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shminux comments on What Can We Learn About Human Psychology from Christian Apologetics? - Less Wrong
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Why this fascination with Christian apologia? Rabbinic writings are at least as clever, if less known outside Judaism. Islam is similar, too. LDS, what have you. There are versions of clever arguers in almost any religion, why pick this one? Actually, if you pick a cause and want to come up with the best argument for it, just hire Yvain to steelman it for you. The downside is that he will not stop there and proceed to write just as convincing a counter-argument, as our reactionary friends know too well
This is at least cursorily addressed in the post; Christian apologia is the subject he's already familiar with. Writing the post didn't require him to develop some new expertise.
In my misspent youth as a philosophy major, I never found any logical-sounding defense of Mormonism that was particularly clever. Are there some that I missed?
Probably not, but:
The Catholic Church has (at one time or another) ruled out as heresy every way to model the Trinity. LDS does not seem to require strict logical self-contradictions.
While getting your own planet when you die is an additional detail with no evidence behind it, you might well expect some such result from a benevolent deity.
Orson Scott Card tries to make their beliefs sound like modern multiverse/macrocosm theory.
Becoming a deity yourself brings Mormonism close to something an intelligent creator might do. Of course, you wouldn't expect people to die before that point. Even if we depart from LDS orthodoxy by accepting re-incarnation, the lack of childproofing safeguards creates a problem for any variant that refuses to go full Truman Show.
What do you mean by "clever?"? I found some to be no less clever than, for instance, Catholic apologia, so the answer could be "yes" or "no" depending on what standards you expect it to meet.
Novel, witty, unexpected, ...
I think that again, this depends on how your standards have been calibrated by exposure to other apologia, and to other fields where standards of genuine insight are likely to be higher.
Why don't you just tell me what you're thinking of, so I can make my own judgement. I promise not to hold you personally accountable if it doesn't satisfy my standards.
I don't have an individual defense in mind, but the LW boards have occasionally been visited by Mormons who recommended some defenses of the religion.
If I were to create a work of apology for Mormonism, I'd probably start by flipping around this argument. Instead of taking it as a premise that we don't take Mormonism seriously, and working from there to the conclusion that we shouldn't put much credence in the testimony of the apostles, I'd work from the principles by which many people already suppose that the testimony of the apostles can be taken seriously, and argue that this calls upon us to put credence in Mormonism.
Well, Mormonism entails the belief that a civilization of Christian Native Americans existed in historical times, and disappeared prior to European colonization leaving behind no trace whatsoever but a single book made of golden plates that nobody except Joseph Smith and eleven alleged witnesses has ever seen.
It seems that Mormonism is strictly less probable than the other main branches of Christianity, though we are comparing exceptionally small numbers here.
How much exactly would we expect to find?
I recall doing some research on the 2012 doomsday thing. As far as I can find, not even the Mayans have any idea what significance that date might have had, and the only reason we have any idea that that date is even a neat point on the calendar is that the Europeans visited just before the Mayans stopped using long count.
Do we have a lot written remains of their religions?
I guess we'd expect to find statues of Jesus (he supposedly visited, complete with holes in his hands and feet). I'm not sure if they would still be recognizable.
Their beliefs are probably more specific, if that's what you mean, but the contents of the Book of Mormon are specific. You don't decide that someone is more likely to be lying the longer they talk, purely because what they are saying is getting more specific.
Lying? No, not necessarily... lying is complicated.
But saying something false? Yes, I certainly do.
All else being equal, the more specific the claim, the less likely it is to be true.
Of course, in real-world cases all else is never equal... but the generalization I quote above simply doesn't hold.
It depends on your definition of "a lot", but certainly we have texts from pre-Spanish times which have been deciphered and, together with other evidence, give us a fairly good picture of who these people were and what they did believe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
We'd expect to find all kinds of written texts, and ruins of cities with inscriptions, statues, temples, tombs, etc. All the kind of stuff that this type of civilizations leave behind.
It depends on what they say. The more improbable claims that don't logically imply each other they make, the higher the chance that they are lying.
This is true, but apologists have done quite a lot of work trying to reconcile the claims of their religion with the existing physical record, and I don't think their efforts are inferior to those of more mainstream Christian apologists.
Biblical literalism entails the belief that God wiped out the human race minus one family with a world-encompassing flood which subjected all terrestrial animals to a population bottleneck of one to seven mating pairs per species, which would have to have spread out from one geographic location to repopulate the globe. Compared to that burden of improbability, the empirical claims of Mormonism are a paltry addition, and there are no shortage of apologists to defend that claim.
Mormons also believe in a literal Noah's flood.
I'm sure you have spent more time reading up on this than I have, so probably not.
Partly it's because I come from a dominant-Christian culture, partly because of accidents of my personal history led to me reading a lot of Christian apologetics. I do know a little bit about Muslim and Mormon apologetics, and yes there are parallels (in fact, I once wrote a book chapter on the similarities between evangelical apologetics and Mormon apologetics).
I haven't bothered much with Jewish apologetics, as Judaism is in the unfortunate situation that its founders (Abraham, Moses) pretty clearly didn't exist (yes, Jesus mythicism, I know, but that's more controversial). On the other hand, yeah, I've heard the rabbinical writings are fascinating.
Why is it important? If it matters to you that a prophet in question is historical beyond doubt, then you ought to stick with Islam or with other more recent religions. Say, how about Scientology? It's well documented, and also pretty convincing, I bet. All that is known about historical Jesus with high likelihood is that there once lived a Jew who was executed during the time Pontius Pilate apparently was the prefect of the Judaea Province. The rest of the "evidence" is heavily Christian and so hardly trustworthy.
It's not the only thing that matters, hence no paying attention to Scientology apologetics. But the non-existence of Moses is well-enough established to justify saying, "Hopless case! Next!" when it comes to Jewish apologetics.
Sorry, I was unclear. My question is, given the title of your post "What can we learn about psychology...", why would it matter if the original event was real or made-up? You can fruitfully study the psychology of the apologetics either way.
As already explained, long before this post I spent a lot of time reading Christian apologetics for other reasons.
I think what's going on here is a misinterpretation of your intention with the "Judaism is in the unfortunate situation..." comment. You were indicating why in the past you had not thought about them, and not that they would be any more or less illuminating for this purpose... right?
Yes.
Why is the nonexistence of Abraham and Moses anymore established than the nonexistence of Jesus? And anyway, Abraham and Moses are also considered prophets by Christianity and Islam, so if their nonexistence was a problem for Judaism, it should be a problem for Christianity and Islam as well.