MG 2.0 wrote: ↑Sun Oct 06, 2024 4:35 am
Res Ipsa wrote: ↑Sun Oct 06, 2024 4:23 am
Three people signing a joint statement isn’t really corroboration in the way you are trying to portray. If you want actual corroboration, you have to independently get each person’s entire story, whether in a detailed interview or more formal testimony. Then you have to compare the essential elements of the story. You also have to consider whether the witnesses have agreed to a story beforehand.
Sticking with a story — even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary — is a very human thing to do. No one likes to admit they were wrong, or were duped, or fibbed.
Just look at the fringes of your own religion today. Read up on all the crazy stuff that people will absolutely swear to. And that’s today. Now, go back into some of the bizarre claims made during Smith’s life. There were guys hanging out on hills and catching messages from heaven in the wind. Religious fervor leads people to make all kinds of extreme claims. How many people witnessed the Fox sisters communicate with many went to their deathbed without changing their story? Hundreds of independent witnesses were filled in to seeing things that did not happen. Two young girls.
When you claim the witnesses as reliable evidence, you are making the extraordinary claim that somehow these selected people don’t behave as people actually behave. That alone should tell you that you are placing far too much weight on the evidence we have from them.
I realize this is a ‘make it or break it’ issue. And it’s been tossed back and forth for many years now. It’s not like I’m going to prove anything to you one way or the other. It becomes at some point a matter of trust and faith.
https://www.ldsliving.com/why-the-three ... te/s/94408
I think there is good reason to look at the three witnesses as honest men who described what they saw and stuck with it through thick and thin.
I’m not going to relitigate it here. For one thing, you would win through rhetorical arguments and logic. I can’t beat your expertise and training.
What I can say is that I think that I’ve looked at this particular issue enough to make an educated judgement that falls in line with the larger narrative.
Regards,
MG
No, It’s not make it or break it at all. It’s one piece of evidence among thousands. Even if it’s the strongest piece of evidence that the COJCOLDS is God’s one and only true and restored church on earth, that doesn’t mean it’s strong evidence, let alone definitive evidence.
I’m perfectly happy to let your testimony be a matter of trust and faith for you. Full stop. What I’m not happy to do is watch you make ridiculous claims about evidence. Dude, when you make arguments based on evidence, you are entering the realm of logic and reasoning. In the realm of faith, you can get away with just asserting stuff. But that doesn’t fly when you start making claims about evidence. You can’t just assert that the three witnesses are compelling evidence and expect to be taken seriously.
I don’t consider myself a strong rhetorician. I aspire to be pretty good at looking for and evaluating evidence for purpose of drawing good conclusions from it. I’ve spent a good chunk of my life doing it, so I hope it’s paid off to some degree.
If you want to make good, evidenced based arguments, you’ve got to learn how to do it and then practice. For example, whether the witnesses were honest men is a red herring when we are trying to address the evidential value of their statements. We don’t have nearly enough information about these men to draw any conclusions about their honesty in general. Even if we did, honest men lie and dishonest men tell the truth. So, their general proclivity for truthfulness tells us nothing about their truthfulness in this specific case. On top of that, I’m not asserting that they were lying in their statements. Reliability of evidence isn’t determined by honesty. We don’t need to choose to believe anything about the general honesty of the three men in order to make a realistic assessment of the reliability of their witness statements. So, appealing to the honest nature of the three men is simply a bad argument if we are assessing the reliability of their statements as evidence.
Similarly, “didn’t deny” is a bad argument. First of all, you don’t know that they didn’t. These folks lived lots of years after their statements. You have no idea what they may have said privately to any number of people. You have evidence of relatively small snippets of their lives. You see only what someone recorded and preserved, and you need to take into account who was motivated to preserve what exists today. Second, it’s not like these folks were coerced in some way to deny their statements. Like I said, people just don’t go around issuing public denials of things they were mistaken about in the past. I bore my testimony hundreds of times when I was a faithful Mormon. I haven’t believed in Mormonism for over 40 years, but I don’t recall ever denying my testimony. After I die, someone could truthfully claim that, even though I left the church, I never denied my testimony.
So, again, red herring.
But the most important thing is not to be focused on “winning,” whatever that means on a message board. I mean, it’s not like we give trophies out here. You’ve got to want to make a good argument, even if it leads you to a conclusion you’d rather not make.
