Late Bronze Age Collapse

> modern day scholars

Everyone, including you, me, and the most expert of scholars, brings their own biases, assumptions, evidentiary standards that will allow us to accept something as truth.

I actually got more dialed into this while listening to Bart Ehrman on a NYT podcast recently. I was interested in him: an atheist who ascribes historicity to certain bits of the Bible, Jesus in particular. But ultimately I wasn't really impressed: If a detail is wrong, that's proof that everything is suspect; if a detail is right, sometimes that means "if I wanted to invent a credible story, of course I'd say that" and sometimes that means "I think it's obviously credible", and there didn't seem to be any meaningful heuristic to distinguish.

And, when he talked about his journey away from faith, all of that had nothing to do with it - it was him getting hung up on the problem of evil. In other words, the underlying value changed, then his interpretation of historical claims changed as a result.

I can live with the idea that one might look at the body of evidence and draw a different conclusion than I do; I just don't like the conceit that one conclusion is somehow objectively correct, especially because of some broad appeal to authority. I can live with "Troy may have existed but we haven't found any archaeological evidence", but I greatly dislike "we haven't found any archaeological evidence, therefore Troy didn't exist", which is what a lot of the replies under my first comment seem to be speaking. (There's be a lot of "we would expect to find..." as well: even if that's true, sometimes we just haven't found it yet! And surely we'll never find everything!)

That's not to say that scholars can't know more or contribute more work: in a case like Jericho, scholarly work seems to have settled the question of whether or not a city named Jericho exists, having walls that were destroyed suddenly. Now, we dispute when exactly that might have happened and how that compares to Biblical chronology, but just because one person gives a date that aligns with my priors or your priors doesn't mean the matter is settled.

I've sat on this tab for too long haha, just gonna send it and step out for a bit.

The god Baal, or his more complete name Baal Hadad, Lord Hadad, is attested in one of the longest pieces of literature we have from the ancient middle east - the Baal cycle, written circa 1100-1300 BCE in Ugaritic, a different semitic language - which is in fact older than the oldest attestation we have of the Hebrew language; but you're right that Baal meant "Lord/Master/Owner" in various Canaanite languages. Calling gods "(The) Lord" is a very common tradition in many languages and cultures, certainly in that area (see Adonai as well). Elijah and king Ahab lived in ~830 BCE, for reference.

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To be willing to claim lineage back to any historical figure means you stipulate that historical figure existed. If you are claiming you can trace back to David back to Adam means you accept the validity of the Old Testament (or however your belief calls it).

Personally, this is the first time I've ever heard Norse mythology being tied into the ancient Hebrew text. I've heard a lot but clearly not everything, and I have no interest in all of the crazy. I'm tired of dealing with all of the crazy I've had to deal with up to now

I think that this arises from one of two presuppositions: Either 1) the physical universe is all that exists, or 2) science is the only way to learn truth. (These two presuppositions are not strictly independent of each other.)

These are presuppositions. They are assumptions that you make at the start of the game, that you build your interpretation of the world on. They are not empirically proven in any way. (For #2, show me the scientific experiment that proved it.)

But people have built these presuppositions so deeply into their thinking that they don't even realize that they're making them. Within the silo of those presuppositions, of course miracles don't ever happen!

But, if that's you (not Brindinooo, but you the reader), try to step outside that for a moment, just as a thought experiment. For this experiment, let us hypothesize that God actually exists - not just the word or the idea, but that someone is actually there. And let us hypothesize that he can actually do things, things that change physical reality. (You could think of it as breakpointing a running program with a debugger, and changing the value of a variable, and then resuming. The value actually changes, with no antecedent that the program can see.) And let us hypothesize that God actually does this - he actually changes something.

(Digression: A typical way of thinking about the scientific method is four steps: Systematic observation, search for regularity among the observations, forming a hypothesis to explain the regularity, and testing the hypothesis.)

For our thought experiment, let us suppose that science observes God doing something at step 1 (systematic observation). Now, what is science going to do with it? It's going to throw it out at step 2 (search for a regularity), because there is no regularity - unless God does the same miracle repeatedly.

But if it makes it past that step, the next problem comes at step 3 (forming a hypothesis). Under current thinking, God will never be the hypothesis. But in our thought experiment, God is actually the cause!

And even if God were to be the hypothesis, the next problem comes at step 4 (testing). How could you test the hypothesis? "Uh, God, could you do that again, and please sign it this time"? I don't see how you could do the experiment, even in principle.

So there is no direct scientific evidence that God exists, because science is not a tool that is capable of investigating that question.

But if God exists, and if he actually does something, even if we don't see it with science, we might see it with history. Somebody might have observed it and recorded it.

And when you read such a thing, how do you react? Do you say "That's impossible?" You're right; it is. But what is your next statement? "Therefore it didn't happen"? If that's your response, it indicates that you're in the silo of the material-universe-is-all-that-exists presupposition, and can't or won't think outside of it. Instead, I think you're reaction should be "That's impossible, but did it happen?" Because the impossible happening is exactly the signature that we would expect if God exists and actually did something.

So the fundamental question is not whether these events have a supernatural element or not. The fundamental question is whether they happened.