Dan Peterson wrote an interesting comment about his thoughts on what these two meant in his defenses of the LDS faith:
Some may also be aware that I’ve been known to distinguish between what I call positive apologetics and what I term negative apologetics. I want to be very clear about that distinction:
By negative apologetics, I don’t mean attacking other positions, let alone assaulting other people — to say nothing of mere nastiness and mean-spiritedness. I realize that my image, in certain quarters, is that I’m a vicious, hardhearted, conscienceless, polemical hack. But even if that characterization were accurate — which it isn’t — it would have nothing at all to do with what I’m saying here.
What I mean by negative apologetics is the defense of a position — whether religious or not — against attack. It can easily be compared to playing defense in football. I judge it to be essential, and I regard it as just as justifiable, both morally and intellectually, as what I’ve called positive apologetics.
Royal Skousen admits that Smith's interpretations are wrong in the facsimile but the content of the book was given by revelation. I am not sure of Gee, does he argue still the missing papyri hypothesis?
So what is positive apologetics? What I mean by the term is the provision of affirmative reasons for holding a position. It is the development and exposition of reasons for accepting a proposition or adopting a belief. One might compare it to a football offense.
Which Andersen is right about the affidavits on Smith's reputation, Richard or Roger? Dan would have to accept Richard's, otherwise how could he trust the alleged witnesses to the existence of the plates?
I see absolutely no reason to regard one as legitimate and the other as illegitimate. Both are necessary and both are perfectly fine, just as both offense and defense are fair and necessary. Of course, in football as in apologetics, both offense and defense can be well executed or poorly executed. Both can be done according to the rules (of logic, of sound scholarship, of fair play, of the NFL) and, unfortunately, both can sometimes fall afoul of the rules. But the occurrence of fouls in football doesn’t render illegitimate the idea of offense or of defense, let alone the game itself. Bad drivers don’t prove driving wrong. And mistaken or bad-faith or disingenuous or uncivil arguments don’t, as such, invalidate apologetics, whether positive or negative.
Suppose that Scientist X argues that nature is more important than nurture in the formation of human personality. He cites evidence and reasons to support his claim. In that case, he is doing something essentially like positive apologetics.
But Scientist Y disagrees and publishes an article disputing Scientist X’s evidence and reasons.
It would be rather odd if Scientist X, while still holding his view, were to chastely decline to defend his own position, declaring such defense morally illegitimate. But if he were to respond by attempting to rebut Scientist Y’s objections, he would, in that case, simply be doing a form of negative apologetics. As well he should.
It is entirely legitimate to argue that the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon are credible. Such an argument would be positive apologetics. n, or that David Whitmer isn’t credible It is every bit as legitimate to seek to rebut claims that Oliver Cowdery denied his testimony, that Martin Harris was an unstable loon. Such an argument would be negative apologetics.
What do the members here think then of our task of negative and positive criticism?
Dan Peterson wrote an interesting comment about his thoughts on what these two meant in his defenses of the LDS faith:
Yes he did. Many years ago. He has simply copied and pasted them (again) to pad out a blog article so as to keep up his daily rate. You’ll find those exact words in an article he posted in 2017.
Premise 1. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.
Premise 2. The best evidence for the Book of Mormon is eyewitness testimony.
Conclusion. Therefore, the best evidence for the Book of Mormon is notoriously unreliable.
It's true that scientists do both defend their own hypotheses and criticize the arguments of other people. Sometimes this is even a real clash of opposing convictions, in which one or both sides may have some a priori commitment to their position. Sometimes there can be money at stake, if for example a lab is only likely to get its funding renewed if some hypothesis remains plausible. Sometimes years of work establishing the implications of a hypothesis may suddenly become completely uninteresting if the hypothesis is just discarded. Sometimes people just like their ideas and want to keep them.
I'm not sure that scientific disputes are necessarily more rigorous or dispassionate than religious ones. In practice I suspect that the religious disputes often are less intellectually honest, but mainly because the disputants are typically amateurs arguing in their free time rather than professionals doing their jobs, not because the subjects of dispute themselves are so different.
The big difference I see, though, is that in most scientific disputes between two alternative viewpoints, the two sides are usually defined with about equal precision. Maybe one side thinks that electrons pair up in high-temperature superconductors because of electrostatic interactions while the other side thinks that it's because of entropy, or something like that. What you don't usually get is a dispute between a theory about electrostatic attraction and an opposing theory that says, "It all just happens somehow, I don't know exactly how, it could be lots of things, but it definitely isn't electrostatic attraction." Plenty of scientists do have vague views like that—it might be the closest thing to a consensus we have now about high-temperature superconductivity—but hardly anybody spends much time arguing for or against such vague views. Anybody who does bother addressing vague positions like that is probably considered weird by almost everyone else, whether they argue for or against, because if a vague position is still plausible then this is the same thing as just not knowing enough to have a worthwhile dispute.
Religious debates, on the other hand, are often wildly asymmetrical in precision. Fundamentalist Christians may say, "Species all just came about somehow, I don't know how God made them, but it definitely wasn't evolution." Skeptics of Mormonism may just as well say, "Joseph Smith faked the golden plates somehow, I don't know exactly how, it could be lots of things, but he definitely didn't get them from the Angel Moroni." It could be the believer or the unbeliever who has the vaguer position.
Vague positions aren't necessarily stupid or unfair or anything. They could be cheap cop-outs, but they could also very well be the most sensible positions. If one position is vague, though, then it is hard to attack the position fairly, because it asserts so little that if offers no target. Attempts to attack a vague position are therefore often fallacies of some kind. The attacking strategies may involve question begging or false dichotomies, but they probably all amount to straw man fallacies because they attribute some narrowness to the opposing position which it does not really have. Attacks from a vague position, on the other hand, often wildly exploit the freedom to shift goalposts, or unfairly demand from a highly constrained theory the same perfect "explanation" of every little detail that a vague theory can always easily make.
This means that some forms of offensive apologetics are inherently likely to be silly, like the Mormon apologetic refrains about all the things that Joseph Smith could never have done or the creationist trumpeting of this or that biological fluke. If a specific criticism of a narrow theory is being debated on its own merits, however, the argument can be well defined from both sides, even to the point of resembling a scientific dispute. The narrower side might legitimately force the vaguer side to withdraw that specific criticism, or the vaguer side might legitimately compel the narrower side to recognize a flaw and correct it, if possible.
It's true that scientists do both defend their own hypotheses and criticize the arguments of other people. Sometimes this is even a real clash of opposing convictions, in which one or both sides may have some a priori commitment to their position. Sometimes there can be money at stake, if for example a lab is only likely to get its funding renewed if some hypothesis remains plausible. Sometimes years of work establishing the implications of a hypothesis may suddenly become completely uninteresting if the hypothesis is just discarded. Sometimes people just like their ideas and want to keep them.
I'm not sure that scientific disputes are necessarily more rigorous or dispassionate than religious ones. In practice I suspect that the religious disputes often are less intellectually honest, but mainly because the disputants are typically amateurs arguing in their free time rather than professionals doing their jobs, not because the subjects of dispute themselves are so different.
There are several legit angles you can come from to reduce science to apologetics, but I still think there's a difference. Science tries to find ways to weed out bias even if it fails, whereas religious apologetics is explicitly built on personal bias.
Religious debates, on the other hand, are often wildly asymmetrical in precision. Fundamentalist Christians may say, "Species all just came about somehow, I don't know how God made them, but it definitely wasn't evolution." Skeptics of Mormonism may just as well say, "Joseph Smith faked the golden plates somehow, I don't know exactly how, it could be lots of things, but he definitely didn't get them from the Angel Moroni." It could be the believer or the unbeliever who has the vaguer position.
That's an interesting angle, you're going down the path that apologetics are often about fending off ground from secular knowledge, and the most viable way ends up being arguing from ignorance. Science can't explain the human eye nor the Book of Mormon or the empty tomb, therefore it's mystical.
Vague positions aren't necessarily stupid or unfair or anything.
I think you hit the nail on the head when the "vagueness" links to arguing from ignorance. There's a good reason for the vagueness, and why it won't get any better when it comes to apologetics. When it comes to skepticism, I think it's misspeaking to say dismissing Joseph Smith's seership is "vague". It's more like, suppose I have a vision where I'm shown a Precambrian rabbit. If I start an email campaign blasting geology professors and they blow me off as not having a credible revelation from God, it's not really vague, it's a shorthand for a much more complicated line of reasoning that starts with a vast knowledge of the earth's physical history. This is a real problem for any anomalous claims, like UAPs. Even if there are real UFOs out there, there's simply no way to prove them without a serious expanding of science's collective conceptual resources. That's almost tautological, as there's a reason why it's called "anomalous" in the first place.
We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have. They get rid of some of the people who have been there for 25 years and they work great and then you throw them out and they're replaced by criminals.
Maybe my concept of vagueness was itself too vague, because there are different kinds of what I called vagueness. The creationist theory that "God somehow made species" is vague in an empty way. There are no possible follow-up lines; there is no way to unpack that or give examples of the kind of thing it might mean. The Mormon-skeptical theory that "Smith faked the plates somehow", on the other hand, is vague in embracing a large number of specific possibilities. He might have found lead roofing shingles or he might have found copper sheets or he might just have put bricks in a box or the people who said things about them might have been co-conspirators or ... .
Either way, though, I think there's an asymmetry in precision that makes rational discussion hard. The side that is more committed to a more specific claim tends to keep projecting its own narrowness onto the other side, to make the comparison between apples and oranges instead of between apples and meat products.
A Mormon apologist may write pages and pages about how hard it would have been for Smith to get thin copper sheets, and the skeptic can just shrug it off because they're not committed to copper sheets in particular and they're not required to rule out rare but normal events just because they're ruling out angels. Okay, perhaps it wasn't the copper sheets but something else; or perhaps Smith did find some copper by being really lucky and it was that luck that inspired his whole scheme. Creationists can be similarly flexible in dodging specific arguments, because they're just not committed to anything much in particular.
Even apart from being right or wrong, having greatly different degrees of commitment to specific claims easily makes for bad arguments. The more specific side may validly defend its specific claims against specific criticisms, but it will have a hard time mounting valid attacks against a vaguer opponent, whether the opponent is vague through having no idea at all or through entertaining many possibilities. The more specific side may at least try to advance its own specific claims, however, arguing that the evidence supports them or that they hold together coherently, or whatever. So I think a vagueness asymmetry can make positive apologetics more legitimate than negative apologetics, even though offence and defence are equally legitimate in disputes with vagueness parity.
I don't think evolutionary biologists undertake much negative apologetics against creationism, for example. It would be silly.
In matters of faith and politics, I believe truth often lies somewhere in the middle ground. Regarding religion, specifically the LDS Church, the most compelling arguments reside neither in the far-right apologetics nor the far-left criticisms.
For LDS apologists to gain greater credibility, they need to acknowledge uncomfortable truths they've previously avoided. Until then, their "peer-reviewed" articles by "scholars" will likely be met with skepticism.
If members of the LDS Church genuinely seek a balanced perspective on their religious texts, I recommend listening to Dan McClellan's videos he posts which are short and concise. He offers thoughtful insights without resorting to extreme viewpoints.
