This article examines the effect of material evidence upon historiographic hypotheses. Through a series of successive Bayesian conditionalizations, I analyze the extended competition among several hypotheses that offered different accounts of the transition between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age in Palestine and in particular to the “emergence of Israel”. The model reconstructs, with low sensitivity to initial assumptions, the actual outcomes including a complete alteration of the scientific consensus. Several known issues of Bayesian confirmation, including the problem of (...) old evidence, the introduction and confirmation of novel theories and the sensitivity of convergence to uncertain and disputed evidence are discussed in relation to the model’s result and the actual historical process. The most important result is that convergence of probabilities and of scientific opinion is indeed possible when advocates of rival hypotheses hold similar judgment about the factual content of evidence, even if they differ sharply in their historiographic interpretation. This speaks against the contention that understanding of present remains is so irrevocably biased by theoretical and cultural presumptions as to make an objective assessment impossible. (shrink)

Numerous supposed immoral mandates and commands by God found in religious texts are introduced and discussed. Such passages are used to construct a logical contradiction contention that is called the moral epistemological argument. It is shown how there is a contradiction in that God is omnibenevolent, God can instruct human beings, and God at times provides us with unethical orders and laws. Given the existence of the contradiction, it is argued that an omnibenevolent God does not exist. Finally, this contention (...) is defended from several objections. (shrink)

Notions of uniform and gradual evolution have been replaced in some circles by biological and paleontological models that postulate that periods of rapid change punctuate long periods of evolutionary stasis. This new theory, called punctuated equilibria (or PE for short), may have implications for paradigms in scholarly disciplines other than the sciences. Whereas old evolutionary models exerted great influence upon historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and students of religion for more than a century, the new model may provide heuristic paradigms for research (...) that correlate more adequately with the current observations of scholars. We therefore provide suggestions for deployment of this new scientific paradigm in history and anthropology. In particular, this model can explain the rise of the Israelite state and the religious ethos in the Hebrew Bible, two major concerns of today's socioscientific study of biblical materials. Thus the possibility of an overarching paradigm for the social sciences is entertained. (shrink)