Chipping away at the middle ground

It’s called a wind setdown event.

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I was hoping to throw this in after an answer to my question ! :laughing:

I had a Christian friend whose office overlooked the shallow and muddy Schuylkill River in Philadelphia years ago, and one very windy day with the particular topography (above and below the water), wind speed and direction, he was excited to see the muddy bottom of the river in a trough made of water all the way across, with water on the left and on the right, upstream and downstream.

That, of course, reminded him of the Exodus and the Israelites’ crossing of the Red Sea. Having had more than a little experience with God’s providential timing myself, I suspect that the sea might have parted without Moses and the Israelites being there. But they were.

I think you mistake the discussion. You were trying to define “miracle”. It’s not a discussion about whether miracles happen. The relevant probability is no the posterior (given evidence X, what’s the probability that a miracle happened) but the prior (what’s the probability, absent a miracle, that X happened). By your definition, a miracle has a prior probability of zero.

But to answer your irrelevant question, I would conclude that both groups were lying.

No, a much lesser thing is called a wind setdown event. This is not something that would get you across the Red Sea, which is miles deep.

Agreed. Of course, many Bible scholars have suggested that maybe some other “sea” is meant, but if it was the Red Sea, your point seems undeniable.

Presumably your idea is this: Jesus knows all that is going to happen (divine foresight, either his own or mediated to him by God), and so he knows when the sea is going to become calm. So he just times his words to match the situation that he knows is coming. No miraculous violation of natural law is involved.

This approach might be plausible, if used to explain only a small number of miracles. But if used frequently, it raises as many problems as it solves. For example, in Mark the author repeatedly stresses the instantaneous occurrence of Jesus’s healings. So if the miracle is only one of “timing”, then the situation is this: Jesus deliberately walks into a town where by a statistical freak (known to him through his foresight), hundreds of people are going to be suddenly cured of leprosy etc. by natural causes, and because he knows the exact moment in each case, all he has to do is approach the sick people at the right moments, and what is merely perfect timing looks like a series of supernatural healings.

But that looks very much like deception on Jesus’s part. He would know that all onlookers would treat the healings as direct supernatural interventions, not coincidences of timing. So he would be trying to gain credit for miraculous powers he didn’t actually display. And the same would apply to God, who is supposed to be the inspirer of the Bible, and hence of the Gospel narratives. God would know the way Mark’s healing stories would read to all future generations of Christians; he would know that they would be understood by Christians as supernatural special divine actions, as healings that would not have happened without Jesus’s intervention. Did God want all future Christians to be deceived on this point?

If some ancient astronomer, who had learned to predict solar eclipses, stood up before a crowd in a magician’s costume, and said, “I am going to make the moon darken the sun one week from now,” and uttered some nonsense magical formula that supposedly would bring about the event, and let people believe that he had caused it, we would call that man a liar and a fraud. I’m not comfortable with an explanation of miracles that makes both Jesus and God (as author of the Bible) liars and frauds.

It seems to me that any general appeal to mere “natural laws plus timing” as an explanation of Biblical miracles merely moves one from the frying pan into the fire. It allows one to escape criticism from those who mock supernatural actions as “unscientific” or “impossible,” but at the cost of making Jesus and God into confidence tricksters. I think it’s too high a price to pay. As an isolated explanation of single miracles, it might be admissible, but as an explanation for the majority of them, I think it has to be rejected. Given a choice between: “You believe in a hocus-pocus magician God who arbitrarily interferes with nature,” and “You believe in a trickster God who never interferes with the natural order but wants people to think he does,” I’d rather be accused of the former than the latter.

Your projections are unwarranted. I was just suggesting what a unbeliever could say about any providential miracle. Also, God is omnitemporal.

My apologies. I thought you were representing your own view. (Which actually surprised me, as I would not have thought it would be your view, so I’m relieved to hear that I didn’t misunderstand your position on earlier occasions.)

That said, there are people who have taken this view, and my objections to it remain as stated above.

I would add that I have most often seen such arguments coming not from “unbelievers” but from Christians who want to hang on to a “literal” reading of the Bible, but don’t want that literal reading to conflict with what “science” supposedly teaches. Thus, they want to believe that there really was an unprecedented physical event at the Red Sea which allowed Israel to get safely out of Egypt, but they don’t want to believe that any natural laws were broken. Or, to give another example that I have seen, they want to believe that Jesus did really seem to the disciples to be walking on the water, but they don’t want any natural laws to be broken, so they postulate that under certain extremely rare weather conditions, an “invisible ice” can form on the Sea of Galilee, and Jesus could walk on that ice, and it would seem to his disciples from afar that he was walking on the water. Again, a miracle of timing rather than a supernatural intervention; Jesus knew when the freak condition would occur, and availed himself of it, to impress the disciples. In all such explainings-away of the miracle stories, the only “supernatural” element involved is divine foresight of future physical conditions, which, being something mental or spiritual rather than physical, need not violate any natural laws.

It is this sort of Christian apologetic that I resist. Actually, I prefer straight denial that the events ever happened to such forced explanations. I don’t see the point in trying to “rescue” the Biblical text from the charge of an “unscientific” view of nature by upholding the historical reality of the events yet rejecting the Biblical authors’ own interpretation of those events. If we can’t trust their interpretation of the events, on what basis can we trust that they have even recorded the events accurately? On what basis would we say that God ensured that they got the facts exactly right, but left them in confusion and error regarding the causes of those facts?

If one can accept the existence of God, there is no point in rejecting the possibility of genuine “interventionist” miracles, and there is no reason why a Christian should be embarrassed by them, and try to make excuses for their presence in the Biblical narratives. Give me Bertrand Russell, or give me Thomas Aquinas, but don’t give me half-baked compromises between Bible literalism and Enlightenment rejection of miracles.

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Given that the current Red Sea is 1.8 miles deep at its deepest point, and around 500 metres deep on average, with 40% of the Red Sea less than 100 metres deep and a quarter of the Red Sea less than 50 metres deep, I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration.

As the article to which I linked explains, the hydrogeography of the Red Sea today is very different to the way it was over 3,000 years ago. It was shallower then, and occupied a different area. The western branch of the Red Sea is the Gulf of Suez, which extends down to the Ballah Lake and Bitter Lakes. This is the proposed site of the Red Sea crossing in the article to which I linked. As the article demonstrates, there is no necessity for a crossing of anything “miles deep”.

Your article seems not to make that actual claim. It’s talking about a shallow lagoon on the very edge of the sea, in the Nile Delta. This is not what anyone would call “crossing the Red Sea”. And it’s talking about a few meters at most, certainly less than 10. This seems like a desperate attempt to save something from the story while rejecting miracles. Why?

Not sure if you read this part?

This domain corresponds roughly to the Gulf of Suez, although the Red Sea at Suez today is deeper.

It’s in section 3.1.

Yes, that’s what I am talking about.

It’s what the people who wrote the text considered “crossing the Red Sea”. That’s the point here.

Because that’s what the text describes. The key difference between your view and their view is that they’ve looked at the text first to see where it identifies the crossing taking place. They’ve looked at how Bible scholars, lexicographers, and archaeologists have analyzed the way the Hebrew term yam suph was understood in other parts of the Hebrew Bible, as well as how it was understood and translated “Red Sea” (θάλασσαν ἐρυθράν), by Hellenistic era Jews, and how it correlates it with the Egyptian ip3 twfy. They’ve also looked at the route of the Exodus as described in the Hebrew text. Then they’ve looked at the hydrogeography of that area around 3,000 years ago to see what could have happened.

Incidentally, in identifying the crossing as taking place in this area of the Gulf of Suez, they’re in agreement with the ninth century Jewish rabbi Saadia Gaon, who identified the Red Sea as the Baḥar al-Qulzum (Gulf of Suez). So over 1,000 years ago, a medieval rabbi who didn’t have the benefit of scientific geographical data, identified the Red Sea as the Gulf of Suez simply based on the Hebrew text itself.

In contrast, you’ve suggested that the Hebrews crossed at a much deeper point, over the Suakin Trough. Just to give you an idea of what you’re proposing, here’s the position of the Suakin Trough in the Red Sea.

As you can probably see, it’s parallel to Sudan. This second image will show you exactly how far it is from Egypt.

So if you want the Hebrews to cross over the deepest parts of the Red Sea, you’ll need to demonstrate that the route described in the Hebrew text describes them walking all the way out of Egypt down to what is now Sudan, and then crossing over, into what is now Saudi Arabia. That’s nearly as great a miracle as crossing the Red Sea at this point. I’ve read a lot of analysis of the Exodus route as described in the Hebrew text, but I’ve never seen a Bible scholar suggesting that the text is saying the Hebrews walked all the way down here. I suggest you look at the Hebrew text again, and identify where your interpretation of the lexicography and grammar have led you astray.

Even 50 meters would be too deep for the wind to blow the water clear all the way down to the bottom. So the vast majority of the current Red Sea would seem to be ruled out as a crossing point. That leaves either an earlier version of the Red Sea (probably not the main body of the sea, but a shallower ancient northwestern arm), or some other body of water entirely, some lake or lagoon. I would suggest that the latter is more likely.

The average healthy adult person, walking on a flat dry surface, could walk the 5 km mentioned in the article in about an hour. However, we are talking about walking on a potentially very muddy bottom, which would slow things down considerably. We are also talking about (using the figures from the article itself) walking against a steady wind in the range of 60 miles per hour (to keep the passage dry for 4 hours; a stronger wind would be needed to keep it open for longer). It’s almost impossible to walk against a wind that strong, and even if one could, one’s walking speed would be only a fraction of normal walking speed.

Plus, according to the Biblical story, we are to imagine people carrying all their worldly possessions along with them, probably in many cases bearing loaded packs on their backs, walking with infants in their arms, pulling little wagons along behind them, leading heavy-laden donkeys or camels, etc.; there would be elderly people, pregnant women, children (whose legs are shorter and don’t walk as fast), etc. We aren’t talking about young men in their running shoes and jogging pants with hands free and no weights attached. So this group of people is going to move slowly at the best of times, and in this case, walking in potentially soggy mud which would cling and drag, and against winds which would exhaust even a very hardy young person after even 15 minutes of struggling. Can they really get across the passage in just four hours?

Another factor is the length and width of the column of Israelites leaving the country. How many thousand Israelites were there, and was there only enough width to march single file, or was there enough width for several hundred Israelites to cross at once? If they have to march single file, then even if the first hundred or so can get across in 4 hours, the last several thousand won’t make it.

Then there is the account of Pharaoh’s army being utterly annihilated when the waters come back. This could only happen if the waters came back suddenly, rather than gradually. If they came back gradually, then there would be time for soldiers near the west end to retreat back to dry land, and for soldiers at the east end to rush onward before the waters completely closed. Did the modelers of these scenarios consider only sudden drops of the wind from 60 miles per hour to zero, of did they consider scenarios with gradually slackening winds?

The question about the destruction of Pharaoh’s army (complete vs. partial) is important, because the whole purpose of such scenarios is concordist; it’s to show that the Biblical accounts can be correct without violating anything learned from science. The moment one admits, “Well, maybe a few hundred of Pharaoh’s men got across or turned back before the waters closed,” one is admitting that the Biblical narrative is slightly fibbing, and that defeats the concordist purpose. So one has to either bite the bullet and admit that the Biblical account isn’t entirely true, or one has to suppose an instantaneous drop of the winds to zero, with waters roaring back without warning, catching Pharaoh’s army too quickly for it to react. And even then, one has to assume that all of Pharaoh’s army was in the middle of the passage, too far from either end to escape. If any of the men were near either end, some of them could have escaped by swimming to shore. (Healthy men who know how to swim can swim a few hundreds yards easily, especially if they are in very light armor, e.g., archers. And indeed, it’s not impossible that there were men in the army capable of swimming a mile and a half, which means they could get from even the middle of the 3-mile passage to shore.)

Considerations such as these lead me to conclude that the writers of the article are “really reaching” to find scenarios that could justify the Biblical narrative. It just might work, if we are talking about a very shallow body of water, with a very wide crossing zone, and Israelites so pepped up by Egyptian-made chemical stimulants that they can fight against gale-force winds for three or four hours while carrying heavy loads, and the Egyptian army is entirely clustered in the middle of the lake and the winds suddenly drop from gale force to zero, with the water roaring back in a wall instantly. But this is really pushing things.

There’s another, more general absurdity in such “it all could have happened under purely natural causes” suggestions. Even if happened in that way, God would have had to go to incredible trouble setting up things so that the Israelites arrived at the site at exactly the right time to catch the geographical freak phenomenon. He would have to make sure that the Israelites left at a precise time and marched at a precise pace so as not to get there even an hour too early or too late. So he is still going to have to “intervene” insofar as he would have to communicate to the Israelites information about leaving times and marching pace that they otherwise would not know. If he is going to perform interventions of that nature, he might as well just perform a physical miracle without natural causes; it would accomplish the same end. There is no economy of explanation achieved by making the parting of the water wholly natural, because supernatural guidance by God is employed anyway.

Further, the Exodus story is full of miracles prior to the crossing. If those miracles were genuinely supernatural interventions, there would be no point in insisting that the Red Sea crossing was a wholly natural event. And if those miracles were not supernatural interventions, but themselves just natural events which were only “miracles of timing”, then the person holding that thesis needs to come up with a “natural” explanation for all the plagues, the rods and the serpents, etc. to parallel the “natural” explanation for the parting of the Red Sea. And even if that could be done, will the same person apply the same method to the New Testament? Will he try to explain water to wine, feeding five thousand, the resurrection of Lazarus, etc. as merely natural events which are miraculous only in their timing? Most of the Christians I know who are willing to entertain the “it was all natural” thesis for Old Testament miracles, balk at applying that to the New Testament ones. But is no good reason for such a distinction.

The whole thing smells of the most unhealthy kind of concordism, and I don’t see why anyone would be attracted to such explanations, either scientifically or theologically. They can be made to fit with modern scientific knowledge only by very complex and contrived arguments which most modern scientists (i.e, those who aren’t Christians of a Biblicist turn) are never going to accept anyway, and they solve no theological problem.

Yes. But no one is suggesting that the Hebrews crossed the Red Sea at a point where it was at a depth of 50 metres.

I look forward to seeing your critical article published in the peer reviewed scholarly literature. Of course we both know that won’t happen, because you don’t publish in the peer reviewed scholarly literature. You;re a culture warrior who hangs out online.

I don’t see this article as proposing “it all could [sic] have happened under purely natural causes”. I’m not suggesting that either.

You don’t seem to realise exactly how much this exposes about your theological position.

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Could a geologist comment on this argument? @davidson

Good; then we have no disagreement on that point. The bulk of my remarks were not meant as objections to you in particular, but to a general line of exegesis which tried to preserve the literal accuracy of Biblical events while denying supernatural causality. If that doesn’t apply to you, then there is no need for you to respond.

I don’t care how much it exposes. I’m not trying to hide anything.

The irony in this statement is priceless. Here’s what you’re trying to hide.

  1. Your name.
  2. Your location.
  3. Your educational qualifications.
  4. Your previous career positions.
  5. Your academic publishing record.

I note you have expressed no intention of objecting to the article in a peer reviewed publication.

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Incidentally Jerry Coyne hated the fact that the original paper was published in PlosONE, but he does not contest the science.

It’s long, technical, and boring, but the upshot is that high winds, blowing for a sufficiently long period, could have driven shallow waters in the Nile delta back, exposing a reef that was about 2 meters underwater. The exposure could have lasted long enough to permit a “mixed group of people” (aka Israelites) to cross a temporary land bridge. Then, when the winds abated, the waters would rejoin, presumably drowning anyone in pursuit. The paper uses mathematical modeling, hydrology and satellite mapping to show that the exposure of mud flats could have occurred in two locations with 100 km/hr winds.

PZ Myers was equally unimpressed.

I was referring to my views regarding the subject we were talking about. You said I had revealed much about my “theological position,” as if you thought I had exposed myself to some danger by doing so. I confirmed that yes, I had been quite forthright about my theological position. We were not talking about my personal life, which is irrelevant to assessing my theological views on how to read the Exodus story.

I find it amusing that one day you accuse me of hiding my theological views, and then the next day you inform me that I have revealed a great deal about my theological views. In any case, it’s clear to me that you don’t understand my theological views, because every time you try to characterize them, you get them wildly wrong.

You have exposed your fundamentalist views once again. The views you keep trying to hide.

It means you’ve slipped up; you concealed your views on one day, and then accidentally revealed them on another day. This isn’t a contradiction to anyone who can understand that someone can do two different things at two different times. I have told you repeatedly that despite your attempts to try to conceal your theological views, your posts repeatedly reveal a persistent strain of fundamentalism.

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