My students bringing me scientific evidence for the historicity of the Bible
I hate to piddle on students' parades, and I have a feeling that we will be talking about religious beliefs a lot in my current class.
Section 4: Eclipse Predictions
Solar Eclipses visible from
| Latitude: | 37° 39' 00" N |
| Longitude: | 21° 39' 00" E |
| Altitude: | 107m |
| Time Zone: | 02:00 E |
| Calendar Date | Eclipse Obs. | A or T Eclipse Duration |
| 1-Jun-10 | 0.042(r) | - |
| 4-Apr-08 | 0.498 | - |
| 5-Mar-28 | 0.429 | - |
| 5-Sep-22 | 0.152(r) | - |
| 6-Sep-11 | 0.21 | - |
| 7-Feb-06 | 0.049 | - |
| 17-Feb-15 | 0.995 | - |
| 19-Jun-21 | 0.63 | - |
| 20-Dec-03 | 0.507 | - |
| 24-Sep-21 | 0.605 | - |
| 25-Sep-10 | 0.006 | - |
| 26-Feb-06 | 0.588 | - |
| 29-Nov-24 | 0.786 | - |
| 32-Apr-28 | 0.161 | - |
| 33-Sep-12 | 0.024 | - |
| 34-Sep-01 | 0.342 | - |
| 39-Dec-04 | 0.128 | - |
| 45-Aug-01 | 0.366 | - |
| 49-May-20 | 0.621 | - |
| 52-Mar-19 | 0.16 | - |
Section 3: Eclipse Predictions
Solar Eclipses visible from Jerusalem, ISRAEL
| Latitude: | 31° 46' 00" N |
| Longitude: | 35° 14' 00" E |
| Altitude: | 808.9m |
| Time Zone: | 02:00 E |
| Calendar Date | Eclipse Obs. | A or T Eclipse Duration |
| 1-Jun-10 | 0.498(r) | - |
| 4-Apr-08 | 0.214 | - |
| 5-Mar-28 | 0.392(s) | - |
| 5-Sep-22 | 0.4 | - |
| 6-Sep-11 | 0.096 | - |
| 17-Feb-15 | 0.624 | - |
| 19-Jun-21 | 0.583 | - |
| 20-Dec-03 | 0.699 | - |
| 24-Sep-21 | 0.184(s) | - |
| 26-Feb-06 | 0.665 | - |
| 27-Jan-26 | 0.035 | - |
| 29-Nov-24 | 0.906 | - |
| 32-Apr-28 | 0.009 | - |
| 33-Sep-12 | 0.101 | - |
| 34-Sep-01 | 0.205 | - |
| 38-Jun-21 | 0.007 | - |
| 39-Dec-04 | 0.042 | - |
| 41-Apr-19 | 0.021 | - |
| 45-Aug-01 | 0.567 | - |
| 49-May-20 | 0.891 | - |
| 52-Mar-19 | 0.54 | - |
Nothing even fucking close.
Seed Newsvine
18 comments:
Good job! I live in a "third world" country. The fact that there are a lot of people in the USA, the country that "rules the world", that take the bible as a source of facts REALLY scare us. Good to see people facing it seriously.
I too recently ran into people claiming to have evidence similar to that which you were shown. I have been told this because I had asked how the theist had jumped from the Kalam cosmological argument used by William Lane Craig to the Christian God. He had said revelation and documentary evidence.
Personally, these debates give me a headache because I am a philosopher who works on the mind body problem and secular ethics and not these metaphysics debates.
Though personally he gave me loaded questions on the moral argument of God, "If raping a baby causes flourishing, then you believe raping a baby is good?" That would be quite a world if raping babies caused flourishing (a translation of the Greek word for good I use), but the question boils down to "Is good good?" Basically, he wanted me to admit that moral absolutes exist independently of us. This meaning, to him at least, that only a God can possibly explain why moral exist at all.
Your students get their money's worth, Bing. Well done, sir.
Good job, but how carefully do you have to tread so that you don't have students complaining to the boss that you're using their holy books as toilet paper and should be fired?
Anonymous,
Canada is not a third world country. Buck up, pardner!
Salad,
Very. I have to show consideration at all moments.
HJ
You may also want to compare it to "evidence" of muslims which says that the moon split and then went back together.
On some websites they claim that because some king who at the time wasn't muslim saw it, then presto chango its real.
If its not enough for them to believe the Muslims (since I'm guessing its not since they're not, you know, Muslim) then why is it good enough for their claim.
http://www.answering-christianity.com/moon_split.htm
And fuck I hate reading muslim (blessed be they) stuff, can't they (glory to them) say a god (holy be his name) damn sentence (beloved of paragraphs) without inserting their crap (Prophet Mohammed Holy be his name blessings of Allah (great and holy he is blah blah blah) be upon him.
Al Hamdillilah!
Looking at this from a Christian perspective, I don't buy this either. I've read Eusebius, and it's my distinct impression he was skeptical of the event being eclipsed. It is a reasonably well-documented fact that such "dark days" can happen apart from eclipses. (Forest fires and volcanoes are plausible causes, and even "mass hallucination" on a large scale could account for such an event.) From the perspective of the New Testament writers and church fathers, the question would have been relatively unimportant: Whether the cause of the event was natural, supernatural or "visionary", it could be counted as a "sign" to reveal Jesus' divinity.)
17-Feb-15 0.995
Here's your eclipse.
What do you think you showed here because I don't get it. The question was not "was there some natural predictable eclipse on some particular day". Rather it was "was there an eclipse at some spot on that day". You showed what all would have agreed with, the "eclipse" as describe was not a natural event. You showed nothing else.
Instead you should have talked to the student about the (lack of) value to third or fourth hand accounts written long after the even in question. You should have show/discussed that there still was no evidence for the event.
see this link
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEhistory/SEhistory.html
complete with maps for each date
Jesus' crucifixion took place around Passover, the middle of the lunar month and the time of a full moon. Solar eclipses naturally take place only at the time of the new moon. For this reason, medieval commentators viewed the darkness as a miraculous event rather than a natural one.
NM the darkness, You might also want to ask where are all the non-biblical accounts of the FUCKING ZOMBIES that rose up out of the grave and walked the streets of Jerusalem? (Matthew 27:51-53)
iana christian but there was an oxford paper decades ago pointing out a lunar eclipse that fell in april of 33 ce and that date corresponding to that could be that of the crucifixion. i'm kinda surprised you didn't bring this up.
I saw that, but it's entirely beside the point, really. It's not the right time of day and it doesn't match any of the various descriptions, so I omitted it. The point is that this is a mythic elaboration not uncommon to the time period or alien to the type of documents we're talking about here. People see an eclipse in the same decade as an earthquake and they conflate the two into a single event. At best. And neither one of them can be tied to a crucifixion. It's a big exercise in searching exclusively for confirmatory evidence.
HJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_darkness_and_eclipse
[edit]Total solar eclipse Records of solar blackouts exceeding a half hour have been attributed to total solar eclipses. For example, the T’ang Dynasty [7] and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s accounts of the hour long solar darkness of 879 AD were attributed to the total solar eclipse of October 29, 878 AD.[8] However, a solar eclipse could not have occurred on or near 14th of Nisan, because solar eclipses only occur during the new moon phase, and 14th of Nisan always corresponds to a full moon. Solar eclipses are also too brief to account for the crucifixion darkness. The length of the crucifixion darkness described by biblical and extra-biblical sources was more than a full order of magnitude for the totality of solar eclipses. Seven minutes and 31.1 seconds has been the established maximum limit of solar eclipse totality.[34] The maximum duration of the total eclipse of November 3, 31 AD, was only one minute and four seconds. The maximum duration of the total eclipse of March 19, 33 AD, was only four minutes six seconds. Neither one had paths of totality passing near Jerusalem. Eclipses lasting at least six minutes, that were close to the crucifixion year, occurred on July 22, 27 AD, for a maximum duration of six minutes and thirty-one seconds and on August 1, 45 AD, for a maximum duration of six minutes and thirty seconds.[35] Astronomer Mark Kidger compared the apocryphal Gospel of Peter passage with historical eclipses.[36] He indicated the total eclipse of November 24, 29 AD had the greatest geographical proximity to the site of the crucifixion. He determined its path of totality had passed slightly north of Jerusalem at 11:05 AM (see the NASA diagram of the path of totality for that eclipse [9]) Kidger indicated the maximum level of darkness at totality was just 95% for the eclipsed over Jerusalem. His research indicated that level of darkness would have been unnoticeable for people outdoors. His calculations indicated the eclipse had been total in Nazareth and Galilee for one minute and forty-nine seconds. Kidger concluded the population in Jerusalem lacked the necessity and the time to light their lamps for that total solar eclipse.[36] Their behavior, as described in the Apocryphal Gospel of Peter, had been caused by a considerably longer period of darkness.
Anonymous Christian said:
17-Feb-15 0.995
Here's your eclipse.
Except...
1. That's not a total eclipse.
2. That's more than ten years too early.
3. It didn't last for three hours.
Number three is really the big one. Have you ever watched an eclipse? They last about four or five minutes. A really long one lasts six minutes.
So unless you can provide some kind of evidence that the motion of the planets changed during that almost-eclipse, you've got nothing.
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