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Comments (162)
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's unlikely for any specific statement to be true. It is also unlikely for someone to say it. Depending on the relative likelihoods, the probability of what they're saying can go up or down as they add new statements. The conjugation fallacy is when you don't realize that the probability goes down when there is no evidence.
Eh? I'm not sure I've understood this.
Are you saying that there exists a pair of statements (A, B) such that "A & B" is more probable than "A"? (That's what it seems to mean for the probability of a statement to go up as the speaker adds new statements.)
If so, can you give me an example?
I'm saying that there exists a pair of statements (A, B) such that P(A&B|Person says A&B) > P(A|Person says A).
As an example, suppose I told you that Boston once flooded with molasses. This is an unlikely statement, and seems like the sort of thing someone would tell you as a joke.
Now suppose I instead gave you an entire article. That's pretty far to go for a joke. Each detail in that article is unlikely, but it's just as unlikely that I'd make up those particular details in addition to being unlikely that I'd be making up that many details in the first place. As such, you'd be more likely to think I'm telling the truth.
Now suppose I hand you a copy of Wikipedia, and point out that article. I might make up a single article. The Onion makes up silly stuff like that all the time. But there's no way someone will write an entire encyclopedia that generally seems sensible and self-consistent, just so you would believe that one article on a molasses flood. A priori, the idea of Wikipedia being almost all true is absurd, but then, so is the idea that someone would write that exact encyclopedia.
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.
Alright then. I guess it is highly implausible.
Come to think of it, the bigger problem isn't what they wrote. It's what language they wrote it in. I assume it's clearly not anything that decedents of Hebrews were likely to use. From what I understand of the Book of Mormon, the Lamenites had their own religions, so finding plenty of non-Mormon stuff isn't too suspicious, but their languages didn't completely change.
Haven't we? Is there some reason all the stuff we find about the Incas and Mayas etc. don't count? Besides the writing, which we already discussed?
The longer they talk, the more unlikely it is a priori that what they're saying is true, but the greater evidence you have (since they're less likely to make that exact claim). I'd say the stuff in the Book of Mormon is the sort of thing that is more likely for someone to say than for it to be true, so each statement makes it less likely, but if you believe the Bible, you clearly don't think that.
Wikipedia makes many improbable claims that don't logically imply each other. I'd say that, a priori, it's far more likely for the Book of Mormon to be true than Wikipedia to even be mostly true. But since it's also a priori far less likely for the more detailed Wikipedia to exist, I would be willing to bet at good odds that Wikipedia is almost all true.
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 aware, which is why I said that the empirical claims of Mormonism are a paltry addition; they're adding a further burden of improbability on top of the empirical claims of biblical literalism, but it's not much compared to what's already there.