hecate

How could the supposed linguistic confusion during the "Babel" episode be of any help for Dave here ?

Calilasseia

Oh, not the Tower of Babel nonsense again.

[1] Given the sheer size of this alleged artefact, it is surprising that no-one has found any credible archaeological evidence for its existence. Much smaller constructions dating back to the earliest periods of the Sumerian civilisation are well-documented by archaeologists.

[2] With respect to language, there is ample archaeological evidence of a continuity of culture and language lasting until the Sumerian language ceased to be an extant spoken language around 1800 BC, not least because the language continued to be used in writing, whilst not actively spoken as an everyday language, for nearly 2,000 years afterwards in the ancient Mesopotamian region.

[3] The cuneiform writing system formed the basis upon which other languages developed their writing systems. Akkadian, Elamite and Hittite are just three languages other than Sumerian that used developments of the cuneiform script.

[4] Even though Sumerian itself is a language isolate (and has not been reliably linked to any other known language family) it possesses features seen in other human languages. It just happens to possess an odd collection of these in the one entity, one of the reasons why it is considered by scientific linguists to be a language isolate. One, it is an agglutinative language, two, it possesses a strange feature called 'split ergativity', and three, it is a syllabaric language (contrast with the Semitic languages, which are based upon consonants).

[5] No mention of a giant artefact built by humans appears in these ancient writings as far as I am aware. If the Sumerians had been responsible for building such a giant building, it is not unreasonable to consider that they might have documented this. They were certainly assiduous in documented far more trivial matters - indeed, a great proportion of extant Sumerian material - a conservative estimate is that museums around the world now possess a quarter of a million tablets with cuneiform inscriptions upon them - consists of receipts, invoices, wills and testaments, the entire bureaucratic panoply of an accounting and legal infrastructure of a kind familiar to us today. One would reasonably expect to find, amongst this assorted collection of bills, IOUs, lists of workers assigned to assorted tasks, and other minutiae, mention of the trade conducted in the materials used for such a giant building. As far as I am aware, none has been published. If evidence of this artefact materialised, it would hardly be hidden away in the minor pages of obscure journals, because such a find would guarantee fame for any scholar alighting upon it.

[6] Indeed, given the ample evidence that entities of far greater age - trilobites, anyone? - can survive to be fossilised and later excavated, it strikes me as highly unusual that a supposed giant building of this nature, a sort of prehistoric skyscraper, would leave no trace whatsoever of its existence. Even more surprising given the huge amount of material that has survived, which when deciphered reveals a veritable obsession with bureaucratic trivia on the part of the Sumerians. A race of people that would go to the trouble of baking a permanent clay tablet record for relatively mundane transactions of goods and services would surely do the same for the much grander transactions involved in constructing the world's largest extant building? Moreover, given that the foundations of much smaller buildings (and in quite a few cases the complete buildings themselves) have been unearthed, it's somewhat stretching credibility to suggest that the world's largest extant building of the period could somehow vanish without leaving even the tiniest of traces of its existence.

If anything, the Tower of Babel nonsense just adds to the problems faced by adherents of inerrancy.

Dave Hawkins

I am trying to come up with a really good analogy to share with you regarding the calibration curves which you all know and love so well. I feel your pain. :-)

Occam's Aftershave

Before you strain both of your brain cells Davie-doo, keep in mind that

ANALOGIES AREN'T REALITY

mung bean

I'm not feeling any pain, Davey boy. I'm comfortably numb and chirpy as hell.
You're the one who's floundering.

deadman_932

Oh, boy, I like dave's analogies...houses with sprinklers that magic on and off while fooling people into thinking it's raining. Space ships that are alleles or ...genes or cells or something...Man, an analogy from dave is like a good cane-toad-lick.

Occam's Aftershave

Analogies aren’t reality Dave, but maybe they will help you understand

Say you’re a contractor, and you assign your workers to measure the height of a particular building. All the men work completely independently of one another.

One man climbs to the top and lowers a string down the side until it touches the ground. He then uses a 12” ruler to measure the string length. He gets height = 100’

Next guy drops a weight from the top and measures the time it takes to hit the ground. He then uses the formula 1/2 gt² to calculate the height. He gets height = 100’

Next guy stands a yardstick next to the building and measures the yardstick’s shadow. Then he measures the length of the building’s shadow and calculates the height based on similar ratios. He gets height = 100’

Next guy measures the length of the building’s shadow, then shoots the sun’s angle with a sextant. He then uses trigonometry to calculate the height. He gets height = 100’

Next guy measures the height of one brick in the building, then counts the number of vertical layers of bricks. He gets height = 100’

Next guy takes a laser rangefinder to the top of the building, then shines it straight down to reflect off the ground for the measurement. He gets height = 100’

Next guy rigs a sound generator on top the building and a microphone at the bottom, then syncs them both to the same accurate time source. He creates a sound at the top then measures the time delta to when the mike picks up the sound. He uses the known propagation speed of sound through air at sea level to calculate the height. He gets height = 100’

The YEC in the crew takes a Polariod photo of the building, then measures the height of the building in the photo. He gets height = 2”

Now Dave, what is the best estimate for the building height? Is it 2” or 100', and WHY?

mung bean

:rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :notworthy: :notworthy: :thumbs:

Faid

You mean our sides hurting?

Dave, how can you make an analogy of something you either have absolutely no idea, or you deliberately avoid? Or both (more likely)?

ericmurphy

How will an analogy help you, Dave? You need to give us a way that all of a dozen or so methods of calibrating 14C dating can be all wrong in different ways, but all wrong by exactly the same amount. If you can't do that, no amount of analogizing can possibly help you.

We've shown you enough examples of radiocarbon calibration curves now that you cannot possibly argue that they don't all agree, and all provide the same correction to raw 14C-derived dates. The only possible way you can argue that those dates are wrong is to come up with a single mechanism by which all calibration methods can be wrong (and not just a little wrong, but wrong by at least an order of magnitude) by exactly the same amount.

And what pain are you feeling, Dave? I think that's your pain, not ours.