bcspace wrote:So tell us, bcspace. . . Did Joseph use a peep stone to look for buried treasures in the earth, or didn't he?
How many people use dowsing to find the best place to dig a well today? In other words, it wouldn't bother me if he did.
If I understand bcspace correctly, he is intending us to deduce that he thinks dowsing is a good way to find the best place to dig a well (he will no doubt correct me if I am wrong).
In other words, he believes that dowsing is a procedure that is able to locate useful amounts of subterranean water with a level of success that is significantly greater than chance - or to put it more crudely, he believes it works.
He then (do I have this right?) extends the discussion to seeking for buried objects using a 'peep stone', and assimilates this procedure to dowsing. Joseph Smith was therefore a 'dowser' and since bcspace believes that dowsing works, he believes that Joseph Smith was not cheating people when he claimed to be able to find buried treasure using a 'peep stone', but was practising a useful skill that gave practically useful results.
[Again, I am open to correction at any step of the above].
Now I think bcspace's argument fails, since despite a long, long history of claims to the contrary there is no evidence that dowsers who rely on dowsing alone produce results any better than chance.
Consider for instance this study, which was supported by Grant BNS 93-13038 from the National Science Foundation: see
http://csicop.org/si/9901/dowsing.html for the whole article. Note particularly the sentence bolded below, which shows that people whose job includes locating water for the government wrote off dowsing as long ago as 1917. Anyway, here is the conclusion:
Conclusion
The Munich dowsing experiments represent the most extensive test ever conducted of the hypothesis that a genuine mysterious ability permits dowsers to detect hidden water sources. The research was conducted in a sympathetic atmosphere, on a highly selected group of candidates, with careful control of many relevant variables. The researchers themselves concluded that the outcome unquestionably demonstrated successful dowsing abilities, but a thoughtful re-examination of the data indicates that such an interpretation can only be regarded as the result of wishful thinking. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a set of experimental results that would represent a more persuasive disproof of the ability of dowsers to do what they claim. The experiments thus can and should be considered a decisive failure by the dowsers.
It seems very unlikely that any future careful experimental study of dowsing will produce results more favorable for the practitioners than the Munich experiments. An atmosphere more sympathetic to the dowsers, with so many concessions to their whims, seems hard to imagine. In view of the outcome of those experiments, it is very unlikely that any sponsor would ever provide funds for an even larger-scale study, such that very weak skills (which might conceivably have vanished into the statistical noise here) could be uncovered. (It is noteworthy that the U.S. Geological Survey concluded much earlier [Ellis 1917] that further testing of dowsing " . . .would be a misuse of public funds.") It seems appropriate, then, to reiterate here the general conclusion originally drawn from these analyses (Enright 1995):
(These) . . . experiments are not only the most extensive and careful scientific study of the dowsing problem ever attempted, but -- if reason prevails -- they probably also represent the last major study of this sort that will ever be undertaken. (Enright 1995, 369).
Because of the vigor, however, with which Professor Betz and colleagues defended their positive conclusions (Betz et al. 1996), and in view of the discouraging history of other claims about the occult, one may have residual doubts, as do I, about whether reason will prevail in this arena (Enright 1996).
But of course the real knock-down blow to this baseless pseudoskill (for it is no more than that) is the fact that any dowser who could demonstrate his abilities reliably could win a million dollars!
See
http://randi.org/research/index.html
No-one has ever managed to win, despite the opportunity to demonstrate their skills under any reasonably fair and objective conditions.
Dowsing is rubbish. If Joseph Smith practiced anything like it, he was either a fraud or a dupe.