Creation vs. Evolution: mai 2022

mardi 31 mai 2022

Continuing on Section 5

Lundahl (2022c) does not like Hypothesis #2. Obviously, any extensive visions of Genesis in Hypothesis #2 sound too much like the lying visions given by Joseph Smith Jr. or the delusions of “prophets” like Kat Kerr, and Mr. Lundahl does not want Genesis to be based on false claims of visions like the Book of Mormon or the Candy Land in Heaven promoted by Kat Kerr (Knox 2021). Lundahl (2022c) even admits this when he denigrates Hypothesis #2 as a “parody” and “ideally suited for those not believing it.” In other words, he admits that Hypothesis #2 allows supporters of Hypotheses #3 and #4 to argue that Genesis is based on false claims of visions just like the Book of Mormon.

Indeed. There is very little Biblical history that is based on prophecy, part being Daniel, part being certain chapters of Apocalypse, and as such upcoming, and part being Genesis 1:1 to 2:4.

But this is not all.

Genesis 12 to 50 reads very much like a chronicled family saga. Also, final generations of that one is not very far back from Moses himself (see Exodus 6).
Genesis 2:5 to 11:32 reads like short snippets learned by heart.

It doesn't seem like the kind of thing a visionary would get, either by hearing or by sight. Or feign to have gotten that way.

Apocalypse 1

[9] I John, your brother and your partner in tribulation, and in the kingdom, and patience in Christ Jesus, was in the island, which is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus. [10] I was in the spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, [11] Saying: What thou seest, write in a book, and send to the seven churches which are in Asia, to Ephesus, and to Smyrna, and to Pergamus, and to Thyatira, and to Sardis, and to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea. [12] And I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks: [13] And in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks, one like to the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the feet, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle. [14] And his head and his hairs were white, as white wool, and as snow, and his eyes were as a flame of fire, [15] And his feet like unto fine brass, as in a burning furnace. And his voice as the sound of many waters.

[16] And he had in his right hand seven stars. And from his mouth came out a sharp two edged sword: and his face was as the sun shineth in his power. [17] And when I had seen him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying: Fear not. I am the First and the Last, [18] And alive, and was dead, and behold I am living for ever and ever, and have the keys of death and of hell. [19] Write therefore the things which thou hast seen, and which are, and which must be done hereafter. [20] The mystery of the seven stars, which thou sawest in my right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks. The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches. And the seven candlesticks are the seven churches.

Ezechiel 1

The word of the Lord came to Ezechiel the priest the son of Buzi in the land of the Chaldeans, by the river Chobar: and the hand of the Lord was there upon him. [4] And I saw, and behold a whirlwind came out of the north: and a great cloud, and a fire infolding it, and brightness was about it: and out of the midst thereof, that is, out of the midst of the fire, as it were the resemblance of amber: [5] And in the midst thereof the likeness of four living creatures: and this was their appearance: there was the likeness of a man in them. [6] Every one had four faces, and every one four wings. [7] Their feet were straight feet, and the sole of their foot was like the sole of a calf's foot, and they sparkled like the appearance of glowing brass. [8] And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides: and they had faces, and wings on the four sides, [9] And the wings of one were joined to the wings of another. They turned not when they went: but every one went straight forward. [10] And as for the likeness of their faces: there was the face of a man, and the face of a lion on the right side of all the four: and the face of an ox, on the left side of all the four: and the face of an eagle over all the four.

Apart from a content that's very different from most passages in Genesis, we have signalling that a vision was going on: "I was in the spirit," "[t]he word of the Lord came to ... and the hand of the Lord was there upon him. [4] And I saw."

Now read Genesis 5:

This is the book of the generation of Adam. In the day that God created man, he made him to the likeness of God. [2] He created them male and female; and blessed them: and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created. [3] And Adam lived a hundred and thirty years, and begot a son to his own image and likeness, and called his name Seth. [4] And the days of Adam, after he begot Seth, were eight hundred years: and he begot sons and daughters. [5] And all the time that Adam lived came to nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.

[6] Seth also lived a hundred and five years, and begot Enos. [7] And Seth lived after he begot Enos, eight hundred and seven years, and begot sons and daughters. [8] And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died. [9] And Enos lived ninety years, and begot Cainan. [10] After whose birth he lived eight hundred and fifteen years, and begot sons and daughters.

[11] And all the days of Enos were nine hundred and five years, and he died.

Apart from the extraordinary lifespans, and an introitus making the first of the men in this lineage the first man created, it reads like a fairly humdrum genealogy like shepherders all over the world like to rehearse about their families, while tending the sheep.

Even Joseph Smith did not try to pass off I Nephi as a series of visions, he preferred to describe a supernatural event in which he lays hands on "golden plates" with a text that ultimately would (if genuine) have been written the normal way, but the one extra supernatural touch being that Joseph Smith claimed supernatural understanding of the language in the golden plate text.

No, hypothesis #2 does not seem like it. But since Henke makes a point of parallelling hypothesis #2 to Joseph Smith, I make a point of pointing out, again and again, Joseph Smith couldn't and probably didn't try to convince his hearers the content of Book of Mormon was history they already knew, he just convinced them it was "in fact history" but transmitted to them in a very unhistoric way, very unlike how Washington and Lafayette were transmitted to Abraham Lincoln. If this were how Genesis was written, how come this extraordinary fact was not preserved?

When refuting Hypothesis #2, Lundahl (2022c) assumes that Moses wrote Genesis as required by Hypothesis #1. Normally, quoting the Bible to defend the Bible would be blatant and fallacious circular reasoning.

No, it would not. Quoting one statement to defend that one statement would be a fallacy, but the Bible is not one statement.

To make it a bit clearer, if I pretended to be a Washington sceptic, and Henke replied that Lincoln believed in his historic existence "fourscore years and ten" before Ghettysburg, I'd be somewhat disingenious (except as continuing the spoof) to reply "but Lincoln is also a character and Ghettysburg also an event in that story book called 'US History' - you can't appeal from one made up character to another one!"

In each case, the appeal would be to one more recent than the one from which the appeal were made, and therefore closer to us and easier to check. And what is more, closer to the community in which we are.

I will here skip forward to section 6:10. Here he is quoting my treatment of it;

The Hellenistic era is a kind of cultural community (to which among others Apollonius of Rhodes belonged) and a community usually knows how it started.

Note : "a commnity usually knows how it started" is the best proof of Alexander the Great - the historians, the texts from back then, just express that knowledge. But this is exactly the same argument that Henke would disagree with when it came to Catholics knowing they came from Jesus, or Jews and Samaritans that they came from Moses, or Moses he came from Abraham and ultimately Abraham he came from Adam via Noah.

Henke wants to have it both ways - the Hellenistic community knows it started with Alexander the Great, but the claims involving theologically relevant miracles suddenly cease to fit that pattern. That is why I continue the statement with:

Like New York knows - independently of old archives, which actually also are accessible as confirmation - that it began with Nieuw Amsterdam.

Exactly as "the Jewish Church" knows it started with God making a covenant with Moses, and that it later split into Jewish proper and Samaritan after the rule of King Solomon.

Exactly as the Catholic Church knows it started with Christ showing Himself to be God by the Resurrection and making a covenant with His chief disciples, Matthew 28, followed by the sending of the Holy Ghost, Acts 2.

After this I give three theoretic objections (not taken from McDaniel) which one could use to impugn the principle.

Once more, Lundahl (2022f) makes a huge mistake of just assuming that whatever view an ancient community may have had about its origin, it must be reliable history. No. Such stories about the founding of various communities may be fairly accurate history or they may contain legends or consist entirely of myths without historical evidence. It’s the job of historians to separate history from fantasy.

But the problem Henke doesn't get around is, McDaniel actually used the existence of the Hellenistic community as evidence for Alexander - as he should. It cannot be the "job of historians" to examine such stories without any bias in favour of a community's own version of its origins, if a historian also has the "job" of affirming the existence of Alexander by a) proving the Hellenistic community existed; and b) sourcing this community (as per its own evaluation) to Alexander. As McDaniel, perfectly correctly, actually did.

Rather than realizing that half-human and half-snake creatures are probably just made-up stories like the centaurs, Lundahl (2022f) thinks that they may have been humans with fused legs. While such a birth defect is certainly possible, his reasoning for this defect in Lundahl (2022f) is not. Without any evidence whatsoever, Lundahl (2022f) argues that nuclear wars before Noah’s Flood contributed to their conditions. Of course, Flood geology is bogus and there’s no evidence whatsoever in the Precambrian for a 4,400-to-6,000-year-old civilization with nuclear weapons (see my essays against Flood Geology here). If Mr. Lundahl has evidence for such a nuclear ancient civilization, I want to see it and I’m willing to change my mind.

I actually do not think that centaurs are just made up stories. It could be a case of very early riders (for the region at least) seen from a distance by most observers. Hercules and Jason arguably were educated by such and told not to break the mystique surrounding them.

The evidences for pre-Flood nuke wars are:

Hindu memories of the pre-Flood world involving visions of "gods" that become "brighter than a thousand suns" (cited by Oppenheimer);
Hindu memories of the pre-Flood world involving a divine arm that spreads death at a distance, but can be avoided by ducking under an obstacle;
this being a probable concurrent explanation with higher radioactivity from the cosmos for shortened lifespans, birthdefects like those of Kekrops and Fu Hsi, faster production of C14, leading to a rise from atmospheric 1.4 pmC at Flood (2957 BC) to 100 pmC at the Fall of Troy (c. 1180 BC).

It is not foolproof, but it is some. Now, Kekrops seems, according to Castor of Rhodes, to be very much too late to have lived in this more radioactive than ours world, but as the name was a recurring one, the list of the kings of Athens given on wikipedia from him could very well have been shortened.

The oldest known human presence in Athens is the Cave of Schist, which has been dated to between the 11th and 7th millennia BC.

And that (11th millennium BC) means times just before Babel, in my recalibration of C14.

But yes, my objection 2 was obviously, China and Athens with Kekrops and Fu Xi (pinyin spelling for Fu Hsi) were "unbelievable" stories of how communities originated and my answer is, they were in fact not unbelievable. China and Athens also confirm the general trend that communities know how they originate.

Until that evidence ever comes forward, Mr. Lundahl is totally failing to separate history from his fantasies about the nuclear pre-Flood civilizations. The speculations about pre-Flood nuclear wars in Lundahl (2022f) are so bizarre, outrageous and unfounded that I doubt that even the young-Earth creationists at Creation Ministries International and Answers in Genesis would take them seriously.

I think I even got the general idea from some remark in connexion with the RATE project. How about asking Jonathan Sarfati if my memory totally sucks, or not? But "failing to separate history from his fantasies" is not an argument about my actual arguments, it's an ad hominem.

My conclusion (concurring with McDaniel) is, yes, the Hellenistic era recalling its origins in Alexander the Great is great proof for Alexander the Great and his carreere. And for some reason, Henke doesn't deal with that. Perhaps because he is aware of the implications it's getting here. Objections 1 and 3: 1 was dealt with more fully in He Applies It and 3 has been dealt with here: while Mormons think there were 5th C AD Mormons, they are aware of a distinction between these and themselves and are fully aware of themselves going back, directly, to Joseph Smith.

So, within the US American community, I can go to the community of the 19th C. as testifying to the community of the 18th C (Founding Fathers). And, back at section 5 now, similarily, within the series of Biblical communities (which show no obvious break like the ones between 5th C and 19th C Mormons!) I go to earliest known community mentioning Moses for evidence he is recalled as origin of Israelites - both Jew and Samaritan - and that puts Moses into the position of testifying to the generations Abraham to twelve sons of Jacob as origin of the Hebrews coming into Egypt, and given all of the time, from Abraham's vocation to Jacob blessing his sons, the Beduin tribe could transport writing material, this brings Abraham (and his 318 men!) into the position of having testified to this community of its more far-off origins, going back to the Flood (to which also a great deal of other communities testify) and via the Flood, to Adam. Precisely as within the Western community, I would refer to 19th C. reaction for the French Revolution, the late Ancien Régime for Henry IV, the time of Henry IV for those of St. Joan, that of St. Joan for that of St. Lewis IX, that of St. Lewis IX for King Robert, that of King Robert for that of King and Emperor Charlemagne, that of Charlemagne for Bl. Alcuin in Tours, Alcuin for St. Gregory of Tours, him for St Martin and also for Clovis, and then the time of Clovis for Constantine, or of Constantine for Caesar, or of Caesar to Antiochus IV and then him (and specifically his Hebrew and Biblical adversaries in Maccabees) for Alexander the Great himself. I know my method, and I apply it with constistency, this is not a failure to separate what should be separated, it is an ability of not separating things arbitrarily, just as that happens to be handed down on a plate by an expert.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary
31.V.2022

Fun fact : this is the number 777 of published posts on this blog./HGL

jeudi 26 mai 2022

Excursus on William Tell and Catholic Saints

Second Round essays: Henke Can't Read · Henke Can't Argue Philosophy Very Well Either · Henke Still Can't Read - Or Hasn't Done so To Lewis · To Reaffirm "Earliest Known Audience" · The Philosophy of History of Henke : Given without References, Refuted without References · He Applies It · (Excursus on William Tell and Catholic Saints) · Continuing on Section 5 · We're Into Section 6!

Kevin R. Henke has now more than once linked to these two links, by Robert Wernick for one, and by Larry Jimenez, factchecked by Jamie Frater, for the other. My turn to make mincemeat of them:

Smithsonian : In Search of William Tell
Robert Wernick | August 2004
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/in-search-of-william-tell-2198511/

Problem 1:

There is just one small problem: many historians doubt that Tell ever made those two famous arrow shots in 1307, and many are convinced that no such person as William Tell ever existed.

No problem, what I expect of such people. Problem 2? Yes:

For one thing, his story wasn’t set down fully until 1569- 70, some 250 years after the events it describes, by historian Aegidius Tschudi

Would have been a problem in a better documented area of Europe, like Paris or London. Problem 3:

In 1758, nearly two centuries after Tschudi’s death, up turned a forgotten copy of the original Oath of Rütli made by the representatives of the three forest cantons, none of whom was named Tell. It was dated “the beginning of August 1291,” so the whole episode had to be moved back 16 years (only Uri remains stubbornly faithful to the old date of 1307).

Solution, William Tell only represented Uri. And therefore only later signed the Rüetli Ääid - case closed, historic.

Listverse : 10 Beloved Saints The Church Just Made Up
by Larry Jimenez | MAY 17, 2014
fact checked by Jamie Frater
https://listverse.com/2014/05/17/10-beloved-saints-with-fictitious-biographies/

10) St. Veronica - In fact, Greeks call here Berenike, and Veronica is a nickname with reference to vera icon, the cloth she obtained by wiping Our Lord's face. And it is in Oviedo, and agrees in facial features and blood group (I think) with the Shroud of Turin (there is yet another not manmade icon, sent to king Abgar of Edessa).

There is no specific reason to doubt her existence except that the Latin version of her name is an anagram, and that she is not in the Bible, neither of which is a reason. There are general reasons presented above, which do not hold ground.

9) St. Euphrosyne was the daughter of Paphnutius, a wealthy citizen of Alexandria. ... Her perfect ascetic life impressed the abbot, and when Paphnutius came to him seeking comfort in his sorrow, the abbot directed him to the care of Smargadus. Paphnutius unknowingly became his daughter’s disciple.Euphrosyne was soon known for her holiness and wisdom. On her deathbed, in A.D. 470, she finally revealed to her father her true identity. Paphnutius thereafter became a monk himself and lived in his daughter’s cell for the remaining 10 years of his life.

Any real problem?

So goes the story of St. Euphrosyne, but she represents a whole class of cross-dressing female saints.

Is St. Joan of Arc a retold story of this group too?

Georges Bernanos took pride in descending from her brother.

It seems that medieval folk were fascinated by women successfully impersonating men to elevate their status in the sight of God. Modern scholarship dismisses Euphrosyne’s story as pious fiction and even concludes that St. Euphrosyne never existed.

OK ... modern scholarship is the alleged reason for rejecting her (and her father St. Paphnutius') existence. Have you tried tea leaves?

8) St. Catherine of Alexandria. ... Donald Attwater, in his updated version of Lives of the Saints, calls the above legend “the most preposterous of its kind,” as there is “no positive evidence that she ever existed outside the mind of some Greek writer who first composed what he intended to be simply an edifying romance.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, though maintaining belief in Catherine’s historical existence, admits that stories about her “are to be rejected as inventions, pure and simple.”The 18th-century Benedictine monk Dom Deforis declared the same traditions as false, and since that time, devotion to the virgin-martyr of Alexandria lost all its former popularity. Catherine was removed from the Church’s liturgical calendar in 1969—but she was restored by Pope John Paul II in 2002.

OK, Donald Attwater, Dom Deforis and Catholic Encyclopedia are reasons to disbelieve what is told of her? With two of the three on top of that denying her existence?

Not good enough for me, no. And especially not as this "criticism" was cause for an impious removal in 1969!

7) St. Margaret Of Antioch ...
5) St. Barbara ...
4) St. Alexius Of Rome ...

All seem obsessed with, a) is not recorded in "history" as if "history" were one book or book collection like the Bible, b) earliest now extant version is from some centuries later (like 700 or later).

That is not an argument. Recorded "in history" means recorded in texts of the past. The question is, which texts of the past are considered historic, and here the argument is, a text from 400 years later than the events is not historic, even if it is not contradicting any contemporaneous text. I disagree with that methodology.

3) St. Eustace (or Eustachius) ... However, the Martyrologium Romanum has dubbed him “completely fabulous,” referring to his story’s authenticity, not his style of dress.

Checking, september 20th ...

Romae passio sanctorum Martyrum Eustachii et Theopistis uxoris, cum duobus filiis Agapito et Theopisto, qui, sub Hadriano Imperatore, damnati ad bestias, sed Dei ope ab iis nullatenus laesi, tandem, in bovem aeneum candentem inclusi, martyrium consummarunt.

In Rome, passion of the holy martyrs Eustachius and his wife Theopistis (or Godfaith), with their two sons Agapitus and Theopistus (also Godfaith, but in masculine version), who, under Emperor Hadrian, condemned to (be eaten by) the beasts, but by God's assistance not the least hurt by them, at last, shut into a brass bull glowing hot, fulfilled their martyrdom.

It says nothing of "completely fabulous" in the Roman Martyrology that I accept, the reference is probably to some production of 1969 by people too cowed down by modern scholarship (why don't they try tea leaves?).

2) St. George ... Pope Gelasius admitted that George is one of those saints “whose actions are known only to God.” He is so shrouded in legend that some people believe he never existed at all or is just a Christianized version of an older, pagan myth.

In fact, the version with the dragon is not given in the Roman martyrology, and believing as I do that dinosaurs were on the Ark, both St. George killing the dragon and Perseus killing another one and Beowulf and Siegfried killing two more such seems legitimate to me. But it is not essential to the story.

23 Aprilis Natalis sancti Georgii Martyris, cujus illustre martyrium inter Martyrum coronas Ecclesia Dei veneratur.

Birthday (meaning heavenly birthday, death to the body, soul going directly to heaven same day and not passing through unknown time in purgatory) of holy martyr George, whose illustrious martyrdom the Church of God venerates among the Crowns of martyrs.

Pope Gelasius said his deeds were known only to God, not that his sufferings were so. He also lived near 200 years after St. George.

So, Catholics venerate him, so do Orthodox who broke off in 1053 - George the Trophy-bearer, so do Copts who broke off against Chalcedon, St. George the Prince of Martyrs (Parmoute 23rd) is also known as St. George of Cappadocia, a city in modern-day Turkey. Of all the saints named George, he is the most known. So do presumably Armenians : The Armenian Apostolic Church of St. George and they also broke off against Chalrcedon, and so do Nestorians, who broke off already against Ephesus:

There is but one church at Asheetha, which is dedicated to Mar Gheorghees (S. George), a favourite saint among the Nestorians.

Wikisource, The Nestorians and their Rituals,
Volume 1 by George Percy Badger, Chapter 15
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Nestorians_and_their_Rituals/Volume_1/Chapter_15

No reason at all to not consider him historic. Btw, The Council of Chalcedon .... convened in the city of Chalcedon, Bithynia (modern day Kadikoy, Turkey) from 8 October to 1 November 451 AD. And the Council of Ephesus was a council of Christian bishops convened in Ephesus (near present-day Selçuk in Turkey) in AD 431. Since he died in 303, this means he was honoured by all Christians within 128 years. A good reason to believe him historic.

1) St. Christopher

I thought he was coming, like one of the crew "put out of job" as intercessors, if the new things in 1969 were valid, which they weren't.

The reasons given are, a) his story is a spiritual parable, b) an anonymous Christian martyr got it attached. Well, if that is so, this "anonymous" Christian martyr (but "delante de Dios, nunca serás heróe anónimo") is interceding for the people invoking St. Christopher. But no real reason is given to believe it did not happen.

All of above fall within what I consider as history, not so:

6) St. Philomena ... The pious fiction was inspired by the discovery in 1802 of a tomb in the Catacomb of Priscilla, mistakenly identified as belonging to an early Christian martyr. The name “Filumena” was inscribed on the earthenware slabs closing the grave, so the alleged martyr was assumed to be a virgin called “Philomena.”The relics were transferred to the church in Mungano, and a nun named Maria Luisa di Gesu began receiving revelations about the life and martyrdom of Philomena, allegedly from Philomena herself.

So, no, it is not history, it is archaeology and prophecy stepping in. Did the prophecy get approval of the Church? Yes:

The revelations received the approval of the Holy Office (today’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), and the entire story, as it came to Mother Maria, was written in an official account by Fr. Di Lucia.

So, we should not hesitate to invoke St. Philomena, even if what we know of her is prophecy rather than history. Unlike Mother Maria, Joseph Smith had no such approval, you see.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Ascension of Our Lord
26.V.2022

mercredi 25 mai 2022

He Applies It

Lundahl (2022a) claims that “Genesis 3 is a piece of history.” Yet, in none of these seven essays (Lundahl 2022a-g) does he ever present any evidence for this claim.

My evidence being, and I think I may have already stated it, "taken so by earliest known audience" and this meaning transmitted as history rather than fiction, miraulous recovery of lost history, prophecy, reconstructed.

As I had stated : “History is verified historically, not scientifically, at its most basic, since science cannot verify whether only scientifically verifiable phenomena exist or occur.” Henke replies:

This statement is merely vague tautology. Archeology and forensic science are legitimate sciences, along with paleontology and other geologic sciences that investigate the remaining evidence of past events. Historical sciences that investigate human endeavors may not be able to determine the why, the how or other details about what happened, but in some circumstances, as discussed in Section 6.0 and Henke (2022a), they can definitely identify the who, what, when and/or where.

This is taking "science" in a broader view than I meant, and than the one Henke uses on other occasions, like wanting zoological (or paleozoological) evidence for talking snakes.

Rather than recognizing the virgin birth of Romulus as nothing more than a made-up story,

It was not a virgin birth, Mars or whatever other entity it was had not left Rhea Silvia a virgin. Livy (and Pausanias?) don't consider the story as made up, nor did St. Augustine.

You can have an atheistic world view, and neither Mars nor a demon is possible. But the rest of the story could stand, if she was not entirely well guarded.

You can have a Christian world view, and Mars is impossible, but demonically assisted procreation is not. The story, including impregnation in absence of human males is possible.

You can have a pagan world view, and Mars becomes possible, or whatever Kumaran or Shiva or Hachiman or Tyr you prefer putting in the place of Mars. The story can stand as it is.

Lundahl (2022a) again suggests that it might have happened and that a demon could have been responsible.

Here is what doctors can do:

Born through MAP, “she had to find her donor at any price. Her life depended on it”. Today, Sarah is 25 years old. In 2013, after a bitter 4-year struggle, the German legal system finally granted her the right to find out the identity of her donor. This sounds extremely promising for Sophie, Béatrice, Romain and Raphaël in France, all of whom were conceived through sperm donation and who want to find out the identity of the biological father or, as Sophie put it: “I would just like to give human aspects to this person, and not just regard him as someone who donated his sperm in a test tube. “

https://www.genethique.org/children-born-through-map-medically-assisted-procreation-face-donor-anonymity/?lang=en

The actually sole means the doctors use are replacing physical objects, notably male sperm. Demons can do the same, supposing they exist. And Romulus, Perseus, women found pregnant after dreams of satyrs or incubi, and so on are recorded instances of this occurring, suggesting that in fact they do exist.

Lundahl (2022a) again shows his inability to separate out real history from likely mythology that involves angels, demons and other supernatural beings. This is part of a superstitious mindset that sees demons almost everywhere instead of recognizing that fertile human imaginations are more than capable of making up stories and that these stories can become popular with gullible audiences.

Henke speaks of "inability" when in fact it is a refusal to use his criterium, for reasons stated. I do not have the atheistic world view, ergo, I do not have any rational ground for excluding full historicity of these occurrences, with the inaccuracy of taking demonic activity for the "divine" one of false gods.

According to his second essay, Lundahl (2022b), there are two ways to verify the existence of the supernatural; namely, metaphysics and history.

Yes.

He is definitely wrong to claim that history is capable of verifying the supernatural.

No reference given, except:

C.S. Lewis (1960, p. 2), a source used by Lundahl (2022a), even agrees with me that “history can never convince us that a miracle occurred.” We can never rule out the strong possibility that “witnesses” to a past “supernatural event” outright lied and made-up a story, or misinterpreted what they saw. These are the bases of Hypotheses #3 and #4 for the Talking Snake, which Lundahl (2022c) utterly fails to adequately address as discussed in Section 5.0 of this essay.

The fact is, on page 2, C. S. Lewis is adressing the mindset of the people he is trying to first convince of the supernatural by metaphysics. He is presuming them atheists and materialists, and is concluding how they will distort historic evidence, and he is putting it in a polite fashion. He is also presuming, they are not likely to get deeper into history than they are already. This has changed on the market, lots of atheists are now geeks who revalorise the Middle Ages and so on.

I disagree with him on methodology. A strong atheist or materialist who has for long applies this philosophy to history would indeed probably need CSL's ordination : a metaphysical overhaul first, before reviewing history from a new angle. An actual agnostic (not that I think Henke's self diagnosis as such a one is entirely correct) would, according to the terms of his own theory of knowledge, unlike the people C. S. Lewis had in mind, be obliged to consider historic evidence as one possible reason to reconsider his (by definition) preliminary world view.

Lewis (1960, p. 87) is also correct when he states that the “progress of science” has not eliminated the possibility of miracles and that science has not demonstrated that miracles are impossible.

Thank you. Henke however seems to think it has eliminated the possibility of historically verifying miracles. However, the view Henke has on history as shown from his discussion of Romulus, is not a progress of historic science, it is a fad considered as valid paradigm by historians.

However, again, Lewis (1960, pp. 17-85) fails to demonstrate that human reasoning or another other process involves the supernatural.

It is possible CSL's reasons in chapter 3 only involve a refutation of a strongly deterministic naturalism. One found in Taine and not shared by Henke.

If I were to give the opposition a good articulation of what Henke only sketches out, it would go like this:

matter and energy are ultimately determining all of reality, by chain reactions going back to past eternal or to the Big Bang and CSL is right that this level of determination, described by the laws of physics, would never by itself lead to reason or morality;
however, against Taine, meaning CSL is strawmanning us by reducing us to Taine, their determinations extend only to certain directions, leaving a certain amount of indetermination, like the sudoku solutions that have 3 or 5 alternatives, given the start and the rules, and this leaves room for complexity to create its own chains of determination, and mind, language, reason, morality all belong to this sphere, via evolution after abiogenesis;
and while he is correct that natural selection does not actively select for reason and morality, only for survival fitness, it happens in other instances too that their mechanisms of culling happen to select for something more than qualified for survival fitness, since that, rather than the bare survival fitness is what is available, meaning that language, reason and morality can give us these advantages along with survival fitness, because the thing enhancing survival fitness that was selected for also involved these;
and as mechanisms can reflect universally valid truth, like a computer reflects mathematics, so these conscious mechanisms (consciousness being also a plus above survival fitness) can reflect universally valid truths of reason, and reflection give us reason to believe we have discovered so, while morality need not be universal, just human-universal, given our evolutionary disposition (crocodiles, piranhas, sharks and spiders having no taboo against cannibalism, we seem to have developed ours after the palaeolithic).

Two big problems with this solution involve simple creationist criticism of evolution, no need to go to CSL Miracles - 1) known evolutionary mechanisms explain selection of new traits once they exist, but cannot explain a new function, since each function normally involves several genes, and since one mutation can certainly render a gene wholly or partially dysfunctional, but is definitely not enough to constitute it from scratch or from a gene for another function 2) human language cannot credibly be derived from ape vocal or gestual communications, since these do not involve notionality and are not doubly articulated.

A somewhat smaller problem is, indeterminism as such does not determine anything, and any chain of determination, even if partially independent in some direction from matter and energy, would arise for non-rational functions. My ordering obviously involves putting Creationist reasons above the Lewisian ones. Good he found one, though, when still missing out on these, as he did in 1947, first edition of his work.

He also failed to realize that the burden of evidence for miracles are on those that argue for miracles. Despite his often vague rambling, Lewis (1960) presents no evidence of miracles.

He absolutely did not do so. He most definitely considered, once naturalism was out of the way, once dualism and pantheism were out of the way too, and once deistic views on "impropriety" of miracles were out of the way, it definitely was up to an examination of history to check if God had in fact chosen to speak to us through miracles.

The chapters named The Grand Miracle, Miracles of the Old Creation, Miracles of the New Creation deal with providing historic proof accompanied with metaphysic discussion of propriety (within general Theism) of the miracle of God become man, born in Bethlehem, of the miracles He worked that shortcut natural processes, and of the miracles involving reversal of death. In other words, in the end CSL is providing at once historic proof and metaphysical answer to objections, for Christianity. Did Henke even arrive at those chapters? Because, his distaste for what he considers as "vague rambling" seems to have been a possible obstacle against his actually arriving there. In the 2012 paperback (translated to French 2018) they are on the pages 173 to 275.

The only way to demonstrate the existence of the supernatural is to have it demonstrated under strictly controlled conditions with multiple investigators from diverse backgrounds. These investigations would certainly involve logic and mathematics, but not any unnecessary pedantic and flawed metaphysical arguments.

How about necessary, unpedantic, and correct metaphysical arguments? Ah, is that not on Henke's board? Well, sorry, Henke is metaphysically illiterate, then.

As an example, someone might claim that he witnessed a “prophet” raising a cat from the dead. Obviously, this claim could be a lie or a misinterpretation.

Under some, but not other circumstance. Depending on the historic case by case probability of either, which again varies according to your world view.

So, how could anyone confirm that this prophet has the ability to raise animals from the dead? The only reliable way is to test the prophet under strictly controlled conditions. First, you collect a DNA sample from a cat that has just died. Get three veterinarians to independently confirm that the cat is indeed dead. Next, place the cat in a well-secured storage area where it can rot for a week. Then under strictly controlled conditions involving videos, get the prophet to raise the cat from the dead. If the cat comes back to life, immediately collect another DNA sample to confirm that it’s the same cat.

And someone could then proceed to say "no, the live cat was a homozygotic twin, or deliberate clone, of the dead cat." Or even (historically!) deny that the test had even taken place.

Let’s say that someone was actually able on their own without technological assistance to resurrect a cat from the dead.

Just to clarify : there is no technological way of resurrecting anyone or anything. Not a man, not a cat.

Perhaps, he lays his hands on dead animals, prays, and in all cases the animals come back to life. Now, some superskeptics might simply argue that the individual has discovered a new, but totally natural, way of resurrecting the dead and that the supernatural remains undemonstrated. For example, someone might argue that aliens from space could have hidden advanced technologies or natural powers that would allow them to resurrect dead animals even after a week. The process would look supernatural to our primitive minds even though natural law was not violated.

Henke, as mentioned, fails to distinguish "needing an agency other than those described by natural laws" and "needing a violation of some natural law" - the former is, the latter is not, the correct definition of a miracle.

Yeah, of course there are Raelians and similar who are willing to swallow any historical miracle, but deny its miraculousness, claiming it is based on natural processes explored or natural technologies invented by extra-terrestrials. Similarily, Buddhists might accept their occurrence, while denying their miraculosity, by claiming it was a rare configuration of appearances.

It is said that advanced technologies appear as “magic” to less technical societies. If this is a genuine concern,

Yes, the problem is precisely what are the genuine concerns. That is where metaphysics comes in. Or, the other method, going as agnostic to history, seeing whether the miraculous is indeed impossible or possible according to if it never happened or sometimes happened, and go on and explain it from there.

have the “prophet” do a bigger task, such as producing a complete solar system from nothing within a light year of Earth. The prophet could be given six days to do it.

That's a task for God, not for prophets - or rather, it is not a task for God. He already did it.

Now, someone might groundlessly speculate that in a million years people might develop the technology to raise the dead or create solar systems from nothing – ex nihilo creation. Maybe, but if humans every gain the ability through either technology, now unknown natural powers or magic to raise the dead or create entire solar systems from nothing; that is, utterly control space and time, then they might meet the definitions of a god and they might deserve the right to be called gods. However, that doesn’t mean that they deserve worship as gods. Their moral character still may be quite human and flawed. Nevertheless, I’m skeptical that humans will ever be able to do ex nihilo creation and resurrect the decayed dead.

I'm not mildly skeptical, I totally exclude it.

Now, I fully understand that a god, prophet, psychic, ghost, demon, or angel probably would never agree to submit to testing,

What if they already did? What if the problem is Henke's disconcern with actually looking up historic claims and looking at historic probabilities. There are far closer ones with far better documentation than miracles from 2000 years ago.

but this is the only way to verify the supernatural.

No, it would be the only scientific way to verify the supernatural as a part of the natural world. Which is a very huge strawman.

So, believers in the supernatural are in the unfortunate position of not being able to demonstrate that their claims are real. Too bad for them. Nevertheless, skeptics have no rational reason to lower their standards so that believers’ likely nonsense could be labeled as reality. Advocates of the supernatural have to find some way to meet strict scientific standards and demonstrate their claims.

How about strict historic ones, but given that history faculties may have procedures a priori excluding miracles, and these would not be equal to strict historic standard?

Concerning my high standards for verifying the existence of a supernatural event or being, Lundahl (2022a) replies:

“Will you ‘lower it’ confronted with the fact that your ‘standard’ is not consistent with how we have historical knowledge?”

Well, they are not high, they are beside the point, and as said inconsistent with how we have historic knowledge.

Of course not. Others might be willing to lower their standards for studying the past so that Mr. Lundahl can label likely fairy tales as “history”,

There is no historic reason to label the things I examplified as "fairy tales" and an a priori metaphysical prejudice against miracles is not a high standard of history. There is a reason why I put "lower it" in quotation marks, as I referred to only his own evaluation of it being high, not to an actual lowering.

but I won’t and neither should anyone else that studies past events.

Let's be clear, the man is a geologist, we first started discussing over a piece of geology he had presented in a video, and when I asked for a experiment to test my idea, this topic petered out. As he had mentioned his takes on history in passing, and while this is not his topic, I decided to demonstrate, he bungles history as bad as or worse than I bungle geology, which admittedly isn't my subject.

He has, as geologist, no business whatsoever, to state that past supernatural events only become credible when the supernatural has been scientifically tested as a really just normal part of normal natural reality, not sufficiently extraordinary to even warrant the reasonable conclusion that God did it. The reason God on occasion did miracles was precisely to prove that He both had existence, attendance, powers enough to control our situation, and that He had chosen such and such a thing as revealing His will for us. It could not be done if miracles were just an ordinary, if unusual, and not too easy to access part of humdrum everyday reality.

I will not lower my standards at all to comply with what he views as being “consistent” with historical knowledge, when he readily mixes angels, demons and other groundless claims with reality to explain both the past and present. Lundahl (2022a-g) is engaging in mythmaking and speculation, and not appropriate historical investigations. I am consistent in my very conservative interpretations of both human and geological history, and I see no evidence whatsoever to inject the supernatural into either of them.

And the problem is, he has very little clue how human history is really conducted. He believes he is consistent, he is not.

Any literate individual can write and make up anything.

OK, make up what really happened in the Texas shooting, and make the world believe Salvador Ramos killed no one and mildly scared 21 people, and see if you can make a community - not just an isolated individual depending too much on your word - believe that.

This is exactly why Mormon apologists are so desperate to verify the Book of Mormon with archeology. They know very well that Joseph Smith Jr. or others could have made up the Book of Mormon. They recognize that they need external evidence to confirm that the Book of Mormon is history.

They also very well know the normal external evidence for the text, namely a memory of events it refers to in the whole community before Joseph Smith, is totally lacking. And I know, even if Henke forgets, that they have still not managed to hide this even to themselves, since they still pretend it was recovered by angelic intervention with golden plates and supernatural gifts of interpretation, rather than simply kept, like Abraham Lincoln had simplky kept the memory of what had happened "fourscore years ago and ten" back from his Ghettysburg adress.

Well, the same problem exists for Genesis and Exodus.

No, it does not. Exodus was accepted as historic by Israelites since it was written soon after the event, partly even while it was yet ongoing.

Genesis was accepted as historic by them, and this means, as corresponding to their memories of earlier days, whether Abraham or before. No one pretended Moses was uncovering hitherto in the immediate past unknown things about Noah, and no one pretended Ezra had discovered Exodus as a hitherto unknown account of history. There was a discovery, but the point is, the news for those reading it were the precise content of the laws, things less easy to recall by popular tradition than a series of events.

It could have been made up by a “prophet” as I discuss in Section 5.0.

I'm prepared for a facepalm .... let's go to sections 5 and 6.

In this case, this statement might be true. Scientists might eventually find some natural snakes that can talk and are intelligent. That is, a snake that can have a conversation and not simply mimic voices like a parrot. Scientists would then have to determine how the snake talked. If the snake had no voice box and no speech capabilities in the brain, then we would have to seriously consider the possibility that the snake has some unknown, and possibly, supernatural powers. This would require more testing. Nevertheless, Mr. Lundahl needs to provide some actual evidence that there’s a snake somewhere that is smart and capable enough to carry on a conversation. Just speculating that a talking snake is somehow naturally possible to promote Genesis 3 isn’t good enough. Anyone can imagine any wild idea and then somehow claim that it’s “possible.”

But I never speculated that talking snakes are naturally possible. I ironised over Henke's demand of showing that natural possibility. It is not setting a high standard for evidence to demand proof to substantiate a total strawman on the claim someone is actually making. Imagine this conversation:

- "Mr. Hitler should accord to all citizens and residents of Germany the integrity of their bodies, and defend them against sterilisation."
- "Prove to me that people with a lower IQ than 80 don't exist!"

It's a straw man, the point against eugenics is that people with a lower IQ than 80 should also not be sterilised. Even people with Downs' syndrome shouldn't. Even if a teen with Downs rapes a young girl, she shouldn't be either forced or even allowed to abort. The whole point is, people with low or permanently immature intelligence may in some ways be a nuisance, but being a nuisance is not a valid reason to be eliminated, before or after conception. And precisely so, the point on demanding proof for talking snakes is not a high standard in science, but a strawman in history and metaphysics.

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.

Henke pretended I, by responding in more than one single page, in separately conceived and therefore separately presented essays, was dispersing the debate, here is a prime example of his doing so, by giving parallel examples as "proof" against my principle, and I am forced to discuss it - or leave the arguments unanswered. AND as at least two of the arguments are presented with links and each link provides arguments, that gives me more arguments to respond to than Henke is pretending to actually make.

This is partly literally failing to account for my already dealing with the difference I made between believing an event as historic and believing a principle enunced in a work of fiction, which is something the author could believe about the real world as well as illustrate in his fiction, and could be right to believe about the real world. In his fiction about Father Brown, Chesterton enounced as a principle anti-Catholics are often ill informed - I believe Chesterton believed this about the real world, and Kevin R. Henke illustrates the point. There is a connexion between Father Brown and the Force : Sir Alec Guiness (RIP). Before he played Obi Wan Kenobi in the earliest published Star Wars film, and two more, he had played Father Brown. As he walked back to his hotel, not changing, a boy taking him for a priest, asked him to walk him home and simply took his hand with total confidence. Certain abuses would have been very rare back then, and unknown or virtually so, in Normandy, where this happened (a Catholic in Paris is to one in Normandy, as a Protestant in NYC to one in the Bible belt). He started to look things up and converted.

Now, the Force was already discussed in our correspondence:

Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl : Continued Correspondence with Kevin : XV - XXVIII
https://correspondentia-ioannis-georgii.blogspot.com/2022/02/continued-correspondence-with-kevin-xv.html

In mail XV, Kevin R. Henke to me, 2/18/2022 at 1:29 AM (Paris time), he said:

There are millions of Americans that actually believe that Columbus proved that the Earth was round and that he landed in what is now the United States. There are people that believe that "The Force" exists. They knew nothing about Eastern religions until they saw Star Wars.

Let's take both statements in turn. And, as I did it back in mail XVI, Me to Kevin R. Henke, 2/18/2022 at 1:37 PM (Paris time), here:

"There are millions of Americans that actually believe that Columbus proved that the Earth was round and that he landed in what is now the United States."

Which is not about non-events, just a distorted account of actual events.

He and Magellan did prove you could sail around the Earth, against people who predicted that too far West storms would make that impossible, or that they could not sail all the way from Spain to Japan on provisions a caravell could take along and didn't know there was a landmass in between. And he did come to the Americas, there is just a confusion between the Americas and the US which is colloquially named "America".

"There are people that believe that "The Force" exists. They knew nothing about Eastern religions until they saw Star Wars."

They don't take Luke Skywalker's childhood on Tatooine as history, which is a case in my point. There is a vast difference between changing outlook due to a work of fiction and believing the work of fiction as history.

It seems, Henke can't see that a point has been already answered. He's content to repeat, rather than try to show despite my answer how popular beliefs about Columbus or in the Force still prove his point despite my answers.

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.

He already said so much in letter XV:

There are partial copies of Genesis in the Dead Sea scrolls, but the bottom line is that we don't know who wrote Genesis 3 or when. It's very possible that the writer sincerely thought that Genesis 3 was an inspiration from God about events that occurred thousands of years ago from the author's time. However, that does not make it history any more than the ramblings of Joseph Smith about supposed events that occurred in the Americas thousands of years ago before him or the delusions or lies of Kat Kerr about "Christmas Town" in Heaven. It does not take very long for a charismatic con-man to form a religion and get millions to believe fiction and half-truths - Mohammad or Joseph Smith. Any blood relationships of Mormons to 18th and 19th century novelists doesn't matter at all. The point is that there are millions of people believing that fiction was actually ancient history.

Me in letter XVI, and I start with last first:

Mormonism doesn't qualify, because all Mormons know perfectly well that this "true" history isn't part of their normal historic collective memory as Europeans, nor a heritage from actually speaking to Indians, but a revelation or "lost manuscript refound". This is not "pedantic trivia" but absolutely essential to my case.

...

"We have millions of Americans that believe that false prophets like Kat Kerr regularly go to Heaven and see Jesus and theme parks there."

That is not properly speaking historical. It's allegedly prophetical. I have no clue who Kat Kerr is and therefore not whether he [she] is a true or false prophet, but suspect the latter. Please note, the one series of events in Genesis we have from prophecy rather than history is the Six Day account.

...

"There are partial copies of Genesis in the Dead Sea scrolls, but the bottom line is that we don't know who wrote Genesis 3 or when."

There is a Xth C. manuscript of Caesar in Carolingian France. Are you saying we don't know Caesar wrote the Commentarii de Bello Gallico? This is exactly where I as a Classicist can give you the context you lack of what comparative evidence is needed in comparative cases. You said you have studied YEC for 40 + years. But I have studied a lot of other things, which have helped to prepare me for that debate during the same 40 + years.

"It's very possible that the writer sincerely thought that Genesis 3 was an inspiration from God about events that occurred thousands of years ago from the author's time."

Not the least. What he sincerely thought about Genesis 3 is what he sincerely thought about Genesis 50 : that it was part of a history handed down to him. That's the kind of fake you don't make with con-men. Sure "past history" is a thing they can and do fake, as freemasons and Joseph Smith prove. But no Mormon grows up thinking II Nephi was a chronicle Joseph Smith came across at the local library. The "information bottleneck" shows. Namely, by his belief that this "history" was first lost and then recovered by an angelic being showing Joseph Smith some golden plates with a funny writing on them.

What has traditionally been ascribed to "revelation" was the Six Days account, which is tradionally ascribed to Moses receiving it on Mount Sinai. The rest is history. As history, not revealed by vision or audition from heaven.

And again, when I say "history" I don't mean it is immediately proven accurate, I mean the potential sources for non-factual statements are fewer than with fiction presented as fiction.

And, here we have a real actual argument dealing with one of mine. A nugget! I'll take a coffee to celebrate it! Ah, fine, thin coffee, with one sugar and two milk, I'm ready!

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 11th 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.

Here is his core point:

For his hypothetical 20-year-olds, Lundahl (2022d) simply assumes that they would accurately remember the details of the events many years later.

Mine is, it is easier to recall the words you make on an event or someone else told you about an event, in a short text, than it is to recall the vivid details of the event correctly. I have compared the early chapters of Genesis, which I consider to have been transmitted at least at some point orally (maximally for Genesis 3, all the way from Adam and Eve driven from the garden or them telling Cain about it as a child a few years later to Abraham setting out to serve with his Beduin tribe God, with writing material at their disposal, and minimally, Sarug read it in written form, but his son and grandson took it away and he had to transmit it from memory to Abraham), as to text length, to creeds and to songs of the Homeric epics.

Creation vs. Evolution : Length of Two Texts
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2019/11/length-of-two-texts.html

Creation vs. Evolution : 6078 Words
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/12/6078-words.html

Long story short, once a memory is verbalised in a short text, and the sooner this happens after the event, the more accurate it is likely to be, if the text is rehearsed by self and by others learning from one, it will be correctly transmitted more likely than incorrectly. Known text versions on the Iliad basically involve things like an invocation to Apollon rather than to the Muse in the beginning of Iliad A. It's not a question of diverging accounts of events. And this despite Homeric songs being transmitted orally from Homer to the time of the Sons of Peisistratus. Milman Parry confirmed an overall accurate memory (though inclusion and exclusion of details could vary from performance to performance) of a text as long as the Vitovdan epic:

Parry’s career as a classicist lasted about fifteen years, from the first Greek courses he took until his sudden death, in 1935, at the age of thirty-three. He published no books and only a few papers. His most important research, undertaken in the last years of his life, involved travelling to remote areas of Yugoslavia to make recordings of local singers, whose improvised songs offered clues about how the Homeric epics might have been performed millennia earlier. These recordings revolutionized the understanding of oral literature, but when Parry died no one had yet listened to them; they were just a pile of thirty-five hundred aluminum disks sitting in a Harvard storage room.

The Newyorker : The Classicist Who Killed Homer
How Milman Parry proved that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by a lone genius.
By Adam Kirsch, June 7, 2021
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/14/the-classicist-who-killed-homer

Note the title is tendentious. What he proved is, Homer did not write and he used already in-use formulas (while he could have invented a few extra ones himself). The composition was made for oral transmission.

There are two main ways to achieve faithful oral transmission : easily recognisable features along the text (like dactylic metre and epic formulas) and simply shortness. Homer and Serbian bards have the former, Genesis 1 to 11 and Austrian legends (mostly more historical than Paracelsus' "kiss the penny" episode) have the latter. This is a very different story from trying to recall 60 years later what you had experienced yourself and not verbalised. There is however another aspect to this:

For his hypothetical 20-year-olds, Lundahl (2022d) simply assumes that they would accurately remember the details of the events many years later.

We are not dealing with all the overlapping generations of the transmission, we are reducing to a minimally overlapping generations - the limits of which involve when your new learners can no longer refer to your oldest teacher but needs to refer to you (or to older pupils of his).

We are also not dealing with a single line of transmission unsupported by parallel transmissions in other lineages. A Homeric bard in Athens could verify with a Homeric bard in Korinth, if they met before Peisistratus. A Yugoslav bard in Belgrade could confer with a bard in Kosovo, before Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës took over some areas. While the main responsibility of recalling the lineage in Genesis 5 was on that lineage, not on the Cainite one in Genesis 4, it did mirror the genealogy on the line from Cain to Lamech and his sons, and probably both had a recall of Genesis 3, and the Cainite one had a mirror of the Genesis 5 genealogy.

So, no, the transmission conditions would be far from hopeless or from totally unreliable.

Here is a list of problems posed me:

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

Totally uncorrupted is not needed. A historic event is still historic, even if inaccurate. With that in mind, inaccuracies don't tend to radically change the nature of external events. Saying Theoderic defeated Ermaneric at Ravenna is inaccurate, but Theoderic and Ermaneric were both involved in battles that took place at Ravenna, just different ones.

And the "without any mythology" makes me desire to repost a meme from Princess Bride (original object of the meme being another word, namely "love"). Mythology is not just "added" when it comes to heroic legend rather than divine myth, it is either accurate or inaccurate transmission of history.

Where is the evidence that Moses and Adam even lived?

In the traditions from them, written and oral, as preserved in the collective memory of the Hebrews.

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

Earliest known audience of Genesis considered Moses as the author.

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 8th from Adam, there’s absolutely no evidence or reason to trust this claim (Price 2017, pp. 59-92).

I did very much not state that Moses was the eighth generation of fathers and sons.

[Adam 1 - Noah 10], Shem 11, Arphaxad 12, Sale 13, Heber 14, Phaleg 15, Reu 16, Sarug 17, Nachor 18, Thare 19, Abram / Abraham 20, Isaac 21, Jacob 22, Levi 23, Caath 24, Amram 25, Moses 26. Or with a second Cainan between Arphaxad and Sale, Moses is 27.

I also did not state I agreed with Haydock that Moses was the 8th (as per Vulgate) rather than (mostly LXX chronology) 12th from Adam in a "minimally overlapping" parts of a transmission, the significance of which is the limits of these minimal overlaps involve when your new learners can no longer refer to your oldest teacher but needs to refer to you (or to older pupils of his). On the other hand, if Moses had writings going back to Abraham (when Hebrews became a Beduin tribe capable of transporting writing as a very small and yet rich part of the luggage), Abraham would be from Adam, as overlapping generations capable of transmitting without intermediate go, 6th from Adam.

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.

To this day, Mormons have not considered these genealogies as normally transmitted lore up to Joseph Smith, they still show they pass it off as something that was revealed to him. The purported normal transmission ceased around 400 AD and the last purported product of it in writing was then "miraculously" revealed to Joseph Smith. You do not need to bring it up again, it may be a dear speaking point to you, but as for this debate, I have already answered it several times over.

Millions of people believe in the Book of Mormon,

Yes, as mentioned, it is a case study on how gullibility preserves the trace of the probable fraud.

astrology and other nonsense.

Astrology is a totally different story. You usually do not believe a certain battle happened because a horoscope for 2 August 216 BC shows (if it does so) Mars in some prominent position (Mars for battle) and Venus (for Rome) in a weak position. You believe it happened because Livy says so. It is called the Battle of Cannae.

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.

The most stark cases of something achieving a false status of history involve prophecy (as with Joseph Smith) or "historic science" as with geology posing as a key to understanding what million year span a rock is from.

Just because stories became popular and were viewed as history by ancient people, why should we believe their opinions on history?

Henke has not given one example of a fictional story enjoyed as such becoming first popular and then confused with history. Oh, wait, William Tell and Catholic Saints, we'll need an extra post for these.

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”.

Office gossip is at the very first a historical or pseudo-historical, not a fictional, type of statement. The book of Mormon has not acquired the status as normally transmitted history, it still has (for those believing it) a status of lost history recovered in such a manner as to make for suspicions about the purported recovery being fraudulent. And "countless urban legends" is not citing even one of them.

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.

Yes, and a lie, unlike a fiction, is a historic statement. When Washington Irving wrote a novel on Columbus, he was kind of making overall a historic statement on him, and this historic statement involves the falsehood he discovered the roundness of earth, which he did not do, and it is very closely related to on the one hand a historic truth, he and Magellan between them proving earth circumnavigable (and Magellan thereby providing a final proof the Earth is round, rather than the three more conjectural proofs), and it is also very closely related to an agenda of painting the Middle Ages as gullible, ignorant people.

Why should we take the views of an ancient and often superstitious people as authoritative on anything?

I suppose your Dutch ancestry in Niew Amsterdam believed the superstitions of the Dordrecht synod, the infamous Calvinist TULIP - which you as a near atheist would arguably decry as much as I, a Catholic do. Why should we believe them when they state so and so had a son who was named such and such and all of this leading up to yourself? For obviously, the one recording was not an enlightened believer in Dewey's philosophy, but a superstitious believer in Calvinism!

You see the point on why superstitious people should be believed on historic events, right?

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?

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.

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

Because Moses is recalled as the author. By the earliest known audience. To an atheist, who has specific reasons in his atheism to disbelieve the Exodus story, this will not be good enough - but for others it will and similar reasons are clearly sufficient for texts purportedly by Arrian (about Alexander) or by Caesar (about himself).

and he doesn’t have a shred of evidence that Moses even existed?

Again, Exodus meets for authorship the criterium of being by Moses, a participant, by being believed to be so by earliest known audience. As Arrian's work on Alexander meets the authorshop criterium of being based on accounts by participants (two generals of Alexander, the accounts of which are now lost) by his giving his own word for it - and being believed by earliest known audience, whose belief is at least a reason to believe that Arrian wrote it - but they could have been gullible about Arrian's purported sources.

Because conartists frequently promote lies and millions of gullible people often believe them (e.g., Joseph Smith Jr. and Putin)

Have I said otherwise? Take any historic fact. Theoretically it could be a lie, theoretically it could be a misunderstanding. But you do not normally prefer these hypothetical possibilities over the verdict of earliest known audience. You may verbally deny the criterium and pretend you do not apply it to Alexander and Caesar, but in fact you do, and your pretence of knowing them sufficiently on other grounds is inconsistent.

and because Mr. Lundahl is making a specific claim that a Talking Snake existed and defied everything we know about reptile physiology,

It doesn't defy a bit of reptile physiology if an angel vocalised through the hissings of the snake.

Mr. Lundahl has the burden of evidence, and not me, to demonstrate that Genesis 3 is history

It was taken so by earliest known audience. Feel free to offer suggestions on why it is false history, but that is a totally different category from fiction, and also from "miraculously recovered" (Joseph Smith) or "secretly preserved and recently published" (freemasonry and Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code - where it features within an actual work of fiction) categories of para-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.

The earliest known audience that accepted Genesis 3 wrote the Dead Sea scrolls

That criterium would make a copyist in a French monastery c. 900 AD the earliest audience for Caesar's Bellum Gallicum.

and lived thousands of years after the supposed event in the Garden of Eden. How did they reliably know the origin of Genesis 3 any more than we do?

As far as we can judge, they went by an earlier tradition. This is as much as conservative Christians do, and more than people do who reconstruct fantastic accounts for when Ezra invented Moses. Their criteria are such that they could as well pretend Apollonius of Rhodes had invented Homer and written the Iliad (oldest surviving verses are 13 verses on a clay tablet from some time before 3rd C AD, which is at the latest 500 years after Apollonius.

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Imagine Someone Said: Apollonius Rhodus Wrote Iliad and Odyssey
https://filolohika.blogspot.com/2014/08/imagine-someone-said-apollonius-rhodus.html

How does Mr. Lundahl know that Genesis 3 is history? Was he there?

No. And neither were you at the battles of Granicus and Lake Geneva, Alexander and Caesar.

So, where is the evidence? Why should we believe Mr. Lundahl and Hypothesis #1?

Earliest known audience.

Lundahl (2022d) needed to give a decent reference for Haydock and why we should even believe Haydock’s opinions of Genesis.

Yeah, forgot Henke's basically total lack of Catholic culture.

HAYDOCK CATHOLIC BIBLE COMMENTARY
https://www.ecatholic2000.com/haydock/title.shtml

This Catholic commentary on the Old Testament, following the Douay-Rheims Bible text, was originally compiled by Catholic priest and biblical scholar Rev. George Leo Haydock (1774-1849). This transcription is based on Haydock's notes as they appear in the 1859 edition of Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary printed by Edward Dunigan and Brother, New York, New York.

mardi 24 mai 2022

The Philosophy of History of Henke : Given without References, Refuted without References

unless a claim in an ancient history is confirmed with independent external evidence, either in another manuscript or from archeology, there’s no reason to accept it as reliable history. There’s a big difference between an historical claim and a reliable historical claim.

This involves two things, from my perspective, as I disagree with the first, and agree with the second, with a qualification:

(1) unless a claim in an ancient history is confirmed with independent external evidence, either in another manuscript or from archeology, there’s no reason to accept it as reliable history.

This is where I diagree, and which would make Alexander's carreere unknowable. And lots of other things.

(2) There’s a big difference between an historical claim and a reliable historical claim.

Indeed. but the difference is bigger between any historical claim and straightforward fiction. This is key to my argument.

The rest actually is a padding on the routine token methodology of historians (dealing with ancient history).

(2 bis) In his second essay, Lundahl (2022b) complains that when I rank a supernatural event as “highly unlikely”, I’m taking my worldview “as a test of historic facthood.” Actually, I’m ranking supernatural events as highly unlikely because I see absolutely no evidence of the supernatural.

The reference is to On Verifying the Supernatural.

Henke sees no evidence "of the supernatural" because he discounts all historic accounts of supernatural events, and he discounts all historic accounts of supernatural events, because he sees no evidence "of the supernatural." Anyone (except Henke, so far) detect a "circulus vitiosus in probando?"

After this, Henke directly goes to what at least he considers as bad evidence of the supernatural, as if this automatically meant there were never good evidence for the supernatural, while generalising this into a non sequitur and very hazy model for how supernatural events could be made up and believed. Here is the whole passage:

I think that it’s far more probable that someone just made up the supernatural story and that enough gullible people believed it, so that it was recorded for future generations. Recently, I saw TV “prophets” frequently making demonstrably false prophecies about covid disappearing in March 2020 and false claims of miraculous healings and other miracles. In recent history, Joseph Smith Jr. made numerous well-documented false prophecies.

And here is the analysis, bit by bit:

(3) I think that it’s far more probable that someone just made up the supernatural story and that enough gullible people believed it, so that it was recorded for future generations.

Let's see how he tries to examplify this:

(4) Recently, I saw TV “prophets” frequently making demonstrably false prophecies about covid disappearing in March 2020 and false claims of miraculous healings and other miracles.

I do not know or claim to know if the claims of healings are false or true. Let's stick with the demonstrably false prophecy : "covid will disappear in March 2020" - is it anywhere near likely that future generations, however gullible, will remember this as "covid disappeared in March 2020, as pastor so and so predicted?

(5) In recent history, Joseph Smith Jr. made numerous well-documented false prophecies.

Is this about the book of Mormon? This would be of interest to the case. While Mormons do believe Nephites are a historically accurate book, they also do not believe it was transmitted as history in a normal way, instead they still recall it as "supernaturally recovered history" which is something else.

Or if it is about prophecies Joseph Smith was making about the future. In that case, it is very significant that they are usually not remembered by Mormons even (or, if ever recalled by someone else, explained away, very discretely, with a kind of gatekeeping attitude about it). Very far from proving anything near Henke's scepticism on history involving at least seemingly supernatural events, it basically proves the opposite.

(6) Ancient people also made up numerous far-fetched stories about gods and goddesses that few people now believe and no one should believe.

This very disingeniously bypasses my distinction between "divine myth" and "heroic legend" - and the ways in which either is supposed to be in any way known by those back then believing them.

I confirm that no one should believe Chaos gave birth to Gaia, Eros, Erebos and Nyx, and Gaia then to Ouranos. It is also not in any usual way a historic claim. The historic claim involved is, Nine Muses revealed this to Hesiod. And to Hesiod alone.

This is a very far call from Achilles facing battle after battle with no wound - which was explained by his mother being a goddess who had gotten half way through the process of making him into a god. Francisco Franco faced battle after battle on the Rif, and was never wounded, and Muslims on the Rif had their fairly superstitious stories about why this was. We should believe Franco wasn't wounded, we should not believe in the superstitions on how you become what is called "kugelfest" in German. Dito with the difference between Achilles and his lack of wounds, and the "divine mother" - similarily, believing Romulus founded Rome doesn't involve believing Mars was his actual physical father or even existed, and believing "Hercules was a strong man, not a god / not God" does not involve believing Zeus was his father or even existed. Unlike Gaia and Ouranos, Achilles, Romulus and Hercules have evidence of the type I classify as historical.

Now, Hesiod getting a revelation from the Muses is confirmed by no miracles, but Moses getting revelations from God is confirmed by miracle after miracle - according to the kind of evidence I consider as historical. The amount of material in Genesis that depends on Moses' getting a revelation is basically the six days account - the rest involve human observers and an at least theoretical lineage of memory, and this involves Genesis 3. Very few aspects would need Moses or some other previous person to be prophetically known - it would involve the identity of the four rivers and the divine plan behind the confusion of languages at Babel - that behind driving Adam and Eve out could have been known directly to them.

Now, see again how Henke introduces the topic of "Greek mythology:"

(6) Ancient people also made up numerous far-fetched stories about gods and goddesses that few people now believe and no one should believe.

It's a sweeping statement. No difference is made between Ouranos and Gaia (where the stories are indeed about gods and goddesses in the main) and heroic legend, which being mainly about human actors (though seen as interacting on some planes with gods and goddesses) are seen as having human observers. I don't feel like taking Ulysses' word for his men being literally turned into pigs or Hercules' for getting down to Hades to fetch Cerberus, but their shooting of the wooers or killing of a lion had human observers apart from themselves. Indeed, Henke will not believe a place was infested with a hydra and I will believe it was a demonic manifestation, and we will disagree there, but so much could be explained by things both Henke and I believe possible, there is no reason to disagree with his descendants later returning to the Peloponnese and becoming kings of Sparta. Except in Henke's case, he thinks it's an argument that his birthmyth is impossible (which as it stands I agree it is, in some parts, though the snakes could have been brought by demons who also helped his tiny hands tie them in a knot) and involves false deities (which I agree are false) and a false explanation of the Milky Way, and being lumped together with Hesiod's Ouranos and Gaia thing.

Hercules having lived was believed to be a historic fact, making it at least a historic claim. That false explanations and fictions are involved in the overall story doesn't justify taking all of it as a fiction and somehow glossing over how it came to be taken as overall historic. And there is even less of that in Achilles or Romulus.

Ouranos and Gaia may have been believed as a prophetic revelation, given to Hesiod, or it may be more like make-believe. Indeed, that is how Chesterton classes it. St. Hippolytus of Rome considers a materialistic and superstitious Zarathustra equalling Ham, grandfather of Nimrod, as the first, and Homer and Hesiod as the last of the philosophers - and the non-Homeric philosophies, if such before him, in that case survived him.

Now Henke likes to quizz me on my stating my sources, but he gives this sweeping statement without either source or proof. Here is how I would analyse it:

(6 a) Ancient people also made up numerous far-fetched stories about gods and goddesses

Correct for Ouranos and Gaia, unless the nine muses were demons, in which case "people" is the wrong word. Incorrect about Hercules, Achilles and Romulus.

(6 b) that few people now believe

Fortunately true for Ouranos and Gaia, undortunately true of Hercules, Achilles and Romulus.

(6 c) and no one should believe.

Agreeing about Ouranos and Gaia, I disagree about Hercules, Achilles and Romulus.

When it comes to their "divine parents" no Atheist or Christian should believe these, but I can't force Hindus and Shintoists into that mold. They are usually very marginal to the story anyway. Most relevant when Theseus asks "his father Poseidon" to kill his son, whom he considers an incestuously adulterous mind, having tried a horrible crime, and "his father Poseidon" grants it. An Atheist will shake his head and be at a loss, I am reminded of diabolical contracts. Of "all the gods of the gentiles are demons" - also very true of Apollon in the Iliad song one and in much of the Greek Tragedy. When it comes to Oedipus, I'm afraid an Atheist will take it as pure coincidence that a young girl in an alpha state said words which, when believed, triggered their own fulfilment, while I take it, a demon controlled her imagination in that occasion (not because of the alpha state as such, but because she had deliberately invoked Apollo or whatever deity it was they actually consulted back in Oedipus' days). We'll agree to disagree. But if Henke asks me for references to demons existing, Iliad I, Aeneid VI, most of Greek Tragedy are clear extra-biblical references to me.

This is the point of the distinction I made between "divine myths" and "heroic legends" - that heroic legends are handed down as history, divine myths as prophecy, guesswork or reconstruction (the latter being also the case for Evolutionism).

And this is very pertinent to the case about Alexander, more on whom later, since I take it, Maccabees author, Arrian and a few more had more or less equal access to Alexander's life as Homer to Achilles' or Ulysses'.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Sts Manahen and Joan
24.V.2022

Antiochiae natalis sancti Manahen, qui fuit Herodis Tetrarchae collactaneus, atque, Doctor et Propheta exsistens sub gratia novi Testamenti, in eadem urbe quievit. Item beatae Joannae, uxoris Chusae, procuratoris Herodis, quam Lucas Evangelista commemorat.

Creation vs. Evolution

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