DEBUNKING THE CONSPIRACY THEORY

[Randy Carson]

I'm happy to hear that you are not a mythicist, and this is in keeping with my opinion that you are a cut above much of the crowd here. When your blog is up, I'll be happy to check it out. One bit of advice...explain your position in small chunks...you don't want to fall victim to the dreaded TL;DR syndrome.

I write novels for a living; verbosity is very much a side effect of that.

The OP is based upon the work of J. Warner Wallace, a cold-case detective with a 20+ & 0 record solving murders that no one else managed to solve. You may have seen him on television...he's been on NBC's Dateline many times after solving various cases.

Googling him doesn't give me any information about the guy at all beyond his religious writings, which only have vague references to his profession. I did take a look at his most recent writings, which were cringe-worthy; the first article of his I read was an argument from ignorance regarding abiogenesis: scientists can't figure out where life came from, so it must be his god. This argument was sandwiched between a couple of plugs for his new book, and that was the least distasteful thing about it.

The other thing that sticks out to me is that his writing is shot through with the same things I had a problem with in the OP: lists of carefully arranged talking points to be knocked down, followed by a vague assertion that the hole the apologist thinks he's made can only be filled with his god. It doesn't matter to me if that style of argument comes from you, or from him, or from anyone, it's still a bad time. For one thing, you're never going to reach positive proof for the position you have through negative argumentation, so knocking down those talking points does nothing to get to the conclusion you've come to. More importantly, the talking points themselves are still just representations of the opposition by someone who disagrees with them, is it any wonder they they come out of his mouth looking easy to refute? Do you really think that the people who actually hold those positions have said nothing against these contentions?

Wallace never actually links out to people saying the words he attributes to the entire position, just as you never did; the whole argument takes place in an echo chamber where the only information allowed in comes care of a person with a vested interest in presenting the position in a certain way. Case in point, when I read an article from Wallace talking about fine tuning, at every single point that he purports to rebut, I found myself with a ready made response, filled with information that seems to have been meticulously groomed out of Wallace's presentation of what the argument is. I also had another argument against fine tuning that his supposed rebuttal of all the possible explanations for it did not have; though he says that he's written a comprehensive response to every explanation for fine tuning that scientists have, he's left one out, and only half explained the ones he did bother to write about.

Of course, because the argument itself is a hermetically sealed presentation that doesn't allow for, or include, input from those who actually hold the positions he's responding to, I can't step in and say that actually, there's more here than he's letting on. That's the thing I object to, this one way street of argumentation where the apologist speaks for his opposition as well as his own case; there's no possible way that's fair, and if there was any interest in making the discussion fair, then the position being rebutted would be composed of the words of those that actually hold it, rather than one sided "explanations" of what it is, solely in the words of the apologist.

Wallace WAS an atheist (his father still is, btw), and he decided to apply his skills as a detective to the evidence of an ancient death. Guess what? He was convinced by the evidence that Christianity is true.

I always flinch when I hear stuff like that; the "I was an atheist once!" gambit is something used by apologists under the fallacious assumption that it lends credence to their ideas. It doesn't, and I never seen a single apologist say that, and actually understand even basic facts about modern atheism.

Wallace is ANOTHER example of someone who was NOT raised in a believing household being convinced by the FACTS and apologetics arguments.

If his writings constitute the things that convinced him of christianity, then he wasn't convinced for good reasons, I gotta tell you.

So, is Wallace speaking FOR his opponents unfairly when he lays out the five factors that he uses to this very day when dealing with conspiracies? Not only is his approach to breaking conspiracies valid, but the arguments for atheism that he challenges WERE his own at one time.

Oh? They were? How do you know that?

I'm an atheist, who doesn't hold to the conspiracy theory, so we can establish from the get go that those arguments are not held by all atheists. In fact, one could be an atheist without having any arguments at all, so simply saying that he was once an atheist doesn't tell us whether he actually accepted the arguments he's refuting now; in fact, from what I can find detailing Wallace's conversion, it happened as a result of a forensic analysis of the biblical narrative as a purported witness account. Now, I have some issues with the conclusion Wallace reached as a result of that, but the point is that, seemingly by his own account, Wallace didn't convert because his conspiracy theory leanings were debunked. His writings on that theory were written, I think, after his conversion, not before.

If you have some writings from Wallace prior to his conversion (which I searched for, but could not find) that establish that he was once a conspiracy theorist then that's all well and good, but the assertion that he was so because he was an atheist isn't a safe one to make otherwise.

I'm not. I'm open to hearing any explanations you may have to offer. I think there are only half a dozen or so REASONABLE alternatives (I may cover them all one thread at a time), and Habermas says he has identified 14 alternative theories.

But it is reasonable for me to ask what your working hypothesis is and to examine (with you?) whether it is better than the Christian theory. Don't you agree?

True, just so long as we agree that the absence of a counter-explanation doesn't lend any credence to yours.

But as I said before, I don't think that your minimal facts require an explanation, in that they don't at all lead to the conclusion you're presenting.

Read his book. Then decide.