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Desrtopa comments on Questions on Theism - Less Wrong
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I have already read the Mormonism essay and mostly agreed with it.
However, I disagree that you would be using the same standard of evidence in this case. For example, all of the witnesses for Mormonism had readily understandable motives such as not breaking up the group or offending their leader. Something similar may be true about the boy and his parents, but it isn't true e.g. of the doctors who testified to amputating the boy's leg. They were from a different town, were not there when the supposed restoration happened, and had nothing to gain by agreeing with a made up story. Calanda could become famous by such a story, but the doctors would get nothing out of it.
That is only one out of a number of substantial differences.
As C.S. Lewis would say-are they lying, are they mad, or are they telling the truth? People do lie sometimes, and perhaps my difficulty in letting go of Christianity despite a mountain of evidence against it is that my prior on people making up stories is too low. It would take an awful lot of psychosis to make someone believe that a leg had regrown, but again, people do go insane. But is there a way to get a sense of how likely/unlikely this is? With Pascal's Wager on the table, it's not enough to say there's ~40% chance Christianity is true, that's less than half, it's probably wrong. Rejecting it without constant fear would take near certainty that accounts like this one are fraudulant or deceived.
C.S. Lewis, I think, failed to adequately account for the likelihood of stories propagating by exaggeration. Jesus need not have been a liar, a lunatic, or the lord, he could have been an honest, sane person to whom people ascribed claims of being divine after the fact (although as a religious leader setting up a splinter movement that strongly deviated from existing doctrine, I think the odds favor the historical Jesus having been at least somewhat crazy.)
I would say that the body of evidence posed by other religions suggests that, in the absence of a true religion, people will still make up stories of a religious nature (also, the degree of theological uniformity that exists among most existing strains of Christianity comes, not from the fact that early sects were at all unified, but that modern sects are almost all descended from the strain that killed the other ones off.) But my position is probably shaped to a significant extent by personal experiences with other people elaborating on outlandish lies that I came up with when I was young, with practically nothing to gain from it.