Good Lawyer, Bad Apologist III

[00:00:04][music] [music] >> Welcome back everyone to Bridge the Divide, where we examine irrational beliefs, the irrational behaviors that often follow, and how we can bridge the societal divides that they create with education, rationality, and reason.

[00:00:26]Today, we're picking up where we left off with part two of our look at Lionel Luckhoo, attorney apologist. Let's dive in.

[00:00:35]>> Similar prophecies about Jericho, and Gaza, and Ashkelon all came to pass.

[00:00:38]Re: Jericho, four prophecies were made.

[00:00:40]One, Jericho would be destroyed.

[00:00:42]Two, one man would rebuild it.

[00:00:44]First Kings 16:34. Three, his eldest son would die when the work started. And four, his youngest son would die when the work was completed.

[00:00:52]Joshua 6:26.

[00:00:54]Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho.

[00:00:56]Abiram, his eldest, and Segub, his youngest, died when the work was started and completed, respectively.

[00:01:00]A fascinating historical truth is that when the excavations were in progress in 1936, John Garstang found that the walls fell outwards and not inwards, just as was stated in Joshua 6:20. The wall fell down flat, and they took the city.

[00:01:10]>> Lionel then mentions the prophecies concerning the city of Jericho, which get really problematic. Firstly, archaeology has discovered that the site where the city of Jericho existed had been inhabited since 9000 BCE, the Neolithic A period. That early settlement eventually evolved into a fortified town with a massive stone wall and tower by 8000 BCE, and it went through periods of occupancy and abandonment over the centuries. Now, archaeological evidence indicates that the settlement suffered destruction multiple times due to numerous earthquakes in the tectonically unstable Jordan Rift Valley. And this is where we have a divide between the archaeological evidence and biblical tradition. The archaeological evidence indicates that a major earthquake struck the area around 1550 BCE. Biblical tradition holds that earthquake took place around 1400 BCE, and that dating is specifically held in order to coincide with the traditional date of Joshua's conquest of the city in between 1400 and 1406 BCE. Then we take a look at the two books cited here, First Kings and Joshua. Fast forwarding, academic scholarship holds that the book of Joshua was written in the 6th century BCE, some six centuries after the siege.

[00:02:16]And First Kings was written in the 4th century BCE, roughly two centuries after Joshua. And the individual prophecies that Lionel cited here concerning the destruction, the rebuilding, and the sons that would die were written in those two books. And there exist no extra-biblical accounts that confirm any of those details, which means the only source of the purported prophecies and the only source of the purported fulfillments are the same source, the Bible, which means none of this stands up to the strict evidentiary scrutiny that Lionel himself established earlier.

[00:02:47]Notice how his epistemic standard changes every time he steps outside of his particular Christian paradigm.

[00:02:53]>> Palestine. It is Palestine that historians are citing today in confirmation of biblical prophecy.

[00:02:57]See Leviticus 26:3-33, written 1491 BC. Ezekiel 35:5-7, Joel 3:4-21, and Zephaniah 2:4-7, in which the following predictions appear. One, Palestine shall become waste.

[00:03:09]It happened.

[00:03:10]Two, sanctuaries and lands will become desolate.

[00:03:12]It happened.

[00:03:13]Three, enemies shall inhabit the land and the Jews shall be scattered. It happened.

[00:03:17]The Muslims took over the land.

[00:03:19]Four, the sword shall go out after the Jews.

[00:03:21]Do you recall Hitler's massacre involving multimillions of Jews?

[00:03:24]Five, the Jews shall return to Palestine.

[00:03:26]Six, the city shall be rebuilt and its lands tilled.

[00:03:30]Note, the prophets foretold in the Bible the twice destruction of Jerusalem.

[00:03:33]They foretold that the Jewish people though scattered for their iniquities would never lose their identity. The Jewish people remain Jews although there are none of the old biblical tribes left such as the Moab's.

[00:03:40]The Bible foretold that the state of Israel would be reborn.

[00:03:43]This came to pass on May 14th, 1948.

[00:03:46]And the day of the Gentiles came to an end with the Six-Day War in 1967.

[00:03:49]With these two factors satisfied, the rapture or return of Jesus for us his saints, his church, could take place even as you read this.

[00:03:55]The Bible prophecies declare this could happen at any time now.

[00:03:57]>> And the entire section he has here on Palestine has also been shown time and again to be nothing more than self-fulfilling prophecy and post hoc fallacy. And none of the events meet the strict scrutiny that Lionel established.

[00:04:08]We also have to keep in mind information about the citations here. Scholarship holds that Leviticus is a compilation of pre-exile, exilic, and post-exilic writings. Zephaniah was written pre-exile. Ezekiel was written during the exile, and scholarship is completely divided on Joel as to whether it's a pre- or post-exilic text, which may indicate it's actually a combination of the two. Palestine will become waste?

[00:04:31]That depends on what your subjective standard of waste is. As far as the Jews of Judea were concerned, it likely meant that the area was occupied by people that they hated. Sanctuaries and lands will become desolate? That never happened. Palestine is still occupied to this day. The Muslims took over the land? Well, that never really happened unless he's referring to the Arab-Israeli War in 1948 following the UN partition plan, and even that wasn't really a full takeover. Before that, skirmishes between the Jews and the Arabs had been going on for more than a century. With the roots of those conflicts deep in Zionist and Arab nationalism. The sword shall go out after the Jews? That one is so open to interpretation that any persecution could be interpreted as fulfilling it.

[00:05:08]There are no dates, no names, and no specific details. So, that's completely post hoc. And as unpopular as it might be, it could also be argued that the insular, superstitious, cult-like nature of Judaic society, cultural habits developed over generations of conflict made them easy for outside groups to essentially other them and cast them as scapegoats for local ills. The Jews shall return to Palestine? That happened after the establishment of Israel in 1948, which makes this self-fulfilling as Jews were aware of the prior written text. Establishing a formal state had been a goal for decades, and enormous work was done to make that happen after the Dreyfus affair, which the prophecy makes no mention of. The city shall be rebuilt and its lands tilled. What else do you think naturally happens when people settle into territory? And that whole rapture thing isn't even considered biblical by scholarship.

[00:05:55]>> The prophecy which fascinates me is the noted record in the Bible of a king who was actually named as Cyrus, king of Persia, would lead the Jews back to their land.

[00:06:01]And this was predicted 150 years before Cyrus was born.

[00:06:05]Babylon, it will be recalled, fell to him in 538 BC.

[00:06:08]Such foreknowledge could only have come from God.

[00:06:10]Cyrus truly led them back.

[00:06:12]>> While the Bible does contain scripture that appears to prophesy Cyrus the Great by name, the reality is far less amazing. Modern scholarship considers the Book of Isaiah to be an anthology written over a period of 600 years. The three principal compositions of which are Proto-Isaiah, containing chapters 1 through 39, which contains the words of Isaiah himself, originating in the 8th century BCE. Deutero-Isaiah, which contains chapters 40 through 55, which comprise the words of an anonymous prophet who lived around the time of the Babylonian exile and mentions Cyrus the Great, written around the middle of 4th century BCE. And Trito-Isaiah, which contains chapters 56 through 66, which comprise the words of another author or group writing about the post-exilic period around the late 4th century to early 3rd century BCE. And these stories were copied over from the now lost prior manuscripts by two unknown professional scribes who matched their styles to appear as one to create the Great Isaiah Scroll in the 2nd century BCE. So, without assuming the existence of a god first, the mention of Cyrus in Isaiah 45 was originally documented by an anonymous scribe during the time of Cyrus's rule, which completely eliminates the Cyrus text in Deutero-Isaiah as being prophecy.

[00:07:27]>> These Bible prophecies are so numerous as to make accidental fulfillment impossible.

[00:07:30]God is true to his word, whether it is in big things or small things.

[00:07:34]In Exodus 12:14, speaking of the Passover, the Lord proclaimed, "This day shall be unto you for a memorial, and you shall keep it a feast of the Lord throughout your generations. You shall keep it a feast by an ordinance forever.

[00:07:43]Truly, the Bible has no rival in being the only book containing supernaturally given and fulfilling prophecies. In like manner, the Christian religion is the only religion based upon and inseparably connected with historical facts which confirm that God sent his only begotten son Jesus to die that we might have life.

[00:07:54]>> And Lionel caps it all off with another claim regarding the supernatural, which of course is again him just begging the question. So, no, by the very evidentiary metrics lauded earlier by Lionel himself, none of these scriptures can actually be considered prophecy.

[00:08:07]>> Bible summary In summary form, we can say, one, the Bible proves itself.

[00:08:13]Two, it is God-breathed, showing an amazing unity of the 40 diverse authors.

[00:08:17]Three, it is indestructible, despite all the persecutions.

[00:08:20]Four, its historical accuracy was confirmed time and again.

[00:08:22]Five, its scientific accuracy has time and again been proven even to the discovery of the day the sun stood still in Joshua 10:13.

[00:08:28]God hath delayed it until the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and haste not to go down about a whole day, and that the earth was round. Isaiah 40:22, It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth.

[00:08:36]Six, finally, hundreds of prophecies have been foretold and have all come to pass strictly as predicted. We now await, I repeat, the fulfillment of the prophecy that could come to pass at any time now, and that is the return of Jesus when the dead in Christ and the living believers will be caught up in the rapture to be with him for always in the place he has prepared for them.

[00:08:49]>> So, knowing what we know now, we can address these points that Lionel brings up here. One, the Bible does not prove itself. Two, this assumes the existence of the God. Three, this is irrelevant as there are far older holy texts that still survive today, so he's basically just special pleading for his book.

[00:09:04]Four, we know from the archaeological evidence that the Bible's historical accuracy ranges from vague and unconfirmable to outright incorrect.

[00:09:12]Five, I have no idea why he's bringing up the scripture that describes Joshua stopping the sun. I only know that he doesn't seem to realize it's self-defeating. If the author of Joshua had known that the earth orbited the sun and that the length of a day was dictated by the earth's own rotation, then he would have known that if the sun had actually stopped in the sky, it meant the earth's rotation would have stopped. Imagine the global cataclysmic destruction if that had actually happened. Even worse, if the scripture is purportedly God-breathed, then the God would obviously have known this was the case and would have been intellectually honest by conveying that it was stopping the earth to expand the length of the day for Joshua. And any attempt to argue around this would be completely ad hoc. Also, when it comes to the shape of the earth, if the Hebrew word for circle in Isaiah is chug, which refers to a two-dimensional circle and not a 3D sphere or ball for which the word dor, which is used in Isaiah 22:18 to refer to being tossed like a ball.

[00:10:06]And this is further supported by the word chug sharing a root with the verb chagag, which means to dance in a circle, and with the noun meshuga, which is a compass instrument used for drawing circles. The last point about prophecies we just spent a great deal of time refuting. And he wraps the section up by repeating the prophesied second coming and including the rapture nonsense, which scholarship has already concluded refers to the Roman Nero redivivus legend and not some far-flung unknown time in the future.

[00:10:34]>> Who is God?

[00:10:35]Having established that there is an almighty God and that the authenticity of the Bible is well and truly based, one may well ask, "Tell us some more of God."

[00:10:41]Who is he?

[00:10:42]>> Obviously, Lionel has not established that any kind of a God actually exists, nor has he established that the Bible's authenticity in all matters is confirmed.

[00:10:51]>> Jesus provides the ideal answer. God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.

[00:10:55]John 4:24. We may add to this by saying that as a spirit, he is incorporeal, invisible, without material substance, and free from all limitations.

[00:11:02]>> Here, Lionel confirms that his God is literally defined as being outside the realm of critical examination. How he didn't see that as a problem, I have no idea.

[00:11:11]>> The attributes of God may be summarized in one word, perfection.

[00:11:14]Here are some of the attributes of perfection.

[00:11:16]God is self-evident, self-sufficient, eternal, infinite, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, wise, immutable, sovereign, incomprehensible, inscrutable, holy, righteous, just, true, faithful, light, good, merciful, gracious, and the quality which is preeminent, God is love. Can you in good conscience, with these basics, with this background, having accepted God and the Bible, resign yourself to the futility of life, that life ceases when we die, or that no one knows what happens.

[00:11:37]>> And these next two parts are just irrelevant claims about the God and another appeal to emotion. But, to break it down, he defines his God in one word, perfect, and then rattles off a number of attributes that in his mind constitute perfection. Fortunately, we don't have to destroy all the individual attributes by showing how they're either logically inconsistent or lead one to committing a logical fallacy to maintain its being true. We only need point out that the term perfect is one used normatively, as it implies a value judgment, typically an ideal standard, something that is entirely stance dependent. When a person says something is perfect, they're comparing that thing to their own stance concerning how things should be rather than just what is. As such, the term doesn't describe an empirical fact of reality and only gives us insight in what the claimant thinks a God should be. And that statement, God is love, doesn't actually say anything, as it's just an uninformative tautology predicated upon his stance concerning what he thinks constitutes perfect love. The appeal to emotion there at the end regarding the futility of life that ceases when we die, or that no one knows what happens, is just icing on the cake.

[00:12:40]>> Freedom of choice.

[00:12:42]Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to doubt is not a sin, but to doubt in the face of many infallible and cogent proofs is a sin.

[00:12:47]I urge and cite the Christian Bible as my authority to establish that God has a plan of salvation for each of us. And if we are obedient, if we accept Jesus and believe in him, then our reward is eternal life.

[00:12:56]The one outstanding difference between man and robot is that man has independence of choice and freedom of will.

[00:13:00]He is in complete control of what he says and does.

[00:13:02]>> This part is essentially just him repeating the claim, advocating for irrationality, and assuming that eternal life is something that everyone naturally wants. And then he appeals to the existence of free will, something the jury is still out on. We know now libertarian free will is not a thing that exists, which is why philosophers are typically divided between various versions of determinism and compatibilism.

[00:13:23]>> When in 1990, the atheist Emile Zola proclaimed that if he saw a cut finger heal at Lourdes, he would accept God.

[00:13:27]His statement received wide publicity.

[00:13:29]He was invited to Lourdes and as he was traveling by train, he saw a man suffering from the dreaded lupus disease.

[00:13:34]The doctors so certified.

[00:13:35]Zola chose that man and as thousands prayed, the man took the waters at Lourdes and was instantly healed.

[00:13:40]Zola turned away in disgust and grunted, "I still do not believe in God.

[00:13:43]Nothing is forced by God onto us."

[00:13:45]Zola sought refuge in his free will.

[00:13:47]One day he will have to answer to God, but like all of us he had the right to reject or to accept. The tragedy is that we sometimes call white black.

[00:13:53]>> This part is interesting because he cites the work of Émile Zola and then goes on to completely butcher it. Now, French journalist, playwright, and novelist Émile Zola is a historical figure surrounded by a great deal of controversy. He is arguably most famous for his 1898 open letter J'accuse, written in response to the Dreyfus Affair, which put the French government on trial in the eyes of the public for anti-Semitism, fabricating evidence to convict Captain Alfred Dreyfus of treason, and exile him to Devil's Island, while covering up the crimes committed by French officer Ferdinand who was operating as a German spy. Now, in respect to what Lionel is talking about here, Zola's bibliography contains a trilogy that he wrote in between 1894 and 1898 called The Three Cities. The specific entries of which are Lourdes, Rome, and Paris. The story of Three Cities follows the journey of priest Pierre Froment, who loses his faith as he travels from Lourdes to Rome and then to Paris at the turn of the century.

[00:14:49]Always the journalist, Zola himself traveled to Lourdes, which was a market town situated in the Pyrenees in southwestern France. Lourdes rose to prominence in 1858 due to the reported Marian apparitions to the peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous, who was later canonized a saint by the Catholics. This led to Lourdes becoming a veritable tourist hotspot for Christian pilgrims, and the town quickly seized the opportunity to capitalize on the tens to hundreds of thousands of visitors every single year. The primary draw for these pilgrimages is the Lourdes Grotto, located in the Massabielle rock cavern near the Gavea River where Bernadette purportedly had her visions of the Virgin Mary. The grotto became famous as tales of people being healed by its spring water traveled around the world.

[00:15:31]Now, as far as can be officially confirmed, Zola traveled to Lourdes with the intention of witnessing a miracle, and he left Lourdes reporting that, number one, the water in the grotto was uninviting and exceptionally dirty from only being cycled twice a day despite hundreds of extremely sick people being entertained in it. He was quoted people likely got sicker later on from having immersed themselves in it. Two, that what he witnessed was a frenzied combination of religious hysteria, profound superstition, and an unflattering commercialization of faith.

[00:16:02]And three, that the two patients presented to him, Marie Lebranchu and Marie Lemarchand, yes, the same surname Clive Barker used for Hellraiser, were reportedly healed, but he couldn't eliminate the possibility of psychosomatic relief or placebo effect, and he could only speculate as to their ultimate fates after he left. These events and their fictionalization in Zola's book Lourdes incensed the Catholic Church to no end. And from there, things get really muddy as the church did everything in its power to try and publicly discredit him. Needless to say, all of the pro-miracle and Zola-bashing stuff comes straight from the Catholic Church. All of the naturalistic stuff and not being convinced by what he saw comes from Zola. And Lionel here is capitalizing on what basically amounts to Catholic propaganda against Zola to reinforce the idea that Zola actually did witness a miracle, but and completely antithetical to his well-known and respected nature as a steadfastly objective and intellectually honest journalist, chose to be intellectually dishonest about the event and reject it. I think you all can be the judge as to who of the two here doesn't have a well-established credibility problem. And Lionel closes this one out with the trusty old idle threat of one day having to answer to a god.

[00:17:11]>> Jesus, my Jesus. It is estimated that about 40 billion individuals have lived on Earth since Adam.

[00:17:15]They are all diversely different, yet they all share a common purpose to live on Earth and to enjoy the destiny of eternal life hereafter, provided that they accept Jesus as their personal Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead.

[00:17:24]This is what the Bible says, but let us take our progression step by step.

[00:17:27]>> Obviously, the Adam story has been debunked by genetics, so that's off the table. And it's estimated that approximately 117 billion members of Homo sapiens have ever been born on Earth since we entered the fossil record with around 7% of all people who ever lived living currently today. Also, Lionel is referencing the Bible here again as though it's true, so we can toss all that.

[00:17:48]>> We have accepted God.

[00:17:49]We have accepted the Christian Bible.

[00:17:51]What now about Jesus?

[00:17:53]Did Jesus live on Earth?

[00:17:54]If yes, what did he do on Earth that places him as one so different?

[00:17:58]Jesus was born about 4 BC in Bethlehem of Judea.

[00:18:00]In the one person, there are two natures, a human nature and a divine nature, each in its completeness and integrity. Yet, as A. H. Strong puts it, these two natures are organically and indissolubly united, so that no third nature is formed thereby.

[00:18:11]He was born of Mary, and so was holy man.

[00:18:13]He had no human father.

[00:18:15]He was born by the will of God, and so was holy God.

[00:18:17]His birth was natural. It was his conception that was supernatural.

[00:18:20]In like form, his death was natural, but his resurrection was supernatural.

[00:18:24]His birth was foretold many times in the Bible.

[00:18:26]Here are just three examples.

[00:18:28]Isaiah 7:14, written 750 years before Jesus' birth, "Therefore, the Lord himself shall give you a sign.

[00:18:33]Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call him Immanuel."

[00:18:37]Isaiah 9:6-7, "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace." Then in Micah 5:2, the prophet Micah foretold, "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel." For a prophecy to be accepted, it must be shown it was made before it was fulfilled later and fulfilled in every material particular.

[00:18:58]The Dead Sea Scrolls containing inter alia the whole of Isaiah, found in 1947, verified that Isaiah was written centuries before the birth of Jesus.

[00:19:04]This was verified by paleographers and after carbon-14 tests were taken.

[00:19:07]So, the prophecies were made before the birth of Jesus and fulfilled subsequently.

[00:19:10]>> No, we haven't accepted God nor the Bible because there's no rational reason to do so in the context of Christianity.

[00:19:16]And I personally don't have a problem with the idea of a person who existed who inspired the character of Jesus in the Bible, but the existence of such an individual doesn't entail he was supernatural in nature. Also, there was nothing earth-shattering in the teaching attributed to the character. When you break them down, they're pretty much just a Jewish repackaging of established popular Hellenistic ideas that were introduced to the area when Alexander the Great tore through that territory centuries earlier. The problem with having no human father is that entails his genome is missing half of his chromosomes unless you're willing to commit an appeal to magic here. And as far as his existence being foretold in the Bible, we need to break this down a bit. Isaiah 7:14 mentions a child born of a virgin named Emmanuel. Jesus' name in Hebrew was Yeshua. Isaiah 9:6-7 also doesn't refer to Jesus by name. And nowhere in any of these verses is Mary, Joseph, the location, nor the date of his purported birth mentioned, which in my opinion would be pretty crucial to count as a prophecy by, again, Lionel's own standards. And Micah 5:2 expands a bit further by naming Bethlehem as the place that the ruler of Israel shall come from. Now, obviously, all the gospels refer to Jesus as being from Nazareth, but Matthew and Luke alone place his birthplace in Bethlehem. And those anonymous authors who wrote those texts decades after his life had a theological reason to do so. In terms of history, Nazareth was completely insignificant and trivial, not even a one-horse town, more of a backwoods deeply impoverished hamlet. It's not mentioned in the Jewish scriptures or in Josephus' work. The very first time the name appears is in the New Testament. It had no school, no synagogue, and only about 50 extremely primitive houses and less than desirable living conditions.

[00:20:53]And it even reports in the gospels that people were deeply puzzled by the idea that anything good could come out of Nazareth given its utter insignificance.

[00:21:02]So, it's pretty inconceivable that the authors would use Nazareth as Jesus' home if it wasn't the case. But, was Jesus actually born in Bethlehem? And the scholarly consensus is that he most likely was not, and that the authors of Matthew and Luke editorialized the story enough to incorporate Bethlehem in order to give the appearance of the fulfillment of Micah 5:2. And he closes the section out by repeating the same claim about Isaiah while ignoring the lack of specificity and obvious post-hoc rationalization. Ultimately, the historical claims about Jesus are scant at best and pure myth at worst, and the theological statements offer no rational reason to accept them as being true.

[00:21:40]And that is where we will end part three of our look at Lionel Lacoux, attorney apologist. Thank you all so much for watching, and if you enjoyed it, I look forward to seeing you all for the finale in part four. So, be sure to hit that like and subscribe button and that bell for notifications. And be sure to leave a comment below. I love reading your responses, and those interactions not only help me to improve, but also help with the dreaded algorithm. Don't forget, July is National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month. The link to where you can support important efforts is down in the description. And if you like to support my efforts further, links to channel membership and to get yourself some official Bridge the Divide gear are also in the description. Once again, I thank each and every single one of you for your continued support, and as always, be safe, >> [music] >> be excellent to each other, and together, we can bridge the divide.

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