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Life From Dirt?
- Thread starter Jimmy
- Start date
ratiocinator
Lightly seared on the reality grill.
What witnesses? All you have is a book, written a long time after the events, that says there were witnesses.
Brian2
Veteran Member
How are you defining 'evidence', then, and 'reality'?
I thought 'real' meant really real; objectively, ontologically real.
But you just said the evidence was subjective, that is, all in your head.
Again, you're presuming God and a valid revelation. Don't other religions with different beliefs start from the same premises? How are your beliefs more valid than theirs?
Some people don't like faith because it's, by definition, unevidenced, thus epistemically useless. The fact that different persons' faiths contradict each other doesn't lend it much credence, either.
Q: What's the difference between faith and blind faith?
The evidence for God is obvious but still rejected by many imo
The evidence for Jesus is prophesied historic events confirmed by witness and all many people can do is say it is BS and that they won't believe unless they see Jesus for themselves and put their fingers in His nail wounds and put their hand in His spear wound.
ratiocinator
Lightly seared on the reality grill.
How come you can't provide any without logical fallacies (argument from ignorance or personal incredulity), then?
exchemist
Veteran Member
If this evidence is subjective, then you are not entitled to say it is "obvious". You may say it is obvious to you, but that is quite different from it being obvious, period.
Furthermore it is incorrect to claim it is "rejected" by many, since, as the evidence you speak of is subjective, these "many" may not have had the same subjective experience as you have. Nobody can "reject" an experience they have not had.
Brian2
Veteran Member
Joshua was told to build an altar on Mt Ebal and to read the curses and blessings of the Law to the Israelites.
There is an altar there and I think possibly another under that one.
If the curse tablet is true then both the altar and the tablet are evidence for the truth of the exodus and conquest and show very early writing, a long time before 1000BC.
The Hebrews came to Egypt with a language and as shepherds. The Egyptians were not fond of shepherds and so I imagine the Hebrews would have kept their own language while there even though they no doubt would also have learnt Egyptian. Moses was probably educated in the Egyptian Royal palace but was brought up also by his mother and would have known the Hebrew language that they used. Abraham had come from Mesopotamia and moved to Canaan. He and his family would have known the language of Canaan and Mesopotamia.
Languages evolve. I don't see the problem.
I don't know what ma'at has to do with Moses and the Law of Moses.
Arkenatan lived after Moses but his monotheism may have been influenced by the Hebrews and their God.
Yes circumcision and clean and unclean animals seem to have been around in religion before the Law of Moses.
God told Abraham to be circumcised and to circumcise those in his household. This was before Egypt. That practice probably was passed down to the descendants of Abraham in Egypt and Moses could have been circumcised. But we know that Moses did not circumcise his son and that was a problem with God in the early Exodus story.
Are you saying that circumcision and kosher laws etc in the Law of Moses came from Egypt?
Brian2
Veteran Member
Evidence of the Exodus?
Does archaeology support the biblical account of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt and the Exodus?
Brian2
Veteran Member
In a democracy someone is going to push their morality onto the people.
I do not completely agree with wanting to force people to comply with the morality of conservative Christians in the USA however.
I can't speak to how it might be there however as I am in Australia.
Brian2
Veteran Member
True. Nevertheless even if answers were found that is still going to be speculation based on the presumptions used. I like to call it educated guess work, but for many it is no doubt more than that because the presumptions (eg no supernatural input) is the facts for them.
It is treated as such in science and by skeptics, and it serves to educate people that God is a fantasy.
However science never claims that God or the supernatural is a fantasy because it could very well be just undetectably by scientific methods.
IOW being treated as a fantasy (ignored) in science can lead to false conclusions if the ignored God actually exists and did those things that He says He did and that science might be looking for natural answers for and even saying (along with skeptics of course) that the only evidence they have is naturalistic evidence.
And yes of course that is the only evidence when that is all that science can detect and see as evidence.
wellwisher
Well-Known Member
A good example in science, to show nobody is immune to this, are dark energy and dark matter. These two assumptions have never been seen in the lab to prove they are real. These are imagined to be responsible for bulk universe trends that are seen in astral physics data. There is bulk astral physics data, which the consensus can see that causes everyone to accept a conclusion, about something that nobody has seen in the lab. I could just as well attribute that astral physics data to leprechauns and fairies, since they too have never been seen in the lab and could be used to fill in the conceptual placeholder.
ratiocinator
Lightly seared on the reality grill.
Nothing remotely like the same thing. Dark matter is matter in the universe that is detectable by observing its gravitational effect on visible matter but by no other means (as yet). We can make maps of where it is based on that alone but nobody (in science, anyway) is claiming to know exactly what it is. Nobody is claiming to know more than that. That is all the (the verifiable, repeatable) evidence can tell us.Dark energy is nothing much more than a label for whatever it is that is causing the observed acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Again, nobody is making a claim that does beyond repeatable, verifiable evidence.
They are not assumptions. They are an admission of phenomena that we don't have a full understanding of yet.
We don't need a lab to prove they are real effects. Observation of the universe is the evidence of what little we know.
Yes, you could. So what?
Nobody is trying to tell you that they know what (for example) dark matter is, except that it's matter of some kind, so invisible but massive leprechauns and fairies is possible but I don't really think it's very probable, do you?
Interestingly this is not the first time somebody has told me that scientists are claiming things about 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' that they simply aren't. Just because they name some observed phenomena, doesn't mean that they are claiming to know all about it.
It's also been pointed out by some scientists that 'dark energy' is a bit of a misnomer anyway, and that something like 'dark tension' would be more accurate, but it sounds a bit weird, so 'dark energy' has stuck...
Not a good example. There remain several hypotheses to explain the observations that are described as dark energy and dark matter, and actually remains inconclusive.
Your grasping at straws with difficult unresolved questions in science, and apparently do not understand the science of dark matter and energy.
Again . . .
This is the selective over reaching the objective verifiable evidence to justify a reality that does not fit the objective evidence as a whole.
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Extremely biased apologetic sources do not reflect academic historyEvidence of the Exodus?
Does archaeology support the biblical account of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt and the Exodus?armstronginstitute.org
Philosophy evolved over time with many philosophers.
Yes, if we have recorded eyewitness, but the most important books of the Bible, the gospels and the Pentateuch lack provenance of authorship and eye witnesses.
It remains that your self imposed ignorance of science and Methodological Naturism id appalling.
Maybe skeptics, but again science is neutral to the existence of God.
They are undetectable by scientific methods,
Again science does not treat the existence of God and the supernatural as fantasy.
Tony and all the King's horses and King's men can't Fix Fiats
Good thing you included imo, because there is not any objective evidence, Personal, subjective and anecdotal evidence is not reliable,
The evidence for Jesus is in the second and third person sources at best. Prophecy claims are subjective, and anecdotal. Prophecies are not evidence, By the way the Torah is the book of the Jews in Hebrew and the reject the prophecy claims of Jesus, which confirms the problem of claims of subjective fulfillment.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
The same evidence as for your god.
Claims aren't valid evidence. Claims require evidence.
Special pleading
"looks" =/= "is"
You need to give a proper definition of god so that evidence even can exist in the first place.
So you need a testable hypothesis that is capable of predicting data that exclusively points to your testable hypothesis and then find that data.
Without a testable, falsifiable definition of X, you can't have proper evidence of X.
Evidence.
You keep repeating this dubious claim of 2 cm by 2 cm scrap of lead, not stones, containing unintelligible glyphs. It is justified that the experts all reject it. Your grasping at straws to justify your agenda.
Take a look at the pictures they do not remotely resemble hebrew or Proto-Canaanite. The scrap of lead has never been offered to experts for verification of the claim.
Academic article on controversial 3,200-year-old ‘curse tablet’ fails to sway experts
Year after team hails bombshell discovery of oldest Hebrew writing in Holy Land, details of the find hit a peer-reviewed journal. But some academics don't see any inscription at all
www.timesofisrael.com
In March 2022, a team of archaeologists made an astonishing announcement: they had discovered a tiny 3,200-year-old folded-lead tablet inscribed with what could be the oldest known Hebrew writing ever found in the Holy Land, while sifting through decades-old debris from an excavation near Nablus.
The archaeologists, led by Dr. Scott Stripling of the Bible Seminary in Texas, believe the 2 x 2 centimeter (.8 x .8 inch) tablet proves that Israelites were literate when they entered the Holy Land and therefore could have written the Bible as some of the events took place. They also claim the tablet holds the earliest known writing of “Yahweh,” or the divine name of God.
More than a year after the finding was first announced through popular media, archaeologists published an academic article about the controversial “curse tablet” in the peer-reviewed journal Heritage Science.
The article’s long-awaited publication on Friday, the few experts who agreed to speak with The Times of Israel on the record expressed doubt as to the conclusions of the discovery.
The small, folded tablet was discovered in 2019 on Mount Ebal near biblical Shechem, in a pile of discarded dirt and debris from excavations carried out in the 1980s. Mount Ebal is known from Deuteronomy 11:29 as a place of curses, and the debris pile was from an area believed by some archaeologists to be an altar.
After Stripling first announced the discovery to the public in a March 2022 press conference, the find was immediately decried by a swath of archaeologists — both for the archaeologists’ conclusions and for the fact that they bucked academic norms by announcing the find to the media before publishing an article in a peer-reviewed journal.
Peers before publishing
Stripling has said, both now and in a Times of Israel podcast last March, that he decided to go to the media because he was worried that other researchers might try to claim credit for his team’s discovery.“I had released photos of the outside of the tablet not knowing there was writing on the inside as well,” said Stripling, who showed them to friends and published photos on his social media accounts. “It was my fault. Once those photos were out, people started to decipher letters on the outside. So because of that, we had the press conference because we had to stake out that this is our inscription, academically.”
A photo of the outside of the Mount Ebal curse tablet (courtesy Pieter Gert van der Veen)
In December, Israeli archaeologists published an open letter decrying colleagues who publish findings in mass media prior to the peer review process.
The statement was written as a general “researchers’ creed” — without naming any specific colleague — and called for well-supported research that is published in peer-reviewed, scientific journals. Prof. Gershom Galil acknowledged at the time he was likely the intended recipient for his work into curses, including the Mount Ebal tablet, though he chalked it up to “bitter” and “jealous” colleagues.
Galil’s research into other curse tablets, including the Jerusalem Stone, a 3,500-year-old inscription which would be one of the earliest inscriptions ever discovered in Jerusalem, has also been questioned. That finding was also announced to the media prior to publishing in a peer-reviewed journal.
One of the major concerns raised by other archaeologists was that following the announcement, Stripling and Galil declined to share high-resolution photos from the scans of the curse tablet, which would have allowed other archaeologists to weigh in on their authenticity.
An image from the tomographical scan of the Mount Ebal curse tablet. (courtesy Pieter Gert van der Veen)
Multiple archaeologists and epigraphical experts approached by The Times of Israel declined to go on the record about the article’s publication, but two who agreed to speak said they did not believe the article had made a convincing case.
“The published images reveal some striations in the lead and some indentations (lead is, of course, quite soft and so such things are understandable), but there are no actual discernible letters,” Prof. Christopher Rollston, an expert in Northwest Semitic languages and the chair of the department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at George Washington University, wrote in an email. “This article is basically a text-book case of the Rorschach Test, and the authors of this article have projected upon a piece of lead the things they want it to say.”
Rollston added that he would have been thrilled with the discovery of an inscription with a curse or the word Yahweh, but he does not believe this is the case. He was very suspicious of the discovery when it was first announced and was not convinced by the peer-reviewed publication.
“Facts are facts, and this article is very short on facts and very long on boundless speculation,” Rollston said. “The ‘readings’ in this article are basically a chimera.”
“I don’t accept all the interpretations that were suggested in the article, and I plan to publish a different opinion in an academic journal,” said Bar Ilan University Prof. Aren Maeir, declining to elaborate further. Meir published the open letter criticizing the announcement of findings in the media prior to academic review on his blog last December.
Stripling said he knows other archaeologists may have different interpretations.
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