Why the religious will never admit you won the argument (and why they don't care)

[Redbeard The Pink]

Sigh. The Bible isn't the data, it's the model. For instance, it's unreasonable to believe the Exodus occurred as written, the archaeological evidence is firmly against it (the data). It is a story from the Babylonian Captivity, likely a sort of a 'God beat Pharaoh for us and gave us a homeland, he'll get us out of this' tale.

What evidence is firmly against it?

The complete lack of requisite archaeological and anthropological evidence to establish support for that claim. We know where Egypt is, and where to dig to find information about the events and culture of the time period during which the Jews are supposed to have been enslaved there. As it turns out, we do have a good bit of information from that time, and not one shred of it suggests mass enslavement of Jews in Egypt, nor their wandering in the nearby desert for 40 years. If the Bible's claims were true, there would absolutely be evidence in this case. It's one of the rare instances where absence of evidence does actually constitute evidence of absence.

One of the most important indicators of a model's accuracy is its predictive power. The Theory of Evolution, for instance, has been able to predict the discovery of certain kinds of fossils in specific strata of rocks. Predicting when and where a scientific discovery will happen is a HUGE checkmark in favor of that model's veracity.

If the Bible were accurate, we would expect it to have the same predictive power. If the Bible is true, and it says the Jews were in a certain place in large numbers during a certain time period, then we should be able to go to that place, dig up things from that time period, and find evidence of huge numbers of Jews. We have done that digging, and we've found plenty of evidence to suggest that people were living in those areas at that time...just not a bunch of Jewish slaves. That really doesn't look good for the Biblical model.