samedi 17 septembre 2022
What Henke Responded - up to "Henke2022aa" (with ab and ai looked up in advance, since referred to in previous)
Here is the page that works like a site map:
May 14, 2022; Most Recently Updated September 15, 2022
https://sites.google.com/site/respondingtocreationism/lundahl
Lowest down we have a few essays ranging from Henke (2022 c) to Henke (2022 fm). A few of them are actually in simple administrational issues.
I have already defended the order as given. If he didn't see it, so be it.
The multiplicity of answers in Henke (2022c) to Henke (2022 fm) seems calculated to spoof my formatting.
This goes on - apparently, not reading it - for these items : Henke (2022e): “Bibliographies are Important” - Henke (2022f): “Readers Shouldn’t have to Search the Internet, Libraries or Bookstores to Figure out Mr. Lundahl’s References Just Because He Won’t Make a Simple Bibliography with His Essays” - Henke (2022g): “Who is Bishop Challoner? Another Adverse Consequence from the Absence of Proper Referencing in Lundahl (2022a)”
First item that seems to have an argument is however this one:
Without giving a proper reference, Lundahl (2022a) refers to a Bishop Challoner and states that angels are capable of making a donkey talk without violating natural law. Once more, Mr. Lundahl commits the fallacy of circular reasoning. Without having a shred of evidence, he invokes a groundless story about an angel to explain another groundless story about a talking donkey. He has done absolutely nothing to rationally convince us that any of these stories ever happened. He just expects us to accept that this account in Numbers was history because it’s in the Bible.
Not quite no.
The pretence of asking for evidence in one item took a form that was in fact an objection : he was asking for evidence that either snakes or donkeys naturally are able to speak, at least some variety, and the answer took the form of objecting to the ignoratio elenchi. For this answer, it does not matter whether the story is true or made up. What matters is, that for my belief system (and I have not purported to defend another one) neither animal as physically biologically living animal was able to talk, but that in both cases an angelic being was controlling sounds that came from them. A guardian angel in the case of Bileam's ass, and Satan in the case of the snake. My concern was not with proving the story true, but with proving the (disguised) objection beside the point.
Henke 2022i Remembering Our Readers and Why We Must Honor Them by Writing for Their Benefit
Makes a good general point, I refuse to argue the application. We are back in administrationals :
Henke (2022j): “Proper Spelling is Essential in Communication and not a “Fetish” or an ‘Art’” - Henke (2022k): “Mr. Lundahl Won’t Even Use His Own Oxford English Dictionary and Spell Correctly: The “Carreer” Example” - Henke (2022L): “Another Deliberate Misspelling of Career from Mr. Lundahl: No Justification for Harassing and Confusing Our Readers” - Henke (2022m): “Using English Dictionaries: Merriam-Webster is Good” - Henke (2022n): “Mr. Lundahl Can’t Communicate and He won’t Read His Own Oxford Dictionary and Spell Correctly: The Imaginary “Undecisives” Example” - Henke (2022o): “Mr. Lundahl’s Vague Writing, Lack of References and Misspellings Don’t Serve the Needs of the General Public” - Henke (2022p): “COTUS: Mr. Lundahl’s Undefined Abbreviations Cause More Senselessly Bad Communication and Confusion” - Henke (2022q): “Mr. Lundahl Needs to Concentrate on Becoming a Good English Writer and Forget about Being a Comedian”
It would have been fairly appropriate if I had been his student, and preparing a thesis under him. It is not the case.
Henke (2022r): “We All Need Mentors, Mr. Lundahl”
I certainly hope for his nieces' sake he's not trying to mentor them, now! They'd be annoyed, and rightly so.
Another attack on wikipedia just came from J. J. McCullough:
Why I hate Wikipedia (and you should too!)
10 Sept. 2022 | J.J. McCullough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vmSFO1Zfo8
Henke does not need to look it up, it's in his favour. However, he can (without using youtube) look up my answer:
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2022/09/why-i-like-wikipedia-fairly-well-unlike.html
C. S. Lewis demonstrated the supernatural way before the chapter with the Pool Game Analogy. I claim here to demonstrate it through the miracles historically known.
Either way, none of us is interested in demonstrating the supernatural by the Pool Game Analogy, we are interested in using it to answer an objection, namely that miracles would be contradicting already known knowledge, the one we have of natural law.
In order for miracles not to contradict the already known knowledge for natural law, it is sufficient if "the supernatural" can do them without violating natural laws, it is absolutely not necessary for God to be unable to undo them. You see, as long as you do not have as a fact that miracle so and so needed to go through the agencies normally described by natural law, and went through them in ways that broke these laws (which by now are part of our knowledge), you cannot validly argue against the veracity of the miraculous accounts from these miracles, if occurring, contradicting natural laws.
An example somewhat more serious than the Pool Game Analogy : there are natural laws that describe what our immune system can do against Hansen's disease, and an instantaneous healing through our immune system is contrary to these laws. There are laws that describe how antibiotics can cure Hansen's disease, and an antibiotics cure takes six months. But neither of these laws argue about what God could or could not do to Hansen's disease, and so an instantaneous healing from leprosy (also known as Hansen's disease) is a very good "calling card" for God, because we know that such instantaneous healings are not what our immune system or antibiotics are able to work. With this out of the way, let's look at the historic evidence that Jesus actually healed lepers. Or in other terms, are the Gospels historic accounts or not? And if they are historic accounts, how likely is fraudulent writing or misunderstanding as explanations of these passages?
What is the use of following all the rules Henke sets up for a writing that serves a certain type of reader, if a simple argument cannot be made without Henke misconstruing it's intended scope of proof, but complains it is not proving something it was not meant to prove, because either author has adequate other proof for that something else?
Simply quoting the Bible, as Mr. Lundahl does in Lundahl (2022a) and elsewhere, is circular reasoning and doesn’t work (see Henke 2022ab). Lundahl (2022b) further claims that miracles can be demonstrated by metaphysics and history.
Looking up Henke (2022ab)
Oxford English Dictionary is a dictionary of English usage, not a topical dictionary of correct formal logic.
A circular definition is a fault in logic. A circular explanation is a fault in logic. A circular proof or demonstration (these mean the same thing!) is a fault in logic. BUT a "circle" with A explaining B, and B proving (or demonstrating with evidence) A is not a vicious circle. The only somewhat proper way in which one could use "circular reasoning" in logic would be to use it as a header for a group of fallacies, namely one comprising the actual fallacies circular definition, circular explanation, and circular proof - what he presumably meant to accuse me of.
Here is a work much more appropriate than either OED or Merriam Webster:
https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/54
Basically repeats the same as previous. And that they "cannot" violate natural law is not a requirement for my case of giving the miraculous accounts same burden of historical evidence as for other important events, it is the opposite that is a requirement for motivating Henke's tactic of giving them a hugely more massive one.
Henke (2022v): “Lundahl (2022i) Limits God’s Omnipotence”
To the title : no, I do not. God arguably will be breaking a lot of "natural laws" (or rather causes, described by laws) to the pieces He made them from when making a new heaven and a new earth.
Here is however a very interesting snapshot view on how Henke views "natural laws" very differently from how I do or how C. S. Lewis did.
Certainly, God, if he exists, is outside of nature by definition, but then why would he necessarily be bound to the laws that control nature?
I heartily disagree on natural laws being that which controls nature. Natural laws are part of how God controls nature in what is called the "ordinary providence" - namely indirectly, through created causes. The only thing that natural law actually does, is to describe what the natural causes can do. There are so many laws of nature that are relevant to an immune system's way of dealing with Hansen's Mycobacterium types (M. leprae and M. lepromatosis seem to be different bacteria with very similar symptoms and disease progression), and so many laws of nature that are relevant to what rifampicin, dapsone, or clofazimine. They do not control all that can happen to a case of leprosy. Obviously, if someone dies, soon he will have no skin or flesh on which the Mycobacteria can fester. If someone (it might be very stupid) cuts off the sole piece of skin and flesh infected, that might do the job (I would clearly not try that method). Neither of these are controlled by the natural law that describes the causality of immune systems or the natural law that describe the causality of dapsone.
The idea that nature "is controlled by laws" - all of it, nothing by chance, nothing by wills, nothing by supernatural wills - is one that Henke would need to demonstrate, and I don't think he can that.
That is why a miracle does not "violate the laws that control nature" because such laws simply do not exist. It also does not violate the law that describes the causality of a thing, because that causality is not the one actually working it : God is.
Let's see if he didn't make some blunder in analysing the Pool Game Analogy.
It only illustrates that a physicist would have difficulty making predictions about a pool game if a human (not a supernatural being) unexpectedly decided to hit one of the balls in the middle of the game.
It so happens, the analogy was not about a game of pool. It was about a table otherwise used for that game and balls on that table also for the moment not so used : and the physicist was predicting how the balls would reflect the waves of the cruiser. And the point is, the only cause of the movement of pool balls that physicist was concerning himself with was ultimately how the waves set the balls in motion. I e, the predictions of the physicist only concern the causality of the waves combined with the added subcausalities of friction on pool table, collision, balls being set in contrary motion when the wave changes the direction of the slant of the pool table and so on. And the analogy was on how these predictions of the physicist are very much like the predictions made from natural law : because the natural laws we do have are based on reularities of observations within certain limited causalities as relevant.
Also known as Common Sense is Strictly Verboten!
If gravity had been annihilated and hair and clothes had ceased to fall as they naturally do, the Disciples in the Boat would have had lots more trouble recognising Christ, and also recognising Him as Lord rather than as a kind of Mary Poppins.
While God could perform a feat without violating any natural laws, if God “removes” gravity, that action would most certainly violate Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation (Orear 1967, p. 73; Henke 2022ai).
First of all, that's clearly not my explanation for the miracle, as previously noted.
Let's look it up Henke 2022ai.
In Newton’s Law, the constant is used in the following equation that describes the force of gravity between any two objects separated by a distance r:
F = G m1m2 / r2
Where:
F = the force of gravity
G = universal gravitational constant of 6.670 x 10-8 centimeter-gram-second
m1 = mass #1 – the mass of an object, such as Jesus’ body
m2 = mass #2 – the mass of another object, such as the Earth
r = distance between the two objects (Orear 1967, p. 73).
Nothing in the equation says that the equation applies to all bodies without even miraculous exceptions. It is a description of how the force of gravity works. And if gravity doesn't work at some point, that description is irrelevant.
The main explanation to the miracle to me, is, anyway, not a removal of the force of gravitation, but something, and in this case not a solid object of created matter, but the will of God, interposing between Jesus' body and the effect of gravity. Any human body, why is it 6300 km above the centre of the Earth? Nothing to do with the equation that describes the force of gravity, it's simply because sufficiently much of the 6300 km separating us from Satan's waist down in Hell (see Dante, Divine Comedy, Inferno, Last Canto) is made up of matter that resists the effects of that force. Notably, and concerned with our comfort, the last kilometer up to us is land, a kind of solid (with or without cavities containing air or water), so that the resistance of that land stops our bodies from going down. My point is that the waves were not doing a similar service, but something else was holding Christ's body up : God's will. Which is not described by this equation.
In other words, the equation as such is not the least any kind of cause to doubt the story.
Henke (2022x): “Mr. Lundahl Contradicts Himself About Miracles Not Violating Natural Law”
At least in this Universe, anything or anyone that can do things with bodies must comply with the laws of physics.
No.
Not even in this Universe. Henke is giving the laws of physics a kind of godlike status that properly isn't theirs.
The correct status of the laws of physics is : descriptions (made by scientists) of regular limitations and capacities of physical causes.
And none of the laws, of physics or any other science, states that physical causes are the only ones that can have physical effects.
Granted, our current understanding of the laws of nature is incomplete
The current understanding of causes within nature is incomplete. But the laws are our descriptions of our undestanding of them. And they say strictly nothing about causes outside physical nature or even outside nature tout court.
However, if God and other supernatural beings do not violate the laws of physics, then we should be able to utilize equations and theories to exactly explain whatever they physically do in our Universe.
The exact analogy of stating that the things the player does by picking up and using a pool queue should be describable in equations the physicist got from observing the balls on the pool table moved by the waves around the cruiser.
he’s actually saying that physicists should be able to eventually discover how miracles occur and develop additional equations to describe them.
Not the least. And the problem is not with my clarity of writing, it is with Henke's lack of mental clarity in reading.
Henke2022y - why bother? I'll refrain from making a pun on zzzz for the next one.
Henke 2022z The Bible Claims that with Jesus Around, Nature was Unpredictable
Nature wasn't unpredictable. Miraculous events were. Nature was the routine between them, just as it is the routine between any other unpredicted events now. We never, ever, predict all of our existence. We never, ever, predict all events. A few months ago, Ukraine was not predicted capable of pushing Russia back.
Henke (2022aa): “Lundahl (2022i) is Wrong Again: Miraculous Healings Would Violate Natural Law”
Quoteworthy quote:
Creating new body parts from nothing or rejuvenating damaged body parts is not God adding “…to the agencies usually involved in a process, those being the ones described by natural laws.” It’s God supernaturally interrupting the natural process of decay, overriding the effects of natural law on human biology and immediately reversing the damage or creating new body parts out of nothing when natural law dictates that that can’t happen. Mr. Lundahl needs to have a better imagination and explain his arguments better.
Natural laws dictate nothing ever. Natural laws describe what cells within a body can do themselves to make new cells to repair a damage, and the cells doing on their own a complete healing from leprosy would violate these laws.
Again, God certainly interrupts a natural process - but so are natural processes interrupted all of the time anyway. Even naturally. Let a pen fall, it will not touch the centre of the Earth 6300 km down, though that is where the gravitational pull is drawing it. If it falls on the floor, or if I catch it in the other hand, either the floor or my hand will be overriding the graviational pull and interrupting the fall.
While damages can be reversed, if the story is true, supernaturally in an instant, they can be reversed naturally with sufficient time for the body's repair system to work.
None of these verbs or participles is any proof that any natural law is actually broken.
So, what Henke responded means, he doesn't adress how natural law is not a cause and none of them anyway have any total control over the physical universe, they are descriptions of factors that are only partial anyway.
I think I'll take a pause now. After it, I'll be checking on how much of the rest is Henke again missing this distinction in a slightly varied way. Oh, if he wants me to improve my writing on English rather than play the Comedian, he might do well to give me less comedy fodder!
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Stigmata of St. Francis
17.IX.2022
In monte Alverniae, in Etruria, commemoratio Impressionis sacrorum Stigmatum, quibus sanctus Franciscus, Ordinis Minorum Institutor, in suis manibus, pedibus et latere, mirabili Dei gratia, impressus fuit.
Publié par Hans Georg Lundahl à 11:20
Libellés : Kevin R. Henke