Debunk "Jews came to America in 1000 BC"

Factual Questions
1

I have a friend who is a great guy otherwise, but is a total 6-day creationist and believes some of the biggest twaddle I’ve ever heard. His contention is that everyone is biased and interpreting evidence to suit their preferred conclusions, so he doesn’t respect any counterevidence I give him.

This is his latest thing, apparently. Just using wikipedia, I see that one of the pieces of physical evidence used has been strongly attacked as a forgery. Does anyone here know more about this topic? The Saga of Ancient Hebrew Explorers -- Who Really Discovered America?

2

If he’s just going to automatically reject all counterevidence you give him, what else can we do? He’s the one who needs to be providing evidence, anyway, not you.

The most rational reply you could give would be to insist that Moses was actually time-traveling Elvis, and insist that he disprove it.

3

Not that I want to get into the whole debate of evidence and such, but I am curious about the phrase “preferred conclusions”? That implies a motive and a desire to believe said claims - but why? Are the stated ethnic grouping somehow “better” or “worse” because of it?

I can understand wanting to know about history for knowedge’s sake; but not having a “preferred conclusion”? How does *preferring *a conclusion benefit anyone? Do they get a prize if that turns out to be true?

4

Disprove it? It sounds like he’d embrace it!

5

That is truly odd.
Not a footnote nor picture in sight.
:slight_smile:

6

Wikipedia article on the Los Lunas stone referred to by Cardinal’s link. It competently covers the problems of provenance and the impossibility of determining the age of the inscriptions. All the assertions in the link are basically meaningless if there is no way to show that the writing (as opposed to the rock itself) is ancient. The minimal scholarly research on the subject appears to be confined to mostly writing and language analysis.

“extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof,” as the cliché goes. The proof offered is far short of that standard.

7

I’m not sure what the motivation would be on this subject, but Friend has a very large desire to see the Bible as basically a scientific history (the way he would have written it), so he gets rewarded in denying evolution in that he gets to be right and his version of Christianity gets to be right, giving him a satisfied feeling. He thinks that the evolution believers have a God-bashing point to make, and are tweaking their evidence so they can reach their preferred conclusion.

Silenius, he does embrace the linked page. That’s where I got it. Seeing he was the one linking to it, I was automatically hugely suspicious. Funny enough, you’d never know this to talk to him on other subjects. He’s not actually crazy, and he supports a wife and 3 girls just fine. It’s his science and dogmatism on this one point that are way out there.

8

My favorite part about the Los Lunas Decalogue Stone from wiki:

“Other researchers dismiss the inscription based on the numerous stylistic and grammatical errors that appear in the inscription.” That’s exactly the kind of detail that trips up many forgers: they don’t have enough education on the item to make it pass with someone who actually knows.

9

so why bother?
His conclusion was not reached by rational means; no rational argument or evidence will change his conclusion.

If he is otherwise worth having as a friend, keep him, and just avoid/refuse to discuss these topics. And if he’s not that good a friend, drop him.

10

Cardinal, I’m not clear on why his claims bother you. If he would turn out to be right, would that affect your worldview in some way?

Personally, I don’t know if he is right or wrong, and I don’t care. Why do you care?

If something in that link claimed that ALL the Jews came to the west, and that none were left in the east, that would contradict a lot of generally-accepted history. But as long as no such claim is made, who cares?

11

If you aren’t interested in debunking lunacy just because it is lunacy, why in the world are you posting in GQ?

And it certainly is lunacy. One of the supposed linguistic verifications on that Wiki page comes from Barry Fell. He’s the America B.C. guy. It’s like citing Velikovski on astronomy. If we’re not debunking claims of this sort, why bother going on?

12

The headline of the story is patently false. How could the Jews “discover” America when it was already occupied?

13

I’d say the claim contradicts accepted history pretty starkly. Even as far back as 1000 BC, the ancient world had a lot of technology, culture, livestock and crops that were never found/developed in the pre-colombian New World. Its pretty inconceivable that ancient Hebrews arrived here in large enough numbers to support an expedition to New Mexico, but that no crops, livestock, or knowledge was either transmitted to the natives or were left behind in the wilds, with the exception of a single stone carving hudreds of miles inland.
Plus, even if like the OP’s friend one has an extreme distrust of accepted science, archaeology and history, but think all things should be developed from the bible, the fact is the Bible goes on at length about the geography of ancient Israel and its neighbors and allies. One would think they’d mention it if their empire streatched all the way to Peru!!

Eh, the other week I discovered a new Pizza place with really great food near where I work. That hardly means that no human-being had ever encountered that Pizza place before.

14

That’s a very good point about the lack of technology traces in America. Besides that, is there any evidence that people had the ability to make it from Africa to America reliably at the time? I guess I really don’t know, and don’t know what Columbus would have had that made it less of a suicide mission. For that matter, how did people find Hawaii?

15

It sounds like the OP’s friend is projecting. Because he interprets any and all evidence in light of his preferred conclusion, he assumes that scientists are doing the same.

In the case of an incompetent or dishonest scientists he may be correct, but a good scientist (true scotsman?) will invest a fair bit of effort looking for evidence that shows they are wrong. In addition, other researchers will be checking the work of others, so that the incompetent or dishonest ones eventually get found out. Getting found out is often career ending, so there is strong incentive to do good and honest research.

On rare occasions the correct idea gets scoffed at by mainstream scientists. These get a lot of attention because they ARE rare, and also note that the truth eventually becomes the mainstream view. I’m pretty sure there are no old geologists insisting that plate tectonics is hoakum because it is not in the the text book they used as an undergrad.

Biblical literalist “research” on the other hand seems to operate thus: “If it supports the idea that the text of the bible is the literal truth, then it is good research, all else is flawed research”. They have a 2000 year old text book that they know is correct, so any evidence to the contrary must be in error.

They are not unique in this in my experience. I have witnessed several commercial R&D programs that were seriously flawed. All too often evidence that will hurt profit is dismissed. There are some high profile drug lawsuits as a result of such poor science. Or maybe you have decided that it is best to launch a space shuttle on a particular date, so you might dismiss evidence that the booster housing O-ring material performs poorly at the temperature that day brings, and give more weight to the fact that you got away with it last time.

My point is that when scientists and corporations behave as the OPs friend claims, there is very often hell to pay…and it comes right here on earth, not as eternal damnation for disbelief in a 2000 year old text.

16

If you really want to engage with him, ask him what evidence he would accept as weighing against this fact (don’t put it as something that would be definitive absolute proof, but what would be acceptable as evidence, able to be weighed with all the other evidence to come up with a tentative verdict of ‘almost definitely’, ‘maybe’, ‘really unlikely’). If he gives a reasonable reply, then you can have a discussion. If not, then you can point to that reply as a reason to never discuss it with him again.

17

I know nothing about sailing, but several hundred years BC the Phoenicians had circumnavigated Africa, and Mesopotamian invoices show trade taking place over longer than transatlantic distances between Mesopotamia and Pakistan/India/Oman/possibly the Horn of Africa (depending on whether the places have been properly identified) well before 1000BC. If the question is “could they?”, the answer is yes. If the question is “did they”, that’s a different matter.

In little wooden boats with sails on them. Following sea birds back to land, I believe. Apparently the Vikings carried their own birds on their ships to release in mid ocean, as they had a higher point of view and would be able to see land first and fly off towards it. Like Noah’s Ark. Of course, they never got to Hawaii, but I dare say the Polynesians knew the ways of water and wildlife well too.

18

I remember reading Bronze Age America and thinking “this man must be mad, this can’t be right”. The pictures of Ogham inscribed stones were very impressive, though. To quote from wikipedia:

*David H. Kelley, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary who is credited with a major breakthrough in the decipherment of Mayan glyphs, complained about Fell in a 1990 essay: “Fell’s work [contains] major academic sins, the three worst being distortion of data, inadequate acknowledgment of predecessors, and lack of presentation of alternative views.” In the same essay, however, Kelley went on to state that “I have no personal doubts that some of the inscriptions which have been reported are genuine Celtic ogham.” Kelley concluded: “Despite my occasional harsh criticism of Fell’s treatment of individual inscriptions, it should be recognized that without Fell’s work there would be no [North American] ogham problem to perplex us. We need to ask not only what Fell has done wrong in his epigraphy, but also where we have gone wrong as archaeologists in not recognizing such an extensive European presence in the New World.”[10]

19

[quote=“Cardinal, post:7, topic:548114”]

I agree with most posters that irrational people don’t accept rational explanations, so that road if often fruitless.

But this point is kind of relevant, so what the heck.

From the point of view of believing in evolution - the existence, or non-existence, of God is completely irrelevant. Evolution is either a viable theory or it isn’t. The existence of God doesn’t prove it wrong, and the non-existence of God doesn’t prove it right.

It’s like tectonic activity or phlogiston - they may be good theories or bad theories, people may accept them or not, they may be considered quackery or accepted, they could move in and out of popularity, they could be tweaked altered or whatever - all kinds of things can happen - but the existence God doesn’t make them right or wrong.

Ultimately the relationship of the existence of God and science is this:

if God exists, then all science is the way it is because God made it that way
if God doesn’t exist, then all science is the way it is because of something else

But none of that answers the question of what amount of force is needed to escape Earth’s gravitational pull or figure out how to safely dispose of radioactive waste - you need to do the grunt work of science either way. So, the question is irrelevant.

The church used to say that the Sun revolved around the Earth. It turns out that it doesn’t. Does that disprove God? No. Neither would acceptance of evolution - it’s just an answer to a question.

If it turned out that the Sun did revolve around the Earth, would that prove the existence of God? No - it would just mean that some guy screwed up his observations or math or whatever.

20

Well, here’s one error:

Welsh is an Indo-European language, which is unsuprisingly only closely related to the other Celtic languages. Hebrew is an Afro-Asiatic (more specifically, Semitic) language.

Pretty much the only thing they have in common is that both were largely dead for a while and both are really hard for English speakers to pick up.