The Manhattan Project: Difference between revisions

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==The recurring logical fallacies==

His recurring themes contain some REALLY ~~bad arguments~~.

His recurring themes contain some REALLY glaring logical fallacies. If you want more detail on how logic applies below and in theological issues generally, please read our separate articles on [[God and the rules of logic]] and [[Logic and the Message]].

== Motte and bailey at the center of it all ==

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=The Manhattan Project - Part 1 =

This is a review and analysis of a document produced by David Courchaine entitled:

:THE MANHATTAN PROJECT - PART ONE - The Meta-Layer (V16)

David Courchaine opens his new document, "The Manhattan Project, Part One," with a football game.

== The Score Was 31 to 27 ==

~~=God~~ and ~~logic=~~

On January 10, 2026, the Packers led the Bears 21 to 3 at halftime. Courchaine is a Packers fan, and he was sure his team could not lose. A Bears fan watching the same broadcast saw a game his team could still win. Same plays. Same recording. Two very different experiences, each fan certain he was simply watching reality.

~~We speak about logic in our discussion above~~. ~~If you want more detail on how logic applies in theological issues~~, ~~please read our separate articles on [[God and~~ the ~~rules~~ of ~~logic]] and [[Logic~~ and the ~~Message]]~~.

It is a good illustration. He pairs it with a real and well-known 1954 study by Hastorf and Cantril, who showed the same film of a college football game to fans of both schools and found that each group saw the other side commit far more fouls. Their conclusion was that there is no neutral "game out there" that everyone observes the same way. Perception is shaped by who we are rooting for.

Courchaine is right about all of this. It is true of Message believers. It is true of former members. It is true of me. Anyone who has argued about the Message online has felt it.

But notice what his own illustration also contains. Something he never comes back to.

The Bears won 31 to 27.

That is not a matter of perspective. The Packers fan and the Bears fan felt the game differently, remembered the calls differently, walked away with different stories. And there was still a final score that did not care how either of them felt. The bias was real. The score was also real. Both things are true at the same time.

Hold onto that, because it is the whole issue.

== What the project promises ==

When Courchaine announced the Manhattan Project in May 2026, he was direct about its purpose. He said he was "systematically dismantling every lie ever set against the Message," and he named names, calling several researchers "liars" who could not be concluded to be honest.

That is a claim about the score. It says the critics of the Message have gotten the facts wrong, and that he intends to prove it.

So a reader comes to Part One expecting the facts. The failed prophecies. The bridge vision. The borrowing from other authors. The doctrines. These are the "lies" the project exists to dismantle, and Part One is where the dismantling begins.

== What Part One actually delivers ==

It does not touch any of them.

Part One is not about Branham's prophecies or Branham's sources or Branham's doctrine. It is about the psychology of the people in his comment section. It walks through five commenters, diagnoses each with a named mental mechanism, and cites a study for each one. Projection. Biased assimilation. Emotional reasoning. The document is thoughtful, and some of its observations about individual comments are fair. A few of those comments really were dismissive, and telling someone to "seek treatment" for disagreeing is not an argument.

But step back and ask the simple question. What was the subject supposed to be?

The subject was supposed to be whether the claims against the Message are true. Part One quietly changes it to how the people making those claims feel while they make them.

Those are two different subjects. Whether a critic is emotionally invested tells you nothing about whether a prophecy failed. Whether a commenter is defensive tells you nothing about whether Branham copied his material. A man's state of mind and the truth of his statement are simply not the same question. You can be anxious and correct. You can be calm and wrong.

This is the oldest move in disagreement. When you cannot answer what a person said, you talk about the person instead. It does not become something else just because it is done gently, with studies attached and the word "brother" in every paragraph. Warmth is better than cruelty. It is not the same as an answer.

A project that promised to dismantle lies has, in its first installment, dismantled no lies. It has analyzed tone.

== The score is still there ==

Here is where Courchaine's own football game turns on him.

His argument is that emotional investment shapes how we see the evidence, and that is true. But his illustration proves something he did not intend. It proves that underneath the biased perceptions, there was a real game with a real result. The fans disagreed. The scoreboard did not.

The Message question has a scoreboard too.

Did Branham prophesy that the Los Angeles area would sink beneath the ocean? Did he describe a vision of a bridge collapse with sixteen deaths, and does the historical record support it? Did his stories stay the same each time he told them, or did they grow? These are not questions of perspective. They have answers that do not change based on how anyone feels about them.

You can acknowledge every bit of bias Courchaine describes, on all sides, and the scoreboard is still on the wall. The honest thing is not to stare at the fans. It is to look up and read the score.

== When you actually look at a claim ==

Let me show you what that looks like, using the one factual claim Courchaine does make in Part One.

He corrects a commenter who said "there are no church ages" and that Branham invented the idea. Courchaine points out, correctly, that the teaching that the seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 represent seven historical periods is not original to Branham. It is found in dispensationalist writers with no connection to him. On that narrow point, he is right, and the commenter was sloppy.

For the record, Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202) was the first person to interpret Revelation as a prophetic survey of church history, considering that the book prophesies the events of Western history from the early church until his own time. It gained significant traction with premillennial dispensationalism, which William Branham basically adopted as well. Clarence Larkin was a major proponent of premillennial dispensationalism.

However, the view of the seven churches as seven ages has basically disappeared because of the substantial objections to this method:

<blockquote>The notion that these seven churches describe seven successive periods of Church history hardly needs refutation. To say nothing about the humorous—if it were not so deplorable—exegesis which, for example, makes the church of Sardis, which was dead, refer to the glorious age of the Reformation; it should be clear to every student of Scripture that there is not one atom of evidence in all the sacred writings which in any way corroborates this thoroughly arbitrary method of cutting up the history of the Church and assigning the resulting pieces to the respective epistles of Revelation 2 and 3.<ref>William Hendriksen, ''More Than Conquerors: An Interpretation of the Book of Revelation'', 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, [1940] 1982), 60</ref></blockquote>

But watch what happens to the real issue.

The careful critique of Branham has never been that he invented the church-ages concept. It is the reverse, and it is worse. Branham took the seven-church-ages framework, and even the specific dates for each age almost word for word, from Clarence Larkin's ''Dispensational Truth'' and from Charles Taze Russell. And then he told his followers the revelation had come to him directly from God. In his own words about that teaching, "the Holy Spirit revealed and opened to us all the mysteries." He also claimed his view was different from the very books he was copying.

So the charge is not "Branham made up church ages." The charge is that he borrowed a man-made framework and presented it as a divine download that came straight from heaven. Courchaine answers the first claim, which no serious researcher is making, and leaves the second claim, the one that actually matters, completely untouched.

That is the pattern. When the subject is a real, checkable claim, the evidence is there, and it does not favor the Message. Which may be part of why Part One is about comment sections instead.

== About the word "liar" ==

I am one of the people Courchaine named. He called several of us liars, then two days later called those same men his precious brothers in Christ. Both statements are in his own material.

I am not going to make this about the insult. I will only point out that "liar" is itself a claim, and like any claim it needs evidence. That is exactly what this document does not provide. It asserts dishonesty at the outset and then spends its length examining other people's psychology rather than demonstrating a single false statement in anyone's research. If the goal is to prove someone is lying, the way to do it is to show the lie. Not to describe the mood of the person you disagree with.

== An invitation, not an attack ==

If you are inside the Message and reading this, I want to be clear about something. I am not looking down on you. I was where you are. I know how it feels to hear the Message questioned, and how much easier it is to examine the questioner than the question.

Courchaine is right that we are all shaped by what we love and what we have suffered. I will go further than he did and say it plainly about myself. Yes, I have a side. Yes, my past shapes how I read this. That is true of me, and it is true of him, and being aware of it does not make either of us the neutral one in the room.

But awareness of bias was never meant to end the search for truth. It was meant to sharpen it. The Bereans heard Paul preach and did not simply accept it because an apostle said it. They "examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so" (Acts 17:11), and Scripture calls them noble for it. Paul himself said, "Test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Testing is not the enemy of faith. It is how honest faith is built.

So look at the fans if you like. Both sets of them. Then do the one thing this document never asks you to do.

Look up at the scoreboard.

The score was 31 to 27. The Message has a score too, and it is written in the historical record, waiting for anyone willing to read it.

[[Category:Unfinished articles]]

@@ Line 59: / Line 59: @@
 ==The recurring logical fallacies==
-His recurring themes contain some REALLY bad arguments.
+His recurring themes contain some REALLY glaring logical fallacies. If you want more detail on how logic applies below and in theological issues generally, please read our separate articles on [[God and the rules of logic]] and [[Logic and the Message]].
 == Motte and bailey at the center of it all ==
@@ Line 250: / Line 250: @@
 ----
+=The Manhattan Project - Part 1 =
+This is a review and analysis of a document produced by David Courchaine entitled:
+:THE MANHATTAN PROJECT - PART ONE - The Meta-Layer (V16)
+David Courchaine opens his new document, "The Manhattan Project, Part One," with a football game.
+== The Score Was 31 to 27 ==
-=God and logic=
+On January 10, 2026, the Packers led the Bears 21 to 3 at halftime. Courchaine is a Packers fan, and he was sure his team could not lose. A Bears fan watching the same broadcast saw a game his team could still win. Same plays. Same recording. Two very different experiences, each fan certain he was simply watching reality.
-We speak about logic in our discussion above. If you want more detail on how logic applies in theological issues, please read our separate articles on [[God and the rules of logic]] and [[Logic and the Message]].
+It is a good illustration. He pairs it with a real and well-known 1954 study by Hastorf and Cantril, who showed the same film of a college football game to fans of both schools and found that each group saw the other side commit far more fouls. Their conclusion was that there is no neutral "game out there" that everyone observes the same way. Perception is shaped by who we are rooting for.
+Courchaine is right about all of this. It is true of Message believers. It is true of former members. It is true of me. Anyone who has argued about the Message online has felt it.
+But notice what his own illustration also contains. Something he never comes back to.
+The Bears won 31 to 27.
+That is not a matter of perspective. The Packers fan and the Bears fan felt the game differently, remembered the calls differently, walked away with different stories. And there was still a final score that did not care how either of them felt. The bias was real. The score was also real. Both things are true at the same time.
+Hold onto that, because it is the whole issue.
+== What the project promises ==
+When Courchaine announced the Manhattan Project in May 2026, he was direct about its purpose. He said he was "systematically dismantling every lie ever set against the Message," and he named names, calling several researchers "liars" who could not be concluded to be honest.
+That is a claim about the score. It says the critics of the Message have gotten the facts wrong, and that he intends to prove it.
+So a reader comes to Part One expecting the facts. The failed prophecies. The bridge vision. The borrowing from other authors. The doctrines. These are the "lies" the project exists to dismantle, and Part One is where the dismantling begins.
+== What Part One actually delivers ==
+It does not touch any of them.
+Part One is not about Branham's prophecies or Branham's sources or Branham's doctrine. It is about the psychology of the people in his comment section. It walks through five commenters, diagnoses each with a named mental mechanism, and cites a study for each one. Projection. Biased assimilation. Emotional reasoning. The document is thoughtful, and some of its observations about individual comments are fair. A few of those comments really were dismissive, and telling someone to "seek treatment" for disagreeing is not an argument.
+But step back and ask the simple question. What was the subject supposed to be?
+The subject was supposed to be whether the claims against the Message are true. Part One quietly changes it to how the people making those claims feel while they make them.
+Those are two different subjects. Whether a critic is emotionally invested tells you nothing about whether a prophecy failed. Whether a commenter is defensive tells you nothing about whether Branham copied his material. A man's state of mind and the truth of his statement are simply not the same question. You can be anxious and correct. You can be calm and wrong.
+This is the oldest move in disagreement. When you cannot answer what a person said, you talk about the person instead. It does not become something else just because it is done gently, with studies attached and the word "brother" in every paragraph. Warmth is better than cruelty. It is not the same as an answer.
+A project that promised to dismantle lies has, in its first installment, dismantled no lies. It has analyzed tone.
+== The score is still there ==
+Here is where Courchaine's own football game turns on him.
+His argument is that emotional investment shapes how we see the evidence, and that is true. But his illustration proves something he did not intend. It proves that underneath the biased perceptions, there was a real game with a real result. The fans disagreed. The scoreboard did not.
+The Message question has a scoreboard too.
+Did Branham prophesy that the Los Angeles area would sink beneath the ocean? Did he describe a vision of a bridge collapse with sixteen deaths, and does the historical record support it? Did his stories stay the same each time he told them, or did they grow? These are not questions of perspective. They have answers that do not change based on how anyone feels about them.
+You can acknowledge every bit of bias Courchaine describes, on all sides, and the scoreboard is still on the wall. The honest thing is not to stare at the fans. It is to look up and read the score.
+== When you actually look at a claim ==
+Let me show you what that looks like, using the one factual claim Courchaine does make in Part One.
+He corrects a commenter who said "there are no church ages" and that Branham invented the idea. Courchaine points out, correctly, that the teaching that the seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 represent seven historical periods is not original to Branham. It is found in dispensationalist writers with no connection to him. On that narrow point, he is right, and the commenter was sloppy.
+For the record, Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202) was the first person to interpret Revelation as a prophetic survey of church history, considering that the book prophesies the events of Western history from the early church until his own time. It gained significant traction with premillennial dispensationalism, which William Branham basically adopted as well. Clarence Larkin was a major proponent of premillennial dispensationalism.
+However, the view of the seven churches as seven ages has basically disappeared because of the substantial objections to this method:
+<blockquote>The notion that these seven churches describe seven successive periods of Church history hardly needs refutation. To say nothing about the humorous—if it were not so deplorable—exegesis which, for example, makes the church of Sardis, which was dead, refer to the glorious age of the Reformation; it should be clear to every student of Scripture that there is not one atom of evidence in all the sacred writings which in any way corroborates this thoroughly arbitrary method of cutting up the history of the Church and assigning the resulting pieces to the respective epistles of Revelation 2 and 3.<ref>William Hendriksen, ''More Than Conquerors: An Interpretation of the Book of Revelation'', 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, [1940] 1982), 60</ref></blockquote>
+But watch what happens to the real issue.
+The careful critique of Branham has never been that he invented the church-ages concept. It is the reverse, and it is worse. Branham took the seven-church-ages framework, and even the specific dates for each age almost word for word, from Clarence Larkin's ''Dispensational Truth'' and from Charles Taze Russell. And then he told his followers the revelation had come to him directly from God. In his own words about that teaching, "the Holy Spirit revealed and opened to us all the mysteries." He also claimed his view was different from the very books he was copying.
+So the charge is not "Branham made up church ages." The charge is that he borrowed a man-made framework and presented it as a divine download that came straight from heaven. Courchaine answers the first claim, which no serious researcher is making, and leaves the second claim, the one that actually matters, completely untouched.
+That is the pattern. When the subject is a real, checkable claim, the evidence is there, and it does not favor the Message. Which may be part of why Part One is about comment sections instead.
+== About the word "liar" ==
+I am one of the people Courchaine named. He called several of us liars, then two days later called those same men his precious brothers in Christ. Both statements are in his own material.
+I am not going to make this about the insult. I will only point out that "liar" is itself a claim, and like any claim it needs evidence. That is exactly what this document does not provide. It asserts dishonesty at the outset and then spends its length examining other people's psychology rather than demonstrating a single false statement in anyone's research. If the goal is to prove someone is lying, the way to do it is to show the lie. Not to describe the mood of the person you disagree with.
+== An invitation, not an attack ==
+If you are inside the Message and reading this, I want to be clear about something. I am not looking down on you. I was where you are. I know how it feels to hear the Message questioned, and how much easier it is to examine the questioner than the question.
+Courchaine is right that we are all shaped by what we love and what we have suffered. I will go further than he did and say it plainly about myself. Yes, I have a side. Yes, my past shapes how I read this. That is true of me, and it is true of him, and being aware of it does not make either of us the neutral one in the room.
+But awareness of bias was never meant to end the search for truth. It was meant to sharpen it. The Bereans heard Paul preach and did not simply accept it because an apostle said it. They "examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so" (Acts 17:11), and Scripture calls them noble for it. Paul himself said, "Test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Testing is not the enemy of faith. It is how honest faith is built.
+So look at the fans if you like. Both sets of them. Then do the one thing this document never asks you to do.
+Look up at the scoreboard.
+The score was 31 to 27. The Message has a score too, and it is written in the historical record, waiting for anyone willing to read it.
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 [[Category:Unfinished articles]]