The Book of Mormon proves the supernatural exists

[drumdude]

I agree kish is wrong. He’s right about respect but wrong about truth. We can respect someone’s beliefs without agreeing with them that they are true.

[Chap]

And for my part I feel that you are discounting the lived experience of many of those who hold or have held religious beliefs. They believed that the teachings of their religion were true, in the same sense that they believed that you get milk from cows, or eating bread stops you feeling hungry. In some cases they were willing to die agonising and humiliating deaths to maintain the integrity of their beliefs under persecution, or take appalling risks to save others from an eternity of damnation by converting them to the truth. There were no grey areas.

I take those people seriously enough to want to say that they were profoundly and tragically wrong in their beliefs about what was the case. What they believed was just not true. Others may have lived in a subtly shaded non-binary world, but they did not.

I give them the respect of taking them seriously as responding to real experiences that reflect something that does indeed exist. We may not fully understand it, or even much at all, but I don’t presume to say that I am better than they are because I am somehow as a human being so much less tragically wrong than they are. To my mind you sound arrogant as hell.

To say "Person X thinks that proposition Y is true. But in fact proposition Y is false" in no way implies the proposition "I am better than person X" (whatever you mean by "better" which is by no means clear).

For instance, both you and I agree, I am sure, that when in the 2nd century AD Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria asserted the proposition that the earth was immobile in the centre of the cosmos, that proposition was (and still is) false. But I really doubt that either of us would claim that because Ptolemy's proposition was false, one or both of us is in some sense 'better' than him.

Referring to what we may call mainstream premodern religious beliefs, you say "We may not fully understand it, or even much at all". I don't think I failed to understand the truth claims of the religion I was brought up in, nor do I think my fellow believers failed to understand them. I have simply come to the conclusion that those truth-claims are not, in fact, true. Is that position in some way morally reprehensible? I fail to see how.

[Kishkumen]

To say "Person X thinks that proposition Y is true. But in fact proposition Y is false" in no way implies the proposition "I am better than person X" (whatever you mean by "better" which is by no means clear).

For instance, both you and I agree, I am sure, that when in the 2nd century AD Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria asserted the proposition that the earth was immobile in the centre of the cosmos, that proposition was (and still is) false. But I really doubt that either of us would claim that because Ptolemy's proposition was false, one or both of us is in some sense 'better' than him.

Referring to what we may call mainstream premodern religious beliefs, you say "We may not fully understand it, or even much at all". I don't think I failed to understand the truth claims of the religion I was brought up in, nor do I think my fellow believers failed to understand them. I have simply come to the conclusion that those truth-claims are not, in fact, true. Is that position in some way morally reprehensible? I fail to see how.

I don’t view Ptolemy’s cosmology to be the same kind of issue at all, but it is the kind of issue you are oriented toward in this conversation. Yes, Ptolemy is wrong as people who believe in a universal flood are wrong. Maybe that is what you mean by “tragically wrong.” I consider the limitations of human perception and cognition to be the tragically wrong we all partake in.

[Physics Guy]

Ptolemy’s solar system model was really good. Perhaps he did consider the Earth to be immobile in some objective way, and if so he was wrong about that, but considering the Sun to be objectively immobile was just as wrong. Describing motion relative to the Earth is fine. It’s what we mostly still want to do today, after all, because we’re on the Earth.

Ptolemy’s model did not have lots of epicycles piled up to salvage a fatally flawed basic idea. On the contrary, Ptolemy's model was simple. It had exactly one epicycle per planet, so that each planet moved on a circle (the epicycle) whose center moved on a circle (the "deferent") around the Earth. That actually is what the planets do, almost. They go around the sun while it goes around the Earth—which it really does, relative to the Earth.

The only flaw is that the orbits aren’t quite perfect circles. They’re slightly elliptical. But really only slightly. And other than that, Ptolemy was just fine.

His model did feature one unexplained coincidence: one of each planet's circles had a rotation rate of once per year, while the other circle rotated at wildly different rates for each planet. And once-per-year was also the turning rate of the Sun's circle—the Sun only had a deferent, no epicycle. The Sun was part of Ptolemy's system, of course; it was obviously special, compared to the planets, since it was big and bright and all, so it seemed reasonable that it might be different in not having an epicycle.

From our point of view the reason for that ubiquitous one-year rate was obvious: the sun goes around the Earth once per year. Within Ptolemy's model, though, this was just a coincidence. From a modern point of view that kind of coincidence seems awfully suggestive, but back then people didn't have a lot of experience with this kind of thing yet.

One thing that might have helped to conceal the coincidence a bit was that in Ptolemy's system it wasn't that all the epicycles or all the deferents went around once per year. For Mercury and Venus it was the deferent, and for Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, it was the epicycle. Or else the other way around—I forget. It's easy to forget because which circle is epicycle, and which is deferent, doesn't actually matter. You can switch them and the final motion of the planet remains the same. That's just a bit of (somewhat surprising) geometry, not a special feature of Ptolemy's model.

Even though we would now say that it should always be the deferent that has the one-year period, because the planets are all orbiting the Sun which is orbiting the Earth (relative to the Earth) once per year, Ptolemy's model took advantage of that circle-switching option to make each planet's deferent turn more slowly than its epicycle (or else the other way round, this is what I forget). That must have seemed reasonable somehow. So for the outer planets, whose orbits around the Sun take longer than one Earth year, the circles got swapped in Ptolemy's model.

People used Ptolemy's model to predict and retrodict the positions of planets in the night sky for centuries. And it worked really well, because it was so close to being right. That was a huge amount of pretty fussy data. The motions of the planets in the sky, over the course of weeks and months and years, are really quite complicated. They speed up, they slow down; at certain times they even stop and go backwards for a while before reversing again; they gather together, they spread apart. And Ptolemy's model tracked all this really well—well enough that the error were probably all smaller than people could measure, anyway. It wasn't a fluke that the model worked so well; and it wasn't just because it was easy to fit all that data. Ptolemy's model was really good and it was almost right. It was the Standard Model of its day. Its day lasted nearly two thousand years.

Ptolemy's model for the Moon was quite kludgy. He gave up on describing it with all circles and had it kind of shuttle back and forth along a line that was going around the Earth on a circle. The Moon's motion is actually really complex because the Moon is affected significantly by both the Earth and the Sun. Ptolemy's model worked for the Moon not too badly but a lot of people after him were disgusted by its departure from circularity and tried to replace it with models with multiple circular epicycles. This was where "adding epicycles" got its bad name.

I wonder how ancient astronomers (who were mostly also astrologers) thought about Ptolemy's model. Did they take its circles seriously to the point of imagining them as immense solid spheres, spinning on an invisible axle in space, transparent enough to be invisible themselves but carrying their bright planet specks (plus the really-bright Sun)? My understanding is that many of them did think of the cosmos as a sort of rotating onion of transparent solid spheres, but I still wonder just how seriously they took this picture.

All their model ever really delivered was angles in the night sky, the angles at which planets should be seen at each time of each night. Everything else was actually just a placeholder that was never tested directly. Modern scientists might teach a picture like that—presumably that's exactly what we do, in fact—but take care to point out that we should take the crystal spheres with a grain of salt because the only things that we know really work in the model are the angles. People back then hadn't had the conceptual rug pulled out from under them as many times yet as we now have, so maybe they were more naïve. On the other hand, they weren't any stupider than we are, on average. If you had backed a Ptolemaic astronomer into a corner I think that he would probably have admitted that the crystal sphere thing was really just a sort of mnemonic for the calculations of angles.

[Chap]

I think that by now I have made my position clear enough so that I can reasonably leave other posters/readers to form their own judgements of what has been said.

[Chap]

Ptolemy’s solar system model was really good. ...

The Almagest is certainly a magnificent mathematical achievement. As you will be aware, Ptolemy spends most of his effort in showing how the numerical parameters of his system can be derived by the careful analysis of past observations.

I referred to the falsity if his view of the immobility of the earth purely in order to give an example of how one can assert that someone is wrong about something without any claim that one is somehow 'better' than that person, as Kishkumen assumed that I was claiming by saying that the truth-claims made by religious believers are false.

[Physics Guy]

I have no idea what implications my mini-lecture about Ptolemy may have for the larger discussion in this thread. I just spat it out in reflex because the topic came up. I wasn't trying to make any point about the Book of Mormon.

For myself, I feel less disrespected if someone considers me to be wrong about a conclusion, than if they somehow make out that what I'm really wrong about is thinking that the issue even matters. In fact I could be wrong about that, as well, but it would make me feel stupider, so I'd rather just be plain wrong. There's no shame in being wrong. Everyone is, quite often.

I have read parts of the Book of Mormon, but certainly not all of it. Are there any great passages that I should be sure not to miss? What are its best shots?

Perhaps that would be a good new thread, actually.

[huckelberry]

I have no idea what implications my mini-lecture about Ptolemy may have for the larger discussion in this thread. I just spat it out in reflex because the topic came up. I wasn't trying to make any point about the Book of Mormon.

For myself, I feel less disrespected if someone considers me to be wrong about a conclusion, than if they somehow make out that what I'm really wrong about is thinking that the issue even matters. In fact I could be wrong about that, as well, but it would make me feel stupider, so I'd rather just be plain wrong. There's no shame in being wrong. Everyone is, quite often.

......

Physics Guy follows an entertaining bit about Ptolemy and the development of scientific understanding with a bit of human wisdom above.

[Kishkumen]

I agree kish is wrong. He’s right about respect but wrong about truth. We can respect someone’s beliefs without agreeing with them that they are true.

Why do you think I am saying that you have to agree that someone else’s position is true?

[Kishkumen]

Kish is so wrong here

You have a point though. Do we respect peoples beliefs simply because they find deep meaning in them? I suppose we should consider how we balance our need to critique each other’s ideas and beliefs and maintain the overarching goal of respecting their right to believe what they want, give room to the notion that they may have plenty to offer, and point out what we see as problems. Kish keeps giving the impression since others find it meaningful there must be more to it. I think that idea is part of our need to be balanced. But too far, kish. We have to still maintain space to observe, analyze, object, explain, etc.

Too far how? No one said you could not or should not “observe, analyze, object, explain, etc.” Of course, before you object and explain, it is important to understand what you are objecting to and explaining. I think it is important to understand that the major world religions have been tied up in some of the most intense intellectual discourse and philosophical thought of the ages, and for that reason they probably do merit some respect. The facile objections of those whom Dean Robbers calls “science popularizers” (an apt if unfortunate phrase) do not do justice to that legacy.

And, I would go further and say that some of the greatest and most influential minds in history did have the mystical experiences they believed to be the experience of God or the One, or what have you. I think it would be foolish to disrespect that too.

No one says you have to agree with them or believe what they believe, but an inability to weigh properly the significance of these things in human history is characteristic of the ignorant and arrogant.