Evidence for the Biblical Record

Here's Buz in Message 103 of the Forum name change thread: Okay, I'm not going to attempt to untangle the majority of that sentence, but I want to focus on the last part:

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...the Biblical record which is supported by significant corroborating evidences.

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Buz refers to this corroborating evidence a lot. But what exactly is it?To my mind, corroborating evidence is a set of data that is both independently derived and that also substantially supports the validity of a certain factual claim.Claims to Biblical accuracy have to meet both criteria, just like any other factual claim does. For one, you can't use the Bible to corraborate other claims in the Bible, just like I can't use my own diary to support my claim that I smoked herb with Abbie Hoffman at Woodstock. Me agreeing with myself doesn't prove anything.Second, this evidence has to be substantial. Again, I could claim that I mooned President Bush Jr during his first inaugural address. A credit card receipt showing that I was in DC on the day in question might be independent evidence, and it would indicate that I was in the right place that the right time to be able to do it, but it would also be trivial, because it doesn't go to the substance of the claim.So I'd like some specifics. What factual claims are being made about the Bible for which someone has independent evidence that isn't trivial?Edited by Admin, : No reason given.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

I'll suggest that maybe it would be wise to pick one extraordinary claim that hasn't been beaten to death - the Exodus, the Tower of Babel, something like that - and see what can be made of it.Since this post was inspired by Buz, maybe he'd care to proffer some of his evidence and explain what claim it substantiates.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

A perfect example of insufficient evidence. The existence of the universe is only evidence that the universe exists. You've disproved the hypothesis that nothing exists at all, but that's about it. The claim that the Hebrew/Christian deity did the work is no more supported by this evidence than is the claim that Bhraman is the source of all being. I'd even say that Brahman is by far a more likely choice.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

Thank you, Buz. This is actually the very claim that inspired this thread. I'll leave the other claims on your list for later, but let's look at this one.This is from World News Daily, not exactly a secular, atheistic God-hating source.

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"All kinds of people are finding coral and calling it chariot parts," says Richard Rives, president of Wyatt Archaeological Research in Tennessee. "It's most likely coral covered with coral. ... Opportunists are combining false things with the true things that are found. These people are making it up as they go to be TV stars."

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Robert Wyatt was the man who came up with the Gulf of Aqaba theory in the first place, and even his people don't seem to be very enthusiastic about someone else finding new evidence. And as far as Wyatt's original evidence? This is what we've got. A picture. Of what could be a wheel, or might be coral. And the original object?

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The hub [found by Wyatt] had the remains of eight spokes radiating outward and was examined by Nassif Mohammed Hassan, director of Antiquities in Cairo. Hassan declared it to be from the 18th Dynasty of ancient Egypt, explaining the eight-spoked wheel was used only during that dynasty around 1400 B.C.

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Curiously, no one can account for the precise whereabouts of that eight-spoked wheel today, though Hassan is on videotape stating his conclusion regarding authenticity.

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So let's examine this a little further. Wyatt may or may not have found a chariot wheel. No physical evidence to support this claim. This supposed wheel may or may not have been in a likely place for the Exodus crossing. Plenty of fundies have good reasons to dispute this claim.But even setting aside questions regarding the validity of this evidence, what does finding a chariot wheel in some body of water actually prove? It proves that a chariot wheel fell in the water! That's it. I personally can think of at least a few other ways that such a thing could have happened. Or are the only people who've ever lost wheels in the Red Sea area people who were miraculously drowned while out chasing Jews?Summation:Claim = YWHW led the Hebrew people out of Egypt after devastating the Egyptians with multiple plagues. YWHW subsequently saved his children from pursuit by creating a magical pathway through the sea for the Hebrews to dash through and then letting all the water back in to drown Pharaoh and all his army.Evidence against = No record of such an event in Egyptian history. No physical evidence of 40 years wandering in the wilderness by any sizable group of Jews. And a Hebrew language, that strangely enough, is utterly devoid of significant Egyptian influence, which would be been impossible had the Hebrews actually spent any time at all in captivity in Egypt. (Slaves may change the language of their masters, but they never fail to learn it.)Evidence for = a photograph of an underwater object that resembles a wheel.Funny how creationists/fundies dismiss the results of 150 years worth of scientific research in evolution, and yet find this sort of stuff so convincing.I find this to be a good example of the fundie mindset regarding evidence.

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The majority of archaeologists today do not have enough faith in the Bible as the accurate word of God. The majority of archaeologists do not even believe in the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt, according to Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review magazine. They are skeptical of the biblical account, perhaps because of a lack of archaeological evidence in the Sinai Peninsula and a lack of faith. We cannot look to these men to tell us where or if the exodus took place.

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So real professional archaeologists, who actually deal with real evidence of real events, have nothing to say about made up stuff for which there is no evidence. Therefore they are not to be trusted.Right.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

Hi Buz! Thanks for your reply.I note that much of your response deals with things that WND failed to report. If you have information regarding this missing evidence that would substantiate your claims, please bring it forth. I would never claim WND to be an unimpeachable source. For the record, I picked them under the assumption that they would be more sympathetic to your views. There are plenty of skeptical (or objective, if you like) sources of information I could have used, but I didn't want to be accused of only looking at "anti-Biblical" sources.But more importantly, you're so far failing to address what I think is the real point of my argument. Here it is again.

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But even setting aside questions regarding the validity of this evidence, what does finding a chariot wheel in some body of water actually prove? It proves that a chariot wheel fell in the water! That's it. I personally can think of at least a few other ways that such a thing could have happened. Or are the only people who've ever lost wheels in the Red Sea area people who were miraculously drowned while out chasing Jews?

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Wheel in the water does not equal pillar of fire at night.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

You're right, we have no idea what this is a picture of. Since the alleged wheel in question is apparently lost and can't be re-examined, the photographic evidence will have to do. And the photographs seem inconclusive at best. However, if there's any additional documentation of artifacts that can be dated and whose provenance can be determined, I'm very willing to consider such. Let's see what Buz comes up with.Regardless, wheels or no wheels, Buz is still ignoring the substantial question of my reply. Once again:

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But even setting aside questions regarding the validity of this evidence, what does finding a chariot wheel in some body of water actually prove? It proves that a chariot wheel fell in the water! That's it. I personally can think of at least a few other ways that such a thing could have happened. Or are the only people who've ever lost wheels in the Red Sea area people who were miraculously drowned while out chasing Jews?

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By the way, thanks for taking the time to address the rest of Buz's list. I concur with your rebuttal.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

Hi Buz. You still seem to be ignoring the major point I've made regarding the archaeological evidence you've so far presented. Once again, from Message 18.

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But even setting aside questions regarding the validity of this evidence, what does finding a chariot wheel in some body of water actually prove? It proves that a chariot wheel fell in the water! That's it. I personally can think of at least a few other ways that such a thing could have happened. Or are the only people who've ever lost wheels in the Red Sea area people who were miraculously drowned while out chasing Jews?

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Let's ask the question another way. If the account of the Exodus given in the Bible were substantially correct, what physical evidence could we find for which the Biblical account would be the simplest and best explanation? What would have to be there that could be explained rationally no other way? I can think of a number of pieces of evidence that would go a long way to to support some significant aspects of the story. Can you?To help you along, here's an example. If I were to hypothesize that Norsemen colonized the coast of modern-day Virginia in the 9th century and stayed there for three hundred years, then I should rightfully expect to find specific types of evidence for my hypothesis to be supportable. There should be at least a few local artifacts that were clearly of Northern European origin and that could be dated reliably to the proper time period. More tellingly, I would pretty much have to find genetic evidence among the descendants of the native population. Three hundred years is just too much time to go by without mixing with the locals. And I would also expect to find linguistic traces in the native languages. If nothing like this were forthcoming, while my hypothesis wouldn't be conclusively disproved, any explanation of such a profound lack of evidence would probably be pretty contrived. (Coyote, please correct me if this isn't the sort of supporting evidence needed to substantiate this sort of claim.)So let's ask again: if the Biblical account of the Exodus were substantially correct, what physical evidence should we be able to find that could be explained no other way (or at least not without straining credibility)?

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

Thanks, hooah. I've been meaning to jump back in and try to put this train back on its tracks.Buz, I really admire how well you've been holding up with so many replies to deal with. Nevertheless, knock it off with the digressions into prophecy. That's is not what this thread is about. Prophecies are not factual, historical events. They cannot be fact-checked. They're poetry - maybe divinely inspired poetry, but poetry nonetheless.You can't fact-check T.S. Elliot's Four Quartets either. All you can do is offer a personal interpretation of its meaning. Same with Revelation.This thread is about evidence that supports claims of Biblical accuracy. You have often claimed to have such evidence, and I wanted to see what it was. Look at the definition I offered again:

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To my mind, corroborating evidence is a set of data that is both independently derived and that also substantially supports the validity of a certain factual claim.

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So you need data. Not assumptions. Not speculation. Verifiable data that supports the substance of your claim.Maybe this will help. As I see it, there are four types of evidence, four ways in which evidence can either support or weaken a claim.The first is evidence that strongly supports that substance of a claim. If I want to make a case that Bob broke into the back of a convenience store and stole a case of Coors, then what I want is video from a security camera showing someone who looks exactly like Bob attacking the door with a crowbar, getting inside, and then running away a few moments later carrying a case of beer. You'd have to really do a lot of twisting and turning to explain that sort of evidence away.The second type is evidence that doesn't necessarily conflict with my claim, but doesn't really prove anything either. Again, in the above case, maybe all I've got is the fact that Bob likes Coors, that he's bought beer at that convenience store before, and maybe that he owns a crowbar. Well, none of that disagrees with my claim, but neither does it help much either.The third type is evidence that either disproves a claim or at least makes it highly unlikely, so unlikely that to continue to maintain a claim despite such evidence would be intellectually perverse. Again, if I could show that on the night in question Bob was actually in the hospital with a broken leg, surrounded by doctors and nurses, then the robbery case against him becomes virtually impossible to sustain.Lastly, there's evidence that weakens a case by its absence. When all our experience about the real world tells us to expect to see certain results after a particular event, then it matters a lot when those results just aren't there. Once again with Bob, if we want to claim that he stole the Coors by breaking into the back of the store, then we should expect to see a broken door, right? But if in fact the door is still intact and shows no signs of damage, then you're really going to have to strain credulity to explain that one away.To bring this back to your claim of the veracity of the Biblical account of the Exodus, I say your claim fails to meet the burden of proof.The substance of your claim is that a large body of Israelites left Egypt after a long stay there as slaves, escaped by miraculously passing through a sizable body of water, and that a pursuing military force led by Pharaoh was drowned in that same body of water. You haven't produced any kind of smoking gun, so to speak, to support this claim. All you've come up with is unsubstantiated assertions about evidence that, even if it were confirmed, still wouldn't touch the substance of your claim. One or two chariot wheels does not an army make. In the meantime, the confirmible evidence that we do have - historical records, archaeological finds, etc. - all speak against the possibility of such an event ever taking place as described. We should expect to find at least one campsite left behind from their 40 years in the desert. None. We should expect to find some mention of it in Egypt's records, or at least in the records of some of Egypt's neighbors. No such mention. We should expect to see a profound Egyptian influence on the Hebrew language, as has happened with every other culture that has been subjugated by another. Again, there is none. Your case has not been made.By their very nature, you can't prove or disprove miracles, so there's no way of either affirming or disproving that the Red Sea parted. But you should at least be able to show substantial evidence of those parts of the story that should be verifiable.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

Hi Buz!Please, before going any further, go back and read Message 136 once again.There. Now it should be perfectly clear why talking about interpretations of prophecy are indeed totally off-topic for this thread.No? Then look at what I said in the OP.

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To my mind, corroborating evidence is a set of data that is both independently derived and that also substantially supports the validity of a certain factual claim.

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I can see how from your point of view there is no difference between the "historical" parts of the Bible and the prophetic parts, but there is indeed a profound difference between them. Prophecy is not a factual claim, among other reasons, because it lacks the specificity of a factual claim. "The Exodus really happened as described in the Bible" is a verifiable claim. It's specific and clear. Either this event happened and there is physical evidence to convince us that it did, or it might have happened but there's no way to say for sure one way or the other, or the evidence shows that it's almost certain that it didn't. happen. That's the sort of claim that I was referring to in the OP.By contrast, prophecy is by its very nature unverifiable and open to interpretation, because it always uses imagery and metaphors. rather than speaking plainly. Look, you and Peg can't even agree what some of your prophecies mean, much less what would fulfill them. So unless you can cite me something as clear and precise as "In 2400 years a Dutch man named van Leeuwenhoek will discover the tiny organisms too small to see that cause many illnesses" then don't claim Bible prophecies can be offered as evidence for the Bible's accuracy.So get back on topic. If you're giving up trying to offer anything solid regarding the Exodus, then there should be plenty of other historical episodes that you should be able to substantiate. How about showing how worldwide language dispersal patterns are clear indications that the story of the Tower of Babel is based on fact? Or maybe some archaeological support for the conquests of Joshua in Canaan? Independent historical records that validate the rule of King David? All fair game. Whatcha got? Now I'm insulted. I refer you yet again to Message 136, where I said:

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The substance of your claim is that a large body of Israelites left Egypt after a long stay there as slaves, escaped by miraculously passing through a sizable body of water, and that a pursuing military force led by Pharaoh was drowned in that same body of water. You haven't produced any kind of smoking gun, so to speak, to support this claim. All you've come up with is unsubstantiated assertions about evidence that, even if it were confirmed, still wouldn't touch the substance of your claim. One or two chariot wheels does not an army make. In the meantime, the confirmable evidence that we do have - historical records, archaeological finds, etc. - all speak against the possibility of such an event ever taking place as described. We should expect to find at least one campsite left behind from their 40 years in the desert. None. We should expect to find some mention of it in Egypt's records, or at least in the records of some of Egypt's neighbors. No such mention. We should expect to see a profound Egyptian influence on the Hebrew language, as has happened with every other culture that has been subjugated by another. Again, there is none. Your case has not been made.

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By their very nature, you can't prove or disprove miracles, so there's no way of either affirming or disproving that the Red Sea parted. But you should at least be able to show substantial evidence of those parts of the story that should be verifiable.

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Could you please comment on the evidence against your claims that I've outlined above, instead of simply asserting that they're substanceless?

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

I see two problems with your reasoning so far, Peg.The first is that your assertion is essentially worthless as an argument. Of course languages have ancestry, some of which is relatively easy to trace, and some of which isn't. All you're really saying is that ANY organization of language families and superfamilies will agree with the Genesis account. If there are 100 language families, well then that's how many God split the Ur language into. And if there's only one ultimate language source, well then that must be the first language that everyone spoke before God split them all up. By being able to explain anything, your story actually explains nothing. (But that's the fun of having an omnipotent deity in all your stories - anything at all can happen, just cuz God felt like doing it that way, and there's no way of proving otherwise.)Now on to your second, more significant problem. Look at what I actually asked for in Message 150.

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How about showing how worldwide language dispersal patterns are clear indications that the story of the Tower of Babel is based on fact?

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You're not proving anything simply by asserting that there are a lot of languages around. What I asked for was evidence showing that the geographic distribution of languages and language families is consistent with a mass dispersal from a central point in the Middle East in historical times. That shouldn't be so hard, should it?Related languages tend to be neighbors, and languages travel as people travel, becoming more and more different from both their ancestors and their siblings as time goes by. French and Spanish are pretty similar, having both split off from Latin relatively recently and both being spoken in the same part of the world. Latin is also related to Sanskrit, both being from the Indo-European family, but there the relationship is more distant and not as immediately obvious. Nevertheless, it can be demonstrated convincingly that once a single group of people spoke a root language that ultimately split into, among many others, Sanskrit and Latin as the speakers moved off into different directions. By studying the relationships in languages, one can map out the movements of people from one place to another, and can even date how long ago related languages split off from each other. So if the Tower of Babel is true, and it happened only a few thousand years ago, then you should be able to map out the dispersal of all human languages from where that tower once stood.Go to it.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

Actually, you just might have had a crackerjack of a prophecy there, Buz, if Jesus had called them sky-ships or metal bowls from beyond the sky or something like that. As it is, you have a figure of speech ("falling stars" for meteors) that's perfectly consistent with the understanding of astronomy 2000 years ago and has absolutely nothing to do with sattelite technology.Now get off the prophecy twaddle, and get back to discussing what this thread is about - corroborating evidence for factual claims in the Bible. You can't corroborate something that hasn't happened yet.ABE: Oh, and I still haven't heard any counterarguments from you regarding my rebutal in Message 136.

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The substance of your claim is that a large body of Israelites left Egypt after a long stay there as slaves, escaped by miraculously passing through a sizable body of water, and that a pursuing military force led by Pharaoh was drowned in that same body of water. You haven't produced any kind of smoking gun, so to speak, to support this claim. All you've come up with is unsubstantiated assertions about evidence that, even if it were confirmed, still wouldn't touch the substance of your claim. One or two chariot wheels does not an army make. In the meantime, the confirmible evidence that we do have - historical records, archaeological finds, etc. - all speak against the possibility of such an event ever taking place as described. We should expect to find at least one campsite left behind from their 40 years in the desert. None. We should expect to find some mention of it in Egypt's records, or at least in the records of some of Egypt's neighbors. No such mention. We should expect to see a profound Egyptian influence on the Hebrew language, as has happened with every other culture that has been subjugated by another. Again, there is none. Your case has not been made.

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Edited by ZenMonkey, : Major addendum to try to get the thread back on topic.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

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Modern linguists have also created a chart of human language and they've found there there are parent languges from which all other languages are derived. This is in harmony with the bible account.
  —Peg

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Again, so what? The fact that modern languages have older parent languages is also in harmony with the theory that Hermes or Coyote created different languages for people as a practical joke.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

Well, no. As a matter of fact, except for acknowledging that human beings speak more than one language, the Bible is utterly and completely inaccurate in its account of the origin of languages.The most widely accept theory dates the ancestor to the entire Indo-European language family to approximately 6000 years ago. This is supported by archeological and genetic evidence, as well as comparitive linguistics. There are competing theories, but none put the origin of Proto-Indo-European earlier than 5000 years ago.However, this doesn't account for all of the other language families, of which there are more than a few. Here's a map of the current distribution of language families. But Indo-European is only one of many different language families, each with their own histories and relationships. So even if you want to play make-believe for just a moment and pretend that the spread of Indo-European is somehow evidence that human language emerged from somewhere kinda almost close to the Near East sometime not really but almost just about 4000 years ago and that this proves that the Tower of Babel story is true, you still have to account for all of the other languages on Earth. How does your story account for the existance of 800 different languages from about 60 different language families just in Papua New Guinea? (Different families means that they're not related.) How about all of the hundreds of human langauge families around the world? Even if their languages were all created instantaneously back when Peleg was a pup, how exactly did all of their speakers get to their various homes around the earth in time to create all of their different cultures with their thousands of years of tradition and history?If you're looking for a possible ancestor to all human languages, you'll probably have to go back about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. It's entirely possible that Neanderthals were capable of speech. Is your Tower that old?Your folk tale has no factual basis at all. The cognitive dissonance is deafening.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

No, the idea that the Chinese character for ship has anything to do with your mythology is so utterly and completely wrong that it makes my head spin like a monkey in a turbo-charged bumper car.First off, your source at creation.com is void of any kind of academic merit whatever. Or more simply, they're full of shit.The authors start making up made-up stuff right in the first sentence.

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Legends from ancient China describe a global catastrophic flood so vast that the waters reached the sun and covered the mountains, drowning all the land-dwelling creatures, including mankind. In the midst of this global calamity, there stood a legendary hero named Nuwa who turned back the flood and helped to repopulate the world.

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Well, no. 45 seconds of research reveals that Nu Wa is a female deity who made people out of globs yellow clay and (this is as close as it gets) saved the world from storms by patching up the heavens with rocks.Here's her picture. Look like Noah to you? It just goes on from there. Your sources lack any credentials - academic or otherwise - that would give them any credibility as anthropologists, folklorists, linguists, or even fans of John Woo movies. I repeat, they're just making up made-up things.All of which is beside the point, anyway. As I pointed out in Message 208, every piece of archaeological, genetic, anthropological and linguistic evidence contradicts the Bible myth of the Tower of Babel. If you're going to try to support your unsupportable position, you should at least address the substance of the evidence, rather than dragging in irrelevant stuff that wouldn't matter even if it weren't fiction.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

Or is possible that since civilizations have often evolved around river valleys and that cities have most commonly been built near rivers and/or the ocean, that most peoples are familiar with the phenomenon of floods? Maybe?

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John LydonWhat's the difference between a conspiracy theorist and a new puppy? The puppy eventually grows up and quits whining.
-Steven Dutch