MG 2.0 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 07, 2024 12:07 am
Res Ipsa wrote: ↑Sun Oct 06, 2024 6:59 am
What you’re doing here is a massive equivocation on the conclusion you are trying to prove. You aren’t trying to prove the existence of plates. You are trying to prove the existence of a very specific plates: a set of gold plates buried in a specific location, found by Smith at the direction of an angel, and containing a history of the ancestors of Native Americans that was translated into the Book of Mormon.
Evidence that the Book of Mormon is not a history of the ancestors of Native Americans is absolutely evidence that the plates that you are trying to prove existed did not, in fact, exist.
The evidence is pretty overwhelming that the Book of Mormon is not a history of any peoples in the Americas, let alone the natives in the geographical area claimed by Smith. That’s strong evidence that whatever the witnesses saw, it thought they saw, it was not what you claim they saw.
As we discussed months ago on another thread about the plates it was/is my belief that it is the plates that we ought to be primarily concerned with and not whether or not we can accept what is on them. That’s the point I’m making in response to Wang’s post.
Book of Mormon historicity has been and still is a work in progress. To discount the plates and the angel because you don’t like what you see…racism, etc., doesn’t compute. At least not for me.
Regards,
MG
I understand. But what you are doing is, in essence, artificially narrowing the field of field of evidence to privilege what you think is a good argument. That’s a result oriented and arbitrary discarding of relevant evidence. Even worse, you still don’t define exactly what you are trying to establish. That’s great tactics for mental gymnastics, as it gives you an escape hatch through equivocation. But it’s a bad tactic for making sound, evidenced based arguments.
If you think you have a strong, evidence based argument, you should never be hesitant to lay it out in detail and precision. Only by that do you have any shot at getting closer to “truth.”
If your argument is just “there were plates,” you immediately have to cope with the prop issue. You’ve gotten exactly nowhere. Even worse, because you haven’t given any specifications as to what “plates” means, any attempt to define plates after the fact will be obvious ad-hoc rationalization as opposed to a bona fide attempt to figure out what the totality of evidence means.
There is no reason to artificially limit the evidence to focus on evidence you like. Not if you are interested in sound reasoning from evidence. One thing that I suspect you realize by now, bad argumentation and motivated reasoning is the least likely thing that would make me a believer again.
And before you move to “I am rubber, you are glue,” the way you talk about the issues screams motivated reasoning. I haven’t discounted the plates at all. I’ve simply rejected the notion that they should privileged as you suggest. Likewise, nothing I’ve said has anything to do with liking the contents. I’ve said nothing about racism. For all I know, maybe racism was present among the Nephites that just happens to mirror racist attitudes common to the U.S. in the early 19th Century.
I’m saying you’re equivocating on what you are trying to prove regarding plates. You are trying to prove the existence of a set of very specific plates, and there is zero reason to adopt an artificial exercise that pretends you aren’t. Those specific plates have writing on them that purports to be a history of Jews in the Americas and their descendants. And it just isn’t. As the evidence as developed both the Church and its apologists have had to ad-hoc shrink the Book of Mormon to the point that it is almost non-falsifiable. If you’re going to purport to reason from evidence, you don’t get to single out evidence and inferences you like and then put the rest on hold. The evidence is the evidence. If you argue from evidence, you deal with all the evidence. You don’t get to put some if it on time out.
If some significant corroborating evidence shows up, then we as it to the pile and re-evaluate. We, as they say, update our prior.
