Demonstrably false? For instance?
Various pseudo-historical claims. Most of those in Genesis, for starters... Garden of Eden? Flood covering the entire world?
Even in the later books, Kings/Chronicles etc, the dating cannot be reconciled with what archaeology shows us, nor can many of the places and events:
news.bbc.co.uk
Jericho - the first walled city on earth - still stands. Archaeologists have poured over its dusty ruins since the 19th century, unearthing evidence of at least 23 levels of occupation.
The ruins have revealed a history of prosperity, decline and conquest. Despite all of the digging, they have never found any proof that Jericho's fabled walls "came tumbling down" as described by Joshua himself.
Not only that, there is nothing to support the great, miraculous story that precedes the fall of Jericho. There is no sign of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the slavery in Egypt, or anyone wandering in the desert.
Professor Ze'ev Herzog is an archaeologist from Tel Aviv University who has participated in excavations up and down the country.
"All these events are practically contradicted by archaeology," says Professor Herzog. "Basically, these events did not happen on a national level. Some of these events could have been the local experience of a few families that were later nationalised into one coherent description."
Or this:
guardian.co.uk
Suppose, then, we let the archaeological evidence speak for itself: what does it say? Visitors to Jerusalem can get an idea by going to the Israel Museum. The Israelis have had the very strongest motives for digging up and putting on show any materials that confirm the belief in a long Jewish occupation of ancient Palestine. And they have indeed found a great deal of material from Hellenistic and Roman times. But of the main 'Old Testament' period there is startlingly little.
What all the world came to think of as 'the Jewish people', their religion and their epic history now seems to have come into being as a result of the fifth-century Persian policy of building temples to the local gods around their empire. So, in biblical terms, history starts not with Abraham, but with Ezra and Nehemiah. Over a period of two or three centuries, the Temple and the Torah were established, and the welding of various local peoples into a New Israel was achieved. The biblical writers collected local traditions and worked them up into the Bible's great story of an Old Israel that had been chosen by God, but had repeatedly been unfaithful and finally was destroyed. One consequence of this revisionist history is that the great unified kingdom of David and Solomon never existed historically.
...
Western Christianity has always narrated a great epic history of salvation based on the Bible: Creation, the Fall, the Flood, the Patriarchs, Moses, the Exodus and the Law, the Conquest, the Judges, the Kings and Prophets, and the promised Messiah. We are now invited to see the whole story as back-projected and mythical.
Actually, there's another nice quote from this article...
If we continue to practise religion, we'll have to do so in the full knowledge that it is a human imaginative construction. ...
Faith tends to create its own facts, and to become heavily invested in them.
The more we research, the less historical reality - the less basis in fact (or as you so quaintly term it 'naturalism') the Bible has...
bibleinterp.com
Sixty years ago, many leading scholars—the legendary W.F. Albright among them—argued forcefully that the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were historical characters who lived in the Middle Bronze Age. Today, most scholars deal with the patriarchal traditions as powerful and influential literary creations; and they consider them no less powerful or influential in the absence of conclusive proof of their historicity. Long gone also are the serious scholarly attempts to trace archaeologically the progress of the Exodus of 600,000 Israelites across Sinai toward Canaan. The Bible offers us a powerful expression of liberation, peoplehood, and covenant painted in the most searing Hebrew prose and poetry the world has ever known.
Forty years ago, reliable biblical history was said to begin with Joshua. The blackened destruction levels of Late Bronze Age tells across the Land of Israel, were confidently believed to be evidence of the military action of the massed Israelite tribes. But here too a battle was waged and the frontline of history shifted. The extensive surveys carried out in the West Bank by Israeli archaeologists during the 1970s and 1980s showed that the settlement of the Israelite Tribes in Canaan was not a lightning invasion but a complex process of social transformation. And it was a process in which population groups both inside Canaan and outside were deeply and not only violently involved.
Lastly, remember that even the finding of an archaeological site does NOT prove the mythical events woven around it, any more than Stonehenge 'proves' the uncanny powers of druids. But the absence of evidence on a researched sites for biblical events does rather prove the opposite...
<ii>If someone claims to have observed a miracle, then how can you say it has never been observed? Can you prove that it has not?
What miracle? Show me.
I believe it's up to the claimant to prove that natural law is not so, that the universe is non-causal. You're the one claiming supernatural events, beyond the ken of science... show me the before, show me the after, show me that the 'miracle' could not be otherwise. Normality is not that requiring proof.
As for someone's claims... well, Sun Yung Moon to you. He claims divine knowledge, or whatever... a claim is not proof. Reality is proof. |
