ttribe wrote:While I was specifically referring to the Book of Mormon in my quote, the same explanation applies:
"To put this in other terms - many social scientists believe humans utilize some form of Bayesian analysis for judgment and decision making. In that process, the individual assigns various weights to evidence in favor of, or in opposition to, any given issue and makes a decision based on the result of that process. Some people assign greater weight to the relative dearth of archaeological evidence in favor of the claims of the Book of Mormon. I happen to assign a lesser weight to that evidence due to the impact of an answer to personal prayer. It's really that simple." (http://mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3/vie ... 53#p314253)
Sure I agree with the above concept that people in their analysis for judgment and decision making assign various weights to evidence. And to some extent I used this process myself in determining whether I thought you were being honest or not. I didn't have a preconceived notion before I read the thread. I knew nothing about you, and little about the Book of Abraham.
I looked at the theory for the Book of Abraham you presented. I evaluated how you presented that theory, how you answered questions throughout the exchange. I noted that it took Scratch a relatively long time to get you to answer at times. You seemed to want to ignore or avoid answering. I assumed based on the way Scratch was asking you questions that he thought you weren't a nut case, that you were fairly intelligent and he's had more experience reading your posts than I have. I compared how I thought a typical believer might rationalize what the evidence suggests to what you suggested and I thought even for a Mormon your theory was way out there. Given these factors which I weighted as being important in critically evaluating your Book of Abraham theory, I came to the conclusion that your theory went beyond being faith based. If there were no Egyptologist translations of the papyri you would accept Smith's word that what he translated was ancient text of biblical Abraham. It's only because of the experts that you are in a position of seeking to rationalize a theory which supports Smith's claim. I'm confident you appreciate exactly what the evidence does lead to absent having to invoke of magic. I'm confident that lack of intelligence is not the factor why you reject a reasonable conclusion of where the evidence leads to. For you to honestly look at the evidence objectively you would have to question your acceptance of Smith and his prophetic abilities. So rather than do that you think all you have to do is invoke the "faith" card in which you are allowed to offer any irrational reasoning, no matter how irrational, no matter how far from what the evidence indicates. With all these factors Tim I reasoned you weren't being honest.
Now I realize most decision making situations in which weighting is used do not involve magic, the supernatural or the extraordinary. Evidence exists or lack of evidence which one would expect is critically evaluated using a subjective weighting. That happens a lot in evaluations of the evidence for how the Book of Mormon was written and I can see to some extent that would happen with archeological evidence or the lack of it when one expects it to exist given various claims.
Explain your weighting of the evidence for the Book of Abraham..what evidence did you weight greater than other evidence such that you concluded the only logical explanation and the only objectively honest theory involved invoking magic.