Skousen & Carmack Lecture Take Aways

[Physics Guy]

8 hours ago, JarMan said:

You really ought to read the papers.

That sound like a nice principle. But seriously, why?

I mean, sure, I could take a few hours and go and read these things, and come back here and say that there was nothing in them that addressed my basic questions. Why do you think that won't happen? What point do they make that so clearly rules out 19th-century composition?

If Carmack's papers do make such a point, why haven't you or he or anybody else even mentioned it? If even you can't put your finger on his clinching argument precisely enough to briefly indicate its nature, why should I read a bunch of stuff that's inconclusive on the only point I doubt?

Edited October 5, 2018 by Physics Guy

[Rajah Manchou]

9 hours ago, strappinglad said:

Should a third source come from one of the " other sheep " civilizations, they will have to scramble to debunk any divine gloss that might be attached to its revealing. 

For a few reasons, this third source could be much more difficult for Mormons than it would be for critics. For example, imagine this third source corrects some of the "traditions of our fathers" or comes from a mundane source that is independent of the Church. Imagine the tension. Critics can easily accept ancient texts, so long as there aren't fantastic claims surrounding their provenance, while Mormons seem to demand fantastic origins. 

My feeling is that had Joseph Smith just said that he found the Book of Mormon, we would have a very different relationship with critics today. I also expect if there is to be a third witness, it will be a simple "found" text. No angels, no seerstones, no drama. In this day and age, people don't need that mystery. Eliminating all that would be the quickest way for a restoration text to reach everyone.

[strappinglad]

4 hours ago, Rajah Manchou said:

No angels, no seerstones, no drama. In this day and age, people don't need that mystery. Eliminating all that would be the quickest way for a restoration text to reach everyone.

And if Jesus and His followers had just dropped all that resurrection stuff...

[Rajah Manchou]

9 minutes ago, strappinglad said:

And if Jesus and His followers had just dropped all that resurrection stuff...

It's already happened. I know a good number of Christians who profess a belief in Christ and follow his teachings, but have no opinion on whether or not he was literally resurrected. Is a belief in angels and seerstones required to have a testimony of the Book of Mormon? Would more people accept the teachings within the Book of Mormon if it wasn't inextricably linked to the account of Joseph Smith seeing the letters glowing on a rock in a hat? For me, the account of the origins of the Book of Mormon (a narrative that is not from the Book of Mormon itself) is the hardest pill to swallow.

I have no concerns about the content of the Book of Mormon, its the story about where it came from that I can't get a handle on.

Edited October 5, 2018 by Rajah Manchou

[Ryan Dahle]

In regard to all this illusion conjecture, I think you are all missing the point. I conceded that those were always possibilities. They just aren't very likely. You have to posit that Joseph was a skilled illusionist and deceiver on a number of different levels or else that he got a good number of people to go along with his hoax, or some mixture of the two.

Sure, one can assume Joseph either discovered or wrote the text of the BofM and then smuggled in portions into his "translation" sessions. But any explanation about the text being from some other source is unlikely. There is no credible external evidence at all, and most people willing to engage in this line of reasoning really aren't interested in exploring the variety of internal evidences that would complicate any thesis about its composition. You would have to deal with a large body of scholarship produced over the past 40 + years on the text and most people simply aren't thorough enough to go down that path. There are lots of reasons aside from EModE to assume Joseph most likely couldn't have written the text on his own, and to assume that it wasn't someone even in his time period or in the EModE period. 

Then you have to assume that he was skilled enough to smuggle in the manuscript and dictate for hours on end, day after day, with other people occasionally observing now and then. Joseph would have needed to be careful to not allow any papers to crinkle and alert those present to his decpetion. If his hat had hidden compartments, he would have to make sure no one else looked at it carefully. At frequent points in the dictation, he would have needed to flip papers over without shuffling them to make noise and without making a noticeable scene. The bigger the manuscripts were that he was working from, the harder they would have been to conceal. The smaller they were, the greater the frequency needed to shuffle them to continue reading, and thus the more likely he would have been found out. He would have to never get the papers out of order. If Joseph wrote the book beforehand or transcribed it from some other source on to note cards, he would have had to do this in secret without arousing the suspicions of those living with him whenever it happened. And he would have needed to pull off the deception, day after day, hour after hour, never knowing when someone might walk in on him or be carefully watching the exchange from some vantage that might detect his fraud. 

Then you have to figure out how he fabricated the plates and the other artifacts with similar types of concerns. Where did he get the materials and the expertise? How did he accomplish it in secret? Then you have to figure out how he produced an angel and a voice from heaven, with the angel appearing to the three witnesses and turning the plates over for them to see. The witnesses said that it was a spiritual experience, but also discernible with their eyes in a way that seemed like everyday discernible experiences. So you would have to figure out how Joseph made the voice come from heaven. Did he have a friend hiding up in a tree? Who was it? And if so, don't you think the witnesses would notice that the voice was coming from a specific location, or feel it was a ruse if it was someone screaming to be heard from further away. The angel descended out of heaven and was arrayed in glorious light. Are we to believe Joseph was a levitation specialist and had lighting technician skills in 1829?  How did Joseph fabricate the spiritual component of the experience? If you give people some hallucinogenic drugs, they almost certainly aren't going to all see the same thing and testify with confidence throughout their lives that they had experienced precisely what they all claimed to experience. How did Joseph fabricate John the Baptist and get Peter, James, and John to appear out of thin air, and pass as believable angels to Oliver Cowdery? What stranger to the Whitmers did Joseph co-opt into his plan to show the fabricated plates to Marry Whitmer? And so on and so forth. 

There is no credible, historically sustainable alternative explanation that accounts for the totality of the data in a way that is more economical and true to the historical data than the standard narrative advocated for by Latter-day Saint historians. One has to needlessly multiply assumptions and resort to unlikely and historically unsupportable scenarios. While these scenarios are certainly possible, they are, under normal evidentiary standards, comparatively weak. When the best explanation of the data leads to a conclusion that people aren't inclined to accept, it is understandable that they will resort to inferior explanations. 

 

 

 

[clarkgoble]

7 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

I'm not even convinced that Smith would have needed to dictate from notes, mind you. The Book of Mormon is repetitive enough that fresh information doesn't come very fast even if you read it quickly, and peering at a stone in the dark would be a good excuse for speaking slowly. It seems to me that somebody could just make it up going along. Maybe it would have been enough to just jot a few notes in the evening, and review them in the early morning, to keep things on track. Maybe not even that.

That's a fair middle ground - have plot outlined but details made up. I still think that would be hard to do without notes and avoid errors. But it's definitely easier than having no notes or preparation. To be fair many critics also argue he had an amazing memory. (Without checking to be sure, I think Vogel makes that point)

7 hours ago, JarMan said:

I'll suggest a plausible way to perform the illusion. The stone is in the hat, but it's not the stone that you are looking at. You pretend to look into the hat at the stone but leave enough space so that you can look into your lap. Try this with an actual hat. It's very simple to pull off. The manuscript is likely hidden in a drawer that pulls out or is secured to a contraption that folds out or slides out from under the table. Or it is simply held in the lap. Perhaps the manuscript is wound around a pair of spools so that it can be advanced as the dictation is occurring. This would be simple to pull off. The items needed to perform the illusion such as the manuscript and spools could be carried in whatever container was said to contain the plates.

While definitely possible, I think over an extended period of time in a room everyone lives in and works in that'd be much harder to pull off. Magicians are careful to restrict access and aren't doing the same trick over and over again. Particularly with Emma I think this would be less likely although again possible.  The fact we're not just talking about a one time trick makes me find most of these arguments unbelievable. But again I understand completely why some do believe them.

15 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I just typically find that people have all these alternative theories about how the text was produced, but once you start probing the details of their theories, it usually becomes clear that they are far more convoluted and have far less historical support than the standard narrative believed by mainstream Latter-day Saint scholars. These alternative theories certainly aren't impossible; they are just comparatively weak. The only reason they are resorted to is that they are more palatable than angels and seer stones. 

They frequently do tend to be more convoluted and typically without much support. I've definitely criticized Taves on that. At least a fraud model explains why no one thought Joseph did it. The Taves model of faithful construction of plates doesn't really explain why no one said that's what he was doing. (At best we get that pretty ambiguous and I'd say pushed too far comment by his uncle about making things appear that aren't really there) Likewise the various models of plagiary seem convoluted and without evidence - especially those postulating a more faithful plagiary. 

All that said clearly theories aren't interpreted in a vacuum. We consider a theory in terms of a set of theories to see what has most explanatory power. So the fraud explanations can't be easily separated out from questions of the likelihood of angels, Nephites and so forth in terms of public evidence. For those without a religious experience grounding Book of Mormon truth the overwhelmingly simplest explanation is fraud with far fewer convolutions. The reason the rest of us reject that has more to do with those private experiences than which one is more convoluted.

[Physics Guy]

43 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

While these scenarios are certainly possible, they are, under normal evidentiary standards, comparatively weak.

Harry Houdini pulled off some great tricks. Reconstructed explanations for how he did them are all weak under normal evidentiary standards.

Perhaps you can try the very experiment that I've been trying by visiting sites like this one. Check out some belief system you don't happen to share. See how people defend it.

I think you'll find the pattern is common of insisting that the mundane alternative explanations are all far-fetched and cockeyed, and that people only swallow them because they're too doggone lazy to engage with the convincing evidence that the enthusiasts have presented. When you don't share the enthusiasts' beliefs, though, it seems quite clear that when they are dismissing the mundane alternative theories, they are just never taking the alternatives seriously, but are instead creating straw men like Cadmus sowing dragon's teeth, continuously. And when they invite everyone else to plunge into their own long explanations, they are sticking their heads in the familiar sand of home ground.

At least to me, it's sobering.

Edited October 5, 2018 by Physics Guy

[Rajah Manchou]

1 hour ago, Ryan Dahle said:

• Joseph would have needed to be careful to not allow any papers to crinkle and alert those present to his decpetion.
• If his hat had hidden compartments, he would have to make sure no one else looked at it carefully.
• He would have needed to flip papers over without shuffling them to make noise and without making a noticeable scene.

None of these is difficult to do.

[JarMan]

10 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

That sound like a nice principle. But seriously, why?

I mean, sure, I could take a few hours and go and read these things, and come back here and say that there was nothing in them that addressed my basic questions. Why do you think that won't happen? What point do they make that so clearly rules out 19th-century composition?

If Carmack's papers do make such a point, why haven't you or he or anybody else even mentioned it? If even you can't put your finger on his clinching argument precisely enough to briefly indicate its nature, why should I read a bunch of stuff that's inconclusive on the only point I doubt?

I have purposefully not waded into the discussion because I think it's a waste of time to debate somebody who hasn't examined the evidence under debate. Many of your questions will be answered by reading the papers. Trust me on this. You will likely still have questions after reading everything, but then at least the discussion can be more focused and relevant.

[JarMan]

3 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

In regard to all this illusion conjecture, I think you are all missing the point. I conceded that those were always possibilities. They just aren't very likely. You have to posit that Joseph was a skilled illusionist and deceiver on a number of different levels or else that he got a good number of people to go along with his hoax, or some mixture of the two.

Sure, one can assume Joseph either discovered or wrote the text of the BofM and then smuggled in portions into his "translation" sessions. But any explanation about the text being from some other source is unlikely. There is no credible external evidence at all, and most people willing to engage in this line of reasoning really aren't interested in exploring the variety of internal evidences that would complicate any thesis about its composition. You would have to deal with a large body of scholarship produced over the past 40 + years on the text and most people simply aren't thorough enough to go down that path. There are lots of reasons aside from EModE to assume Joseph most likely couldn't have written the text on his own, and to assume that it wasn't someone even in his time period or in the EModE period. 

Then you have to assume that he was skilled enough to smuggle in the manuscript and dictate for hours on end, day after day, with other people occasionally observing now and then. Joseph would have needed to be careful to not allow any papers to crinkle and alert those present to his decpetion. If his hat had hidden compartments, he would have to make sure no one else looked at it carefully. At frequent points in the dictation, he would have needed to flip papers over without shuffling them to make noise and without making a noticeable scene. The bigger the manuscripts were that he was working from, the harder they would have been to conceal. The smaller they were, the greater the frequency needed to shuffle them to continue reading, and thus the more likely he would have been found out. He would have to never get the papers out of order. If Joseph wrote the book beforehand or transcribed it from some other source on to note cards, he would have had to do this in secret without arousing the suspicions of those living with him whenever it happened. And he would have needed to pull off the deception, day after day, hour after hour, never knowing when someone might walk in on him or be carefully watching the exchange from some vantage that might detect his fraud. 

Then you have to figure out how he fabricated the plates and the other artifacts with similar types of concerns. Where did he get the materials and the expertise? How did he accomplish it in secret? Then you have to figure out how he produced an angel and a voice from heaven, with the angel appearing to the three witnesses and turning the plates over for them to see. The witnesses said that it was a spiritual experience, but also discernible with their eyes in a way that seemed like everyday discernible experiences. So you would have to figure out how Joseph made the voice come from heaven. Did he have a friend hiding up in a tree? Who was it? And if so, don't you think the witnesses would notice that the voice was coming from a specific location, or feel it was a ruse if it was someone screaming to be heard from further away. The angel descended out of heaven and was arrayed in glorious light. Are we to believe Joseph was a levitation specialist and had lighting technician skills in 1829?  How did Joseph fabricate the spiritual component of the experience? If you give people some hallucinogenic drugs, they almost certainly aren't going to all see the same thing and testify with confidence throughout their lives that they had experienced precisely what they all claimed to experience. How did Joseph fabricate John the Baptist and get Peter, James, and John to appear out of thin air, and pass as believable angels to Oliver Cowdery? What stranger to the Whitmers did Joseph co-opt into his plan to show the fabricated plates to Marry Whitmer? And so on and so forth. 

There is no credible, historically sustainable alternative explanation that accounts for the totality of the data in a way that is more economical and true to the historical data than the standard narrative advocated for by Latter-day Saint historians. One has to needlessly multiply assumptions and resort to unlikely and historically unsupportable scenarios. While these scenarios are certainly possible, they are, under normal evidentiary standards, comparatively weak. When the best explanation of the data leads to a conclusion that people aren't inclined to accept, it is understandable that they will resort to inferior explanations. 

You are assuming that if Joseph copied a manuscript then he must have faked everything else. Presumably you wouldn't make the same assumption about his "translation" of the bible since it's clear he copied parts of that. Or if the Book of Abraham was not really on the papyrus does that mean he lied about everything? The point is that the model doesn't need to be 100% traditional or 100% critical. I think there is a lot of ground in the middle.

[Exiled]

8 minutes ago, JarMan said:

I have purposefully not waded into the discussion because I think it's a waste of time to debate somebody who hasn't examined the evidence under debate. Many of your questions will be answered by reading the papers. Trust me on this. You will likely still have questions after reading everything, but then at least the discussion can be more focused and relevant.

Why can't Mr. Carmack simply explain himself or point to where in the papers the answers will be found?  Why can't you?  Instead there is this push to force someone to read all this material instead of just being helpful.  I don't get it, unless there aren't any good answers to Physics Guy's questions and that seems to be why there is this push to have him needlessly search the papers.

[JarMan]

1 hour ago, Rajah Manchou said:

None of these is difficult to do.

Right. There would not even need to be a hidden compartment in the hat. And the sound of paper problem is addressed by winding the manuscript around a pair of spools axially connected to each other with a rod.

[JarMan]

3 minutes ago, Exiled said:

Why can't Mr. Carmack simply explain himself or point to where in the papers the answers will be found?  Why can't you?  Instead there is this push to force someone to read all this material instead of just being helpful.  I don't get it, unless there aren't any good answers to Physics Guy's questions and that seems to be why there is this push to have him needlessly search the papers.

There is no single silver bullet. There are dozens and dozens of examples that point to hundreds or thousands of EModE grammatical constructions (this is probably not the correct technical term) that occur in the Book of Mormon. The combined weight of these examples is what builds the case.

I am astonished to find that people think they don't need to read the material to productively discuss it. This is very bizarre to me--particularly coming from a scientist.

[Ryan Dahle]

1 hour ago, Rajah Manchou said:

None of these is difficult to do.

Hmm... I think I personally would have a very difficult time pulling it off for hours on end every day. I suspect that would occasionally slip up, drop a paper on the ground, have to dig around in the hat to rearrange papers that got out of order, or give some other clue that I was reading from a prepared manuscript and not a stone in a hat. I'm no Houdini.

But I get that others may feel they need to turn Joseph Smith into a Houdini, despite the lack of evidence to support such an assertion, other than the remarkable text, artifacts, and angelic encounters themselves--which, of course, can't be logically appealed to as supporting evidence because they are precisely what is being disputed in the first place.   

[clarkgoble]

10 minutes ago, JarMan said:

Right. There would not even need to be a hidden compartment in the hat. And the sound of paper problem is addressed by winding the manuscript around a pair of spools axially connected to each other with a rod.

Of course then you have to hide the rod, spools and paper. Again a problem in a small home over the space of months. This would particularly be an issue for Emma who likely did much of the work on the 116 pages.

So I would not say these tricks aren't possible. The bigger complication is maintaining them under the circumstances in question. Perhaps that's less of an issue for Oliver but the extended close proximity would still be an issue there.

10 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

If Carmack's papers do make such a point, why haven't you or he or anybody else even mentioned it? If even you can't put your finger on his clinching argument precisely enough to briefly indicate its nature, why should I read a bunch of stuff that's inconclusive on the only point I doubt?

I don't think it does cinch the case although it makes a strong indirect one. The remaining problem as I've mentioned before is local spoken dialects. The way to resolve that is to test the various grammatical forms against court transcripts. So it's doable but not yet done.

[Ryan Dahle]

21 minutes ago, JarMan said:

Right. There would not even need to be a hidden compartment in the hat. And the sound of paper problem is addressed by winding the manuscript around a pair of spools axially connected to each other with a rod.

Not sure how that would be much help. It would require lots of manual manipulation to keep the rod turning to unwind the paper, and possibly a second rod to keep the paper taut so the portion being unwound would have somewhere to go and wouldn't get in the way. A rod or two just adds a different type of complexity to the mix. Either way, this is just one step in what would necessarily be a series of supposed deceptions. 

Edited October 5, 2018 by Ryan Dahle

[JarMan]

5 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Hmm... I think I personally would have a very difficult time pulling it off for hours on end every day. I suspect that would occasionally slip up, drop a paper on the ground, have to dig around in the hat to rearrange papers that got out of order, or give some other clue that I was reading from a prepared manuscript and not a stone in a hat. I'm no Houdini.

But I get that others may feel they need to turn Joseph Smith into a Houdini, despite the lack of evidence to support such an assertion, other than the remarkable text, artifacts, and angelic encounters themselves--which, of course, can't be logically appealed to as supporting evidence because they are precisely what is being disputed in the first place.   

Joseph doesn't need to be a Houdini to pull this off. Seriously, try this yourself. Get a hat, a stone, and a piece of paper. Sit at the edge of a table or desk with the paper in your lap, or better yet, in a drawer that pulls out from under the desk. Then pretend to look into the hat at the stone and see if you can comfortably read the paper. You'll find this is very easy to do.

[Ryan Dahle]

30 minutes ago, JarMan said:

You are assuming that if Joseph copied a manuscript then he must have faked everything else. Presumably you wouldn't make the same assumption about his "translation" of the bible since it's clear he copied parts of that. Or if the Book of Abraham was not really on the papyrus does that mean he lied about everything? The point is that the model doesn't need to be 100% traditional or 100% critical. I think there is a lot of ground in the middle.

Definitely apples and oranges

[JarMan]

11 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

Of course then you have to hide the rod, spools and paper. Again a problem in a small home over the space of months. This would particularly be an issue for Emma who likely did much of the work on the 116 pages.

But you do grant that he was able to hide gold plates over the same period of time. If he can hide gold plates he can hide manuscripts and a few small tools.

[Ryan Dahle]

1 minute ago, JarMan said:

Joseph doesn't need to be a Houdini to pull this off. Seriously, try this yourself. Get a hat, a stone, and a piece of paper. Sit at the edge of a table or desk with the paper in your lap, or better yet, in a drawer that pulls out from under the desk. Then pretend to look into the hat at the stone and see if you can comfortably read the paper. You'll find this is very easy to do.

Its not just about "a" paper. Its lots of text on lots of paper over a long period of time. Seriously, try to transcribe the entire book of Mormon onto concealable note cards and then see how easy it would be to read them off for hours on end without looking like you are frequently manipulating something in the hat or below the hat with your hand. 

[clarkgoble]

1 minute ago, JarMan said:

But you do grant that he was able to hide gold plates over the same period of time. If he can hide gold plates he can hide manuscripts and a few small tools.

He didn't hide the gold plates though. Emma was constantly aware they were there and gives reasonable descriptions of them. Yes she didn't see the plates themselves to be able to determine if there were writing or the like. But she knew they were there. Plus the big difference is that unlike the plates, there was no command to leave Joseph's hat alone. So I don't think that parallel works.

2 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Its not just about "a" paper. Its lots of text on lots of paper over a long period of time. Seriously, try to transcribe the entire book of Mormon onto concealable note cards and then see how easy it would be to read them off for hours on end without looking like you are frequently manipulating something in the hat or below the hat with your hand. 

And paper was for the Smiths expensive. Something in these days of ubiquitous cheap paper we forget.

[Ryan Dahle]

4 minutes ago, JarMan said:

But you do grant that he was able to hide gold plates over the same period of time. If he can hide gold plates he can hide manuscripts and a few small tools.

Again, completely apples and oranges. Everyone knew he had the plates concealed and probably knew where they were most of the time. They weren't integral to the supposed sleight of hand deception that would have needed to be carried out day after day. Etc.

Edited October 5, 2018 by Ryan Dahle

[JarMan]

10 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Definitely apples and oranges

No, it's Books of Mormon and Bibles. Or Books of Mormon and Books of Abraham. Scripture and Scripture. The point is the given explanation for producing scripture turns out to not always be the actual way the scripture was produced.

[Exiled]

20 minutes ago, JarMan said:

There is no single silver bullet. There are dozens and dozens of examples that point to hundreds or thousands of EModE grammatical constructions (this is probably not the correct technical term) that occur in the Book of Mormon. The combined weight of these examples is what builds the case.

I am astonished to find that people think they don't need to read the material to productively discuss it. This is very bizarre to me--particularly coming from a scientist.

I can't speak for physics guy but I think he wanted to know if Mr. Carmack had definitive proof that Joseph Could not have composed the book of mormon. If that were the case, one would expect Mr. Carmack to cite chapter and verse of where to find it in his papers, together with a summary of the findings. That wasn't given and I think that's why he wasn't interested in reading the papers.

Finding EmodE doesn't seem remarkable to me unless there is definitive proof that JS could not have composed it. But that would require eliminating the possibility that JS's oral dialect and all those in the area didn't contain some of the structures Mr. Carmack has found. There is also the possibility that JS was trying to sound old world biblical to make his work seem like something a native american christian would have written.

[champatsch]

I don't suggest Dr. Physics Guy read my papers at this time. There will be more useful ones to appear in the future that summarize a range of evidence and give a broader view of things.