There’s A Big Difference between Thinking that You Know Something and Actually Having Evidence to Demonstrate It
Kevin R. Henke
September 15, 2022
In Henke (2022b), I stated the following:
“As mentioned in Henke (2022a), Alexander the Great had numerous silver coins minted in his name during his lifetime. Lundahl (2022g) makes the following responses to Henke (2022a) and the coins:
“I would need to acknowledge that someone or something at the time of the coining referred to as Alexander existed.
That this entity disposed of a mint in Macedonia - and elsewhere in the budding Hellenistic world.”
While Lundahl (2022c) blindly accepts that Genesis 3 is history and without a shred of evidence believes the old story that Moses wrote it, Lundahl (2022g) thinks that the individual that ordered the minting of these coins and the humans that did it were only “someone or something.” How could a “something” order the minting of coins and then carry out that order? How could “someone or something at the time of the coining referred to as Alexander” afford to mint all of those coins, have the power to do it, and have so much influence that those coins would be widely used from India to Greece and Egypt if he wasn’t a powerful and wealthy leader? Again, all of the archeological evidence must be examined together – the Alexandros coins, the Egyptian temple inscriptions, the Bactrian documents, etc. – and not just the five ancient histories to confirm the existence of Alexander the Great.” [my emphasis in bold]
Lundahl (2022p) makes the following comments on the bolded sentence from Henke (2022b):
“Why? First, we did know the carreere of Alexander by the authors before the archaeological evidence, and second, the archaeological evidence is certainly compatible with it but cannot give the details thereof.”
Here, Lundahl (2022p) makes two serious mistakes. First of all, Mr. Lundahl fails to understand that there is a big difference between thinking that you know something and actually having evidence to demonstrate that you’re right. Until archeologists actually looked for confirmational evidence for Alexander the Great, we did not know anything conclusive about the career of Alexander the Great or that he even lived. We simply had no reason to take the Roman historians’ claims at face value. Nevertheless, based on archeological and other evidence, overall, their views of Alexander the Great and his accomplishments often turned out to be correct or at least plausible. The same thing cannot be said about the Israelites’ beliefs about Adam, Abraham and Moses. Their existence has not been demonstrated at all. To be exact, from what we know about Israelite history, Adam, Abraham and Moses may never have existed (Finkelstein and Silberman 2001).
Before we can claim that any group actually knows anything about their founding fathers or another figure from their remote past, we need to look at the evidence to see if they are correct. Their traditional stories may or may not be correct. We must be skeptical of all claims about the past until they can be demonstrated with external evidence.
Secondly, Lundahl (2022p) fails to realize that it’s the quality of information about the past and not the large quantity that is important. This means that we can’t always have as much confidence in stories and claims that are made about the past as we would like. But, that’s reality. Using the probability scale for past events in Henke (2022b), we may only be able to state that a historical claim is plausible, provided that the source has been demonstrated to be reliable on related claims about the past.
Reference:
Finkelstein, I. and N.A. Silberman. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts: The Free Press: New York, USA, 385pp.