DiscussMormonism.com

J Green wrote:
And I'm already chalking one yes up for Darth from the Church of 300 of ancient Greece.

tagriffy wrote:A believer has good reason to be skeptical--if said spiritual experiences are offered as "proof" of an objective reality. But I readily concede that those experiences can't be used as proof of anything due to their subjective nature. One of my goals is in fact to get believers to abandon this line of argument.

Gadianton wrote:Who are you to teach contrary to the prophets of God?

CaliforniaKid wrote:Recently, however, I ran across a description of a less well-known fallacy that I think is equally applicable to the religion debates. For lack of a formal Latin phrase, I'll call this the "fallacy of too much information." The following description of this fallacy is loosely based on Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking.



Of course, one could argue that whereas a 95% confidence might be acceptable in a life-or-death medical diagnosis, it’s not acceptable where one’s immortal soul is concerned. But that's beside the point if 95% is the best we can achieve. Besides, the stakes may be higher, but the problem of limited resources remains. Just as hospitals have limited resources to diagnose a large number of potentially life-threatening conditions, so people have limited time to investigate a large number of religious claims with potentially eternal consequences. We just can’t afford to confuse ourselves or bog ourselves down in the quest for 100% certainty with respect to every claim.

beastie wrote:Michael Coe made a similar observation in his Dialogue article about Book of Mormon archaeology. I can't find the article online at the moment, so I'm paraphrasing by memory. He said something like the apologists run around saying, "hey, but look at this tree", while the elephant in the room is more like THERE WERE NO HORSES IN MESOAMERICA.

Like I said, very rough paraphrase that doesn't do him service, but he was making the same point that Celestial Kingdom is making here. Didn't Nibley once admit that he was throwing a bunch of spaghetti against the wall in the hopes that one would stick? It's a mess of spaghetti noodles out there.

tagriffy wrote:There are no direct mentions of apologists running around pointing at trees. He may have made such comments elsewhere, but not in this article.

With Sorenson's elastic style of argumentation setting the overall tone, there is about FARMS a dizzying buzz of intellectual energy, with scholars investigating every imaginable cranny of inquiry, from hermeneutics to meteorology, from animal husbandry to the prevailing currents of the oceans. Yale's Michael Coe likes to talk about what he calls "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness," the tendency among Mormon theorists like Sorenson to keep the discussion trained on all sorts of extraneous subtopics (like tapirs and nuptial beds) while avoiding what is most obvious: that Joseph Smith probably meant "horse" when he wrote down the word "horse," and that all the archaeology in the world is not likely to change the fact that horses as we know them weren't around until the Spaniards arrived on American shores.

"They're always going after the nitty-gritty things," Coe told me. "Let's look at this specific hill. Let's look at that specific tree. It's exhausting to follow all these mind-numbing leads. It keeps the focus off the fact that it's all in the service of a completely phony history. Where are the languages? Where are the cities? Where are the artifacts? Look here, they'll say. Here's an elephant. Well, that's fine, but elephants were wiped out in the New World around 8,000 B.C. by hunters. There were no elephants!"

tagriffy wrote:You're going to run into the problem of objectively defining how we can know whether a spiritual experience originated/emanated from God. And trying to do that is necessarily going to be fraught with difficulties.