Answering Tovia Singer: Was There a Conspiracy?

One of Singer's most effective techniques is his use of conspiracy theory reasoning. Specifically, the central claim of his Let's Get Biblical series is that the New Testament authors deliberately and maliciously changed the Tanakh so that they could paint Jesus into it. Singer also claims that the New Testament writers altered and fabricated events in the life of Jesus in order to strengthen the case for his messiahship, and that the church conspired to cover it all up. Seeing how conspiracy theories seem to be all the rage these days, it is no surprise to me why Tovia Singer is the most successful of the anti-missionaries.

Conspiracy theorists make heavy use of three techniques:

Technique #1. Arguing from coincidence. Conspiracy theorists love to exploit the phenomenon called pareidolia. Pareidolia is what happens when our minds impose patterns on randomness. Ink blot tests are an example of this, so is our tendency to see faces in rocks, trees, and clouds. Did a politician cancel a flight at the last minute, right before a disaster such as 9/11? There are a lot of politicians and they tend to travel a lot. Flight cancellations are not that uncommon, so it could be a coincidence. But not if you're a conspiracy theorist! No. That cancellation is proof positive that the politician is deeply involved in an elaborate conspiracy of evil masterminds!

Technique #2. Use of explanatory gaps as proof of their theory. Conspiracy theorists recognize that almost any explanation will have "errant data" i.e. facts or alleged facts that do not fit the official explanation. Errant data are the currency of conspiracy theorists, the proof that their pet theory is correct. The problem with this technique is that it often fails to properly weigh the criteria for justifying historical explanations.

The fact that a conspiracy theory perfectly fits all the errant data, and fills all the holes left by the official explanation is not in itself proof, or even strong evidence that the theory is correct. Explanations are judged by a wide range of criteria, primarily the ability to explain future discoveries. Other criteria include the ability to imply other statements describing present, observable data, as well as how ad hoc the explanation is (it must include fewer new suppositions which are not already implied to some extent by existing beliefs). Conspiracy theories tend to have strong explanatory scope, but also tend to be very ad hoc, or contrived.

Technique #3. Exploiting the audience's ignorance. I love speakers who ask questions. It helps to engage the audience. It makes the audience feel they are part of a two-way dialogue. It helps the audience take interest in the subject, and feel that they are the ones arriving at the speaker's conclusion. All of this is good. What is not so good is when a speaker abuses this technique to derive his or her own conclusions from the often ill-informed assumptions of the audience members.

Here is a series of errors that conspiracy theorists often make, all of them ripped from Dr. Jeremy Goodenough of the University of East Anglia.

Error #1. Moving from the accepted fact that X once lied to the belief that nothing X says is trustworthy. This is a favorite of Holocaust deniers. If there is just one demonstrable mistake in for instance a witness statement, the whole statement is rejected as a forgery. The deniers argue that since there are several historical interpretations of the Holocaust, therefore it never happened. In other words: If one historian suggests that only 4 million Jews fell victim to the Nazi persecution, and another historian suggests 7 million, it means the Holocaust must be a false construction.

Error #2. An inability to make rational or proportional means-end judgments. Conspiracy theorists argue that some group of conspirators has been acting to further some aim or to prevent some action taking place, but often fail to ask whether such a group of conspirators could further their aim in some easier or less expensive or less risky fashion.

Error #3. Treating evidence against the theory as evidence for it. Conspiracy theorists do not just argue that the evidence could point toward a different conclusion. Rather, they claim that the evidence supporting the official verdict is suspect, fraudulent, faked or coerced. And because this fraudulent evidence exists, that further proves that the conspiracy theory is right!

Error #4. The classic logical fallacy of post hoc ergo proper hoc (after this, therefore because of this). The conspiracy theorist claims that because event B occurred after, or even as a result of event A, therefore, event A was caused to bring about event B. For example: The First World War happened after the death of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and there is clearly a sense in which it happened because of his death: there is a causal chain leading from the death of the Archduke to the first World War. Though these effects of the assassination may now appear obvious, that is no indication that such a progression was obvious to the people involved in these events at that time. There is no evidence that the people who assassinated the Archduke had any clue that it would bring about a world war. Hindsight is overwhelmingly clearer than foresight.

We observe these techniques and errors all the time in Singer's tape series. For example, he commits error #1 when he argues that the New Testament accounts contradict each other in certain details, and therefore cannot be trusted to represent history. Quite the contrary. Livy and Polybius give two irreconcilable accounts of Hannibal's campaign as he crossed the Alps and invaded Rome. Yet no historian doubts that Hannibal did mount such a campaign.

Singer dismisses the Septuagint as a church invention. Singer claims as his evidence that that in the book of Acts (Acts 7:14, to be exact), Stephen described the entrance of the patriarchs into Egypt, but Stephen got the number wrong, claiming that seventy-five souls went down from Canaan to Egypt rather than 70, which is stated by the Masroetic text in Genesis 46:27, Exodus 1:5, and Deuteronomy 10:22.

Singer then makes the claim that the church altered the Septuagint so that the text in those three locations would fit Stephen's speech! The Septuagint, or at least the Pentateuch, was translated from Hebrew into Greek under Ptolemy Philadelphus around 250 years before the birth of Jesus. Singer claims that the church changed the numbers to cover Stephen's error. How does he deal with the fact that the Septuagint still reads seventy souls in Deuteronomy? Obviously the church blundered when the altered the text and missed it. How is it we have no manuscript evidence of the alleged tampering, such as ancient fragments that read "seventy" in all three places? The church was powerful and thorough in covering its tracks.

This argument utilizes technique #2, where Singer concocts his elaborate tale of fraud and conspiracy. He then goes to the text to imply that the textual evidence perfectly fits his theory's predictions. In reality, he looked at the differences in the texts, and contrived a story to fit. In his argument, Singer commits errors #2 and 3. It would be a lot easier for the church to cover Stephen's alleged error by altering his speech in the book of Acts, over which the church had far greater control than it had over the Greek Pentateuch. He also paints the church as an entity crafty, organized, and powerful enough to obliterate all manuscript evidence of its alterations, and yet careless enough to forget to alter Deuteronomy.

By the way, the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran agree with the Septuagint, so Stephen might have been quoting a variant of the text. Regardless, Singer's explanation is one of the Rube Goldberg variety. It is woefully and unnecessarily fanciful.

One of the best ways to prepare yourself for dealing with people like Tovia Singer, is to learn the methods and fallacies behind conspiracy theorists by reading the articles in the links below:

A Quick Introduction:
http://www.fontcraft.com/idiotwars/?p=8

A List of Conspiracy Theorist Fallacies:
http://warp.povusers.org/grrr/conspiracytheories.html

Critical Thinking About Conspiracies (long, but worth it):
http://www.uea.ac.uk/~j097/CONSP01.htm