A more detailed critique of Mormonism

A response to an inquiry on the meaningfulness of life

Mark Plus said...
I'd like for an apologist to clarity this "meaning of life" business for me. Does the christian theory offer "meaning" to life because you can go to heaven? Or does it offer "meaning" because you have to go somewhere other than into Epicurean oblivion after you die?

If the latter, that seems to imply that if you wind up going to hell, why, that gives your "meaning" too.

VR: When Christians claim that Christianity provides meaning to their lives, I think it is best interpreted as saying that if Christianity is true there is such a thing as a person's achieved the goal that is intended for that person, and that in achieving that goal one also achieves a goal that is good from the point of view of the person himself. This would not be satisfied if, for example, humans were simply being raised for food by extraterrestrials. If we were eaten, we would fulfil the goals set for us by the extraterrestrials, but we would not fulfil anything that could be recognized as our own good.

What God created us for, and what will fulfil us for an eternity is, according to Christianity, eternal fellowship with Himself. If atheism is true, that kind of satisfaction isn't in the cards for anybody.

That said, I think Christians make a mistake in saying that life has no meaning if Christianity isn't true. Christianity offers a meaningful life in this particular sense, but atheists can have a meaningful life an many over sense, which should not be denied by theists.

The Jesus Seminar's list of reliable and probably reliable statements of Jesus

From the Wikipedia.

Man or Rabbit?

Thanks to Earth and All Stars for pointing out that Man or Rabbit is online. I think that, unlike people who somehow think that it isn't important or relevant, atheist critics of Christianity do take Christianity seriously in ways that a lot of people don't. You too Steven Carr.

Do Christian apologists and atheists agree on something important that much of the world denies?

On the Secular Outpost Jeff Lowder posted a letter by Keith Parsons in response to a letter from William Lane Craig about people who found Christianity irrelevant. I have always found the agreements between atheists and theists to be as interesting as their disagreements, but we don't talk about them as much.

I read the response of Charity's friends differently. I would have thought that it was one of the fundamental areas of agreement between atheists like Parsons and Christian apologists like Craig that the differences between Christian theism and atheism were matters of truth and not relevance, that it does matter whether Christianity is true or not, and that rational argument can at least possibly aid us in resolving the question of whether or not it is true. So I read Charity Craig's friends not as saying that they thought Christianity false (they would have said that if that is what they meant to say) but rather to have fallen into the same sort of postmodern trap that is as old as Protagoras and in fact is as dangerous to modern science as it is to Christianity. "Evolution is an interpretation, and creationism is an interpretation, and there really isn't any such thing as truth, so can't we all just get along, and accept whatever is relevant, and what is relevant to me is true for me, even if it is not true for you."

Craig does indulge in the rhetoric that life is meaningless without God, but at least one can say that if Christianity is true then those who deny it have gotten the wrong meaning out of life. But I must admit that unless Craig can get this argument beyond the stage of exchanging autobiographical reports (T: I found life meaningless without God A: I find life completely meaningful without God) this type of claim does nothing to provide a reason for the hope within.

The historical case for Christianity

1) The skeptic is not committed to viewing the NT authors as being stupid or ignorant at all. Indeed, I think Luke especially was a very impressive historian. Thus, the skeptic would expect his natural facts to be largely correct.

VR: Most skeptics historically, before the accurate detail was discovered, thought that Acts was a late document, perhaps even from the second century.

JG: I simply see no reason why the skeptic cannot allow that something unusual, but completely natural happened which later got exaggerated into supernatural claims. Under such a view, one would expect the "historical" transition between natural and supernatural to be fairly fluid.

VR: We're talking about, among other things, a resurrection from the dead. What "natural" event could have happened that could have morphed into a resurrection claim?

JG: 2. The testaments are clearly NOT cases of multiple and independent attestation. First of all, because the author did not witness anything at all themselves. Second, and more importantly, they are shared sources amongst themselves.

VR: Luke in several places speaks in the first person plural, and these passages are amongst those where the historical accuracy kicks in. I think the evidence that Luke was present as a companion of Paul is quite strong here. As for sharing, these people were leaders in the same Church, so this shouldn't be too surprising.

Sometimes I get the feeling from skeptics that it's heads I win tails you lose. If they say the same thing, they are colluding. If they say different things, they contradict each other.

JG: An unbiased report would be a report which the reporter gains nothing it the report turns out to be true. When the reporter reports something which actually goes against their own interests, that is good historical evidence that some claim is reliable.

VR: Peter, for example put his life at risk by getting out in front of the gate and telling the people who had crucified Jesus that he had been resurrected and vindicated. After all, the people who got rid of Jesus had the power to get rid of him as well. That was why he had been sneaking out the back door making denials before the cock crowed.

JG: What I'm looking for is some person who saw Jesus perform any of his miracles, didn't believe him and then testified of it himself. Considering how many purported accounts of miracles which we have in the NT, this shouldn't be asking too much. Or we could ask to Paul or James' record which they wrote before their conversion.

VR: You expect all sorts of people having their reflections recorded? I mean we could expect to have some letter from C. S. Lewis saying rejecting God and Christianity, but Paul and James?

In any event, I think that the evidence for Christ's resurrection, for various reasons, is substantial. However, other factors decide whether or not it is sufficient, such as the antecedent plausibility of theism and the antecedent plausibility of Christianity. I also maintain that nothing like this historical case can be found on behalf of either Islam or Mormonism, which was the point I was making. I find it sufficient myself, but probably would not find it sufficient if my background beliefs were different.

Two Questions for Clark

Two questions about Mormon epistemology for Clark. First, just to clarify, my objection to the appeal to religious experience is not to say that religious experience claims are always unjustified, or to object to the terms ("burning in the bosom") in which it is expressed. The objection is to the idea that you can deflect criticisms of the Nielsen Hayden variety by saying "None of that really matters. Just take the book of Mormon home and pray over it, and if God gives you a feeling that it is true, then become a Mormon." Is this an appropriate response? It sounds like "Don't Confuse me With the Facts, I have a Testimony." (the title of an article by Steve Cannon on Mormonism). I wouldn't consider that to be an adequate response to questons about the defensibility of Genesis, for example. Some Christians are going to try to defend a literal reading of Genesis, and some will attempt to escape difficulties by backing away from strict literalism, and there is a gamut of ways of dealing with the problems with Genesis. But an appeal to religious experience in this context would be a complete non sequitur.

Second, is it open to the Mormon to accept a non-literalist move in response to NH criticisms which is similar to the nonliteralist move that Christians often make with respect to Genesis?

Response to Jeff G

Jeff G: First of all I should point out that I'm not the one who believes that any supernatural claim are supported by history. Nevertheless, here are a couple of standard criteria:

1) Multiple and independent attestation.
2) Reported by unbiased witnesses


The two criteria of
3) Internally consistency
4) External consistency

are what Vic is focusing on. But my point is that these last two are not criteria for supporting supernatural claims at all, but are instead criteria for disconfirming supernatural claims only. While this may sound a little Popperian, I find it appropriate when we are dealing with historical claims which we expect to be mostly consistent whether they are true or not.

VR: If you look at a lot of the works focused around supernatural claims, it seems as if you do not find the kind of fine-grained accuracy with respect to the non-miraculous detail that you find in the NT. I think this is something a skeptic should not expect to find. Getting all the governmental details right is pretty significant and places Luke close to the events. It renders unlikely the idea that the book of Acts is thr product of extensive legendary development.

It seems to me that you do have mulitple and independent attestation of the Christian miracle claims (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Paul, and others). But I'm not sure what a report by an unbiased witness would look like. There are reports of people becoming believers who had even been opponents or skeptics (Paul, James), but you're probably going ot argue that these people tainted themselves by becoming Christians. So what are we looking for? Someone who says "Yeah, I saw Jesus rise from the dead all right. But even though it looks like Jesus overcame death and said that I could receive eternal life if I followed him, I figured I had better things to do, so I didn't." Should we expect there to be anyone like that, and would someone like that write a biography of Jesus?"

My paper on miracles for Internet Infidels

Democrat ethical problems

Earlier I posted a link to a piece charging Nancy Pelosi with hypocrisy for marching in a Gay Pride parade with a man-boy love advocate while at the same time condemning the Republican response to the Foley scandal. Dennis Monokroussos wrote me to point out that there isn't adequate reason to believe that Pelosi knew about Mr. Hay's views. In any event, she did not occupy a supervisory position with respect to the parade in which she marched, while her opposite number, Dennis Hastert, had a supervisory role with respect to Mr. Foley's conduct. However, this is rather more serious.

Shandon's Guthrie's case for the resurrection

The case against the stolen election charge

HT: Steve Hays.

Mormonism and the historical case for Christianity

I should make some clarifications about what I mean when I say that the New Testament has a substantial amount of historical verification that the Book of Mormon lacks. I do not mean to say that it isn’t logically possible that there should have been all those things happening in the Americas for which all of the circumstantial evidence is somehow lost. (Though the DNA disconnect between Jews and Native Americans is a problem I haven’t even discussed). It is also perfectly possible that in spite of the evidence that the authors of the NT were familiar with the details of governments in certain cities and had detailed knowledge of first-century sailing ships from that area, nevertheless the miracles they reported did not take place and that Christianity is false.

It isn’t just that the NT mentions places like Corinth and Malta. It’s the fact that archaeological evidence shows that Luke had detailed knowledge of exactly what kind of governmental systems each of these places had. And these places changed their governmental systems as time went on. This is pretty strong evidence to me that Luke was in pretty close contact with the major parties involved in the missionary journeys. Who would know, for example, the Maltese were headed up by a “First Man.” That is the point of the F. F. Bruce quotation quoted by Riss:

One of the most remarkable tokens of his accuracy is his sure familiarity with the proper titles of all the notable persons who are mentioned in his pages. This was by no means such an easy feat in his days as it is in ours, when it is so simple to consult convenient books of reference. The accuracy of Luke's use of the various titles in the Roman Empire has been compared to the easy and confident way in which an Oxford man in ordinary conversation will refer to the Heads of Oxford colleges by their proper titles--the Provost of Oriel, the Master of Balliol, the Rector of Exeter, the President of Magdalen, and so on. A non-Oxonian like the present writer never feels quite at home with the multiplicity of these Oxford titles. But Luke had a further difficulty in that the titles sometimes did not remain the same for any great length of time; a province might pass from senatorial government to administration by a direct representative of the emperor, and would then be governed no longer by a proconsul but by an imperial legate (legatus pro proetore).

Now, this kind of correct detail is of course compatible with nothing out of the ordinary happening, but it does undermine the idea that the Book of Acts is the product of extensive legendary development, which is what you would expect if the whole thing were made up. For this reason a late date for Acts seems out of the question. We are left wondering, if Christianity is not true and none of these things really happened, then what did? And none of the extant theories (theft theory, hallucination theory, wrong tomb theory, evil twin theory, etc.) is satisfactory enough even for all the skeptics to agree on what might have happened, much less to persuade believers. Now it may be rational for some persons to maintain their skepticism about these accounts based on some version of the Humean principle (something like "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence).

With the Book of Mormon, I seem to come pretty easily to the conclusion that the whold darn thing was made up, not even that it was something built on a factual foundation but embellished. There is a positive historical case to me made here, even if that case is overcome, in some minds, by a stronger reason to reject it.

Was the 2004 election stolen? I'd like to think this is wrong

I'm no fan of Bush, but I am a fan of the American system of government. So I'd just as soon see this refuted.

What case can be made against this report, that came out in Rolling Stone Magazine last summer?

Historical evidence for Christianity

Can any other religion claim the kind of historical support that Christianity can claim? Or even come close? Even though it doesn't follow from the fact that some parts of the NT are confirmed by historical evidence that the miraculous part of the NT is so supported, nevetheless to me the historical support for the NT seems remarkable.

In particular, there's nothing like it for Mormonism, or for Scientology, or Islam. People who are trying to argue that Christianity is no better off than Mormonism have some things to think about.

Scientific evidence for supernaturalism?

From Charles Colson.

A criticism of Nancy Pelosi

We're fair and balanced here at Dangerous Idea, so here is a charge of hypocrisy against incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Mormon epistemology

This, from a Mormon site, speaks for itself.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden's critique of Mormonism

I thought I should put Teresa Nielsen Hayden's critique of the book of Mormon up on its own entry. I also linked to her blog.

So there's that venerable (150 years old now) book for you, reduced to a pureed caricature of itself for your easy consumption. But remember Joe Sheffer? We left him sitting in the Howard Johnson's in Tempe several pages ago, drinking coffee and waiting to deliver his clinching argument. Actually, all he said was that Lehi & Co. would have had to forget the use of the wheel somewhere on the voyage from the Middle East to America, since the invention was widely in use at the time of their departure from Jerusalem but was never used in the Americas until the European conquests. I thought about that for a moment. Joe was dead right, of course. Then I considered it for a couple of minutes more while I waited for the tremors to die down (no doubt the serpent at the foundations of the earth stirring), and then plunged into an orgy of dissection.

For instance, the book is written in very bad King James English that sounds like the language spoken in Mighty Thor comic books (I say thee, nope!). This is a little hard to swallow in a manuscript that was theoretically translated by an upstate New York farmboy in the nineteenth century; harder to swallow is the notion that God really talks like that. It reads as though someone very familiar with the Bible (in an unscholarly way) were trying to write in imitation of the King James Version's style--say, the son of a devout Protestant Fundamentalist family, where reading the Bible would have been the order of the day, where more sophisticated Biblical scholarship would have been unknown, and where the most commonly available version of the Bible would have been one in a distinct and peculiar style that included things like verse breaks.

Then there's the archaeological side of the question. In the nineteenth century the science hadn't really been invented yet; there was still the possibility that the Amerinds were the Ten Lost Tribes, or something equally fabulous. Of course, the truth (current version, who knows?) turned out to be just as strange, in a wildly different way, and I'd no more give up on Olmec heads, the Mound Builders of the eastern United States, and the trek across the Siberian land-bridge, than I would have given up on dinosaurs as a kid. Moreover, the Amerinds are manifestly not just dark-skinned Semites; there are some distinct physiological differences besides skin color, the blood type is all wrong, and the indigenous American languages, all God-knows-how-many-dozens of them, are nothing like any known Semitic language.

Another thing, a small thing that peculiarly caught my eye, is that in the Book of Mormon there are many large battles fought with swords. Now, there are two kinds of swords that could be used in these conflicts. They could have the all-metal one- or two-edged sort that comes in a hundred shapes and sizes in Old World literature, or they could be using the best New World equivalent, a sort of large club or paddle edged on both sides with inset rows of sharpened obsidian chunks--a fearsome weapon. Whichever; take your pick. Many men with swords go out to the field of combat and die there, their swords and armor decomposing somewhat more slowly than their bodies. Now, if they were using metal swords, there ought to be some trace of that much metal left--its rust in the ground in wetter climates, the artifacts themselves further west. (In some parts of the Southwest, corncobs and broken sandals are found in caves thousands of years after they were abandoned there, still in perfect shape.) In either case there'd be metalworking sites near sources of ore. There's nothing of the sort. So, okay, they were using the Aztec-style wooden paddle with obsidian edges. In that case there should be, around the old battle sites, innumerable shaped obsidian pieces lying where they came to rest after their wooden cores rotted out. These should occur frequently at sites extending from Old Mexico to New York. They don't, of course; there was a remarkably widespread trade in Central American obsidian across North America, but the stuff was used for things like ritual implements and jewelry.

Elections, Arrogance, and Accountability

Well, the elections are over, and the result, from the point of view of us Democrats, is something like Frodo Baggins completing the Ringbearer's quest and the fall of Mordor.

Actually it reflected the population's frustration with the sheer stubbornness of the Bush administration with respect to its "Captain Ahab" policy in Iraq, the complete control of all branches of government by a single party, and corruption and hypocrisy on the part of people in the seats of power. You can have one party be predominant in government if it is constantly vigilant to hold its fellow party members accountable. As an Arizonan, I am proud of the moment when Barry Goldwater and John Rhodes were among the Republicans in Congress who went to the White House to tell Richard Nixon that they could no longer oppose impeachment, and the he would do well to resign. The public would have accepted the Foley scandal better if the party had held its own members accountable. They didn't. Corruption of the Democrat-controlled congress in 1994 (Rostenkowski et al) resulted the the "Contract with America" Republican congress, but that Congress failed to keep its promises and hold its own party accountable for its actions (not to mention its own members).

It's a little like the televangelist scandals of the late 1980s. Too much power and money in the hands of a few people resulted in those whose mission it is to preach the gospel falling into corruption. Christian leaders after those scandals broke concluded that accountability was the key. Anyone interested in the exercise of political power, Republican or Democrat, needs to learn that same lesson.