After that last discussion, I decided to confront JB on his own page. I posted a link to the Natufian culture, one that's from the Levant/modern-day Israel area. and just asked "Thoughts on this?", since they are from a time period that's 12,000 to 9,000 years ago and his world view only allows for the Earth to be 6,000 years old.
He wouldn't talk in public about the topic, but sent me a message instead. If you're too worried to speak about your convictions in public, maybe you should reconsider what you think.
Here is the conversation that followed. Some of it was brought over from our previous discussion:
Me: If
you find my posts on your wall bothersome, let me know. I don't want to
be too much of a pest. And don't worry, it's not like I'm going to do
this every day. It's just this one for now.
Me: Oh
man. I'm reading through that "
answering genesis" link. I could tear
most of these apart with just the knowledge that I have on hand. But
it's not worth my time. What I can say that I take offense to is 1) that
the author obviously doesn't know the correct terminology for a lot of
the scientific aspects that they're attempting to tackle, and 2) that
they think people in the past were stupid.
The author also
makes many suppositions, like "why would people do or not do this?"
which is a lot of people do, but nobody really knows. You can't just
think that you understand how or why people did things and then if it
doesn't make sense to you, in the one scenario that you created, you
can't say that it doesn't make any sense at all. There are multiple
cultural and environmental factors that can make a dynamic scenario in
the past seem unlikely today. This is how science works. If one scenario
doesn't make sense, then you look at another. If one doesn't work you
don't say that you've figured it out.
In that same vein, the
author obviously thinks that erosion and degradation aren't possible
since they're looking for however many billions of bodies. Neandertals
are the first hominids to have shown evidence of burial and that's only
50,000 years ago and that is still tenuous.
http://archaeology.about.com/od/shthroughsiterms/g/shanidar.htm If this person wants to refute science, they should do their homework. As should you.
JB: Fair
enough, it could be that this particular article from Answers in
Genesis was geared more for a simple audience. The author Dr. Humphreys
has his Ph.D in physics from LSU so i'm sure that he has the capability
to speak in more scientific terms and give explanation to his arguments.
However, I am not too familiar with him. Hopefully you found the ICR
article a bit more engaging. I do appreciate you not "tearing it apart",
it would not be a waste of time but you're right in that it probably
wouldn't be worth the time (as you said). Not because I'm not willing to
read but I freely admit that i'm not immediately versed in a lot of
scientific language and therefore it would take me awhile to respond.
I certainly don't mind if you leave links on my wall if you think they
are worthwhile. I will take a look at the link you posted, as a jump
start what are some things you would like me to consider about it?
Me: Well. I suppose for the
Natufians I would just wonder what you thought of the age of these
people. I mean, I know you're just going to refute the dating techniques
to reach that 12,000 date, so I suppose that's a futile question on my
part. But these people are sedentary hunter-gatherers, meaning that they
didn't have agriculture. However, they did have rather cool and
well-made stone mortars that they used to grind the seeds that they
harvested. (That's how they could manage to be sedentary.)
I
guess what just set me off was the author saying that there wasn't much
time where people weren't farmers, and here you have a culture that
spans for 3,000 years, presumably not only based on radiocarbon dating,
which I'm sure you refute, but can also be noted on just the sheer
numbers of people and locales, as seen by the map in the wiki article.
That author said that non-agriculturalists would only have been just
after Noah's flood calmed down, but this is more than a small band in a
small area. There is also evidence of a pre-Natufian culture in the
area.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0015815
The funny thing here is that I could tell you about history all day
long I can enlighten you to the laws of supraposition, where things in
sediment layers that are lower are obviously older, and if I had access
to sites in Israel, or if I knew O. Bar-Yosef (famous archaeologist in
the Levant area), he could probably show you site after site where you
can just see a dense occupation from Jesus' time, showing associated
artifacts, and going back to David's time, then Abraham's time, then
back to what might be considered Adam's time. Then he would go farther
back from there.... evidence... in his hand or right in front of you.
But what can you show me? You can point to the Bible, something I'm
already well familiar with, and you can try to point to passages, which
I'm sure can be extremely insightful and can help elucidate the history
of that time period, but it's not going to show me anything else about
the world that happened before that time. And I realize that you don't
believe that there is anything beyond that to be shown, but as much as
you'd like to think that, if you actually went out and looked, you might
have your eyes opened.
Armchair theology only gets you so far.
Me: Looked
at your
Young Earth/Age link. The argument is that the moon is slowing
at a pace that would only allow for a young age of the moon. Looks like
Newton figured this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_theory#Solar_perturbation_of_lunar_motion
I'm not saying I know physics, or how he came to his conclusions, but I
believe this sentence is an important one. "Thus Newton concluded that
it is only the difference between the Sun's accelerative attraction on
the Moon and the Sun's attraction on the Earth that perturbs the motion
of the Moon relative to the Earth."
It seems like this author doesn't consider the sun's pull and only looks at:
1) The earth-moon spacing and recession rate refutes that long age.
2) The shape of the earth refutes that long age.
Where he only looks at "earth-moon tidal friction".
So. Here, again, we're at least at a wash, though it seems to me like
the author of your article wasn't considering all the dynamics of the
system.
__________
I haven't heard back and I think this might be the end of this conversation for now. Though I suppose it's only been two days.
Labels: archaeology, christian, Proof, religion, Science, Young Earth
LC: Sure - you know, except for all the human sacrifices and orgies paganism is where it's at.
TS: Christianity evolved from that stuff. Why do you think it wasn't weird for Abraham to attempt to kill Isaac in the name of his God?
LC: Tell me something I don't know.
TS: http://en.wikipedia.org/
Biblical texts - Moloch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
LC: Ok TS, well played. But I should tell you that I almost got a minor in Theology at my Jesuit undergraduate University....so yeah, we talked about all the other gods and such in the Old Testament. There's actually a version where Abraham kills Isaac. The editors of the OT went back and changed it when human sacrifice went out of style.
TS: That, I didn't know. I also have a feeling that when Herod was killing all the babies around Jesus' time, it wasn't just because he was looking to kill Jesus but it was an annual/common tradition.
LC: Nah, that's all mythology. If you look at the Jesus birth story a lot of it mirrors the Moses story. The authors of the NT went back to ascribe significance to Jesus' life, and well, Moses was kind of a big deal to the Jews. A lot of the Jesus story is mythology. He was a real person, but you know, you've gotta jazz up the story a bit if you want to claim he's the messiah.
TS: Ah, there are Roman corollaries too: Adonis, Apollo. Greek: Attis. Babylonian: Tammuz. But I'd definitely buy that baby killing was common in Egypt -- first born. There's a name for a Jewish tradition, Bekhorot, where the first born is to be given to God. Instead of sacrifice, it was later acceptable that penance/payment was worthy, you know, unless you gave your child up to the clergy.
LC: Yuppah, or you know, first born goat works too
TS: Well, that was the whole point of the Abraham/Isaac story, I believe. Getting out of that baby-killing tradition. That's why Isaac was so old -- Abraham had put it off because Sarah was so damn old before he popped out, that he probably thought there wasn't going to be a chance for another.
TS: And then the Jesus story made goats obsolete. And well, it kind of went hand-in-hand with when the Jews stopped it because their temple was blockaded and they would have run out of food if they hadn't stopped sacrificing to their God (70AD).
LC: You got it =) Yeah, the whole point of the story was to show that human sacrifice wasn't cool anymore
LC: Jesus was the sin offering to end all sin offerings
TS: I went to Bible school from K-7 and then a year in college. I have more knowledge on that subject than I need/want. Yup. Exactly. Adonis was killed by a boar, so the "offering" went to a ham dinner instead of wasting food by simply burning it. Although I'm sure those offerings may have been eaten by the priests on the DL.
LC: But it's SO interesting!
TS: I know. It's fucking ridiculous. I delve into it because I'm putting off thesis work. I just like all the corollaries from different religions in the area. I think the ancient Egypt religion had a lot of impact on the Jews from Moses' time. The problem with Egypt's religion though is that it had several thousands of years to mature and several hundreds of conquests that promoted certain deities over others or had them meld, so it's hard to tease out the individual stories. Horus was the son of a trinity (Osiris and Isis), but Osiris was the father and the one who was raised from the dead. Ihy was allegedly the golden calf, which was also the son of Hathor, that cow goddess with the sun symbol between her horns. I also believe that the original trinity involved a female, but that the patriarchy kicked out the Mary-like goddess and inserted an androgynous character such as the Holy Spirit.
LC: Or that whole brouhaha when Akhenaten tried to disempower the sun-priests and commanded worship of only one god....totally! I think the Babylonian captivity had a big effect too - the Jews were like "Shit, we better write down all our mythology...but man, I sure do like this flood story."
TS: YES! And, you know. Amun is sometimes seen as Amen, since, the Egyptians didn't really do vowels....
LC: Precisely! That's exactly where it came from. That and the use of incense. The Egyptians were big into that, as well as choral chanting and stuff. Oh Egypt.
TS: Amun-Ra, the omniscient eye -- that iconic Egyptian eye. And they used palms as a symbolic measure because it had 12 fronds, but dammit, now I forget what they stood for. But I think they had a 12-part cycle like months. I think the disciples all represented that and have Roman/Greek corollaries. Sometimes I think I dip a little bit into "crazy" territory with this stuff.
TS: But at least other people do as well...? http://www.angelfire.com/
LC: I mean, all those religions in the near east are pretty related. It is definitely not beyond the scope of possibility. I was working at a Mimbres site in New Mexico and we found 7 snakes all sacrificed in a post hole....instantly I thought AZTEC! But again, that's getting into crazy territory.
TS: Oh, no, there was definite trade going on there, if not just indirectly from the main centers. And the Aztec mythology/belief system, I think, has them coming from that Uto-Aztecan area, which is kind of CA/AZ.
TS: What I think was awesome, at least about the Maya, was that when the Spaniards came and tried to convert them, they brought the story of Jesus on the cross, but the Maya already had the "Sacred Tree/Tree of Life". So originally the Catholic church just had the cross as their symbol, but the Maya were confusing that with their own religion, so the church put Jesus on the cross. http://www.flickr.com/
LC: That is too fricken' cool. And this gets into the whole universality of the "Tree of Life" symbolism, you know, Yggdrasil and everything else
TS: Yeah. Sometimes I worry that Joseph Smith may have had some truth to his stories. But on the other hand, there might just be some deep-ass religiosity that kept some of these basic tenants of faith.
TS: Or, you know, that whole independent-thought thing, but sometimes they're a bit too close.
LC: Ah, the psychic unity of mankind
TS: Yeah, the Maya have this 26,000 year cycle for their calendars where at the end of that point, there is some kind of planet/galactic alignment where Xibalba opens up and the connection between the heavens and earth are made through the Sacred Tree which allows for the rebirth of the twin heroes, who started it all for humanity. Sometimes I wish Christianity wasn't so lame. I mean, Christianity is based pretty in-sync with the calendar, but other than this ominous "He shall return", there's nothing keeping people on the edge of their seats. I suppose Y2K did it a bit, but this 2012 thing actually has some celestial significance. Christian slackers....
TS: However, some have tried to say that the ending of "Ages" have been symbolized in the Bible: Moses condemned that golden calf/bull (Age of Taurus), Abraham killing the first goat (Age of Aires), and then Jesus, the fisher of men, was crucified (Age of Pisces). So what shall be the dawning of the Age of Aquarius...?