Editorial Review at FARMS: New information Comes to Light

[_silentkid]

you guys commission articles based on ideological orthodoxy rather than expertise. I defy you to prove that this is not the case.

That's why, when we were responding to the Amerindian DNA issue, we published articles from Michael Whiting (molecular biologist), Ryan Parr (archaeologist/geneticist), John Butler (forensic DNA specialist), David McClellan (population geneticist), and the like.

How many of these folks are TBM? How many of them were reviewed by TBMs?

Michael Whiting is TBM. He is an insect phylogeneticist at BYU. I took a class from him. He's a well-published proponent of parsimony. David McClellan is also TBM. I never had a class from him, but I had a pretty nasty run-in with him over my grad funding. I don't like him very much, but that doesn't have anything to do with his scientific abilities, of which I know little. I don't know the others on the list.

[_Chap]

Could you accept that believers may have weighed the same evidence as you did and just came to a different conclusion?

I accept that this is true of some believers. On the whole, however, those who believe in religion (say) X do not do so because at one stage they had no religious belief, then reviewed the evidence for and against religions X, Y, Z and no religion at all, and came to a reasoned decision that by and large and on the whole the propositions advanced by religion X were true, and those of other religions were not true.

It is surely a matter of common knowledge that the very great majority of those who believe in religion X were in fact brought up to believe in and practice that religion by parents who were believers in religion X. Believers thus tend to have strong social and emotional commitments to continuing that belief when it is challenged, and their defences against such challenges frequently are of a nature that reflect this.

[_Daniel Peterson]

I deal (to my satisfaction) with Scratch's implicit complaint in my "Editor's Introduction" to FARMS Review 18/2, entitled "The Witchcraft Paradigm: On Claims to 'Second Sight' by People Who Say It Doesn't Exist":

http://farms.byu.edu/publications/revie ... 8&number=2

The essay doesn't satisfy Scratch, of course. But, off hand, I can't think of anything I could possibly say, on any subject, that would satisfy Scratch, and it would surely be an exercise in futility to waste time and effort seeking to placate the implacable.

[_Mister Scratch]

I deal (to my satisfaction) with Scratch's implicit complaint in my "Editor's Introduction" to FARMS Review 18/2, entitled "The Witchcraft Paradigm: On Claims to 'Second Sight' by People Who Say It Doesn't Exist":

http://farms.byu.edu/publications/revie ... 8&number=2

The essay doesn't satisfy Scratch, of course. But, off hand, I can't think of anything I could possibly say, on any subject, that would satisfy Scratch, and it would surely be an exercise in futility to waste time and effort seeking to placate the implacable.

You're right, it didn't satisfy my criticism. In fact, you just seemed to reinforce everything I've been saying here, which is that FARMS Review is a tendentious attack journal which uses a "rigged" peer review process in order to ensure Mopologetic orthodoxy while at the same time creating the patina of "legit" scholarship.

You might begin to "satisfy" me by:
---Naming the peer reviewers
---Publishing pieces critical of Mopologetic orthodoxy
---Eliminating ad hominem attacks, mind-reading, and character assassination

[_beastie]

Wouldn't a believer be jusitified in believing that your characterization of the believer's IPE, which, incidentally, non-believers don't seem to have (at least in the realm of religion), is a wee bit condescending? Maybe even to the point of concluding that you are saying that the believer is stupid (after all non-believers don't have this IPE problem), dishonest (ignoring evidence), or mad?

Could you accept that believers may have weighed the same evidence as you did and just came to a different conclusion

Let me highlight the portion of my text that your own IPE has helpfully edited out.

I generally agree, although I equivocate more on the word “honest” than “rational”. Human beings* are inherently prone to all sorts of logical fallacies in our thinking, unless we strictly adhere to a disciplined method of analyzing ideas (which is the beauty and power of science). The human brain – without the volition of the person who happens to have that brain in his/her cranium – has the habit of editing information for our consideration – The Invisible, Patronizing Editor (IPE – my own “cute” creation). I’ve seen this over and over in conversations with believers, and I’m sure they’ve witnessed the same thing from their side. Neither side is immune to this phenomenon.** We can train ourselves to be more aware of it – one of the reasons Darwin was such a great thinker was that he was aware of this tendency in human thought, and deliberately sought out disconfirming data whenever he was exploring a theory. But it is difficult, and we tend to be selective in terms of when we choose to be more careful and aware of the IPE. I fully recognize I am more aware of it in religious conversations,*** and less aware of it in political conversations. Likely this is due to the heightened emotions associated with the particular item under consideration (and I tend to believe politics affects my life more than religion, so tend to have more emotions associated with that, which is why I avoid political boards like the plague).

* are nonbelievers human beings?
** do the words “they’ve witnessed the same thing from their side” and “neither side is immune to this phenomenon” indicate that I think nonbelievers also fall prey to IPE?
*** Does the word “I” indicate the speaker is talking about herself, alone?


First, let me assure you that while I coined the phrase IPE, the phenomenon I am describing is not of my own invention. It is described in literature that studies human thought processes. It is related to confirmation bias.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/c/ ... n_bias.htm

Now, how is it that you read my post, which included the bolded phrases, and yet concluded that I was saying only believers fall prey to IPE, and I was really just saying, in a round-about way, that believers are stupid? Could it be that you did not pay sufficient attention to the portion of my text that would contradict the conclusion you had drawn? Were you reading fast? Sloppily? Or was there some unconscious process that prevented you from mentally noting this disconfirming evidence?

I did state that I am more cautious in regards to my own IPE in religious arenas. This was a personal statement, not meant to reflect something about the larger pool of nonbelievers in general.

Chap also has a good point, which is people who began as believers and then became nonbelievers usually went through a process which led to that loss of faith, and the process included learning to look at one’s own beliefs in a critical and skeptical fashion.

Second, of course some believers have weighed the same evidence and come to a different conclusion. Whether or not I suspect that the IPE helped them do that has to do with the particular conclusion or point being weighed. There are some issues that have a preponderance of evidence on one side – let’s take it outside of Mormonism and take the Young Earth debate. The preponderance of evidence weighs against the idea that the earth is around 6,000 or so years old. Do Young Earthers weigh the same evidence? Some do. How is it that they can still ignore that preponderance of evidence that contradicts their belief? Are they stupid? Mad? Dishonest? Or was their belief formed in a way that has nothing to do with logic, debate, or rational analysis, and they then simply use logic, debate, and rational analysis to try to support a belief that was formed in an entirely different process to begin with?

John Clark hints at this when he states that it’s necessary to get a testimony of the Book of Mormon first, and only THEN will the evidence become clear. Why is it necessary to get a testimony first, if the evidence alone is persuasive and clear? The answer is that the evidence alone is NOT persuasive and clear, and in fact, leads those without testimonies to the strong conclusion that the Book of Mormon is not an ancient Mesoamerican document. So why does believing FIRST change the ability to recognize evidence????

There are other issues far less clear cut – I’m talking about the issues that have a clear set of evidence that can be evaluated and weighed.

[_Daniel Peterson]

You're right, it didn't satisfy my criticism.

It satisfied your criticism. It simply didn't satisfy you.

And, since you're both unreasonable and insatiable, that's just the way it's going to have to remain.

In fact, you just seemed to reinforce everything I've been saying here, which is that FARMS Review is a tendentious attack journal which uses a "rigged" peer review process in order to ensure Mopologetic orthodoxy while at the same time creating the patina of "legit" scholarship.

That's your thesis, and you're going to stick to it regardless of the evidence.

Your problem, not mine.

You might begin to "satisfy" me by:
---Naming the peer reviewers

I could prove that we follow standard peer review practice by violating a common practice of standard peer review?

I point the silliness of this demand out in my essay.

But here's something relevant: "You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone." (Cue music.)

---Publishing pieces critical of Mopologetic orthodoxy

We've published articles critical of Mormonism, of course, and have published even more articles critical of various apologetic arguments. Jack Welch, Hugh Nibley, yours truly -- all have been criticized in the pages of the FARMS Review.

But, as I explain in my essay, the FARMS Review was established principally to provide a venue for Mormon thinkers to publish certain kinds of writing on Mormon topics. We raised the money for it, we expended the effort to do it, we spend the time to edit and publish it. Non-Mormons have plenty of venues to publish anything they want, and are entirely free to do so and to establish any new venues that suit their whims. So are anti-Mormons and ex-Mormons.

And, as I point out in my essay, there are many quite legitimate academic journals that exist to serve as voices for the Benedictine community, Austrian-school economists, Freudians, existentialists, practitioners of annales historiography, Thomists, evangelical theologians, Cistercians, neo-Darwinians, monetarists, Christian philosophers, Marxists, and etc. and etc.

You're imposing a standard for legitimacy that you've simply made up out of thin air, arbitrarily, and that doesn't reflect the real world of scholarship. And it's worth every penny you paid for it.

---Eliminating ad hominem attacks, mind-reading, and character assassination

Done.

[_Daniel Peterson]

John Clark hints at this when he states that it’s necessary to get a testimony of the Book of Mormon first, and only THEN will the evidence become clear. Why is it necessary to get a testimony first, if the evidence alone is persuasive and clear? The answer is that the evidence alone is NOT persuasive and clear, and in fact, leads those without testimonies to the strong conclusion that the Book of Mormon is not an ancient Mesoamerican document.

As I've said, I think you're fundamentally misreading John Clark.

[_Daniel Peterson]

Here's a link on John Butler, by the way:

http://www.cstl.nist.gov/biotech/strbase/butler.htm

Plainly, we asked him to write on DNA for us solely because he's LDS.

[_beastie]

As I've said, I think you're fundamentally misreading John Clark.

No, I am not. This was from his Q/A period:

But I'm, I would never tell anybody to try to prove the Book of Mormon is true through physical evidence, just because of the way metaphysics and epistemology work—it's not possible. And so, you have to get the testimony some other way, and then the evidence will become very clear. If you're on the opposing side you can say we basically just, ah, brained washed ourselves (one or two words inaudible). You're free to think that—we're not doing anybody any harm.

and

And, no, I can't convince any of my archeology colleagues that the evidence proves the BoMor is true. They have read it, but they just read it like they're reading an archeology book, and that's not going to go anywhere.

[_Daniel Peterson]

Sorry. I think you're misunderstanding those quotes, too.