History Needs Science. Mr. Lundahl Continues to Have the Wrong Approach to Science and History
Kevin R. Henke
November 11, 2022
In Henke (2022b), I argued that people often lie, misinterpret and make up stories, and these are factors that undermine Mr. Lundahl’s “first known audience” scheme, which he uses in an attempt to separate history from fiction. In response, Lundahl (2022k) made the following comments:
“Let's go through Henke's principled objections to my theorem, "if the earliest known audience took it as history, it is a historic, not a fictional text" - here:
1. People lie and make up stories.
Those are two different things. A liar also makes up his story on some level, changing real for made up, where that is strategic for a purpose, but a poet makes up all of his story.
I think this is in fact the key principle Henke should ponder before answering any more. So much of his argument depends, so far, on equating Spiderman with Book of Mormon and with Russian reports on who it was who liberated Prague and how after most of WW-II was over.”
In Henke (2022bj), I gave the following response to Lundahl (2022k):
“Yes, poets often write total fiction and the author of Spiderman admits that it’s fiction. However, both Mr. Lundahl and I would agree that the Book of Mormon, Genesis 3, and Russian news reports are meant to be factual and not fiction and not poetry. The question then becomes, are they actually factual or just a lot of lies? To avoid being deceived by such lies, we need good evidence. The Mormons have no good evidence for the book of Mormon, Mr. Lundahl has none for Genesis 3, and Russian news reports are also highly untrustworthy.
It’s also important to recognize that liars in the religious and political realms may not simply take a real account and partially change it into something deceptive. They may totally make up a story so that there’s no truth in it whatsoever. As examples, I see no kernel of truth whatsoever in the Book of Mormon or in the Scientology Xenu story.
Mr. Lundahl also overlooks another critical point here. People often lie and make up stories for a variety of reasons. In the political and religious realms, money and/or power are often primary reasons for why politicians and religious leaders lie. In other cases, politicians may lie in an attempt to avoid criminal prosecution. In Henke (2022b), I further stated:
“The most common reasons for why ‘prophets’ invent false stories are for power and/or money. I think Kat Kerr invents stories to get attention and contributions. Joseph Smith Jr. used Mormonism to gain wealth and power, including the power to fornicate with whomever he wanted. No doubt, the ancient Israelite priests found the Pentateuch useful in gaining a lot of power and tithes and offerings that would otherwise have gone to the temples of Baal and other competing religions. The ancient Israelite priests were especially able to gain wealth and power when they had the support of Hezekiah and other powerful kings backing up their religion with force. As I explained in Henke (2022a), unlike the Talking Snake, we have external evidence that King Hezekiah actually existed.”
I think that Mr. Lundahl seriously underestimates how much disinformation is out there and how many millions of people often accept these falsehoods as fact. Interestingly, Lewis (1960, p. 159) makes an interesting statement that is generally correct:
“Lies, exaggerations, misunderstandings, and hearsay make up perhaps more than half of all that is said and written in the world.”
One could quibble about the percentage of spoken and written material that turns out to be false. Nevertheless, Lewis (1960) is qualitatively correct here. The internet, newspapers, magazines, and the Bible are full of false information. So, lies are widespread and serious problems. The only way to combat lies is to be initially skeptical of every claim and to immediately demand evidence when the claim is first presented (Henke 2022dv; Henke 2022eu). This is where peer-reviewed science publications may help to provide reliable evidence and separate fact from fiction. Peer-reviewed science journals are certainly not inerrant, but when multiple peer-reviewed articles obtain the same results using different procedures, these results are generally more trustworthy than anything given by TV preachers or the Bible.” [italics in original; my emphasis in bold]
In my last nine essays, I responded to Mr. Lundahl’s (2022v) comments on some of the unbolded sections in the above quotation from Henke (2022bj). Lundahl (2022v) then responds to my bolded sentence in the above quotation:
“Peer reviewed science may certainly help to separate current science from debunked one. It may certainly help to give exact minutiae of either a natural law or the specific way it is realised in certain circumstances. B U T history is not science, and while the peer reviewed journals in history do give access to less known source material, they are not the supermen of reason that one would need to separate "fact from fiction" as if there were any account where those were the alternatives.
Their major weakness isn't blunders, but false paradigms, and Mr. Henke is voicing one of them, as I am here and elsewhere on this debate arguing.
Meanwhile, my example of challenging the story of Utøya perpetrator being a Christian Fundamentalist shows there actually is an alternative : provisionally believing all, but challenging anything that there is a reason to actually disbelieve.”
Although history is not a science per se, like so many other non-science disciplines, it usually depends on science to obtain reliable results. In particular, historians depend on archeology and other sciences to successfully decipher the past and separate what actually happened from myth. Certainly, false paradigms and other biases are problems in any investigation. This is why an investigation should have a team of researchers with different worldviews and areas of expertise that use the Method of the Multiple Working Hypotheses (Strahler 1999, pp. 19-20). Any analytical results should be confirmed by independent laboratories and checked, if possible, with other methods. This is also why peer-review and confirmation are so important. When a group of scientists date a manuscript and use the Method of the Multiple Working Hypotheses, their results should be consistent. If the results are not consistent, the various sides should have good reasons for supporting their opposing conclusions. The results should not depend on whether they are politically conservative or liberal, Roman Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Atheists, etc. That is, their religious and political views should have no role whatsoever in the results. Additional studies and debate in the peer-reviewed literature would then be done to try to resolve the conflicts.
Mr. Lundahl is arguing that stories in newspapers and other sources should be tentatively believed unless a reader or two just happen to notice something suspicious and report it. Again, this is exactly the wrong approach. We shouldn’t simply believe whatever is in a newspaper or any other source, and then depend on readers to find any errors. This is why multiple peer-reviewed articles and using multiple and independent news sources are so important. At least in science and history, until claims are peer-reviewed and thoroughly conformed, skepticism is warranted. For ordinary and non-technical news, we should depend on multiple and independent sources.
References:
Lewis, C.S. 1960. Miracles, 2nd ed., printed 1974: Harper One: HarperCollinsPublishers, 294pp.
Strahler, A.N. 1999. Science and Earth History: The Evolution/Creation Controversy: 2nd ed., Prometheus Books: Amherst, NY, USA, 552 pp.