An exotic new argument for eye-witness testimony

[Gadianton]

But they might not distinguish whether it was a genuine gun, or simply a prop. Especially if the gun were to be, say, hidden under a cloth.

Indeed, IHAQ.

[Kishkumen]

I find utterly fascinating the continued inclusion of the witness “testimonies” to the plates. On the one hand, it must seem necessary to provide some kind of corroboration of their simple existence. But as soon as one considers the actual value of the testimony provided, and the circumstances under which it was obtained, it starts to look positively counterproductive that any such witnesses were provided, let alone that their testimonies continue to be printed in the Book of Mormon.

One thing that should be crystal clear but surprisingly is not is that the witness testimonies do not concern anything like a mundane encounter with a normal artifact. No, these testimonies are comparable affidavits to group sightings of UFOs or the Virgin Mary. I am not running down such things, but the one ought not to be mistaken for the other. If a person wants to accept as part of their reality sightings of UFOs or the Mother of God, fine, but passing off such events as the equivalent of scientific observation does not work.

If the witnessing of a crime should teach us anything about the gold plates, it is that people will fill in the blanks according to their cultural assumptions. In the case of the gold plates, this as much applies to modern receivers of the story of finding the Book of Mormon plates as it does to the 19th-century witnesses. In the former case, everyone tends to assume mundane finding of artifacts and translating of documents, when the truth is closer to what one might find in a UFO cult that uses doctored photos, abduction stories, and a few gush about the time they touched a real piece of alien technology at a secret meeting of fellow UFOlogists.

[Physics Guy]

I've always been surprised at the two Witness Testimonies being so prominently published because they really seem more damaging than supportive.

First of all the Testimony of Three Witnesses is all about an angel and the voice of God. It goes out of its way to say that the plates were shown to the witnesses by the power of God rather than any human power. That would be a weird thing to say if the plates were physical objects seen with physical vision. Even if the plates had just been popped through a portal from heaven by an angel, once they were lying there on a table or a tree-stump or whatever it wouldn't need any divine power to show them. You could just look.

Sure, you might possibly use the wording of the Testimony of the Three just to emphasise that the whole opportunity of seeing the plates was a miracle. The more I think about it, though, the more this interpretation just seems far-fetched. The Testimony of Three really reads like a description of a spiritual vision, not the ordinary seeing of a physical object which, however miraculous its provenance may have been, once it was there, was there in the ordinary way.

And so the Testimony of the Three is actually pretty feeble. It testifies to a vision in a bald and banal we-the-undersigned manner, padded with conventional theological pieties. This hardly raises the bar for ecstatic utterance. The Testimony of Three only really claims that these three guys thought they saw and heard things, and it manages to do so in a way that leaves me unconvinced that they really even did think that—and uninterested either way.

In the Testimony of the Eight there is in contrast no angel and no voice of God. The plates are heftable objects that Smith simply has in his possession like so many bricks (or lead shingles). The Testimony of Eight is no more enthusiastic than the Testimony of Three, though. It remarks perfunctorily on "curious workmanship" and "appearance of gold" as if this great divine relic were a thing brother Smith had picked up at a yard sale. And in its terse wording there is a subtle hitch.

In the Testimony of Eight plates are shown and seen and hefted, but what are handled are "leaves". If you're used to thinking of the plates as pages bound in a book then you probably just assume that these leaves were the plates. Conveniently, though,

as many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated we did handle with our hands

is something that anybody would sign right away if they had been shown some metal plates at a distance, and hefted a box that was said to contain metal plates, and handled ... a stack of paper pages on which Smith's purported translation had been written.

To a witness who had handled paper pages, moreover, it likely wouldn't even occur that others would read this simple statement about handling translated leaves as a testimony of having handled the plates. The Eight steadfastly never recanted, but if I'm right about this crucial equivocation on "leaves" then the Eight would have had nothing to recant about. They saw some scratched-up plates, hefted a bag or a box and handled some foolscap, and said so. And in their understanding, that's all they said.

So the Three Witnesses sounds like a dull kind of vision and the Eight Witnesses sounds like a nothing-burger misleadingly spun with the careful word "leaves". Both Testimonies together, though, are worse than either alone. They are less than their sum because the diametric opposition of mystical and physical in the two Testimonies undermines both. If the plates are a mystery vouchsafed in vision like the Holy Grail, how can eight guys just heft them? If the plates can be seen and hefted by eight normal guys, why did it take the power of God to show them to anyone?

None of that's even the most damaging thing about the Testimonies.

The most damaging thing about the Book of Mormon witness testimonies is to think about what kinds of witness testimonies we could expect to have if Smith had genuine plates. If eight people had actually handled ancient plates which were even just rumoured to have been brought by an angel and translated into a new kind of Bible, all eight people would have run off and told eight breathless tales full of detail to all the other people they knew. By the time the accounts got written down we'd have at least a dozen witness statements, congruent in outline but divergent in detail.

And they'd be full of keen detail. The plates were cold to the touch. The corners were worn smooth but the edges were straight. I cut my finger on one, Martha, right here, see this mark? When they clattered together as you turned them over in your hands, they rang. They were actually sort of dirty—they had this fine, gritty dust. They were all covered in these weird jagged scratches, both sides front and back of each plate, they were like letters about the size of my little fingernail, but no letters I knew. The scratches went right to the edges of the plates, Jack, they didn't leave margins like in the prayer book at church, no.

And so on. So we have eight or eleven witnesses, but no statements like that. The most damaging thing about the Book of Mormon witness testimonies is that they call attention to this conspicuous absence of real witness accounts.

[Gadianton]

God has his wires crossed. He wants impressionable followers -- "blessed are those who have not seen". In the Book of Mormon, the witness comes after the trial of faith. Being a witness is literally, being an impressionable person who voluntarily submits to conditioning that holds belief in a certain proposition as the end goal in advance. Boyd K. Packer connected the dots for the extreme version: you only receive the witness after taking the leap of faith to testify. Born-agains differ in theory: God seeks them. But they almost always get jolted in contexts where there is tremendous pressure to reach a conclusion set in advance, and they put themselves into the vulnerable situation. Most people get saved at the end of one of those big, high-energy services. So the Mormon and Christian versions of becoming a witness are really the same thing when it comes down to it. And hey, if there is a God and this is how he works, then fantastic.

But this sense of being a witness is antithetical to being a witness in a legal sense. A public notary is a good witness because she is impartial to the contractual matter she is witnessing, and I suspect a notary's liability increases substantially when that assumption is untrue. The first rule for vetting witness quality is getting into their incentives. The most credible witnesses, in the legal sense, are those who have no incentive for the thing they saw to be true, or have an incentive for it to be false.

So be it if God "witnesses" his truth in a way that makes for a meaningful personal narrative, but he's irrational if he then turns around and offers such a person as a credible witness in the legal sense. Funny enough, the Witnesses movie, at least the parts they've shown, undercuts its own message when their plot device builds the credibility of Smith and friends by the judgements of outsiders. Both the scene with the Judge and the scene with the mob did exactly this.

[Bought Yahoo]

To a witness who had handled paper pages, moreover, it likely wouldn't even occur that others would read this simple statement about handling translated leaves as a testimony of having handled the plates. The Eight steadfastly never recanted, but if I'm right about this crucial equivocation on "leaves" then the Eight would have had nothing to recant about.

That's not true. John Whitmer recanted, in a way. There certainly was nothing "steadfast" about him.

The way the witnesses "testimon[ies]" are handled seems consistent with the day. Verifications of accuracy and authenticity often accompanied controverslal works. Look at John C. Bennett's expose of Mormonism and his affidavits. Mormon apologists have criticized those affidavits as "protesteth too much." The Book of Mormon witnesses' statements appear to be banal so as not to deviate too much from what all the witnesses are willing to say. Or giving less to criticize. John C. Bennett's affidavits by contrast have all sorts of crazy detail supporting Bennett's character. I don't have the book anymore but I recall they seemed to take up half the book.

[Lem]

....One thing that should be crystal clear but surprisingly is not is that the witness testimonies do not concern anything like a mundane encounter with a normal artifact. No, these testimonies are comparable affidavits to group sightings of UFOs or the Virgin Mary. I am not running down such things, but the one ought not to be mistaken for the other. If a person wants to accept as part of their reality sightings of UFOs or the Mother of God, fine, but passing off such events as the equivalent of scientific observation does not work...

This is the key point. There is no legitimate basis for concluding UFO sightings or gold plate leaf-throughs constitute legitimate testimony. Even if they pass Peterson's "qualifications."

The Witnesses movie suffers from this same issue. No matter how many earnest Mormons testify that the witnesses were truthful, reliable, and unwavering, no one will walk away from the movie thinking 'maybe Mormon angels and seer rocks ARE real.' The believers will continue to believe, and that's it.

[mentalgymnast]

I find utterly fascinating the continued inclusion of the witness “testimonies” to the plates. On the one hand, it must seem necessary to provide some kind of corroboration of their simple existence. But as soon as one considers the actual value of the testimony provided, and the circumstances under which it was obtained, it starts to look positively counterproductive that any such witnesses were provided, let alone that their testimonies continue to be printed in the Book of Mormon.

1 Cor. 2:12-13
12 ​Now we have received, not the ​​​spirit​ of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.
​​​13 ​Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s ​​​wisdom​ teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost ​​​teacheth​; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

The law of witnesses has always been a part of the Lord’s work on earth. This law states that “in the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established” (2 Cor. 13:1; see also Deut. 17:6; Deut. 19:15; Matt. 18:15–16; John 8:12–29). This witness confirms that certain events took place and that God-given doctrine and principles are true
Loren C. Dunn-General Conference 1995

If one subscribes to the law of witnesses in the gospel framework then it’s no surprise there were witnesses to the plates. It’s also not surprising that those who question gold plates, angels, and God, would find reason to discount or reject the testimony of ANY witnesses to the plates.

Regards,
MG

[Philo Sofee]

MG
If one subscribes to the law of witnesses in the gospel framework then it’s no surprise there were witnesses to the plates. It’s also not surprising that those who question gold plates, angels, and God, would find reason to discount or reject the testimony of ANY witnesses to the plates.

I'll take Thomas's view, show them to ME and then I Will believe. Jesus demonstrated that is entirely acceptable, so that is the stance I will take. That would be SURE knowledge. No heresay through others, just one on one to me.

[mentalgymnast]

MG
If one subscribes to the law of witnesses in the gospel framework then it’s no surprise there were witnesses to the plates. It’s also not surprising that those who question gold plates, angels, and God, would find reason to discount or reject the testimony of ANY witnesses to the plates.

I'll take Thomas's view, show them to ME and then I Will believe. Jesus demonstrated that is entirely acceptable, so that is the stance I will take. That would be SURE knowledge. No heresay through others, just one on one to me.

Hope that works for you. I have my doubts. by the way, how much effort are you giving it?

Or have you already been there done that?

Done.

Regards,
MG

[IHAQ]

....One thing that should be crystal clear but surprisingly is not is that the witness testimonies do not concern anything like a mundane encounter with a normal artifact. No, these testimonies are comparable affidavits to group sightings of UFOs or the Virgin Mary. I am not running down such things, but the one ought not to be mistaken for the other. If a person wants to accept as part of their reality sightings of UFOs or the Mother of God, fine, but passing off such events as the equivalent of scientific observation does not work...

This is the key point. There is no legitimate basis for concluding UFO sightings or gold plate leaf-throughs constitute legitimate testimony. Even if they pass Peterson's "qualifications."

The Witnesses movie suffers from this same issue. No matter how many earnest Mormons testify that the witnesses were truthful, reliable, and unwavering, no one will walk away from the movie thinking 'maybe Mormon angels and seer rocks ARE real.' The believers will continue to believe, and that's it.

Why is what 11 of Joseph's closest family and friends, and associates with a financial interest in the book, said the determining factor for some people? If Bernie Madoff got 11 people to vouch for his Ponzi scheme would Mormons invest in it? Oh wait....yes they would if he was their Bishop.