The State of Mormon Apologetics

[champatsch]

On 8/15/2018 at 5:15 PM, clarkgoble said:

That presupposes it was God himself consciously dictating the translation. I rather doubt that was the case. Most assumptions involve Joseph being either consciously or unconsciously involved in the translation or other figures such as Mormon or Moroni [!]. No one knows though and since it seems unanswerable don't spend much time on it.

[What Joseph did was not what we would normally call translation; he didn't grasp the meaning of a script representing a foreign language.]

I know you fully appreciate that there is a large amount of hard linguistic evidence to consider. Because of this, this question is actually eminently answerable.  From what I've seen, the lexical and syntactic data definitively answer this question.  Maybe you haven't studied the Book of Mormon's original English linguistic data that much, so you personally don't see it as answerable, or maybe you privilege other evidence over what is probably the strongest evidence, the lexis and syntax.

What the earliest text of the Book of Mormon presents us with are thousands of cases where the wording was unlikely for Joseph.  And we have names that had to be sent to Joseph.  If you think that he worded what he could, then you accept a continual switching between words given and ideas given — a fill-in-the-blank revelation. I reject that view and accept consistency and what several verses of 2 Nephi 27 say.

In addition, Book of Mormon ungrammaticality points away from Joseph, since there is a lot of bad grammar that wouldn't have been his bad grammar.  In short, there's bad grammar that wasn't Joseph's and there's bad grammar that is indeterminable in isolation: it could've been Joseph's or it could represent earlier English usage.  In view of this and all the high-level, extrabiblical language in the text, it's reasonable to take almost all the bad grammar not to be Joseph's.

On this view, actual bad grammar (19th-century dialect) would be cases where Joseph or the scribe altered the given words, and they weren't corrected during the dictation and were written down incorrectly.  Some of these are correctable by conjectural emendation, and have been corrected in the earliest text. "Ishmael and also his hole hole" (1n0705) is one of these; a conjecture has to be made. Other cases resist correction because there isn't enough clear information.  The one case of drownded is one of these. EEBO has 40 titles with drownded, from 1593 to 1698.  But if the given word was drowned, then drownded in 1 Nephi 4:2 is an instance of dialectal overlay.

Who has studied Book of Mormon ungrammaticality seriously?  Perhaps no one besides Skousen and me.  I'll give two examples here.

Object they, mostly occurring in the phrase "they which".  Joseph's own linguistic preference, and that of those around him, was "those who", not "they which", so the reasonable conclusion is that the 36 instances of "bad" object they grammar were revealed as words.

Non–3sg {-th} inflection.  Pseudo-biblical texts indicate the level and type of non-3sg {-th} usage Joseph might have produced on his own, but the earliest text goes way beyond that: 180 +/– 5 instances.  But it doesn't have the indicia of a parody, which would be thousands of instances and other things.  As one example, the Book of Mormon clearly shows the pronoun constraint of Early Modern English (five solid instances with have/hast and hath). A reasonable conclusion in this case is that the "bad" {-th} inflectional usage of the earliest text wasn't due to Joseph either.

Speculation about Mormon or Moroni being involved in the English language translation has been promoted by people who don't know the linguistic data.  Basically, the argument goes that they would have learned English as a second language, so that's why there's so much faulty archaic language in the Book of Mormon.  But this just doesn't work.  Promoters of this kind of approach must demote the elevated, archaic language of the Book of Mormon.  And they don't actually know what Early Modern English was like.  If you want to know what it was like, you have to read many texts from many genres and time periods.  You have to read linguistic studies.  You have to study corpora and search them thousands of times.  You have to read and analyze lots of archaic language.

There's an article on pronominal usage in the Book of Mormon written by someone who proposes Moroni as the translator. This author, however, didn't know crucial details about earlier pronominal usage in English, some rather basic things that could've been discovered by looking at Shakespeare or the OED.  So he went along with the received view that the Book of Mormon has a lot of bad pronominal usage, because he didn't do enough research and didn't know about a lot of past usage.

 

On 8/15/2018 at 5:15 PM, clarkgoble said:

One could still ask why God would allow such a flawed (from our perspective) translation. Why not make a translation at least as good as the KJV relative to the underlying Septuagint or Masoric text?

Maybe you could expand on this so I understand what you're thinking about here. (Is Masoric a term that is preferred over Masoretic now, or something else?)

[clarkgoble]

23 minutes ago, champatsch said:

Maybe you could expand on this so I understand what you're thinking about here. (Is Masoric a term that is preferred over Masoretic now, or something else?)

Just a typo from using a phone instead of a real keyboard. I could have sworn I'd fixed the typo but somehow Apple's autocorrect screwed up the correct giving Masoric instead of Masoretic. No idea how since neither word is in its dictionary. I'll try and check that more carefully next time.

23 minutes ago, champatsch said:

[What Joseph did was not what we would normally call translation; he didn't grasp the meaning of a script representing a foreign language.]

I know you fully appreciate that there is a large amount of hard linguistic evidence to consider. Because of this, this question is actually eminently answerable.

For the record I don't think with regards to the Book of Mormon - at least the beginning - that Joseph was consciously involved. Being unconsciously involved (meaning his knowledge and habits were being accessed in some fashion for the substance of the translation) seems quite different.

That said, as I'm sure you know the counter-argument is something like Taves model where Joseph is not consciously writing as himself but subconsciously channeling more akin to how a Pentacostal speaks in tongues. While I'm obviously very dubious about such a position, I'm not sure the linguistic evidence you marshal can reject that easily. You can of course compare pseudo-KJV texts. I believe (going by memory) that you've looked at a set of 10 of those. However that doesn't get us to the tradition of oral channeling of that sort unless you know of transcripts of that sort of thing.

So I think it unlikely, but don't feel I can dismiss it out of hand.

Now the counterargument would be that if one looks at Joseph's other revelations, nearly all dictated, they'd follow the same cognitive processes that Taves is appealing to. Thus if they don't appear in the D&C and related revelations that knocks Joseph out as author. (And I believe you've done that - although I don't recall the paper off the top of my head) That presupposes that his revelatory speech remains consistent and doesn't evolve grammatically. So that'd have to be checked.

But based upon my past reading of your data but without being careful and checking that you've addressed everything I'd say there's good prima facie reasons to reject Joseph as author. Not everyone agrees obviously. But I've not seen a solid counter-argument yet. Just dismissals.

Edited August 17, 2018 by clarkgoble

[clarkgoble]

2 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Your argument is just going in circles.

Again, all you are saying is that being wrong in the assumption about a tight translation could make it so that a Hebraism might not shown up in the translation. And in that case we would have to look to other explanations for its presence. And I'm saying that I have already looked at the other possible explanations for their presence, and these explanations' lack of believability is what is driving me to accept the tight translation in the first place, even though it is an uncertain assumption. 

As I've tried to be clear, I'm addressing just the arguments. The circularity was for the earlier argument. The argument about other reasons you gave I said was closer to hermeneutics but not fully satisfactory due to the reasons I listed. But I agree now we're just repeating things. 

[Ryan Dahle]

22 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

As I've tried to be clear, I'm addressing just the arguments. The circularity was for the earlier argument. The argument about other reasons you gave I said was closer to hermeneutics but not fully satisfactory due to the reasons I listed. But I agree now we're just repeating things. 

Just for the record, the reason I have kept at this is because I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something important in my thinking about these issues. Thanks for letting me pester you about it. 

 

[Ryan Dahle]

52 minutes ago, champatsch said:

Speculation about Mormon or Moroni being involved in the English language translation has been promoted by people who don't know the linguistic data.  Basically, the argument goes that they would have learned English as a second language, so that's why there's so much faulty archaic language in the Book of Mormon.  But this just doesn't work.  Promoters of this kind of approach must demote the elevated, archaic language of the Book of Mormon.

My speculation was somewhat along these lines several years ago, as well, when the data first started coming out. I thought that Tyndale was most likely responsible, probably with a translation committee or something. But I think the problem is that we are far from being able to make any of these types of judgments. If such beings were involved in the translation, there is no particular way that we would could make a good argument for it. There are just too many unknown variables about divine beings and languages on the other side of the veil. There are also too many unknowns about the translations goals of whoever translated the text. We can make some inferences about what things the translator(s) may have intended to accomplish, but it is all pretty speculative at this point. About all we can really say is that Joseph very likely wasn't responsible for the English wording of the text, and yet that it is entirely possible that a divine being or groups of beings could be responsible. To me, the text doesn't seem like it would fit the native linguistic patterns of an single English speaker from any specific time period. 

[JarMan]

2 hours ago, champatsch said:

[What Joseph did was not what we would normally call translation; he didn't grasp the meaning of a script representing a foreign language.]

I know you fully appreciate that there is a large amount of hard linguistic evidence to consider. Because of this, this question is actually eminently answerable.  From what I've seen, the lexical and syntactic data definitively answer this question.  Maybe you haven't studied the Book of Mormon's original English linguistic data that much, so you personally don't see it as answerable, or maybe you privilege other evidence over what is probably the strongest evidence, the lexis and syntax.

What the earliest text of the Book of Mormon presents us with are thousands of cases where the wording was unlikely for Joseph.  And we have names that had to be sent to Joseph.  If you think that he worded what he could, then you accept a continual switching between words given and ideas given — a fill-in-the-blank revelation. I reject that view and accept consistency and what several verses of 2 Nephi 27 say.

In addition, Book of Mormon ungrammaticality points away from Joseph, since there is a lot of bad grammar that wouldn't have been his bad grammar.  In short, there's bad grammar that wasn't Joseph's and there's bad grammar that is indeterminable in isolation: it could've been Joseph's or it could represent earlier English usage.  In view of this and all the high-level, extrabiblical language in the text, it's reasonable to take almost all the bad grammar not to be Joseph's.

On this view, actual bad grammar (19th-century dialect) would be cases where Joseph or the scribe altered the given words, and they weren't corrected during the dictation and were written down incorrectly.  Some of these are correctable by conjectural emendation, and have been corrected in the earliest text. "Ishmael and also his hole hole" (1n0705) is one of these; a conjecture has to be made. Other cases resist correction because there isn't enough clear information.  The one case of drownded is one of these. EEBO has 40 titles with drownded, from 1593 to 1698.  But if the given word was drowned, then drownded in 1 Nephi 4:2 is an instance of dialectal overlay.

Who has studied Book of Mormon ungrammaticality seriously?  Perhaps no one besides Skousen and me.  I'll give two examples here.

Object they, mostly occurring in the phrase "they which".  Joseph's own linguistic preference, and that of those around him, was "those who", not "they which", so the reasonable conclusion is that the 36 instances of "bad" object they grammar were revealed as words.

Non–3sg {-th} inflection.  Pseudo-biblical texts indicate the level and type of non-3sg {-th} usage Joseph might have produced on his own, but the earliest text goes way beyond that: 180 +/– 5 instances.  But it doesn't have the indicia of a parody, which would be thousands of instances and other things.  As one example, the Book of Mormon clearly shows the pronoun constraint of Early Modern English (five solid instances with have/hast and hath). A reasonable conclusion in this case is that the "bad" {-th} inflectional usage of the earliest text wasn't due to Joseph either.

Speculation about Mormon or Moroni being involved in the English language translation has been promoted by people who don't know the linguistic data.  Basically, the argument goes that they would have learned English as a second language, so that's why there's so much faulty archaic language in the Book of Mormon.  But this just doesn't work.  Promoters of this kind of approach must demote the elevated, archaic language of the Book of Mormon.  And they don't actually know what Early Modern English was like.  If you want to know what it was like, you have to read many texts from many genres and time periods.  You have to read linguistic studies.  You have to study corpora and search them thousands of times.  You have to read and analyze lots of archaic language.

There's an article on pronominal usage in the Book of Mormon written by someone who proposes Moroni as the translator. This author, however, didn't know crucial details about earlier pronominal usage in English, some rather basic things that could've been discovered by looking at Shakespeare or the OED.  So he went along with the received view that the Book of Mormon has a lot of bad pronominal usage, because he didn't do enough research and didn't know about a lot of past usage.

 

Maybe you could expand on this so I understand what you're thinking about here. (Is Masoric a term that is preferred over Masoretic now, or something else?)

How would you explain the origin of the Book of Mormon if you stripped away all the supernatural elements involved in its 1829 production? Pretend that all we know about the text is that it came to light in English in 1829 New York or Pennsylvania. We don't even know whether it is a translated work or not. And it's a book of scripture about somebody else's religion, not yours. You are looking at it from a purely scholarly perspective and cannot invoke the supernatural in your explanation. What could you tell us about it? Was it likely produced within a certain time frame? Does it show signs of having been modified over a certain period of time? Is it likely to be a translated work? Could a theoretical philologist in 1829 have acquired the ability to produce it given the knowledge and tools available at the time? What things are virtually known for certain and what things are still open for debate?

[champatsch]

18 hours ago, JarMan said:

How would you explain the origin of the Book of Mormon if you stripped away all the supernatural elements involved in its 1829 production? Pretend that all we know about the text is that it came to light in English in 1829 New York or Pennsylvania. We don't even know whether it is a translated work or not. And it's a book of scripture about somebody else's religion, not yours. You are looking at it from a purely scholarly perspective and cannot invoke the supernatural in your explanation. What could you tell us about it? Was it likely produced within a certain time frame? Does it show signs of having been modified over a certain period of time? Is it likely to be a translated work? Could a theoretical philologist in 1829 have acquired the ability to produce it given the knowledge and tools available at the time? What things are virtually known for certain and what things are still open for debate?

This can be answered in at least two ways.  One is to ignore dictation evidence, and allow that others could have produced the text. That sounds like what you want.  But that's highly unlikely. Another is to give the Michael Morse answer of 1879, as recorded in an RLDS periodical.

  He further states that when Joseph was translating the Book of Mormon, he, (Morse), had occasion more than once to go into his immediate presence, and saw him engaged at his work of translation.
  The mode of procedure consisted in Joseph’s placing the Seer Stone in the crown of a hat, then putting his face into the hat, so as to entirely cover his face, resting his elbows upon his knees, and then dictating word after word, while the scribe — Emma, John Whitmer, O. Cowdery, or some other, wrote it down.
  Bro. Cadwell enquired as to whether Joseph was sufficiently intelligent and talented to compose and dictate of his own ability the matter written down by the scribes. To this Mr. Morse replied with decided emphasis, No. He said he then was not at all learned, yet was confident he had more learning than Joseph then had.
  Bro. Cadwell enquired how he (Morse) accounted for Joseph’s dictating the Book of Mormon in the manner he had described. To this he replied he did not know. He said it was a strange piece of work, and he had thought that Joseph might have found the writings of some good man and, committing them to memory, recited them to his scribes from time to time.
  We suggested that if this were true, Joseph must have had a prodigious memory — a memory that could be had only by miraculous endowment. To this Mr. Morse replied that he, of course, did not know as to how Joseph was enabled to furnish the matter he dictated.

Morse couldn't ignore the dictation evidence since he witnessed the dictation multiple times. Morse didn't indicate that Joseph was reading from another manuscript. Morse didn't think Joseph could have come up with it all by himself, that he must have memorized it.  When pressed on the unlikelihood of memorization, Morse just said that he didn't know how Joseph did it.

But if we ignore the dictation evidence, then we would posit a team of Oxbridge scholars working in the early 1800s. Theologians, philologists. In terms of form and structure, they would have needed to identify a variety of non-biblical archaic features that they wanted to incorporate in the text, but not to the point of parody.  Some of these are subtle, like personal relative pronoun patterns. Some of these are obscure types of usage, such as "of which hath been spoken". The scholars would have also allowed themselves to be slightly innovative and creative in what they chose to use lexically and syntactically, but guided by attested usage. They also would have injected a few modern elements and patterns, such as auxiliary selection with unaccusative past participles.

How about a translation?  Yes, it's not unreasonable to think, assuming arguendo what you state above, that it could have been a translation by scholars of something written in Latin or another language. The verb complementation of the text is heavily finite, which is unlike English and like many other languages. As I've said before, speculation allows us to think that it could have been formulated/translated much earlier than 1829 and reworked. Or it could have been formulated/translated in the 1800s. An 1829 philologist needed to know a lot of obscure usage (less-common earlier English). For example, the philologist would have known "more part" phraseology, and perhaps even "the more parts", but "a more part" would have come from knowledge of Fabyan's Chronicle or a few other more obscure writings, or lucky coincidence. "Of which hath been spoken" language (10 times in the Book of Mormon) doesn't occur in any famous writings that I've seen. Maybe Poole's Annotations on the Holy Bible, which has "of whom already hath been spoken" in an Ezekiel 47:3 note, was the most frequently re-issued text with an example of this language. Do you see the difficulty?

[mfbukowski]

48 minutes ago, champatsch said:

This can be answered in at least two ways.  One is to ignore dictation evidence, and allow that others could have produced the text. That sounds like what you want.  But that's highly unlikely. Another is to give the Michael Morse answer of 1879, as recorded in an RLDS periodical.

  He further states that when Joseph was translating the Book of Mormon, he, (Morse), had occasion more than once to go into his immediate presence, and saw him engaged at his work of translation.
  The mode of procedure consisted in Joseph’s placing the Seer Stone in the crown of a hat, then putting his face into the hat, so as to entirely cover his face, resting his elbows upon his knees, and then dictating word after word, while the scribe — Emma, John Whitmer, O. Cowdery, or some other, wrote it down.
  Bro. Cadwell enquired as to whether Joseph was sufficiently intelligent and talented to compose and dictate of his own ability the matter written down by the scribes. To this Mr. Morse replied with decided emphasis, No. He said he then was not at all learned, yet was confident he had more learning than Joseph then had.
  Bro. Cadwell enquired how he (Morse) accounted for Joseph’s dictating the Book of Mormon in the manner he had described. To this he replied he did not know. He said it was a strange piece of work, and he had thought that Joseph might have found the writings of some good man and, committing them to memory, recited them to his scribes from time to time.
  We suggested that if this were true, Joseph must have had a prodigious memory — a memory that could be had only by miraculous endowment. To this Mr. Morse replied that he, of course, did not know as to how Joseph was enabled to furnish the matter he dictated.

Morse couldn't ignore the dictation evidence since he witnessed the dictation multiple times. Morse didn't indicate that Joseph was reading from another manuscript. Morse didn't think Joseph could have come up with it all by himself, that he must have memorized it.  When pressed on the unlikelihood of memorization, Morse just said that he didn't know how Joseph did it.

But if we ignore the dictation evidence, then we would posit a team of Oxbridge scholars working in the early 1800s. Theologians, philologists. In terms of form and structure, they would have needed to identify a variety of non-biblical archaic features that they wanted to incorporate in the text, but not to the point of parody.  Some of these are subtle, like personal relative pronoun patterns. Some of these are obscure types of usage, such as "of which hath been spoken". The scholars would have also allowed themselves to be slightly innovative and creative in what they chose to use lexically and syntactically, but guided by attested usage. They also would have injected a few modern elements and patterns, such as auxiliary selection with unaccusative past participles.

How about a translation?  Yes, it's not unreasonable to think, assuming arguendo what you state above, that it could have been a translation by scholars of something written in Latin or another language. The verb complementation of the text is heavily finite, which is unlike English and like many other languages. As I've said before, speculation allows us to think that it could have been formulated/translated much earlier than 1829 and reworked. Or it could have been formulated/translated in the 1800s. An 1829 philologist needed to know a lot of obscure usage (less-common earlier English). For example, the philologist would have known "more part" phraseology, and perhaps even "the more parts", but "a more part" would have come from knowledge of Fabyan's Chronicle or a few other more obscure writings, or lucky coincidence. "Of which hath been spoken" language (10 times in the Book of Mormon) doesn't occur in any famous writings that I've seen. Maybe Poole's Annotations on the Holy Bible, which has "of whom already hath been spoken" in an Ezekiel 47:3 note, was the most frequently re-issued text with an example of this language. Do you see the difficulty?

I thought I would never say this, but it seems "a miracle" is the only explanation.

Unless Joseph had a cell phone in the hat.

Is there other evidence that Joseph had a "prodigious memory"?

A tiny percentage of the population has such a memory.

I knew a person who had memorized the standard works.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/72434/9-facts-about-people-who-remember-everything-about-their-lives 

But that still does not explain the origin of the manuscript in Middle English.

 

 

Edited August 18, 2018 by mfbukowski

[JarMan]

2 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

I thought I would never say this, but it seems "a miracle" is the only explanation.

Unless Joseph had a cell phone in the hat.

Is there other evidence that Joseph had a "prodigious memory"?

A tiny percentage of the population has such a memory.

I knew a person who had memorized the standard works.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/72434/9-facts-about-people-who-remember-everything-about-their-lives 

But that still does not explain the origin of the manuscript in Middle English.

3 hours ago, champatsch said:

Morse couldn't ignore the dictation evidence since he witnessed the dictation multiple times. Morse didn't indicate that Joseph was reading from another manuscript. Morse didn't think Joseph could have come up with it all by himself, that he must have memorized it.  When pressed on the unlikelihood of memorization, Morse just said that he didn't know how Joseph did it.

What if Joseph had “miraculously” pulled a rabbit out of the hat? We would be much less impressed. Anyone now can find how this trick works on YouTube. Descriptions of the dictation process always seem to involve the scribe situated on the other side of a table or the witnesses to the process on the other side of the room…just like the rabbit trick. (Go look up how it’s done if you don't know already.) Isn’t it possible Joseph had mastered some sort of slight of hand trick to make it appear he was reading text off the seer stone in his hat when he was really reading from a manuscript somewhere in his view? The presence of a hat and a table is a clue to me that something may have been concealed.

Edited August 18, 2018 by JarMan

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, JarMan said:

What if Joseph had “miraculously” pulled a rabbit out of the hat? We would be much less impressed. Anyone now can find how this trick works on YouTube. Descriptions of the dictation process always seem to involve the scribe situated on the other side of a table or the witnesses to the process on the other side of the room…just like the rabbit trick. (Go look up how it’s done if you don't know already.) Isn’t it possible Joseph had mastered some sort of slight of hand trick to make it appear he was reading text off the seer stone in his hat when he was really reading from a manuscript somewhere in his view? The presence of a hat and a table is a clue to me that something may have been concealed.

Oh there's probably a hundred ways it "could" have been done, unfortunately there is no evidence for any of them, so they are all just speculation anyway, which is why a "naturalistic" explanation is irrelevant to the BOM's spiritual value.

Every mystery could be solved immediately with a naturalistic meaning and still not show that the BOM is God's word.

Other texts in reformed Egyptian could be found, Zarahemla could be discovered, the entire civilization could be rediscovered and we would still have the question of whether or not the Book of Mormon was God's word.

I don't know why that is so hard for people to understand.

[Stargazer]

On 8/17/2018 at 6:01 AM, mfbukowski said:

Of course this is only true if you think religion is about objective facts instead of people finding meaning in the universe.

So you are just a hundred eighty degrees off that's all.

It's like criticizing a violinist  for not proving string theory. After all doesn't  a violin have strings? So shouldn't the violinist be an expert on strings?

It's a good thing I wasn't reading that last sentence while drinking something.  My monitor would have needed a good washing.  I'm still chuckling!

On 8/17/2018 at 6:01 AM, mfbukowski said:

It's hard to imagine how one could be more wrong.

Plenty of people do it, though.  Every day.

[JarMan]

35 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

Oh there's probably a hundred ways it "could" have been done, unfortunately there is no evidence for any of them, so they are all just speculation anyway, which is why a "naturalistic" explanation is irrelevant to the BOM's spiritual value.

Every mystery could be solved immediately with a naturalistic meaning and still not show that the BOM is God's word.

Other texts in reformed Egyptian could be found, Zarahemla could be discovered, the entire civilization could be rediscovered and we would still have the question of whether or not the Book of Mormon was God's word.

I don't know why that is so hard for people to understand.

In terms of finding spiritual value it’s irrelevant to me how the Book of Mormon came to be. But a mystery begs to be solved. Some people are content with believing it will never be solved or to “solving” it with a supernatural explanation. It sounds like you are saying “solving” it is irrelevant for you. The beauty is the Book of Mormon is meaningful in different ways to different people. 

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, Stargazer said:

It's a good thing I wasn't reading that last sentence while drinking something.  My monitor would have needed a good washing.  I'm still chuckling!

Plenty of people do it, though.  Every day.

Yeah that one just popped into my head and I decided it was pretty apt!

Essentially what these fundamentalist literalist atheists do is take a word like "God", look around and say "Well I can't see him so he's not there".  DUH.

String theory?  Sure we have the word "string" in it so a string is a string isn't it?

Different contexts different meanings different significance- but hey that word is there so a statement about strings is a statement about strings right?  Same with the term "true" which has a zillion nuances.  Is it true that Colonel Mustard killed someone in the Ballroom even if it's only a game?  Or is he getting the death sentence?  Would that be a fictional death or a "real" death?

Context means nothing to them.

"The cup is on the table"- true or false?   What if it's more like a "mug" that's on a "desk" that looks like it once was a "table"?  Or what if it's a trophy cup on a buffet?

Which is a "fact"?

In a trial, the jury might be a "trier of fact" but what if they find it a "fact" that the guy is guilty and they are wrong?  Is it still a "fact"?  Or does it get "un-facted" in the appeal?  Was it ever a "fact" or was it a "false fact?"

Is Pluto a planet this week? Is light a wave or a particle?   

"It's either true or it's false"-  I don't think so!!  It depends on a whole lot of circumstances and contexts!

Edited August 19, 2018 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, JarMan said:

In terms of finding spiritual value it’s irrelevant to me how the Book of Mormon came to be. But a mystery begs to be solved. Some people are content with believing it will never be solved or to “solving” it with a supernatural explanation. It sounds like you are saying “solving” it is irrelevant for you. The beauty is the Book of Mormon is meaningful in different ways to different people. 

Yes solving puzzles is fun but I do not put questions about the nature of God on the level of a jigsaw puzzle or computer game.

I think it requires focus and logical discipline to differentiate what kind of "data" counts in questions about God- and the only data that counts on those questions is testimony.

And yes, phenomenological data is phenomenological data.  Any RADICAL empiricist will tell you. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_empiricism

 

[JarMan]

47 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

Yes solving puzzles is fun but I do not put questions about the nature of God on the level of a jigsaw puzzle or computer game.

I think it requires focus and logical discipline to differentiate what kind of "data" counts in questions about God- and the only data that counts on those questions is testimony.

And yes, phenomenological data is phenomenological data.  Any RADICAL empiricist will tell you. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_empiricism

 

It seems to me that all scripture is produced by man in the same way man produces any other written work. Faith doesn’t come in to play until we start to consider the contents of the scripture. So the way I look at the production has nothing to do with faith. It’s simply a natural process. No reason to resort to anything mystical or supernatural to explain it or to consider it even slightly profane to try to solve the puzzle. 

[Stargazer]

8 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Yeah that one just popped into my head and I decided it was pretty apt!

Essentially what these fundamentalist literalist atheists do is take a word like "God", look around and say "Well I can't see him so he's not there".  DUH.

String theory?  Sure we have the word "string" in it so a string is a string isn't it?

Different contexts different meanings different significance- but hey that word is there so a statement about strings is a statement about strings right?  Same with the term "true" which has a zillion nuances.  Is it true that Colonel Mustard killed someone in the Ballroom even if it's only a game?  Or is he getting the death sentence?  Would that be a fictional death or a "real" death?

Context means nothing to them.

"The cup is on the table"- true or false?   What if it's more like a "mug" that's on a "desk" that looks like it once was a "table"?  Or what if it's a trophy cup on a buffet?

Which is a "fact"?

In a trial, the jury might be a "trier of fact" but what if they find it a "fact" that the guy is guilty and they are wrong?  Is it still a "fact"?  Or does it get "un-facted" in the appeal?  Was it ever a "fact" or was it a "false fact?"

Is Pluto a planet this week? Is light a wave or a particle?   

"It's either true or it's false"-  I don't think so!!  It depends on a whole lot of circumstances and contexts!

Very interesting set of statements.

And I used to have a piece of furniture that looked nearly exactly like the one in the picture.  It was stained darker, and the knobs were larger, but nearly the same!  I broke it up and used it for firewood eventually.

[mfbukowski]

5 hours ago, Stargazer said:

Very interesting set of statements.

And I used to have a piece of furniture that looked nearly exactly like the one in the picture.  It was stained darker, and the knobs were larger, but nearly the same!  I broke it up and used it for firewood eventually.

What did you call the thing? 

[USU78]

Credenza?

[Stargazer]

2 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

What did you call the thing? 

Cabinet

[Glenn101]

On 8/18/2018 at 8:08 PM, mfbukowski said:

In a trial, the jury might be a "trier of fact" but what if they find it a "fact" that the guy is guilty and they are wrong?  Is it still a "fact"?  Or does it get "un-facted" in the appeal?  Was it ever a "fact" or was it a "false fact?"

What the jury decided was their belief beyond a reasonable doubt (whatever that is) that the guy is guilty. The fact in such case is that the jury returned a verdict of guilty.

Glenn

[cdowis]

On 8/19/2018 at 12:01 PM, Stargazer said:

Cabinet

No politics allowed here.  😊

Edited August 20, 2018 by cdowis

[mfbukowski]

8 hours ago, cdowis said:

No politics allowed here.  😊

"The cup is on the cabinet" = "the government  funded the creation of the Stanley Cup"

If there is a way to take something ambiguously I will find it. 😎

Words don't always say what you think they mean. 

So is this context is it true that "The cup was on the cabinet?"

Is there a Canadian in the house?

Just trying to show the point that the truth of a statement is always contextual.

 

 

[Kenngo1969]

22 hours ago, Glenn101 said:

What the jury decided was their belief beyond a reasonable doubt (whatever that is) that the guy is guilty. The fact in such case is that the jury returned a verdict of guilty.

Glenn

A reasonable doubt is a doubt that a reasonable person would entertain.  For example: (1) A Martian did it?  Probably an unreasonable explanation.  Or  (2) Witnesses only saw the perpetrator from a distance, it was dark, the weather was poor, and so on.  While the perpetrator is the same height, same build, and otherwise is similar in appearance to the defendant, the witnesses could not say for certain, given those circumstances, that the defendant is the perpetrator.  Ergo, reasonable doubt.

Edited August 21, 2018 by Kenngo1969

[mfbukowski]

On 8/19/2018 at 6:34 AM, USU78 said:

Credenza?

Yes, credit Enza, but watch for typos, it seems you left out some letters.

 

[Kenngo1969]

9 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

Yes, credit Enza, but watch for typos, it seems you left out some letters.

 

You funny!