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Late Bronze Age Collapse

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Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#321

Post by simiones »

coffeecat wrote: post #302
krapp wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that later generations of archeologists took the opposite view because the preponderance of evidence uncovered in that time pointed in that direction (and because the cultural and political stigma against contradicting the Bible diminished over time,) or are you implying that the interpretation of archaeological evidence either way is simply a matter of arbitrary personal preference? And notwithstanding t…

> Could it be that later generations of archeologists took the opposite view because the preponderance of evidence uncovered in that time pointed in that direction (and because the cultural and political stigma against contradicting the Bible diminished over time,) My understanding is that the shift can mostly be attributed to the rise of biblical minimalism as the dominant interpretive framework. Radiocarbon dating…

> How could it be otherwise? If there were reproducible evidence, then the phenomenon in question would be classified as natural.

Imagine that we found, today, the burning bush, still on fire but not consumed by it, thousands of years later. Say someone tried all known techniques to extinguish it, but it wouldn't. We may be able to study and characterize it precisely and call it "natural" in that sense, but I think many would agree that it would be very clear evidence that this claim in Exodus was actually historically based.

Similarly, say that we had credible videos, and other instrument recordings, of the blue fire that the Orthodox Patriarchs claim descends from the heavens on Jesus' tomb every year on Orthodox Easter. We may even develop a theory of what the substance is and what it represents and where it originates (spatially) and so on - but if it happens spontaneously and only affects certain things (candles held by the faithful) and not others (say, gasoline-soaked rags prepared by a scientist to test this out), then even a scientist would have to conclude that this phenomenon is real and outside the realm of physics as it is understood today.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#322

Post by IAmBroom »

ReptileMan wrote: post #51
simiones wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Exodus is an entirely fictional account though, it's not based on any real historical events. Even King David seems to be mostly mythical, though there is some vague evidence of a "House of David" being something some real kings claimed descent from. Edit: I should say "almost entirely fictional". The main scholarly agreement is that it may record some stories of some small numbers (hundreds, at most some thousan…

Iliad is fictional yet Troy existed. The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago black sea connected to the Mediterranean and probably was not entirely unpeaceful. I have absolutely backed by nothing theory that ancient Armenians and Jews are the same people that got separated. For some tribe living on the shores of east black sea - a myth about massive flood and some saving boat that stopped on…

> The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago black sea connected to the Mediterranean

8,000 years ago.

> But apply exponential reduction for each generation of oral account and you may get to something resembling truth.

Unfalsifiable claims are not truth.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#323

Post by IAmBroom »

gamblor956 wrote: post #174
simiones wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there had been a massive migration of hundreds of thousands of people, and even more so hundreds of thousands of slaves, from late bronze age Egypt (a powerful, old, highly literate kingdom), we would expect to find significant evidence of this (inscriptions, local stories, migration sites, etc). The absence of any such evidence, while not conclusive proof of course, constitutes evidence against this event happeni…

The absence of any such evidence, while not conclusive proof of course, constitutes evidence against this event happening. There is documentation in Egypt of slaves around this time, and of the subsequent departure of some unstated number of slaves. There is evidence of pig bones disappearing from trash sites on the path of the migration, and there is evidence of a shift in religious practices along the migration pat…

> There is documentation in Egypt of slaves around this time, and of the subsequent departure of some unstated number of slaves

No one claimed the Egyptians didn't own slaves.

> There is evidence of pig bones disappearing from trash sites on the path of the migration

There are also many Jewish sites that had pig bones in their trash. That mandate had not yet solidified.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#324

Post by IAmBroom »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #143
simiones wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Troy existed - we know that because we found it. If we found evidence of a mass migration of slaves from Egypt to Canaan, we'd also know that certain aspects of the Exodus narrative are true - but no such evidence has ever been found. The biblical flood has been connected to various possible historical floods, but any such connection is highly speculative and tenuous, because the details simply can't match the o…

> Yes, Troy existed - we know that because we found it. We knew Troy existed long before that because it remained as a city at least into the 3rd century CE. We just didn't know which ruins it was.

It was widely believed to be fictional. The discoverer of Troy's ruins astounded the world because it showed a fable had a serious basis in fact.

But until we dig up a boat in "the Holy Land" with biological samples from South America, Australia, and Siberia...

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#325

Post by simiones »

coffeecat wrote: post #190
krapp wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that: Yes, I am certain of these things because I am an adult with an education, and an awareness of the difference between mythology and reality. If you believe in magic, and that the Bible describes reality more correctly than the entirety of science, and that archaeology and Biblical scholarship are all wrong, and that somehow out of all…

During Albright's time, the archaeological evidence was generally interpreted as being in support of Old Testament narratives. Later generations of archaeologists mostly took the opposite view. The bottom line is, there's very little to go by, and the little archaeological evidence that exists can be interpreted either way, depending on one's preferred conclusion.

Not really. Sure, sometimes long established archaeological conclusions get overturned by new digs, new sources, or just new methods or new evidence of similar events in other places and so on.

But one very important thing to add here is that there is no bias against the naturalistic narratives of the Bible in mainstream archaeology / Bible scholarship / historiography. Huge swaths of the Bible are considered firmly historical, with many important Bible characters being well attested to and many events in the Bible being accepted as historical facts. For example, the prophet Elijah and King Ahab are widely considered to be real people. The events of the exile to Babylon are (now) considered as well to be real historical events.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#326

Post by simiones »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #189
Brendinooo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. > witness something that defies all natural explanation > write about it > people say it cannot have happened because it was a supernatural element You see this too with stuff like "anything that predicted the destruction of the temple must have been written after because no one can predict the future." Like, the whole point of huge chunks of the Bible is that world-altering supernatural events actually happene…

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…

> 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.

This sounds very convincing at first glance, but it completely disregards the actual history and practice of science.

In particular, for your insurmountable problems with steps 1 and 4, we actually have lots of scientific theories about singular events that we can't reproduce. Perhaps the most famous and well studied of these is the Big Bang.

If there were some god who could perform supernatural events, and presuming it didn't then explicitly try to obscure them from us, we could still study the consequences of these breaks in regular physics. If loaves multiplied for a feast, we may not be able to reproduce the event, but we could still use scientific means to confirm whether enough material had been present in the area to produce the total observed number of loaves of bread that was reported; and we could study the waste from the feast to corroborate eye witness testimonies with physical evidence (bread crumbs, stool samples, weight of the participants before and after, etc).

And historically, for step 3 - even though today gods or God are not commonly accepted hypothesis, they/he were for a long time in the history of science. However, every time something was thought to only possibly originate from supernatural causes, a natural physical/biological mechanism was later found. After this happened enough times, scientists started disfavoring this hypothesis, on the basis that it was not turning out to be useful or necessary.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#327

Post by simiones »

Amezarak wrote: post #307
pqtyw wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that Muslim accounts of the same events are sometimes very different to those of (Nicaean)Christians. Also we do know there were many competing narratives describing the life of Christ just a few hundred years after he died. After the Church become more established scholars spent a lot of time and effort trying to determine which ones were "accurate" or not and suppressing the other narratives. I…

> Also we do know there were many competing narratives describing the life of Christ just a few hundred years after he died. There were meaningful competing theologies , there were not meaningfully different competing narratives of the historical events.

Of course there are, even among the canonical gospels. The length of Jesus' ministry is uncertain (1 year in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but 3 years in the later John). What Mary and Joseph did after his birth also conflicts among the gospels - according to Matthew, they fled to Egypt, and only returned after Herrod had died (4 BC) while according to Luke, they went to the Temple in Jerusalem to cleanse Mary, which would have happened 40 days after the birth. Some of the identities of the disciples differ between the Synoptic gospels and John (particularly, there is no Bartholomew, no Matthew, no James son of Alphaeus, and no Simon except Simon Peter). The various miracles and acts of Jesus, the exact contents of the sermon on the mount, the parables that he shared - there are many other differences between all the canonical gospels.

Of course, they all agree on a broad narrative - Jesus was born of a virgin Mother in Bethlehem, lived in Nazareth for some time, wandered for 40 days in the wild where he was tempted, then returned and was baptized by John the Baptist, collected a number of disciples while preaching in Galilee and performing various miracles, then during Passover entered Jerusalem, came into conflict with the Jewish religious authorities and/or the Roman authorities, had a last supper with his disciples, and was crucified, died, was buried in a tomb, and was resurrected.

This is about it in terms of the major plot points that are common. Major acts, such as expelling the money lenders from the Temple or the resurrection of Lazarus, are not part of the shared narrative - they either occur at different times (in John, expelling the money lenders is one of the first acts of Jesus, at the start of his ministry, not one of his last public acts at the end), or not at all (the story of Lazarus is only present in John).

I would say that there are indeed major narrative differences between the Gospels.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#328

Post by pfdietz »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #319
pfdietz wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public choice theory explains why irrational collective results obtain from individual rational behavior. To get rational collective results requires that people act altruistically, favoring the collective over themselves.

And they are asking why it is so hard to get rational collective results, aka in your wording why is it so hard to get people to act altruistically . So the answer to your question “why do you think altruism is common* is still “what are you talking about”.

Altruism isn't common because we're created by evolution, and nothing is created by evolution without a selfish (for the genes) payoff. Supposed altruistic behavior in evolved creatures always has a selfish alterior motive (group selection, tit-for-tat payoff, for example).

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#329

Post by Brendinooo »

IAmBroom wrote: post #322
ReptileMan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iliad is fictional yet Troy existed. The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago black sea connected to the Mediterranean and probably was not entirely unpeaceful. I have absolutely backed by nothing theory that ancient Armenians and Jews are the same people that got separated. For some tribe living on the shores of east black sea - a myth about massive flood and some saving boat that stopped on…

> The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago black sea connected to the Mediterranean 8,000 years ago. > But apply exponential reduction for each generation of oral account and you may get to something resembling truth. Unfalsifiable claims are not truth.

> Unfalsifiable claims are not truth

My favorite color is orange.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#330

Post by lazyasciiart »

pfdietz wrote: post #328
lazyasciiart wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they are asking why it is so hard to get rational collective results, aka in your wording why is it so hard to get people to act altruistically . So the answer to your question “why do you think altruism is common* is still “what are you talking about”.

Altruism isn't common because we're created by evolution, and nothing is created by evolution without a selfish (for the genes) payoff. Supposed altruistic behavior in evolved creatures always has a selfish alterior motive (group selection, tit-for-tat payoff, for example).

So the answer to your question "why do you think altruism is common" is still what are you talking about?
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