Caleb, an interesting point
Caleb, I can't remind you enough how inappropriate is your dependence on an incomplete data set in an ongoing learning process. For instance, the point about the camels: the domestication of camels has other anthropological and sociological implications than the legitimacy of the Bible. Whoopee: scientists found evidence and made the appropriate adjustments. It's what science does.
But what I find more intriguing is the idea that because a verifiable part of the Bible can be verified (e.g. the existence of a city) that apparently the unverifiable parts of the Bible must also be legitimate. I'd say it's horrible science, but it's not even science.
Furthermore, what, then, when the Bible is wrong? From
America B.C., by Dr Barry Fell:
From the Bible we learn that the ships of Tarshish were the largest seagoing vessels known to the Semitic world, and the name was eventually applied to any large ocean-going vessel. On the coasts of Palestine, where the ancient psalmists of Israel could watch the vessels of their Phoenician cousins plying their trade with Lebanon and Egypt, the ships of Tarshish became proverbial as an expression of sea power. On this coast the wind was feared by the sailors in Bronze Age times because it could blow ships out into the Mediterranean, and most of the coastal vessels were unable to withstand the tubulence of open sea. Thus, in their naivete as landlubbers, the Hebrews imagined that the same east wind meant disaster for the shps of the Phoenicians too. (In fact, of course, it would not.) So we find the poet of Psalm 48 expounding the power of Jehovah as such that "Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish with an east wind." Another reference to the ships of Tarshish occurs in the book of Jonah, which describes how the prophet "went down to Joppa where he found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid the fare thereof and went down into it to go with them unto Tarshish." Here, too, the ship is no sooner dispatched from land thaan it immediately gets into grave difficulties with a tempest. The ships of Tarshish come under threatening notice also in the book of the prophet Isaiah, and by and large it is rather clear that the Tartessian ships were a source of envy or irritation to the Jews. (93-94)
Dr Fell notes a few pages later, that "
The first Tartessian inscription discovered in America is engraved on a rock on the seashore of Mount Hope Bay, Bristol, Rhode Island." (98)
It would seem that the east wind did not, in fact, break the ships of Tarshish. Their inscriptions exist on the American continent.
I would recommend that you look into Ogham, an alphabet used for several languages; Phoenicia in the years before Christ, on up to the Irish illuminated texts of the sixth and seventh centuries, and on stones in the Americas, and even some remnants of ships and copper plates from which inscriptions are being translated.
Dealing with similar phenomena, we find this a long-running issue for Christianity. Cotton Mather, in letters to the Royal Society of London, proposed that circumcision among a Connecticut tribe suggested that the native tribes were the "lost tribes of Israel" (Fell, 17). Fell also includes a heirarchy devised by Pope Julius II (ca. 1512) to explain the presence of the indigenous tribes of America. It's real simple, and I can quasi-reproduce it for you here:
* Adam and Eve
"sinful Bablylonians" and
"Noah the righteous and his spouse".
* From Noah to Shem, Ham, and Japheth, who become, respectively--
- Shem: Arabs, Hebrews, Syrians, given the semitic lands.
- Ham: Libyans, Egyptians, Africans
-Japheth: Peoples of Europe and Asia
* From Sinful Babylonians to:
"(Some banished to the wilderness)" and
"(Most destroyed in the Flood)".
* From those Banished to the Wilderness to
Amerindian tribes.
Can science verify how many of the Babylonians survived the flood? Does that number match what the Bible says?
It is worth mentioning that mitochondrial DNA studies suggest that the indigenous peoples of North America are most likely descended from Japheth, as such, with older haplogroups primarily out of Asia, and a comparitively recent insertion of haplogroup X which resembles many European traits.
Surprisingly, the Latter Day Saints are the only ones really tempted by Doctor Fell's research, which does, incidentally, provide the grounds for Christianity in America in the first couple of centuries after Christ. They bought up some stones from a place called Burrows Cave; the stones contain inscriptions including a holy sigil (IHS) referring to Christ. Unfortunately, most qualified archaeologists and anthropologists dismiss the stones at first glance as anachronistic and likely fraudulent. Nonetheless, the LDS church will not release the stones for study without a certain degree of oversight which, according to some who have asked to see the stones, equates to agreeing to legitimize the stones before even seeing them. I find it interesting that with evidence of European words and Ogham influence among Algonguin and Pima histories, a church would cling so desperately to a questionable collection of artifacts and refuse to subject the stones to scientific verification.
Archaelogists used to have no idea that there was this big city over in Assyria called "Ninevah." They had never seen evidence for such a city, therefore, it must not exist!
An irresponsible conclusion; I think you should document that one. We'll probably find that the scientists making such conclusions had not yet had experienced such a thorough technical revolution in their lifetimes that a matter of means was the missing key. After it occurred to people that most of these cities are under
sand, we've started undertaking more accurate methods for locating such cities (e.g. sonar) than standing on a hilltop with shaded eyes saying, "Nope, don't see it." I would love to see the basis of the conclusion that Ninevah doesn't exist, as published.
Ditto for a whole race of people known as the "Hittites". The Bible was wrong because there was no evidence that they ever existed... Until archaelogists rediscovered them!
Please provide the archaeological assertion that the
Bible was wrong. Again, this is one that I'd love to see. I honestly think you're reacting to compressed summaries of data, personal conclusions by later authors. All you need is a paper that says, "We didn't find Ninevah" or "We were unable to verify that these artifacts belong to the Hittites", and then someone will write another paper claiming they don't exist. I'm quite sure that the "conclusions" you're responding to are not scientific and do not represent the scientific data body present in our lifetimes. Please, provide these citations; they're so polarized they reek of bad science to begin with.
Similarly, accounts of places, names, and events in Luke and Acts have been later verified. (e.g. the tax in the nativity story. The ruler who issued it was originally thought to have ruled at the wrong time. Later, we found that he actually ruled twice, the second time fit in just right with Luke's account. Similar stories hold for details of the ship journeys he describes in Acts.)
Strangely, this is why people ask for historical evidence of Jesus. We know that tax and other official records exist. Why does Josephus become reputable when attesting to the rumors of Christ, and disreputable when describing the rude state of Christian rabble? You'd think that for such a period, some official record of these events would exist, yet the best evidence I've seen of a historical Jesus is part of a data set that is acceptedby Christians generally because it matches prejudice. The rest of that data set is commonly rejected. Sorry, either Josephus is reputable or not. And even so, he does not provide source evidence of the historical existence of Jesus. So given that there are accounts of places, names, and events that verify certain objectiviities of the Bible, why are the vital ones not there? So a guy named ____, who believed this Christ dude was cool, went to ____ to preach ____. Fine. Verify that all you want. It gets you no closer to legitimizing the supernatural claims of such testimony.
The two primary points I want to stress are:
* I think you might be responding to "myths" of pseudoscience; compressed ideas from other debates where certain presuppositions are on the table. We need to see these sources from which you take these seemingly-irresponsible assertions in order to determine what those presuppositions are, or whether they even exist.
* That certain data in the Bible can be verified means
nothing, given what it is. The Bible says ___ went to ____. Well, it would
really undermine the Biblical authors if those places never existed. Salman Rushdie set his new story in New York, at least, and a couple of other cities as I recall. Does that make his story true, since New York exists?
And therein lies a great comparison:
Midnight's Children versus
Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The former has a good deal of truth, but is still fictionalized through the author. Allegory and analogy push the truer aspects of the tale. The latter, however, is a pure fantasy with allegorical bites. India is real, as such. The Sea of Stories cannot be said to be real in the sense that India is real. Does this make
Midnight's Children "gospel truth" (e.g. true exactly as written)?
That's how loosely I feel you're asserting your points.
I'm quite sure you're familiar with the nature of sources; what are your sources for these assertions? I can only encourage you to go and read the papers that most "sources" we come up with at Sciforums regard. For instance, I read a CNN story just the other day which might help for comparison. As I go back and look at the story, they've fixed the headline, which read
Alien-like microbes discovered under Antarctic ice. (
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/01/15/antarctic.life/index.html )
Like I said, they've fixed the headline. But that was a great example, so I wish they hadn't. Because I'm quite sure that nowhere in the original paper released to the scientific community did the phrase "alien-like microbes" appear. What most likely appears is a statement that these "microbes do not correllate to any presently-known structure". In other words, they're "new to us".
Did you see a talk show, or something, where someone asserted that Ninevah "didn't exist"? What report were they talking about?
Consider this juxtaposition, please: We have the Bible right in front of us. What's there is for all of us to see. What we do here (at our best moments) is essentially what can be seen at blueletterbible.org and other sites: commentary. If I dislike your claim about something in the Bible, I can look it up. It's a little harder with the scientific body, but it's the same process. And I encourage you to make that distinction: From what are you deriving your scientific conclusions to protest against? Are you protesting a later author's conclusion? Does that later author include enough factors to legitimize that later conclusion? What is the fault of that conclusion, and how does that embody the whole of science?
I'd love to explore that aspect of it with you,
Caleb. But most often irresponsible science indicates irresponsible conclusions derived for the purposes of a political position.
Think of Hawking's
Brief History of Time. It's a bestseller. Is it definitive? No. Why? Because to be definitive would preclude it from being a bestseller; the market couldn't comprehend that amount of data. So he compresses, as best he can, without distorting the message. What happens then is that you can, indeed, find isolated faults because the author is speaking of
trends. Let's imagine you're responding, then, to Hawking: are you responding to his actual
science or to his
bestselling compression thereof? It is, typically, a safe bet that those who can understand what Hawking is getting at also understand the limitations of such assertions.
Have you ever seen the whole of Einstein's notes for relativity written out? Suddenly, e=mc^2 doesn't seem quite adequate, does it? But it's the most relevant part of the theory, and therefore the one we know best.
That's all I'm after; when you cut through the pop-culture representations and get to the actual data, you might find that science doesn't say what you think it says.
And that might be part of the problem.
It's kind of like the people who celebrated that "Einstein has been proven wrong."
No, he hadn't. We just got to that point in our observational capabilities where Einstein said, "This theory won't work anymore". And, guess what? He was right about that, too. He even left future scientists a starting point for what he could not resolve without better equipment that never did come about during his lifetime. He said black holes would be there; they were. That's a little more impressive to me than the fact that a city mentioned in the Bible exists. What, Jerusalem isn't enough? Galilee?
We opened a couple of "time capsules" here in Seattle that were buried forty or fifty years ago. Inside one of them was letters from city councilmen. They complained about traffic. In the 1950's, we found a tremendous time capsule: Nag Hammadi. That these rumored scriptures actually exist seems to upset more Christians than anything.
Tommy Shaw, guitarist for Styx, sings, "It's all in how you say it."
Somedays, though, it really is all in how you
take it.
I don't argue with you on the point of camels being early enough for the Bible, or floods in the history of human development; heck, I don't even think evolution contradicts the Bible. But that camels exist means nothing in relation to whether or not Jesus was the Son of God. That those floods exist have nothing to do with the Bible until those terms are scientifically reconciled, and presently they're not. (Worldwide flood or regional flood--I'll buy the legitimacy of a regional flood, constituting the world to the Biblical authors, but that doesn't work for some Christians, and I'll skip expounding on the evolution dichotomy.) What I hope to convey to you, sir, is that it's all an ongoing process. You'll have to point out
what scientists and historians have to catch up on, because, frankly, scientists are also trying to catch up to Gene Roddenberry. You and
Loone have managed to classify the Bible with
Star Trek, and that one I'll gladly give you. Christianity
still hasn't caught up to Hegel. Everybody seems stuck on Machiavelli ....
Okay, now I'm starting wax philosophical ... I'd best scoot along.
thanx,
Tiassa
