Reading your exchanges with buzsaw I am struck at the contrast between logical argument and emotional persuasion. Although, buzsaw could be purposively confounding the argument I don't think he is trolling.
No Buz isn’t a troll, he’s been a regular member here for a long time, but I do think he purposely ignores anything that upsets his worldview. For example, when I listed a few people who argued that the Sea of Reeds was in Egypt, rather that provide evidence or references to counteract their claims, he blew them off as being ‘secular revisionists who have a problem with the supernatural’, even though one source was the highly respected Rashi, and another one was the Torah society! This is a common feature of the fundamentalist mindset, when faced with watertight arguments they retreat into a shell and defame the scholar, they do not have the ability to reason calmly and convincingly.
I think rather that he works from his conviction that artifacts from the Exodus have been discovered and this gives him great pleasure and then he seizes on the nearest scrap of text etc. to support his conviction.
Yes, this is exactly what any fundy will do, but all it does is to show that they really have no understanding of how archaeology and history works. It is immaterial if there are chariot wheels at Aqabah or not, if there were hundreds there it still doesn’t prove anything in the Bible. All chariot wheels at Aqabah prove is that at some time in the past chariot wheels found their way into the Red Sea, that is all that archaeology can tell us, the rest is in their imagination.
Buzsaw appears to be genuinely unable to construct a consistent argument, even to recognizing one.
He is difficult to follow at times, but I believe he has a good heart.
My interest is not specificly in buzsaw, or even in this exodus argument, but they serve as an example of a very typical behaviour of millions of people.
I wouldn’t single Buz out either, he is a lot more tolerable than a lot of the type of people you are on about. But I do know the type you mean, they really are incapable of understanding how theories are constructed, a wheel in a sea, a story in a book, wow the story is true, easy really. But when it comes to them providing a link between the two they are lost, they genuinely seem incapable of understanding that there has to be a great deal of background evidence if the hypothesis is to become a theory. I employ Braudel’s ‘La longue duree’ approach when researching a past event, events do not happen in a vacuum, all events are part of a much wider context. For example, for the Exodus to have any credibility we need to have evidence of ‘Israelites’ in Egypt, we don’t need evidence of Canaanites, we also need evidence of a sudden breakdown of Egyptian power in the near east, we also need evidence of a new material culture entering Canaan with a sudden halt of the previous material culture, there is just so much that is not there.
Logical argument appears to be a very difficult to attain ability. Most people and particularly literalist of any religion seem to work from emotional persuassion.
It is a very powerful psychological process, people believe all sorts of nonsense which is easily falsified, but they continue to believe it anyway, they are scared of the alternative.
There’s a good book that explains some of the psychology behind the maintaining of a belief that is contrary to all known evidence, it is called
When prophecy fails. by
Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota P., 1956. It is very interesting if you examine their five reasons why people can hold on to a belief that is essentially nonsense, and these five features can easily be applied to the Wyatt brigade.
They argue that:
1. A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.
2. The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual's commitment to the belief.
3. The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
4. Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognised by the individual holding the belief.
The first two of these conditions specify the circumstances that will make the belief resistant to change. The third and fourth conditions together, on the other hand, point to factors that would exert powerful pressure on a believer to discard his belief. It is, of course, possible that an individual, even though deeply convinced of a belief, may discard it in the face of unequivocal disconfirmation. We must, therefore, state a fifth condition specifying the circumstances under which the belief will be discarded and those under which it will be maintained with new fervor.
5. The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence we have specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, we would expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselyte or to persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.
IMO, number five is spot on as far as what we experienced on the Exodus thread. The supporter must have social support, take as an example Buz’s post of support thanking Dumb and Dumber for their contributions and that they were a Godsend (or words to that effect). Now, every reasonably educated person knows that a link cannot be made between a chariot wheel in Aqabah and the Exodus from Egypt, the nature of archaeology doesn’t allow that. However, we get a few people who are basically ignorant of history and archaeological methodology that think they have made a decent hypothesis to support the biblical account, their fellow believers are so desperate that they latch on to the hypothesis, it sounds plausible to them because they think that it somehow supports their faith to have external evidence. But wheels in Aqabah is only evidence of wheels in Aqabah, that’s all it is, we can see that, they cannot, but the fact that others tell them that their hypothesis is wonderful, which it isn’t, inspires these people, it confirms what they want to hear, they have the truth and we are blind to the amazing evidence. What they don’t seem to understand is the only people supporting them are people who really have a very limited knowledge of what history and archaeology actually is.
On the other thread, some people moaned about professionals not investigating the Gulf of Aqabah and that it was the amateurs who were doing the work. They didn’t understand why the professionals wouldn’t investigate the area, I think the reason given was that the professionals were all scared that God’s word was correct and they were wrong, or that there’s some conspiracy going on. But, the reason why professional archaeologists wont go there is pretty simple really, and if these amateurs had a clue about archaeology they would know the reason. Professional archaeologists won’t go there because there is no point, what if they did discover hundreds of chariots there; it doesn’t actually prove anything other than there is chariots in the Gulf of Aqabah. The Gulf of Aqabah has been eliminated as a possible crossing point by every qualified professional archaeologist in the last 100 years or so, hell even Jerome questioned it 1500 years ago! It is too far away from Egypt, it is also contrary to the topographical information in the Bible, therefore there is no point in an archaeologist going to Aqabah, and it is a waste of time and resources.
Given the susceptiblity of humans to be swayed by emotional persuassion, something that advertisers as well as hucksters like Wyatt skillfully exploit, is there a way to improve education so that people leaving our schools are better equiped to reason? Or will the pull of emotions almost always override logic for many people and I just have to accept that?
It is difficult to say for sure, the problem with something as strong as a person’s faith is that they actually can reason very well in their everyday lives but when faced with concrete proof that they are wrong about something they hold dear then the cognitive dissonance kicks in, they are perfectly happy to employ different approaches to different situations in their lives. If a child has parent who have bombarded it with THEIR faith during its early years then it is difficult to deprogram that child when they are older, do you think that Kent Hovind’s children had a choice of which faith they would follow? I really don’t think so.
I think very few people can separate their emotions from their logical approach to life, we all have certain occasions when our emotional attachments to a subject cloud our judgement but some people seem better at detaching than others. I think that you are just going to have to accept that there are just some people who will never change their views regardless of what evidence is produced to falsify them, some people will always find something to cling to that keeps their delusion intact, calling someone a secular revisionist for example is a great way of achieving this and it is much easier that getting off their butt and doing some research themselves.
Brian.
in the context of the chit chats we have been having with Lysimachus, I do think he is talking about the Bible accounts as if they are a literal account of what happened, and very very few people actually take the Bible in that context nowadays.
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