Archaeological Proof? 3

From the Errancy Discussion list, May 4, 1997:

ADNAN
I was having a discussion with a Christian and he mailed me following info
about archeological claims that it proves Bible is true. How accurate are
these claims :

AA
The tower of Babel and the dispersment of the people after changing
their speech which can be confirmed by several language scholars and
archeological finds as the remains of the Tower of Babel can still be seen. 

TILL
Yep, I'm believing more and more that AA just has to be Aubrey Matthews. If
not, I will say again that Aubrey and AA should try to get together. They
will get along famously.

Archaeological Proof? (3)

From the Errancy Discussion list, 5-4-97:

AA
The tower of Babel and the dispersment of the people after changing 
their speech which can be confirmed by several language scholars and 
archeological finds as the remains of the Tower of Babel can still be seen. 

TILL
Yep, I'm believing more and more that AA just has to be Aubrey Matthews. 
If not, I will say again that Aubrey and AA should try to get together. They
will get along famously.

AA
The greatest oriental language scholar Dr. Max Mueller declared that all
human languages can be traced back to one single original language. 

Archaeological Proof? (2)

From the Errancy Discussion list, 5-4-97:

TILL
The more I read of Amateur Apologist's (AA's) archaeological evidence, the
more I wonder if AA isn't Aubrey Matthews. Does anyone know? Anyway, my
response continues from where I left off.

AA
Another stone inscription discovered in the temple of Pharaoh at Thebes 
in Egypt which mentioned an invasion by the Egyptians against Israel 
confirming the presence of Israel at the time of Joshua which was accused 
by many critics of the Bible as fiction. 

TILL
AA speaks only of "another stone inscription," but he doesn't tell us 
what this inscription said, so there is no way that we can evaluate it. 
If he will post the text of the inscription, we can then react to it.

Let's suppose, however, that there is an inscription on a temple in Egypt,
which mentions an Egyptian invasion of Israel at the time of Joshua. Unless
the inscription mentioned Joshua, this would not prove that Joshua was an
actual historical person, and it wouldn't confirm that Joshua parted the
waters of the Jordan River as recorded in Joshua 3, and it wouldn't confirm
any of the exploits attributed to Joshua unless the inscription gave
corroborating references to those exploits. As usual, AA is reading
entirely too much into alleged archaeological discoveries.

AA
The countless books written criticizing the Bible were rendered as obselete
and worthless, and had to be removed from the scholarly accounts of history. 

Archaeological Proof? (1)

From the Errancy Discussion list, 5-4-97:

TILL
Amateur Apologist, whom I will refer to as AA, has regurgitated the same
apologetic tripe about archaeological evidence that has been repeatedly
discredited. I will resume my response to his "evidence" where I left off.

AA
Today biblical personalities that were denied for hundreds of years like...
King David can be confirmed by the study of the science of archeology 
as 100% true and accurate. King David for example was considered to 
be a myth by many universities. Yet in 1993 archeologists dug out a 
stone tablet at Tel Dan in Israel clearly refering to the "house of David" 
(Bait Daveed), identifying him as king of Israel. This was the first inscription 
outside the Bible dated to about the ninth century B.C. 

TILL
If the Tel Dan inscription referred to the house of David so "clearly," then
why has this inscription been a point of considerable controversy among
biblical scholars? If AA has followed the controversy in *Biblical
Archaeological Review,* he would know that some contend that it has been
mistranslated by "archaeological maximists," who seize even questionable
archaeological evidence as confirmation of the biblical text. Furthermore,
this was not the first extrabiblical inscription that allegedly referred to
David. The Moabite Stone, which AA refers to later, also contained a
statement that some have said is a reference to David, although it too has
been disputed.

Absence Of Evidence

From the the Alt. Bible. Errancy discussion list, 4-22-03

DGM
Was it not Carl Sagan who said: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"?

LK
Absence of evidence means there is no evidence to believe it's true. I'll give you a simple test so you can prove this too yourself. File in court that Bill Gates owes you a million dollars. Go to court and when they ask for evidence tell them, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." see how quickly your case is dismissed.

TILL
Depending on the claim, however, absence of evidence can be compelling evidence against the claim. If, for example, someone should claim that an asteroid struck Sikeston, Missouri, last week, the absence of any evidence of such an impact would be compelling evidence that this did not happen. In the same way, absence of evidence of extraordinary claims in the Bible, such as the midday darkness during the crucifixion, is evidence that this event did not happen.

Biblicists like to talk about archaeological discoveries that confirm the accuracy of the Bible, and there have been some discoveries that corroborate SOME of the information in the Bible. However, the discoveries have confirmed only ordinary events. I have never heard of an archaeological discovery that corroborated any of the numerous miraculous claims in the Bible, yet if all of these events happened, surely there would have been some evidence left of their occurrence.

Farrell Till

Archaeology And Biblical Accuracy

From *The Skeptical Review*, 1998 / March-April:

by Farrell Till
Has archaeology proven the historical accuracy of the Bible? If you listened only to biblical inerrantists, you would certainly think so. Amateur apologists have spread this claim all over the internet, and in a letter published in this issue, Everett Hatcher even asserted that archaeology supports that "the Bible is the inerrant word of God." Such a claim as this is almost too absurd to deserve space for publication, because archaeology could prove the inerrancy of the Bible only if it unearthed undeniable evidence of the accuracy of every single statement in the Bible. If archaeological confirmation of, say, 95% of the information in the Bible should exist, then this would not constitute archaeological proof that the Bible is inerrant, because it would always be possible that error exists in the unconfirmed five percent.

Has archaeology confirmed the historical accuracy of some information in the Bible? Indeed it has, but I know of no person who has ever tried to deny that some biblical history is accurate. The inscription on the Moabite Stone, for example, provides disinterested, nonbiblical confirmation that king Mesha of the Moabites, mentioned in 2 Kings 3:4-27, was probably an actual historical character. The Black Obelisk provides a record of the payment of tribute to the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III by Jehu, king of the Israelites (2 Kings 9-10; 2 Chron. 22:7-9). Likewise, the Babylonian Chronicle attests to the historicity of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and his conquest of Jerusalem as recorded in 2 Kings 25. Other examples could be cited, but these are sufficient to show that archaeology has corroborated some information in the Bible.

The Old Logic

The following article is from *The Skeptical Review*, 1996:

By Farrell Till 

I think we can safely assume that Louis Rushmore didn't think very much of the March/April 1995 edition of Biblical Archaeology Review. Before I say anything else about Rushmore's denunciation of modern archaeology, I should explain his comments about the "new hermeneutics." Rushmore is a preacher in the old-guard faction of the Church of Christ that opposes a liberal movement within the denomination to reexamine some of its hardline doctrinal positions that have isolated it from fellowship with other churches. As a first step toward mending the breach that divided the old Campbellite movement into the Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ, this liberal movement has in particular advocated taking another look at the scriptures on which the Church of Christ has based its exclusion of instrumental music from worship. The old-guard contemptuously refers to this movement as "the *new* hermeneutics."

From what I have read on the subject (and also heard in lectures that were held in conjunction with the Portland, TX, debates I participated in), the old- guard preachers aren't willing even to consider the possibility that their doctrinal beliefs have been based on incorrect interpretations. They simply assume that the "old" way is the right way. They declare the "new hermeneutics" wrong, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

Two Goliaths?

More nonsense from desperate biblical inerrantists. From the Errancy Discussion List, Nov. 14, 1995:

RH 

All right, I think inerrancy is a good test to use because the Bible is alleged to be the word of God and to be so, it must not contain any errors. If the Bible contains errors, or is errant, it cannot be the word of God. Inerrancy is one test that I think we should use to determine if the Bible is the word of God. What else is needed?

TILL

I don't think we are communicating on this point, Roger. I'm trying to find out how one can go about "testing for inerrancy." I can't really see that fundamentalists "test" inerrancy. When confronted with a text whose face-value meaning contradicts the face-value meaning of another text, they just arbitrarily assign a figurative or possible-but-unlikely meaning to one of the texts. I can't see that this is a valid way to test inerrancy. As I have offered to do in past postings, if you or anyone will send me an example of contradiction or inconsistency in a nonbiblical historical document, I will use inerrantist methods to show that the contradiction or inconsistency doesn't exist when my "explanation" is accepted. However, I can't see that such an explanation would constitute a valid test for inerrancy in the document, because it lacks corroborative proof and fails to recognize the possibility that errancy might actually exist in the text.

Let me give an example of what I think would constitute a valid inerrancy test. The Bible says that David killed a Philistine warrior named Goliath who had a spear whose !"staff was like a weaver's beam" (1 Samuel 17:7), but 2 Samuel 21:19 says that the Philistine Goliath "whose spear was like a weaver's beam" was killed by Elhanan. Errantists consider this a "doublet" that found its way into the Bible by writers who incorporated two separate versions of a legend into 1 Samuel. In one legend, David killed Goliath; in the other Elhanan killed Goliath. Inerrantists, however, argue that this is not a doublet, but separate incidents. In other words, there were two Goliaths "whose spear was like a weaver's beam." David killed one of the Goliaths; Elhanan killed the other. Period, end of the discussion! The discrepancy is resolved, and the Bible has passed the "test" of inerrancy.

Inerrantists, however, fail to realize that just because the postulation of two Goliaths conveniently resolves the problem, it in no way proves that there really were two Goliaths. However, the problem could be satisfactorily resolved if archaeologists should discover extrabiblical records left by the Philistines that clearly and unequivocally refer to the existence of two giants named Goliath. We would also need some kind of archaeological evidence that David existed, because many scholars consider him to be sort of the "King Arthur" of Hebrew folklore. To date, archaeologists have discovered only two very questionable references to David in nonbiblical references. Archaeologists have discovered nonbiblical references to Ahab, Omri, and several other Israelite kings less prominent than David but no indisputable references to David, the most famous king of them all, and this seems strange indeed in view of the prominence that he was given in biblical documents. So if confirmation of David's existence and the existence of two Goliaths could be obtained through extrabiblical records, this would be a reasonable confirmation of the Bible's accuracy in its references to two Goliaths. In the absence of such evidence, however, the two-Goliaths explanation of the inerrantists is pure speculation that proves nothing at all about the Bible's accuracy in this matter.

F. Till

The Moabite Stone

From Alt.Bible.Errancy, 2-24-02:

GEISIK Greetings all. Traffic is slow so I will not feel too guilty asking this. It appears that there are many similarities between the Moabite god Kemosh and the god of the bible YHWH. I will not detail them here, but would like to ask if anyone has suggested references to pursue this amazing parallel.

TILL
Yes, read the inscription on the Moabite Stone. It purported to be a message from King Mesha, the Moabite king mentioned in 2 Kings 3:4-27. If the name Yahweh were substituted for Chemosh, it would read like a page out of the OT.

Farrell Till 

[Here is a link to information about The Moabite Stone, including the text of inscription, kwh]

Art That Survived Noah's Flood

More evidence that Noah's flood didn't happen:

By Farrell Till 

Young-earth creationists, who claim that the earth is only about 10,000 years old, have to reject a huge body of geological and paleontological evidence that says otherwise, but there is also nonscientific evidence that the earth is much older than just 10,000 years. One of these is the paleolithic art that has been discovered in several caves in Southwestern Europe. Some of these paintings have been dated as far back as 20,000 years before the 10,000 that many YECs (Young Earth Creationists) say is the maximum age of the earth. Although there is nothing scientifically unusual about these paintings, their existence is scientific evidence that Noah's flood did not happen in the manner described in the Bible, because it would have been scientifically impossible for these paintings to have survived a universal flood that covered the highest mountains on earth to a depth of 22 to 25 feet (Gen. 7:19-20).

If biblical chronology is trustworthy--and biblical inerrantists must say that it is--then Noah's flood happened 8,430 years ago. This can be determined by just analyzing the chronology that the Bible gave for events and births. The Bible claims that Adam was 130 when he begot his son Seth (Gen. 5:3), who was 105 when he begot Enosh (v:6), who was 90 when he begot Kenan (v:9), who was 70 when he begot Mehalalel (v:12), who was 65 when he begot Jared (v:15), who was 162 when he begot Enoch (v:18), who was 65 when he begot Methuselah (v:21), who was 187 when he begot Lamech (v:25), who was 182 when he begot Noah (v:28). Hence, the Bible claims that1056 years passed between the creation of Adam and the birth of Noah (130 + 105 + 90 + 70 + 65 + 162 + 65 + 187 + 182 = 1056).

Noah was 600 years old--a good round number--when the flood came upon the earth (Gen. 7:6), and it lasted a year and 10 days (Gen. 7:11; 8:13-14), so for convenience, I will round it off to one year. Hence, the flood ended and Noah left the ark about 1657years after the creation of Adam (1056 + 600 + 1 = 1657).

Noah's son Shem begot Arphaxad two years after the flood (Gen. 11:10). Arphaxad was 35 when he begot Shelah (v:12), who was 30 when he begot Eber (v:14), who was 34 when he begot Peleg (v:16), who was 30 when he begot Reu (v:18), who was32 when he begot Serug (v:20), who was 30 when he begot Nahor v:22), who was 29when he begot Terah, the father of Abraham (v:24-26). Hence, 1879 years passed from the creation of Adam to the birth of Abraham's father Terah (1657 + 2 + 35 + 30 + 34 + 30 + 32 + 30 + 29 = 1879).

The Absence Of Evidence (1)

Farrell Till responds to inerrantist Dave Miller's article in the Skeptical Review:

I commend Mr. Miller for an excellent definition of the Bible inerrancy doctrine and perhaps an even better explanation of the importance of the doctrine to Christianity. Maybe it is a carry-over from my own fundamentalist background, but I have a much deeper admiration for Christians who believe in a divinely inspired inerrant Bible than those who believe in a divinely inspired errant Bible. To the latter, I can only repeat what Mr. Miller said in the foregoing article: "If the Holy Spirit is responsible for what the biblical writers wrote, and if the Bible contains errors in historical details, then the Holy Spirit is the author of error" (p. 2). As Mr. Miller effectively argued, for the Bible to be authoritative, it must be inerrant; otherwise, man is left with an impractical moral guide, for what good is a moral guide that is blemished with errors? If the Bible says X, and one can establish that X is an untruth, then how can he trust anything else it says? 

Mr. Miller may have been on track in recognizing the absolute necessity of an inerrant, "trustworthy" revelation in order to give credibility and authority to a religious system, but he wandered far afield in his attempt to prove that the Bible provides Christianity with such a revelation. An entire section of his article was devoted to a discussion of "the biblical claim for inerrancy," but I have to disagree with his contention that the Bible claims inerrancy, because it doesn't. Every scripture that Miller cited in this section concerned either promises to send the Holy Spirit to guide the disciples in what they should say or claims that the scriptures were inspired of God or that prophets had spoken as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. However, to say that the Holy Spirit was sent to guide men in what to say or that men spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit is not to say that whatever these men said or wrote under the direction of the Holy Spirit was inerrant. To arrive at the doctrine of inerrancy, one must go through the logical process that Miller took us through in his article. A basic premise of this process is that if the Holy Spirit is omniscient and omnipotent, then any document that he verbally inspired would have to be inerrant, because an omniscient, omnipotent deity would be incapable of error.

I would agree with Miller's logic if he could prove three things: (1) an entity known as the Holy Spirit actually exists, (2) this entity known as the Holy Spirit is both omniscient and omnipotent, and (3) this Holy Spirit verbally inspired all of the writers of the Bible in everything that they wrote. Unfortunately for Miller's confidence in Bible inerrancy, these are all very big ifs, none of which he could actually prove if his life depended on it. This underscores the major problem in the Bible inerrancy doctrine: it is based on unprovable assumptions. Any belief founded on assumptions is worthless.

Even if we grant Mr. Miller the first two of his assumptions, he would still have a very high hurdle to clear in the third one. That hurdle, of course, would be to establish the truth of the biblical claim that its writers were inspired by the Holy Spirit. A claim is only a claim and must therefore be examined before its truth can be confirmed. Mr. Miller can never prove the truth of the biblical claim of divine inspiration. Claims of divinely inspired books are almost a dime a dozen. The Book of Mormon claims to be a "latter day" revelation from God; the Avesta claims that it was divinely inspired; the Koran claims that it was revealed to man by the angel Gabriel. So what evidence can Miller give us to prove that we should accept the biblical claim of inspiration over all the many others? Christian apologists have tried to give us such proof, but Miller made no attempt to do so in his article. Like so many Bible fundamentalists, he just made the claim and expected his readers to accept it. In the publication in which his article originally appeared, he could get away with this, because the paper is aimed at a predominantly fundamentalist audience. However, more rational readers, which we believe The Skeptical Review has, will insist on much more than what Mr. Miller gave them in the reprint of his article.

Israelites 40 Years Wandering In The Sinai?

The source of the following information is an article from the News Toronto Bureau by Barry Brown, dated February 27, 1988,  by way of Farrell Till on the Yahoo group errancyn, "The Size of the Hebrew Camps," 5-20-00:

On February 26, 1988, the Israeli archaeologist Eliezer Oren spoke at the Royal Ontario Museum about his excavations at 80 different sites in the Sinai peninsula from 1972 through 1982. He reported that he had found no evidence for a 40-year nomadic residence in this region by two to three million people. He reported finding at the ruins of an Egyptian outpost a record of two runaway slaves who had been spotted, but in all of his diggings, he found nothing about the sightings of a vast horde of people going through the desert. "They [the two slaves] were spotted and the biblical account of 2.5 million people with 600 thousand of military age weren't?" Oren questioned. "This can't be explained unless you invoke miracles here, and I am a member of the department of archaeology and not of miracles."

Oren reported that other archaeological expeditions beside his have been working in the Sinai region for just as long as he has, but they had found no traces of human activity at all from the time of the exodus except for small mining operations that were under the control of the Egyptians. He reported that archaeologists have found none of the cities that the Israelites allegedly conquered on their way out of the region except for the town of Kadesh, but he said, "To our great surprise, there is nothing there earlier than the 10th century." The exodus, however, allegedly happened in the 15th century B. C. The Bible reports that the 2.5 to 3 million Israelites camped at over 40 different sites, taking with them large herds of livestock, but Oren reported that no evidence of such encampments have been found.