On the other,  I think it is wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater because the material itself is too soft to machine using the analogy of butter.

Seeing chaismus in a passage of literature, I would argue, is not subject to statistical analysis.  The vagaries of language and translation just make the issues all too fuzzy to quantify imo.

[mfbukowski]

15 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

I've seen this particular point brought up many times as an example of the kind of thing that Mormon apologetics should address. To me it has also given examples of how apologetics can blithely overlook the elephant in the room.

Many of the discussions of seer stones proceed as if the difference between poring over ancient golden plates while wearing miraculous lenses, and staring at a rock in one's hat, were just a minor detail of the scenario, like the difference between preaching a sermon while wearing brown shoes or black. But of course Mormon twenty-year-olds are not feeling "lied to" because they'd always been told that Joseph preached in brown shoes, and now they find that he only wore black.

The problem is that poring over miraculous plates with miraculous lenses is absolutely miraculous, while staring into a hat is something any shyster could do. That doesn't prove that Smith wasn't a prophet. Perhaps seer stones and supernovae are much the same to the Almighty, so who's to say that revelation cannot come in a hat?

The fact remains that the rock-in-hat detail is incongruous in the Smith-as-prophet story. It can be made to fit, but only with some stretching, while it fits the alternative story, in which Smith is a charlatan, very well. If you were making a fictional film about a backwoods religious fraud, the rock-in-hat method of revelation is just the kind of iconic image you'd be glad to invent.

Apologetic responses which barely even seem to notice this aspect of hat-versus-plates, and go on as if gently reminding young Mormons that the content of the sermon is more important than the preacher's shoes, are examples of the kind of apologetics that undermines itself by betraying a disconnect.

I think it only supports that scenario if you discount the CONTENT of the Book of Mormon itself and what it clarifies about Christianity.

If anything what it puts forward in terms of an interpretation of Christianity far surpasses any of the, say, Reformation "philosophy" of Luther, Calvin, et al.

It solves a ton of theological problems, in fact, that they started.

So as you said, no, it does not prove that Joseph was not a prophet, and adding in what actually got down on paper, it is clear to me intellectually that no shyster in the backwoods could possibly pull that one off unless said shyster was also a religious genius of the highest, and unsurpassed caliber.

But then we also get to Moroni and his challenge.  When you have God himself telling you that he wants you to take this seriously, suddenly the backwoods religious genius becomes something else entirely different.

All any of us can do with religious experience is interpret how it speaks to us individually, and I got my lesson in that now nearly 40 years ago, and I ain't goin' nowhere.

[mfbukowski]

15 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

I'm talking about modern-day perception. I think rock-in-hat strikes people today as hokey and dubious, while poring over golden plates would still be cool.

I can't say for certain how people felt about these things in the 1830's. But come on. Hats and rocks were commonplace things then, and inscribed golden plates weren't. Perhaps seer stones had a better popular image then than now, but golden plates and miraculous lenses would surely still have been the more impressive picture. 

Indeed, a fraud which was so expert and thorough that it controlled its PR right down to this level of detail would surely have found something cooler than the rock in the hat. A pious trance pose, for example, would have been easy to do, and effective. So the fact that Smith didn't do that is a sort of back-handed point in his favor. And the fact that the rock-in-hat story came out at all is surely a testimony to the sincerity of witnesses who believed in Smith enough to record even less flattering details, instead of prettying everything up.

I'm not saying that there is no effective apologetic response to the rock in the hat. I'm saying that apologists often fail to provide it, and what they do instead is likely to backfire. It's always better to take the bull elephant by the tusks, so to speak.

I can't disagree with that!

[hope_for_things]

29 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

It's not about "hiding evidence" - it's about not seeing it AS "evidence" in the first place.

The second sentence and the third sentences are a little contradictory  really.  If everybody sees evidence differently, as proven by thousands upon thousands of trials by jury, that doesn't mean that the evidence is "hidden" or "slanted".   It is simply perceived differently.

It's often difficult to tell between a perception difference and a motivational one where the person is intentionally slanting the narrative.  Both happen often enough from my experience.  

[mfbukowski]

6 hours ago, juliann said:

I don't mean name names in any other sense than authors would be named in any other situation. That is simply standard procedure when taking on another's position. It should never be seen as an attack because it should be the position that is disputed, not the person. (Boyce's mistake, aside from a poor analysis)  was that he did attack the person.)  I appreciate your willingness to give examples. That is the only way that a discussion rather than an attack can proceed.

I agree that the head in the hat looks goofy to modern eyes. I think it was Ereksen (at the conference) who explained it as a means of concentration....JS had already used the seer stone for that. I think the larger point is that he did not use one means...or any means...a good amount of time. I think that has gotten lost because of the art that has been substituted for the reality.

 

Uh, that makes TWO major mistakes for Boyce.   Just sayin'

"Seers" whether real or fake- whatever that means in the context- are famous for using tea leaves, the entrails of a chicken, crystal balls, gazing into a fire, or looking at the ocean (that one works for me) or pretty much anything.

I personally get my best ideas driving often- there seems to be something about visual perception that is tied to creativity.   I thought I saw something about right brain (or was it left?) being tied to visual perception and creativity but I am too lazy to look it up.

Edit:  I took a second or two and found this- not sure how relevant it is, but I really know there is some correlation there just from introspection.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00223989709603521?journalCode=vjrl20

 

 

Edited August 19, 2017 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

25 minutes ago, hope_for_things said:

It's often difficult to tell between a perception difference and a motivational one where the person is intentionally slanting the narrative.  Both happen often enough from my experience.  

Yeah, sure, but in the final analysis that difference becomes irrelevant because you are making a snap judgement.  The argument just "smells fishy" and you reject it, unless there is some motivation for trying to analyze it.  As in this case, "Are they lying intentionally?" might be something that would flicker through your mind, but my point is that since it is impossible to see into what is going on inside someone else's head, it becomes irrelevant to the argument.  

Arguing about the motivation then takes precedence over the point being made, but doesn't change the point that people just plain see things differently.  For me that is the end of the story.  It just hits you as a good argument or not.

Edited August 19, 2017 by mfbukowski

[Calm]

3 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Yeah, he's a newbie and doesn't know who is really who.

No, he isn't.  He has been on for quite sometime and has asked me to help out with FM stuff for him.

[Physics Guy]

On 8/19/2017 at 8:34 AM, Calm said:

Have you looked lately at the FM response to this topic?  I am curious whether you think we failed to provide it or took the bull elephant by the horns ... .

Thanks for the link; I looked at it. It seemed that only the last item in the list, the article by Brant Gardner, addressed the "elephant" issue of how the rock in the hat seems hokey and incongruous.

I think it might be more "horn-grabbing" for the site as a whole if the Gardner article weren't left to the end. I can see how some of the other items may be important preliminaries for some of the FairMormon readership. It makes some sense to first establish that the rock-in-hat method was indeed used, before going on to try to account for it. But leaving till last the only article that tackles the fact that rock-in-hat looks more like village seer than like prophet, and having articles before it about what Fielding Smith thought or precisely which stones were used, gives a bit the impression of deliberately turning a blind eye to the really pressing concern.

As to the Gardner article itself, I think it's trying to do the right thing, but it could be more forthright. It takes quite a bit longer than necessary to establish that seers with stones were popularly accepted in Joseph Smith's day, and to distinguish locally resident consulting seers from itinerant charlatans. Gardner then introduces the concept of Great vs. Little Traditions much too breezily, without doing much to establish that the concept makes sense and is relevant.

It's not clear to me, to be honest, that "Little Tradition" is anything more than a re-branding of "hokey". If there's more to it than that, then I think Gardner should have left out some paragraphs about village seers and added some paragraphs about why any "Little Traditions" deserve our respect. So the way Gardner sets out his argument, piling up details about village seers before slipping in the debatable assumption that "Little Traditions" are respectable in their way, still seems to me to be an example of the bad apologetics that dwells at length on the comfortable ground and ducks through the tricky spots. 

For my money, really seizing the bull by the horns would be something more like saying, "Yes of course the rock in the hat is awfully hokey. Joseph Smith was a hick, and so were his first hearers. They believed in hokey things. So God spoke to them in the language they knew, using things that they knew: hokey things. God does do things that way, speaking to humans where they are—otherwise not even the wisest among us would understand God."

That argument wouldn't convince me, I'm afraid, but I would call it a fair try.

Edited August 20, 2017 by Physics Guy

[cdowis]

48 minutes ago, Physics Guy said:

For my money, really seizing the bull by the horns would be something more like saying, "Yes of course the rock in the hat is awfully hokey. Joseph Smith was a hick, and so were his first hearers. They believed in hokey things. So God spoke to them in the language they knew, using things that they knew: hokey things. God does do things that way, speaking to humans where they are—otherwise not even the wisest among us would understand God."

That argument wouldn't convince me, I'm afraid, but I would call it a fair try.

Not to change the subject, but dealing with elephants is the issue here.

In case you are unaware, evolution, quantum physics, and other branches of science also have those elephants.  Just small things such as spooky interaction at a distance, which is indistinguishable from magic.  Newton and alchemy, changing lead into gold, certainly puts him in the arena of hokey.  Evolution and the "gaps of the gods".

Perhaps you can start a new thread and deal with these elephants, and see if you can convince us.  You can give it a try by seizing the bull by the horns.

In terms of elephants, Mormonism is in good company.  We will give it a try, do the best we can, but our success is not measured on whether some atheist is convinced.

Anyway, let's look at the Newton elephant.  We do not judge him on the process, the path he took, but on his RESULTS.  Who really cares if he spent alot of time with alchemy, when we see his opus, his results.

We deal with his so-call elephant when we consider the magnificent results.  And we should wisely do the same for the prophet Joseph Smith.  The seer stone is merely a minor footnote when compared to the opus, the Book of Mormon.

 

Edited August 20, 2017 by cdowis

[provoman]

I don't think apologist being considered derogatory is anything new.

[Physics Guy]

I think the elephant-in-the-room metaphor may be getting away from us. It's not supposed to just mean "something unpleasant". It's supposed to mean "something too big to ignore, that people try to ignore."

Nothing whatever in modern science is believed because Newton said it. Newton himself is a footnote to his discoveries; it's historically interesting to know that he had an awful childhood and grew up to be a nasty guy, but it's of no importance for science. Nothing about Isaac Newton is an elephant for physics. He's not a big thing at all.

One could in principle make the same kind of assertion about Joseph Smith: that his revelations stand entirely on their own, because all the doctrines he propounded and all the practices he initiated have been confirmed as valid independently by the spiritual experience of millions of Mormons. There do seem to be people who are worried about exactly what Joseph Smith really did, or was really like. It may be effective apologetics to say to such people, "Look, we can see that you care about Joseph Smith, but really you shouldn't. He doesn't matter. Just read the Book of Mormon."

Is that a common apologetic line? Or is it important to defend Joseph Smith himself as a prophet, along with whatever it is that he prophesied?

[Calm]

Thanks for your input, PG.  It helps me see what you are talking about.

It is interesting to me how we view things differently...one definitely needs a different writing approach for wiki than one does for papers, which one builds up to the important stuff at the end (or so my English prof taught me).  

[hope_for_things]

17 hours ago, Calm said:

No, he isn't.  He has been on for quite sometime and has asked me to help out with FM stuff for him.

I knew Calm had an association with FM, and suspected Juliann did as well, but didn't know Juliann was an author in the Apologetics book until this thread.  

I will admit there are many on this board that I really have no clue who they are in real life or have any knowledge of what they've done.  

[cdowis]

4 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

One could in principle make the same kind of assertion about Joseph Smith: that his revelations stand entirely on their own, because all the doctrines he propounded and all the practices he initiated have been confirmed as valid independently by the spiritual experience of millions of Mormons.

That is a very inadequate response, and I have never used it.

 There do seem to be people who are worried about exactly what Joseph Smith really did, or was really like. It may be effective apologetics to say to such people, "Look, we can see that you care about Joseph Smith, but really you shouldn't. He doesn't matter. Just read the Book of Mormon."

You are very insightful but take it a step further.  What greater witness can someone receive than from God Himself?  See Matt 16:16-17

Is that a common apologetic line? Or is it important to defend Joseph Smith himself as a prophet, along with whatever it is that he prophesied?

I just point out some Biblical prophets who had some "interesting" backgrounds, much worse than using a seer stone -- Moses, Saul, Peter, etc. The point being that God knows what He is doing, even when we would disagree with His choices of prophets.

I have had alot of discussions with the critics over the past 35 years.

 

Edited August 20, 2017 by cdowis

[Calm]

"I just point out some Biblical prophets who had some "interesting" backgrounds, much worse than using a seer stone -- Moses, Saul, Peter, etc. The point being that God knows what He is doing, even when we would disagree with His choices of prophets"

And how does that work for those who don't believe the Bible is the Word of God?

[hope_for_things]

On 8/19/2017 at 4:13 PM, mfbukowski said:

Yeah, sure, but in the final analysis that difference becomes irrelevant because you are making a snap judgement.  The argument just "smells fishy" and you reject it, unless there is some motivation for trying to analyze it.  As in this case, "Are they lying intentionally?" might be something that would flicker through your mind, but my point is that since it is impossible to see into what is going on inside someone else's head, it becomes irrelevant to the argument.  

Arguing about the motivation then takes precedence over the point being made, but doesn't change the point that people just plain see things differently.  For me that is the end of the story.  It just hits you as a good argument or not.

Hmm...  I'd like to understand more, is it irrelevant because it's difficult to ascertain in the moment when making snap judgments.

 What about for important life decisions, financial decisions and other things that allow for more time, research and analysis?  

[Physics Guy]

I should probably also say that the FairMormon page on the seer stone is clearly well above an amateur or student production. It's not my field, so my judgements of content are only amateur ones, but the kinds of criticism I've made about how much space and priority are given to which topics are the sorts of things I say about journal articles that I review.

And I get the same kind of feedback on my own papers. I slap my forehead and revise them. Writing is hard.

[Physics Guy]

31 minutes ago, cdowis said:

I just point out some Biblical prophets who had some "interesting" backgrounds, much worse than using a seer stone -- Moses, Saul, Peter, etc.

Sure, and the staff of Moses is a bit of a magical totem in Exodus. For me the issue is whether God is likely to have kept up that sort of thing in 1830, or whether God is instead glad to leave such things in the ancient world. For another audience, though, the comparison with Biblical prophets might be a good line to take.

27 minutes ago, Calm said:

And how does that work for those who don't believe the Bible is the Word of God?

Or for those for whom the traditionally represented prophethood of Joseph Smith is so tied up with revealed religion in general that they're already doubting Moses when they doubt Joseph Smith. It's just anecdotal but it does seem noticeable that a lot of ex-Mormons are atheists. If there was a stage at which an apologist could have kept them in the fold, appealing to the Bible probably wouldn't have been the way to do it.

[mfbukowski]

17 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

I should probably also say that the FairMormon page on the seer stone is clearly well above an amateur or student production. It's not my field, so my judgements of content are only amateur ones, but the kinds of criticism I've made about how much space and priority are given to which topics are the sorts of things I say about journal articles that I review.

And I get the same kind of feedback on my own papers. I slap my forehead and revise them. Writing is hard.

And in these cases defining "peers" is often very hard.  Yet it seems everyone knows one when they see them.  But someone submitting a paper is not going to debate that obviously even if they can guess the identity of the reviewer.

[mfbukowski]

22 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

I think the elephant-in-the-room metaphor may be getting away from us. It's not supposed to just mean "something unpleasant". It's supposed to mean "something too big to ignore, that people try to ignore."

Nothing whatever in modern science is believed because Newton said it. Newton himself is a footnote to his discoveries; it's historically interesting to know that he had an awful childhood and grew up to be a nasty guy, but it's of no importance for science. Nothing about Isaac Newton is an elephant for physics. He's not a big thing at all.

One could in principle make the same kind of assertion about Joseph Smith: that his revelations stand entirely on their own, because all the doctrines he propounded and all the practices he initiated have been confirmed as valid independently by the spiritual experience of millions of Mormons. There do seem to be people who are worried about exactly what Joseph Smith really did, or was really like. It may be effective apologetics to say to such people, "Look, we can see that you care about Joseph Smith, but really you shouldn't. He doesn't matter. Just read the Book of Mormon."

Is that a common apologetic line? Or is it important to defend Joseph Smith himself as a prophet, along with whatever it is that he prophesied?

I see Joseph more as an inspired philosopher- I won't say "Than a prophet" because I don't know that any prophet can be characterized differently.  So in my opinion, we judge concepts by their fruits, meaning that a philosopher's life is irrelevant to how they were as a person.

As in anything else, I evaluate arguments for anything with my intellect and "gut" (aka "the spirit") acting as one- I don't think they can be separated.  If it is good philosophy it is good religion and vice versa intellectually speaking but if it doesn't hit my emotions, I won't classify it as "religion",

There are many ways to debate transubstantiation for example- it is bad philosophy and bad science both, but if I had a "testimony" that regardless of it being bad philosophy and science, if I really believed that Christ was present in the bread and my deepest feelings of my unconscious or "God" confirmed that I must believe that, I would take it as a "divine mystery" and get on with life.

I mean any theist will tell you we cannot "know all there is to know" about God anyway.   Bertrand Russel even confessed that he could not disprove the hypothesis that the world did not blink into existence 5 minutes ago and that all the evidence to the contrary is an illusion.

There is a guy here who believes that the earth is actually 6,000 years old AND that God deliberately covered up the evidence for that so we had to accept it all by faith.  I am not going to go after that opinion- if it is necessary to his whole world view.

I think it's clear that Mormon culture is moving away from the whole notion of prophetic infallibility- thank goodness.  I think it has to move that way

[PeterPear]

10 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

 

I think it's clear that Mormon culture is moving away from the whole notion of prophetic infallibility- thank goodness.  I think it has to move that way

Speak for yourself, faithless.

You're hung up on "the Earth can't be 5,000 years young.." because you believe in the infallibilty of science, obviously.

Did Nephi lie? 1 Nephi 17:50

Did the waters of the Red Sea and the Jordan River not part for the Children of Israel?

Did the Lord not Resurrect and appear unto His Disciples?

Will the Earth not be wrapped together as a scroll?

Will the Gospel not be taught to all Nations and Temples not be found over the Earth?

Will the Lord not return?

But you're hung up about the past, even the Creation of this Earth and decide to stab the Prophets in the back, because of it.

This sounds like you:

16 Some things they may have guessed right, among so many; but behold, we know that all these great and marvelous works cannot come to pass, of which has been spoken.