Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

Dianetics makes its inauspicious début, in the pages of a pulp science fiction magazine.
Hubbard might have wished for a more venerable medium in which to launch his new science, but
he could hardly have found a more receptive forum. Many science-fiction fans at that time had an
engineering and science background and as far as they were concerned Hubbard's dissertation,
filling more than forty pages and seemingly resulting from years of diligent research and study, was
logical, enticing and thoroughly persuasive.
It was certainly very different from his previous writing. The customary narcissistic swaggering was
notably absent and his usual racy prose was replaced by a sober, textbook style sometimes too
worldly to be immediately comprehensible: 'When exterior determinism was entered into a human
being so as to overbalance his self determinism the correctness of his solutions fell off rapidly.'
Hubbard's approach was that of an engineer seeking practical, scientific solutions to the mysteries
of the human mind, constantly testing his postulates against a single, simple criterion: does it
work? He began by drawing an analogy between the brain and a computer with an infinite memory