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[_beastie]

Science responds to data and evidence. There is no need to be "creative" and "open-minded" when that evidence and data are conclusive - unless, of course, you're trying to build a case on quackery.

[Guest]

"when that evidence and data are conclusive"

You missed the point Beastie, the Data is never "conclusive", becuase a new discovery might come up and there goes all those conclusions of yester year. Like I said... We've only excavated 9 of 360 Complexes in this area. What else are we going to find? The Complexes that where excavated are the most PUBLIC of the complexes... what are we going to find in all the back allies which tend to collect bones and refuse?

[Dr. Sunstoned]

Coggins,

1) Hokey anti-realist postmodern b***s*** won't get you any farther than it got David Bohn,

Postmodernism is for the academic and literary Left, not for me. As you clearly have not the faintest idea what I'm even getting at, and apparently lack the intellectual disposition or skills to engage the ideas you oppose in a substantive manner, why respond at all Kid?

2) There are plenty of reasons to believe that there were no horses in ancient Mesoamerica,

Such as?

whereas there are no reasons to believe the opposite

Such as?

Frankly, anybody who wants to overturn the accepted scientific paradigm needs to put in the legwork. If you're convinced that carbon-dating of horse bones will do the trick, then it's up to you. But I'm convinced that the carbon-dating that has already been done, which all shows that pre-Columbian horse bones date no later than the Pleistocene, is positively decisive when taken in conjunction with the archaeological evidence.

Best,

Well, at all events, the Carbon dating has not been done on some very pertinent tidbits, which you not so cleverly ignore.
Say the mantra again and again Kid, until it becomes true, or at least as true as your need to have it be true can make it: " There were no horses in pre-Columbian America..."

[_Coggins7]

"when that evidence and data are conclusive"

You missed the point Beastie, the Data is never "conclusive", becuase a new discovery might come up and there goes all those conclusions of yester year. Like I said... We've only excavated 9 of 360 Complexes in this area. What else are we going to find?

Uh...but Beastie already knows, and has been quite clear throughout this thread that she already knows, without the slightest doubt whatever, that there will be no such new discoveries, ever. Not any, at least, that would lend plausibility to the historicity of the Book of Mormon.

That would be...unthinkable.

[_Coggins7]

Science responds to data and evidence. There is no need to be "creative" and "open-minded" when that evidence and data are conclusive - unless, of course, you're trying to build a case on quackery.

This is something near a scientistic faith in science as an oracle and an ideal that in some manner automatically obviates the very human factors inherent in the scientific enterprise. It would probably be better to say that, over time, science gets around to responding to data and evidence. but the dynamics interpenetrating and conditioning what science is as well as what it does are much more complex than that.

Facile positivism such as this should have been left in the early 20th century after the Uncertainty Principle and the New Physics destroyed it.

Strange that it remains at its strongest not in the hard sciences, but in the social sciences and humanities.

[_beastie]

I'm reading the Mercer chapter dedicated to the Loltun cave. It's interesting that he really is emphatic about the fact that there was some disturbance of the soil layers, obviously due to burrowing animals. Perhaps I discounted that possibility too readily earlier. (see page 118, for example)

And yeah, sure, new discoveries continue to be made. To cling to the hope that one of those new discoveries will be horse bones from the Book of Mormon time period is about the equivalent of clinging to the hope that one day we'll discover aliens really DID build egyptian pyramids.

[_CaliforniaKid]

Coggins,

Have you read beastie's essay and followed this thread? Because coming in here and making arrogantly dismissive comments when you don't even know what has been argued isn't going to accomplish anything besides irritating the hell out of everybody else.

-Chris

[_Coggins7]

Have you read beastie's essay and followed this thread? Because coming in here and making arrogantly dismissive comments when you don't even know what has been argued isn't going to accomplish anything besides irritating the hell out of everybody else.

I've read this entire thread.

Beastie, and you, are prevaricating and splitting hairs to avoid closing with and wrestling with the evidence in all its ambiguous glory. Case closed.

And given what you've written so far, I'm not at all convinced that you have any frickin' idea what your talking about on the nuances of this issue either.

In a word, your mother rides a vacuum cleaner, and she does it with her face in a hat...

[_beastie]

Beastie, and you, are prevaricating and splitting hairs to avoid closing with and wrestling with the evidence in all its ambiguous glory. Case closed.

I'm sure you won't mind providing examples of how we "prevaricated" and "split hairs". Thanks in advance.

[_CaliforniaKid]

I've read this entire thread.

This thread has been about the alleged FARMS "evidence" for horses in the Book of Mormon. Beastie's essay presents the positive argument that horses went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. I suppose if you haven't read her essay, then that explains how you can be so completely dismissive.

As for your comment that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," even if it were true that all we had was a dearth of evidence, I'm afraid that statement is mathematically fallacious. Read here to see why. Moreover, as is reiterated several times in that link, Sagan's statement in context means something more like "absence of proof is not proof of absence".

And given what you've written so far, I'm not at all convinced that you have any frickin' idea what your talking about on the nuances of this issue either.

If you mean the nuances of historical and scientific method, I'm quite familiar with them. However, our inability to be truly objective or to arrive at absolutely certain conclusions does not negate the weight of the probabilities in this case. Nor does it nullify the archaeological discipline's scientific value or suggest that we can be "creative" in drawing conclusions. What we have here are probabilities, and I'm afraid the probabilities are vastly against you in this case. If you want to overturn the accepted scientific paradigm, you have to do more than prattle on about scientific method and accuse everyone else of being "positivists". You have to actually find data that falsify it, or find an alternative paradigm that fits the data better. And then you have to go through the accepted scientific channels-- peer-reviewed publication, for example-- and convince the academic community that your paradigm is better. It's true that no paradigm is ever completely safe, but I for one am not willing to live my life based on the one-in-a-million chance that your ignorant proclamations are right and the experts' interpretation of the data is wrong. Nor am I willing to live my life based on the slim possibility that I don't really exist or that God inspires his agents to take forty wives and commit bank fraud. As the evidence against the Book of Mormon mounts, I suspect we will find more and more apologists retreating into epistemological skepticism. Yours may be softer than David Bohn's, but you should have no illusions that that's what you're doing. You're basically arguing that since no paradigm is ever final and we can never know absolutely everything, your religious paradigm can never be totally disproven. Well, neither can the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But that doesn't save the intellectual integrity of worshippers of the FSM, and it won't save the intellectual integrity of people who cling to the Book of Mormon against all the odds.

Best,

-Chris