Henke (2022bh) is Not Discussing Deliberate Works of Fiction, but Lies and Made-Up Stories Being Passed Off as History
Kevin R. Henke
October 21, 2022
In Henke (2022bh) and Henke (2022b), I stated the following:
“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.” [emphasis in original]
Lundahl (2022t) is largely a response to my nine points. Actually, Lundahl (2022k) earlier responded to these same nine points when they were originally listed in Henke (2022b). I don’t know why he’s doing it again. Anyway, here is how Lundahl (2022t) replies to my first point about people lying and making up stories:
“Those two are very different. Lying involves making up a story, or rather a salient part of it, but making up a story is not automatically lying.
A liar, unlike a poet of fiction, wants to be believed, as to prosaic actual fact. In order to achieve this, he has to calculate what he is likely to get away with.
Those who don't see the difference are horrible art critics : they criticise sci-fi or fantasy for "it's so fake" (just because the setting isn't mundane, it would be something else if the reason for the comment were bad psychology or psychology mismatched with the facts about the character (I saw some Tolkien fans do that criticism with the Galadriel of Episode 3)). In fact, the fiction writer is not trying to convince people that things happened. He's trying to make them experience it as if it happened, that's another thing, but he's not trying to elicit the judgement after reading or watching that it is a fact. This gives him much more freedom, he doesn't need to consider what he "can get away with" but only with what he can paint in words.
Now, the whole point is, the liar who does get belief is limited to "what he can get away with" - if someone wants to argue early chapters of Genesis are a fraud, he needs to explain how it was successful. One line would be - as for book of Mormon or as for Silmarillion, if it had been seriously put forth as lost and recovered history, like the book of Mormon was, that at one point Genesis' early chapters were "lost and recovered history" - a status excellently suited for introducing frauds or passing off fiction as fact, unless the content actually contradicts something which already is a basic belief of some member of the audience. A Catholic would not believe the Book of Mormon if attending to the fact that the Church according to Matthew 28:16-20 needs to be present on earth from Ascension to Harmageddon. An Atheist would not believe the Book of Mormon if it contained miracles, and would usually also not believe it because it referred to a people as a holy people of Christians, a category to which he gives no special status (in theory).
That is why it is important that:
· a) we find no particular point at which early chapters of Genesis was "lost and recovered history" rather than "history" to the earliest known audience;
· b) we find bridges from those early chapters up to Christ all over the Old Testament (least detailed in the time between Daniel and Maccabees);
· c) we do not find Mormons changing the status of Book of Mormon from "lost and recovered history" to "history."
But if Henke wants to word it as "Mormons sucked at distinguishing history from fiction" he is simply misstating the very real case against Book of Mormon.
And he's forgetting that it never ever had the status of Spiderman or Rapunzel among Mormons. Or of simple normal transmission.” [my emphasis]
In this essay, I’m only responding to the bolded section of Mr. Lundahl’s response in Lundahl (2022t). In subsequent essays, I’ll respond to the rest of statements in Lundahl (2022t).
In Henke (2022bh), I was clearly and only referring to made-up stories or lies being passed off as “history.” I was not discussing stories that are made up for poetry or deliberate works of fiction. As I have argued in Henke (2022b) and my other essays in this debate, Genesis 3 is in all probability a lie that was meant to be passed off as “history.” That’s the real issue here. The rambling in Lundahl (2022t) about poetry, art critics, science fiction, Tolkien, etc. is irrelevant to the issue of lies or made-up stories being passed off by the author(s) as history.