Resuming at Henke(2022bL) after Interruption, up to 2022br.

What Henke Responded - up to "Henke2022aa" (with ab and ai looked up in advance, since referred to in previous) · Ah, Some New · Back to Philosophy · Beginning on Henke2022az? Nope. · Why Catalogue the Supernatural? Why Catalogue Fiction? · Henke(2022bi) Starts It Today! But I only get to Henke(2022bk) For Now. · New Batch of Henke Essays · Resuming at Henke(2022bL) after Interruption, up to 2022br. · Why Did I Bring Up Greek Myth? · Historicity of Certain Religious Stories, Notably Genesis

Henke (2022bL): “A Lot of Gullible People Believe Lies”

Even though the Mormons readily admit that Joseph Smith Jr. “miraculously” translated the Book of Mormon into English, they would argue that the original gold plates were an inerrant “history” finished by Moroni around the 5th century AD. The plates were then carefully preserved in the ground from the 5th to the 19th century until Joseph Smith Jr. recovered them. The Mormons would further argue that the “first known audience” of the Book of Mormon were the Jews that wrote the “history” on the golden plates and not the 19th century Americans.

Inerrant is not the salient portion.

Recovered is.

The plates were then carefully preserved in the ground from the 5th to the 19th century until Joseph Smith Jr. recovered them.

Yes. Not "history" then, but "lost and spectacularily recovered history" which is another thing.

And a genre which Mr. Henke has so far not demonstrated that Genesis 3 ever had.

Henke (2022bm): “Mr. Lundahl Must Fulfill His Wishes and Demonstrate Both the Historicity and Inerrancy of Genesis 3. He has Totally Failed to Do So in Lundahl (2022d), Lundahl (2022k) and His Other Essays and Emails”

Hypotheses #3 and #4 in Henke (2022b) already state that the ancient Israelites came to believe either by misinterpretation or by being deliberately deceived that Genesis 3 actually happened.

My first step is, Genesis 3 is history, not fiction, history, not "lost and spectacularily recovered history."

My second step is, as to misinterpretation or fraud, it is Mr. Henke who should give specifics on how these could be plausible in the case.

Henke (2022bn): “Dating Genesis 3 and Who Wrote It”

Here, Mr. Lundahl is again making groundless proclamations that have no evidential support whatsoever. So, where’s the archeological evidence that Moses ever lived?

I'm not claiming much archaeological evidence Moses lived (he is one option for the empty tombed pharao coruling with his father Amememhet IV). I am claiming historic evidence as per first known audience for Exodus. Let's say people alive when the book of Joshua was written since they accepted this:

Now it came to pass after the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, that the Lord spoke to Josue the son of Nun, the minister of Moses, and said to him:
[Josue (Joshua) 1:1]

Or you could pretend that audience as not being a known one, and then we have a reference in Judges, a book probably written as a chronicle or combination of chronicles and finished a few centuries after Moses:

And he left them, that he might try Israel by them, whether they would hear the commandments of the Lord, which he had commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses, or not.
[Judges 3:4]

Or you could claim Samuel's contemporaries:

And Samuel said to the people: It is the Lord, who made Moses and Aaron, and brought our fathers out of the land of Egypt.
[1 Kings (1 Samuel) 12:6]

Or if you think that was written much later, you can take the contemporaries of King Solomon or so:

And keep the charge of the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, and observe his ceremonies, and his precepts, and judgments, and testimonies, as it is written in the law of Moses: that thou mayest understand all thou dost, and whithersoever thou shalt turn thyself:
[3 Kings (1 Kings) 2:3]

Or if that's too early for you, how about the times after Elisha or Elisaeus as we Catholics like to call him:

But the children of the murderers he did not put to death, according to that which is written in the book of the law of Moses, wherein the Lord commanded, saying: The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: but every man shall die for his own sins.
[4 Kings (2 Kings) 14:6]

The later you put the presumed (on the alternative view) "invention of Moses" the more inexplicable it is. Because all of these references, Moses is featured simply as history, and not as "lost and spectacularily recovered history" which is another thing.

Why should we trust the traditions of ancient Israelites?

Because we trust our own traditions and should generally trust traditions overall.

How can we trust the beliefs of individuals that lived about a thousand years after Moses supposedly lived and many more thousands of years after Adam supposedly lived?

I don't think that Joshua or King David qualify as living "about a thousand years after Moses" ...

To be exact, the archaeological results in Finkelstein and Silberman (2001) and other 21st century sources provide good evidence on the origin of ancient Israel and the Moses story is baseless.

To be exact, archaeology is not and will not be my final word against a tradition, unless the aptness is very much better argued than for an investigation, the details of which Mr. Henke refuses to provide, even any especially striking one, but which are so far (before I have any chance of reading them) suspect of being:

• misdating organic material older than the fall of Troy
• misdating the Biblical archeology
• misinterpreting the similarity of otherwise between what is found and what one would suspect from the Bible
• misjudging the likelihood of finding evidence for sth
• presuming on one's status as archaeologist to reconstruct history rather than receive it ...

... with the last of these as a good parallel to Joseph Smith finding Golden Plates and the ones accepting the conclusions as a good parallel to 16 million Mormons.

Oh, I make suspicions against the book by Finkelstein and Silberman without reading it, and so without giving specifics why this or that argument of them is wrong? Yeah, like some guys are making suspicions against traditions.

Lundahl (2022k) needs to look at the evidence and not just blindly trust groundless Hebrew speculation and myths.

Myth is illdefined, and speculation is one pretended other source for texts - for instance Genesis 3 - than receiving them as history. How is Mr. Henke arguing that the source for Genesis 3 is speculation?

By asking me to blindly trust his judgement rather than "blindly" trust what he has failed to provide an identification as speculation for.

Finkelstein and Silberman (2001, pp. 10-24) and many other experts also present good evidence that the Pentateuch was written by multiple authors and not all at once.

You can be an expert in what you can watch yourself repeatedly. You cannot be an expert in assigning authorships other than those assigned by first known audience.

The authority of expertise is not the kind of evidence I should look at, the authority of tradition is.

Henke (2022bo): “Why Believe in Any Accounts in Ancient Documents if They are Not Supported by Archeological or External Other Evidence?”

Once more, instead of providing evidence that Moses ever existed and wrote the Pentateuch, Lundahl (2022k) rambles on about other unrelated ancient sources that also have questionable claims ...

I'm providing as parallel sources where the claims are not questioned by the expertise.

Which Mr. Henke would know if he knew the expertise.

Henke (2022bp): “Snake Biology and Genesis 3”

This is like saying: “I know that the family traditions of my great, great, great, grandfather’s dog speaking to him are true because the invisible fairies vocalized the speech.”

If you said that within your family already having the tradition of that dog speaking to his master, fine.

But only for your family (are your nieces accepting this story as family tradition?)

For the rest of us, there is no public knowledge of this tradition within your family and so the example could be an entirely fictitious counterexample, not because it involves an angel vocalising, but because it involves sth of which I and most of the rest of the world had no knowledge as being a traditional claim. You must respect that so far your family is not all that well known to the rest of the world.

Henke (2022bq): “Mr. Lundahl Still Fails to Respond to Secular Hypotheses #3 and #4, which Rationally Explain the Origin of the Talking Snake Myth of Genesis 3”

As explained in Henke (2022a) and Henke (2022b), Hypothesis #3 states that the Talking Snake story arose because a group of people misinterpreted a campfire story or another work of fiction and thought that the story actually happened.

A process not shown as active, other than at the very margins of well established fact.

On a smaller scale, this was also seen in one of President Reagan’s speeches, where he and his staff mistook a work of fiction about WWII as an actual event (Henke 2022a; 2022b).

Now, he kept returning to Reagan:

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.

I looked up the source this time, a sweeping statement by a Cohen:

It was Reagan, you might remember, who told an annual meeting of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society about a World War II B-17 commander who elected to stay with a wounded crewman rather than bail out of his stricken plane. "He took the boy's hand and said, 'Never mind, son, we'll ride it down together.' Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumously awarded."

Actually, Congressional Medal of Honor never awarded. There's some dispute about where Reagan got the story. Some said it was from the 1944 movie "A Wing and a Prayer" while others cited a Reader's Digest item. Whatever its source, Reagan's account was not true.

If Richard Cohen doesn't know the source, how does he know the person involved? If he doesn't know the person involved, how does he know it was a fictitious character?

Readers' Digest actually contains lots of factual articles.

However, it just possibly could be that Richard Cohen was right. But WW-II itself is a fairly well established fact, right? So, we are dealing with a pseudo-event at the margin of real events. By the way, you have failed to provide sources for the fiction so one can check it is such.

Now, at the margins of what well established fact would Mr. Henke put Genesis 3?

While Hypothesis #3 involves people making accidental misinterpretations, in Hypothesis #4 people are deliberately deceived with propaganda and other lies by influential people. That is, in Hypothesis #4, powerful religious and/or political leaders deliberately deceive a large number of people through oral or written transmissions (Henke 2022a; 2022b; 2022es).

Mr. Henke has failed to provide a method of deception.

Currently, this type of deception is being seen in how a majority of Russians believe the propaganda from Putin’s government on how Russia is supposedly “liberating” Ukraine from NAZIs.

Loosely based on facts like the "special operation" (to the rest of the world known as invasion), like the Ukraine having a régime supported since 2014 by a free militia regiment known as Azov regiment, and that one containing quite a few Nazi sympathisers or otherwise right wing such.

What is the similar loose basis for Genesis 3?

Also, see Henke (2022cc) for discussions on how tens of millions of Americans currently believe the lies that President Trump actually won the 2020 election.

Given what I have heard about some Democrats stealing ballot boxes or getting access to them well before the count, that would be an interpretation which is at least possible as one of legitimacy status.

The fantasy involving St. Philomena is another prime example of how Hypothesis #4 can occur (Henke 2022es). A delusional 19th century nun invents a biography about an early saint and the 19th century Roman Catholic Church, as well as Mr. Lundahl and some other current conservative Catholics, blindly accept and believe that the lies are real.

We are very aware that St. Philomena was not transmitted by tradition from her own times. Weren't you the one giving high credits to archaeology, Mr. Henke?

As far as I recall the story, we deal with a combination of archaeology and prophecy. And it is not clear when Genesis 3 would have been so presented.

Even if Mr. Lundahl eventually manages to dismiss Hypothesis #3 as a likely explanation for Genesis 3, he still has to dismiss Hypothesis #4

For #3, the process is only shown in the margins of otherwise good fact. For #4, Mr. Henke has failed to provide a credible modus operandi for the deceiver.

Henke (2022br): “Lundahl (2022k) is Wrong. Mr. Lundahl Has the Burden of Evidence to Demonstrate that the Talking Snake of Genesis 3 Actually Existed”

Mr. Henke fails to see where an argument is leading or fails to wish our readers to see it.

A miracle is therefore the most improbable of all events. It is always more probable that the witnesses were lying or mistaken than that a miracle occurred.

Mr. Henke rightly states that CSL summarised Hume. It does not follow that this is the actual case. If you pretend to make it on philosophical grounds, you need to make miracles actually impossible. Exclude anything from being which is not governed by processes described by laws of nature (those known or similar such). In doing so you deny freewill - see Harris - but also reason. If you pretend to do it on empirical grounds, as is apparent to anyone better acquainted than Hume was, you need to sift out stories basically on the ground of being miraculous, irrespectively of other proof, before the remainder give you a set or miracle free stories that you use for your induction. You recall "the expurgated version ... the one without the gannet" perhaps?

He wrongly pretends to find a distinction between evidence and proof. Evidence is the visible part of a proof.

Henke (2022br2): “Warped and Inaccurate Views of History and Fiction in Lundahl (2022L)”

Given that the following is bt, it seems Mr. Henke was not oblivious to how "bs" could be interpreted.

Now, what is warped and inaccurate?

Nevertheless, on point (1), Lundahl (2022L) is failing to realize that it’s more important to have a few historical accounts that are known to be reliable than blindly accepting a large number of claims in old manuscripts about Alexander the Great, Moses and other characters that could be either historical or imaginary.

The criteria I use are such that they have been deemed, by pretty much everyone, sufficient for Alexander and others.

Large numbers of facts are in fact key to any intelligent sifting of facts from false facts (mostly not fictions, but frauds or misunderstandings).

If someone claims that he has enough information to write three history books, but if none of that information has been confirmed with external evidence, then his books are not histories, but nothing more than large collections of unverified rumors and stories.

Key : has been confirmed. If the people who accepted the book as a piece of history back then had such external evidence, that is good enough for me, even if it is lost. One such major external evidence being at least some prior knowledge to the events of the text. You know, the factor actually lacking with the Book of Mormon, because it isn't and never was as far as we know any normal history, but has been, since first audience both believers and disbelievers, "lost and spectacularily recovered history" - a gold mine for fraudsters, or at best unconscious frauds, like Joseph Smith and Finkelstein.

Lundahl (2022L) is telling his readers to just blindly believe whatever the Bible or even accounts about Alexander the Great tell them.

Henke's lack of reading skills? Or downright dishonesty?

I said, and I am willing to defend:

• the knowledge we all think we have of Alexander the Great cannot be rationally gleaned from archaeology as such
• but can be directly gleaned from a certain number of texts, the oldest of which happens to be in the Bible.

Because any document may contain lies and misinterpretations among authentic historical accounts, Mr. Lundahl’s approach to understanding the past is totally irrational and sloppy.

Mr. Henke trusts peer reviewed papers. Because any peer reviewed paper may contain lies and misinterpretations among authentic rational conclusions, Mr. Henke's approach to understanding the present is totally irrational and sloppy.

That was parody. But seriously, the credit Mr. Henke is giving peer reviewers, I am giving the first audience and any later audience : not to let total fact free nonsense pass. In neither area does this automatically lead to infallibility, though certain both papers and historic texts can be infallible : Ineffabilis Deus is infallible as Stephan Borgehammar's How the Holy Cross was Found isn't, and the Bible is infallible as Homer's accounts are not. This doesn't add up to a total scepsis against either Borgehammar or Homer.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Our Lady of Mercy
24.IX.2022