Henke 2022cw

High Standards are Needed for Investigating History and Mr. Lundahl’s Approach is Totally Inadequate

Kevin R. Henke

September 15, 2022

In Henke (2022b), I state:

“Concerning my high standards for verifying the existence of a supernatural event or being, Lundahl (2022a) replies:

“Will you ‘lower it’ confronted with the fact that your ‘standard’ is not consistent with how we have historical knowledge?”

Of course not. Others might be willing to lower their standards for studying the past so that Mr. Lundahl can label likely fairy tales as “history”, but I won’t and neither should anyone else that studies past events. I will not lower my standards at all to comply with what he views as being “consistent” with historical knowledge, when he readily mixes angels, demons and other groundless claims with reality to explain both the past and present. Lundahl (2022a-g) is engaging in mythmaking and speculation, and not appropriate historical investigations. I am consistent in my very conservative interpretations of both human and geological history, and I see no evidence whatsoever to inject the supernatural into either of them.

Any literate individual can write and make up anything. This is exactly why Mormon apologists are so desperate to verify the Book of Mormon with archeology. They know very well that Joseph Smith Jr. or others could have made up the Book of Mormon. They recognize that they need external evidence to confirm that the Book of Mormon is history. Well, the same problem exists for Genesis and Exodus. It could have been made up by a “prophet” as I discuss in Section 5.0.”

Lundahl (2022m) then comments on the bolded section of this quotation from Henke (2022b):

“Well, they are not high, they are beside the point, and as said inconsistent with how we have historic knowledge.”

No, my standards for investigating the past are very high, appropriate and consistent with the scientific method. I approach claims about past events with skepticism and care, as any geologist, archeologist, anthropologist, or other scientist should. Before a claim can be identified as “historic knowledge”, it must be thoroughly scrutinized for reliability. These standards are certainly higher and more thorough than Mr. Lundahl’s haphazard approach. Mr. Lundahl is willing to blindly accept as “history” whatever groundless stories that a group, that he arbitrarily labels as the “earliest known audience”, accepted as reality. Mr. Lundahl is especially and irrationally biased towards whatever is written in the Bible.