Your actual beliefs are best determined by your actions, not what you say your beliefs are. (The ‘invisible dragon’). That many people’s beliefs are actually just attire and tribe-identification.
I don’t understand this. Why would learning this make it seem more likely that there is a god?
My impression is that calcsam believes that Mormonism (or the Book of Mormon) has produced accurate claims or predictions about human nature, non-supernatural events, and the like, and then extrapolated from that to a high probability that the institution’s metaphysical claims are accurate. If this isn’t the argument, I’d appreciate clarification or correction!
That could certainly be the case, and I can see how one might incorrectly extrapolate from performance in one area to another in a situation like that. But it seems likely that many of these predictions are things that are interpreted as predictions after-the-fact, and possibly collected, filtered, and interpreted by Mormon scholars.
I agree that if Calcsam does believe that Mormonism has made predictions, at least some of them are probably postdictions. Right now I’m just trying to figure out how the part of his comment I quoted above would raise his probability there’s a god. Your interpretation makes sense as an interpretation for how that would happen, though as you say it implies that Calcsam was making a mistake.
I don’t understand this. Why would learning this make it seem more likely that there is a god?
My impression is that calcsam believes that Mormonism (or the Book of Mormon) has produced accurate claims or predictions about human nature, non-supernatural events, and the like, and then extrapolated from that to a high probability that the institution’s metaphysical claims are accurate. If this isn’t the argument, I’d appreciate clarification or correction!
Are you trying to say that he’s trying to say that the Book of Mormon caused him to anticipate experiences which then happened?
That could certainly be the case, and I can see how one might incorrectly extrapolate from performance in one area to another in a situation like that. But it seems likely that many of these predictions are things that are interpreted as predictions after-the-fact, and possibly collected, filtered, and interpreted by Mormon scholars.
I agree that if Calcsam does believe that Mormonism has made predictions, at least some of them are probably postdictions. Right now I’m just trying to figure out how the part of his comment I quoted above would raise his probability there’s a god. Your interpretation makes sense as an interpretation for how that would happen, though as you say it implies that Calcsam was making a mistake.