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The Gold Plates


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3 hours ago, JarMan said:

This is a false dichotomy. You said you had looked into possible naturalistic explanations and found them wanting. This is easy to do if you alone get to set the bounds of what is possible and what isn't.

You haven't watched the youtube videos, then. It clearly is a phone. He takes it off the siderail and holds it in his lap while he peeks at it. He pretends to re-check his cards, but he's really looking into his lap. Much as Joseph pretended to look into the hat but really looked into his lap.

This isn't a mathematical exercise. It's not like they were shooting free throws. The point is that somebody sitting in a chair behind a table was able to deceive thousands of witnesses over a period of many, many hours by secretly looking at a device hiding in his lap. Most of the people deceived were poker players who strive to observe their opponents in order to pick up tells. This was certainly a heavier lift than Joseph's.

Perhaps Joseph had a series of scrolls that he could change out. He leaves what he's not using in his box he calls the plates. And we don't know what table Joseph had at the time. Assuming Oliver was sitting at the same table I think it's fair to say it was at a comfortable writing height. This would have been sufficient to hide the manuscript behind. And he didn't do the translation in someone's bedroom. He initiates the process when the coast is clear, perhaps while the household is out doing their morning chores. 

We don't have witnesses that say Joseph didn't have plates in the room when he did the translation in 1829. Those accounts refer to the earlier period of translation. And as mentioned, there's evidence the "plates" were present, wrapped in cloth while he translated. I imagine that for the vast majority of the translation time it was just Joseph and Oliver. When others were present he would need to be more careful, obviously. These people believed Joseph had found ancient gold plates with the help of an an angel. But somehow they were sophisticated enough to know they were being deceived when Joseph told them that seeing the plates meant death? Joseph loved using the threat of imminent, divine destruction when he needed to manipulate the situation.

Here's my deep academic judgement on thi matter.

Dudes, read the book.  Try to write one with all the new Doctrine melded with the old. Compare it with our times and what we need now.

Forget where it came from, it's irrelevant either way, and even says to try the promise.

Go ahead and fake that and see how many millions of followers you get. :)

 

 

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18 hours ago, JustAnAustralian said:

He didn't.

The text is pretty clear. Words of Mormon says that he finished the abridgement of what he thought were "the plates" and then found the small plates, and put them with his abridgement.

Also, since they were going with the remainder of his record, they would have been bound together.

I think you missed my main point.  Did ANY of the witnesses claim to see two different size sets of plates?  If I was looking at something so historically important, that seemed like it would be important to comment on in describing what I saw.

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19 hours ago, california boy said:

I have a pretty basic question.  Where did the small plates go?  Were they bound with the large plates?  

Yes:

Quote

Where do the books in the Book of Mormon come from?

Small Plates of Nephi

The small plates of Nephi were actually the second plates Nephi created at the command of the Lord, about 30 years after leaving Jerusalem (see 2 Nephi 5:28–33). They were kept by Nephite prophets and record keepers and were devoted to spiritual matters and the prophets’ ministry and teachings . Amaleki was the last person to write on the small plates of Nephi. He then passed them on to King Benjamin (see Omni 1:25), who put them with the large plates (see Words of Mormon 1:10). The first part of today’s Book of Mormon (1 Nephi–Omni) is an unabridged translation of the small plates.

See also here:

Quote

Jacob is the one who designated the two sets as the “small plates” and the “the larger plates” (Jacob 1:1; 3:13). But then, speaking of the small plates commissioned to him, he says, “These plates are called the plates of Jacob, and they were made by the hand of Nephi” (Jacob 3:14). So, Jacob seems to rename the plates Nephi made and named when he starts writing on them.
...
plates.jpg

And here:

Quote
The Small Plates of Nephi

One day while Mormon was working on his digest, he discovered a little volume of the prophetic writings of his early forefathers in his library of ancient records (WofM 1:3). An examination of its contents revealed that it had been started by the same prophet Nephi who began the large plates of Nephi. Because of its brevity we call it the small plates of Nephi. About one-third of our published Book of Mormon is a translation of the small plates of Nephi.
...
The sacred record that we know of as the small plates of Nephi is indebted to a yet earlier volume that the colony of Lehi brought from Jerusalem in 600 BC. This previous work, known as the brass plates of Laban, probably set the pattern for the Nephite practice of preserving their most precious writings on metal plates. It also appears to have influenced the language of some of these works (Mosiah 1:4; compare 1 Nephi 1:2 and Mormon 9:32–33). About one-third of the small plates of Nephi is directly or indirectly related to the brass plates of Laban. About one-fourth is quoted from that record verbatim.

The small plates of Nephi served the Lord’s purpose as a repository of religious writings during an age in which the Nephite kings, who were custodians of the large plates of Nephi, were not qualified, I suspect, to cope with the writing of sacred history. By the time of king Benjamin, however, prophet-kings again occupied the throne. It was at this juncture that Amaleki concluded the small plates of Nephi and turned them over to king Benjamin for safekeeping. Thereafter, sacred and secular writings alike were entered on the large plates of Nephi as had been the case at the beginning of Nephite history.

(Emphasis added.)

19 hours ago, california boy said:

Were there two different sets of plates?  

Delivered to Joseph Smith?  No.

Compiled and abridged by Mormon (and Moroni)?  Yes.  Several "sets of plates," actually:

  1. Record of Lehi
  2. Plates of Brass
  3. Benjamin's Speech
  4. Record of Zeniff
  5. Records of Alma
  6. Records of Sons of Mosiah
  7. Epistles (Helaman, Pahoran, Moroni)
  8. Records of Nephi
  9. Records of the Jaredites
  10. Documents from Mormon
19 hours ago, california boy said:

Has anyone ever testified to seeing the small plates and the large plates?  

You seem to be thinking of "small" and "large" in terms of physical size/dimensions.  I think that is incorrect, as the Plates were described as being essentially uniform as to size/dimensions.  The "small" and "large" seems to refer more to the content of, and also perhaps the number of the plates in, each respective collection.  See, e.g., here:

Quote

Nephi wrote two sets of records: first his large plates, and then some time later his small plates. He stressed that he would focus on spiritual, not worldly, things on the small plates and that on his other plates were to contain “the more part of the reign of the kings” (1 Nephi 9:4). Today, what Nephi recorded on his small plates is found in the first and second books of Nephi. The central message of Nephi’s account there is a religious one, but he is not entirely non-political in his small plates text. 

And here:

Quote

In order to differentiate between the initial secular record of Nephi and this second more spiritual record, the former came to be called the "larger plates" of Nephi (Jacob 3:13) or simply the "large plates of Nephi." This name was likely applied to the first set of plates because it came to consist of a larger number of plates than the second record. It likely had nothing to do with the actual dimension of the plates. The second record was then referred to as the "small plates" of Nephi (Jacob 1:1). This set of plates was "small" because it consisted of fewer plates.

As the Book of Mormon story unfolded, the large plates of Nephi eventually became an extensive set or collection of plates. Brigham Young described this collection as being a library of plates-"many wagon loads" (JD, 19:38). The small plates remained just that, a "small" single set of plates.

As we read the book of First Nephi, we tend to regard it as a daily journal, but we should keep in mind that the writings by Nephi on the small plates of Nephi were begun in retrospect, some thirty years after the events actually happened.

Both the small plates of Nephi and the large plates of Nephi were passed along after Nephi's death. The small plates were passed from prophet to prophet, and important spiritual happenings were entered. The large plates were passed down from king to king, and an ongoing secular history was kept.

The above graphic helps me keep track of these things.

19 hours ago, california boy said:

Did the witnesses testify that they saw both the small plates and the large plates?  I have never heard anything about the small plates after the 116 pages was lost.  Has anyone else? 

Something that also doesn't make sense to me, unless I am missing something.  Why would Mormon start the narrative with small plates and then switch to different size plates?  

He didn't.  From FAIR:

Quote

Each plate was approximately 6 to 7 inches wide and 7 to 8 inches long

  • "7 inches in length, 6 inches in breadth" [13] - Quoting Oliver Cowdery
  • "six inches wide by eight inches long"[14] —Joseph Smith Jr.
  • "seven inches wide by eight inches in length"[15] —Martin Harris
  • "seven by eight inches"[16] —Martin Harris
  • "about eight inches long, seven inches wide"[17] —David Whitmer
  • "about eight inches square" - quoting David Whitmer [18]
  • "six or eight inches square" - Critical newspaper[19]
  • "The plates were each about 7 by 8 inches in width and length." - Parley P. Pratt [20]
  • "about eight inches long, and six wide" - Lucy Mack Smith (allegedly)[21]
  • "Each plate was about six by eight inches"[22]

...

Question: What was the thickness of the entire volume of gold plates?

The entire volume was approximately six inches thick

  • "a pile about 6 inches deep." - Quoting Oliver Cowdery [34]
  • "[W]hen piled one above the other, they were altogether about four inches thick."[35] — Martin Harris
  • "six or eight inches thick" - Critical newspaper [36]
  • "The volume was something near six inches in thickness." - Parley P. Pratt[37]
  • "The volume was something near six inches in thickness" - Joseph Smith [38]
  • "the whole being about six inches in thickness"[39]

Thanks,

-Smac

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10 hours ago, california boy said:

I think you missed my main point.  Did ANY of the witnesses claim to see two different size sets of plates?  If I was looking at something so historically important, that seemed like it would be important to comment on in describing what I saw.

No witnesses would have claimed to see two different size sets of plates because there weren't.  There was one set of plates, the golden plates.  Mormon or Moroni appended the small plates to the end of their set of plates or copied the text over to the end of their set of plates.

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9 minutes ago, webbles said:

No witnesses would have claimed to see two different size sets of plates because there weren't.  There was one set of plates, the golden plates.  Mormon or Moroni appended the small plates to the end of their set of plates or copied the text over to the end of their set of plates.

I always thought that was what Mormon did. Which raises the possibility that the plates of Nephi have in fact been abridged or received some variety of redaction.

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21 hours ago, JarMan said:

This is a false dichotomy. You said you had looked into possible naturalistic explanations and found them wanting. This is easy to do if you alone get to set the bounds of what is possible and what isn't.

No, it isn't a false dichotomy.  When ever you add a new set of variables to the possibilities (Oliver being a co-conspirator, Oliver being duped, Oliver not seeing them), it changes the calculation.  Just throwing something out to explain away a problem doesn't mean the problem goes away.

21 hours ago, JarMan said:

You haven't watched the youtube videos, then. It clearly is a phone. He takes it off the siderail and holds it in his lap while he peeks at it. He pretends to re-check his cards, but he's really looking into his lap. Much as Joseph pretended to look into the hat but really looked into his lap.

This isn't a mathematical exercise. It's not like they were shooting free throws. The point is that somebody sitting in a chair behind a table was able to deceive thousands of witnesses over a period of many, many hours by secretly looking at a device hiding in his lap. Most of the people deceived were poker players who strive to observe their opponents in order to pick up tells. This was certainly a heavier lift than Joseph's.

It is definitely a mathematical exercise.  It is how we calculate probabilities of whether something happened or not.  But no, it is definitely not a heavier lift.  Watch the video.  How many phones are visible?  The fact that he had his phone on his lap is a none issue because no one believed that it could be used for cheating.  A phone doesn't help you with poker.  What actually helped him was that he was somehow getting a feed of the game and no one expected that.  In fact, they still haven't figured out how he got that feed.  Most likely he had an accomplice but no one has admitted to it.  Nor have they found any vulnerabilities or such that would explain how he got the feed.

The people in the room did notice him looking down.  They also noticed the phone on his lap.  None of that gave any sort of warning sign that he was cheating because a phone doesn't mean he is cheating.  This is because poker has hidden details (the other players hands) which you aren't supposed to know.  That's why his chance of getting away with his con would be 99% or higher.

21 hours ago, JarMan said:

Perhaps Joseph had a series of scrolls that he could change out. He leaves what he's not using in his box he calls the plates. And we don't know what table Joseph had at the time. Assuming Oliver was sitting at the same table I think it's fair to say it was at a comfortable writing height. This would have been sufficient to hide the manuscript behind. And he didn't do the translation in someone's bedroom. He initiates the process when the coast is clear, perhaps while the household is out doing their morning chores. 

We don't have witnesses that say Joseph didn't have plates in the room when he did the translation in 1829. Those accounts refer to the earlier period of translation. And as mentioned, there's evidence the "plates" were present, wrapped in cloth while he translated. I imagine that for the vast majority of the translation time it was just Joseph and Oliver. When others were present he would need to be more careful, obviously. These people believed Joseph had found ancient gold plates with the help of an an angel. But somehow they were sophisticated enough to know they were being deceived when Joseph told them that seeing the plates meant death? Joseph loved using the threat of imminent, divine destruction when he needed to manipulate the situation.

At the Whitmers, it appears he translated in at least two different places: upstairs in a bedroom and downstairs in the main area.  They had a blanket hung up when he was in the downstairs to give some privacy from visitors but people in the house don't appear to have any problems with going through the blanket and seeing what was happening.  Some say that there was a blanket between Joseph and the transcriber and some say there weren't.

The Whitmers house was a 20x30 ft building.  The reconstructed building has 2 enclosed rooms upstairs along with a loft.  Downstairs has a main room and a bedroom.  The size of the bedrooms upstairs look to be about 10 ft wide and 15 ft long.  In that room, you have the bed and trunks along with the table and two chairs.  That doesn't really fit a large table.

And most witnesses of the translation at Whitmer don't mention anything about the plates, including warnings of destruction.  The only person who really talks about that is Martin.  One witness, though, did mention that the plates were hidden in the barn.  So, at the Whitmers, Joseph almost definitely didn't have the plates nearby when he was translating.  It was just him, the hat, and the seer stone.  Since he let people see the stone and the hat, there really wasn't anything preventing people from sitting nearby and watching.

But we are really just arguing over what probability he had to keeping it hidden.  You think it is really high, like 99%.  That number looks great, but if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, the chance of being caught increases.  After 60 days, he only has a 50% chance of pulling it off.  Those aren't very good odds.  I don't think it was 99%.  I think the main reason you feel it is high is because of the imminent, divine destruction.  But if he doesn't have the plates nearby, then that imminent, divine destruction threat goes way down.

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1 hour ago, OGHoosier said:

I always thought that was what Mormon did. Which raises the possibility that the plates of Nephi have in fact been abridged or received some variety of redaction.

I think Mormon actually would have needed to translate the small plates.  The first section of the plates was written 1000 years before Mormon.  That's a long time for languages to change even in societies with high literacy.

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57 minutes ago, webbles said:

No, it isn't a false dichotomy.  When ever you add a new set of variables to the possibilities (Oliver being a co-conspirator, Oliver being duped, Oliver not seeing them), it changes the calculation.  Just throwing something out to explain away a problem doesn't mean the problem goes away.

Um. . . I haven't added a new set of variables. You've simply chosen to ignore reality and the many nuances of human behavior and psychology. This suggest you're not really interested in considering alternative explanations.

1 hour ago, webbles said:

It is definitely a mathematical exercise.  It is how we calculate probabilities of whether something happened or not.

Is that so?

1 hour ago, webbles said:

But no, it is definitely not a heavier lift.  Watch the video.  How many phones are visible?  The fact that he had his phone on his lap is a none issue because no one believed that it could be used for cheating.  A phone doesn't help you with poker.  What actually helped him was that he was somehow getting a feed of the game and no one expected that.  In fact, they still haven't figured out how he got that feed.  Most likely he had an accomplice but no one has admitted to it.  Nor have they found any vulnerabilities or such that would explain how he got the feed.

The people in the room did notice him looking down.  They also noticed the phone on his lap.  None of that gave any sort of warning sign that he was cheating because a phone doesn't mean he is cheating.  This is because poker has hidden details (the other players hands) which you aren't supposed to know.  That's why his chance of getting away with his con would be 99% or higher.

You're right that he was able to cheat partly because nobody thought it was possible to intercept the feed. The lesson, I think, is that it is easy to deceive people when they have a preconceived notion about what is going on in the room. Mike Postle wouldn't be able to get away with the same thing now in the same way that a group of hijackers with box cutters wouldn't be able to take over a plane.

You claiming with certainty that Joseph would have been caught is a form of presentism. You are essentially projecting your knowledge onto those in the past who, of course, don't have the benefit of the hindsight you have. The translation witnesses truly believed a divine miracle was happening before them. That kind of preconceived notion was bound to leave them vulnerable to deceit. They simply weren't looking for cheating because they didn't even conceive it was possible.

1 hour ago, webbles said:

At the Whitmers, it appears he translated in at least two different places: upstairs in a bedroom and downstairs in the main area.  They had a blanket hung up when he was in the downstairs to give some privacy from visitors but people in the house don't appear to have any problems with going through the blanket and seeing what was happening.  Some say that there was a blanket between Joseph and the transcriber and some say there weren't.

The Whitmers house was a 20x30 ft building.  The reconstructed building has 2 enclosed rooms upstairs along with a loft.  Downstairs has a main room and a bedroom.  The size of the bedrooms upstairs look to be about 10 ft wide and 15 ft long.  In that room, you have the bed and trunks along with the table and two chairs.  That doesn't really fit a large table.

And most witnesses of the translation at Whitmer don't mention anything about the plates, including warnings of destruction.  The only person who really talks about that is Martin.  One witness, though, did mention that the plates were hidden in the barn.  So, at the Whitmers, Joseph almost definitely didn't have the plates nearby when he was translating.  It was just him, the hat, and the seer stone.  Since he let people see the stone and the hat, there really wasn't anything preventing people from sitting nearby and watching.

But we are really just arguing over what probability he had to keeping it hidden.  You think it is really high, like 99%.  That number looks great, but if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, the chance of being caught increases.  After 60 days, he only has a 50% chance of pulling it off.  Those aren't very good odds.  I don't think it was 99%.  I think the main reason you feel it is high is because of the imminent, divine destruction.  But if he doesn't have the plates nearby, then that imminent, divine destruction threat goes way down.

I am not arguing that my scenario is highly likely. I'm just saying that it's possible. And so are many other scenarios that you or I have never thought of. Humans behave in all sorts of ways that we would never conceive of. We can't confidently reconstruct events that happened almost 200 years ago, even when we have tons of information. In this case we have very little.

Over the years I used the very same type of arguments you are using in order to debunk naturalistic explanations for the Book of Mormon. This was one of my favorite things to do when I was teaching Gospel Doctrine. Heck, I used to do it on this very forum. I thought I had things figured out. . . but it was all just youthful hubris.

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1 hour ago, JarMan said:

Um. . . I haven't added a new set of variables. You've simply chosen to ignore reality and the many nuances of human behavior and psychology. This suggest you're not really interested in considering alternative explanations.

On the contrary, if I read @webbles correctly, the problem is precisely that you haven't added a new set of variables; or rather, you haven't accounted for variables which we know were present. 

1 hour ago, JarMan said:

You're right that he was able to cheat partly because nobody thought it was possible to intercept the feed. The lesson, I think, is that it is easy to deceive people when they have a preconceived notion about what is going on in the room. Mike Postle wouldn't be able to get away with the same thing now in the same way that a group of hijackers with box cutters wouldn't be able to take over a plane.

And yet webbles' observation obviates the obvious comparison to Joseph Smith. This more abstract point about "it being easy to deceive people when they have a preconceived notion about what is going on in the room" just...doesn't land in this case. 

On 10/4/2022 at 9:52 PM, JarMan said:

This is a false dichotomy. You said you had looked into possible naturalistic explanations and found them wanting. This is easy to do if you alone get to set the bounds of what is possible and what isn't.

How are we to consider things when we do not evaluate the bounds of what is possible and what is not? Any calculation of what is possible or not will ultimately be done in our own heads. 

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10 hours ago, webbles said:

It is definitely a mathematical exercise.  It is how we calculate probabilities of whether something happened or not.

So show us some of the math ...

Actually, this is a misunderstanding. Why? We don't really calculate probabilities of whether something happened or not. Something has already happened, or it hasn't (past tense). There isn't a probability there. Probability, by definition, means to predict whether something will happen (future tense).

But, in discussing what you really meant (rather than what you said), probability is always a range from 0 (impossible) to 1 (certain). Every option or possibility has to be included so that the probability of all potential outcomes, when added together, equals 1 (or 100 percent). Since we know that the Book of Mormon exists, and that there are different views on how that happened, then we can try to discuss the idea of the likelihood that it may have happened in a particular way. The challenge for people who want to try and calculate such a thing is that while it is easy to do in situations where all possible processes or steps are known, it is next to impossible when they aren't - because the likelihood that our belief that any one set of steps or processes resulted in the historically known outcome can be calculated only by subtracting the likelihood of all of the other possibilities from 1. And in situations like this, that seems relatively ridiculous to assert (on either side). And every time we add a detail to an existing framework of details, we only create probabilistic subsets - which are by definition mathematically smaller than the original set from which the new subset is derived.

When webbles notes that "When ever you add a new set of variables to the possibilities ... it changes the calculation." This is only true if you are adding variables you hadn't considered before (breaking up an identified variable into smaller pieces doesn't change anything as long as the pieces all add up to the same value as the original larger container variable). If you can add new variables and change the calculation in this way (by adding previously unrecognized pathways),what it really means is that you probably are still missing more potential pathways (variables) than you have already identified. And in this recognition, we discover that we really cannot calculate the probability of something when we don't know all of the possible pathways. And this is why, in most of these situations, people (on all sides of the discussion) like to discuss things in terms of impossibilities, or to simply pull numbers out of a hat (both of which webbles seems to do in this thread).

It's worth making one more side point. The unlikelihood of any particular pathway to an outcome is pretty much trivialized by the fact that something happened. The odds of winning the Powerball are 1 in 292.2 million (assuming you play). But people routinely win it. If you flip a coin 20 times, the likelihood of getting heads 20 times in a row is a little more than 1 in a million. But, if you flip the coin 20 times and get a different outcome, that sequence of flips also had a 1 in a million likelihood. In fact every possible sequence you could get has that same 1 in a million likelihood. And your chances of getting a 1 in a million result from flipping a coin 20 times? 100 percent. Unlikely events occur routinely (all the time). So the idea that something would have been unlikely isn't usually a good argument when applied to something that has already happened. And this is why it isn't valuable in these kinds of arguments to make a claim like this: "He has a 99% chance of pulling it off every day.  To do that for 60 days, that gives a probability of 54%." This claim is meaningless, since we all do things all the time that (had we predicted it before we did those things) would have significantly lower probabilities than this. Apart from the arbitrary numbers used here, the entire concept is a misapplication of probability.

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On 10/5/2022 at 10:54 PM, OGHoosier said:

On the contrary, if I read @webbles correctly, the problem is precisely that you haven't added a new set of variables; or rather, you haven't accounted for variables which we know were present. 

And yet webbles' observation obviates the obvious comparison to Joseph Smith. This more abstract point about "it being easy to deceive people when they have a preconceived notion about what is going on in the room" just...doesn't land in this case. 

How are we to consider things when we do not evaluate the bounds of what is possible and what is not? Any calculation of what is possible or not will ultimately be done in our own heads. 

This point is the posterboy for William James' Radical Empiricism- which in 25 words or less says that we need to include ALL connections and relations in studying a topic in order to call the study "empirical"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_empiricism#:~:text=Radical empiricism is a philosophical,a place in our explanations.

Quote

Radical empiricism is a philosophical doctrine put forth by William James. It asserts that experience includes both particulars and relations between those particulars, and that therefore both deserve a place in our explanations. In concrete terms: Any philosophical worldview is flawed if it stops at the physical level and fails to explain how meaning, values and intentionality can arise from that.[1]

And so for the technical ,jargony statement - the best description but also the most opaque:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/radical-empiricism

Quote

 

radical empiricism, a theory of knowledge and a metaphysics (theory of Being) advanced by William James, an American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist, based on the pragmatic theory of truth and the principle of pure experience, which contends that the relations between things are at least as real as the things themselves, that their function is real, and that no hidden substrata are necessary to account for the various clashes and coherences of the world.

James summarized the theory as consisting of (1) a postulate: “The only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience”; (2) a factual statement: “The relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves,” which serves to distinguish radical empiricism from the empiricism of the Scottish philosopher David Hume; and (3) a generalized conclusion: “The parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous transempirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.” The result of this theory of knowledge is a metaphysics that refutes the rationalist belief in a being that transcends experience, which gives unity to the world.

 

This basic view finally becomes "Empirical Theology" which most directly fulfills James' original vision

https://www.religion-online.org/article/empirical-theology-a-revisable-tradition/

Quote

 

Empirical Theology: A Revisable Tradition

by Willliam Dean

William Deanis Professor of Religion at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota.

The following article appeared in Process Studies, pp. 85-102, Vol. 19, Number 2, Summer, 1990. Process Studies is published quarterly by the Center for Process Studies, 1325 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Used by permission. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

SUMMARY

Dean suggests that American religious empiricists may have lapsed into objectivism at times, but a third position of speculative and radically empirical realism, a religious historicism, holds up well in the current forces of deconstructionism, neopragmatism, and language philosophy.

But God did not only create mountains, he also created jungles. And today we are beginning to understand that the jungles are the richest and most vibrant part of his creation. The modem explorer in South America or in Africa is not looking for mountains. She is looking into the depths of the jungles to observe and understand the creatures who live there in all their intricate variety. We ourselves came out of the jungle a few million years ago, and we are now becoming aware that we need to understand and preserve the jungle if we are to remain alive and healthy on this planet. --Freeman Dyson1
 

I portray a current and revisionary theological empiricism, one bent by winds of American thought in the last twenty-five years, and thus appreciably different from theological empiricism as it was thirty or sixty years ago. But I do not speak simply reactively; rather, I describe an empiricism traditional and strong enough to keep its roots and to have some effect on the prevailing winds.

Theological empiricism is a distinctively American form of religious thought. Although in recent decades empirical theology in America has flourished under the roof of process theology and in many respects is allied with process theology, empirical theology is not a subdivision of process theology. Such an approach would neglect the temporal priority of empirical theology to process theology, as well as the relative independence of empirical theology over the years. Empirical theology moves from the post-Lockean sensationalist religious aestheticism of Jonathan Edwards, to the radical empiricism of William James, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead, to the "Chicago School" of theology, to varieties of empirical and pragmatic theologies at Yale and Columbia, to the empirical side of process theology, to a current revisionist empirical theology -- which is fast becoming an empiricist theology that is better seen as a historicist theology. I assume that there is nothing anywhere in religious thought quite like the combination of empiricism, pragmatism, pluralism, meliorism, relativism, and historicism that form this American chain of philosophical-theological work.

 

Ordinarily I would not be this technical.....  ;)

 

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48 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

This point is the posterboy for William James' Radical Empiricism- which in 25 words or less says that we need to include ALL connections and relations in studying a topic in order to call the study "empirical"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_empiricism#:~:text=Radical empiricism is a philosophical,a place in our explanations.

And so for the technical ,jargony statement - the best description but also the most opaque:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/radical-empiricism

This basic view finally becomes "Empirical Theology" which most directly fulfills James' original vision

https://www.religion-online.org/article/empirical-theology-a-revisable-tradition/

Ordinarily I would not be this technical.....  ;)

 

Seeing as I have never heard of "empirical theology" before, I clearly have a lot to learn. Must read this paper in detail.

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18 minutes ago, OGHoosier said:

Seeing as I have never heard of "empirical theology" before, I clearly have a lot to learn. Must read this paper in detail.

Philosophers get paid by the syllable, with as many as possible in every word.  ;)

if you get stuck let me know

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On 9/19/2022 at 8:16 AM, Benjamin McGuire said:
On 9/19/2022 at 2:54 AM, Ryan Dahle said:

Serious question: do happen to know of a 19th century text that you think has a diversity and concentration of parallel structures comparable to the Book of Mormon (especially the 3+ layer variety)? I'm not talking here about loose macro chiasms (often referred to as ring forms).

No. I haven't done a lot with 19th century texts. Now, for 18th century texts, sure. I can do this. Generally, the people I see who make claims of this sort have never spent any time actually reading the literature or the source texts. Ring forms are particularly interesting to me (and were a bit of a hobby a while back) because not only do we find them as these large macro chiasms, we also find them as much shorter chaisms of the sort you highlight in the Book of Mormon. More to the point, we know in several instances that these were deliberate rhetorical structures based on comments by the authors. It was a favorite, for example, of Giambattista Vico. There are lots of examples in his Liber Metaphysicus. This issue has always been one of the real weaknesses of Book of Mormon apologetics - it has tended to approach the Book of Mormon strictly through the lens of Biblical Studies - it wants to treat the Book of Mormon as an ancient text rather than what it really is - a modern text claiming to be a translation of an ancient text. As I pointed out in my 2016 presentation:

Okay, so I looked up the information that you sent me on this topic from this source: http://www.ispf-lab.cnr.it/2014_301.pdf. But, assuming the orations are indeed chiastic, they appear to be of the loose macro type. I didn't study the analysis in depth because it seemed from the outset to be different from most of what we find in the Book of Mormon. In any case, considering that Vico was apparently well versed in classical Greek literature and rhetoric, he seems like the type of person that might very well resurrect some of these forms. But can you actually demonstrate that his works have a diversity and concentration of parallel structures comparable to the Book of Mormon, as you claimed? 

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On 9/13/2022 at 11:27 AM, Teancum said:

I see the point goes right past your overly pious head.  If the plates were available they could be examined and shown to be authentic, or not, by experts.  See simple. Should not be to tough to comprehend.  I am not sign seeker.  But fantastic claims require fantastic evidence and you don't have it.  Burden of proof is on the one making the fantastic claim.

The evidence is the Church itself as well as the Book of Mormon. 

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4 hours ago, rodheadlee said:

The evidence is the Church itself as well as the Book of Mormon. 

Yes, exactly!  One assertion vs another!

It always riles me when ill informed opinion is stated as a The Rule Of The Universe with no evidence or definition for the existence of the Rule itself.

There is no evidence that such a rule even exists much less  evidence that the the rule is itself "true" or what theory of truth one is using to justify the argument in a religious or psychological context.

You didn't walk through the truth door and turn around 3 times and then blow your nose, therefore the statement is false. 🤥

 

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Come brothers and sisters, let’s sit over here on the overstuffed credulous chair and say, “Thank you God for the Holy Spirit, thank you for the Holy Spirit.” 

Edited by Bernard Gui
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11 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

But can you actually demonstrate that his works have a diversity and concentration of parallel structures comparable to the Book of Mormon, as you claimed? 

I think so, sure.

This is such an odd sort of request. Why? At its core, it seems to be making some sort of assertion about the Book of Mormon, that it is, in some way, a unique text, with special sorts of textual indicators. This reminds me of something written by Ralf Norrman, way back in 1986, when he published one of the earliest treatments of chiasm in non-biblical texts (it was important, and it was a highly referenced work): Samuel Butler and the Meaning of Chiasmus. Norrman writes (page 4):

Quote

 

There are many authors with a well-known love of symmetry whom one could choose for a study such as the present one. Lewis Carroll, for instance, with his constant preoccupation with mirror-phenomena, would be worth consideration. As could be expected, chiasmus is a fairly prominent feature of his style.

The best choice for the moment, however, must surely be Samuel Butler (1835-1902). It is difficult to find any author, from any period or country, who is so extraordinarily obsessed with chiasmus as Butler. He uses chiasmus constantly. His texts abound in chiastic sentences. His thought is dominated by chiastic structuring. He fits whatever he can into the chiastic pattern and usually denies the existence of other patterns. The leading ideas of practically all his books have their origin in the chiastic formula. All his scientific doctrines derive from his obsession with chiasmus. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that everything he observed went through a chiastic filter, so that he took in only what chiasmus let through.

 

This study hasn't gotten a lot of attention in LDS writings (although there are several that reference it) because Samuel Butler is a little late for the apologetic purposes that you are using it for. He was born in 1835. But this is quite the argument. When you make the claim that the Book of Mormon's chiasmus has a unique diversity and concentration, what exactly do you mean? How do you measure that diversity and concentration in empirical terms for the purpose of comparison? Or is this really simply hyperbole expressing your perception that the Book of Mormon has unique characteristics that set it apart from other literature in terms of chiasmus?

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1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I think so, sure.

This is such an odd sort of request. Why? At its core, it seems to be making some sort of assertion about the Book of Mormon, that it is, in some way, a unique text, with special sorts of textual indicators. This reminds me of something written by Ralf Norrman, way back in 1986, when he published one of the earliest treatments of chiasm in non-biblical texts (it was important, and it was a highly referenced work): Samuel Butler and the Meaning of Chiasmus. Norrman writes (page 4):

This study hasn't gotten a lot of attention in LDS writings (although there are several that reference it) because Samuel Butler is a little late for the apologetic purposes that you are using it for. He was born in 1835. But this is quite the argument. When you make the claim that the Book of Mormon's chiasmus has a unique diversity and concentration, what exactly do you mean? How do you measure that diversity and concentration in empirical terms for the purpose of comparison? Or is this really simply hyperbole expressing your perception that the Book of Mormon has unique characteristics that set it apart from other literature in terms of chiasmus?

Several years ago, using Parry’s Reformatted Book of Mormon, I started to catalog the various parallelisms he identified by speaker, type, topic, and purpose (sacred or secular). I was hoping to be able to arrive at some conclusions about each speaker’s usage. I thought it would be interesting to know the if there were characteristic patterns used by Nephi, Jacob, Mormon, Moroni, angels, etc. To me most interesting parallelism in the Book of Mormon is stairstep (climax, or anadiplosis).

It was too daunting a task. After several weeks I had only made it through 1 Nephi. Unfortunately, the program I was using is no longer supported by Apple, so I can’t access the files now.

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10 hours ago, rodheadlee said:

The evidence is the Church itself as well as the Book of Mormon. 

I am sure there is a term for the logical fallacies in your remarks. I assume that you say the same for Islam and the Quran? After all there is a book and there is the religion and there is the over 1 billion adherents.  By your standard it must be true and divine.

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5 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Yes, exactly!  One assertion vs another!

You cannot be serious.  As noted:

I am sure there is a term for the logical fallacies in your remarks. I assume that you say the same for Islam and the Quran? After all there is a book and there is the religion and there is the over 1 billion adherents.  By your standard it must be true and divine.

5 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

It always riles me when ill informed opinion is stated as a The Rule Of The Universe with no evidence or definition for the existence of the Rule itself.

There is no evidence that such a rule even exists much less  evidence that the the rule is itself "true" or what theory of truth one is using to justify the argument in a religious or psychological context.

You didn't walk through the truth door and turn around 3 times and then blow your nose, therefore the statement is false. 🤥

 

 

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2 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Actually, I think mark would say yes. It’s true for them. 

Exactly 

And like ALL religions there is much I would accept in the Koran.

I nearly became Bha'i at one point, and accept many points of that faith.

And yes, as I have said MANY times before we all have our own paths.  I was raised Catholic, became atheist, Communist, (a secular religion) Buddhist, nearly Baha'i, and I believe I needed ALL of those steps in my life to get here.

Yes them Utah farmers have, I believe, the best paradigm for all mankind!  ;)

When I was an academic atheist in New York, no one west of the Hudson could have POSSIBLY had anything worth listening to! But there in the philosophies of men I found the door to personal revelation and its justification.

Even I am wrong on extremely rare occasions!  ;)

 

 

Edited by mfbukowski
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On 9/13/2022 at 12:27 PM, Teancum said:

If the plates were available they could be examined and shown to be authentic, or not, by experts. 

The same could be said about the knives used to assassinate Julius Caesar.  Because they are not available, do you deny that the assassination took place?

On 9/13/2022 at 12:27 PM, Teancum said:

See simple. Should not be to tough to comprehend.  I am not sign seeker.  But fantastic claims require fantastic evidence and you don't have it. 

I'm curious what "extraordinary evidence" you think exists for the divine sonship of Jesus Christ, for His miracles, for His atoning sacrifice, for His resurrection, etc.?

In any event, there is patent ambiguity in what "extraordinary" means "in this realm."  See, e.g., this article:

Quote

In other instances, the invocation of ECREE has been virtually unintelligible. Tressoldi (2011: 1) described ECREE as a statement that “is at the heart of the scientific method, and a model for critical thinking, rational thought and skepticism everywhere.” Yet in the same paragraph the author conceded that it was impossible to objectively define the term “extraordinary.” He admitted that “measures of ‘extraordinary evidence’ are completely reliant on subjective evaluation” (Tressoldi 2011: 1). It is clearly impossible to base all rational thought and scientific methodology on an aphorism whose meaning is entirely subjective.

ECREE sounds cool, but its utility is quite limited.

More:

Quote

Invocation of the ECREE aphorism tends to confuse more than clarify. Pertinent questions remain unanswered. What is the nature of an extraordinary claim? What qualifies as extraordinary evidence? Should there be two standards of evidence in science? Is there any context in which ECREE can be invoked correctly?

If ECREE has difficulty in being applied in a scientific context, how much more problematic is it when deployed in relation to religious truth claims?  For example, the resurrection of Jesus Christ was a purported event that happened 2,000 or so years ago.  I don't think ECREE has much utility in evaluating it.  

And here:

Quote

In 1979 astronomer Carl Sagan popularized the aphorism “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE). But Sagan never defined the term “extraordinary.” Ambiguity in what constitutes “extraordinary” has led to misuse of the aphorism. ECREE is commonly invoked to discredit research dealing with scientific anomalies, and has even been rhetorically employed in attempts to raise doubts concerning mainstream scientific hypotheses that have substantive empirical support. The origin of ECREE lies in eighteenth-century Enlightenment criticisms of miracles. The most important of these was Hume’s essay On Miracles. Hume precisely defined an extraordinary claim as one that is directly contradicted by a massive amount of existing evidence. For a claim to qualify as extraordinary there must exist overwhelming empirical data of the exact antithesis. Extraordinary evidence is not a separate category or type of evidence--it is an extraordinarily large number of observations. Claims that are merely novel or those which violate human consensus are not properly characterized as extraordinary. Science does not contemplate two types of evidence. The misuse of ECREE to suppress innovation and maintain orthodoxy should be avoided as it must inevitably retard the scientific goal of establishing reliable knowledge.

I don't think there is anything close to "overwhelming empirical data of the exact antithesis" of the claimed origins of the Book of Mormon.  To the contrary, I have found the claimed origins to be quite plausible, and also supported by secondary evidences.  I also think that critics of the Book of Mormon are not necessarily obligated to provide a coherent counter-explanation for The Book of Mormon.  But the point is, they have not been able to.  We're coming up on nearly 200 years since the original publication of the text, and yet when the chips are down, and when a well-informed person (like, say, Daniel Peterson) argues for the plausibility of the LDS position, we don't get reasoned responses and rebuttals.  We get glib sarcasm.  We get curt dismissals a al ECREE.  We get unreasoned insistence on archaeology being the end-all source of evidence for (or against) the Book of Mormon.  We get anything but an engagement of the evidence at hand.

Thanks,

-Smac

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