I don’t mean to be pedantic, or to be too critical, but this illustrates exactly my earlier point… With respect, this is exactly the kind of claim that induces my deepest sense of exasperation, and precisely what I was critiquing about Dr Walton…
OF COURSE they would have known that the sun was at least a little farther up than the nearest mountaintop… Or the sun would have had trouble getting over said mountaintop, or would have crashed into it… no? They never noticed the sun not rising as it had trouble getting over the mountains…? Or they never noticed the mountaintops crumbling as the sun came crashing through them, I’m guessing…? Or if it didn’t crash… if the sun was in fact lower than the nearest mountaintop, it would have had to climb or otherwise ascend said mountain in order to get over it, at which point it still would have been higher than said mountain, no???
I mean, if they saw a bird fly over a mountain, they probably would have deduced easily enough that the bird was farther up than the mountain. If a cloud passed above the mountain, they would have deduced easily enough that the cloud was higher up than the mountain, no? But they couldn’t have deduced the same in relation to the sun and a mountain??
So again with deepest respect, but I’m genuinely baffled how you could make such a claim as that. Genuinely not meaning to be rude or hyper-critical, but it seems completely nonsensical to me. How in the world could they NOT have noticed that the sun was farther up than the very mountains they saw the sun regularly passing above??
And what would 29th century erudite scholars believe about us, who read our words woodenly literally, and thus thought that we believed we could build buildings that literally scraped against the sky…!
The back door which allows Him to participate in events, for sure. But no, God does not change the rules by which He made the universe to work just to cater to those who use religion to rule over others.
Why did Jesus say this… “It is an evil generation which looks for a sign” (Matthew 16:4, Luke 11:29, and Matthew 12:39)?
In John 6 people wanted magic to fill their belly so when Jesus required them to have a spiritual understanding they left Him.
Why should He use such clumsy things as sound and human language (with all the ways in which humans use and abuse such things), when He can speak directly to the human heart.
Actually it is not. Your use of concepts and definition do not change the word “voice” into the word “audible.” This is interpretation, not the text. And frankly its sounds like the same sort of lame literal interpretation as the creationists use.
The Bible describes hearing the voice of God in various ways, emphasizing a quiet inward understanding rather than an audible voice. The classic passage for this is 1 Kings 19:12. But there are many other passages which say only those of God hear His voice. But hearing sound waves has nothing to do with your heart or what you believe.
Because 1) he is often recorded as having done so, and 2) because he wanted to?
Speaking with audible sound and human language is really “beneath” a God who was literally willing to become man? He was willing to be born in a stable in Bethlehem and require someone to change his diaper, but using audible sound and human language is somehow clumsy and beneath him?
And yet, he nonetheless performed numerous signs, particularly not when said evil people were looking for them, no? To show himself to those who were willing to believe?
This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.
But that’s inherently internally contradictory: back doors result in “magic crap” (which is a total misrepresentation of miracles in the first place, but that’s a different topic).
The programmer analogy fails here, BTW, because there is no hardware except God; reality is the software and nothing else. So the programmer’s intervention is in sticking in new code for an immediate situation.
Depends on when. By the time of Xenophon, probably not; go back to Homer and it’s an interesting question.
But the ancient Babylonians and Canaanites did believe that, as did the Sumerians – else they wouldn’t have needed “high places” to talk with deity.
In ancient Hebrew thought, the story could be “non-historical” even though the event itself, i.e. creation of human beings, was reckoned as absolutely historical. After all, the idea that “nothing that has been created was created without Him” was not invented by Paul, so given that humans exist, they must have been created by YHWH-Elohim!
[Blast it, I was going to add an example from second-Temple literature, but my service dog Knox just demanded my attention and the thought went winging off somewhere!]
Influence of the modern scientific materialist worldview we absorbed from the cradle: modern humans have difficulty accepting any worldview that include scientific and materialistic standards of truth.
I recall him saying that and cringing – but it’s the sort of thing to be expected when any scholar speaks outside his expertise. I could stack up examples from Dawkins, Tyson, Greene, Hawking, and others that are at least that cringe-worthy.
Though for an astronomer, to say those 300 bodies were “exactly the same as Pluto” was not a misstatement – an astronomer thinks first in terms of scientific parameters, and in terms of those parameters the statement is correct!
It’s the error that Richard and others make regularly, taking language from one field and insisting on it applying in another.
Ah, but “near-identical” (what the astronomer probably said, really) and “exactly the same” aren’t the same at all – plus Walton was certainly “translating” for an audience as astronomically ignorant as he was.
Though I will note that Walton seems to have become more of a showman, perhaps caught up in the ego-boost of book sales and popularity.
At the time he gave that number it was the same figure Neil deGrasse Tyson was giving out; the number has passed 800 and possible 900 by now.
Because he was speaking outside his area of expertise.
In a public speaking class this was a warning we were given: be very, very careful with any examples from outside your expertise!
Because there he is speaking within his area of expertise.
I generally operate on the assumption that experts speaking to popular audiences are going to try to make points using material from outside their areas of expertise and that I am going to have to be prepared to stifle laughter.
Of his books I’ve read (nothing recent) I would say that’s not likely; he gives plenty of sources (though as with Dr. Heiser, there are some that can’t be publicly verified since the material is behind an academic or other paywall). When I was first listening to Walton I vigorously checked his sources until I was satisfied he was on the level.
I must be missing something here – you repeated points I made as though they go against those very points.
???
But that’s taking “skyscraper” out of context – you skipped the part I wrote that gave context: they believed not just that the heavens touched the mountains in such a way that the gods could step down out of heaven onto them, but that the solid sky-dome rested on those mountains!
So like the YECists you throw out the actual vocabulary when it suits you: the root meaning is “sound”, the sort that comes from living beings but also that comes from thunder and wind. You are stripping the basic meaning of the word away in order to force it into a modern use.
There’s no “quiet inward understanding” in that passage, there’s a sound – it’s the same word that the LXX renders as φωνή, an audible sound. And the adjective is contrastive, pointing to the difference between the loud noise before and the very quiet noise after. “Silent” is a derivative meaning of the root.
Only if you force a MSWV onto it. They didn’t even have a concept of a “silent voice”; if a concept is absent from a vocabulary, it is absent from the thought of those who use the language, and there is no vocabulary for a “silent voice”, only for an audible spoken one.
Exactly – so why are you trying to make them do that?
φωνή means noise, sound – that’s not an interpretation, it’s the core meaning.
Indeed – there is no rejection of signs, only of the desire of “proof” that will satisfy human conditions.
And others saw it and didn’t believe – just as others heard the audible words and didn’t “hear” the meaning.
I am not an expert but have listened to some archeologists and researchers telling about the old burial customs in Egypt and elsewhere. My interpretation of what they told is that the ancient people had a very different perspective than what a modern scientist would conclude from the material evidence.
The buried person could move to the afterlife with his possessions but the material was somehow transformed to something that could go to afterlife. The material that could be taken into the afterlife was in the grave but at the same time, it was in the afterlife with the buried person.
I do not think that the people tried to make analyses about what was logical, they just believed what was told.
That kind of beliefs were very widespread in the ancient cultures, at least in those where people believed that the ancestors could somehow affect what happened to the living. Burial gifts were common throughout the globe and people were offering to the ancestors food and other gifts because they believed that the ghosts/spirits of at least some ancestors were roaming around the living.
The Asian custom to burn fake money as an offering to the dead may reveal something about the beliefs - the money was fake and was burned, yet it was supposed to somehow turn into something valuable in the world of the ghosts. Nowadays, these practices are mostly just old traditions but I assume that people commonly believed in these practices. You can still see reflections of these beliefs in Asian movies where some people see ghosts, discuss with them and the ghosts are eating meals that the living are offering to them.
precisely… in this, we recognize that these ancient people had some distinction in their mind between the physical world and the other aspects of their “Cosmos”. Even if in their conception of the universe, They spoke about, or had some kind of mental image of the afterlife being at some location in their cosmos, I think it should be obvious given any reflection that they did not literally, woodenly believe it was a literal, physical location in the universe. in some sense, they perceived the place of the dead as being in some kind of different reality that was not literally, physically, in the same realm… a realm that the dead bodies would have to literally, physically get pulled out of their graves and transported to. Whatever mental images they had about how the dead go to sheol, duat, netherworld, or whatever, they also knew quite well that the “dead” stayed right in their graves. and to my knowledge, none of these ancient people set up expeditions to try to travel to these location to visit their deceased loved ones.
Hence why I’m just baffled when I hear people insist that the ancient Hebrews believed Sheol to be a literal, physical place deep down under their feet. Firstly, they were not so dull as to not notice that the bodies of the dead stayed right where they were, and secondly, it doesn’t appear that they regularly tried to dig deep mining networks deep into the Earth to attempt to visit their deceased grandparents. However they may well have had a certain mental image of Sheol being beneath them, they also clearly understood it as being in a totally different reality, not a woodenly literal physical location some literal number of fathoms beneath them.
Although I am not an expert, I have got the impression that the ancient people believed that the Sheol/Hades/Valhalla/etc. was a physical location and it would have been possible to travel there. The interpretation that a body in the grave would have proved that the Sheol/Hades was not a physical location may sound correct when analysed through our modern materialistic worldview but there are no proof that the ancient people would have been limited to what we think today.
Globally, there are stories about living persons who managed to travel to the sites of the dead, although in the stories, there is commonly a separation between the sites of the dead and the living - the road was one-way, except for a hero who somehow managed to fool the guards and return.
In the pre-Christian beliefs at the northern latitudes, shamans could travel to the places where the dead and spirits lived. Here, the travels usually started from special sites, often a site where a crack in the rock or a cave entrance was assumed to lead to the sites that were deep beneath the rocks. The shaman could transform to a snake that could pass through the narrow crack.
The only ‘evidence’ for a non-physical location that I know of is the modern materialistic way to interpret the (material) evidence.
right, and that is what I am disputing. There are all sorts of mental images, linguistic conventions, or metaphors they used to describe reality that I have a hard time believing they embraced in the woodenly literal way as so often described. we discussed at length elsewhere, so I don’t want to simply repeat that discussion, but in short, I simply have a hard time believing that they Believed these sorts of things in such a woodenly literal way, as is so often portrayed. if an ancient Jew climbed to the top of a mountain, did take the last few steps with special care to avoid bumping his head on the firmament?
I sincerely appreciate your charity here, but my bottom line remains. This is the kind of mistake that simply is not made by scholars who are very careful to only state what they know to be true, whether in their field or not. And of course, I can similarly be charitable that the person was speaking outside of their field. however, it Simply does not inspire confidence in me that I am listening to, or reading someone, who is especially diligent to only make statements about things that they have confirmed to be true. Rather, I am listening to someone who has demonstrated a willingness to simply convey something they heard without being careful to get the basic facts straight… and thus, I just do not have particularly strong confidence that they would not do something similar within their own field.
well, you had said…
and I’m saying that there would be a number of very obvious reasons for them to believe that the sun was indeed farther up than the nearest mountaintop.
Again, though, this just baffles me. This is not me forcing a modern, materialistic view onto them, it just seems like indisputable reality: When Joseph died in Egypt, Did he immediately go to sheol? Or did Moses bring his embalmed remains With them in the caravan out of Egypt? I would think it beyond obvious that whatever part of him was understood to be in sheol was something spiritual or non-material, as they had his physical body right there with them, no? Or did Joseph not go to sheol until he was buried back in the promised land?
It seems to me beyond self-evident that there is something beyond the strictly material/physical going on here.
I have heard an explanation that the mountain tops were places where people could meet a deity because mountain tops were physically closer to the ‘heavens’ than the other places. If you read what the Hebrew Bible tells about mountains, there are expressions that seem to connect mountains with deities.
Also the ziggurat of Babylon was obviously not meant to reach physically the heavens, it was intended for building a high top where the deity could step down and be worshipped, as in a mountaintop.
Mountains are mentioned as (parts of) the pillars of Earth. At least in some explanations, the sky dome did not actually rest on a mountain, it got its support from the edges that touched Earth at the ends of the more-or-less flat Earth pancake.
At least in the Egyptian beliefs, the sun was believed to travel through the sky in a ship/wagons that rised from the East end of the Earth, climbed higher and then descended towards the West end of the Earth. There it passed to the land of the dead and travelled through those locations during the night.
It is baffling to first time realize that the people living in other cultures do not think as I think.
The differences in the knowledge, beliefs and values between the ancient and modern world are so huge that it is very difficult to try to step into the shoes of an ancient person. You would have to wipe from your head most of what you think you know. Very difficult to do because what we have been told is so strongly guiding our thinking, setting the basic assumptions that form the fundamentals of our logic.
Even ‘modern’ people living in different cultures may have quite different worldviews and thinking. The assumed fundamental rights and values we learn in a western civilization, like US, are not shared or valued among all cultures. In all countries, there are individuals that hope for more individual rights and freedom and because of that, support many of the teachings of the western societies. At the level of cultures and societies, those are not shared everywhere. Many think that the demands of individualistic rights and values are selfish and are threatening the wellfare of the societies - what happens to the society is more important then what happens to the individual.
Do not take for granted that your assumptions about fundamental human rights, values and beliefs are shared among all cultures.
An even more baffling observation may be that the biblical scriptures do not represent or even support the basic values of the modern western civilizations. That is somewhat surprising as the western societies have been established on cultures that have been influenced by centuries of Christian teaching.
Preachers and teachers are trying to force a modern western thinking into the sciptures by interpreting the scriptures through their worldview. We have swallowed these interpretations uncritically and may therefore be partially blinded to the differences between the cultures. The worldview promoted by the biblical scriptures is not one that stresses the human rights of individuals. Protestantism may have brought a stronger individual-level emphasis on salvation but otherwise, the teaching promotes the welfare of families and communities at the cost of the rights or happiness of the individuals.
Faith is not a logical deduction or the sum total of knowledge. It’s an attachment response, grounded in experience with divine love and grace.
No one is developing a relationship with God via the tools of science, so this whole idea that there are “scientific individuals” who some how come to faith in God through reasoning is just wrong.
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T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
316
On the flip side, if someone does base an argument on GW chopping down a cherry tree we don’t ignore all of the evidence that it is a myth. An argument based on a claim is not evidence for the claim.
You are free of the charge. I think we agree on the general outline of how to approach the question.
Some here might respond to that with: “Unless it’s a biblical authority like Jesus making the argument.” In which case (those same ‘some’ would say), the whole thing from premise to conclusions is now entered into the sacred domain of inerrancy.
But I’m not ‘some here’ in that respect. At least not in any automatic sense. Jesus, for example, may have based an ‘argument’ or observation regarding faith on the relative size of a mustard seed compared to all other seeds. But it seems disrespectful in the extreme to take a passage about faith, and try to turn it instead into a botany lesson about seeds. It is an exercise in sidelining the major point/teaching Jesus is making by first trying to force [1st century] Jesus to pass some [21st century] botany test before being willing to listen to or accept anything else he was actually trying to teach his [1st century] audience using the accepted knowledge such as it was, to help them see connections. So it is ironically the inerrantists who most end up (in my view) disrespecting the very scripture they so want to be seen venerating.
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T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
318
Indeed it does move into that domain which is a whole big mess of sticky flypaper that I will not attempt to untangle. I will defer to the Cardinal Bellarmine as I often do:
“Third, I say that, if there were a real proof that the Sun is in the centre of the universe, that the Earth is in the third sphere, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and we should rather have to say that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true.”–Cardinal Bellarmine
Although this deals with Heliocentrism, I think it applies generally. Facts trump interpretation of scripture because the alternative is disproving scripture. That seems like a good approach, at least to me.
Agreed. And the Heliocentrism example remains the perfect example, the objections of those to whom it best applies neverwithstanding. The best way to disrespectfully shuffle sacred writ off into dustbins of irrelevancy is to build a fence around them, and post a ‘no-trespassing’ sign on it to keep all other reality out.
That dualism was common – it’s not easy to wrap a modern mind around.
(emphasis mine)
More accurately, they understood two different physical realms more often than not – the “other world” was just a different sort of physical realm, and the things left in the grave both remained here and “translated” into physical objects in the other realm.
The non-material “other realm” is more of a Greek influence than anything.
But most ANE cultures, possibly all, held that it could be done, it just required the assistance of a deity to do so (or being a deity or demi-deity). Yes, there was a corpse still in the grave, but there was also a body in Sheol or wherever – it was a dualism of two kinds of physicalities, not one of physicality and non-physicality.
Why would they have? The tales of the few who managed to visit the realm of the dead make it clear that finding a particular individual in the underworld was on par with finding a particular individual somewhere in the fertile crescent without having an address, without even knowing which kingdom to start in – and that denizens of the underworld were not friendly to intruders. Think of it as knowing that a friend whom changed her name has moved to Indonesia and you only get to use a paddle boat and hiking to search for her, while people are either unhelpful or actively trying to make you go away.
Besides that, the underworld was conceived of as being below the roots of the mountains, where the roots of the mountains went at least as deep as the mountains stood high – and there was no way to know where to dig in the first place! There were exceptions; at Mt. Hermon, for example, there was supposedly an entrance to the underworld (the “gates of hell”), but all the above uncertainty applied and on top of it was that the dead would resent anyone leaving and actively try to keep them from doing so – so even where there were supposedly entrances to the underworld, only an absolute fool (or occasionally a deity) would contemplate entering; the “sensible” approach would be to find a way to summon the dead to come up.
Not if you take their writings as they read, at least back before Hellenistic influences led to understanding the land of the dead as immaterial. Hebrew has the concept of a “shade”, but the shade was only immaterial in appearance when summoned as with the Witch of Endor calling up Samuel, and that was because the material of the body in Sheol was the wrong kind of material for the land of the living.
I think you’re trying hard to translate ancient thought into modern Western terms as though ancient thought actually used modern Western categories. It’s a near-universal phenomenon among those who are just beginning to look at a worldview as alien as the ANE; it can take years to grasp the difference, and some never make it. Our minds want items to be one thing or another; ANE minds had no problem with something being two things at once – so we try to force their categories to be “allegorical” or “poetical” or some such, save for those who deny that the ancients thought differently at all.
The issue appears in their literature; it was not uncommon to treat details in a story literally in one context while denying that they were literal anywhere else, a good example being the two Creation stories in Genesis: within the stories, the details were taken as literal, but outside the stories they weren’t! We want them to be one or the other, but to the ancient mind that would be foolishness; to them, it was obvious that within the story the details were literal but WRT outside the story they weren’t. In Genesis 1 the “days” function that way; in other ANE literature it might be divisions in a kingdom, that in a given story are meant to be treated as literal when outside the story everyone knew that there were no such divisions; inside a story there might be just four winds so wind came only from the four cardinal directions, when outside the story everyone knew that was silly; inside a story there might be seven seas when outside the story everyone knew there was just an inner sea and an outer sea; and so on.
To go back to graves, there is some ANE literature where a grave can be a portal to the land of the dead, not because it is a door of some sort that leads anywhere but because inside the grave isn’t a singular location, it is a location that shares in two locations at once: from outside, it is a hole in the ground with a corpse while from inside it is part of the underworld, so it is both just several feet down and a vast distance down at the same time.
