Henke 2022bt

No Circular Reasoning Fallacy in Henke (2022b): Again, History Cannot Demonstrate the Reality of Miracles

Kevin R. Henke

September 15, 2022

In Henke (2022b), I said the following:

“In his second essay, Lundahl (2022b) complains that when I rank a supernatural event as ‘highly unlikely’, I’m taking my worldview ‘as a test of historic facthood.’ Actually, I’m ranking supernatural events as highly unlikely because I see absolutely no evidence of the supernatural. I think that it’s far more probable that someone just made up the supernatural story and that enough gullible people believed it, so that it was recorded for future generations. Recently, I saw TV “prophets” frequently making demonstrably false prophecies about covid disappearing in March 2020 and false claims of miraculous healings and other miracles. In recent history, Joseph Smith Jr. made numerous well-documented false prophecies. Ancient people also made up numerous far-fetched stories about gods and goddesses that few people now believe and no one should believe. I have seen no evidence that magic existed in the past any more than it does in the present. I don’t see any evidence to believe any of these present and past miraculous stories, including Genesis 3. So, Mr. Lundahl, I challenge you to refute my worldview by giving me the evidence of the Talking Snake that I’ve been asking for. In contrast, we have plenty of artifacts and videos of WWII and even a few WWII veterans are still alive. My dad experienced that war. WWII deserves a high ranking based on the evidence, the Talking Snake does not. Theology and political and personal desires have no role in judging the validity of history.” [my emphasis]

Lundahl (2022L) makes the following false comments on the bolded section of the above quotation from Henke (2022b):

“Henke sees no evidence "of the supernatural" because he discounts all historic accounts of supernatural events, and he discounts all historic accounts of supernatural events, because he sees no evidence "of the supernatural." Anyone (except Henke, so far) detect a "circulus vitiosus in probando?"”

No. Lundahl (2022L) is totally mistaken here as he was in Lundahl (2022i) – see Henke (2022ac). I have not committed any circular fallacy because I made it quite clear in Henke (2022b) and Henke (2022au) on why history cannot be used to evaluate the existence of the supernatural. The existence of the supernatural or miracles can only be demonstrated under strict contemporary laboratory conditions. So far, no evidence of the supernatural has been found under these strict present-day conditions. Until this evidence is obtained and confirmed, there’s simply no reason to trust any miraculous story from the past.

Here is what I said in Henke (2022b) and what Lundahl (2022L) fails to recognize:

“We can never rule out the strong possibility that “witnesses” to a past “supernatural event” outright lied and made-up a story, or misinterpreted what they saw. These are the bases of Hypotheses #3 and #4 for the Talking Snake, which Lundahl (2022c) utterly fails to adequately address as discussed in Section 5.0 of this essay.”

So, if someone could perform a miracle under strict laboratory conditions, I would drop my objections and admit that it’s more likely that at least some of these Bible miracle stories are true. Meanwhile, Mr. Lundahl has the burden of evidence to somehow demonstrate that not only is all of the far-fetched account in Genesis 3 “history”, but that it’s “inerrant history” (see Henke 2022b; 2022br). So far, he has utterly failed to do so.