Hello to Tim Griffy

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Re: Hello to Tim Griffy

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Kishkumen wrote:
Thu Nov 24, 2022 10:39 pm
Have you had a chance to read Don Bradley’s book, Tim?
Only the portions that are available on Academia.edu and the excerpt published in the Interpreter. It was enough to spark some thoughts about how the small plates fit into the present Book of Mormon, but those thoughts are not fully developed enough to start an essay yet. I have a lot of catch-up research to do before I can really start fully writing the way I would like.

I did just post a new piece on my blog, "David and the Book of Mormon." (I hope I linked this correctly.) It is partly a response to an anti-Mormon work and partly an experiment in Book of Mormon interpretation.
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Re: Hello to Tim Griffy

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Thanks for directing us to your blog, Tim. I look forward to reading it.
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Re: Hello to Tim Griffy

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Hello Tim!
I really enjoyed this essay on God you wrote
https://tagriffy.blogspot.com/search?up ... -results=7

May I utilize it for a podcast soon? Or better yet, would you like to come onto my show and let's talk about this? I have been doing a new series of podcasts on the Backyardprofessor.org, https://backyardprofessor.org/ discussing as many ways, aspects, philosophies, and evidences of God as I can find - it's gonna take years - no, I am not joking - but what fun sharing ideas! I have Charles Harrell coming on pretty darn soon and we are going to do several shows together discussing his significant text This is My Doctrine. I am going to be making some new podcasts this weekend utilizing more of his chapters on God the Father, along with Boyd Kirtland's essays. I find yours here every bit as stimulating and interesting, thanks for writing it!
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Re: Hello to Tim Griffy

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Is it true that Tim wrote:It should go without saying that if the presence of something is not evidence of anything, then the absence of that that thing is not evidence of anything either.
I don’t think I see this. The presence of something may fail to be significant evidence of anything in particular, because many different causes could plausibly have been responsible for its presence. In such a case, though, the absence of the same thing may easily be a surprising fact that points strongly to one particular cause.

Suppose, for instance, that everyone in my family except me loves Corn Flakes and always buys them, while I never eat them. If there are Corn Flakes in the week’s bag of groceries, then anyone could have gone shopping—even me, because I might have remembered to buy them for the others. If there are no Corn Flakes, though, then that’s a significant indication that I did the shopping that week. It’s not a proof that I did, but if we were betting on the point, the absence of Corn Flakes would shift the odds in favor of me as the shopper by much more than the presence of Corn Flakes would shift the odds towards anyone.
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Re: Hello to Tim Griffy

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Philo Sofee wrote:
Fri Nov 25, 2022 6:12 am
Hello Tim!
I really enjoyed this essay on God you wrote
https://tagriffy.blogspot.com/search?up ... -results=7

May I utilize it for a podcast soon? Or better yet, would you like to come onto my show and let's talk about this? I have been doing a new series of podcasts on the Backyardprofessor.org, https://backyardprofessor.org/ discussing as many ways, aspects, philosophies, and evidences of God as I can find - it's gonna take years - no, I am not joking - but what fun sharing ideas! I have Charles Harrell coming on pretty darn soon and we are going to do several shows together discussing his significant text This is My Doctrine. I am going to be making some new podcasts this weekend utilizing more of his chapters on God the Father, along with Boyd Kirtland's essays. I find yours here every bit as stimulating and interesting, thanks for writing it!
Yes, you can utilize it. I don't know about the logistics of appearing on your show, but I would certainly be interested. I think we clashed occasionally back in your Mopologetic days, so I think it would be interesting to compare notes now. If you PM me, we could exchange e-mail addresses and discuss things further.
Timothy A. Griffy
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American conservatives are a paradox (if you want to be polite) or soulless expedient cynics (if you want to be accurate).--TheCriticalMind
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Re: Hello to Tim Griffy

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Physics Guy wrote:
Fri Nov 25, 2022 10:54 pm
Is it true that Tim wrote:It should go without saying that if the presence of something is not evidence of anything, then the absence of that that thing is not evidence of anything either.
I don’t think I see this. The presence of something may fail to be significant evidence of anything in particular, because many different causes could plausibly have been responsible for its presence. In such a case, though, the absence of the same thing may easily be a surprising fact that points strongly to one particular cause.

Suppose, for instance, that everyone in my family except me loves Corn Flakes and always buys them, while I never eat them. If there are Corn Flakes in the week’s bag of groceries, then anyone could have gone shopping—even me, because I might have remembered to buy them for the others. If there are no Corn Flakes, though, then that’s a significant indication that I did the shopping that week. It’s not a proof that I did, but if we were betting on the point, the absence of Corn Flakes would shift the odds in favor of me as the shopper by much more than the presence of Corn Flakes would shift the odds towards anyone.
You make a good point. OTOH, the fact there are no Corn Flakes in the bag may also indicate the person who did the shopping saw there was enough on hand to not need include it in their grocery shopping. So we could see the absense of Corn Flakes in the shopping bag as a significant indication that you did the shopping only if your household were out of Corn Flakes. And even then, we would have to assume the person who did the shopping didn't simply forget them or wanted to try something new. That might be surprising, but there are still many different causes that could result in no Corn Flakes being in the shopping bag. So while it may be a good bet that you did the shopping, I wouldn't like the odds enough to take that bet.

The thought as I expressed it reflects something I've been thinking about for well-nigh twenty years. Back in the old a.r.m. listserv days, someone offered an argument against Book of Mormon historicity that the dates are not very random. Everything seems to happen on the first day of the month. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how this was supposed to serve as evidence against historicity. It just meant that the dates weren't random. The author even went so far as to say that even if the dates were random, that wouldn't be evidence of historicity. So what's the point then?

So basically, it's a reflection on what would actually show the Book of Mormon is historical. The Book of Mormon has approximately thirty named cities and an additional number of "lands." Not one of these cities or lands can definitively be placed on a map. To my mind, that is not merely surprising, that is a significant absence that definitely points to ahistoricity. So the only evidences that could truly be evidence of (a)historicity are the sorts of things the defender of a the given position would rightly be crowing about if we had them. Note how apologists crow about NHM, even claiming it is in "exactly the right place" (never mind the fact that the Book of Mormon doesn't give enough precision about where Nahom is to make such a statement).

Eventually, this is going to lead to the question of what do I have to address if I'm going to write about the Book of Mormon from an explicitly Smithian point of view. Hard apologists want me to address 50+ years of LDS apologetics, but I have neither the time nor inclination to do that.
Timothy A. Griffy
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American conservatives are a paradox (if you want to be polite) or soulless expedient cynics (if you want to be accurate).--TheCriticalMind
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Re: Hello to Tim Griffy

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Welcome back.
Another spot to start might be RFM’s explanations from the perspective of a magician.
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Re: Hello to Tim Griffy

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Do you happen to have a handy link or at least an expansion of "rfm"? I would at least want to know how rfm is using the term magician.
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Re: Hello to Tim Griffy

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tagriffy wrote:
Tue Nov 29, 2022 7:48 pm
OTOH, the fact there are no Corn Flakes in the bag may also indicate the person who did the shopping saw there was enough on hand to not need include it in their grocery shopping. So we could see the absense of Corn Flakes in the shopping bag as a significant indication that you did the shopping only if your household were out of Corn Flakes. And even then, we would have to assume the person who did the shopping didn't simply forget them or wanted to try something new. That might be surprising, but there are still many different causes that could result in no Corn Flakes being in the shopping bag. So while it may be a good bet that you did the shopping, I wouldn't like the odds enough to take that bet.
As I said, absence of Corn Flakes is no proof that I was the shopper. When I'm the only one in my family who doesn't eat Corn Flakes, though, the absence of Corn Flakes in the weekly shopping has to count as some significant evidence that I did the shopping.

More importantly for this thread's real discussion, I think, the absence can easily point more strongly towards me being the shopper than the presence of Corn Flakes would point away from me. Suppose there were only a 1% change that my other family members would ever omit Corn Flakes, and with me the chance is 50%. If Corn Flakes are present, I'm only about half as likely as anyone else to have done the shopping, but if Corn Flakes are absent, then I'm fifty times more likely to be the shopper than anyone else is.

There just is no blanket logical rule of reciprocity about absence and presence, as evidence. You have to look in detail at how likely absence and presence would respectively be, under each rival hypothesis.

Having said that, I agree that bad arguments can be made in favour of true propositions, or against false ones. Just because the Book of Mormon actually is ahistorical doesn't mean that every argument against its historicity has to hold water. If the goal is to understand why and how things are true, and not just to tick the right final boxes, then it's important to unravel the flaws in a bad argument, even if one agrees with its conclusion. Even if one agrees that the Book of Mormon isn't historical, it's a worthwhile contribution to explain which reasons for believing that are sound, and which are actually bogus.

It's not uncommon in physics, on the other hand, for something to remain controversial for some time even though there's a simple argument for one side, until someone comes up with a trickier argument, that is somehow easier for people to accept. For one thing, it's harder to admit that you've failed to follow a simple proof, than to accept that you were confused on a tricky point. After the controversy is settled by the tricky proof, however, it often comes to be acknowledged that the simple argument was not only right but also perfectly valid, and people just didn't want to believe it. The tricky proof is then forgotten. I mention this just to warn that sometimes it's worth thinking twice about whether an argument that one would like to dismiss as simplistic is really as bad as one wants it to be.
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Re: Hello to Tim Griffy

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tagriffy wrote:
Tue Nov 29, 2022 9:51 pm
Do you happen to have a handy link or at least an expansion of "rfm"? I would at least want to know how rfm is using the term magician.
Sure. Here’s the first episode in which RFM (our own user, Consiglieri) considers the Book of Mormon in context of magic. He has done other episodes on the topic, If I recall correctly.

https://radiofreemormon.org/2020/05/rad ... of-Mormon/
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