Instigator
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.
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
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home