Now, I probably wouldn't have to say anything, as I'm still living in the territory of the congregation where I spent 35 years as a Witness. I'm still pretty well known by the congregation where I served as a Ministerial Servant and elder for two decades. The one time a car load of JWs pulled into the yard and saw me watering our garden, they slammed on the brakes and quickly backed out!
But, I thought, what if a Witness who didn't know me actually came to my door, or tried to Witness to me informally, what would I say? How would I proceed? I don't want to leave it to chance. I want to be prepared for that, and a few things came quickly to mind. I remembered exactly what caused me to leave the Witnesses.
First, I'd take control of the conversation by asking them questions.
I'd be very calm, polite and kind, not angry or sarcastic, and I'd want to try to get them to think. I'd smile and get them to laugh. I'd make it a conversation, not a confrontation. But I would keep us absolutely on topic, and be persistent in getting my questions answered and not ignored.
I'd also not argue Witness doctrine with them. The Bible is their comfort zone. I would take them out of their comfort zone. As many of you know that have been reading my stuff for the past few years, to me, arguing from the Bible whether Jesus is God or if there is a hell makes as much sense as arguing what The Night Before Christmas says about Santa Claus.
I'd start by asking questions about how they view the Bible, seeing if they agreed that the Witnesses are a literalist religion, taking parts of the Bible, especially Genesis, as literally true, making them old earth creationists, with an actual Adam and Eve as the very first humans. I'd ask them if they had a date for Adam's creation, which they do, in the fall of 4,025 BCE.
At this point I have a number of questions I'd use, depending on how the conversation was going. So, if the Bible is true here in Genesis, there couldn't have been any other humans prior to Adam's creation 6,034 years ago, right? Isn't part of the importance of this the fact that the Bible says Adam sinned and passed sin and death down to all of humankind? This ties in with Jesus supposedly being our redeemer, correct? How does that work?
The answers are first-study book obvious - Humans were created perfect and would live forever. Then Adam sinned and passed sin and death on to his offspring, so all of us are sinners, and sin is the only reason we all die. It's as simple as the old "a dented bread pan will always produce a dented loaf" illustration the Watchtower Society (WTS) has used for decades. It's one of the very first parts of Witness theology any new study learns. The first Adam sold humankind into slavery to sin, the second Adam, Jesus, gave his life as the ransom sacrifice, buying back humanity and giving us a way to a relationship with God and once again having everlasting life through our having faith in Jesus and his sacrifice.
The Genesis story is absolutely vital to Christianity, because without a literal first Adam, there is no need or reason for a redeeming second Adam. For Jehovah's Witnesses and other Christian fundamentalists, there has to be a literal Adam and Eve as the first humans. It is the bedrock of the entire faith.
But, for any thinking person, it is also the deadly flaw in fundamentalist and biblical literalist doctrine. Without a literal Adam and Eve, the central concept of Christ as redeemer, collapses like a house of cards, and the evidence against a literal Adam and Eve is overwhelming.
Once I'd established the importance of the Genesis story to their beliefs, I'd proceed with some variation of these questions: So, in order for what you are teaching to be true, there couldn't have been any humans on Earth prior to Adam being created some 6,000 years ago, right? So, if there were humans on Earth prior to that, you'd have to really examine what you teach, don't you think? I mean, don't you even refer to yourselves as "being in the Truth?" That holds you to quite a high standard in making sure of what you're teaching, don't you think?
From this point, I'd start with a small handful of concrete examples of humans living long before Adam was supposedly created. The ones that I researched while still a JW that took me out of the religion include the cave paintings of Lascaux, France, where bone and carbon radiometry date the paintings to 16,000 years ago. Then there are the thousands of Chauvet Cave paintings in Southern France that date to 30,000 years ago, the skeleton of the Kennewick Man, discovered in Washington State, dated to 9,300 years ago, and verified by dating a stone projectile head found lodged in the body. The Oya skeleton discovered in Japan has been dated to 11,000 years old. Some 200 skeletons discovered at the Grotte des Pigeons excavation cave site in Oujda, Morrocco have been dated back to at least 11,000 years, and the cave has been occupied by humans going back at least 100,000 years.
In fact, there are tens of thousands of human skulls and skeletons, human artifacts and paintings from all over the globe, that have been accurately dated to tens of thousands of years before Adam was supposedly created 6,000 years ago.
And what would be the Witness response to that? We were always taught to question the dating method, and so over the years, Watchtower Society literature has attacked Carbon-14 dating, noting where it can have shortcomings. What WTS literature fails to ever discuss is the fact I discovered when I first took the time to really study the science behind dating. That's when I learned that there are really numerous dating methods used by geologists, paleontologists and archaeologists, and these methods are being improved and made more accurate every year.
There is stratigraphy, seriation, dendrochronology, radio carbon, luminescence, of which the most common is thermoluminescence. There are several forms of radiometric dating which use various isotope pairs like potassium-argon or argon-argon, there is obsidian hydration which works with stone projectile heads, there are various forms of fission track dating, there is oxidized carbon dating and accelerator mass spectrometry, there is racemization, and there is archaeomagnetic and paleomagnetic dating.
It pays to take some time to at least understand in general the principles behind these techniques.
All dating methods have shortcomings and limitations. Carbon-14 dating works well from a few hundred years back until about 60,000 years ago, which means that its accuracy has been consistently proven using materials of a known age. Some methods, like radiometric potassium-argon dating work from 50,000 to a couple of billion years back. The point is that there are over a dozen quite different methods of dating things, and they work well in overlapping time periods from a few hundred to a few billion years. Scientists attempt to establish dates using more than one method.
Now, how would I fit all this into the discussion with the Jehovah's Witnesses standing at my door? I'd make it simple. I'd say that there are over a dozen different dating methods used by scientists. Sure, a sample or even a few samples from a site can be contaminated, but that would be discovered when dozens of samples from a site are tested using a variety of methods. Contaminated samples would be out of the norm and could be rejected. When three or four entirely different dating techniques are used and they all come up with the same date, over and over again, that is proof beyond any reasonable doubt. Dating is based on repeated and careful testing and consideration of all this data, preferably using several different dating techniques. The result? Repeated cross testing of radiometric dates confirm their validity.
The dates can be trusted. In fact, current dating techniques are up to 99 percent accurate, according to Dr. Michael Benton, Ph.D, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. There are hundreds of thousands of pieces of evidence proving that humans were around tens of thousands of years before the Bible says Adam was created. It's been proven beyond doubt. That is the final thought I'd leave with my Witness callers.
The seeds of doubt. If the Genesis story is simply not true, and the evidence proving Genesis is a myth is absolutely overwhelming, then the whole of Christian theology, especially as understood by biblical literalists and fundamentalists like Jehovah's Witnesses, is a massive house of cards.
I am no scientist, but as I wrote in an earlier blog, here, http://www.freeminds.org/blogs/a-freethinker-s-journal/jehovahs-witnesses-a-tools-for-making-sense-of-science.html there are two basic principles I use in researching something, whether it's how to adjust a carburetor or how to date a fossil:
1. Find where the preponderance of expert opinion and evidence is.
2. Find out what the majority of experts in the field see the evidence as supporting.
And a third point, always be wary of someone with an ax to grind, a point to prove, a pre-conclusion about what they feel the evidence should support.
I'm sure this discussion would float over the heads of many a die-hard JW, but I also remember that for years, these very sort of questions deeply troubled me. A reasoned, calm, conversation like this would have had a serious impact on me, even if I wouldn't have admitted it. I know there are a lot of still active Witnesses who have expressed doubts about WTS teachings when they've heard information like this.
I've meant to create a mental outline of how I'd talk with a Witness if given the opportunity, and now that's what I've done, using the very issues that eventually made me walk away from The Watchtower.
The amount of information on evolution hitting the media this year due to it being Darwin's 200th birthday and On the Origin of Species' 150th anniversary is just mind-boggling.
That has got to be having some kind of impact on thinking JWs.
Written by Robert F. Smith
http://www.freeminds.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=496:what-would-i-say-if-a-jehovahs-witness-knocked-on-my-door-today&catid=71:a-freethinkers-journal&Itemid=626