He is the way
Well-Known Member
It is better to rely on God than science. Science can be wrong, but God never is.Because it's not up to any layman (someone not trained in the relevant fields) to evaluate claims relevant to the fields that the Mormon religion manipulates to keep its people believing that it's actually based in something real. That is why peer review is important: it takes the research or supposed research out of the hands of anyone who might approve of it for non-scientific reasons (e.g., religious narrative) and evaluates it according to the standard of the relevant field. The individual who looks at it without the requisite background/training, and even worse maybe with the inherent biases for/against it (e.g., religious narrative again), cannot be trusted to do that. You don't ask a random person to perform heart surgery, do you? All the sciences ought to be treated similarly.
Like in my case, I'm a linguist, so while I'm not saying I'm an authority on anything (because I'm not; I've been asked to fill in for adjunct professors sometimes, but please no one confuse me for an actual professor...hopefully my frequent typos and grammatical mistakes made here on CF rule that out ), I'm at least trained to evaluate claims relevant to my field. And when I do that with the linguistic Mormonism, as I have many times before on this board, they don't stand up to even minimal scrutiny.
I strongly suspect that the same would be true if we had instead a trained anthropologist, archaeologist, geographer, etc. here to evaluate Mormon claims. I can say that with some degree of confidence because, again, being trained in an academic field I know the proper process to go through to have your research scientifically vetted (it's how I got my degree in the first place; I wrote a thesis and defended it successfully before the board, which is roughly analogous to what happens to research papers submitted for publication, in that they too go through a process of review, correction, and resubmission), so it's really easy to tell when that hasn't been done, as is the case in the vast majority of Mormon publications. There's a reason why they're "internal", i.e., published by BYU and other organs of the Mormon religion. If they want to be taken seriously by the rest of the world, it is imperative that Mormon researchers actually operate according to the impartial, secular standards of the relevant fields. That they mostly don't do that is very telling.
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