DiscussMormonism.com

I've been advised that a blogger has recently purchased a book. The book was written by a Mormon historian/philosopher against atheism, although his grudge is particularly towards "new atheism". The purchaser of the book writes:

the Afore wrote:I’m embarrassed to say that I read Hyrum Lewis, There is a God: How to Respond to Atheism in the Last Days (Springville: CFI, 2017), last week. Why am I embarrassed?

To which he answers:

The Afore wrote:Because it makes an argument that runs parallel to some things that I continue to putter with.

"Putter" really captures the whole thing and I can see his point here with all the toe-dipping into surface ideas he does. The Afore is embarrassed, as he clearly explains, because Lewis says the same predictable things that he does and so what was the point of buying the book and reading it in the first place? The Afore, for instance, already believed prior to encountering Lewis that the Book of Mormon anticipates Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Logical Positivism, and Freud. Lewis writes, for example:

Lewis wrote:Two millennia ago, the anti-Christ Korihor (in Alma 30) argued that religion was “the effect of a frenzied mind” (Alma 30:16; an anticipation of Freud)

I must admit that for me, this prophetic anticipation is the most psychologically fascinating of his arguments. What he's really doing, is trying to avoid doing any philosophy. He doesn't need to counter Darwin's arguments if he can establish the Book of Mormon can only be explained by God. Because if the Book of Mormon is true and if it links Darwin to the teachings of anti-Christs, then Darwin is false.

It goes like this. Joseph Smith wrote a book starring ancient prophets who predict the thought crimes of an array of disbelievers far into the future from their own standpoint, but also in the future from Joseph Smith's standpoint. Because these villains come after Joseph Smith wrote the book, how could he have known what they would teach? Therefore the Book of Mormon must be true, and therefore the ideas in it associated with anti-Christs must be false.

The Afore jumps all over this line of reasoning, suggesting that the Book of Mormon truly saw our day. So I guess to counter the Afore and Lewis, we don't need science or philosophy, we just need to show there is no reason to believe the Book of Mormon predicts modern ideas ahead of Smith's time any more than it reacts to enlightenment ideas prior to Smith. Voltaire was guilty of all of the above, you can substitute one name for five and still be right. But even better, BYU Studies has some fascinating material that suggests just like the prophet Daniel, Joseph Smith is responding to his own circumstances, and not predicting the future.

BYU Studies has an essay called "Effusions of an Enthusiastic Brain", a charge leveled against vision culture in a letter from a random parishioner to a random minister of Smith's time. Concerning the time Joseph Smith lived, the authors write things like:

BYU Studies wrote:Doctors at times clinically diagnosed visionaries with “religious madness,” one of several “standard medical explanations of mental illness.”

No reason to think Korihor predicted Freud when, as BYU Studies points out, there was already a long history of "rational religion" discounting "visionary experience" in America that goes back to the Mayflower, and just waiting for Joseph to take the stage. It's surprising that a guy with a Phd in history missed this.

But what a one-trick pony! The Afore doesn't need to know much as long as the Book of Mormon can't be explained. If it can't be explained, then presumably everything he personally believes is right. But in later posts, the Afore does move on to other ideas Lewis has that run parallel to his own, resulting in further instances of the Afore learning nothing, and then bragging about it.

Quoting Lewis doing his own personally favorite thing of creating a strawman of materialism from either thin air (in his case) or in Lewis's case, statements made a hundred years ago and then pinning them on contemporary "atheists" (like the New Atheists) he writes among other things:

Lewis wrote:But in our current twenty-first century, post-industrial age, the most crucial component of reality is information — something that is decidedly nonmaterial. The thinking machines (computers) that underlie this new age, while physical, are nothing without the organizing software that makes all of their activity possible... Ryle ridiculed the idea of “ghosts in the machine” while on the very cusp of the new information age in which “ghost-animated” machines would transform the world......In physics, quantum theory...(nuff said)

This is some major foot shooting. If physicalism is falsified by quantum mechanics and computation, then the world has only changed a little, such that new atheists like Daniel Dennett and Pinker (broadly functionalists) or Stephen Hawkins and Roger Penrose (quantum mystics) have explained consciousness rather than Gilbert Ryle. I mean, if "computation" animates the machine with well-understood ideas under the rubrick of causal closure that we aren't allowed to label as "materialist," who the “F” cares? Even better with the proliferation of neural nets in AI. It looks like Scientific America just recently discovered some YouTube videos I've linked to in the past showing a guy who substitutes human neurons for his software-based neural nets that he puts to the the task of playing the game Doom. If you want to say that the "information" created by neurons is the "ghost" that animates the brain, then fine with me. Dan and Lewis are emptying their chambers on their own toes in the biggest way possible.

On the other hand, NOTHING is explained by a physical spirit that is supposedly needed to animate physical body, what the Afore and Lewis were taught in primary, and what they still believe. Yet still, even more nothing is explain by adding another turtle to the stack, "intelligence" to explain the spirit, but which is also a kind of "light" and therefore, physical. Mormons are the only ones I know of who got so thoroughly sucked into the trap of materialism that they have no means of escape. They are left with a regress of new material constructs that sound mystical in order to explain the more familiar constructs that seem ordinary.

And in a final instance, for now, the Afore cites Lewis on God and morality, another parallel idea Dan will learn absolutely nothing about. And then boast about how he didn't learn anything.

Lewis wrote:If humans are mere material, then a murderer is only rearranging matter (the assemblage of atoms we call a human body) in space.

Can Dan say that murder results in anything more than than same? Murder temporarily separating a physical spirit from a physical body.

the Afore wrote:I visited the former Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald for the first time in the summer of 2015. A naturalistic materialist can oppose such things, of course. She can point out that they cause pain, harm society, and so forth. But can she pronounce them objectively, absolutely, non-metaphorically evil? If so, on what basis?

What's Dan's basis? I guarantee you'll never find on Dan's blog nor in Lewis's book anything about the Euthyphro Dilemma, you know, going way back to Plato. That would be the newest idea Dan would ever encounter in his long career of being a "God" influencer. A long, long time ago, critical thinkers realized that God likewise has no basis for moral judgments. And we see that all over the Old Testament where God's chosen people commit their own Holocaust at the behest of Dan Peterson's "man of war" Jehovah, the ante-mortal Christ. The Book of Mormon itself says that God can cease to be God, suggesting that God is in the same position that we are, looking for answers in the material universe that Joseph Smith pronounced as co-existing with God. At least modern atheists appreciate the difficulty of the problem, unlike Dan, who just assumes he has answers to which he doesn't. And he would never, ever, try to explain his alleged basis.

The one thing we know for sure in all of this, is that Dan Peterson has learned absolutely nothing from the book he bought, and continues to assume that if he can make fun of materialism then God is vindicated and atheists are wrong, even though the kind of materialism he's talking about has more in common with his own faith as a Mormon than it has for any atheist alive today.

I will just say, I ran your discussion here through Chat GPT 5.2 and it finds some good stuff of your critique and other areas where you over reach and a few items that you just don't do very well. Two of those I will mention (don't wanna get into trouble for using AI ya know).

Here’s the deepest insight—the “that’s the juice” moment:
Both sides accuse the other of illusion while performing their own version of it.

Peterson: filters reality through academic authority
Gadianton: filters reality through suspicion of authority
Neither is purely neutral. “This isn’t just a book review—it’s a struggle over who gets to define what counts as knowledge in Mormonism.”
“Peterson critiques the book—but Gadianton critiques the right to critique the book.”
(A) The “Prediction Problem” Is Oversimplified. He says essentially: These ideas already existed in Enlightenment thought (Voltaire, etc.), so Joseph Smith could have drawn from them. That’s plausible—but not airtight.
Why?
Intellectual parallels ≠ identical arguments
“Religion is delusion” existed before Freud, but Freud’s theory of mind is distinct
Evolutionary ideas existed pre-Darwin, but Darwin’s mechanism (natural selection) was new
So the real question should be: Are the parallels specific and unlikely, or general and predictable?
Gadianton asserts the answer—but doesn’t demonstrate it in detail.

So, like I say, it's a fun discussion but one major flaw in your approach appears to be settling things when in fact they actually aren't settled yet. He invokes the classic dilemma:
Euthyphro dilemma

Is something good because God commands it?
Or does God command it because it is good?

This is a real philosophical challenge to theistic morality. But Gadianton overstates his case: “Critical thinkers realized long ago God has no basis for morality.” That’s simply not accurate. There are major responses:

Divine nature theory (good = God’s nature)
Modified divine command theory
Natural law traditions
He presents a debate as settled when it isn’t.

I'm just sharing some other views of ideas for you to mull over Gad. It's always such an eye opening experience reading your critiques. There was much more in the AI but like I say, I don't want to get yelled at or banned for using it overly much.

So Korihor was a prophet after all?

The AI isn't doing too well on this one Philo -- part of the problem might be that it didn't also read all the embedded links?

Peterson critiques the book

No, Peterson doesn't critique the book, he lavishes praise upon it without a shred of skepticism as it appears to restate a list of talking points he's fond of recycling on his blog and nothing more. And I have no idea where I contested rights to criticism...

These ideas already existed in Enlightenment thought (Voltaire, etc.), so Joseph Smith could have drawn from them. That’s plausible—but not airtight.

It wasn't meant to be airtight, only equally plausible -- plausible as a throwaway idea. The AI missed the argument that I actually made. I'm not saying that Joseph Smith drew from the enlightenment -- I highly doubt Joseph Smith read Voltaire. I'm saying that since Lewis's argument is supposedly about ancient prophecy, then the enlightenment hits all the same obvious points the Book of Mormon assigns to its anti-Christs that later figures do. It would be just as stunning for Nephites to predict Voltaire as it would for them to predict Freud. But it would be far more stunning for Nephites to actually exist in the first place! The most extraordinary claim Lewis is making is the laughable idea that Nephites were real. Hell, if they really existed, prophesying "whatever" takes a back seat to their mere reality. And so Lewis's argument that Nephite prophets predicted Freud and several other figures and movements after Joseph Smith (based on single lines of text) is actually an argument for Joseph Smith as a prophet, he's saying that Joseph couldn't have known about these future ideas and so therefore Joseph Smith must be a prophet. And if Joseph Smith is a prophet, then God lives, and atheists are wrong by default, and so no need to therefore actually engage any ideas of Freud, Marx, or Darwin. And that's where Dan leaves it.

The BYU studies link I provided and quoted from offered a detailed and "airtight" explanation of Korihor's idea about religious insanity.

I think Mormons don’t understand they worship a demiurge of the gnostic variety.

Anyway, Thanks for pointing out that the phony is being a phony again.