Quote: However if I just sit in my own house and ponder whether or not the cat exists, prior to looking for it, my absence of evidence in that case is not evidence of absence.
That is not "evidence" at all, Apo. That's being too lazy to go look. Even Kitchen wasn't suggesting that. The context of Kitchen's comment was
Quote:A phrase often used by Kitchen is "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" meaning that the lack of higher dated monuments or inscriptions for a certain Pharaoh's reign does not exclude the possibility that this ruler enjoyed a longer reign than is generally assumed.
When xtians try to stretch the idea to cover the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever of any mass of "Hebrew slaves" in Egypt they run into the fact that 200 years of archaeological excavation has failed to detect them.
The only thing that is missing is "evidence" of bible bullshit. Egyptologists have a fairly solid grasp of ancient Egyptian history and there are no "Hebrews" in it. In fact, the matter is so convincingly closed about Egyptologists that no one is even looking for it anymore.
Oddly, it was Israeli scholars who excavated in Sinai after the Six Day War who put the nail in the coffin. The Exodus never happened.
