You're Welcome, Steve! (The Resurrection proves Joseph Smith)

[_Gadianton]

Just days ago, on the Seventeenth of June to be exact, I wrote the following about the apologist's recent emphasis on the eleven witnesses:

I don't even recall DCP talking about this until very recently, within the last 5 years? Craig has also exploded in popularity. Even this crazy right wing friend that I have one day was in a huff and told me he thought it was "pretty good" that there were "500 witnesses" to the resurrection. I came across the idea as it seemed to have been exploding in blog topics incidentally a while back, and I figured this is where he was getting it from -- the viral counterpart in Evangelical Christianity.

I've mentioned this a couple of other times in the past also, that the Old Guard seems to be riding the Evangelical wave of "witness frenzy". Well, I'd need to know how far back the idea went for FARMS and also for the EVs to see if a real case could be made for the correspondence. Ms. Jack and Mr. Stak convinced me the idea in EV circles was not nearly as recent as I thought it was. And for the history of the idea within Mopologetics: given the gravity of the situation, I fired a question out into what I call "the void". A contact who frequently changes accepts a question and brings the matter to an underground network that crawls the Mopologetic landscape and returns information that is generally so explosive, that I commit what I can to memory and destroy the rest. They don't suffer fools and so I rarely dare to use this service, but for the matter of the rising Mopologetic "witness" paradigm, it was worth the risk.

To my embarrassment, what came back was a dead miss, and so that's why I never returned to the discussion on the other thread. Oh sure, substantial evidence came back showing the shifting narrative of the early period of the senior SeN Staff Writer, but as the narrative has shifted toward a young hero inspired by the eleven witnesses, there is no connection to Josh McDowell or William Lane Craig on the witnesses to the resurrection that I can see. It really does seem that the LDS witness ideas developed independently of the EV resurrection ideas.

But then, just hours ago, a message was relayed to me from deep within "the void" that only six days after I posted what I did on Mr. Stak's thread, which was sure to have gotten the attention of all the apologists, Steve Smoot has pinned an aggressive "Open Letter" to none other than William Lane Craig, calling him out and challenging him, primarily for his inconsistency of promoting the witnesses to the resurrection while brushing off the witnesses to the Gold Plates. Incredible! What are the odds? If there was never a connection before, well, there certainly is now, and quite possibly, it's all thanks to me! I wouldn't mind a "pingback" to this site and maybe a humble attribution in a footnote, but either way, I don't mind helping out a rising young scholar. So all I can say is, take the foundation that I laid and off you go! Go get 'em tiger!

Now, lest everyone think I'm taking credit for a brilliant observation, let me point out that if you read Smoot's essay you'll see that in addition to an atheist philosopher, call-ins are challenging Craig all the time on this, and so what's crazy is that given how obvious the play is, that the apologists are so lacking in imagination that they never made the connection after all these years! Now that Smoot has gotten a hold of the idea, he'd do well to develop it, because it could be a great tool for stubbornly standing their ground and burning whatever bridges they have left with EV's.

Now then, there's one last thing I wanted to mention. Smoot is taking a real risk here, not only is he goading the most important apologist in the world and by doing so, inviting potentially mixed results for his church, and all in order to further his own popularity (like a chess newb calling out a Grand Master publicly: the loss to the master means nothing compared to the credibility gained if the engagement happens at all), he's also contradicting a major theory of DCPs.

For the most part I have found you to be a fine public speaker, a persuasive debater, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. I have not always agreed with your arguments, but as a fellow theist I have at least always appreciated that you have so vocally defended the existence of God.

There is one area, however, where, I must confess, I have found your reasoning and argumentative abilities so woefully impaired that I feel compelled to air a few of my thoughts

As DCP has always said, apologists competent in their fields don't just shut off their brains or become "Dr. Jekyll Mr Hyde" when they do apologetics. However, Smoot is throwing this right in DCP's face, showing him that here is an apologist, a "Dr. Jekyll" who does stellar work, until it comes to one and only one topic, and then he becomes "Mr. Hyde" and everything falls apart. His brain and ability to reason literally shuts off.

And it gets worse. You know how the apologists hate atheists and think they are totally dumb and all that, right? Well, when Rosenberg, an atheist philosopher compares the 11 witnesses to the witnesses of the resurrection, Smoot says:

Nor do you actually address Rosenberg’s argument. He is, strictly speaking, correct.

The reverse is also true. An atheist, a "Mr. Hyde" has the ability to turn into a "Dr. Jekyll" and display profoundly good reasoning on a topic of religion. I don't think DCP, Mr. Midgley or Kiwi57 are going to take kindly to ideas like this.

[_Physics Guy]

I don't recall ever having heard of this Craig guy before and I probably don't subscribe to all his arguments. Reading Smoot's letter, though, gives me a fresh view of how weird and sad it can be to talk about Mormonism in certain ways. The poor guy is so angry about people casually dissing his faith in spite of all the great work by Mormon apologists.

In a sense Smoot's grievance is just legitimate. Non-Mormons don't take Mormon apologists seriously. The apologists work so hard with all their wide-ranging arguments, but only rarely do they really catch our interest. Mostly they just lost us at "angel": if not the one with the plates then for sure the one with the sword.

To the apologists we casual skeptics are outrageously sophomoric. We don't read their tomes, we don't ponder their nuances, we're probably checking our e-mail while we listen to them. We're horribly ignorant of all their vast lore and yet we presume to hold opinions on their serious subjects. And I'm awfully sorry but to us they really just look like a bunch of little kids pasting decals on their soapbox racer and sulking furiously when Mom and Dad won't sign them up for the Indy 500. They really think they have an actual car. How can you tell them they don't?

For me this is kind of Take Two on my view from a while back that Mormonism was "the most obviously made-up religion". What I'm realizing now is that maybe Mormonism doesn't have to be like that, but the apologists have made it that way by the way they defend it.

For me at least one can go a long way to defend even a seemingly kooky religion by backing off from its literal claims and showing me some kind of deeper meaning in its teachings. If there's enough depth there in some way then at some point I'll concede that it wouldn't be completely crazy to have a "What is the Matrix?" moment and decide to reassess one's whole mundane experience in light of these deep concepts. And from that point one might well be able to come back and pick up some of those literal claims again, if one wanted. Teach me enough Arabic to appreciate the Koran and maybe I'll eventually agree that a God who would express a thing like that might well reveal it to an entranced Arab prophet. Convince me that something like the Tao could be in some sense a person and maybe I'll agree that that particular person might be able to rise from the dead. And so maybe I'd be more impressed with Mormonism if its defenders simply waved off the plates and the seer stone and managed to impress me with the vision of Exaltation or something.

Instead the Mormon apologists just seem to double and redouble down on the mundane details, as if they had a mundane story. They're not even trying to make me challenge the Matrix. They're all about signatures of eleven witnesses who never really recanted, cryptic letters on Arabian stones, and legal loopholes for denying polygamy ... as if they didn't need a Matrix moment to make their propositions even plausible. The more energetically they go through all the motions of conventional scholarship, the more they just seem cluelessly disconnected from reality.

They're pasting decals on the racer; having the idea that they could perhaps use an engine they're showing up at the Porsche dealership pulling a wagon with a big jar of pennies. Every cent is legal tender earned from hours at the lemonade stand and it's a big heavy jar! It even weighs more than Timmy!

What can you say to them?

[_DrW]

And I'm awfully sorry but to us they really just look like a bunch of little kids pasting decals on their soapbox racer and sulking furiously when Mom and Dad won't sign them up for the Indy 500. They really think they have an actual car. How can you tell them they don't?

^Best MDB analogy ever ^ for Mormon apologetic endeavors.

You do have a way with words, Physics Guy.

[_candygal]

And I'm awfully sorry but to us they really just look like a bunch of little kids pasting decals on their soapbox racer and sulking furiously when Mom and Dad won't sign them up for the Indy 500. They really think they have an actual car. How can you tell them they don't?

^Best MormonDiscussions.com analogy ever ^ for Mormon apologetic endeavors.

You do have a way with words, Physics Guy.

yes....and I am a NASCAR fan...so those decals mean a lot to those....who are just in for the dollar.

[_Dr. Shades]

For the most part I have found you to be a fine public speaker, a persuasive debater, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. I have not always agreed with your arguments, but as a fellow theist I have at least always appreciated that you have so vocally defended the existence of God.

There is one area, however, where, I must confess, I have found your reasoning and argumentative abilities so woefully impaired that I feel compelled to air a few of my thoughts

Umm, . . . link?

[_toon]

Umm, . . . link?

It was up there, just buried.

https://www.plonialmonimormon.com/2019/ ... craig.html

[_Dr. Shades]

It was up there, just buried.

https://www.plonialmonimormon.com/2019/ ... craig.html

Ahh, okay. Thank you.

[_Gadianton]

Smoot's point is legitimate, but let's see how far they get trying to pry open the door to the ark with a crowbar to take their rightful place inside.

Who knows what the Mopologists might offer Craig? One kind word from a guy with his status would win him a bevy of devout and loyal friends for life, and so it's potentially even worth his time.

I'm reminded of Cleon Skousen, whose version of reality is a bit nightmarish, but his love for right-wing ideology won him a long list of friends from the religious right and he had lots of supporters that were ministers who disagreed with his religious beliefs but Skousen, whatever his faults were, was a true believer and he was totally focused on the message and had an impossibly optimistic attitude about it. So he succeeded at what DCP would no doubt like to succeed at, win mutual respect with the religious right and stand together against secularism. Ironically, Lou Midgley himself apparently trashed Skousen in a debate back in the day, at BYU. How hard would that be? Hmm, let's see: use real history against Skousen the same way critics use real history against FARMS.

A big problem with these guys is that they're literally on a life raft at this point, yet they speak to the rest of the world as if they're the ones calling the shots. They demand everything to be on their terms. They can't take any criticism whatsoever, they can't let anything go, they can't see that people are going to be like Craig -- that they are far worse than Craig when the shoe is on the other foot -- and step back and think about how they could make inroads to other faith communities. A good PR person or salesmen knows how to take criticism and keep an eye on the objective, but these guys have no clue about how to do simple stuff like, hell, make friends or go out of their way to be kind to somebody.

[_Physics Guy]

Craig appears to be a pretty conservative Evangelical who has managed to stake some claim to academic respect. That may make his approval doubly attractive to Mormon apologists but I think it makes him doubly unlikely to give it. He's made the big time precisely by not being seen with the likes of them.

Given that, Smoot's approach might be smart. If the guy won't come to your party anyway, you can at least get applause from your friends by rebuking him in absentia. And that might be the explanation for all the aggressiveness of Mormon apologists. Maybe they know full well that nobody outside their bubble will listen to them and they're really only ever grandstanding for the home crowd.