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Author Topic:   Would confirmation of the "Biblical Exodus" add any support for God
AZPaul3
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Posts: 8564
From: Phoenix
Joined: 11-06-2006
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Message 38 of 56 (595293)
12-07-2010 8:27 PM
Reply to: Message 36 by Jon
12-07-2010 8:01 PM


Re: What is the Exodus?
BUT, the question of the thread is: Would confirmation of the "Biblical Exodus" add any support for God? Since part one must be true for each part two to be true, then proving part one makes part two a possibility at the very least; I'd say, then, that confirming the Biblical Exodus (the references to God excluded) would 'add support for God', at least the God of the Exodus. Proving something possible that wasn't thought possible before, I think, is a way of adding support, even if just a little.
Maybe so, but how could we ever hope to identify such evidence? Let's assume the biblical Exodus was real. 4000+- years of weathering, nomadic tribes, marauding armies (ancient and modern) would hopelessly obliterate any signs and contaminate anything that would have remained.
Tents, poles, rope, clothing, anything of an organic nature could be expected to wither away after all this time, even in a desert. Pottery shards and metallurgy would be good ones if it wasn't for the fact that the Israelites were not the only wanderers of the Sinai. The Bedouin had criss-crossed every inch of the area for hundreds of years either side of the various proposed Exodus time-lines leaving their own scatterings of pottery and other debris. Can anyone tell the difference between a shard of an Israelite pot made of the desert clays and a Bedouin shard of the same source and age? Can the mostly disintegrated remains of a tent pole be identified as Israelite vs Bedouin?
I wouldn't think a wandering mass of 2 million would stop wandering long enough to erect much in the way of stone structures that might endure the ensuing ages. I would think we would have found such settlements by now, which would, in themselves, put the question of the biblical rendition of the Exodus in doubt anyway, so that's a non-starter.
The Israelites stayed for one year at Mt. Sinai before they pissed-off Moses, which pissed-off God, and thus ensued the 40 years of wandering. This might be a good place to erect some stone structures that could have survived 4000 years. Problem here is that the A'raab, the cultural forerunners of the Arabs, were in the same area doing just that at several sites at the same time. The remains are collapsed dry-laid stone walls ravaged by millennia. There's more than one of them. If one such wall were Israelite at some disputed Mt. Sinai site, no one can tell.
So if the Exodus wandering is true all the evidence has been either obliterated or contaminated by other peoples' activity to the point where nothing remains.
There is no evidence other than the one story that any such Exodus wandering was a reality.
Join this with two other facts:
Egyptian artifacts, which document everything from conquests and lovers' trysts to household shopping lists, say not one word about the most devastating series of plagues in quick succession to ever befall the kingdom.
The supposed Israelite population involved some 600,000 armed men thus having nothing to fear from an Egyptian army known at the time to be 1/30th this size.
The Exodus did not happen as the bible rendered.
Now, on to the OP.
But the key question is that even if we're able to reach some rough agreements about dates, events, travel routes, number of people, how does one get from "the Exodus happened" to "God exists"?
Regardless of the above, if we assume the Exodus did happen, then the plagues that punished the Egyptians into opening the Exodus must be assumed to have happened as well, and that includes the last plague, the Death of the Firstborn, with its miraculous passover of the houses where the lambs blood had been smeared on the lintel. Assumptions suck, but there we are.
If these (ick!) assumptions are made then, in my opinion, there would have been some rather unusual spooky intelligent action in play to pull it off. Something outside the usual experience of physics by which we know this world operates. This type of thing, in juxtaposition with the quick succession of the other plagues, defies rational explanation and must delve into an absurd confluence of events to reach rational justification. Under these assumptions, supernatural becomes more parsimonious than any set of convoluted natural rational.
This would not, however, prove that the god conceived by today's fundy christian is a reality. But it would lend credence to the existence of some force, some intelligent thing we could describe as supernatural. These caveats do not affect the theistic logic, however. So Exodus=My kind of God instead of Exodus=Some Unexplained Supernatural Intelligence is their conclusion.
For may part, I thank God (any God, pick one) that none of it appears to be real.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 36 by Jon, posted 12-07-2010 8:01 PM Jon has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 39 by arachnophilia, posted 12-07-2010 8:51 PM AZPaul3 has seen this message but not replied

  
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