Author: Martin
Date: 02-01-10 04:40
It is not a fatal flaw by any means, and I certainly will continue here, but I have a bit of a problem with the starting premises of this thread. Allow me to state my objections before moving on in other posts in this thread...
Regarding your hopes, JG, that a structured Socratic approach would be a good idea with which to discuss the sans-MF SR theory, here's what I had to say about that here: Summary response to last 3 posts from JG:
Quote:
As for your hope of a step-by-step Socratic dialog, I'm sorry to disappoint, but I reject the value of such a thing. At least from what we read in Plato, Socrates bested his opponents primarily because of the intellectual dishonesty inherent in that type of argument. By not allowing his opponents to address more than one question or topic at a time or to offer more subtle and nuanced points and counter-arguments, they simply didn't stand a chance against the big guy. With his Socratic technique, he essentially cooked the books in advance, so to speak. That's very probably one of the most frustrating aspects of his gadflyism that prompted his fellow Athenians to demand his death!
I understand that you had not read that at the time you created this new thread, and so I'm definitely not annoyed or anything like that, but I cannot accept the underlying premises involved in trying to separate out the various elements of the MF aspect of the SR theory. You see, by separating them out that way, you inadvertently stacked the deck, so to speak, in a manner somewhat akin to the way Socrates did so against more organic and human-nature-based alternative explanatory frameworks.
Alternative explanatory frameworks such as that which I'd posted before you started this thread.
So, I will repost most of what I've already written in my most expansive discussion of alternatives to date regarding the MF aspect of the otherwise apparently strong and sound SR theory (from: Re: Buying into the premise (a line of bold equal signs precedes and terminates this copied material from my other post):
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Then you [JG] posit: "When we trim away the MF fat from the theory, we lose the following:
1. The Conneaut Witnesses
2. The agenda of both Hurlbut and Howe/relevance of MF
3. The names/locations in the BoM, storyline features"
If by (1) & (2) you refer to all the affidavits as well as all the non-affidavit claims that are contingent upon the existence of MF, then yes (I'm not sure at this late date if any other affidavits remain or not, that's why I put it this way).
But as for (3), a more nuanced reply is necessary. I haven't the evidence upon which to either credit or reject the possibility of a kind of circularity of recall regarding those elements. Perhaps some unknown number of Conneaut "witnesses" were engaging in the very common kind of thing that Loftus writes of in which someone -- in a kind of deja vu-type experience -- reads something for the first time and imagines they've read or heard it before. Something like this might have ensued:
Man: "Well, I've finally found some time to read that stupid Golden Bible people are talking about. Let's see what it says..."
[a short time passes]
Man: "Nephi! Haven't I heard that name before? Where was it... Where was it..."
Wife: "Might it have been that old writer we used to know, dear?"
Man (pretending not to hear): "Oh, yes, now I remember! Didn't old Spalding use that name in something? It was kind of like that, anyway. Nephi. Nehpi. Delphi? No, Nehi? No, probably Nephi, just as I read it here in the Gold Bible. And look at all those times that ridiculous "And it came to pass" comes up! Didn't old Spalding say that a lot in his stuff?"
Wife: "I don't think so, dear."
Man: "What would you know! You always think you're so smart! Yep, now I distinctly recall how often Spalding relied on that corny old gimmick! Told him it was ridiculous, too, I think. Yes, now that I think on it, I definitely told him he used it too much. It's all coming back to me now... I'm sure of it! I'd swear to it on a stack of real Bibles! Hell, I'd sign an affidavit!"
So, regarding the names and the story lines and such, in light of my strong intimation that a single mind led, prompted, or pushed those "recollections" and affidavits, it's more than plausible that one or more of the "witnesses" reading of the BoM induced that kind of deja-vu effect that contaminated the "recollections" of the others once Hurlbut led them to drink from the same poisoned well.
You correctly and wisely note: "The Conneaut Witnesses are easily expendable. They are a source of criticism from apologists and apostates alike, and are seen only as serving the agendas of Hurlbut and Howe."
Indeed! As an atheist and critical thinker, I never believed in any sacred or ancient source for the BoM. One major problem for me is that it posits a visit to America of the risen Jesus, and for decades now I have held that there is no credible reason to believe that Jesus ever existed and that piles of evidence and arguments have been amassed to dispute that premise.
When I was first introduced to the SR theory here (I'd never encountered it elsewhere), after researching it I held that Fawn Brodie's Appendix B served as an extremely strong rebuttal of that theory. Brodie, of course, had long rejected the idea of a sacred or ancient source for the BoM, too, but at that time there was no persuasive evidence that Joseph Smith had not concocted it himself from his own mortal imagination (which was quite extraordinary and he was quite gifted in employing it spontaneously with real brilliance). The horrible grammar and spelling and punctuation lent a great deal of credence to that view as well. After all, if Smith was reading the cribbed (or open) writings of others, why go to all the great trouble of eliminating all correct grammar and spelling and turning it into brainless pap, only to have to fix all that later? Surely he would have realized that if he were ostensibly reading supernatural script through miraculous intercession, God's grammar would have at least shown the signs of having achieved third-grade level!
But once Craig directed me to the earlier (pre-Jockers) computer text analysis of likely authorship, I told him right here in the forum that my then-extant hypothesis couldn't account for those results or explain them away, so that I'd clearly have to change my views. I also explained that it was unjust for so many to be so extreme in Brodie-crushing hatred and vitriol when she couldn't possibly have availed herself of 21'st century computer text analysis! She was the clearest and most level-headed voice of reason and sanity on the BoM origin issue at the time, and the subsequent historical revisionism of the Brodie-haters is and remains nothing short of despicable.
The Jockers, et al. paper much later utterly cemented that it could not have been Smith alone and that the wordprint signatures of several others -- including, most prominently, Rigdon -- were quite clearly manifest (though as Craig's 9-part video series reports, there's strong reason to believe that Smith was one of the authors after all!)
The above also serves as a context setting for my next replies, including my reply to what you're getting at with the following:
"The names and locations of the BoM and story line are easily reinstated via Rigdon tampering with the Manuscript Story/Roman Story/Oberlin Manuscript which, for anyone reading here, are all the same document referred to by all three titles, and possibly lifting ideas from "View of the Hebrews". However, if we have Rigdon using the Oberlin manuscript only, we might lose the method used to develop names that is attributed to Spalding unless Rigdon was so astute that he detected it and immitated it.
We don't know that MF ever existed or that the testimonies of the Conneaut Witnesses are reliable. What we do know is that the Oberlin Manuscript exists and thanks to Jockers et al, using it in their analysis, is that Spalding is in the Book of Mormon to a reasonable degree of probability.
Taking what we do know exists, Oberlin Manuscript and signals for Spalding in the BoM using the Oberlin Manuscript, and rolling back the tape to the beginning of the theory (sans MF) here is the first issue that apologists will identify:
How does Rigdon take possession of Manuscript Story/Roman Story/ Oberlin Manuscript?
You tell me."
Your implicit and explicit criticism is astute and well justified, though I was well aware of the conundrum you bring out. I just couldn't stay awake any longer to address it.
I'm aware that the Oberlin document would be pretty poor grounds upon which to construct the BoM basic story and outline. My response is that I don't insist that it was any such thing. But the "Manuscript Found" fable isn't necessary either!
What Jockers, et al. demonstrated was that wordprints closely matching that of Solomon Spalding were present in the BoM. While I understand that doesn't absolutely and incontestably prove that one or more Spalding documents were woven in to the BoM, I consider any line of criticism that rejects that premise to be unworthy of my time and consideration, since the probabilities opposing that premise are so strong. I'm not about to employ the kind of statistical arguments Ryan's colleague employed on Ryan's site, but not just because I lack pretty much all competence in statistics, but also because I can't get enthusiastic about a line of argument wherein the facts are so strongly against such a line of argument in the first place.
So faced with such strong evidence of plagiarism from Spalding (and others) and simultaneously faced with as strong or perhaps even stronger evidence against the existence [or scientific merit of, anyway] of the MF story, I see no alternative to an empirical line of argument ("empirical" in the lesser sense of working to connect factual observations when sufficient connecting evidence is simply not available).
[. . .]
In any event, I hold that there are good reasons to believe that Spalding was also a writer and that he penned more than just the Oberlin document. If we had access to everything he wrote -- whether published or not -- perhaps we would discover something that Smith and Rigdon and company considered to be more fruitful and ripe for stealing than the Oberlin document alone. But then again, perhaps the Oberlin document was enough for inspiration, given that they were likely desperate for anything at all that they didn't think could be traced back to them (and why would they imagine that the Oberlin document would necessarily surface?). They needed a lot of text and ideas, apparently, to flesh out what almost certainly was their own ideas involving a magically buried "sacred" text comparable in size and scope to the Bible that Joe could pretend to dig up.
For one of -- if not the -- greatest flaw in most if not all versions of the MF-influenced SR theory is the implied premise that Joseph Smith hadn't lived much of his whole life to date such that making a name for himself as the ghost-defying "discoverer" of an ancient religious text under the ground! Why on earth would Joseph Smith -- of all people -- need Spalding's alleged "Manuscript Found" fable -or- Oberlin document with which to model his religious book upon when that whole notion was his own life's central goal during that period of his life?
The mind reels! At the anachronisms if nothing else!
At the end of his video series, Craig and/or Craig's audience seems almost shocked to learn that Joseph Smith had a hand in inventing the Book of Mormon. Of all things! That could never have come as a surprise if not for credulously granting the whole "Manuscript Found" thesis in the first place, which needed to utterly destroy Fawn Brodie's reasoning and evidence first if it was to be so gullibly credited. Of course Joseph Smith contributed to the fundamental framework of an ancient sacred text buried under the hills and earth! The naivety of asserting that Solomon Spalding must have thought of it first is simply staggering.
Few people are aware that even Albert Einstein was essentially scooped on at least special relativity, if not the general theory as well. Others anticipated those ideas before Einstein seized on them and developed them further. Quite often in educated human societies you will see common notions and ideas "in the air" so to speak, just waiting for someone to pluck them and promote them as their own. We know with certainty that the whole "lost tribes of Israel" meme (to use that term only casually), the whole "Indian mounds and monuments that were allegedly beyond those 'savage's' abilities" meme, the "ancient buried secrets of the aboriginal Whites" meme, [the "And it came to pass" meme (which I employed in a 5'th grade creative writing assignment even though I'd never even heard of the BoM before I was about 20 years old)] etc, etc, were all wafting in the air well before Solomon Spalding or Joseph Smith could have invented them ex novo.
So while I accept the Jockers, et al. evidence demonstrating that Spalding's wordprint appears in the BoM, the claim that his "Manuscript Found" formed the outline or key features and that he is responsible for the odd proper names and all the "And it came to pass" repetitions is simply not credible and, in my view, severely detracts from the credibility of the whole authorship reassessment argument and theory.
To summarize, then, how I might deal with LDS apologists (aside from pointing them to the Jockers, et al. paper), the first thing I would emphasize is that I'm not a historian and I don't presume to be able to reconstruct any sort of timeline of when, where, or how Smith & Co got a hold of something Solomon Spalding wrote, but then I'd emphasize that I don't need to do any such thing, either. I don't need to be able to reconstruct how generations of supernovas and stellar evolution produced the heavier elements in order to prove they exist. In the same way, I don't have to be able to reconstruct a historical timeline or hypothesis for how it came to be that Spalding's specific wordprint is so strongly detected in the BoM either to show that it's clearly there. Facts first, hypotheses and theories later.
As Doyle quite astonishingly had Holmes point out (starkly contrary to Doyle's own worldview), "It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts".
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To return now to this post and to summarize my view more concisely, the whole morass of issues including "Can the BoM have been built upon the Oberlin Manuscript?", the purely alleged "Spalding method" of crafting the BoM's proper names, the "It came to pass" repetitions, the "Holley map could only have been known about by Solomon Spalding", and the rest of the wholly credulous and extremely rickety shebang is nothing but a gullibly unscientific house of cards built ENTIRELY upon the shifting sands of ex post facto fallacies and evidence-free anecdotes!
Every bit of it is but wildly speculating backwards from wildly unscientific and unjustified conclusions back to wildly unscientific and unjustified assumptions and premises. The SR proponents desperately need to heed the words that Doyle put in Holmes' mouth: Stop twisting facts and relying on anecdotes to suit the irreparably flawed MF theory and start anew. Abandon the credulous dead weight of the whole MF house of cards and allow credible, scientific, intellectually honest research to try to discern the incredibly complex and subtle routes to the BoM instead (if uncovering such routes are genuinely valuable, which I tend to doubt).
On that last point, Martin Gardner has been fascinated in the course of his astonishing life by the sources of, and historical routes to, The Urantia Book, but do you imagine he views that as anything but a fun intellectual puzzle to toy with in his spare moments? Really?
Thanks to Jockers, et al., the Book of Mormon stands revealed as a fictional contemporary forgery and very crazy though somehow simultaneously boring religious fable invented by several early Mormons and fleshed out by plagiarism of other writers in the early 19'th century. Trying to prove that this plagiarism effort included the contents of a purely anecdotal book that has never been put in evidence strikes me as revealing that those who so argue lack confidence in the science they themselves have put forward! To consider such a ludicrously fallacious and anti-scientific effort to be batshit insane seems to me to be a hallmark of sanity, but there's no denying that that's just this man's view.
But there are excellent reasons why testimony derived from "the fruit of the poisoned tree" (as lawyers put it) should be stricken from the record and, in a perfect universe, stricken from the minds of the jury hearing it. Surely I don't need to elaborate more fully among the readers here, do I? Just as I hope I don't need to again point out how every single assertion and idea arising from the fruit of Hurlbut's and Howe's and marg's and Broadhurst's poisoned tree needs to be stricken from the SR theory?
I repeat: You don't need justification for excluding anecdotal "evidence", you need extraordinarily compelling factual justification for including it! Extraordinarily compelling factual justification that none of you have ever come anywhere close to providing!
It is egregiously anti-scientific and irredeemably fallacious to base any theory on anecdotes! And you have nothing else besides anecdotes when it comes to the MF portion of the SR theory! You have absolutely no credible scientific evidence that "Manuscript Found" ever existed, let alone was necessarily plagiarized to become part of the BoM.
True, it might have existed and it might have been plagiarized by one or more of those who created the BoM, but the BoM might equally have been an ancient sacred text written by one of the "lost" tribes of Israel inspired by God in such a way as to confound modern computer science into detecting false positives indicating the presence of 19'th century writers' works!
Once you abandon logic and scientific thinking, all reason is lost and anything becomes true. Don't you people see that?
- Martin
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Those who prize eloquence+rationality+analytic skill above politeness, Martin's our Allen Iverson. We put up with the other shit 'cause it's worth it; I didn't come to have a cup of tea. --BrianDC
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