We don't have to answer this directly. In Christian apologetics, one of the most popular arguments today is that the reality of the resurrection is firmly established by eye-witness testimony. "Five hundred people saw Jesus in the air!" Like the "Lunatic, Liar, Lord" argument, the Mo-pologists re-purpose apologetic tools already invented by Christian apologists. One advantage of doing this, is that if a Christian is going to accept the terms of establishing Jesus by eye-witness testimony, then to be consistent, the Book of Mormon witnesses should at least be in the realm of consideration. And then it's going to come down to details: If you reject the eye-witness case for the plates, but accept the eye-witness case for the resurrection, then what, specifically, does the resurrection claim have going for it that the witnesses for the plates don't?
And just what kind of argumentation is it anyway, that establishes that something happened by eye witness testimony? Here's a quote from William Lane Craig, where he debates Bart Erhman on the resurrection.
Craig wrote:First, as in physical science you don’t have to have direct access to explanatory entities in order to infer them. Secondly, the historian’s whole project is dealing with the inaccessible past, where you have to infer things based on present evidence, even though you don’t have direct access. And thirdly, this isn’t a debate about what historians can do professionally. It’s a debate about whether there’s historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection and the conclusions that we can draw.
Craig is quite right here, in my opinion. Mopologists tend to mangle their discussions on science. Geology, Biology, and Economics and even Cosmology make inferences from objective data without the ability to experimentally verify in a lab. The grasp of science is quite wide, far wider than SeN gives it credit. What Craig is saying here, is that the argument from witnesses is an empirical, scientific argument right at home with all kinds of other science that isn't strictly stuck in a lab. At the beginning of this lecture, he even gets into details of probability theory to bolster his case for the resurrection (get ready for somebody to lift that one for the three witnesses, Lemmie).
In other words, The Interpreter is spending millions of dollars to create a scientific argument for the existence of Gold Plates. They'd never spend the same kind of money on a film that shows how to get a testimony from reading and praying. SeN can go on and on about the Testator, and science being wrong, and how there's ten thousand other ways to get truth aside from science, but none of these other ways hold the interest of the Interpreter staff in the least. At the end of the day, if there's the faintest of hope that science can prove the Book of Mormon true, then the Interpreter staff will put every last cent they have into that chance and not waste their time or money on any of these alleged other ways to get to the truth.
They can talk big about science changing all the time and making mistakes but they've not put their money where there mouth is -- their talk is about faith but their money is on science.