In publishing Mr. Fox's response to my rebuttal article, I omitted the first page of his manuscript, because it pertained entirely to "mistakes" that Fox alleged that I had made in my debate with Jerry Moffitt. Many readers of The Skeptical Review have seen this debate via the rental tapes that we make available to interested subscribers. However, the majority of our readers have not seen the tapes, and since the debate has not been published in TSR, most of Fox's comments about the debate would not be understood by those who have not viewed the tapes. For these reasons, I omitted that section from Mr. Fox's article and began with his comments about the "errors" I made in responding to his first article.
Before I address the points in his latest article, I will suggest to Mr. Fox that if he thinks I made mistakes in my debate with Jerry Moffitt, he should try to convince Moffitt to debate me again. I have asked Mr. Moffitt to debate the same proposition (the existence of the Hebrew god Yahweh) in another location, and all that he has said is that he will consider it if I will guarantee him an audience of atheists. Atheistic organizations in both Ohio and California have agreed to sponsor a second debate on this issue, and although that information has been communicated to Mr. Moffitt, he has not yet accepted either offer. Since he and Mr. Fox, who was Moffitt's moderator in the debate, seem to believe that I was soundly defeated, I can't understand why Moffitt wouldn't want to give me a second thrashing before another audience, this time on my own turf, i.e., before an audience of skeptics and atheists.
TSR readers may remember that Jerry Moffitt submitted an article about the debate that I published in the Spring 1995 edition. In this article, Moffitt focused on a side issue that came up in the debate, which really had nothing to do with the propositions we debated, and indicated his belief that I had pretty much made a fool of myself. Now along comes his moderator, who tries to sneak into TSR his comments about "mistakes" that he thought I had made in the debate with Moffitt. It just seems to me that Moffitt and Fox are spending a lot of time trying to convince TSR readers that Moffitt scored a big one for God in that debate. Well, if they really believe that, maybe they will consider doing it again. The challenge has already gone out to Moffitt, so if he doesn't want to accept it, maybe Fox would consider debating the same issue.
WHAT WAS FOX'S CONCLUSION? I said in my rebuttal article that Fox's article "arrived at no firm conclusion about what Deuteronomy 23:2 means." Now Mr. Fox comes back to assure us that he "certainly did arrive at a firm conclusion." He had concluded that "God is not unrighteous in that He does not have any *ex post facto* (retroactive) laws." Oh, really? That's what Deuteronomy 23:2 means? A passage that banned bastards from entering the assembly of Yahweh unto the 10th generation meant that God does not have any *ex post facto* laws?
We know what Mr. Fox was trying to say, of course; he just seems to have trouble saying what he means. He seems to think that there is some kind of virtue in being brief to the point of obscurity, so he frequently makes statements whose meanings can only be guessed at. Having taught college writing for 30 years, I certainly know that one should never take more words than necessary to say what he means, but there is a flip side to this rule of economy. One should never sacrifice concreteness of expression just for the sake of brevity. Fox seems to think that the use of specific, concrete details in support of one's argument constitutes "rambling," but a major flaw in his writing is a failure to support his assertions and rebuttal statements with specific details; consequently, we sometimes have to guess at what he meant.
In saying that his conclusion about the meaning of Deuteronomy 23:2 is that "God is not unrighteous in that He does not have any *ex post facto* (retroactive) laws," I assume that what he actually meant was that my application of this text to Judah's son Perez and the sons of Aaron is inappropriate because it would be applying the law to people who were born before the law was given. If this is what he meant, I remind him that my second rebuttal article established that Yahweh has been known to make *ex post facto* laws (Special Fifth Edition, p. 3). Here, I cited the case of the man who was caught picking up sticks on the sabbath day while the children of Israel were still in the wilderness (Ex. 15:32-36). The man was taken to Moses and Aaron, who put him in ward, "because it had not been declared what should be done to him." Yahweh promptly told Moses that the man should surely die, and he was taken before the congregation and stoned to death. In other words, Yahweh pronounced an *ex post facto* sentence of death on this man, so Fox's premise that Yahweh "does not have any *ex post facto* laws appears to contradict what the Bible says. Fox said exactly nothing about this, but I suppose he didn't want to follow me in my ramblings.
I also pointed out that Fox's attempt to prove that Perez was the offspring of a levirate marriage between Judah and Tamar was predicated entirely on an *ex post facto* application of the levirate marriage law that was given in Deuteronomy 25:5-10, long after the time of Judah's and Tamar's sexual escapade. In telling the fate of Onan, Judah's son who spilled his seed on the ground rather than risk impregnating Tamar, Genesis 38 certainly implies the existence of a levirate custom at this time, but nowhere before Deuteronomy 25 will Fox find it stated as a law. His attempt to apply it to Judah and Tamar in order to give legitimacy to their offspring is, therefore, an *ex post facto* application of the law, the very thing he accused me of doing with the ban on bastards.
I further pointed out in my second rebuttal (5thEdition, p. 3) that the levirate marriage law pertained to the rights of a widow to be impregnated by her dead husband's oldest surviving brother and in cases where there was no surviving brother, the "next of kin." Judah was not his dead son's next of kin, because he had another son Shelah whose duty it would have been under this law to impregnate Tamar. I showed by the case of Boaz and Ruth that there were ceremonial obligations that the next of kin had to attend to before consummating a levirate marriage but that Judah didn't do this in the case of Tamar. He intentionally withheld his only surviving son from her and then impregnated her himself when he thought that he was just striking a deal with a prostitute. All of these things I pointed out in my rebuttal, and Mr. Fox said... nothing. We can only assume that he didn't wish to follow me in my ramblings.
Mr. Fox began his second article by restating an assertion from his first: "Perez was not a bastard, and all of Farrell's arguments on this matter are moot," but he cannot make a matter "moot" by simply asserting that it is. He must examine my counterarguments point by point and show that they are moot. Let's hope that we can convince him to engage in a little rambling long enough to do that. Until he does, he has refuted nothing, and my argument still stands.
HOW MANY GENERATIONS FROM PEREZ TO DAVID? Mr. Fox seems to find inconsistency in my admission that "if there actually was a person named Perez, who was born at the time claimed in Genesis 38:29, and if King David, who lived in the time claimed in the books of Samuel, was a direct descendant of this Perez, then there surely were more than just ten generations separating Perez and David," but he has missed the point entirely. I can recognize the obvious fact that there would have to be more than ten generations in a line of descent spanning more than 800 years, but I can also read the Bible and see that the writers who cited David's genealogy always did so in a way that indicated they thought that there had been only 10 generations from Perez to David. So where is the inconsistency? I am not responsible for what the writers thought, and if they couldn't recognize an obvious mistake like this, it must have been the fault of the omniscient, omnipotent Yahweh who guided them to write such a flawed genealogy. Fox should blame Yahweh for this and not me. All I'm doing is pointing out errancy in the Bible where errancy obviously occurs.
Fox tried to salvage this point by citing places in the Bible where the word "son" was used in obviously figurative senses, but I have never denied that the word was so used in the Bible. In the "Editor's Note" after Douglas Smith's letter (p. 12, this issue), I cited the same figurative use of "son" in Matthew 1:1 that Fox did as I tried to explain to Mr. Smith the skipped-generation argument that inerrantists use to "explain" genealogical inconsistencies in the Bible. Since the "Mailbag" columns are always set up two to three months before the other articles in an issue, I wrote this statement long before I had received Mr. Fox's rebuttal, so obviously I am aware of figurative usage of the word "son" in the Bible.
Whenever the word is used figuratively, this can be easily determined by the context. In Matthew 1:1, for example, Jesus was called "the son of David," and David was called "the son of Abraham." Since Matthew proceeded to give a genealogy of Jesus that listed 14 generations between Abraham and David and 28 (27 actually) between David and Jesus, one doesn't have to be a genius to see that the context of this passage indicates that the word "son" was being used figuratively in the first verse of the chapter. Now I defy Mr. Fox to find any genealogical information in the Bible that will show the writers were using the word "son" or the verb "begot" figuratively in any of David's genealogies so that we can determine by biblical context that the writers were speaking figuratively when they said that Hezron was the son of Perez, Ram was the son of Hezron, etc., or that Perez begot Hezron, Hezron begot Ram, etc. On pages 6-7 of my first rebuttal article (Summer 1995), I did a detailed, generation-by-generation analysis of all of the complete genealogies from Perez to David that are given in the Bible and showed that the usage of "son" or "begot" in all of them require us to understand that the words were being used literally. Mr. Fox has said exactly NOTHING about this, but, of course, he probably didn't want to follow me in my ramblings.
This has been his tactic throughout this discussion. I showed that the expression "even unto the tenth generation" in Deuteronomy 23:2 really meant forever, and so it really didn't matter if there were ten or fifty generations between Perez and David. If the ban was to apply to all generations forever, David should not have been allowed in the assembly. I sustained my argument that the expression really meant forever by pointing out that in the very next verse Ammonites and Moabites were also banned from the assembly "even unto the tenth generation *forever,*" and Fox's only response to the argument was this: "I sincerely doubt that he has properly interpreted the word *forever* in this passage *but will not deal with this in this treatise.*" So this is apparently the way that Fox refutes arguments. He simply asserts that they are erroneous and then chooses not to deal with them.
An article from Mr. Fox would not be complete without a syllogism to illustrate how he thinks atheists reason, so he didn't disappoint us. He said that the following premise represents the way that I reasoned in my reply to him:
All I can say is that I certainly hope that this was not the case. Beginning an argument like this would be like saying, "If robins can fly, then robins can fly." I suggest that Mr. Fox reconsider my articles and try to see that I was really arguing like this:
As I pointed out above, my first response to Fox contained very detailed analyses of these genealogies to show that there is no basis at all for assuming that the writers were at any time using the words "son" and "begot" figuratively in listing the generations in the genealogies. Mr. Fox has complained about my "ramblings," but he has not even attempted to show that my conclusions about this were inaccurate.
Mr. Fox defended his own reasoning with the following syllogism:
If this is indeed his position, I would dearly love to see him prove the second premise of this syllogism. Since Mr. Moffitt is showing little enthusiasm to accept the invitations from Ohio and California to debate the existence of Yahweh, perhaps Mr. Fox would like to do it. As for his claim that "the Bible has evidence of being inspired of God," if he will present that evidence in an article or even a series of articles, I will publish them with my simultaneous responses. His refusal of this invitation will tell us just how much he really believes this claim.
If he thinks the evidence for the divine inspiration of the
Bible is as
overwhelming as the evidence of guilt in his hypothetical example at
the end of
his article, I would think he would welcome the opportunity to present
it.
