Gorman wrote:
Continuing on with Mentalgymnast's analogy, the combination of problems can eventually cause someone to not purchase the car. But if you only look at the bad without considering the good, you will likely not purchase any car on the lot. If one has a few dents and is missing a window but has only 5,000 miles, the benefits may outweigh the deficits.
Yes, if there were thousands of pieces of evidence against Mormonism and no evidence for Mormonism, then the case may be a bit more clear. As it stands, there is some balance on each side. I have never really sat down and logically calculated which side has the edge over the other (I suspect the evidence against outweighs the evidence for), because I have chosen to add personal experience to the balance. From an outside view, this just simply looks like I have a hand on the scale and will never allow the negative evidence to sway me. This may be what it looks like from the outside, but in fact, I am just adding weight to both sides corresponding to what my personal experience dictates. As for now, the personal experience far outweighs any evidence against Mormonism. Those who do not allow personal experience in the balance of things could easily come to a different conclusion.
There is always a cost benefit analyst when purchasing a vehicle, however that was not the point of my analogy. My point was that MG was dismissing the stone box as unimportant, as if there was nothing else to see or consider. He wasn't supplying a reasonable (or ever far fetched like some here) explanation as to why no one can find the box, he simply dismissed it as unimportant.
MG wrote: I looked at it years back and found it interesting but, well, that was about it.
Obviously if the only issue one could find with the production of the Book of Mormon would be the lack of any physical evidence of the stone box, it wouldn't be a big deal.
"Hey look we don't have the stone box but we have the actual plates and we can compare what is on the plates to what Joseph Smith translated, we have proof that Joseph Smith was capable of running at full speed for an hour with 60-100 pounds of weight while being chased through a forest, we have found the lost 116 pages and can confirm they were translated from parts of the plates and we can see the evidence that evil men actually tried to change what was originally on those pages, we have evidence that Joseph Smith actually found buried treasure when he was working as a treasure hunter, we have found other instances where metal plates were written on in large quantities in the western hemisphere, we have found other artifacts of steel bows and swords in the Americas, we have found evidence that American civilizations between 600 B.C. and 400 A.D used devices like a Urim and Thummim, we have also found a brass ball type device in the ruins of an ancient American civilization of exceedingly fine workmanship that could've been some type of compass."If we could say all that and more, then a facile dismissal of a stone box would be acceptable. Since we cannot say any of that, the missing stone box remains just one more reason to reject what is already an unbelievable story, the evidence against which must be considered in totality.
There isn't "some balance on each side". The evidence is overwhelmingly against Mormonism. It suffers from all of the same criticisms that mainstream Christianity does while at the same time is subject to the scrutiny of a recently written extensive historical record, scientific analysis of claims like ancient American cities peopled by descendents of the middle east, anachronism in the Book of Mormon, and implausible claims and stories from Joseph Smith like the gold plates in a stone box.
There is a reason the church is trying to reinterpret its own past and distance itself from things like seer stones and magic spectacles set in breastplates. Not even its own leaders believe in the use of those things any more. I was a member for more that 40 years before I even discovered the church still possesses the seer stones Joseph Smith used.