In 1985, I Personally Witnessed Golden Plates

[mfbukowski]

13 hours ago, Vanguard said:

Boy you sure seem to 'nail it' sometimes, though you still leave me scratching my head on others... ; )

Yes, I can see that, thanks.

I am often posting as if it is written to an old friend with whom I am conversing for years, and refer to things WE have discussed BUT guess what!?

Not everyone has been in on the last 10 years of discussion ! Shocking!

And I often am being sarcastic, saying the opposite of what I actually mean, etc.

Sorry- I also almost never proof-read my posts.

I gotta take this stuff more seriously!

I hereby promise to try to fix that.

Thanks for pointing it out.

Was there a particular word clump you had in mind?

[Teancum]

12 hours ago, bluebell said:

Do I believe that every other religious text from other faiths are issues of theology and not science?  Yes, I do.

You know I totally misread your post that I responded to.  Sorry about that.

[Analytics]

14 hours ago, Stargazer said:

@Analytics I am curious why you think statistical likelihood is a reliable way to assess the likelihood of God doing any particular thing? 

My wife took a short holiday in Austria last year, taking one of our church friends who had recently lost her husband, in order to help her deal with things. I didn't go with them. But I seriously considered flying out there myself just to surprise them. It would have been a complete surprise, and the inherent statistical likelihood of my showing up would have been about 0% to them. 

Why do you think God only does things that are predictable?

I'm simply using statistical probabilities to express my credence in various truth claims--I'm not suggesting that God (presuming He/She/It exists) is somehow governed by a stochastic process. Rather, I'm using probabilities to express my belief. This is sometimes called the subjectivist interpretation of probability. 

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_interpretations#Subjectivism

[Analytics]

14 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I don't think Joseph had any "doubt" about whether Martin saw the vision. He clearly was convinced Martin had the vision. It seems Joseph was just trying to be careful about not speaking for Martin. Joseph couldn't definitively say what Martin saw, especially in this sort of quasi-legal context. He could only certainly declare what he himself experienced in that moment.

Fortunately, Martin repeatedly testified throughout his life about the experience. For a recent treatment of Martin's testimony, see Neal Rappleye, "Material Plates, Spiritual Vision: Martin Harris, Divine Materiality, and Seeing with 'Spiritual Eyes'," in Steadfast in Defense of Faith, ed. Shirley S. Ricks, Stephen D. Ricks, and Louis C. Midgley (Orem and Salt Lake City, UT: The Interpreter Foundation and Eborn Books, 2023), 271-298. 

I appreciate you sharing this and largely agree that Joseph was being careful with his words. However, the actual witness statements are more of a "quasi-legal" statement than Jospeh's own first hand account, and those are full of claims that they didn't personally witness (e.g. When they say "we...have seen the plates which contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi" they aren't talking about what they saw; they are making a ton of presumptions about what they saw).

I think "at least it was again to me" does imply something. It implies the visions were individual things that happened to them as an individuals, not a group things that happened to all of them as a group. Not even the most pedantic witness would say, "while I was in Sunday school, the bishop came in with the TV and showed us a scene from the 2021 film Witnesses, at least it was shown to me."

 

 

[Ryan Dahle]

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

I appreciate you sharing this and largely agree that Joseph was being careful with his words. However, the actual witness statements are more of a "quasi-legal" statement than Jospeh's own first hand account

I think Joseph Smith understood the role of the Three Witnesses, generally speaking, as quasi-legal. If you look in the revelations that Joseph Smith translated, it is clear that these witnesses play something analogous to witnesses in a legal trial in a court room, in connection with Deuteronomy 19:15: "at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established." Here is a quote from a recent article showing how pervasive this idea is in the Book of Mormon and how the three witnesses of the Book of Mormon are obviously part of this general theme: 

Quote

Finally, the Book of Mormon makes specific predictions about three human witnesses who would testify to its truthfulness. Nephi prophesied that “three witnesses shall behold it, by the power of God, besides him to whom the book shall be delivered; and they shall testify to the truth of the book and the things therein” (2 Nephi 27:12). A fairly clear allusion to Deuteronomy 19:15 is then given two verses later: “in the mouth of as many witnesses as seemeth him good will he establish his word (2 Nephi 27:14). Centuries later, Moroni delivered a similar prophecy: “in the mouth of three witnesses shall these things be established; and the testimony of three … shall stand as a testimony against the world at the last day” (Ether 5:4).

These prophecies were fulfilled when Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, and David Whitmer were shown the plates of the Book of Mormon via a miraculous angelic visitation. It is also interesting that witnesses sometimes played a similar authenticating role in ancient documents, some of which, like the Book of Mormon, were also sealed in some manner.

In other words, when speaking of the witnesses of the Book of Mormon, the text makes obvious allusions to this seminal legal statute in the Old Testament. Whether one thinks this is an authentic translation or that Joseph Smith made it up, there is reason to believe that Joseph most likely understood the testimony of the Three Witnesses in at least a quasi-legal context (whether speaking of the official statements from the witnesses or in any other context). 

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

However, the actual witness statements are more of a "quasi-legal" statement than Jospeh's own first hand account, and those are full of claims that they didn't personally witness (e.g. When they say "we...have seen the plates which contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi" they aren't talking about what they saw; they are making a ton of presumptions about what they saw).

It seems the first bolded statement is erroneous. If I say that my friends and I watched a movie, would it be reasonable to claim that I didn't personally witness the movie (simply because I saw it in the presence of other individuals)? Clearly not. As for the second bolded statement, are the witnesses making presumptions about what they saw, or are you making the presumptions? 

Look, we have dozens and dozens of statements from various witnesses talking about what they saw, both individually and collectively, and both in ordinary and supernatural settings. Martin Harris and David Whitmer directly deal with the efforts to distort the spiritual nature of the experience, and the reasoning used by critics is just bad, on various levels. If someone wants to conclude that the witnesses were lying or delusional, then fine. But such conclusions aren't based on standard historical analysis or typical legal approaches to eye-witness testimony. 

Let's just be honest, the rejection of their collective and individual testimonies (when all the relevant data is included into the mix) is based primarily on worldview assumptions that can't accommodate the logical outcome of the witnesses' statements. Critics of the Church should just own up to that fact. It's okay to say that the witnesses actually provide a strong case (under typical evidentiary reasoning), but that you just reject it based on other sets of data.

Edited February 27, 2024 by Ryan Dahle

[CV75]

On 2/26/2024 at 9:05 AM, Analytics said:

This isn't addressing my actual position in any way. Trusting your math, only about 0.000018% have ever claimed to see Joseph Smith's golden plates. Fine. Point granted. However, I saw some golden plates too. Without lying, I testified in public about what I saw. However, the people who heard my testimony and the testimony of the others who saw the same thing was misleading. I think the seminary teacher was intentionally trying to be misleading--he wanted his claim about plates under the lectern to sound really extraordinary in order to demonstrate that the testimony of eleven witnesses was also extraordinarily strong--if we all agreed that the artifact he described was there, it must have really been there.

My point is that in order to fully understand what to make out of their testimonies, we need more details. As it is, their testimony is quite suspicious, and there are multiple possible explanations. Some of those other explanations are more likely than others.

I'm in an airport and having difficulty finding the quote. But I beleive President Nelson once counseled that criticism of anyone's doubting the faith, testimonies, teachings, etc. concerning the Church is no more apprpriate or warranted than criticism of anyone's supporting them.

[Stormin' Mormon]

22 minutes ago, CV75 said:

I'm in an airport and having difficulty finding the quote. But I beleive President Nelson once counseled that criticism of anyone's doubting the faith, testimonies, teachings, etc. concerning the Church is no more apprpriate or warranted than criticism of anyone's supporting them.

Here you go.  I think:

Quote

If friends and family should step away from the Church, continue to love them. It is not for you to judge another’s choice any more than you deserve to be criticized for staying faithful.

Worldwide Youth Devotional, May 2022

 

Edited February 27, 2024 by Stormin' Mormon

[smac97]

On 2/24/2024 at 8:33 PM, Analytics said:

In 1985, I Personally Witnessed Golden Plates

Okay.

On 2/24/2024 at 8:33 PM, Analytics said:

In another thread , the issue of the eleven witnesses came up in passing. I said something to the effect that their statements were unpersuasive when you look at the totality of the evidence. @smac97 went off on this with insinuations of “intellectual dishonesty, even moral cowardice,” and suggested I was “apparently ditching the entire notion of the examination of evidence” and that I had “arbitrarily, and in a priori fashion, exclude the Witness statements” as being “reliable evidence” because doing so was “convenient.” He found it objectionable that I expressed my opinion in passing and provided “no argument.  No evidence.  No analysis.  No explanation.”

I was, in retrospect, uncivil and curt.  I apologize.

With the possible exception of Ann Taves, I am not aware of any recent attempt by any secular or sectarian skeptic to meaningfully address the evidence pertaining to the Plates and to the Witnesses.  This includes your comments in this thread (at least the first three, as I have not read further).

On 2/24/2024 at 8:33 PM, Analytics said:

Since hearing the details of my thoughts on this is so important to him, I’ll share some true personal experiences that illustrate where I’m coming from. This will be somewhat long, and I’ll break up my position in about three posts.

In the 1985-1986 school year, I was a junior at Hillcrest High in Midvale Utah. I took release-time seminary, and we were studying Church history and the D&C that year. One day, the instructor stood in front of the class, and there was a cloth covering the lectern that was on the table at the front of the class. He told the class that underneath the cloth and underneath the lecturn, he had a very, very, special object. He said it was a stack of several plates that were gold in color. He said some of them were sealed. He said they were bound together with three rings, that they were of curious workmanship, and that they had characters on them that appeared to be written in an ancient language, perhaps Egyptian or something that could be called reformed Egyptian. Everyone in the class was extremely curious about this—it sounded like he had an exact replica of the original Book of Mormon codex in front of the class.

Everyone in the class really, really, wanted to see what he had underneath the lectern. He asked the members of the class if they believed he really had what he said he had. Some people raised their hand and believed him. However, most did not.

He then said he’d prove to us that he really had what he said he had. He chose eleven people out of the class of about 30 to come up and see the plates. I was lucky enough to be one of the witnesses. He fashioned some sort of a curtain out of the cloth so that he could pull the object out from under the lectern and let eleven of us examine what he had without revealing it to the other 20 people.

We went to the front of the class to see the artifact he had. It was real. He let us touch them. We thumbed through the pages. Everyone else in the class saw us doing this and they were permitted to ask us questions about what we saw. We all answered honestly. There really was an object behind the curtain. The object consisted of a stack of plates. Each plate was about 6” by 8”. They were golden in color. They were bound together with rings. They had antique writing on them. We could thumb through some of the plates, but others were sealed. All eleven of us attested to the rest of the class about what we saw.

After we were done examining the plates, we returned to our seats. The teacher then repeated the question he asked at the beginning: how many students thought the object he claimed to have under the lectern was really there? Everybody raised their hand. And that was the point—twelve people attesting to the reality of the plates was really strong evidence that they really existed.

Okay.

On 2/24/2024 at 8:37 PM, Analytics said:

Part 2

A couple of weeks ago, some attorneys asked me to help them as a non-testifying subject matter expert. There was a legal dispute, and they were going to have a seven hour deposition with somebody who had worked at the company that was the other party in the lawsuit. My role was to review several documents they had gathered in discovery, help the attorneys understand some of the technical subtleties involved, and help them make a list of questions to ask in the deposition. The documents we reviewed included several reports and emails written by the guy who was to be deposed. The attorneys and I got a clear picture of who this guy was and what he thought and believed. We anticipated what he would say under oath and how it would be helpful to their case.

There is a substantial difference between a percipient ("fact") witness and an expert witness. 

A percipient "fact" witness is someone who testifies about events or information they personally observed or experienced. They provide testimony based on firsthand knowledge of the facts relevant to the case. For example, if a person witnessed a car accident, they would be a percipient fact witness.

On the other hand, an expert witness is someone who has specialized knowledge, skill, training, or experience in a particular field relevant to the case. Expert witnesses provide opinions or interpretations of evidence based on their expertise to help the trier of fact (such as a judge or jury) understand complex issues. For instance, a medical doctor might serve as an expert witness in a malpractice case to explain medical procedures and offer opinions on whether the standard of care was met.

In summary, while a percipient fact witness provides firsthand accounts of events, an expert witness offers specialized knowledge and opinions to assist in understanding the evidence presented in a case.

All of the Witnesses to the Plates were the former, not the latter.

On 2/24/2024 at 8:37 PM, Analytics said:

In the deposition, my client, the attorney, asked the gentlemen being deposed questions. It was a full seven hours of questioning, with breaks every 90 minutes that were off the record and off the clock. A lot of the questions were background in nature: who the guy was, where he went to school, when and why did he start working at this company, what he did, how was his career going, what did he think about the people he worked with and worked for, etc. And a ton of questions had to do with specific documents. Did he remember seeing them before. Did he write them. Did he agree with what was said. What was the motivation for writing them. What was the background. What was done about it. The questions went on and on and on, with the goal of making sure we understood all of the nuances about what this guy had witnessed and what he thought.

It turned out that our impression of him from just reading the discovery documents was way off. He hadn’t written some things we thought he had. He didn’t have many of the opinions we thought he did. He cared about things that were different than what we thought he cared about. By going through this process of digging deep into what he thought with follow-up question after follow-up question, a completely different picture of his role in the dispute came into focus that was impossible to get by just looking at the reams of documents that were handed over during discovery.

And I think that is the point. Somebody can write a document and sign it, but that document probably doesn’t contain all of the background information needed to fully understand what the document really means. That’s why things like depositions and cross examinations are things—they are necessary to get to the truth.

The competency of an expert witness is primarily based on A) his training, experience and expertise, and B) his honesty and credibility.

The competency of a "fact" witness is primarily based on A) his being a percipient witness to the events to which he is testifying, and B) his honesty and credibility.

In both instances, honesty and credibility are very important factors.  Hence the value of Richard L. Anderson's Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses.  Daniel Peterson has commented on this quite a bit over the years.

See, e.g., here: Variety and Complexity in the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon

Some excerpts:

Quote

I am absolutely convinced that we should not neglect a more cognitive support for our faith — one that is intellectually or rationally based.

Commitment to religion should not rely merely upon emotional satisfaction, as important and essential as such fulfillment may be; our moods fluctuate and our emotions are inconstant. We also should be able to articulate reasons in support of our faith. Doing so is in no way a detraction from the importance of spiritual conviction. It may, in fact, be a way of piquing the interest of outsiders who may then be led to develop their own Spirit-infused faith.

“Be ready always,” says 1 Peter 3:15, “to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you.” “In your hearts,” says the English Standard Version1 of that same verse, “honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.”
...
When Latter-day Saints attempt to provide rational grounds for belief, however well or poorly we execute the task, it can rightly be said that we are attempting to follow the Savior, for he did that as well.

I choose this particular subject of the witnesses for two specific reasons, one practical and one theological:

• I’ve been involved, over the past several years, in an Interpreter Foundation project on the witnesses to the Book of Mormon. The effort began shortly after we had interviewed the late Richard Lloyd Anderson, for decades the leading authority on the subject.2 Our project has produced a theatrical film that will, I expect, receive its premiere in just a few weeks from the time this essay appears.3 It will be accompanied by a documentary or docudrama that features interviews with scholars and other experts, as well as by other online supporting materials, both video and textual.4
• Since the Witnesses represent the only evidence for the Book of Mormon (beyond the existence and character of the book itself and the corroborating testimony of the Holy Ghost) that was scripturally promised by the Lord himself and that he has directly provided, it seems to me imperative that we pay careful attention to them.

Now let us return from the airy realms of philosophical and theological speculation to the solid ground of history, where I believe the witnesses to the Book of Mormon are firmly rooted.

He goes on at some length to examine the not only the statements, but the lives, reputations, etc. of the Witnesses (and repeatedly citing Anderson's book in the process).

And here: Witnesses Assembled

Some excerpts:

Quote

Witnesses have been very much on my mind of late. I've been involved in thinking about the witnesses for decades. I think that there are various groups and they need to be understood as different groups, not just that there are additional Witnesses, but different groups of them so the Witnesses Assembled include the three Witnesses. This is not an actual photograph of the three witnesses and Joseph Smith in the grove waiting for the experience they were to have, but it comes from the film that I've been involved with. The eight Witnesses are a separate and distinct group and I'll talk about them.

Then there are also what I call The Unofficial Witnesses or the Informal Witnesses of the Book of Mormon and I'll eventually add another group to that and talk about them briefly, but you've got these three distinct groups the three Witnesses the eight Witnesses and The Unofficial or Informal Witnesses. My interest in this was peaked, I suppose, kindled by a great scholar and a friend, Richard Lloyd Anderson, who passed away just in 2018. He was by far the leading expert in the church on the witnesses to the Book of Mormon. A very meticulous scholar and a very honest scholar who would devote his energy to tracking down the slightest evidence and he put it together in a book that I think is one of the great classics of Latter-day Saints scholarship. I think him to be one of the great scholars in the Latter-Day Saint tradition. This book is called Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses and here's a comment from him in that which I think is important and true.

”No testimony,” he says, “of direct revelation in the world's history is better documented than the testimony of the Book of Mormon witnesses” and that's why they're so interesting. You have ancient witnesses, but here you have modern witnesses awash in a sea of documents. We can know a great deal about them and their character. We know very little about Isaiah, essentially nothing apart from what is said in the Bible.

See also here: 

The Book of Mormon Witnesses and Their Challenge to Secularism

Why Do We Care If There Were Witnesses?

The three witnesses and the reality of the Book of Mormon

Tangible Restoration: The Witnesses and What They Experienced

Did the Book of Mormon Witnesses Really See What They Claimed?

All of these address the Witness statements, and the Witnesses, in depth and detail.

In contrast, Roger's first two posts in this thread make no effort whatsoever to do this.  Instead, he has told us A) a story about an object lesson he participated in during high school, and B) an experience he had as a non-testifying expert witness.

On 2/24/2024 at 8:55 PM, Analytics said:

Part 3

If the eleven witnesses were being called to testify in an actual court, I’d expect each of them to be subject to a full 7 hours of deposition in order for the opposing attorney to fully understand the reality of what they were testifying about.

"If."

First, I am reminded of the old saying: "If wishes were fishes, we'd be swimming in riches." It conveys the idea that wishes are impossible to make come true.  So it is here.  The Witnesses are long dead, so they can't "testify in an actual court" or be deposed (though several of them were repeatedly interviewed).

Second, you don't condition your acceptance of historical narratives about the assassination of Caesar on the eyewitnesses being (hypothetically) called to testify in court in 2024, or of being deposed beforehand).

Third, you are not addressing the substance of the historical record we have about the Witnesses, their statements, their character, etc.  Instead.

On 2/24/2024 at 8:55 PM, Analytics said:

A skilled attorney would spend weeks preparing for these depositions so that we could really, really, understand what the witness statements actually mean.  The issue isn’t whether the guys were honest, upright guys.

Actually, that's a very big issue.  The honesty and credibility of witnesses are key factors in their competency as witnesses.

And I note the massive sidestep here.  You are not just failing, but refusing to address whether the Witnesses were "honest, upright guys."  No attorney would disregard the credibility of a witness.

On 2/24/2024 at 8:55 PM, Analytics said:

The issue is what do these statements actually mean if you strip out all of our assumptions about what they mean?

I fully endorse this sentiment.  Ironically, "strip{ping} out all of our assumptions about what they mean" essentially obliterates the alternative theories espoused by both secular and sectarian skeptics about the Plates and the Witnesses.  The extant evidence simply does not support the notions of the Witnesses being "liars" or "dupes."  But then, nothing you've said so far makes any attempt to examine "the extant evidence."

On 2/24/2024 at 8:55 PM, Analytics said:

And that’s brings me back to that seminary class in the Fall of 1985. When the class ended, I stayed back a little bit, because one of my fellow students was very dissatisfied with this whole thing and desperately wanted to see the golden plates under the lectern for herself. The teacher held his ground and insisted there was no need, because she had heard the witness statements. I found the interaction fascinating, because this student was sure that whatever it was we saw was absolutely spectacular—a near-perfect replica of the authentic golden plates, or maybe, just maybe, they were the authentic golden plates themselves. After all, if they weren’t the authentic golden plates, where would a lowly seminary teacher come up with the gold to make his own replica? And how would he make them? That doesn’t seem plausible, either.

Why isn't this plausible?  Later on you explain how "a lowly seminary teacher" could fabricate "his own replica."

On 2/24/2024 at 8:55 PM, Analytics said:

If a skilled attorney would have deposed the witnesses of the golden plates we saw under the lectern, he would have learned a few things the students in the class did not. He’d learn that yes, we saw what we described, but he also would have learned that the plates we saw were ridiculously underwhelming.

Which speaks to your experience in 1985, but not to the Witnesses' experience.  

On 2/24/2024 at 8:55 PM, Analytics said:

Once you bought a few thin pieces of balsa wood, some gold colored spray paint, and some nikel-plated loose leaf binder rings, all you’d need was a black sharpie, a table saw, a drill, some glue, and about 2 hours to make your own set of “golden plates.”  No serious woodworking or artistry skills required. You’d notice that “sealing” plates with glue was easier than writing on them with a sharpie. The plates we saw were so unimpressive it was comical.

You appear to be headed toward a Joseph fabricated the Plates"-type explanation.  So is that your assessment?  That there was an actual, tangible artifact, but it was a fabrication?  A sham artifact?  And that the Witnesses were hapless dupes?

If so, why did you, in the other thread, speak as if the Plates never existed?

Quote

Quote

The physicality of the Plates needs to be accounted for. 

If the plates physically existed, they wouldn’t have disappeared into thin air. Real, physical things just don’t do that.

From the above I had understood you to be taking the position advanced by Dan Vogel and Grant Palmer, who dispute the objective/physical reality of the artifacts.  Was I in error?  Are you now saying that there was a tangible artifact, but that Joseph Smith or someone colluding with him fabricated them?

Your comments remind me of these comments from Daniel Peterson about the CES Letter:

Quote

Witnesses to the Book of Mormon

The author of the letter then attacks the witnesses. And one of the things that is now done, the newly fashionable way of addressing the witnesses is to say, “Well, these were primitive people, you know, of a different era. They really couldn’t distinguish reality from fantasy.” And so, there was an article that Richard Lloyd Anderson wrote for the old Journal of Book of Mormon Studies.

I confess, I was the one who provoked him into doing it. I pestered him and pestered him and pestered him for about two years, because I thought this article was necessary: “Attempts to Redefine the Experience of the Eight Witnesses.” The eight witnesses were explicit in many cases. They held the plates. They saw them. Hyrum Smith said, “With these eyes… I held them with these hands.” And then I hear people say, “Well, they never really claimed to see them with their natural eyes.” What? What more could they say? It’s like they’re directly addressing these critics today. But those sorts of statements are ignored in favor of often second- and third- and fourth-hand statements suggesting they never actually saw or touched the plates at all.

This is what he says, the author of the letter:

[Letter to a CES Director] “The mistake that is made by 21st century Mormons is that they’re seeing the Book of Mormon Witnesses as empirical, rational, nineteenth-century men instead of the nineteenth-century magical-thinking superstitious and treasure-digging men they were.”

I confess, as somebody who has spent a lot of time, much of my life, looking at people from pre-modern periods, that the sheer condescension of this, the chronological smugness and complacency of that statement irritates me, and not merely because I’m a believing Latter-day Saint. It’s rather like someone to ascribe early Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus to the supposed fact that ancient people, unlike us, hadn’t yet realized that dead people tend to stay dead, which, if it were true at all, would leave us wondering why they thought the resurrection of Jesus was such a big deal. Happens all the time, right?
...
 

It seems implausible to assume that the witnesses, early nineteenth-century farmers who spent their lives rising at sunrise, pulling up stumps, clearing rocks, plowing fields, sowing seeds, carefully nurturing crops, herding livestock, milking cows, digging wells, building cabins, raising barns, harvesting food, bartering, in an often cashless economy, for what they could not produce themselves, wearing clothes made from plant fibers and skins, anxiously watching the seasons, and walking or riding animals out under the weather until they retired to their beds shortly after sunset in “a world lit only by fire,” that they were estranged from everyday reality.

It’s especially unbelievable when the claim is made by people whose lives, like mine, consist to a large extent of staring at digital screens in artificially air-conditioned and artificially lit homes and offices, clothed in synthetic fibers, commuting between the two in enclosed and air-conditioned mechanical vehicles while they listen to the radio, chat on their cell phones, and fiddle with their iPods, whose inner workings are largely mysterious to them, who buy their prepackaged food (with little or no regard for the time or the season) by means of plastic cards and electronic financial transfers from artificially illuminated and air-conditioned supermarkets enmeshed in international distribution networks of which they know virtually nothing, the rhythms of whose daily lives are largely unaffected by the rising and setting of the sun. Somehow the current generation seems ill-positioned to accuse the witnesses’ generation of being out of touch with reality.⁸

DCP's last paragraph here seems to aptly describe Roger.

See also this DCP article: Variety and Complexity in the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon

Some excerpts:

Quote

The Eight Witnesses

We now turn to the Eight Witnesses, whose statement reflects a very different experience. It is, among other things, far more restrained, matter of fact, cooler, even legalistic, than the statement of the Three — for instance, in their reference to Joseph Smith as “the said Smith.”²⁰ Notice, too, their almost noncommittal language. They will not go beyond what they saw and what their eyes and their hands had been able to verify:

• They saw the plates, which, they said, “had the appearance of gold.”
• They saw the engravings on those plates, which, they said, had “the appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship.”²¹

They do not claim to have seen the Liahona (the “Directors”), the sword of Laban, the breastplate, the Urim and Thummim (the “Interpreters”), or any collection of other metal plates. They do not claim to have heard an audible divine voice. They do not claim to have received a heavenly confirmation that the translation was correct, nor reported an unearthly light, entrancing influence, or sensation of transcendent joy. No angel appeared to them. They do not even testify to divine power in the translation process. They simply bear witness that they “know of a surety [Page xvii]that the said Smith has got the plates.” They have “handled” those plates, leaf by leaf, “with [their] hands.” They have “seen and hefted” the plates²².

The verb to heft is worth noting; it’s significant. It means “to lift” or “to carry,” with the clear connotation that what is being lifted or carried is something heavy. (We don’t “heft” goldfish or feathers or tufts of cotton.) It is, in fact, scarcely surprising that the verb contains such a suggestion, since we also use heft as a noun to indicate notable weight and since, very distantly, both ultimately derive from the same Proto-Indo-European root. At one point before he saw the plates and the angel, for example, Martin Harris had a chance to lift the box that purportedly contained the plates. His recollection of that test has always struck me as hilarious, whether the humor was intentional or not. But please note the word that he uses: “I knew from the heft that they were lead or gold, and I knew that Joseph had not credit enough to buy so much lead.”²³

Returning to the Eight Witnesses and their declaration that they had seen, hefted, and handled the plates: “With these simple claims,” Richard Anderson remarks,

eight farmers and artisans publicly reported that Joseph Smith had shown them ancient plates of the Book of Mormon. A practical group who worked with their hands, they were better able to evaluate the “appearance of gold” and the “curious workmanship” than eight picked at random from a modern city.²⁴

Moreover, there is at least one report that seems to suggest that the Eight Witnesses encountered the plates in two groups of four rather than all together. If that is true — and it may or may not be — the scam, if it were a scam, had to be run not once but twice.²⁵

These farmers and artisans were, again, members of a “jury of peers,” ordinary, common men. There were many like them on the American frontier in the early nineteenth century. Counting Joseph Smith himself and the Three Witnesses, there were “twelve good men and true.” However, the Eight Witnesses cannot simply be added to the Three for a total of eleven supplemental, confirming witnesses for Joseph. That would be true, but inadequate. They aren’t interchangeable; they’re not [Page xviii]fungible or redundant. Their testimony is markedly different — and, I think, designedly so — from that of the Three.

This article, from Doctrine & Covenants Central, is worth a read: 

Is There Evidence That Joseph Smith Possessed a Urim and Thummim and Breastplate?

An excerpt:

Quote

Did Joseph Smith really have the materials and knowledge to create an artifact that his mother estimated to be worth at least 500 dollars? It seems not. Martin Harris, for instance, once lifted the plates while in a wooden box and commented that they were either “lead or gold,” and that he knew Joseph “had not enough credit to buy so much lead.”¹⁹ In other words, the Smith’s truly were destitute, and merely the weight of the plates alone helped convince Martin that he wasn’t being duped. In a similar way, Lucy would likely have known whether or not Joseph had the materials, skills, or funds to produce the breastplate she beheld.

I think this is a pretty important point.  Roger's analogy only works because in the 1980s his seminary teacher had ready access to cheap materials which he could use to fabricate a set of faux plates ("balsa wood, some gold colored spray paint, and some nikel-plated loose leaf binder rings, ... a black sharpie, a table saw, a drill, some glue...").

But where did Joseph, of the destitute family Smith, get the materials in the 1820s to fabricate a set of sham plates?  From this article by DCP:

Quote

All right, let’s assume that Joseph had plates. One possibility is he made them. Let’s assume, again, that he was a cynical fraud. Who made them? Joseph? Where’d he get the gold? Do you realize how much gold that would have taken, to produce even gold alloy that weighed 60 pounds? A lot of gold. Some people have suggested – Joseph showed no metallurgical skills – that Oliver Cowdery was the metallurgist who did this – a blacksmith. Look at the picture of Oliver Cowdery. This is an authentic picture of Oliver Cowdery, the massive man who died of tuberculosis just after 50. He was a very small, and not overly healthy, man. He was not Longfellow’s blacksmith with, you know, the sinewy arms and all that sort of thing, nothing like that. There’s no reason to believe that anybody in the early Latter-day Saint community had access to 40 pounds of gold or 20 pounds of gold, whatever it would have taken to have made this alloy. There’s nobody recording smoke belching out of the secret furnace just to the south of Palmyra or anything like that as they’re producing not only the plates, but the Liahona, the Urim and Thummim, a whole array of specialty metal objects, right? These guys are good. They’re really good and nobody knows that they can do it. Nobody sees the wagonloads of gold going into the Smith home. Remember, they’re subsistence farmers. Where’d they get all this stuff from, and where does it go afterwards? Poof, it’s just gone. They could’ve been incredibly wealthy. We’re talking about millions of dollars’ worth of metal here. There’s no sign of it. There’s no sign that Joseph made the plates, OK?

Possibility 2 –he received them from somebody else. Well, you have a lot of problems with the idea he received them from a contemporary. Who was it, and with what motives, and where did they go? What happens to this enormously impressive metallurgical object with lots of gold in it? Again, just not plausible; there’s no historical evidence for anything like this.

And this one:

Book of Mormon Evidence: Purpose of the Plates

Quote

8. A Deterrent to Naturalistic Explanations

As for the possibility of fraud, the supposition that Joseph Smith or one of his associates simply forged the plates runs into major roadblocks. For one thing, those who resort to this theory often fail to account for the metallurgical expertise required to create such an object.²⁵ Whoever made the plates likely needed competence in smelting, hammering, gilding, annealing, and engraving metal.²⁶ They would have needed familiarity with the properties of gold and likely of copper and silver.²⁷ They would have needed a good deal of time to create the object, presumably in secret. And, most unlikely of all, they would have needed a large amount of gold!²⁸

Yet, the historical record suggests that neither Joseph Smith nor any of his associates would have had the metallurgical skills or materials to pull off such a scheme. Nor is there any reliable historical evidence that any of these individuals were involved in such activities.²⁹ One also has to consider the additional efforts that would have been needed to fabricate the associated Nephite artifacts that were observed by various witnesses.³⁰ As Peterson humorously remarked,

But once we’ve posited a previously unnoticed Deseret Custom Design Metal Foundry operating under Joseph’s management on the outskirts of Palmyra, that industrial concern also needs to produce the breastplate seen by various witnesses, as well as the brass plates, the Urim and Thummim, the sword of Laban, and the Liahona. One wonders how many skilled metallurgists and craftsmen were available in the area at the time, what the local wage scale was, and why nobody ever seems to have reported the noise and the belching smoke of Joseph’s fraud-producing furnaces.³¹

Thus, the witnesses of the plates and other Nephite artifacts provide strong positive evidence of the Restoration. In order to explain away these historically attested items, skeptics have to resort to a series of unsubstantiated and, in many cases dubious, assumptions (necessary to account for the raw materials, financial resources, knowledge, skills, time, secrecy, subterfuge, and perhaps conspiracy involved in the creation of all these artifacts, as well as the enduring belief of so many witnesses in their reality and antiquity).

So, did Joseph conspire with others in the fabrication?  If so, with whom?  And why did none of them after divulge the fraud?  And what evidence is there of such collusion?  Or did Joseph do this all by himself?  If so, when?  Is there evidence that he had skill in working with metal?  Where did he get the copper or tin, and how did he pay for it (since according to Martin Harris, "Joseph had not credit enough to buy so much lead," and I assume copper was more valuable than lead at the time)?  And where did he get the skills to etch hieroglyphics onto the plates?  And so on.

Roger's "sham artifact" theory obligates him to justify all sorts of things over and above the mere existence of the Plates and the statements of the Witnesses.  Dan Vogel, I think, has long recognized the pitfalls inherent in this theory, which is why he won't touch it with a ten-foot pole and goes with the "delusion" approach.  But that one has pitfalls as well.

On 2/24/2024 at 8:55 PM, Analytics said:

Yet because we as witnesses instinctively followed the lead of the seminary instructor when describing what we saw, and because the students didn’t know how to ask the right probing questions, they were left thinking that we saw something that was miraculously impressive.

First, I doubt they really thought the seminary teacher's object lesson as "miraculously impressive."  It was, after all, merely an object lesson, and therefore qualitatively different from Joseph Smith showing the Plates to the Witnesses.

Second, you - as one of the "witnesses" - were not impressed with the object lesson, right?  "No serious woodworking or artistry skills required."  "The plates we saw were so unimpressive it was comical."  In contrast, the Witnesses were persuaded.  No scoffing.  No repudiation.  No after-the-fact "Hey, I was scammed by Joseph and a sham artifact"-style confessions.  

On 2/24/2024 at 8:55 PM, Analytics said:

So what did Joseph Smith’s witnesses see in 1829? I don’t know. 

Really?  Back in 2022 you said this:

Quote

I'm on record as saying I suspect Joseph Smith had some artifact of the plates. I don't believe this fake artifact was a particularly good or convincing artifact--I believe that is why he kept it wrapped up and hidden. I think he may have shown this one artifact to the eight witnesses, but their testimonies are in desperate need of serious cross examination and shouldn't be taken at face value.

So which is it?  "I suspect Joseph Smith had some artifact of the plates" or "I don't know {what Joseph Smith’s witnesses saw in 1829}"?

Also, you reach this conclusion after three lengthy posts in which you make no effort whatsoever to substantively evaluate the evidence of the physical reality of the Plates and the credibility of the Witnesses and their statements.  You are only demonstrating my prior point:

Quote

It never ceases to surprise me how so many ardent critics of the Church instantly become aggressively apathetic and indifferent to scrutinizing Church-related topics when they are asked to rationalize and demonstrate the validity of their preferred explanations/perspectives.

Dan Peterson had it right: "I think it’s intellectually incumbent upon people like that to, come on, give us an answer to this. Otherwise it’s like guerrilla warfare. You attack and attack and attack, you always withdraw, you never defend territory. You never have to stake out your own explanation, which then will be subject to criticism and attack." 

Again, on the skeptic/cynic side, I think there is no particular obligation or duty to formulate a cohesive alternative explanation for the Book of Mormon.  But if they do choose to present such an alternative explanation, I think at that point it does become incumbent upon them to lay out their arguments, evidences, reasoning, etc.  

You merely conclude "I don't know {what Joseph Smith’s witnesses saw in 1829}."  Not only does this seem to contradict your prior statements ("I suspect Joseph Smith had some artifact of the plates" and, more recently, "If the plates physically existed, they wouldn’t have disappeared into thin air. Real, physical things just don’t do that"), it does not interact with this historical evidence in any meaningful way, nor does it constitute "lay{ing} out their arguments, evidences, reasoning, etc."

This is the sort of aggressive apathy and indifference that I was referencing above.  

On 2/24/2024 at 8:55 PM, Analytics said:

I find the joint statements that Joseph Smith wrote and they signed to be intrinsically problematic and in desperate need of a serious cross examination.

The Witnesses are dead, so we are left with the historical record.

On 2/24/2024 at 8:55 PM, Analytics said:

I don’t know what, exactly, if anything, they saw.  

Roger: "I'm on record as saying I suspect Joseph Smith had some artifact of the plates."

Also Roger: "I don’t know what, exactly, if anything, they saw."

On 2/24/2024 at 8:55 PM, Analytics said:

I just don’t know.

Are you backing off your prior claim re: "Joseph Smith had some artifact of the plates"?

On 2/24/2024 at 8:55 PM, Analytics said:

But just because I don’t know what to make of their statements doesn’t mean I don’t know anything at all.

Nobody has suggested you "don't know anything at all."

On 2/24/2024 at 8:55 PM, Analytics said:

One of the things I do know is that if you study the totality of all the evidence, the theory that they saw an authentic Mayan codex that was buried in New York and then dug up by Joseph Smith is the least likely explanation imaginable.  

And the aggressive apathy continues.

The Church and EPA mess up on submitting disclosure forms to the SEC, and you're all over that like white on rice.

You are asked to substantiate your alternative explanation for the Plates and the Witness statements by laying out your arguments, evidences, reasoning, etc., all we get is "I don't know" followed by a fervent anti-testimony ("One of the things I do know...") against Joseph Smith.

Well.  Okay.  I am reminded of this comment from Daniel C. Peterson:

Quote

The arguments that I typically make for the Book of Mormon, and that others typically make for the Book of Mormon, are cumulative arguments.  They don’t simply rest upon one Thermonuclear Factoid That Obliterates All Resistance.  That answer is commonly received with skepticism or even cynicism, but it’s the truth and it’s what I expect.  Although there are some strong cases to be made, there is no single argument or fact that will prove the truth of the claims of the Restoration beyond reasonable doubt in each and every mind that encounters it.

People are different, and different things stand out to them.  They weigh things differently.  Some are paying close attention; most are not.  And there are even — I’ve met them — who so badly don’t want the claims of the Restoration to be found true that convincing them seems essentially impossible.

I think in this context of the atheistic historian Dale Morgan (1914-1971), who was once something of a fashionable darling of cultural Mormons.  In 1945, he wrote a letter to the believing Latter-day Saint historian Juanita Brooks in which he stated the fundamental issue with unusual frankness and candor:

“With my point of view on God,” he said, “I am incapable of accepting the claims of Joseph Smith and the Mormons, be they however so convincing. If God does not exist, how can Joseph Smith’s story have any possible validity? I will look everywhere for explanations except to the ONE explanation that is the position of the church.”  (Dale Morgan to Juanita Brooks, 15 December 1945, at Arlington, Virginia. Transcribed in John Phillip Walker, ed., Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1986], 84–91. The quoted passage occurs on page 87.)

Just as striking, I think, is the eminent New York University philosopher Thomas Nagel, who famously said,

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind …. This is a somewhat ridiculous situation …. [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist.”  (Thomas Nagel,  The Last Word [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 130-131.)

Again, on the skeptic/cynic side, I think there is no particular obligation or duty to formulate a cohesive alternative explanation for the Book of Mormon.  But if they do choose to present such an alternative explanation, I think at that point it does become incumbent upon them to lay out their arguments, evidences, reasoning, etc.

You have not done this ("lay out their arguments, evidences, reasoning, etc.") in this thread.  You have not interacted with the historical evidences regarding the Plates and the Witnesses.  You have not marshaled evidence for a sham artifact, or for any other alternative explanation.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited February 27, 2024 by smac97

[Analytics]

45 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I think Joseph Smith understood the role of the Three Witnesses, generally speaking, as quasi-legal. If you look in the revelations that Joseph Smith translated, it is clear that these witnesses play something analogous to witnesses in a legal trial in a court room, in connection with Deuteronomy 19:15: "at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established." Here is a quote from a recent article showing how pervasive this idea is in the Book of Mormon and how the three witnesses of the Book of Mormon are obviously part of this general theme: 

In other words, when speaking of the witnesses of the Book of Mormon, the text makes obvious allusions to this seminal legal statute in the Old Testament. 

Yes, that's my point. At least half of it. The other half of it is that in terms of offering credible fact testimony in a quasi-legal context, Joseph Smith's statement meets the legal standards much better than the official statements. As we we discussed earlier, Joseph Smith was limiting his statement to what he personally saw. The official witnesses did not.

45 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

It seems the first bolded statement is erroneous. If I say that my friends and I watched a movie, would it be reasonable to claim that I didn't personally witness the movie (simply because I saw it in the presence of other individuals)? Clearly not. As for the second bolded statement, are the witnesses making presumptions about what they saw, or are you making the presumptions? 

You misunderstand my point. In a legal context, there are two types of witnesses: fact witnesses and expert witnesses. Fact witnesses describe what they saw, what they heard, and otherwise describe the facts that they directly observed. In contrast, the expert witness has some expertise that allows him to evaluate what the facts imply and make statements about those broader issues.

For purposes of providing statements with evidentiary value, the 11 witnesses are fact witnesses. I'm very interested in knowing precisely what they claim they saw and heard. I'm far less interested in hearing their religious beliefs, interpretations, and speculations.

In terms of providing a fact testimony that would be useful in a legal setting, Joseph Smith did a good job by saying what he personally saw and heard (e.g. "the same vision was opened to our view; at least it was again to me.") Likewise, when the eight witnesses said the plates had "the appearance of gold," they were speaking like good fact witnesses and were describing what they saw--they weren't qualified to determine if it actually was gold or not, and they didn't speculate about that. However, they weren't consistently good like that. For example, when they said "as many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated we did handle with our hands" they were talking about things they didn't see or hear--they had know way of knowing whether "the said Smith" really translated the leaves they looked at or not. As another example of poor fact testimony, the three witnesses statement left out a ton of actual facts about what happened (e.g. the much faith, the fervent prayer), and they say a lot of things that aren't facts about what they saw and heard, but rather are their religious beliefs (e.g. maybe they heard a voice, but how do they know it was really the voice of the Lord?).

45 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Look, we have dozens and dozens of statements from various witnesses talking about what they saw, both individually and collectively, and both in ordinary and supernatural settings. Martin Harris and David Whitmer directly deal with the efforts to distort the spiritual nature of the experience, and the reasoning used by critics is just bad, on various levels.

Okay, so explain to me what happened. The three witnesses said "an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes" the plates. When they say the angel brought the plates down from heaven, did they mean the angel came down from heaven, stopped by the Whitmer residence to get the plates, and then brought them to the woods? Or did he go the the Whitmer residence first, then go to heaven, and then bring the plates down from there? 

This should be a simple question. How did an angel come down to heaven with an artifact that wasn't in heaven, but rather was hidden at the Whitmer's house? What, specifically, are they claiming here?

45 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

If someone wants to conclude that the witnesses were lying or delusional, then fine. But such conclusions aren't based on standard historical analysis or typical legal approaches to eye-witness testimony. 

I disagree. The official statements are full of speculations that wouldn't be admitted in a court. And the plausibility of what they're saying, the timelines, and the internal coherence all matter when assigning weights to such things. 

For my part, I'm not saying they are lying or delusional. I'm simply saying that their statements are too vague to be worth very much. If you disagree answer the question about the plates the three witnesses saw. Was it purely a spiritual manifestation? Or did a physical angel of flesh and bones come out of the sky with a set of tangible plates? If it was a physical angel, did he bring the exact same artifact that was at the Whitmer's house, or did he bring something else?

I just want to understand what they're claiming.

45 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Let's just be honest, the rejection of their collective and individual testimonies (when all the relevant data is included into the mix) is based primarily on worldview assumptions that can't accommodate the logical outcome of the witnesses' statements. Critics of the Church should just own up to that fact.

That isn't a fact, and if you want to have a good faith conversation with somebody, don't put words in their mouth and then lecture them about not being honest.

The truth is an earnest endeavor to properly use abduction to find the best explanation for all of the evidence, the testimony of the witnesses is lacking. If this were a legal setting, I would expect the judge to have significant concerns about somebody with an extraordinary claim who goes to extraordinary claims to prevent anybody independent, dispassionate, or qualified from examining the evidence, thereby creating the artificial need for witness statements, which he then satisfies with statements by people he hand-picked based on their prior loyalty to him. That is problematic. 

45 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

It's okay to say that the witnesses actually provide a strong case (under typical evidentiary reasoning), but that you just reject it based on other sets of data.

They provide a strong case for what? Did the three witnesses testify that an angel showed the plates that Joseph Smith had hidden at the Witmer's house? I just want to understand the specifics of what they are claiming. Once we clear that up, we can talk about whether it is a strong case.

[smac97]

On 2/25/2024 at 7:23 AM, Analytics said:

I know some of them were. For example, multiple people pressed Martin Harris on the details and according to them, Martin Harris says he saw them with his spiritual eyes, not his physical eyes.

"Multiple people?"  As in . . . maybe three?  John H. Gilbert and Jesse Townsend (quoted by Pomeroy Tucker)?  See here:

Quote

John H. Gilbert, who printed the Book of Mormon, reported that Harris said that he saw the plates with his "spiritual eye"

John H. Gilbert:

Martin was in the office when I finished setting up the testimony of the three witnesses,—(Harris—Cowdery and Whitmer—) I said to him,—"Martin, did you see those plates with your naked eyes?" Martin looked down for an instant, raised his eyes up, and said, "No, I saw them with a spir[i]tual eye."^[2]

Pomeroy Tucker told of Harris using the phrase "seeing with the spiritual eye"

Pomeroy Tucker in his book Origin, Rise, and Progress of Mormonism (1867) also refers to Harris using the phrase "spiritual eye":

How to reconcile the act of Harris in signing his name to such a statement, in view of the character of honesty which had always been conceded to him, could never be easily explained. In reply to uncharitable suggestions of his neighbors, he used to practise a good deal of his characteristic jargon about "seeing with the spiritual eye," and the like. ^[3]

Martin elsewhere emphasized that the vision was also with the "natural eye," to enable them to "testify of it to the world"

In 1875, Martin said:

"The Prophet Joseph Smith, and Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer and myself, went into a little grove to pray to obtain a promise that we should behold it with our eyes natural eyes, that we could testify of it to the world (emphasis added)."^[4]

Harris did not, then, see "spiritual eye" and "natural eye" as mutually exclusive categories. Both described something about the witness experience.

Regarding John H. Gilbert, see here:

Quote

The CES Letter excerpts are in red:

Martin was in the office when I finished setting up the testimony of the three witnesses,--(Harris--Cowdery and Whitmer--) I said to him, "Martin, did you see those plates with your naked eyes?" Martin looked down for an instant, raised his eyes up, and said, "No, I saw them with a spir[i]tual eye."

John H. Gilbert learned the printer's trade in the late 1820s and established himself in business at Palmyra. After a short newspaper experience, he sold out to E. B. Grandin, and continued in his employment as a journeyman printer. He was interviewed many times regarding his role in the printing of the Book of Mormon and his disbelief in Joseph Smith is always evident.

...

This is a very late recollection recorded in 1892 claiming to be an accurate verbatim quotation.

This quotation contradicts other statements from Martin Harris. To a questioner in in 1870 Martin said: 

“Young man, I had the privilege of being with the Prophet Joseph Smith, and with these eyes of mine," pointing to his eyes, "I saw the angel of the Lord and I saw the plates and the Urim and Thummim and the sword of Laban, and with these ears," pointing to his ears, "I heard the voice of the angel, and with these hands, "Holding out his hands, "I handled the plates containing the record of the Book of Mormon.”^[25]

The reference to “spiritual eyes” is ambiguous. Since was seeing a heavenly vision in the daytime, it would have constituted a different viewing experience from that which he was accustomed to. For natural eyes to view such spiritual things could be described as a spiritual experience rather than a natural one.

Gilbert was antagonistic to the Church and was highly biased.

Regarding Jesse Townsend, see here:

Quote

The source of this quotation is a letter: Jesse Townsend to Phineas Stiles, 24 December 1833, Pomeroy Tucker, Origin, Rise, and Progress of Mormonism (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1867), 288-91. The CES Letter excerpt is in red:

At that time Martin Harris was worth five or six thousand dollars, while the Smiths were not worth a cent. The latter used Martin's money freely; and some other men, having a great dislike to labor, joined Joe in his deceptions, among whom was a sort of schoolmaster named Cowdery, who assisted him in writing or transcribing the "Book of Mormon," as a pretended translation of the golden plates which he affirmed he had been directed by the Spirit of the Lord to dig from the earth. This was all done in the most secret manner. At the same time it was assumed to the uninitiated that it would be "immediate death" for any except the translators to see the plates. Poor Martin's faith was apparently strengthened by this pretension, but afterward the "command" was modified, and he claimed to have seen the plates with "spiritual eyes."

While Townsend was living in the area, this is not a direct quote but appears to be hearsay evidence.

Jesse Townsend (1766-1838), was highly biased. A graduate of Yale University, he was ordained in 1792 and installed as pastor of Palmyra's Western Presbyterian Church on 29 August 1817. After serving three years, he moved to Illinois and later to Missouri. Returning to Palmyra in 1826, he served as pastor in neighboring Sodus from 1827 to 1831. After several years of illness, Townsend died at Palmyra in 1838.

Alleging a “command” to not allow anyone to see the plates under the penalty of “immediate death” demonstrates Townsend’s lack of understanding. The Book of Mormon foretells: “the eyes of none shall behold it save it be that three witnesses shall behold it, by the power of God, besides him to whom the book shall be delivered” (2 Nephi 27:12; see also Ether 5:4; D&C 5:15, 17:1).

So "multiple people" turn out to be two.  And of the two, one is hearsay or double hearsay.  And the other is a very late, but still verbatim, recollection from a hostile source.

On 2/25/2024 at 7:23 AM, Analytics said:

Believing in the Book of Mormon is a religious belief, not a scientific one.

True.  But then, the same can be said for acceptance of many historical events.  "Science" is typically not really part of the equation.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Ryan Dahle]

49 minutes ago, Analytics said:

They provide a strong case for what? Did the three witnesses testify that an angel showed the plates that Joseph Smith had hidden at the Witmer's house? I just want to understand the specifics of what they are claiming. Once we clear that up, we can talk about whether it is a strong case.

They provide a strong case for the core details of their experience.

All of these other expectations--that the witnesses fill in all the missing details of their experience, or that they explain the precise metaphysical nuances of the vision (i.e., how Moroni got himself and the plates from point A to point B, or the precise nature of his body), or that they provide some type of courtroom-level testimony (where they cover every possible objection from a skeptical observer as if they were being cross-examined)--is misunderstanding the nature of historical evidence. As historians reconstruct history, they rarely if ever have that type of data. You can't sit down with George Washington and cross-examine him on his motivations and claims and fill in every missing detail or push back against his narrative. Instead, we look at the available evidence and reach the best possible conclusion. 

What I'm saying is that based on standard historiographical methods, the available statements from the witnesses (despite any imperfections and limitations) would still provide strong supporting evidence for some of Joseph Smith's core claims. The reason critics make all these additional demands (which wouldn't be needed for most other historical issues) is not because the evidence isn't good on its own terms. It is because their worldview can't allow angels to show gold plates to farmers. Which, again, I understand.

Let's just not pretend that the same level of scrutiny or disbelief or demand for additional evidence is at play when assessing most historical topics. Otherwise, we might as well dispose of "history" altogether. 

[SeekingUnderstanding]

8 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

What I'm saying is that based on standard historiographical methods, the available statements from the witnesses (despite any imperfections and limitations) would still provide strong supporting evidence for some of Joseph Smith's core claims.

 

9 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

The reason critics make all these additional demands (which wouldn't be needed for most other historical issues) is not because the evidence isn't good on its own terms. It is because their worldview can't allow angels to show gold plates to farmers. Which, again, I understand.

Not quite. More along the lines of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. As Bart Erhman notes the miraculous (angels and plates) is by definition very very unlikely. Weighing the evidence and ignoring this fact is not good reasoning. It’s why SMAC’s analogy with Brutus’s knife breaks down. In court you’d like to have the murder weapon. But if you don’t, witnesses would suffice in almost all circumstances. On the other hand, If you want me to believe that Brutus killed Ceasar with a light saber delivered by an alien Jedi who then took it back and you don’t even have contemporaneous firsthand accounts from your witnesses, we’ll call me skeptical, but I’m not believing. 

[SeekingUnderstanding]

20 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Let's just not pretend that the same level of scrutiny or disbelief or demand for additional evidence is at play when assessing most historical topics. Otherwise, we might as well dispose of "history" altogether. 

Respectfully it’s exactly the same level of scrutiny. It’s why we call Gilgamesh’s deeds a myth and not history. 

[Ryan Dahle]

10 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Not quite. More along the lines of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. As Bart Erhman notes the miraculous (angels and plates) is by definition very very unlikely. Weighing the evidence and ignoring this fact is not good reasoning. It’s why SMAC’s analogy with Brutus’s knife breaks down. In court you’d like to have the murder weapon. But if you don’t, witnesses would suffice in almost all circumstances. On the other hand, If you want me to believe that Brutus killed Ceasar with a light saber delivered by an alien Jedi who then took it back and you don’t even have contemporaneous firsthand accounts from your witnesses, we’ll call me skeptical, but I’m not believing. 

Yeah. That is pretty much my point.

But I would just add that the supernatural claims of the Restoration are, imo, in a fundamentally different category than alien Jedi. The Restoration offers a variety of fairly unique supporting evidences, both secular and spiritual, that the likes of George Lucas aren't providing. I get that people don't agree on that evidence. But there are some very intelligent Latter-day Saints and Christians who believe in this stuff. Not so with alien Jedi.

But, yes, to your point, even when confronted with fairly strong supporting historical evidence, it is going to take a lot more to get me to believe in alien Jedi. I will be way more skeptical and will probably value even seemingly remote explanations as much more likely than the one supported by the eye-witness testimonies. 

[Stormin' Mormon]

35 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

 

Not quite. More along the lines of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. 

Never was a fan of this aphorism.  Rather than try to articulate why in my own words, Ima just copy-and-paste this from a astrobiologist in Edinburgh (emphasis mine):

Quote

 

Let us imagine a scenario in which scientists in Sagan’s own field, astrobiology, make a stupendous announcement: they have found a signal of extraterrestrial life. What happens next?

I expect there will be a mass outbreak of Sagan’s dictum and wall-to-wall demands for extraordinary evidence (including from scientists themselves). But these demands may be unreasonable. We don’t know if life is rare or common in the universe, probable or improbable. There is very little evidence either way, so the claim isn’t really “extraordinary” in the sense required for Sagan’s dictum to apply.

We might suspect that the scientists are wrong for technical reasons, or we might think they have neglected alternative explanations of their data because they are too excited by the prospect of a great discovery, but these worries should only motivate us to check that the normal burden of evidence has been met and to proportion our beliefs accordingly, not to impose a double standard by asking for something extra.

True skepticism aims to follow the evidence as diligently as possible, not simply to exclude radical or outlandish conclusions in advance.

Source: Carl Sagan was Wrong: Ordinary Evidence is enough

 

 

Edited February 27, 2024 by Stormin' Mormon

[Ryan Dahle]

22 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Respectfully it’s exactly the same level of scrutiny. It’s why we call Gilgamesh’s deeds a myth and not history. 

That is a different issue altogether. The Three and Eight Witnesses (and other witnesses) are known modern people in a known modern context. We are talking about the nature of their testimony, as given less than 200 years ago.

So it would be more like trying to assess events in the life of Andrew Jackson. If the degree of support for the experience of the three and eight witnesses were instead supporting a particular event in Jackson's life (i.e., something which isn't loaded with so much religious significance), there would be little doubt about its veracity. 

[smac97]

31 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Not quite. More along the lines of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence.

Kinda hard to apply Sagan's aphorism to religious claims.  See, e.g., here:

Quote

{T}here 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.

Also, my sense is that you are implying that the claimed origins of the Book of Mormon are "novel" and/or "violate human consensus," and are therefore "extraordinary."  

Yep.

31 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

As Bart Erhman notes the miraculous (angels and plates) is by definition very very unlikely. Weighing the evidence and ignoring this fact is not good reasoning. It’s why SMAC’s analogy with Brutus’s knife breaks down.

"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."

This is why your invocation of ECREE breaks down.  

31 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

In court you’d like to have the murder weapon. But if you don’t, witnesses would suffice in almost all circumstances.

In the context of the Book of Mormon, you'd like to have the Plates.  But if you don't, witnesses would suffice.

31 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

On the other hand, If you want me to believe that Brutus killed Ceasar with a light saber delivered by an alien Jedi who then took it back and you don’t even have contemporaneous firsthand accounts from your witnesses, we’ll call me skeptical, but I’m not believing. 

Again: "Claims that are merely novel or those which violate human consensus are not properly characterized as extraordinary."

The Latter-day Saints don't "want you to believe" the Restored Gospel because of secondary evidences such as those under discussion.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Benjamin Seeker]

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

the same vision was opened to our view; at least it was again to me

This phrase has gotten a lot of mileage in this conversation. There’s some historical context that may help shed some further light on it. I believe it’s likely that JS used this phrase to protect himself against Martin Harris, who was claiming to have never seen the plates with his physical eyes, only his spiritual eyes in 1838. These claims came after Martin split with the church at the end of 1837 over the Kirtland bank fail. 

I think the phrase in question was penned in 1838 or later. Someone correct me if I’m wrong. Here’s the JSP link: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-a-1-23-december-1805-30-august-1834/31#historical-intro

EDIT: It’s worth noting that it was highly likely that JS was aware of Martin’s claims given they’re recorded in a JS letter book. My point with all of this, is that the wording JS used in that account of the witnesses is pretty specific, and I think the historical context tells us why.  Here’s the link to the letter book on JSP: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letterbook-2/69

Edited February 27, 2024 by Benjamin Seeker
Add one more supporting evidence

[Analytics]

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

Okay.

I was, in retrospect, uncivil and curt.  I apologize.

Thank you. Apology accepted. 

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

With the possible exception of Ann Taves, I am not aware of any recent attempt by any secular or sectarian skeptic to meaningfully address the evidence pertaining to the Plates and to the Witnesses.

As far as I can tell, there just aren't that many people who think the evidence is strong enough to merit a response.

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

This includes your comments in this thread (at least the first three, as I have not read further).

I think you missed my point of the stories I've told here. The point is this:

I don't think we have enough specific details to know what to make of the testimonies.

In my seminary class, an honest teacher and 11 honest students told the truth about what they saw. The other members of the class asked us some questions, and we answered truthfully. But the members of the class imagined our words meant more than they did, and misinterpreted what we said. Dramatically.

The eight Book of Mormon witnesses described what they saw using similar, and sometimes identical language to us. 

Is it possible that the orthodox interpretation of what they said is reading too much into it? I think it is possible. And that is why I don't think we have enough specific details to know what to make of the testimonies. 

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

All of the Witnesses to the Plates were the former, not the latter.

Sort of, but a lot of their testimony goes way beyond merely relaying "firsthand knowledge of the facts relevant to the case." For example, the three witnesses didn't have firsthand knowledge that that plates they saw "contained this record." And they don't know that it was translated by the gift and power of God. And they don't know if the voice they heard was really God. And they don't know that they saw what they did because of the power of God, and they don't know if the being they saw was really an angel, and they don't know whether it had just come down from heaven, etc. 

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

The competency of an expert witness is primarily based on A) his training, experience and expertise, and B) his honesty and credibility.

The competency of a "fact" witness is primarily based on A) his being a percipient witness to the events to which he is testifying, and B) his honesty and credibility.

In both instances, honesty and credibility are very important factors.  Hence the value of Richard L. Anderson's Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses.  Daniel Peterson has commented on this quite a bit over the years.

See, e.g., here: Variety and Complexity in the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon

Some excerpts:

He goes on at some length to examine the not only the statements, but the lives, reputations, etc. of the Witnesses (and repeatedly citing Anderson's book in the process).

And here: Witnesses Assembled

Some excerpts:

See also here: 

The Book of Mormon Witnesses and Their Challenge to Secularism

Why Do We Care If There Were Witnesses?

The three witnesses and the reality of the Book of Mormon

Tangible Restoration: The Witnesses and What They Experienced

Did the Book of Mormon Witnesses Really See What They Claimed?

All of these address the Witness statements, and the Witnesses, in depth and detail.

I disagree. 

Do all of them address the witness statements in the same depth and detail as a seven-hour deposition?

To understand what this all means, it is essential to know if the plates that the three witnesses say an angel brought down from heaven are the exact same plates that Joseph Smith had hidden in the Whitmer's house. 

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

In contrast, Roger's first two posts in this thread make no effort whatsoever to do this.  Instead, he has told us A) a story about an object lesson he participated in during high school, and B) an experience he had as a non-testifying expert witness.

My posts explain my thinking about this and illustrate why more details are needed in order to understand what, specifically they are claiming. I don't think I'm being unreasonable by wanting to understand what they are claiming before passing judgement. 

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

"If."

First, I am reminded of the old saying: "If wishes were fishes, we'd be swimming in riches." It conveys the idea that wishes are impossible to make come true.  So it is here.  The Witnesses are long dead, so they can't "testify in an actual court" or be deposed (though several of them were repeatedly interviewed).

Correct. There are lots of things in the past that we don't understand. This is one of them.

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

Second, you don't condition your acceptance of historical narratives about the assassination of Caesar on the eyewitnesses being (hypothetically) called to testify in court in 2024, or of being deposed beforehand).

As @SeekingUnderstanding pointed out, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. 

If somebody claimed that they had one of the knives that killed Caesar, I'd be very excited about the archeological discovery. But if they refused to show it to anybody who was an expert and could authenticate it, I'd be very, very, suspicious, even if he showed it to eight of his closest friends that were hand-picked for this honor based on their loyalty. And if it mysteriously vanished without a plausible explanation for how, I'd be very skeptical he really had the authentic knife in the first place.

Driving the analogy further, if he claimed the knife that killed Caesar was made out of titanium, I'd be even more suspicious still and would be quite confident that this knife wasn't an authentic artifact. If you pressed me to explain away the witnesses of this anachronistic, deliberately hidden knife I'd be willing to do so, but if they couldn't be cross-examined and all we had were their vague statements, I'd be inclined to shrug my shoulders and say that the burden of proof needed to believe that Caesar was killed with a titanium knife that my friend had and that was then taken away by an angel hadn't been met. 

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

Third, you are not addressing the substance of the historical record we have about the Witnesses, their statements, their character, etc.  Instead.

I find the substance to be a lot thinner than you do, and I've tried to explain why.

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

Actually, that's a very big issue.  The honesty and credibility of witnesses are key factors in their competency as witnesses.

For purposes of this conversation, I stipulate that. The witnesses that signed the statements in the Book of Mormon were just as honest as the seminary teacher and students in 1985.

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

And I note the massive sidestep here.  You are not just failing, but refusing to address whether the Witnesses were "honest, upright guys."  No attorney would disregard the credibility of a witness.

If you have evidence that they weren't honest, upright guys, bring it on. Otherwise, I'm quite comfortable assuming that they were.

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

I fully endorse this sentiment.  Ironically, "strip{ping} out all of our assumptions about what they mean" essentially obliterates the alternative theories espoused by both secular and sectarian skeptics about the Plates and the Witnesses.  The extant evidence simply does not support the notions of the Witnesses being "liars" or "dupes."  But then, nothing you've said so far makes any attempt to examine "the extant evidence."

I am not claiming they are liars and dupes. I'm merely trying to understand what, specifically, they were claiming.

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

Why isn't this plausible [for a seminary teacher to construct authentic-looking golden plates]?  

A few reasons. Gold is very expensive. Seminary teachers are woefully underpaid. Making such plates in the real world is very, very, difficult.

I said, "If a skilled attorney would have deposed the witnesses of the golden plates we saw under the lectern, he would have learned a few things the students in the class did not. He’d learn that yes, we saw what we described, but he also would have learned that the plates we saw were ridiculously underwhelming." 

In respose, you said, 

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

Which speaks to your experience in 1985, but not to the Witnesses' experience.  

Yes, that speaks to my experience in 1985. But it also suggests there might be more to the story of what they experienced than you are imagining.

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

You appear to be headed toward a Joseph fabricated the Plates"-type explanation.  So is that your assessment?  That there was an actual, tangible artifact, but it was a fabrication?  A sham artifact?  And that the Witnesses were hapless dupes?

I'll give you straight answers to those questions if you'll give me a straight answer to this: Do you believe angel Moroni went to the Whitmer's house, retrieved the tangible artifact that Joseph Smith had hidden there, took it to heaven, then descended from heaven to show the three witnesses the artifact, and then returned it to where Joseph Smith had hidden it? Is that what you think happened?

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

If so, why did you, in the other thread, speak as if the Plates never existed?

In general, it doesn't take much faith and fervent prayer to see something that has physicality. 

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

From the above I had understood you to be taking the position advanced by Dan Vogel and Grant Palmer, who dispute the objective/physical reality of the artifacts.  Was I in error?  Are you now saying that there was a tangible artifact, but that Joseph Smith or someone colluding with him fabricated them?

I'm putting together the facts that we have. I don't have any firm conclusions on what to make of the witness statements, other than the fact that I find them surprisingly vague.

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

Your comments remind me of these comments from Daniel Peterson about the CES Letter:

DCP's last paragraph here seems to aptly describe Roger.

I'll respond to DCP with a quote from the author who he thinks about more than any other:

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think—though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one—that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.

All attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule for precisely these reasons. I read, for example, of some ecumenical conference of Christians who desire to show their broad-mindedness and invite some physicists along. But I am compelled to remember what I know—which is that there would be no such churches in the first place if humanity had not been afraid of the weather, the dark, the plague, the eclipse, and all manner of other things now easily explicable. And also if humanity had not been compelled, on pain of extremely agonizing consequences, to pay the exorbitant tithes and taxes that raised the imposing edifices of religion.

Hitchens, Christopher. god Is Not Great (pp. 108-109). 

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

I think this is a pretty important point.  Roger's analogy only works because in the 1980s his seminary teacher had ready access to cheap materials which he could use to fabricate a set of faux plates ("balsa wood, some gold colored spray paint, and some nikel-plated loose leaf binder rings, ... a black sharpie, a table saw, a drill, some glue...").

But where did Joseph, of the destitute family Smith, get the materials in the 1820s to fabricate a set of sham plates? 

My primary point is that the orthodox position might be misunderstanding what the witnesses are actually claiming. The kids in my seminary class made assumptions about what I the teacher had under the lectern. You are making assumptions about what Joseph Smith had under the cloth and why.

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

So, did Joseph conspire with others in the fabrication?  If so, with whom?  And why did none of them after divulge the fraud?  And what evidence is there of such collusion?  Or did Joseph do this all by himself?  If so, when?  Is there evidence that he had skill in working with metal?  Where did he get the copper or tin, and how did he pay for it (since according to Martin Harris, "Joseph had not credit enough to buy so much lead," and I assume copper was more valuable than lead at the time)?  And where did he get the skills to etch hieroglyphics onto the plates?  And so on.

Those are all excellent questions, which is why I wish somebody competent cross-examined the witnesses.

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

And the aggressive apathy continues.

apathy (noun): lack of interest in or concern for things that others find moving or exciting.

humility (noun): the quality or condition of being humble; modest opinion or estimate of one's own importance, rank, etc.

If I was apathetic about this issue, I wouldn't be having this conversation. 

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

You are asked to substantiate your alternative explanation for the Plates and the Witness statements by laying out your arguments, evidences, reasoning, etc., all we get is "I don't know" followed by a fervent anti-testimony ("One of the things I do know...") against Joseph Smith.

There are lots of alternative explanations. All of them are much, much, more likely than the orthodox one. I don't know what happened, and I've tried to explain why.

Edited February 27, 2024 by Analytics

[SeekingUnderstanding]

1 hour ago, Stormin' Mormon said:

Never was a fan of this aphorism.  Rather than try to articulate why in my own words, Ima just copy-and-paste this from a astrobiologist in Edinburgh (emphasis mine):

Quote

I don’t see the issue. Let’s say you go to the doctor and he recommends routine bloodwork. Without a second thought you would likely agree. Let’s say he recommends invasive surgery for an issue you didn’t know about. Would you seek a second opinion? That’s all that’s meant by the phrase. 

[SeekingUnderstanding]

1 hour ago, Ryan Dahle said:

That is a different issue altogether. The Three and Eight Witnesses (and other witnesses) are known modern people in a known modern context. We are talking about the nature of their testimony, as given less than 200 years ago.

So it would be more like trying to assess events in the life of Andrew Jackson. If the degree of support for the experience of the three and eight witnesses were instead supporting a particular event in Jackson's life (i.e., something which isn't loaded with so much religious significance), there would be little doubt about its veracity. 

That’s fair. But let’s say Jackson’s friends claimed he could walk on water. How would you go about the evaluating that? Did he actually walk on water? Trick them? Or was it a hoax. 

Edited February 27, 2024 by SeekingUnderstanding

[Analytics]

2 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

What I'm saying is that based on standard historiographical methods, the available statements from the witnesses (despite any imperfections and limitations) would still provide strong supporting evidence for some of Joseph Smith's core claims. The reason critics make all these additional demands (which wouldn't be needed for most other historical issues) is not because the evidence isn't good on its own terms. It is because their worldview can't allow angels to show gold plates to farmers. Which, again, I understand.

Do "standard historiographical methods" indicate that in the 1920's, an farmer discovered an authentic ancient Mesoamerican artifact in upstate New York? Maybe. But it reminds me of the following quote from Pinker:

A failure of Bayesian reasoning among scientists themselves is a contributor to the replicability crisis that we met in chapter 4. The issue hit the fan in 2011 when the eminent social psychologist Daryl Bem published the results of nine experiments in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which claimed to show that participants successfully predicted (at a rate above chance) random events before they took place, such as which of two curtains on a computer screen hid an erotic image before the computer had selected where to place it. Not surprisingly, the effects failed to replicate, but that was a foregone conclusion given the infinitesimal prior probability that a social psychologist had disproven the laws of physics by showing some undergraduates some porn. When I raised this point to a social psychologist colleague, he shot back, “Maybe Pinker doesn’t understand the laws of physics!” But actual physicists, like Sean Carroll in his book The Big Picture, have explained why the laws of physics really do rule out precognition and other forms of ESP.

The Bem imbroglio raised an uncomfortable question. If a preposterous claim could get published in a prestigious journal by an eminent psychologist using state-of-the-art methods subjected to rigorous peer review, what does that say about our standards of prestige, eminence, rigor, and the state of the art?

Pinker, Steven. Rationality (pp. 159-160). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

[Ryan Dahle]

27 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

That’s fair. But let’s say Jackson’s friends claimed he could walk on water. How would you go about the evaluating that? Did he actually walk on water? Trick them? Or was it a hoax. 

If I had analogous evidence for Jackson's water-walking feat as I do from the witnesses to the Book of Mormon, then I would think that was pretty impressive evidence. I might not believe it. I probably wouldn't (unless I had other outside supporting reasons or rational explanations that could render it as more plausible). But the eye-witness testimonies (if truly analogous) would be surprising and difficult to account for in my current worldview. 

To be quite frank, I don't think the witnesses of the Book of Mormon would be enough to persuade me to believe in Joseph Smith's claims, if that is all there was to the story. This is just one piece in a much larger landscape of competing types of evidence. But that doesn't mean these witness testimonies are worthless either. I think the case for the Book of Mormon is a lot stronger with them than without them. They certainly don't compel belief, but they play a fairly significant role in how I assess what is plausible or probable, all things accounted for. 

[SeekingUnderstanding]

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

Yep

So you quote yourself and then agree with yourself? 

[pogi]

2 hours ago, smac97 said:

"Multiple people?"  As in . . . maybe three?  John H. Gilbert and Jesse Townsend (quoted by Pomeroy Tucker)?  See here:

Regarding John H. Gilbert, see here:

Regarding Jesse Townsend, see here:

So "multiple people" turn out to be two.  And of the two, one is hearsay or double hearsay.  And the other is a very late, but still verbatim, recollection from a hostile source.

True.  But then, the same can be said for acceptance of many historical events.  "Science" is typically not really part of the equation.

Thanks,

-Smac

In the link you provide, there is also the second-hand testimony of John A. Clark -

Quote

To know how much this testimony [of three witnesses] is worth I will state one fact. A gentleman in Palmyra, bred to the law, a professor of religion, and of undoubted veracity told me that on one occasion, he appealed to Harris and asked him directly,-”Did you see those plates?” Harris replied, he did. “Did you see the plates, and the engraving on them with your bodily eyes?” Harris replied, “Yes, I saw them with my eyes,-they were shown unto me by the power of God and not of man.” “But did you see them with your natural,-your bodily eyes, just as you see this pencil-case in my hand? Now say no or yes to this.” Harris replied,-”Why I did not see them as I do that pencil-case, yet I saw them with the eye of faith; I saw them just as distinctly as I see any thing around me,-though at the time they were covered over with a cloth.[1]

There is also Anthony Metcalf who interviewed Harris (only mentioned in passing in the article you link to, and not really addressed) - 

Quote

I never saw the golden plates, only in a visionary or entranced state. I wrote a great deal of the Book of Mormon myself, as Joseph Smith translated or spelled the words out in English. Sometimes the plates would be on a table in the room in which Smith did the translating, covered over with a cloth. I was told by Smith that God would strike him dead if he attempted to look at them, and I believed it. When the time came for the three witnesses to see the plates, Joseph Smith, myself, David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery, went into the woods to pray. When they had engaged in prayer, they failed at the time to see the plates or the angel who should have been on hand to exhibit them. They all believed it was because I was not good enough, or in other words, not sufficiently sanctified. I withdrew. As soon as I had gone away, the three others saw the angel and the plates. In about three days I went into the woods to pray that I might see the plates. While praying I passed into a state of entrancement, and in that state I saw the angel and the plates. (Anthony Metcalf, Ten Years Before the Mast, n.d., microfilm copy, p. 70-71.)

Metcalf also interviewed Whitmer, which was addressed in the article:

Quote

 In regards to my testimony to the visitation of the angel, who declared to us three witnesses that the Book of Mormon is true, I have this to say: Of course we were in the spirit when we had the view, for no man can behold the face of an angel, except in a spiritual view, but we were in the body also, and everything was as natural to us, as it is at any time. Martin Harris, you say, called it 'being in vision.' We read in the Scriptures, Cornelius saw, in a vision, an angel of God. Daniel saw an angel in a vision; also in other places it states they saw an angel in the spirit. A bright light enveloped us where we were, that filled at noon day, and there in a vision, or in the spirit, we saw and heard just as it is stated in my testimony in the Book of Mormon. I am now passed eighty-two years old, and I have a brother, J. J. Snyder, to do my writing for me, at my dictation. [Signed] David Whitmer. [14

It was "as natural to us".

The link you provide suggests that:

Quote

Harris did not, then, see "spiritual eye" and "natural eye" as mutually exclusive categories. Both described something about the witness experience.

I think that accurately describes the way they perceived spiritual visions and explains why they go back and forth between the two in their descriptions.

Besides those testimonies above, there are other noted quotations from articles that speak of it being viewed by "The power of God", or by a "supernatural power."

Seeing with a "second sight", or "eye of faith" was a commonly reported experience by those who practiced folk magic and money digging.  To them, the vision and experience was just as real as anything.  For example, this is in the "Last Testimony of Martin Harris":

Quote

 Three of us took some tools to go to the hill and hunt for more boxes of gold or something, and indeed we found a stone box. We got quite excited about it and dug carefully around it, and by some unseen power it slipped back into the hill. We stood there and looked at it and one of us took a crow-bar and tried to drive it through the lid and hold it, but the bar glanced off and broke off one of the corners of the box. Sometime that box will be found and you will see the corner broken off, and then you will know I have told you the truth ("The Last Testimony of Martin Harris," The Instructor, October 1930, Vol. 65, No. 10, pp. 587-589).

Similar experiences are attested to have happened to many other treasure seekers practicing folk magic at the time.  They saw with "second sight" or the "eye of faith" which was many ways indistinguishable to them from any other form of sight. 

And this is how Brigham Young described one of Oliver Cowdery's experiences:

Quote

When Joseph got the plates, the angel instructed him to carry them back to the hill Cumorah, which he did. Oliver says that when Joseph and Oliver went there, the hill opened, and they walked into a cave, in which there was a large and spacious room ... They laid the plates on a table; it was a large table that stood in the room. Under this table there was a pile of plates as much as two feet high, and there were altogether in this room more plates than probably many wagon loads; they were piled up in the corners and along the walls. The first time they went there the sword of Laban hung upon the wall; but when they went in again it had been taken down and laid upon the table across the gold plates; it was unsheathed and on it was written these words: "This sword will never be sheathed again until the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our God and his Christ." I tell you this as coming not only from Oliver Cowdery, but others who were familiar with it... Carlos Smith was a young man of as much veracity as any young man we had, and he was a witness to these things. Samuel Smith saw some things, Hyrum saw a good many things, but Joseph was the leader. (Journal of Discourses 1878, 19:38)