No, but it also doesn’t make sense to reject all of it out of hand.
The Old Testament is a heterogeneous collection of tribal folklore, myth, fiction and history. The history is made up of fictional accounts, such as Esther as well as pretty solid history.
Scholars have spent long years untangling the sources of the Old Testament so it is now possible to make a fair assessment of what parts are good history and what are not.
So no, you shouldn’t accept its history uncritically but you shouldn’t dismiss it. It is necessary to go to the scholarly works and spend a lot of time studying them. Or alternatively, go to authoritative history books for information. By the way, I suspect that many of the history books dealing with ealiest times rely on the Old Testament as a source but presumeably the author has done our research for us and uses only that part of it that can be confirmed by extra Biblical accounts and studies.
This is where the divide between science and faith is, and cmkellar’s post is an example of someone respecting the divide. The Flood should not be taught in public school because the secular justification is absurd and the religious one has no place there. You can get a more or less consistent story with the right application of miracles, though - just like his history. The problem with Creation “Science” is the unwillingness to admit the need for miracles.
As for the Superman parable, the true skeptic would say “I see no reason to believe you without some evidence.”
For ** cmkellar**: I don’t think F & S are trying to destroy anyone’s belief as an intention. Most of us are either taught this history as the Bible tells it, or not taught it at all. i got that their goal was to present the latest scientific findings in a popular form, which goes against much of which is “known” by anyone. It is true that this goes against the religious and political beliefs of many. Those objecting can either look for scientific evidence supporting the Bible, or appeal to unfalsifiable miracles as you do. The first is on the science side of things, the second is on the faith side, so both are legitimate.
What was Egypt’s interest in Judea? I don’t read very much in the Egyptian’s history about forays into Israel. Of course, the egyptians traded with the Phoenicians (most of Egypt’s wood came from the cedars of lebanon). If the Kingdom of Judea was a powerful kingdom (Solomon), wouldn’t the egyptians have made mention of it?
I believe that the kingdom of David and Soloman rose up while Egypt was in a temporary decline and before the rise of the Assyrian Empire. That makes it reasonable that it wouldn’t figure large in Egyptian history because while the kingdom existed Egypt’s attention was fixed on internal problems.
If the kingdom of David and Solomon existed as described, it existed only because there was a niche in time when there were no great empires in the region.
Absolutely; IMHO the point of the parable is to show that applying a certain type of scientific reasoning to debunk religious claims of truth is faulty. The skeptic’s answer above is a better refutation, and exposes the different world-views applied to the same evidence.
You neatly summarize the obvious reasons why biblical “facts” like the flood and ID have no place in public schools. To impart knowledge–belief with justification–the tacit assumption in public education is thatclassroom assertions must be justified in a secularly-acceptable way. If we were running madrassas in the US, we might adopt a different standard of truth; I for one am glad we don’t, just as I am happy churches do not have to submit to scientific proof of their tenets to preach.
Hard evidence? Of course not. However, given the lack of a corresponding legend on the Phoenecian side, I think it’s intellectually dishonest to invent one when an existing legend accords with what evidence does exist.
Could be she’s misrepresenting and had actually searched elsewhere and stumbled on the site by chance, but unless you have any proof, I see no reason not to take her at her word.
Diogenes, thanks for the kind words.
Voyager:
But my point was not whether the skeptic is obligated to believe. My point was that the skeptic, in dissecting the believer’s statement, failed to actually disprove it.
That’s not how I read it. It seemed to me that their book made a point of trying to refute Biblical narratives. While it’s true that they present their thesis in the context of archaeological scientific discovery, the theme of the book is to interpret said finds in support of their argument, not to present hard, dry encyclopedic facts.
Not that there’s anything wrong with a book that states a thesis.
But her word is very obviously incomplete. The only clue she has is “down from the north.” So given this incredibly vague direction, did she hit something on her first try in such a vast search space, or what? Is she the only Biblical searcher ever, or are we only hearing about those that find something? and so on.
The point is not that while this might be consistent with a Davidic story, its very very far from being meaningful evidence for it.
Agreed. This is supported by C. Behan McCullagh’s criteria (Justifying Historical Descriptions, ISBN: 0521318300). Among other things, he says that the best historical explanations must be less ad hoc than other hypotheses, and it must be disconfirmed by fewer accepted beliefs.
In evaluating history, we can always as questions like, “Well, what if there was such-and-such legend…?” or “What if a massive hoax occurred?” or “What if all the witnesses all suffered from a mental disease?” and so forth. Unless one has evidence to support such speculations though, they are ultimately fruitless. An intellectually honest researcher looks at the actual evidence, rather than speculating about legends for which no evidence exists.
I’m not sure how the accuracy of some information in the Bible is evidence for the accuracy of other information. I feel like often this is a smokescreen argument that people who don’t believe often use, because they think, “ah, I can point to things in the Bible that I know are factually wrong, thus bolstering my own opinion about how right I am to write the whole thing off! I don’t even have to talk about miracles or junk, I can just say, ‘hey, until you show me that the verifiable parts are true (which you won’t be able to do) I won’t take the posibility of you being right seriously.’”
But, of course, these same people, if presented with adequate factual proof of the historical parts of the Bible, would certanly not change their minds about the factuality of miracles or god or whathaveyou. (I myself am, amongst other things, an athiest, FWIW).
I’m not questioning your belief at all, but certainly there is/was as much benefit in maintaining Jewish belief for Jews as there has been for any other faith to maintain itself, conversion or no? I mean, from a sociological perspective, religions have formed the basis for many communities of all sizes, and provided a common ground and common rules for peaceful co-existance. For any individual, it’s very beneficial to bring one’s children up believing the same stories. That certainly would hold true on a larger scale as well.
This reminds me of when I heard Richard A. Freund, an archaeologist who’s done excavation and work at the Cave of Letters (amongst other things) speak at my dad’s temple.
He was relating a story about one time when he was digging at a fishing village. He was excavating at the largest fishing hut/home of the village, when he uncovered a key. Well, this town was aparently the town that St. Peter had been from (or was thought to possibly the the town from which he came), and so word got out that this might be “Peter’s Key,” an important religious relic, since Peter holds the key to the gates of heaven.
Well, the Pope got word, and he was coming to the dig site for some other reasons, and the Pope’s aide came to Mr. Freund and asked if he would be willing to give the Pope Peter’s Key. “Well, I don’t really know that it’s Peter’s Key, and anyway, it’s the gov’t of Israel’s decision, blah blah, but it’s really not Peter’s Key.”
To make a long story short, the Israeli gov’t made a duplicate of the key to present to the Pope, but all the time Mr. Freund was saying, “it’s just a key. That’s all we can say about it.”
So, the Pope shows up, goes down the receiving line, and gets to Mr. Freund, who has the key replica in a box. The Pope asks him, “this is Peter’s Key?” and Mr. Freund sighs and says, “yes, this is Peter’s Key,” which is now housed in the Vatican somewhere.
The moral of the story is, people believe what they want to about this sort of thing.
You certainly should know better than to say that skeptics (or atheists) claim they can disprove anything. That’s what unfalsifiability is all about. There must have been hundreds of posts made in this very forum around this point.
This sounds very much like the fundamentalist creationist argument about why teaching evolution is inherently attacking religion. They conflate their particular version with religion in general. If one’s relgion involves believing that the sky is purple in Peoria, then a picture from Peoria showing a blue sky is attacking that belief. One can hardly do anything without “attacking” somebody’s belief somewhere. So, just as in biology and cosmology, results may challenge the belief of some as a side effect, but that is not the goal of the work.
I believe they were also attacked for casting doubt on the Biblical claim for the West Bank, right? I doubt that was intentional either.
And it is true that they interpreted their findings - which made this a popular book, not a journal article. I assume all this stuff was published in journals before, out of sight of the average reader. You might as well attack Gould for making evolution so darn accessible. (I’d add Dawkins, but in some cases you might have a case for his purpose being to attack faith.)
No, that’s not what the article says. The Biblical verse said “down from his palace to the fortress.” She deduced that this meant he came from somewhere of higher ground relative to the fortress, and there is only one place in the Jerusalem area that fits that description. Most (if not all) prior researchers operated on the assumption that David’s palace was within Jerusalem proper, without giving that verse any thought.
And I agree, without further digging, we cannot be certain what the structure she found really is. However, it certainly is a significant find, and Finklestein hand-waved it away as Messianic nonsense.
Eonwe:
Oh, no doubt…if the people passing along the belief believe it themselves. However, if the book was originated by the court of King Josiah, and the people are en masse asked to present it to their children as something that their family had been familiar with for hundreds of years, how does perpetuating it benefit their cultural cohesion? Even if the stories therein were bona fide oral traditions that are only now being written down, to pass along the BOOK ITSELF as being of ancient divine origin and utmost importance would serve to undermine the pre-book culture.
Voyager:
Have you read The Bible Unearthed? Finklestein and Silberman are quite clear that they see recent archaeology as actual disproof of the Biblical narrative. Whether or not it’s logically reasonable to say anything can be disproven, I am not just knee-jerking when I say that those two have disproof as their aim. Diogenes, if you’re still reading this thread, can you back me up on this? (If you feel I’m misrepresenting F&S, I’ll happily accept correction.)
It’s true that F&S regard the archaeological evidence of the ANE as providing positive disproof of at least some of the Biblical narratives (and some pretty key ones at that), but I think Voyager may have been talking about the impossibility of disproving non-empirical claims like the existence of God or the possibility of miracles rather than whether some historical claims can be physically verified or falsified.
He may also have been speaking in the strictly technical sense that in science nothing is ever absolutely proven or disproven but this gets into more abstract, philosophical distinctions that practical ones (e.g. it’s not technically proven ABSOLUTELY that gravity exists but the possibility that everything in the observable universe has always just coincidentally and randomly behaved in a manner which only makes it APPEAR that gravity exists is so astronomically remote as to require no practical consideration.
I also think a distinction should be made between drawing a conclusion that a particular Biblical claim is not literal history and trying to “disprove” the Bible as a whole. F&S certainly do not think the Bible lacks any accurate historical detail at all and I think it would be inaccurate to assume that they have any sort of anti-religious or “anti-Biblical” motivations. I don’t even know that they’re atheists. My impression is that they are pretty secular but they might have some minimal beliefs or practice that I haven’t heard about. As Israelis, I doubt they have any desire to damage Jewish historical claims to Israel. Of course, there is some irony in the fact their conclusions would arguably actually strengthen Jewish claims on Israel since it puts the ancient Israelites in the area by indigenous origin rather than by conquest.
The problem being that people have found any number of ancient buildings all sorts of other places, and the fact that one was found on high ground (where it makes sense to put buildings) has nothing to do with David in particular. Unless there is some actual evidence that this was David’s palace, it doesn’t mean much of anything, and isn’t a “prediction” either. Regardless, the concensus is not necessarily that there was no David figure, but rather simply that him and his rule were mythicized.
Perhaps I misunderstood Voyager, but I interpreted his remarks in that second way (“He may also have been speaking in the strictly technical sense that in science nothing is ever absolutely proven or disproven”), and, however true that may be philosphically, that’s certainly not how F&S are speaking (as you agree).
This may all be true; I was not at any time addressing their personal spiritual beliefs. All I meant was that in scholarly terms, they are extreme Biblical minimalists, and they have staked out their position so strongly in their writings, that they seem extremely invested in defending it.
I hadn’t even thought them to be politically motivated; I simply think that having invested so much professional prestige in their minimalist position, they are overly dismissive of a new find which might, given further digging, chip away at it.
Apos:
But not in or around Jerusalem, dated to that era.
Plenty of buildings may be built on high ground, but the point here is that this is where the Biblical verse (as Mazar read it) indicated David had come from. The drive to search there came from her reading of the verse, not that the verse provided post-facto identification of a building found by random digging.
Digging continues, but the size, dating and style of the building at least make further digging warranted. I don’t think even Mazar claims there is yet conclusive evidence that it was David’s.
Well, how do you define prediction?
True, but the main argument for saying that David’s grandeur was exaggerrated was the lack of any discovered big public buildings in his supposed capital city. Discovery of one means that the degree of exaggeration that minimalists wish to posit will have to be re-evaluated.
With regards to miracles, it is not as if any skeptic is under the slightest obligation to disprove them. You say that the skeptic is under no obligation to believe, but with regards to superman, the six day creation, or the walking on water; a better descriptor would be that anyone, not only the skeptic, would be foolish to believe.
It’s not a smoke screen argument. The bible makes many claims, some reasonable, some unreasonable, some ordinary and some extraordinary. The reasonable and ordinary ones we can debate about their likelihood of being true based on the given evidence, historical, archeological, etc. The more extraordinary claims however should be held to a higher standard. If it turned out that science continually confirmed the bible was true on cosmology, geology, prophesy, the power of prayer, etc., it would actually become reasonable to assume it was of genuine divine origin. However, since the bible is demonstrably full of errors and contradictions, it is not reasonable to take it at face value regarding much of anything, but particularly not with regards to the miracles. And to the contrary of what many liberal Christians say, the miracles are the important part.
Nor should they, whether the city of Troy exists, says little if anything to the existence of the Greek gods.
And I’m not saying one is. My point is that his completely voluntary offer of disproof is not a valid one…pointing to the lack of footprints does not rebut the statement that someone magically flew across the muddy field. My analogy was not meant as support of biblical belief or as condemnation of anyone who wishes to disbelieve it. It was merely making the point that certain arguments simply do not address the statement they mean to address.
Dio pretty much nailed it. I’m sure they wrote their book to correct those who, in their eyes, believe in those parts of the narrative they had evidence against. I don’t remember exactly how much of the work mentioned they did, but certainly not all of it, so you can’t say the excavations described were done to disprove the narrative - they could have supported it just as easily.
The main thing is that it is somewhat unfair, and even a bit dangerous, to say that someone searching for the truth is attacking faith. Even as an atheist I strongly believe that we should protect all religions against government intrustion and true attacks (and we both know what that feels like) but we can’t extend this to protecting religion from research that might weaken its case.
I’m sure you are right about their desire to defend their position, but in this they are like just about any other scientist of any repute. Science is not done by pipe smoking professors having amiable discussions in lounges, but by people (politely) yelling at each other in conferences and papers.
From reading the book, I’m sure that they are convinced that some portions of the Bible are not factually accurate, but I’m not convinced that they came to or hold this conclusion from to attack religion. I trust that any Jewish archeologists working on sites from around 30 CE are also looking for the truth, not for evidence against Christianity.