Henke 2022dv

Skepticism is the Default Position. The Person Making the Claim has the Burden of Evidence.

Kevin R. Henke

September 15, 2022

Starting with Henke (2022dm), I am replying to responses that Lundahl (2022m) gave to a series of questions from Henke (2022b). In Henke (2022b), I reintroduced the four hypotheses on the origin of the Talking Snake story in Genesis 3 and I gave a series of questions for Mr. Lundahl to answer dealing with his support for Hypothesis #1. Here’s the context along with the response that Lundahl (2022m) gave to the first bolded part of the seventh question and its associated statements from Henke (2022b):

“In Henke (2022a), I proposed four hypotheses to explain Genesis 3 with its Talking Snake story:

1. The Talking Snake existed and the account in Genesis 3 was accurately passed down by Adam to Moses. Moses then wrote it down in Genesis. There would have been no human eyewitnesses for most of the events in Genesis 1-2:14. If Genesis 1-2:14 is history, God would have to have given the information in these verses as visions.

2. Moses saw Genesis 1-3 and perhaps most or even all of everything else in Genesis through visions given by God. There didn’t need to be a continuous human transmission of information from Adam to Moses. Visions from God would not be open to errors unlike written or oral transmissions from Adam to Moses.

3. The Talking Snake of Genesis 3 was part of a made-up campfire story, a parable or based on a pagan myth that eventually was taken as fact by the ancient Israelites, like how President Reagan and his fans mistook fictional stories from World War 2 as real. William Tell (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/in-search-of-william-tell-2198511/ ) and a number of Roman Catholic saints (https://listverse.com/2014/05/17/10-beloved-saints-with-fictitious-biographies/ ) are probably also myths. Of course, in the United States, pro-abortionists regularly use fictional TV shows to convince Americans that abortion is a good thing. Even though they are fiction, many people believe the propaganda. Right now, a lot of Russians are believing the fictional propaganda their government is inventing about Ukraine. People also often pick and choose parts of fictional stories that they want to believe and ignore the rest, such as individuals believing in the existence of “The Force” from the Star Wars movies, while recognizing that the rest of the movies are fiction. A lot of people are gullible and believe fictions are real.

4. “Prophets” or others claimed to have visions from God about events that supposedly happened thousands of years earlier. These visions were delusions or outright lies, but a lot of people came to believe them. Joseph Smith also did this and Kat Kerr continues with this nonsense in the US.

This is a serious issue for conservative Christianity. If the Talking Snake story is fiction, then how did Adam and Eve fall into sin? Did Adam and Eve even exist? If there was no Fall, then why did Jesus need to die for an Atonement for sin? If Genesis 3 never happened, what keeps the entire foundation of conservative Christianity from collapsing? Thus, any conservative Christian must find some way of demonstrating with either Hypothesis #1 or #2 that Genesis 3 is history and that Hypotheses #3 and #4 that promote Genesis 3 as probable myth must be false.

As indicated in Lundahl (2022c), Mr. Lundahl accepts Hypothesis #1. In Lundahl (2022d), he argues that “historical events” in Genesis 3 could have been successfully passed down from Adam through Moses using Hypothesis #1 by comparing the number of generations between Adam and Moses with the number of generations between the battle of Granicus (May 334 BC) and when it was recorded and the fall of Troy (1179-1185 BC) and when it was recorded centuries later. Besides containing individuals that are unidentified and solely hypothetical, his Granicus and Troy chains also mention Nestor, Diodoros Sikeliotes, Arrian and Homer. For his hypothetical 20-year-olds, Lundahl (2022d) simply assumes that they would accurately remember the details of the events many years later. Unfortunately, Lundahl (2022d) fails to realize that the memories of his hypothetical 20-year-olds would tend to considerably fade and distort long before they turn 80. Human memories are not that good and, in reality, details are often lost or even completely fictionalized over time. A good example of memory loss and alteration are seen with the eyewitnesses of the Challenger and the September 11^th disasters. See Neisser and Harsch (1992) and Greenberg (2004). Tepper (2014) also gives a layperson’s summary of the Challenger study at: https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2014/0128/Where-were-you-when-the-Challenger-exploded-Why-your-memory-might-be-wrong Years later, people are often shocked by what they wrote or said in videos immediately after the events. They are no longer remembering the events correctly. People also lie and boast about seeing events that they really did not. As I have seen with some of my relatives, senile individuals in their 80s may actually come to believe some of the stories that they obviously made up.

Lundahl (2022d) then states:

“The Battle of the Granicus in May 334 BC / Troy Conquered 1180 BC (between 1179 and 1185) - someone was 20 and could recall it well.

60 years passes, he is 80 and dies, but before that, someone who is then twenty has been formed by him : 274 / 1120.

60 more years, handed on to third minimally overlapping tradition bearer : 214 / 1060.

Fourth needs to take over as Nestor - within the minimal overlapping generations, not overall - in : 150 / 1000.

Fifth : 90 (had Diodoros Sikeliotes as younger contemporary) / 940.

Sixth : 30 / 880.

Seventh : 40 AD / 820.

Eighth : 100 AD (we are talking Arrian) / 760 (we are talking Homer).

In Masoretic chronology, Moses would be eighth from Adam, as Haydock said, and in LXX (without the second Cainan) Abraham would be sixth from Adam, Moses 12th.

In each of the three cases, we believe the eighth generation account to be reliable because:

· it was in its time believed to be history (or it wouldn't have acquired that status later)

· there is no reason specifically to believe someone specific actually frauded about it being history, no potential Joseph Smith in sight.

If it is adequate in two of the cases, there is no real reason why it wouldn't be so on the third case too. Except obviously, Henke has, contrary to his announced agnosticism, a pre-set agenda excluding talking snakes and such. But that agenda is - however respectable it may be in academia - no actual reason to exclude the history of Moses from historicity.”

Once more, Mr. Lundahl uses fallacious circular reasoning by invoking groundless claims for the existence of two biblical characters (i.e., Moses and Adam) to justify the existence of another groundless biblical character (i.e., the Talking Snake of Genesis 3). Before Lundahl (2022d) can even make these proclamations, he needs to thoroughly answer the following questions, which he has, so far, utterly failed to do:

· [#1] How can Mr. Lundahl demonstrate that any of his three eighth generational examples were passed down uncorrupted and without any mythology?

· [#2] Where is the evidence that Moses and Adam even lived?

· [#3] Where is the contemporary evidence that this individual named Moses had anything to do with the origin Genesis 3?

· [#4] Why should we believe the genealogies in Genesis at all when Lundahl (2022d) admits that there are inconsistencies between the Septuagint (LXX) and the Masoretic texts? Although Lundahl (2022d) believes that Moses was the 8^th from Adam, there’s absolutely no evidence or reason to trust this claim (Price 2017, pp. 59-92).

· [#5] Why should we believe the genealogies in Genesis, when someone can easily make up genealogies and effectively pass them off to millions of gullible people (e.g., Ether 1:6-32 in the Book of Mormon)? As seen in the Book of Mormon, any liar can claim to be an “eyewitness” to any event.

· [#6] Millions of people believe in the Book of Mormon, astrology and other nonsense. So, certainly, with time nonsense may commonly attain a false status of science or history in the minds of millions of gullible and ignorant people. Just because stories became popular and were viewed as history by ancient people, why should we believe their opinions on history? Everything from office gossip to the Book of Mormon to countless urban legends refute Mr. Lundahl’s claim that an account must be history or otherwise “it wouldn't have acquired that status later”. Large numbers of people believe lies all the time and if lies are repeated enough over time and passed onto children as fact, people come to believe that they’re true. Why should we take the views of an ancient and often superstitious people as authoritative on anything?

· [#7] How does Mr. Lundahl know that “there is no reason specifically to believe someone specific actually frauded about it being history, no potential Joseph Smith in sight” when whoever wrote Genesis 3 disappeared from history thousands of years ago? How can Mr. Lundahl confidently proclaim that Moses and not a conartist or deluded priest wrote Genesis 3 when conartists and deluded people have always been common and he doesn’t have a shred of evidence that Moses even existed? Because conartists frequently promote lies and millions of gullible people often believe them (e.g., Joseph Smith Jr. and Putin) and because Mr. Lundahl is making a specific claim that a Talking Snake existed and defied everything we know about reptile physiology, Mr. Lundahl has the burden of evidence, and not me, to demonstrate that Genesis 3 is history and that a Talking Snake actually existed. The following two excuses in Lundahl (2022d) are groundless assumptions and not evidence:

In each of the three cases, we believe the eighth generation account to be reliable because:

o it was in its time believed to be history (or it wouldn't have acquired that status later)

o there is no reason specifically to believe someone specific actually frauded about it being history, no potential Joseph Smith in sight.” [my emphasis in bold; original emphasis in bold and italics]

Lundahl (2022m) initially comments only on the bolded part of the seventh question and its associated materials:

“There is no reason specifically to believe he disappeared from records rather than to believe he was recalled correctly as Moses.

But if he had, this disappearance leaves no specific reason left comparable to the "golden plates" recovery of long lost history for being sceptics for a specific reason.

You see, I do not forbid scepticism, I just want specific reasons for it - and what Henke is offering is general reasons for scepticism, not specific to the case at hand.”

Skepticism is always the first and default position in any investigation. Skepticism says that there are many possible explanations for an event and that, at least initially, we don’t know which one is correct. Nevertheless, because the supernatural has never been demonstrated under strict present-day laboratory conditions, any explanation relying on the supernatural is less likely, but not impossible (Henke 2022ae). So, my approach to any historical claim is skepticism, caution and being conservative. Mr. Lundahl, however, takes a careless approach, where groundless claims about Moses, Adam and a Talking Snake are simply accepted at face value as “history” until “proven” otherwise. What’s even worse, if the claim is in the Bible, Mr. Lundahl seems to accept it as fact even if the evidence, such as the numerous examples in Finkelstein and Silberman (2001) and other archeological sources, say otherwise. The point is, a huge and unknown gap exists between when Genesis was written and our earliest copies in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Lundahl (2022m) just assumes that nothing nefarious happened in that gap, someone named Moses wrote Genesis and it was successfully passed down to us from generation to generation without any corruption or interruption. Mr. Lundahl has no evidence to back up his blatant assumptions. He has a serious chain of custody problem with Genesis that would never stand up in a court of law. He has no way of confirming who the author of Genesis was and that it was passed down through the generations without corruption or interruption. Not only are his assumptions totally without merit, but they are circular and fallacious. Mr. Lundahl believes the Bible is historical because the Bible says so. Instead, he should first embrace skepticism and not accept at face value whatever Genesis or any other document says. Again, skepticism is always the first and default position in any investigation.

Genesis is an anonymous book. The author(s) never identified themselves. So, the person making the claim that Moses wrote Genesis has the burden of evidence. Because we don’t know who wrote Genesis or when it was written, there’s a high probability that the claims in Genesis are unreliable, as well as the tradition that Moses wrote it. Archeological resources, again such as Finkelstein and Silberman (2001), give us very good reasons not to trust the claims in Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, and elsewhere in the Old Testament. Rather than Moses writing a history about a Talking Snake, it’s far more probable that some authority figure made up a story about a Talking Snake, a story with a Mormon-like time gap that supposedly happened thousands of years before the author and first audience were born. A gullible audience would blindly accept that story, especially if the priests had the support of a king that would threaten anyone that did not. If anyone dared to question the priests on why Genesis 3 was reliable, why couldn’t the forger of Genesis 3 simply claim that someone named Moses found some buried Golden Plates from Noah or Abraham or that God told him about Genesis 3 through prophecy? Not surprisingly, conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews would probably protest and claim that there’s no evidence that Moses ever found any Golden Plates from Noah or Abraham! Exactly! With such a huge knowledge gap between the origin of the Pentateuch and the Dead Sea Scrolls, many explanations are possible and it’s doubtful that archeology will ever definitively tell us who wrote Genesis 3 and when. Nevertheless, just trusting at face value whatever the Old Testament says about itself is never justified, especially when the archeology of Israel says that the historical claims of the Pentateuch and Joshua are largely wrong. Although we really don’t know who wrote Genesis, when it was written, or how it was written, natural law and imperfect human nature tell us that Hypotheses #3 and #4 of Henke (2022b) are far more probable than Hypothesis #1 and #2, which tell us that a Talking Snake actually existed. Mr. Lundahl does not understand this.

References:

Finkelstein, I. and N.A. Silberman. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts: The Free Press: New York, USA, 385pp.

Greenberg, D.L. 2004. “President Bush’s False ‘Flashbulb’ Memory of 9/11/01” Applied Cognitive Psychology, v. 18, pp. 363-370.

Neisser, U. and N. Harsch. 1992. “Phantom flashbulbs: False Recollections of Hearing the News about Challenger” in E. Winograd and U. Neisser (eds.), Affect and Accuracy in Recall: Studies of "Flashbulb" Memories, Cambridge University Press, pp. 9–31.