Mr. Lundahl is Still Wrong. He has the Burden of Evidence to Demonstrate that the Far-Fetched Story in Genesis 3 Actually Happened
Kevin R. Henke
October 22, 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). In my essays (Henke 2022bh through Henke 2022br2), I thoroughly refuted the responses in Lundahl (2022k). From Lundahl (2022t), here are Mr. Lundhahl’s additional comments on my point #1 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; italics emphasis in original]
In my previous essay, Henke (2022ij), I responded to the unbolded first part of the above quotation from Lundahl (2022t). In this section, I will respond to the bolded claims in the above quotation and, in particular, the claim in Lundahl (2022t) that if the skeptic “… wants to argue early chapters of Genesis are a fraud, he needs to explain how it was successful.” No, I do not! I don’t need to demonstrate that Genesis 3 is a work of fiction. As I explained in Henke (2022br), the burden of evidence is on Mr. Lundahl to show that the far-fetched story in Genesis 3 actually happened:
“Mr. Lundahl has the burden of evidence here and not me. Unlike the miracle-based Hypotheses #1 and #2 in Henke (2022a; 2022b), Hypotheses #3 and #4 are totally natural and reasonable explanations. I’ve already shown based on the laws of chemistry and physics and the fact that people commonly believe lies or misinterpret fiction that it’s far more probable that either Hypothesis #3 or #4 is the explanation for the Talking Snake story of Genesis 3 than either Hypothesis #2 or Mr. Lundahl’s preferred Hypothesis #1. Although miracles are always possible, in any given situation, it is far more probable that an event had a natural explanation than a supernatural one. As Lewis (1960, p. 162) correctly states when he summarizes the views of Hume:
“A miracle is therefore the most improbable of all events. It is always more probable that the witnesses were lying or mistaken than that a miracle occurred.”
That is, natural explanations are always the default position unless good evidence that a miracle actually occurred becomes available. So, Mr. Lundahl must produce some extraordinary evidence to demonstrate that miracles actually happened in Genesis 3 and that Hypothesis #1 is actually far more probable than either Hypothesis #3 or #4. Then and only then can Mr. Lundahl proclaim that Genesis 3 is history and that the Talking Snake actually existed. He has failed to do any of that and the natural explanations of Hypotheses #3 or #4 remain intact. Lundahl (2022k) is further claiming that the account in Genesis 3 is inerrant. He also has the burden of evidence to demonstrate that God actually exists, that he inspired Genesis 3 and that God not only made Genesis 3 historical, but also inerrant. So far, he’s utterly failed to achieve his lofty goals. Unless he can ever achieve these goals, Hypothesis #3 or #4 remain far more plausible and logical explanations.
Again, Mr. Lundahl and I already agree that the ancient Israelites actually believed that Genesis 3 was history. Both Hypotheses #3 and #4 even require that the ancient Israelites thought that Genesis 3 actually happened. For example, this is clearly stated in the definition of Hypothesis #3 that I gave in Henke (2022a):
“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.”
So, Mr. Lundahl is wasting his time on that issue. He needs to finally present his evidence that the ancient Israelites were right and that Genesis 3 is history and not a myth. His “earliest known audience” scam is not evidence that Genesis 3 is history because, as discussed in Henke (2022b; 2022bh), Finkelstein and Silberman (2001) and other archeological sources, history often shows that the beliefs of the “earliest known audience” were either improbable or just plain wrong.” [emphasis in original]
Although all of the evidence on the origin of Genesis is long gone, the examples of William Tell (Henke 2022ek) and the St. Philomena hoax, as discussed in Henke (2022es), clearly illustrate how lies and misinterpretations can readily become widely accepted as fact by millions of people. The St. Philomena hoax even deceived the authorities in the 19th century Vatican. So, Hypotheses #3 and #4 in Henke (2022a; 2022b) are the most likely explanations for Genesis 3; that is, it’s just a biblical fairy tale.
I will respond to the rest of the above quotation from Lundahl (2022t) in my upcoming essays.
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.
Lewis, C.S. 1960. Miracles, 2nd ed., printed 1974: Harper One: HarperCollinsPublishers, 294pp.