\ As long as there are no living witnesses from the archaeological sites themselves you have to depend on theories alone that have to remain forever uncorroborated no matter how well they seem to hang together.
Wrong, as usual. We depend on evidence, and from that evidence we form hypotheses and test them. Those hypotheses that survive might become theories. Theories are not "wild-ass guesses" as creationists often claim. They are the single best explanations for a given set of facts, they have survived testing, and they have made successful predictions.
It's odd how you managed to say something so detailed that is nothing but an abstraction that never comes down to earth. WHAT sort of evidence are you talking about? WHAT are your hypotheses ABOUT? How about some examples to make this real? How do you test your hypotheses? There could be many kinds of explanations for some particular evidence, is it possible to test them all? We really need an example or two, otherwise this is no better than any just-so story. Nobody has ever said by the way, at least I haven't, that your theories are "wild-ass guesses," just that because you are a lot more limited in your efforts than you are willing to recognize, because you are trying to explain something in the past based only on clues in the present, that there are a lot more ways to be wrong than there would be if you had say a written document from the time you are studying that mentions some of the evidence you have found. That would be a situation more like the hard sciences where there are many workers on the same project and their results can be exactly tested by the work of everybody else on the same project. You don't seem to appreciate how different the situation is when you are trying to explain something \that can never be directly tested.
See, this is the point I'm trying to make--you don't know that a lot of what you are claiming is just wrong. And you don't seem to mind being wrong.
Well, YOU don't seem to know that you are not even providing enough actual factual description for anybody to have any idea what on earth you are talking about. Put in some real facts, along the lines I ask for above, Otherwise all this is just hot air.
I often make my case on observable physical phenomena only to get told by you, and particularly you, that I'm not doing science I'm doing religion. That is a delusion, a really pernicious delusion. The least you could do is try to be honest about such things instead of just tossing out your usual half-baked prejudice.
When science says one thing and when the only folks who find problems with that are true believers in one religion or another, what other logical conclusion would I come to?
You should look at the argument itself and drop your prejudgment. The "religion" is claimed to shed light on real world facts and it's only your prejudice that dismisses it as merely a "religion" without bothering even to look at the argument itself. The Bible is mostly a historical report, not a "religion," that's just your blind prejudice and one gets awfully tired of being dismissed without any thought whatever having been given to the argument itself.
This is particularly true in your case as you have repeatedly stated that when evidence contradicts the bible you will believe the bible. The only logical conclusion is that you are not doing science, you're doing religion.
Then you simply are not thinking. When I can't prove something from the observed facts I just figure I need to come at it some other way. With the observed facts. And yes even if I'm wrong about a particular approach I know the Bible is true so another approach is needed. To the observed facts. The Bible provides a few basic facts, all the rest is attempts to explain the physical situation as scientifically as possible. There is nothing unscientific about such an effort, it's about physical realities as imagined to have occurred in the past based on observations in the present, which is all anyone can do with things in the distant past.
The Bible is the inspiration, but it provides very few facts, and those ARE foundational, there's no way around that. Such as: There was a worldwide Flood, that's foundational. The best estimates of when it occurred are around 4350 years ago. That is subject somewhat to change but so far there has never been any good enough reason to change it. Eight human beings and representatives of all land animals were saved from the Flood by a boat that it took a hundred years to build. First it rained forty days and forty nights. The Flood waters rose over so many months and it receded over so many months, after which humans and animals multiplied and spread out over the earth.
That's about all we have to go on. The rest is what we are able to understand of observations of the physical world as it appears now in relation to those foundational facts. What would such a Flood do? Unbelievers come up with absurdly inadequate ideas and expect those to debunk the whole idea. But when we see the strata that occur in so many places over the planet, that are the basis for the ToE, that explanationt hits some of us as absurd just on the face of it, without even considering the Flood, but the Flood then enters as an amazingly good explanation for it, a deep stack of layered sediments with dead things fossilized in them? The only weird thing is why it isn't obvious to YOU and other believers in evolution, and the only explanation for that is the habit that has built up over years of believing it demonstrates evolution, no matter how absurd that is.
This is just one of the arguments creationists make of course, but it's all constructed from observations of the physical world itself.
All you ever seem to say is that your dating methods trump it all and you don't seem to feel any necessity of actually thinking about the presented physical facts.
I know a lot more about archaeology and geology than the average college graduate. And you have never said one thing about the actual situations you work in, or anything any creationist has ever said about any of it, except to refer to your one-note argument about your dating methods.
Actually I have described a lot of the evidence I have come up with, but you aren't willing to accept it because it disagrees with your religious beliefs.
One example please, at least, because I don't recall you ever presenting anything other than your faith in your dating methods.
No matter what the evidence is, if it disagrees with your religious belief you find some reason to discount it.
Well, it's true that if you insist on a date that "proves" the Flood never happened or didn't happen on the Biblical time calculation I'm not going to accept it. But that's about the extent of it as I recall.
So don't claim to be doing science--you are doing the exact opposite.
That's another silly idea tossed around here. If all the evidence offered is actual physical phenomena then you can't rightly say it's not science. When I'm arguing from the Bible you'll KNOW I'm arguing from the Bible, I'll say so, I won't pretend to be arguing from physical facts when I'm not.
You are just as committed to your conclusions as I am to mine, I mean to the point that you really don't want to debate at all because you are so sure you're right and that creationists aren't talking about anything real anyway.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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