Constant Mews

Dave, the flood never happened. We have proved this multiple times on multiple threads on multiple forums. You may continue to close your mind to God's truth, but you can never avoid it.

You have never shown that C14 dating is inappropriate or inaccurate beyond 5K years BP. Indeed, the consilience of the calibration curves confirms that the earth is far older than 6 thousand years.

Stop making Christians look foolish by being so anti-science. None of this is particularly difficult to grasp. Come back to reason. Come back to science. Come back to God.

VoxRat

Yes they are proven. As proven as anything gets in science.
As proven as the double-stranded structure of DNA.
As proven as the fact that measles is caused by a virus.
As proven as the fact that the sun's energy is the result of atomic fusion.

All of these things have exactly the same number of serious challenges to them in the scientific literature, where it counts:

ZERO

If the assumptions were faulty, the multiple independent calibration curves would not agree. You can ask whether the "assumptions" are valid; and the way you ask that, is to do those multiple independent calibration curves. That's been done. The answer is in. The question is no longer open. Time to move on. We can now refer to the fact of radiometrically determined dates with the same confidence we refer to the DNA/measles/solar facts cited above.

Deal with it.

Minimalist

I got your point and can only suggest you read Dever's book (or via: amazon.co.uk). He explains far better than I ever could. When we find amulets and statues in Egyptian tombs we presume them to be evidence of cultic rites. The same holds true in Judaea.

Jack the Bodiless

Dave, you really should learn to curb this quaint habit of pulling stuff straight out of your rectum and declaring it to be a "fact".

Why shouldn't we do it too? In fact the Torah was written by one of Alexander's generals as speculative fiction while Alex was holed up in Siwa. In fact the NT was written by Constantine, who was bored with just being Emperor of Rome and wanted the secret thrill of being the founder of a whole new religion. In fact the Ark of the Covenant contained a small, brown, smelly... oops, sorry about that.

Roger Pearse

(My emphasis added)

I expect some people do. But I would suggest that in fact we know that these Egyptian items are amulets and statues of deities because they have this writing on them to tell us so, and writing on the walls, etc. A blank statue from an unknown civilisation cannot identify itself as a cultic statue.

If anyone doubts this I have this lump of ancient rock, otherwise unidentified, found in a tomb. We can take votes on whether it is a cultic object or not.

Pardon me for being insistent here, but one thing that should make us wary is when some archaeologists display a tendency to say that anything they don't understand must be 'religious'. It seems to be a sort of 'junk' category for "I don't know". This is not knowledge, but speculation, of a low grade.

I think that we ought to keep clearly in mind the kinds of things that archaeology can and cannot tell us, the kinds of things that literature can and cannot tell us, and so forth.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Hex

Roger, did you perhaps miss what I said before? Context?

Well, in case you doubted, here was the first example I found on JSTOR, so here you are, a chalk figurine found in Britain with the reasoning as to it's importance as a religious thing:


Note, they've hedged their bets a bit, since they haven't found more in that area, but from the CONTEXT, they can make inferences based on the ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD, not just from the single find in Kent, but also other locations in the area, and, of course, ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES.


Aside: It always amazes me, the way that people abuse and misunderstand Archaeology. :huh:

Answerer

Two can play the game.

You keep repeating all these flood dates as if they were proven. They are not. In fact, they are based on faulty assumptions about water levels throughout history.

Hex

It's true, before there were real studies of religions in archaeology, archaeologists used to say that things that they saw repeated in the record were likely religious.

Before. Used to.

Now, you can't get away with that. You have to have -evidence- to back up your findings and interpretations of the archaeological record, or your peers jump all over you. If not in the peer-reviewed journals, then in reviews of your books.

Welcome to the 21^st century, Roger.

ericmurphy

Dave, when you can come up with an alternative explanation for the consilience of radiocarbon calibration curves that does not involve them all being correct, then you will have some basis for claiming that radiocarbon dates are incorrect. Until you can manage that, you have zero basis for questioning the accuracy of radiocarbon dates. Those dates are accurate, and you have presented absolutely no reason to think otherwise.

There are no "assumptions about ¹⁴C levels throughout history. There are observations about those levels that have been confirmed over and over again.

Either find a reason for why those dates are wrong, Dave, or live with them.

In other words, Dave, those dates are proven.

Hex

Actually, that's what that Chalk Statue in my post above is.

Interesting, no?