Henke 2022bj

Lies About the Past

Kevin R. Henke

September 15, 2022

In Henke (2022b), I stated that:

“In Lundahl (2022d), Lundahl (2022f), Lundahl (2022b), and in several of his emails, Mr. Lundahl makes a totally unwarranted assumption that if the earliest known audience believed that Genesis 3 or another claim in an ancient text was historically true, then the claims must be true. Of course, this assumption is nonsense for the following reasons:

1. People lie and make up stories.

2. People misinterpret natural events and sometimes credit them to supernatural forces (e.g., volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, severe storms, draught).

3. The history of Mormonism, Scientology, etc. demonstrate that lies can become accepted by thousands or even millions of gullible people in a short amount of time, perhaps in no more than decades or a century.

4. Even if ancient historians (such as the five ancient biographers of Alexander the Great, Section 6.0) were sincere and honest, they still may have included inaccurate information, false rumors and misinterpretations in their works.

5. We don’t know who wrote Genesis 3 and when it was written.

6. The Dead Sea scrolls have the oldest known fragments of Genesis. This was about 1,000 years after Moses supposedly wrote the book. So, how could the writers of the Dead Sea scrolls have reliably known anything about events that occurred perhaps a thousand or more years earlier? How does Mr. Lundahl know that Genesis 3 is not a fabrication that may have been additionally altered or rewritten long before the Dead Sea scrolls? Why should anyone trust the claims in Genesis? Lundahl (2022c) assumes that God would have protected Genesis from corruption, but this assumption is totally without merit.

7. The biology of snakes is incompatible with them talking and there’s no evidence of either a supernatural or biological Talking Snake ever existing.

8. As further discussed in Section 5.0 and Henke (2022a), Hypotheses #3 and #4 on the origin of the Genesis 3 Talking Snake are rational, but Hypotheses #1 and #2 are not.

9. Mr. Lundahl has the burden of evidence to demonstrate that the claims in Genesis 3 and elsewhere in the Bible are factual.

Mr. Lundahl fails to realize that ancient histories by themselves cannot be trusted, especially if they were written centuries or millennia after the supposed event that they are describing or if the documents are copies of copies of copies of copies... and not the originals Even if an ancient history happens to be an original copy describing an event that occurred at the time that the document was written, unless a claim in an ancient history is confirmed with independent external evidence, either in another manuscript or from archeology, there’s no reason to accept it as reliable history. There’s a big difference between an historical claim and a reliable historical claim.” [my original emphasis in italics only; my current emphasis in bold]

Lundahl (2022k) makes the following comments about point #1 in Henke (2022b) that people tend to lie and make up stories:

“Let's go through Henke's principled objections to my theorem, "if the earliest known audience took it as history, it is a historic, not a fictional text" - here:

1. People lie and make up stories.

Those are two different things. A liar also makes up his story on some level, changing real for made up, where that is strategic for a purpose, but a poet makes up all of his story.

I think this is in fact the key principle Henke should ponder before answering any more. So much of his argument depends, so far, on equating Spiderman with Book of Mormon and with Russian reports on who it was who liberated Prague and how after most of WW-II was over.”

Yes, poets often write total fiction and the author of Spiderman admits that it’s fiction. However, both Mr. Lundahl and I would agree that the Book of Mormon, Genesis 3, and Russian news reports are meant to be factual and not fiction and not poetry. The question then becomes, are they actually factual or just a lot of lies? To avoid being deceived by such lies, we need good evidence. The Mormons have no good evidence for the book of Mormon, Mr. Lundahl has none for Genesis 3, and Russian news reports are also highly untrustworthy.

It’s also important to recognize that liars in the religious and political realms may not simply take a real account and partially change it into something deceptive. They may totally make up a story so that there’s no truth in it whatsoever. As examples, I see no kernel of truth whatsoever in the Book of Mormon or in the Scientology Xenu story.

Mr. Lundahl also overlooks another critical point here. People often lie and make up stories for a variety of reasons. In the political and religious realms, money and/or power are often primary reasons for why politicians and religious leaders lie. In other cases, politicians may lie in an attempt to avoid criminal prosecution. In Henke (2022b), I further stated:

“The most common reasons for why ‘prophets’ invent false stories are for power and/or money. I think Kat Kerr invents stories to get attention and contributions. Joseph Smith Jr. used Mormonism to gain wealth and power, including the power to fornicate with whomever he wanted. No doubt, the ancient Israelite priests found the Pentateuch useful in gaining a lot of power and tithes and offerings that would otherwise have gone to the temples of Baal and other competing religions. The ancient Israelite priests were especially able to gain wealth and power when they had the support of Hezekiah and other powerful kings backing up their religion with force. As I explained in Henke (2022a), unlike the Talking Snake, we have external evidence that King Hezekiah actually existed.”

I think that Mr. Lundahl seriously underestimates how much disinformation is out there and how many millions of people often accept these falsehoods as fact. Interestingly, Lewis (1960, p. 159) makes an interesting statement that is generally correct:

“Lies, exaggerations, misunderstandings, and hearsay make up perhaps more than half of all that is said and written in the world.”

One could quibble about the percentage of spoken and written material that turns out to be false. Nevertheless, Lewis (1960) is qualitatively correct here. The internet, newspapers, magazines, and the Bible are full of false information. So, lies are widespread and serious problems. The only way to combat lies is to be initially skeptical of every claim and to immediately demand evidence when the claim is first presented (Henke 2022dv; Henke 2022eu). This is where peer-reviewed science publications may help to provide reliable evidence and separate fact from fiction. Peer-reviewed science journals are certainly not inerrant, but when multiple peer-reviewed articles obtain the same results using different procedures, these results are generally more trustworthy than anything given by TV preachers or the Bible.

Reference:

Lewis, C.S. 1960. Miracles, 2^nd ed., printed 1974: Harper One: HarperCollinsPublishers, 294pp.