Forgiveness: The science

 

The most obvious failure of Christians when presenting their "case" to agnostics is that we use the arguments and language that has traction with believers. Rather, we should first share the portions of the faith that resonate with the not-yet-believing.

From the perspective of the secular, not-yet-believing, any serious discussion must engage them with "science". Science is magical to the secular, college graduate. Being able to make a cogent, scientific case for your point-of-view is the price of entry for them to consider your argument.

You may be puzzling over my use of the orchid as the header of these posts. The reason I chose this image (Ondontoglossum crispum, I think) is that it shows a clear "landing pad" for pollinators. The white petals and pink sepals shine like a ghost in the murky rain-forest. The bright "tongue" shows the pollinator exactly where to land to get the good stuff.

When attempting to make an persuasive argument to the agnostic, SCIENCE is the landing pad of choice. They might not concede while you are there but with the grace of the Holy Spirit we pray they will thoughtfully reconsider your points in the near future.

The challenges of social sciences

Social sciences like psychology are often referred to as "soft sciences". That has nothing to do with the intellectual rigor of the course of study.

When a person performs an experiment in physics or chemistry the results will fall within a narrow range and the results of the experiment confers a high degree of predictive information.

When a person performs an experiment in the social sciences there is a very low degree of repeatability, the results manifests over a variable amount of time and there are often unexpected secondary effects.

Because the results or secondary effects might be unethical to expose humans to, and because of the fuzzy-results requiring very large sample sizes, psychologists often resort to rats or insects for their experiments. This obviously limits the ability to predict secondary effects in human communities.

Hypothesis ==> Experiment ==> Data ==> Analysis ==> Rule set

Suppose you were offered a choice between two brands of smartphones. One had been tested by a handful of young people in a sanitary lab for two months. The other had been torture tested in extremely harsh environments for a billion man-hours. Furthermore, the testers relied on the "apps" to make life-and-death decisions on a daily basis. During that million man-hour test it had been exposed to thousands of people who deliberately tried to break it. 

Which smartphone is likely to be better?

Let's take a closer look at the shortcomings of the social sciences and see how Exodus measures up as an experiment.

Low repeatability is addressed by increasing the sample size and increasing the number of "runs".

Depending on the scholars you reference and how they choose to interpret the word "eleph" the number of Israelites who left Egypt may have ranged between 3600 and 2,400,000.*

Even though the middle-East is drier in modern times than it was back in Biblical times it was still a thorn-desert and not very fertile. Every oasis had people around it and while they may have been hospitable to the occasional wanderer they would have been very defensive about large armies marching around the desert.

Leaving the group was very, very likely to have fatal consequences.

The distance between the southernmost extremity of the Jordan River and Cairo is approximately 300 miles. A fit back-packer who prepositioned his supplies could knock that out in twenty days. The Bible says the Israelite people wandered around the desert for forty years. While that might seem implausible, remember there were no straight line trails or prepositioned supplies. Moses left Egypt a young and hale man and died (of old age?) before the 12 tribes crossed into the promised land.

So even if you take the extreme-low estimate for the number, the indisputable fact that the terraine is an inhospitable desert and that they were homeless for 40 years, you are looking at an astronomical number of human interactions. That huge number means that nearly all unintended consequences were manifested and be ironed out.

The fact that problems could not be resolved by avoidance means that they had to be dealt with...and so did the secondary effects. The forty years in the desert was akin to being locked in an elevator with your mother-in-law and your bone-head cousin for forty years...while suspended over an active volcano with a diet of boiled chicken and saltine crackers.

Tough test!

Robust processes

Framed in that way, any person who respects science should concede that the Judeo-Christian heritage has a high probability of being "robust". That is, it has a very high likelihood of producing acceptable outcomes even when "fed" inputs with a wide range of variation.

Even if they cannot bring themselves to concede the point, the science is strong enough when compared to "rat-based" science that they are likely to not be dismissive when talking about Forgiveness.

*The word "eleph" always refers to a formation of fighting men. The high number uses a battalian-like number of 1000 fighting men and multiplies by 600, the number who left Egypt. Then there is a "multiplier" applied to account for women, children and men either too young, too old or too infirm to be "fighting men". Factors that mitigate against the higher number is that as slaves the Israelites would not have been permitted to engage in military training and large, complex formations seem unlikely.

The smallest number assumes that "eleph" refers to a single fighting man. Furthermore it assumes a multiplier of 6. That is, 1/3 of the men will be of the proper age and fitness to be considered soldiers. Remember, they did not have corrective lenses for their eyes, no formal dental care, no knee surgury.

As a frame of reference, except for the very most favorable sites, pre-agriculture villages topped out at about 250 people. The deserts of modern Jordan and western Saudi Arabia are not favorable sites. A group of 3600 would clearly overshoot the natural carrying capacity by at least a factor of 15 and more likely by a factor of 60.