Gadianton wrote: ↑Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:49 pm
I'm inclined to see it Lem's way, assuming I'm reading as intended; ironically, she sums up to pretty much what honor has said, that the incident may be unfalsifiable.
Normally, if something is unfalsifiable, that isn't good for credibility. Bought suggested on the Witnesses thread, that John Whitmer wrote a retraction to his witness. Honor said he doubted it. But let's face it, it may be unfalsifiable. So should we comb the shelves of LDS libraries looking for it, and until we can definitively make the ultimate absence of evidence case, we tentatively accept the alternative Whitmer scenario?
to make that point differently, first recap: Honor said that the critics here wish to falsify this incident, but it may be unfalsifiable. (hopefully I didn't misrepresent you, Honor)
I don't think there is an issue with wishing to falsify the incident. I think Res was seeking to falsify it, at least initially. When I read the thread through this morning, more or less from start to finish, the impression of the reading was most participants began somewhere close together in calling the account into question. The differences began to accumulate based on the reactions to the evidence and differing thresholds for accepting the lack of evidence that supported Nelson's account as tipping the balance to what was then asserted. Each incremental acceptance and assertion led to a conflict over what seemed like fairly straightforward and disciplined evidence handling on the part of Res.
Does it matter if the account was embellished? Well, it almost certainly was. There's plenty of evidence that it evolved and became more significant, more aggrandizing of Nelson's reaction as the drama also evolved. But is Nelson lying when he shares the story? I don't know. Anyone who fails to realize the mechanisms behind the story evolution are almost universal is underinformed about the mind and memory. I find the idea its a fabrication to be one of the least likely possibilities compared to the alternatives of it being based initially on some factual incident. The possibilities of the real event being potentially outside the available evidence to falsify isn't a big deal.
So rather than divide this into critics and others, I'd argue there is an increasingly diverging spectrum of approaches to maintaining intellectual discipline in investigating the evidence. So when you say -
I'm not sure we're trying to falsify, and namely, falsify via argument from silence, so much as taking an initial position of high doubt, highlight the lack of evidence for the positive case. Given the dramatic telling, namely, an engine fire with oil spraying all over the side of the plane, and the pilot nosediving to put the fire out, pulling up right before the plane went fireball; and there's other civilians on board, it's not a war, and not a third world country, it's happy valley -- there are many channels by which a scrap of corroborating evidence could surface, especially given the story involves the current prophet and the telling is increasing over time. A key channel would be some kind of official report or a newspaper mention.
- we agree. I'd just say that initial position was widely held and likely has no real bearing on if the account is a fabrication or a reconstructed and embellished memory now made even more dramatic by an adoring biographer who can hardly be called unbiased.
Recall Carl Sagan's Dragon. So what's the difference here?
The claim someone has an invisible dragon in their garage assumes an alien worldview is in fact true. It demands one accept the existence of dragons, of immaterial yet influential invisible material living beings, and a host of other conditions. Nelson's story does not require an explanation that reinvents the world in fundamental ways. There are skeptical explanations for the story that allow for his having experienced something he may sincerely believe happened that does not require a fundamental restructuring of the world to be at least acceptable. There are many explanations, most much more parsimonious in my opinion than that Nelson chose to fabricate the story out of whole cloth or even an imagined event with no basis in reality than he sat on a plane that flew from SLC to Delta.
More importantly, none of the explanations for Nelson's story at either end of the spectrum or somewhere between demand I reconsider my worldview. Nelson was calm in the face of death? Cool. That's not meaningful to me as I know people who have faced death with serenity. How a person confronts their own mortality is not defined so simply.
if 'agree to disagree' is what you call a thought-stopping cliché, then what is 'clear?' 
