The early Christian church only knew of the Septuagint. The first claim the Septuagint is a translation is after the Septuagint appears in history. The provenance of the Letter of Aristeas is unknown and it is a forgery. It is first mentioned by Josephus as evidence the Septuagint is the translation of the sacred books of the Jews. It is unclear what to make of this as Josephus also says the Jews had only 22 holy books. This is fewer books than in either the Septuagint or the Hebrew version.

There is no definitive version of the Septuagint just as there is no definitive version of any other version of the OT. While the books it included are not in question debating the actual wording of an original version is as specious as for the other versions.

The New Testament quotes from the Old Testament come from the Septuagint not from the Hebrew version. Of course this could have been simply copying the New Testament words back into the Septuagint. This is the source of the perpetual Christian dogma problem of the virgin Mary. The Hebrew says ALMA, young woman. The Greek says Virgo, virgin.

While one can attribute authority to the Hebrew language version we must also consider that translation is an art. Even if the Hebrew version is the original the Septuagint was over 2000 years closer to the original intended meaning of the Hebrew version than we are. Additional the Jewish animosity towards Christianity does not preclude them from having changed the Hebrew version just to negate Christian claims.

You can ignore that last paragraph if you like. Unless we recover the long lost originals of these books from at least 200 BC there is no way to know what changes came later. And even if we do recover "originals" that old we have no way of knowing if there was only one version in those days.

Having more than one version should not surprise us. We have it today. Consider the famous story of Daniel in the Lion's den. Get out your bible and find it. Your bible has to contain the Septuagint book "Bel and the Dragon" to have this story. This is not considered a canonical book in the west. But it is one of our favorite stories.

The idea of canonical, given Josephus mentioning only 22 holy books of the Jews, clearly did not exist in his day which was the late 1st c. AD. So different popular collections in different places are to be expected.

Now, maybe, you have an unbiased introduction to the subject. Please give it a google and get yourself up to speed on the subject. I do not have a dog in this fight. Whether or not the Septuagint is original does not matter to me. I simply propose it as the best fit to the available facts from the science of archaeology. Until there are facts which make it possible for the Hebrew version to be the original I have no reason to change my position.

You may have heard this idea before but likely not. The Old Testament itself is a problem to both archaeology and history.

1. There was no bibleland civilization capable of creating or preserving the Old Testament until the Greek period.

2. Every story in the Old Testament is fiction. It contains no history at all.

3. The first mention of the Old Testament in ancient literature is of the Greek Septuagint.

4. The first mention of the Jews/Judeans is after the first mention of the Old Testament, i.e. the Jews appear in history after the first mention of their holy book. [url herodotus]

These facts can also describe the Koran and the Muslims, Book of Mormon and the Latter Day Saints, as well as Scientology and the Scientologists.

These facts lead us to conclude Judaism falls into the category of a religion invented in a short period of time. Judaism cannot be described in terms of the religions of ancient Greece or Egypt.

For believers there is no problem with Judaism being an invented religion. The Old Testament has stories of its invention and by who, Moses and/or Abraham depending upon how you look at it. Whether one considers it human invention or creation the Old Testament is clear on the main people and the rough dates.

Archaeology and history have both shown that Abraham and Moses are fictional characters. All I am saying is Judaism is an invented religion, simply that it was invented much later and by unknown people. And as its creation date is after the Greeks come to rule the region it should not matter to believers in which language the original was created. I say the original language was Greek because there is no evidence of a Hebrew language prior to the 1st c. BC.

For example the style of Greek in the Septuagint can be compared to other examples of Greek which are well dated. There is so much other Greek that one can make a professional career of studying the Greek of that period. That is not possible with Hebrew. There is no contemporary Hebrew for comparison.

With some handwaving and a little faith one can invent a way in which Hebrew could have existed as a liturgical language but we are still faced with the absence of physical evidence. Unfortunately for faith there is a greater problem. That problem is the style of the writing.

For example one of the favorite beliefs is that the Old Testament contains real history. We know that when it comes close to real history it gets its facts all wrong such as the descriptions of the king of Egypt in Genesis and Exodus. We know for a fact it contains no real history but it reads like history.

Then we look at the known fact about writing what we consider history. The first historian was Herodotus in the 5th c. BC. What an odd conflict. The creators of the Old Testament were either writing history before Herodotus or they were writing after Herodotus invented writing about history. We know that after Herodotus invented the style it spread quickly and eventually came to the form we consider history. There is no indication of any other source of this style of writing much less that dirt farmers and shepards in Palestine created it.

A Greek at the height of Greek culture invents it at a time when the Greeks were inventing many other styles of writing or backwater dirt farmers and shepards with no culture of interest invented it. Those are our only choices. These dirt farmers and shepards never contributed a single thing to civilization. How can we attribute to them the invention of recording history when their other writings were so sparse that a credible case can be made that it was nonexistent?

As they say on late night TV, But wait! There's more!

The Greeks invented more than just history. They invented almost all literary styles used for the next 2000 years until the 19th c. gave us creations like Sherlock Holmes, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. We find the styles invented by the Greeks in the Old Testament.

We have the Greek hero with a direct pipeline to a god and we have Old Testament prophets with the same direct connection to a god. Believers assume these books are much older than the Greeks, even older than their older name Acheans putting the creation of the olderst stories either with Abraham or with Moses. Tradition but nothing else has the Torah written by Moses. But even as a tradition, no one knows when that tradition began.

The problem is the date of the Old Testament creation by the methods of both the science of archaeology and by the study of writings surviving from ancient times appears to be the 2nd c. BC not the 17th and 13 c. BC respectively. One may debate the "time of" Abraham and Moses by a few centuries but none of the debates accepts anything as recent as the 2nd c. BC. Such a recent creation negates the entire Old Testament. It puts the invention of the religion after the region was conquered by Alexander, [url herodotus and alexander]

It is nearly impossible to get this through the heads of believers. Changing their beliefs is not my objective. If it is your misfortune to be talking with believers here are some pointers.

Keep in mind believers are not people who think rationally in matters of religion even though they may be highly educated and are rational in other areas. They have no idea of the elementary requirements of establishing something for a fact. They are willing to grasp at the smallest straw as confirmation of everything.

If they have any knowledge of archaeology in the region they get it from fellow believers not from impartial sources. There are many people who claim to be objective but who describe anything found in bible terms even though the item does not have even an indirect connection to the Old Testament.

One example
Take for example a coin found near Jerusalem. It was minted in Tyre with an image of a sacrifice to the patron god of Tyre. That has no direct or indirect connection with the Old Testament other than found near Jerusalem. Believers describe it as "a coin twice the value of the Temple tax which would explain the money changers at the Temple to change it for a coin of the correct denomination." That kind of description of finds is common. A thing which has no bible connection is described in terms of the bible leaving the impression the object does in fact have a connection to the bible. This is very common.

Another example.
An inscription is found with names of people similar (but never identical) to those in the bible associated with an event that appears similar to one in the bible. We see the use of real names and events quite often in modern historical fiction where they are used for verisimilitude, to give the story credibility.

The fact that things are never identical leads one to question if the identification is more than wishful thinking. Who else could it be? is begging the question, a logical fallacy. The issue here is there is no way to discriminate between the inscription being a parallel recording of a bible story and the inscription being the inspiration for the creation of a bible story centuries later.

Wishful or pious translations are common. There is the Tel Dan inscription. It uses the single word, BYTDWD, Believers take this to be a reference to the Dynasty of David but it is the only use of BYT to mean dynasty. All the usages of BYT mean a literal place to live. It is nothing but wishful thinking that by translating it as "house" one can slip in the modern usage of house to mean dynasty. [url tel dan]

The fact that it was recently found has no bearing upon who knew of it in the past. That it came to the attention of western Europeans in the 19th c. does not preclude it from having been in the local town square for thousands of years.

In this regard it is interesting to consider that when archaeology was in its infancy and used no scientific methods items confirming the Old Testament were found regularly. But after proper scientific methods were developed none were found. The last find with "similar" names was in the early 20th century. Frankly, all the 19th c. finds need to re-evaluated in light of modern archaeological standards and knowledge of history. I would bet the farm on them all being discredited.

The absence of scientific methods in the early days is particularly important in bibleland. Since the 3rd c. AD when the mother of the emperor Constantine made her pilgrimage to bibleland the people of the region have made money producing artifacts, then called relics, to sell to pilgrims. So when a 19th c. adventurer, a common name for them, traveled to bibleland with the announced intention of finding support for the bible there were local people with centuries of family experience creating what they wanted to find and were willing to pay for.

Adventurers in those days did not do their own digging to find things. They bought what was offered to them for sale. These items did not pass even the most elementary concept of provenance we have today. They were the equivalent of a country rube buying a $5 gold watch in the city. This is not to say these adventurers were naive in that sense. But they were absolutely confident scientific confirmation of the Old Testament existed in exotic, far away Palestine. They were simply the first not to search for "papist" relics but real artifacts as were being found in Egypt. Unfortunately, as they were the first, they had no idea how to tell the real thing from a fake as they had no idea what the real thing would look like.

After scientific methods came into use and with the archaeological efforts increasing by a factor of a hundred or more, finds which "confirm" the Old Testament were no longer found. One would expect the opposite given just the increase in the searching for artifacts. In the 19th c. Lord Whomever announcing an intention to travel to or finance a trip to bibleland to find bible artifacts almost always announced success upon return. These "adventurers" were years apart. Today the universities in Israel have full time digs of many sites at a time and they find nothing as "confirmatory" as did the 19th c. adventurers. Exactly the opposite of what we would expect.

Regardless of the verisimilitude trick used by authors let us assume there was in fact an event similar to a bible story did occur and was recorded, that is the inscription is not a fake and the bible story is also a contemporary account of the same event. The inscription only relates to itself.

Even if there really was a minor battle by some minor king of Judah believers will assume it confirms the entire Old Testament even if the story has no connection to anything else in the Old Testament. One has to ask them if this minor battle confirms all of Eden, Noah's flood, Abraham, Moses, Solomon, biblical Israel and the captivities. When they answer YES, one has to ask them how it does.

The importance of this point is if something confirming a minor event by some minor characters in the Old Testament have been found, one would expect to have found confirmation of major characters and events by now. For every find regarding a minor king we would expect to find several regarding a major king. We might even expect to find the land littered with mentions of David and Solomon. We find no such thing. The most we have are two or three minor persons and events. Notably these were all found in the 19th c.

There is good reason to expect many finds mentioning major persons and events. Percentagewise bibleland is the most dug place in the world. Certainly there are more digs in Egypt but it is a big country (even if only the size in ancient times is used) so the fraction of the country which has been explored is smaller than that of bibleland.

In modern Israel alone every suburb and road counts as a dig because of its antiquities laws. Huge areas are farmed in modern Israel which were never farmed before. In England farmers find a large fraction of the archaeological finds; in modern Israel they find almost nothing. In Greece and Rome road construction is a source of a large fraction of the finds; in modern Israel they find almost nothing. I could go on and on in this vein but the bottom line is almost nothing has been found in modern Israel or in surrounding regions associated with Old Testament stories.

As to surrounding regions such as Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, I grant they are not quite as technologically advanced as Israel but their population has increased rapidly. The population of Jordan in 1948 and 1967 increased much more rapidly than Israel's ever has due to Palestinians driven out by Israel.

Politics aside these people have to live some place. Their new homes and the new streets they build just to have homes are nearly as extensive as those in Israel proper. Israel's construction in the West Bank, aka Judea and Samaria, are equally extensive. And that is on top of the Palestinian construction to accomodate their doubled population even after the loss of the refugees.

And with all of this digging and contruction and all the rest in an area larger than even the most imaginative view of the size and borders of biblical Israel there are no signs of biblical Israel. Paranoid believers may say the Muslims are hiding it for political reasons. But the fact is the places under complete Jewish Israeli control find nothing either. And they are looking much closer to Jerusalem than anyone else.

Away from the coast where most of the events of the Old Testament are supposed to have taken place we find only a primitive agrarian society without writing or cities. The few settlements are little more than the kinds of villages found in primitive cultures but not elaborate cities. A city is a place where people specialize in different areas of work. A village is where farmers come to deal with the few specilizations they cannot do for themselves such as metal working. Bibleland simply has no cities.

In the 19th century people were claiming to find the cities built by Solomon. Since then these cities have been properly identified with known cultures outside of bibleland. They were not built by the indigenous people of bibleland. We have to conclude the local people could have neither created nor preserved the huge work of the Old Testament.

Note here an Egyptian influence does not support the translation story in the letter. The letter claims Jews were brought to Alexandria and there translated it into Greek by themselves. If this were the case then Greek would have been their second language and it would have been influenced by Damascus which ruled bibleland. Recall Alexander's empire was divided into three parts which were roughly, European, Asian and Egyptian. The Asian empire was ruled from Damascus.

This Egyptian influence also supports the idea of the Septuagint being the original and created in Egypt. If Alexandria is also a legitimate inference then the use of the great library at Alexandria is also reasonable. It is not necessary to have this access but clearly there was a source of inspiration.

There are other possibilities such as a wealthy Palestinian had copies of material that related generally to the history of the region. Perhaps they were even bought for the purpose of creating the Old Testament. In any event an Egyptian influence on the Greek is not a surprising thing. But in no case does it support the myth of a translation made in Egypt.

If one does not assume the Septuagint is the translation rather that it was created in Alexandria in Greek then this Egyptian influence is reasonable. The problem with this idea is whoever created the Old Testament knew nothing about ancient Egypt. Nor is there any indication that the Egypt of the Old Testament was like Greek ruled Egypt.

If you doubt this you can test it for yourself by simply reading Exodus and the story of Abraham cheating the king of Egypt. But when you do keep in mind Egypt had a polytheist religion, that the king was a living god and that he ruled one of the largest kingdoms in the world. When reading those stories see if the descriptions of the kings and their actions match those of a living god.

It is not credible the living god and king of Egypt would recognize the rules of Abraham's god regarding marriage. Nor is it credible he would have paid off Abraham's extortion instead of having him killed and solved the marriage problem. Notice also Abraham and Moses simply walk up to this powerful god-king more casually than one might approach a city mayor.

The Abraham story says it mattered to the king that Abraham was married to Sarah. Egyptian kings married their sisters when necessary to keep the royal line pure. In that vein the never married outside of Egyptian royalty. They had concubines and symbolic marriages but never more than one official marriage. The Abraham con game is contrary to all of this.

Even granted that an arrest for murder expired with the death of one king this smelly shepard from the hinterland approaches the King of Egypt like he would go into a bar and talk to a small time Mafia Don. Moses tells this living god king of Egypt that his god wants the Hebrews freed. Here is what can best be considered a prophet of one god talking to a god. The story says the god took the mere prophet seriously. It goes downhill from there.

There are other problems with those stories. The point to keep in mind is that whoever created these stories got ancient Egypt all wrong. So the stories cannot have occurred.

And here the "cannot have occurred as told" is a cop out that is not acceptable. The qualification of "as told" is an assumption that it happened in some form. It is no more than an attempt to salvage the story because of a belief that it occurred. That is called arguing to a conclusion. It is a logical fallacy.

With regard to when the stories were created, the older they are the more difficult to explain how they got it all wrong about ancient Egypt. Even in Greek times the emperor assumed the role of a god king. So the question of when the story was created is moot. No matter when it was created the creator(s) either did not know or did not care what Egypt was really like. It was intended to create fiction as there was no time the view of Egypt could have been even remotely correct. In this regard the Old Testament most closely approaches the view of Mesoamerica in the Book of Mormon. There is no interest in getting the story even remotely correct.

If there is an objection to this then it negates any authoritative view of the Septuagint. It cannot be considered other than a casual translation. But a casual translation negates any interest in an exact translation and therefore there can be no objection to the Septuagint meanings. One meaning is as good as another. Both were just telling a good story. There is no correct meaning.

It must be kept in mind that Alexandria was barely ten days walk from Jerusalem. Of course a ten day trip is a ten day trip something today we might only consider for a vacation by car to see the sights along the way it was quite short in those days. Trading caravans were numerous. Conveying the local news back and forth was part of the stock in trade of merchant caravans. Additionally caravans for the trip from bibleland to Egypt and thus Alexandria would contain many speakers of the language of bibleland. This makes the idea of not knowing the meaning of the language quite remote.

The issue of differences between the Greek and Hebrew versions first appears in the 3rd c. AD, roughly around the time of Constantine and the codification of Christianity. Josephus does not complain about the accuracy of the translation. He only makes the (false) point that it is a translation.

Josephus was a warrior priest in the 76 AD revolt against Rome. This was the second revolt not the first as is commonly believed.

Speculation as to origins follows OK, Smartass, who created it and why?
That is the usual form of the question I get from believers. In this case a believer is not just that it is the revealed word of god. Many will settle for just some tribal legends. The only thing they appear to have in common is that the Old Testament story is something special.

So lets start from the top. If you are in the divine revelation category, go thy way, nothing can save you. Divine revelation or not there is still no evidence supporting this revelation and more than sufficient to say the stories are no, at best, divine bullshit.

If you are not in the divine revelation category you don't have jack. The most you have is a different creator(s) at a different time. No matter who you want to have created it or when it is still in the category of an invented religion. Whomever it was and whenever they did it they are no different from Mohamed, Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard.

The bottom line is no matter who or what I suggest as to the creation of the Old Testament there is no essential difference between what I suggest and all the other non-divine sources. It makes no difference when this pile of fiction was created. At bottom it remains both created and fiction.

Without defining it, some talk as though they hold a middle position, that the Old Testament was the product of deep religious thought by "holy" men over centuries. To address that possibility we simply compare the religion with other religions from Persia to Greece to Egypt. What we find is contrary to that idea.

The first thing we observe is it is not a religion in the same sense as the otehr religions. It is little more than a ritual/taboo lifestyle. There was no contemplation of correct living. There was no revelation of the divine. There was nothing but a collection of arbitrary and capricious prohibitions and requirements. What is more the rituals were performed and the taboos avoided solely for rewards in this life for the person and for his descendents. There was no afterlife, no heaven or hell. Judaism is largely unchanged to this day.

We can look at the ten commandments and note that anyone needing to be told not to murder and steal was a moral basketcase to begin with. We can also compare it to the Code of Hammurabi which is nearly a century olders. The Code reads like we expect laws to read although their subject matter is at times strange. As a society we don't care if nuns run a bar while that is roughly how to read a prohibition in the code. But the extensive penalties for poor housing construction could be right out of today's negligence laws.

We can also look to the form of worship in Judaism. It is animal sacrifice. We find it demanded by this religion at a time when contemporary religions had largely abandoned that as primitive and low class.

There are also people with a political bent who attack not the idea but merely talking about it as antisemitic. This is nonsense. Christianity and Islam require the Old Testament to be a true recounting of history. If this undermines Judaism it also undermines the other two. There are maybe 13 million Jews in the world and around 2.5 billion Christians and Muslims. If this is anti anything it is anti-Christian and anti-Islam.

I frankly admit I can only guess who created it. My guess in time is after the Greeks ruled the region as it was only after the Greek rule that an indigenous civilization existed to created and preserve these fictions. In addition the use of Greek literary forms requires the Greek influence.

This region was the Anus Mundi of the Greak empire as it was of the Roman Empire. It was populated with primitive genital mutilating people who practiced animal sacrifice and used capital punishment to enforce their ritual/taboo society. See stoning for details. There is no nice way to say it.

That may explain the fact that nothing of the events in the region before Rome took over was important enough to record. Because so little survived in general we can't say that nothing was recorded at the time. We can say that nothing was important enough for any wide spread mention or interest.

The absence of mention leads to two important books, 1 and 2 Maccabe. This recounts a civil war between a civilized Greek faction and an Ayatollah fundamentalist faction. The Ayatollahs won lead by Judah Maccabe. The winners preserved two versions of the victory, one with a religious and the other with a civil view of the war.

Before going to far with this consider there is exactly one piece of evidence separating these books from the canonical Old Testament. One coin has been found with an image of a person's head and an inscription saying he is the grandson of Judah Maccabe. That is all there is. To put this in context, there is not even that for the Old Testament.

Assuming the books of Maccabe recount a real event the winners of this civil war would want to create a historical right to rule. The right to rule throughout all human history has been based upon conquest. The only change to this was in 1945 when UN members abjured that right on paper.

So I nominate the Maccabes as the creators of the Old Testament. First off there is a major fault with this identification. They are the only people we know about involved in the only event we know about between the start of the Greek and Roman involvement in the region. So there is really no one else to suggest created it.

But here we have people who did in fact create books documenting their victory so they were not all that primitive. So creating more books is not a problem. They were also around prior to the appearance of the Old Testament, prior to any mention of any of the stories in the Old Testament and prior to any mention of the people of the Old Testament. There was no one before them.

At the other end of the time frame the Romans in the immediately post Caesar period involve themselves in the kingdoms in the aftermath of Maccabes. This is hard to say but if the Herods' kingdom had existed at the time of the civil war it is not clear why they did not become involved in it. They should have simply eaten the weaken victors to enlarge the kingdom.

How did they create it?
This was after the Greeks took over the region and created three loosely associated empires. If they wanted to create a history for themselves they had the entire Alexandrian Library to draw upon for inspiration. Alexander's contemporaries considered his collection of official records of the conquered peoples to be looting. There is no evidence Alexander had the "copy and return" policy of the later library.

In any event the library would certainly have the history of bibleland from Damascus as well as surrounding regions going back at least 1000 years [upheaval reference] and of Egypt and its rule of bibleland another 500 or more years. Inspirational material was certainly plentiful. Additionally what is known of the real history of bibleland shows their pantheon was the same as that from Persia to Greece to Egypt. So stories of the gods were readily available. Consider no greater fraction of religious literature survived than of secular literature.

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This is not to suggest it was created out of whole cloth any more than the Book of Mormon was. The Book of Mormon is as the LDS describe it another testament not a wholly new religion. (Whether or not such testaments are to be taken seriously is left to the reader.) We know the worship of both Yahweh and Astarte were common in the region since at least the 12th c. BC from the tablets found at Ugarit. The Old Testament simply makes Yahweh the only god of the people of Judah/Judea. History and archaeology do find plenty of evidence of the worship of those two and others in the region. No Yahweh cult is found until after the Septuagint appears just as no Muslims are found until after the Koran appears.

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As there is no credible history in the Old Testament whether the original was created in Palestine or Egypt does not matter. It is possible to create a work of fiction any place if there is the infrastructure to create and preserve it. Literacy is so common to us that we cannot easily imagine an infrastructure needed for it. Try to imagine knowing only one person who can read and write and you are not him. With that try to imagine you have actually seen only a few examples of writing and what you saw made no sense at all.

If that is too hard, google for an example of C source code and consider that like writing. Or just go to your menu and choose VIEW -> SOURCE and try to make sense of what you see. In both cases consider even the words that appear to make sense to you would make no sense at all to you. That is true cultural illiteracy.

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The Septuagint has many variations, corruptions, and we have no idea of the exact form of the original. However, despite the resounding denunciations, the same problem exists for the Hebrew version. Rabbi Akiba in the 3rd c. AD appears to have been the source of the first definitive Old Testament and the rules for exact copies. It is only after him that the idea of exact copies appears in history and at about the same time as Christianity took an interest in exact copies. There is no reason to assume there was an interest in exact copies before this time. There are many reasons to assume no one gave a damn before that time. There are many reasons to assume people appreciated new versions before that time and did not take exact versions seriously.

In the days when hand copying was the norm it was not uncommon for people to include explanatory notes or expansions in the body of what they were translating. To the copyist their own notes may have been obvious but not necessarily to anyone else. This is a simple explanation of the many cases where the same thing is said twice in succession but in different words.

Today we have ways of annoting a copy to separate our additions and changes from the original. These did not exist until after the printing press. With the printing press the original and changes could be compared.

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In many cases (sect-4) the Hebrew material is out of chronological order in the same story -- Ex 35-39 -- where things are simply done in the wrong order. This is not the case in the Greek. If the copyists of the Hebrew were in fact faithful to perfect copies why is it that it appears the copyists had no idea what they were copying and were able to get the order wrong? Further, how could the priests or whomever cared to have copies made missed this mix up when it first occurred? And then had the mix up copied such that it is the only Hebrew version extant today?

But in the Septuagint the natural order is correct. How can we explain a translation having the correct order and the original having the wrong order?

The bottom line is we are faced with a Greek version which in many places is correctly ordered and a Hebrew version which is not. It is difficult to explain how a translation would get the order correct when the original is wrong.

There is no mention any place in recorded history of the language of bibleland being other than Aramaic. There is nothing but Phoenician found in writing any place in bibleland save for a few inscriptions definitely associated with peoples who ruled the region. There is no indication of indigenous people with any language but Phoenican and Aramaic in bibleland.

Thus we have no rational choice but to consider Hebrew an invented language as we can find no evidence it was ever a real language nor that anyone ever spoke it. Believers will make the irrational choice of believing without evidence.