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From: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Re: Orphaned Response
Message-ID: <607@psivax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 2-Aug-85 12:18:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: psivax.607
Posted: Fri Aug  2 12:18:01 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 4-Aug-85 10:34:14 EDT
References: <404@iham1.UUCP> <14600033@hpfcrs.UUCP>
Reply-To: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Pacesetter Systems Inc., Sylmar, CA
Lines: 61

In article <14600033@hpfcrs.UUCP> lief@hpfcla.UUCP (lief) writes:
>
>	>An interesting collection of anecdotal and circumstantial
>>"evidence" of no scientific value whatever! Really such partisan
>>authors as Josephus!(A Jew no less). But as a matter of fact many
>>ancient historians were veru uncritical of thier sources and generally
>>included myths and unsubstantiated tales as "facts". Then of course
>>there are these people who saw the Ark and waited 30 yeaers to tell
>>someone, and when they did it was for financial gain(being hired as
>>guides by a gullible foreigner)!! I have seen some of these photos,
>>they are about as clear and unambiguous as the photos of pyramids
>>on Mars! Really, none of these accounts is of any value, none would
>>even be acceptible in a court of law, let alone a serious historical
>>textbook!
>>
>You complain about the ambiguity of the data above.  Yet some of the very
>theories you are backing with your life have even more ambiguity tied to
>their evidence than that above.  Why is it that you can be so open minded
>with some theories that have questions left open, and so closed minded on
>other theories that may still have questions?  Or are you basically bias
>against anything that hints at Creation?
>
	You missed the main point, which is *not* the ambiguity but
the *anecdotal* *nature* of this so-called evidence. Such word-of-mouth
stories have *no* *scientific* *standing* at all, not because of
ambiguity, or anything like that, but because they are *in principle*
unverifiable and untestible. Humans(including scientists) are immensly
gullible, and our senses can be easily fooled(ever watch a stage
magician?). So I, and scientists in general, insist on *repeatibility*
or some equivalent form of *verification*, which is missing in all
of the accounts I was discussing above. Really, if this standard of
evidence maintained by Creationists they have not progressed beyond
Aristotle and the ancient historians!
	Or to put it in legal terms, all of the accounts refered to
above were *hearsay* evidence and not admissible in court for the
same reasons scientists reject it.

>In case you didn't know, Josephus (who was a Jew) had no reason to help the
>Jewish cause.  In fact, he fought with the Romans aginst the Jews.  So why
>should he want to lend validity to a Jewish book?
>
	Well, perhaps since he was raised a Jew, he had Jewish
preconceptions about the world. Besides you again missed part of
what I was saying, that is that ancient historians *in* *general*
are unreliable because they had no concept of *substantiating* an
account before reporting it as "true". They often included hearsay
and anecdotes uncritically because they fit into thier preconcieved
world view. This error goes back to Aristotle and his A Priori
approach to knowledge. When he wanted to know how many teeth a horse
had he tried to *reason* it out from first principles, it *never*
occured to him to actually go out and *count* the teeth in a real
horse. This same approach was used almost universally until the birth
of science in the late Renaisance, and so *any* historian prior to
modern times must be treated *very* skeptically, and independent
validation must be required.
-- 

				Sarima (Stanley Friesen)

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