Reading Stephen’s Old Testament posts I found them interesting but tended to come back to how to think about certainty. I started writing a comment but once I hit 500 words I figured it made more sense to just write a separate post.
Start with a general observation: the claim “in the field of x, there is no evidence for y” tends to conflate two claims, one much stronger than the other. The strong claim is that “we have a lot of evidence and we know a lot about things around x, so we can rule out y as true”. The weak claim is “we have huge amounts of missing information in the field of x, so we lack enough evidence to say that y is true because we have no idea”. Both of them, and many things in between, get read out as “there is no evidence for claim y.”
So when Stephen says “So let’s just repeat: it is widely accepted that there isn’t historical evidence for the events in the Pentateuch, especially the Exodus and Conquest. ” is this the strong claim or the weak claim? Or how much of each? For example, I am on board with the idea that the exact description of the Exodus, including exact dates, time spans, and number of people, may all be wrong, and since none of them are really crucial to the message I am fine with not knowing. I think if such an event occurred precisely as described, there is enough evidence of events in our current record that you’d expect more of it to be visible, so there is something getting close to the strong claim that the events exactly as described did not happen, even if we still have some pretty big gaps in archaeology. But can the extant record definitively rule out a smaller exodus of 3000 people (or whatever) at some point in a 500 year time span? I don’t know, but I am doubtful our knowledge is that good.
Next, there is the idea of something being “widely accepted” and how strong a piece of evidence that is. This is a straight up appeal to authority, which is fine as far as it goes, but crucially relies on how much we think the authorities know. Personally, I think biblical scholars know some things, but I suspect that many of them have some substantive biases and that, like most academic fields, there are some things they are happy to consider open questions and other things where they’ve all just sort of agreed on something even if the actual evidence for or against it is actually pretty weak. And I fully expect that in the coming decades, the field will discover a rather large number of things to be true that it previously rejected. So… while I am willing to accept their claims about narrow statements, I am super doubtful about claims as they come to span wider and wider areas. If a Bible scholar says the root of a given word is probably x, I’ll go with it. But I get real skeptical when it comes to really big claims, because I think a fair bit of group think is at play.
Lastly, one of the most important aspects of belief is how it may cause a change in our behavior. if something requires more of me, then I am going to require a higher standard of proof. If you tell me that actually Ramses the great was not that great and most of what we know is myth, that is kind of interesting and may or may not be true, but has little implications for my world view and what God expects of me. The same is not nearly as true with knowing that Moses, in some form, existed as an actual prophet, so it makes sense to require a higher bar of evidence. A bar that is substantially higher than the current conflation offered by “we have no evidence that …”
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