Expressing bad attitudes to historians and critical scholarship without realizing it

Faith & Science Conversation
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The ultimate act of creation is indeed miraculous, by definition. But paying attention to Genesis 1 finds the phrase “let the earth bring forth”, rather than direct ex nihlo, for certain components of the creation. And of course God’s ongoing work in creation uses physical means, e.g., the “knitting together” of each individual person. Creating the earth and its inhabitants through ordinary means of natural laws does not contradict the ultimate ex nihlo origin. (However, it should be noted that many in the early and medieval church thought that creation might be eternal, yet created, to always have a work of the Creator.)

I have consistently affirmed that Noah’s flood is a real event. But the claims of flood geology are impossible, contradicting Scripture, physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and biology. Likewise, there is no good reason to doubt that Moses and the exodus are real events; nobody brags about being escaped slaves. But there is good reason to think that the number of people in the exodus is misinterpreted by most translations - there are various inconsistencies that indicate we’re not understanding something correctly, besides needing to be able to actually fit everyone in Sinai.

The virgin conception of Jesus is affirmed as a specific exception to the normal way things happen. But that is different from having specific evidence that it did not happen. The geological evidence clearly indicates that no global flood has happened at least in the past 3.5 billion years; before that would not exactly be a flood if the earth started underwater. Acts says that the locals thought that the snakebite would be fatal, not that the snake was venomous; stray snakes could show up with cargo even if the island lacked native venomous species at the time (given some uncertainty on identifying the island).

In other words, your characterization of theistic evolution is inaccurate. It’s a broad category, and not everyone believes the same thing, just as not all young-earthers believe in geocentrism.

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Look i have to pull you up there…that is simply untrue.

Your version of the geoligical evidence suggests that…however your version also accepts that the fossil record is found within sedimentary deposits related to water… even the asteroid impacts theory for the extinction of dinosaurs caused huge tidal waves…you are arguing no against your own observations that support the biblical flood!

Even the YEC mldel has no problem with dust storms causing extinction…why wouldnt the breakup of the fountains of the deep be consistent with that? Also, we know God caused fire to fall from heaven on at least two occasions in the Old Testament (Elijah and Sodom and Gomorah)…i dont see why we should necessarily exclude that from Noahs flood? Perhaps he did also cause asteroids to hit the earth in the flood…maybe some asteroids were first ejected from the earth when the fountains of the deep burst fourth and came crashing back again…why cant this be a scientific hypothesis given such a theory would also fit the bible historical account as well as its theology?

It gets worse for you than just the above…you trash stephen myers intelligent design belief largely for the wrong reason. Stephen claims genetic code is evidence for intelligent designer, God. This forum seems to muddy the waters on that notion by jumping ship to the secular no God model and using that to earbash myers claim that the statistics of secularism cannot account for enough time for even a basic addition that isnt fatal to the organism. Accorring to the hoover institute interview “Mathematical challenges to darwin” the chances are so small they are impossible. You say they are possible becahse in your version tbose changes are here…you can see evidence of them. But i have to challenge, where are the intermediatries on a large scale for it? Even the cambrian explosion is highly problemitic…it all appears too quickly in that layer to fit the mathematical dilemmas given there are so many significant appearances of sudden change.

I honestly do not believe you realise what you do here to your own notion of God…its no wonder atheists laugh at Theistic Evolution…you have so many inconsistencies in your religious belief, you are representing a basket case of confused cofllicting theology.

You still bave not addressed the theological issues. Making claims…“there are various inconsistencies”…what inconsistencies…what evidejce do you have supporting your conclusion about the exodus population? What average life expentancy are you using for the claim only a few thousand Israelites left Egypt? If you claim the bible is wrong on the 600,000 men besides women amd children…how do you then believe the mircaulous biblical claims if you dont believe the historical ones (especially given Christ has 2 linesges listed going back from.whivh we can reference. We can even cross check those genealogies in the Old Testament story…how do you account for that issue? I argue you cant…so instead you choose to straw pluck…ignoring what isnt convient. I dont ignore any of it…and i certai ly dont explain away citing “no kne brags about being escaped slaves” …honestly, that is your defense? That wouldnt even stand up in a modern court of law, and yet here you are using it to defend your faith and worldview? How is that scientific?

Your claim a out the “locals in Acts thought the snakebite would be fatal”…

Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance
viper.
Of uncertain origin; an adder or other poisonous snake (literally or figuratively) – viper.

Google AI result for the question…"was the snake that bit the apostle Paul poisonous

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The point is, the locals held a spiritual belief that an evil act recieved divine judgement at the hands of a poisonous snake…this wasnt an Aboriginal “pointing the bone” tribal meeting judgement where an individual is then excluded from the tribe and sent off into the Australian wilderness to die. In the Australian indignenous model, the individual believed it was the bone that would cause their death…so much so, they died from self imposed dehydration and starvation…clearly an act of suicide!

(You will have to excuse spelling and grammar mistakes…im fighting a phone keyboard too small for my fingers and a screen too small to see properly. Its so frustrating i could friggin smash this f$%#r with a hammer!)

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There is a possibility to take the description as it was written and conclude that the 600,000 men is probably a wrong interpretation. There is an article showing this:

Humphreys, C.J. 1998. The number of people in the Exodus from Egypt: decoding mathematically the very large numbers in Numbers I and XXVI. Vetus Testamentum XLVIII, 2

Here is the Abstract of the article:
“A mathematical analysis is given of the very large numbers of people at the Exodus from Egypt
recorded in the book of Numbers. It is shown that if there were “273 first born Israelites who exceed the number of Levites” (Num. iii 43), then the total number of Israelite men aged over 20 in the census following the Exodus was about 5000, not 603,550 as apparendy recorded in Numbers. The apparent error in Numbers arises because the ancient Hebrew word 'lp can mean “thousand”, “troop”, or “leader”, according to the context. On our interpretation, all the figures in Numbers are internally consistent including the numbers at both censuses, the encampment numbers, etc. In addition we deduce that the number of males in the average Israelite family at the time of the Exodus was 8 to 9, consistent with the concern of the Egyptians that the Israelites had “multiplied greatly” whilst in Egypt (Exod. i 7). The total number of men, women and children at the Exodus was about 20,000 rather than the figure of over 2 million apparently suggested by the book of Numbers.”

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The YEC ‘model’ requires that dust storms buried fossils dry on top of Flood sediments and under other Flood sediments, with not the least suggestion in those dust storm deposits that they even got damp.
This is what comes of invoking ad hoc solutions for a whole set of phenomena without thinking of other parts of that set: the result in inconsistent, incoherent, and self-contradictory.

Because that’s making stuff up, as opposed to relying on the text.

More adding to the text.

Yet another made-up miracle.

How about where all the livestock of Egypt are reported as being killed by hail after all those livestock were already killed by pestilence? and the firstborn of those livestock are killed (again) later?
Or when Pharaoh and Moses agree that they will never meet again but then they do?

What does life expectancy have to do with it?

The question is whether that’s actually what the text says.

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It’s a pretty good article. Humphreys has challengers, of course, and it comes down to which text is considered to be most reliable – a matter I no longer have the energy to pursue. Others have arrived at slightly different figures, ranging from Humphreys’ 20k up to 35k. I once spent most of my time in one week pursuing the matter and deciding that 35k was probably accurate, though I don’t remember why.

There are also some who say there were multiple Exodi (Exoduses?), either two or three; I sort of lean towards two but can’t deny that three could be the case.

Then there’s also a guy who maintains that the figures in Numbers were based on the population in David’s time with the intent being to assure all the Ivri who had joined up with Israel after the Exodus that they really were part of Israel. I’m skeptical of the idea, but there is archaeological evidence that numerous Ivri who lived among the Canaanites before Israel arrived joined themselves to Israel during the period of the judges.

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Never go in against a paleontologist when geology is on the line. It is precisely because I am a paleontologist, the son of a paleontologist, and for that matter brother and father of paleontologists (to paraphrase Amos) that I can confidently say that both flood geology and Meyers are wrong. Of course, they can’t both be right, as Meyers recognizes that young-earth claims are wrong.

Plenty of fossils are in land sediments. Although I have mostly collected marine material, I did help to dig up an early Triassic land reptile and some scraps from a dinosaur nest area. The freshwater and marine deposits cannot fit a flood geology model, if a coherent flood geology model even existed. Flood geology fails the stink test that you recommended. Kurt Wise, who you may recognize as a prominent young-earth advocate and one of the few young-earthers with a legitimate geology degree, has noted that a hardground habitat (like a reef or any other rock surface with animals boring into it and attaching to it) can’t form during a flood geology flood. But fossil reefs occur through much of the geological record. Evaporites (salt deposits) can’t form during a flood geology flood. Salt deposits form only when water is salty enough to kill most aquatic life, and in a global flood you can’t have part of the ocean much saltier than the rest. We can observe what kinds of deposits form under different conditions today. We can also determine what should be produced by a young-earth scenario and see if it matches what is observed. But creation science does not honestly assess the evidence. It is garbage. It dishonors God by its abysmal quality. It is not biblical.

Over 20 years ago, I co-authored a paper explaining that the Cambrian radiation does not pose any problem for evolution. In fact, many of the formerly puzzling fossils from the Cambrian are transitional between major groups. The ID movement has not particularly advanced their arguments beyond the initial claim that the Cambrian radiation was too fast. Ironically, the ID claims are largely based on Steve Gould’s popular account, where Gould was claiming that the Cambrian was highly random. Both Gould and the ID folks are imposing their philosophies on the data. The statistical claims of Meyers and other ID are not well-founded. And the ID movement has not paid much attention to all of the research on Cambrian and late Precambrian fossils in the past 30 years. Popular versions of the “Cambrian radiation challenges evolution” myth often include slanderous claims that the fossils were hidden away to conceal the problem for evolution. This may be inspired by a fanciful description of research on the Cambrian in Gould’s Wonderful Life, in which he imagines someone looking at a specimen, exclaiming “Not another #$% phylum! I’ve got enough to do already. I’ll leave it for someone else.” But the reality is that the supposed problems for evolution were not discovered until after the specimens were well-publicized (including in National Geographic). The purported problems for evolution are that there is very high diversity of kinds appearing in a short time. The Burgess fossils were discovered in the late 1800’s, but new study techniques in the 1970’s and beyond are what showed how distinctive the Cambrian fossils are. And it was only in the early 1990’s that it was determined that significant animal diversity developed in just 10 million years.

You would not accuse someone of putting secular botany over the Bible for affirming that “The trees of the field will clap their hands” is figurative. But how do you know what is figurative? By examination of the context and by comparison to our knowledge of physical reality. The actual biblical miracles are specific instances of God setting aside the normal laws of nature for a particular theological purpose. Both Jesus and Paul reject demands for miracles. Even when miracles are used, they seem to be the minimum needed for the purpose. Water was turned to wine, but had to be served in the ordinary way; thousands were fed from a few loaves and fish but the leftovers were carefully saved; the axe head floated but had to be fastened on better; a wind was sent to part the sea but with the exact timing needed and Moses was notified in advance; there is a fish species in Galilee that tends to eat shiny things, but Jesus knew one with exact change. Miracles have the specific purpose of pointing to God. But, as the ID movement sometimes admits, they can’t tell if the designer is God or Allah or Zeus or advanced aliens, etc. It’s not Christian apologetics, despite frequently marketing itself as such. Creation science likewise fails to be uniquely Christian. It has substituted acceptance of young-earth claims for the gospel and thus degenerated into a legalistic heresy.

The loud, foolishly militant atheists with pretensions to be scientific laugh a lot more at young earth claims than theistic evolution. Young earth claims are overwhelmingly so bad scientifically as to make it easy for someone to claim that atheism is supported by science. Theistic evolution, in contrast, challenged the bad god of the gaps assumptions that such atheists (like most young-earth and ID advocates) are making.

I reject the claims of a global flood not because I don’t think that God could cause one to happen, but because both the Bible and the scientific evidence clearly indicate that it did not happen.

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A student in one of my geology courses made that claim on the basis that the university had fossils it kept in drawers where no one could see them. The professor invited the gal to sign up for training in handling fossils and she could not just see but handle any of them that she wished – and extended that to the entire class, saying the fact was that they weren’t hiding anything, they just had more fossils than they could handle.

How very true! YEC apologetics convinced someone I met to become a Buddhist because she listened to it all and concluded there must be no deities at all.

Definitely. Some such atheists on my university campus quite logically stated that there is no way to falsify theistic evolution, but that young earth claims are self-defeating.

The whole “Don’t you believe God could do it?” still strikes me as being on the same level as “My dad is tough enough to do that!” histrionics among grammar school kids.

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Touching on this briefly, if regions of the genome are important in embryonic development then we should see some sort of signal for sequence conservation in those regions. The fact that we don’t see sequence conservation is strong evidence that these regions lack function at any point in human development. In fact, there have been many cases of identifying functional regions of the genome based on sequence conservation without knowing if those regions are transcribed at any point in an organism’s development.

One of the concepts that I often wondered about is the cost of junk DNA. Luckily, Lynch and Marinov wrote a paper on just this back in 2015:

Why is there junk DNA in the genomes of complex eukaryotes? Because there can be. There’s not enough selective pressure against junk DNA because of it’s relative low bioenergetic cost and the higher bar for negative selection set by small effective population sizes.

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One complication is that DNA can have function that does not depend on the sequence. Certain regions function as spacers,so the exact sequence does not matter as long as enough but not too many bases are in there. Certain DNA, particularly related to immune functions, need to vary rapidly to function.

Mitochondria seem to have some similar constraints on extra DNA to bacteria. However, a complication there is the existence of many organisms with a long, highly repetitive (and thus difficult to sequence and often missed in shotgun-type analyses) segments in mtDNA.

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“… the fact was that they weren’t hiding anything, they just had more fossils than they could handle.”

Additionally, most fossils are small and/or not very exciting-looking to the average member of the public. I loved the extensive display of actual Paleozoic invertebrates at the natural history museum in Praha, but that would never be featured in a museum influenced by a PR department. Compare the photo of an exhibit at the Smithsonian with the photo of a drawer back in the back of the Smithsonian:

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The local museum has drawers like that, filled with fossils from the immediate area. They only display about a half dozen; the drawers hold a few hundred. A few years back there was an uproar when the museum said it was giving fossils to a university and people thought that meant the display would disappear. But the display didn’t change, just the contents of the drawers – those got reduced by maybe half.

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you might be better served in all this if you pulled out one or two examples (maybe at a time( and stuck to them…BTW many evangelical archaeologists/historians argue against the “600,000” number for the exodus as well…

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I am not sure that I understood correctly what you asked. Anyhow, here are examples from the paper. For those interested to know more, I recommend reading the article
Humphreys, C.J. 1998. The number of people in the Exodus from Egypt: decoding mathematically the very large numbers in Numbers I and XXVI. Vetus Testamentum XLVIII.
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“First, the numbers in Numbers appear to be internally inconsistent. For example, Num. iii 43 states that the number of firstborn males a month or more old was 22,279. However, if the number of males over twenty years old was 603,550, this implies a total number of males a month or more old of about one million, hence a ratio of all males to firstborn males of about 50 to 1. The average mother must then have had about 100 children (50 sons and 50 daughters). This is unlikely.”

“Amid all the very large numbers in the book of Numbers, one figure stands out as being entirely reasonable, that is “the 273 firstborn Israelites who exceed the number of the Levites” (Num. iii 46). This very precise figure is reasonable not only because it is small, but it is also likely to be correct because redemption was involved, which would be taken very seriously.
… [many mathematical calculations omitted]
Hence the problem noted in the Introduction, that the numbers in Numbers imply an average number of men per family of 50, which is biologically unlikely, is now ruled out by our mathematical analysis which shows that this number must be less than 11. The significance of Table 1 is that it gives figures for the number of men over 20 at the Exodus, the number of Levites and the number of men in the average Israelite family which are internally consistent with the key figure of 273 (Num. iii 46) mentioned above.”

“Table 2 gives the numbers of men over 20 years old recorded at the first census (Num. i 46), interpreted in two ways: (i) if 'lp is translated as “thousand” and (ii) if 'lp is translated as “troop”. If 'lp is translated as “troop” then the total number of men aged over 20 is 5550. We note from Table 1 that this implies an average family size of between 8 and 9 men per family (men aged over 1 month), the actual number being 8.7 (from equation 6). This number is consistent with the small amount of available evidence. When Jacob was in Egypt his 12 sons had a total of 57 sons, i.e. an average of about 5 sons per family. Exod. i 17 emphasises that subsequently the Israelites “multiplied greatly” in Egypt, hence a figure of 8 to 9 men per family is not unreasonable at this period of time. It may be of interest to note that this figure is close to the average number of men aged over 20 per troop which from Table 2 is about 9. If about 50% of the population was under 20 this implies that each troop comprised the men of military service age (over 20) of about 2 families. The small size of about 9 men per troop is consistent with broadly contemporary information about troop sizes in ancient texts.”

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The assumptions and conclusions in the article can be criticized but at least, the article shows in a mathematical way that the translated (Masoretic) text is internally inconsistent and the shown inconsistency can be removed if we select another translation for a single ancient Hebrew word ('lp) that has multiple meanings depending on the context.

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So let me get this straight…you claim that 273 individuals…400 years later only bred into a total of 5,000? You see the gross error there right?

In addition to the above, can you actually.read Numbers chapter 3…its more than 5,000 Levites in the camp…there were over 20,000 of them!

In any case, my own Grandmother who loved (woops, i mean lived :rofl:) into her nineties was the matriarch of a family of children, grandchildren, great great grandchildren etc.

I know for a fact that my heritage, my nans offspring consists of about 80 individuals in just her lifetime.

Multiply her 90 year lifes family size by 3.5 and my own family with just 1 husband and 1 wife with an average immediate familly size of 3 children would be almost 400 individuals.

Multiple 400 x 270 early Israelites = a breading potential over 400 years in Egypt, using only an average of 3, is 100,000 people.

Given early israelites often had much larger families than 3 children amd the more wealthy had more than one wife…1 million or more individuals in the exodus is not only mathematically credible…its actually a conservative number!

You need to actually do the math in your head to critique the crap you read and ensure its actually is sensible. Its clearly not with the evidences ive provided here.

I can say that because my only family history just on my mums side refutes that nonsense. Given my family on my dads side is also a similar size and we come from a culture whos average family size was consistent in my country historically…ive got strong lifes experience evidence there that correlates eith the biblical account. I have 5 kids myself and my sister has 4, so theres that dilemma for you to consider…how many offspring do you think mine and my sisters example would realisticaly produce after 400 years? Add to thst my.dozens of cousins and second cousins who also have 2-4 kids, the potential size of my family mutliplied by those 270 odd early Israelites enterring Egypt, its absolutely huge!

Also we should not forget, the bible tells us that in the Exodus, a considerable number were not even historically Jewish… we also have the mixed multitude. Whether one wishes to read the 600,000 is inclusive of the mixed multitude or exclusive of it, doesnt really cause any problems for me because that tells us the Israelites inter bred with Egyptians during those 400 years. This then means that population growth even for the Exodus group was not limited to jist those 270 individuals who first enterred Egypt 400 years earlier. The atheistic speculation they couldnt breed into a million people in 400 years is unintelligent, insulting and utter nonsense.

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Here, I also used a calculator for some steps:

5,000 “Israelite men aged over 20”, so more like 20-30,000 total people. Which, with a starting population of 70, and assuming that they had a slightly better rate of mortality than their neighbors (say, about 60% of girls reaching childbearing age and having children), and average age at the start of childbearing was about 20, that requires an average fecundity per woman of 1.36-1.39 (number of girls per woman who survive, so 2.7-2.8 children who survive per couple). As the global average at that time seems to have been something like 1.2, that seems like a reasonable high value.
By contrast, the translation option of 600,000 would give 1.73 (average of 3.5 children who survive per couple), a value greater than any that I can find for a large human population. Occasional intenmarrying with outsiders would decrease those values by a few percent, but not much more. The bigger problem is that the estimated total population of Egypt at the time is only a million or two, which would cause obvious problems for there to be an extra 2 million who left.

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Where do you get 5,000 men from?
The bible tells us in numbers that there were over 20,000 Levites and thats not even including the other 12 tribes.

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You are ignoring what the bible actually states. Given the bible is the major source we have that the Israelites were even in Egypt, how can you present so called authoritative and reliable external references citing numbers that are nothing like those given in the Bible?

Heres another huge theological dilemma for Theistic Evolutionists…

Bible says 600,000 men… the TEist using non biblical references where there is no external claim Israelites were ever even in Egypt…says “nope its just a few thousand”

Jesus casts demons into a group of pigs, who then go down into tue sea and drown themselves…

Jesus turns water into wine

Jesus raises a dead body back to life, thats already started rotting in the grave after 3 or more days…

The second coming, people are going to simply float up into the air im.defiance of the law of gravity…

Apparently science is ok with those miracles and the legitimacy of the prophecy of the second coming? Really? If i wanted to define delusional…that right there is it:rofl:

Update

Oh btw, thats not an individual expression bad attitudes towards historians and science, thats a nitwit publishing utter crap and in doing so is insulting the intelligence and expertise of individuals in both of those professions. (I refer to the author btw)

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Adding up the values after the “# 'elep”. The issue here is that the word (אֶלֶף 'elep) translated as “thousand” has another possible meaning: “group [size unspecified]” (allowing repointings adds a few more, like “military unit leader”). If those (or most of those) “thousands” are actually “groups”, and the final tallies are concatenations of the totals for “#1 groups” and “#2 thousand #3 men”, then the issues associated with having a few million people leave Egypt (not enough food or space for them, no evidence for that many people arriving in Canaan, required family size, etc. ) disappear.

Additionally, there is published archeological evidence for a population increase of about 20-30,000 people in the central hill country of Canaan between c. 1250-1150 BC. This is a rather rapid increase for just locals having children to explain, and the new population had a somewhat different material culture–most relevantly, fewer idols and a lot less pork in the diet.

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600 אֶלֶף men. Which might be “thousand” or “group [unspecified size]”.

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  1. I think the text answers that question internally
  2. If it means group, the the text reads as…the total “group” is 600 “group”…which is linguistic nonsense!

For point 1 above, read Numbers 3 both english and the interlinear are referenced/illustrated below

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The article about the large numbers in Numbers produces support for a hypothesis presented by Mendenhall (1976) rather than the certain truth.

What is noteworthy is that the article starts by accepting Numbers (the ancient Hebrew version) as a valid document. The mathematical analyses use just the information told by the scripture + some linguistic knowledge about the meaning of an ancient Hebrew word. In that sense, it could be called faithful to the scripture.

The translations about the text we use are mainly based on the Masoretic version of the Hebrew Bible. That version is considered largely reliable but the Masoretic version with the marks that tell how the Hebrew words should be pronounced was compiled crudely 800-900 CE. There is no quarantee that the way how the words were pronounced during that time were always the same as what was used >1000 years earlier. It is good to remember that until the Masoretic text, only the context and tradition determined which of the several potential meanings of the words was selected to be read. Selecting another of the potential meanings of a word did not demand changing of any words in the scripture. Only our translations would change, which shows once again that the translations we use are necessarily imperfect attempts to tell the message of the ancient Hebrew text.

Edit:
Other parts of the Torah seems to give some relevant information:
Exodus 23:29-30 state that initially there were too few Israelites to occupy the promised land.
Deut. 7:7 state that they were “the fewest of all peoples".

The total population of Palestine before the Jewish immigration has been about one million. It is likely that the promised land did not harbour much more people at the time of Exodus. Even if we would take a high estimate, 1.5 millions, it is less than the assumed total number of people attending Exodus, if we use the translation ‘thousand’. That does not fit well to the verses that tell about a small group that could not occupy the whole promised land when they arrived from Exodus.

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