Instructions Review This Unit's Readings, And Include Specific Information With Citation Within Ib History Essay Help - Best History Assignment Help By Professors

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Analysis of the Constitution write my essay help

There are five (5) tasks for the Legal Project, as follows:

Analysis of the Constitution

Read and analyze the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Choose the institutional power and personal right you would remove, and explain why; and add a power and right that you would include, and explain why. Two to four (2-4) pages, double spaced.

Homeland Security Legislative Issues

Write a four to six (4-6) page, double spaced, legislative analysis of only 1 of the following bills form the 116th Congress. Your analysis should include consideration of the:

Legislative History;
Agency Involvement;
Cost Implications (CBO Score);
Committee Reports;
Pros and Cons of the legislation;
Recommendation to the head of the agency on implementing the Act;
Grammar and compliance to APA (6th) including citations and reference page;
Double spaced; and
Times New Roman, 12 point font.

Pick only one (1) from the following:

Identification of two (2) Post 9/11 Homeland Security Events

As we study this new concept of Homeland Security, we quickly learn that threats to national security are not new. In fact, the United States faced major threats to its existence even before it was officially a nation. Identify and describe two such events in U.S. history that occurred after September 11, 2001, and explain why this event/threat is similar to a current emerging homeland security event. Four (4) pages, double spaced.

Legal Research Exercise

Beginning withsigned on May 5, 2019, analyze President Trumps declaration of a national emergency in regards to securing the information and communications technology and services supply chain. Your paper should clearly discuss the EOs possible impact on the National Security agenda of protecting citizens from foreign national terrorists while evaluating agency implementation, and the role federal, state, local, and tribal governments to support your argument. All requirements of prompt and format must be met to receive full credit.
Grades are based on the following:

Pros vs cons on the EO;
Recommendation to your superior on the implementation;
What will be the outcome by the Supreme Court, and why;
Four (4) pages;
Grammar and compliance to APA (6th) including citations and reference page;
Double spaced; and
Times New Roman, 12 point font.

Presidential Directive Draft

For this task, you must use the current emerging threat that you identified in part 3 to articulate and format your proposed solution as a Presidential Directive. Use directives supplied in part 2 as an example of how to format the task. One to two (1-2) pages, double spaced. Please use APA 6th or 7th edition.
Please use just one document with 5 separate headings. One question I have received is on part 5. Yes you are drafting your very own Presidential Directive based on an emerging threat of your choosing. Please make sure its original.

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Texas Government Writing Assignment college essay help near me: college essay help near me
Texas Government Writing Assignment
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Texas government writing assignment. 750 words with citation page. Topic must involve Texas politics. See attachment for details.

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Legal Process Project law essay help

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Hide Assignment InformationTurnitinThis assignment will be submitted to Turnitin.Instructions
There are five (5) tasks for the Legal Project, as follows:

Analysis of the Constitution

Homeland Security Legislative Issues

Write a four to six (4-6) page, double spaced, legislative analysis of only 1 of the following bills form the 116th Congress. Your analysis should include consideration of the:

Pick only one (1) from the following:

Identification of two (2) Post 9/11 Homeland Security Events

Legal Research Exercise

Presidential Directive Draft

ProjectlinkPICK1.txt

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What is the Department of Defense’s role in Defense Support of Civil Authorities? extended essay help biology: extended essay help biologyAfter reviewing the course material for this week, please look at the questions below. Write a 150-500 word post answering the questions below.

1. Describe what could be in a Tactical Operations Center Standing Operating Procedure and why it is essential within Mission Command.

2. What is the Department of Defense’s role in Defense Support of Civil Authorities?

3. Describe and explain all four decisive actions being sure to include the task, purpose, and characteristics for each one in your own words

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The Power Of Interest Groups ccusa autobiographical essay help: ccusa autobiographical essay help

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For this assignment, you will choose to focus on one interest group. Choose a real interest group and two to five resources regarding the interest group. You will need to choose resources with differing viewpoints. Then, in 500-750 words, do the following:
1. Describe the type of power the interest group has. Include where the power comes from. Is the power instilled in the organization or does it come from citizens?
2. Discuss if that power has changed over time. Has the interest group gained or lost power? Include your perceived catalyst of the gain or loss of power.
3. Discuss the difference between formal and informal interest groups. What type of power does each have?
Use two to five scholarly resources to support your explanations.
Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide.

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Describe and explain two of the Warfighting Functions? computer science essay helpAnswer the 2 questions they should be approximately 150-250 WORDS both questions not each.

1. Describe and explain two of the Warfighting Functions?

2. How do commanders exercise the Command and Control System?

This are the 2 references to answer the 2 questions
Department of the Army. (July 2019). ADP 2-0.Intelligence.
Department of the Army. (July 2019). ADP 6-0.Mission Command.

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How are new technologies affecting OSINT collection and analysis? my essay help uk: my essay help uk

For this forum, you are to answerONEof the questions listed below.Please be courteous and succinct in your response. The goal is to extend the conversation through your observations and experience.Questions:
How are new technologies affecting OSINT collection and analysis?
What potential vulnerabilities does a social media network present?
Define Social Media Intelligence. Give examples
What potential affect does social media intelligence present regarding non state actors? Give examples to support your assertion.
Which reading this week did you find most interesting and important. What resonated with you? What are 2-3 key lessons learned from it?
Students are required to provide asubstantive initial post of 250 words

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Shaping The Enlisted Force For The Joint All-Domain Task Force writing an essay help
Shaping The Enlisted Force For The Joint All-Domain Task Force
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Shaping the Enlisted Force for the Joint All-Domain Task Force
The U.S. Army is prioritizing the future of warfare in multi-domain operations. How do you ensure the enlisted force is prepared for Joint All-Domain Operations (JADO)? The three Ps, discussed in the article, serve as the foundation of re-orienting enlisted service-members. How are you integrating the three Ps in the development of your Soldiers? (Make sure you discuss professional commitment, perspective, and platforms to excel)

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What is the Department of Defense’s role in Defense Support of Civil Authorities? professional essay helpWrite a 200-500 word post answering at least two of the questions.
1. Describe what could be in a Tactical Operations Center Standing Operating Procedure and why it is essential within Mission Command?

2. What is the Department of Defense’s role in Defense Support of Civil Authorities?

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Discuss UN Sustainable Development Goals custom essay help: custom essay help

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On 1 January 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by world leaders in September 2015 at an historic UN Summit officially came into force. These goals address every topic of concern we have discussed this semester. Over the coming decade, it’s the hope of UN member nations (which includes the U.S.) that the SDGs will universally be applied to all, countries will mobilize efforts to end all forms of poverty, fight inequalities and tackle climate change, while ensuring that no one is left behind.
With the SDGs as your reference, answer these questions:

Are any of the 17goals from the UN website particularly unrealisticdescribe, in detail, why you think so (or not).
Which of the 17 goals do you believe is the highest priority for the world and why? Cite specific examples from class content, discussions and assessments.

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Effects of human activity on the environment best college essay help

The final assessment will address Course Outcomes 1 and 3:

interpret quantitative information to determine effects of human activity on the environment and to evaluate environmentally sustainable decisions
communicate effectively and use scientific evidence regarding human impact on the environment with emphasize on sustainability and global citizenship

Description
The final assessment will be composed of three parts and should be 4-6 pages in length (excluding citations page):
INTRO: Using your three data projects, provide a comprehensive overview of your environmental footprint connecting the various calculator results you obtained over the course of the semester. Be sure to include new insights you gleaned while summarizing your results. (1-2 pp).
EXPLORE: Pick one of your behaviors/choices that has the most harmful impact on our environment and explain why you believe this behavior is the most harmful. Explore possible solutions or counter-measures to correct/improve your focal behavior. Be sure to review at least 2-3 alternatives in the literature (pick reliable resources!) (2 pp).
CONCLUSIONS: Pick the best solution you EXPLORE above with an analysis of both the economic and ecological “savings” per year to be gained by the new behavior/choice (1-2 pp). NOTE: pickmeasurableunits for both savings categories, like dollars, pounds, gallons, etc.

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What are the advantages to using volunteers write my essay help: write my essay helpThe recovery phase of any disaster event creates a huge requirement for manpower for cleanup, repair, and restoration. Traditionally, a sizable segment of the manpower pool is provided by volunteers from NGOs, churches, community organizations, schools, etc. What are the advantages to using volunteers? What are the disadvantages?

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Publishing public performance results on the Internet essay help websites: essay help websitesBased upon the following two readings:

Publishing public performance results on the Internet – Do stakeholders use the Internet to hold Dutch public service organizations to account? by Meijer; and

The big question for performance management: Why do managers use performance information?, by Moynihan & Pandey:

What are the important points the authors want readers to take away from each article?
Identify common themes that link both articles together.
Discuss whether their arguments are convincing, or not.
In what ways could each research study be made stronger?

This part of the assignment should 1-2 pages.

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Is the group likely to be successful in swaying public opinion/political leaders? gp essay help

Find and explore the website for a Texas interest group of your choice. Do a search for a subject you are interested in and see if there is a group that matches. Then see if they are active in Texas. You may have to spend some time looking, if you want to find a group that matches your own interests.
Some suggested places to search: Project VoteSmart () or the Texas Tribune’s list of Interest Group Scorecards:or the list of top lobbyist/interest groups from the Texans for Public Justice report:
Most of the groups that you will find should have site names ending in .org since they are organizations. Once you have found a group, analyze the group through its website. Be sure and discuss what kind of information is available on the site. Consider the following:

What does the group stand for? (usually this is in the “About” section),
What activities does it engage in to draw attention to the cause/change government policy?
What types of benefits does the group offer to prospective and current members?
Is it an offshoot of a national interest group? If yes, how is it similar/dissimilar to its national counterpart?
What attracts you to this group?
Is the group likely to be successful in swaying public opinion/political leaders? Why or why not? Consider what you know about political culture in Texas, the current legislature and executive.

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Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture essay help free: essay help free
Discuss Your Food Mileage
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Using the data you compiled under the, discuss these questions:

How do your data relate to air, water, and energy uses/abuses associated with the average American meal–is it greater or less than the average miles driven per day in a typical American car?
If your meal included meat, dairy or eggs, be sure to discuss the water footprint of these items. How is carbon footprint impacted by plant-based vs. animal-based products?
If your meal did not include animal products of any kind (vegan diet), discuss local alternatives for at least three main meal items.
Visit theCenter for Urban Education about Sustainable Agricultureto learn more about food mileage:

FoodDescription.docx

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Write an essay expressing your thoughts and opinions about the killings of Mr. Floyd persuasive essay help
6
DIRECTIONS:

Your paper is a personal essay. Write an essay expressing your thoughts and
opinions about the killings of Mr. Floyd and Mr. Brook and the other issues raised in
the above essay. Approach the subjects and issues raised in whatever manner and
however you wish to address them. Also, address the following questions in your
paper:

Address these questions:

What are your reactions to these events?
Did you participate in any such events in Houston or elsewhere?
Do you believe police brutality exists in the U.S.
Are black American and other non-white Americans victimized by
discrimination from the police, the government, businesses, and white society
in general despite freedoms gained particularly from the Civil War
Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th), the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s,
Civil Rights measure of the 1960s (Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights
Act of 1965, Fair Housing Act, and others)
Is there racial bias in policing?
Have you been the victim of discrimination by the police?
Do you support, do your oppose, or do you no opinion about the goals and
beliefs of the Black Lives Matters movement that seeks equal justice and
treatment for black Americans and other minorities? Or do you believe their
claims are incorrect or exaggerated?

7
Do you support the ideas postulated by protestors that police agencies across
the US should be defunded and whatever removed from police budgets be
rerouted to social service agencies?
Do you support the ideas of protestors that the police should be less violent,
should cease using military tactics and equipment against citizens?
Do you believe all monuments to Confederate leaders be taken down because
these men were racist and traitors to the United States?
Demands are being made and considered by military leaders and some Senators
that U.S. military bases named after Confederate Army generals be renamed
because they were racists and traitors? (e.g., Fort Hood, Texas; Fort Polk,
Louisiana; Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Lee, Virginia; etc.)
The Confederate battle flag, the Stars and Bars, is being banned from public
display at sporting events such as NASCAR as a result of the protests and
demonstrations across the U.S. The National Collegiate Athletic Association
(NCAA) has expanded it Confederate flag to prevent any championship
events from being played in states where the symbol has a prominent
presence.
Many Southern states used to have the Stars and Bars as part of their flag.
Mississippi is the last state to have such a flag and is in the process of
removing the Stars and Bars from the flag. Is this ! or not? Is this symbol
offensive to you? Is it offensive to others (who, do you think, would be
offended?)
At the end of the essay I state that (t)he protests sent a message to the nation.
What message do you thing they sent? What message, if any, did you receive
from the protest in Washington, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and cities and towns
across the nation?

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Modern civil rights movement and the black power movement college application essay help onlineCompare and contast the modern civil rignts movement and the black power movement? Identify key members and organizations as tiy discuss their inception, tactics and greater goals. How did they differ politically versus culturally? Be sure to include major accomplishments and major setbacks.

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The Black Revolution in America persuasive essay help: persuasive essay help

WEEK 6: The Black Revolution in America

Lesson Overview

Welcome to Week 6! For many students, this week is one of the most informative because they specifically wanted to learn more about the Civil Rights Movement. In addition, to the Civil Rights Movement we will also be discussing “Black Power”, Black nationalism, and the Black Arts Movement.
Many students have a hard time wrapping their heads around why men and women let themselves be treated in such a oppressed way. Hopefully, what you have learned thus far helps put this into perspective. There is probably no other story that illustrates the power of the color line as the lynching of Emmett Till. In the summer of 1955, Till, who was only 15 years old, was taken out of his uncle’s home and lynched because he supposedly whistled at a white woman. His lynching, along with the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision helped launch the modern day civil rights movement.
Up to this point in history, we have read about the formation of black organizations, the strength of the black church and black presses. It is evident that the black community had strong social institutions in place, so when Till was lynched and schools were ordered to desegregate, the community was willing and able to jump into action. A photo of Till’s lynched body was published in Jet Magazine. This photo angered, saddened and helped propel many in the black community into action.
With the past 5 weeks under your belt, you should have a solid understanding of what African Americans were fighting for, what philosophies and ideologies they used, who the national leaders were, the role of African American women, the role of White America and how the United States changed after the movement concluded.
In addition, you will learn how the civil rights movement helped unleash Black Power, what Malcolm X was really about, and how African Americans tried to gain more cultural power through the Black Arts Movement.

Course Objectives:

Identify the various methods and philosophies used to campaign for advancements in civil rights by the African American community.
Understand the significance of past historical events on issues surrounding the African American community today

Weekly Objectives:

Understand how the theory of civil disobedience impacted the southern protest strategy
Identify the various key leaders and organizations during the civil rights and black power movements
Identify how the U.S. government helped and hindered the civil rights movement
Understand the goals of the civil rights movement and how these goals differed depending on geography.
Examine stereotypes concerning the civil rights movement and why they exist

In this lesson, we will discuss:

The significance of Brown v. Board of Education and how white supremacy challenged the Supreme Court’s ruling.
The leaders, tactics and philosophy of the modern civil rights movement.
The role of Federal Government as ally, and opponent, to the movement.
The role of the youth and students within the movement.
The rise of Black Power and why African Americans became more angry during the 1960s.
Malcolm X and the ideology of the Nation of Islam and other separatist groups of the era.
African American protests to the Vietnam War and the role of the African American soldier in Vietnam.

Chapter 21: The Freedom Movement

Why is Brown v Board of Education one of the most important Supreme Court decisions of the 20th Century?
How did white southerners’ strategy of massive resistance affect the modern civil rights movement?
How did black women and children challenge segregation and discrimination in their communities?
Who were the leaders of the modern civil rights movement?
How did the federal government support and at times thwart the freedom movement?
What role did ordinary or local people play in the civil rights movement? How did children contribute to the struggle for social Why did the federal government intervene in the civil rights movement? What were the major pieces of legislation enacted, and how did they dismantle legalized segregation?
What were the ideologies, objectives, and tactics of the major civil rights organizations and their leaders?
Who were some of the people who lost their lives in the struggle?
What were the major successes and failures of the freedom movement? What intergenerational tensions plagued the movement? How did the movement transform American politics and society?

Chapter 22: Black Nationalism, Black Power, Black Arts

Why did African Americans in Watts, Newark, and Detroit rebel in 1965-1967? What did these rebellions suggest about the value of the civil rights movement victories?
How did the visions and ideals, successes and failures of Martin Luther King Jr. compare with those of Lyndon Johnson? Why were these men at odds with each other?
What role did African Americans play in the Vietnam War?
In what ways can the presidency of Richard Nixon be considered progressive? Which reforms initiated by President Johnson did Nixon advance once he took office? What was the southern strategy?
How did the black power movement stimulate black culture?
What were the major ideological concerns of the artists of the black arts movement? To what extent did James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka have similar views about art consciousness, aesthetics, and politics?
Why did African Americans not form a third political party? Why was the rise of black elected officials so significant?
Why were African Americans disappointed with the presidency of Jimmy Carter?

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The Birth of a Nation Film college essay help onlineLA1
After watching all the films in Week Twos content (with the exception of The Birth of a Nation) discuss at least 5 storytelling/narrative/plot) devices or editing choices that you have seen in recent films or TV shows. How did these devices or choices help drive the story? Then link those narrative techniques to the films you watched.
For example: In Walk, – You, Walk! (1912) Rose gets the help of friends to teach someone who mistreated her a lesson. This is common plot device in todays situation comedies.

LA 2
The Birth of a Nation (1913) is still seen as a monumental film due to its innovation of filming techniques that are still used today. For example, one of D. W. Griffith’s key contributions was his pioneering use of cross-cutting to follow parallel lines of action. An early audience might have been confused by a film that showed first one group of characters, then another, then the first again, But Griffith successfully uses such a technique in a chase scene that is rarely not use in an action movie today. Besides cross-cutting, There are at less 16 other ways in which Griffith was an innovator, ranging from his night photography to his use of the iris shot and color tinting. Due to Giffiths efforts, this is a film of great visual beauty and narractive power.
However, the movie is racist and unapologetic about its attitudes, which are those of a white Southerner, raised in the 19th century, unable to see African-Americans as fellow beings of worth and rights.
With that in mind, answer the following questions.
Is it possible to separate the content from the filmcraft? If art should serve beauty and truth, can great art be in the thrall of hateful ideologies? Can we still find beauty in such an ugly past? Is it reasonability okay to enjoy viewing such art with such a message?
Are there more recent films, TV shows, music, pieces of art that press against the same types of issues? If so, how do we/should we respond to them?

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U.S History Working essay help services: essay help servicesgood answer that fits the paper
first picture and second one is together as 1 paper
total is 5 paper
so the third and fourth is the second paper
fifth and six together in fo the third and contiue other 2 is fourth paper and last two pic is the fifth paper
attach different file so i know which answer is for which paper

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The Progressive Movement history essay help: history essay helpPrepare:Read Chapter 5 of the textbook,ofThe Jungle, and watch.
Reflect:As you learn about the Progressive Era, consider the areas of American society and economy in need of reform during the first two decades of the 20th century. Think about the issues on which the Progressive Movement focused, and consider where Progressives were able to make reforms and where they were not.
Write:After readingofThe Jungleand watching, use these sources and the textbook to address the following questions:

What do you see as the most serious problem of the first decade of the 1900s?
Why was this problem more serious than the other problems?
How did Americans attempt to solve the problem?
In what ways were they effective?
In what ways did aspects of the problem still remain?

Your initial post should be at least 250 words in length. Support your claims with examples from the required material(s) and properly cite any references. You may use additional scholarly sources to support your points if you choose. Your references and citations must be formatted according to APA style
MUST USE THE ATTACHED CHAPTERS AND RESOURCES FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT!!! MUST CITE WITHIN WRITEN WORK!! MUST ADDRESS ALL ISSUES OF THE ASSIGNMENT!!!! MAKE SURE TO USE THE CHAPTER AND OTHER RESOURCES ASSIGNED FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT!!!!!

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The Incorporation Of Mexico Into The United States college application essay help
HIST 120 Dr. Schaffer
Primary Sources on the Mexican-American War

Refer to Map 14.5 on p. 301 of Out of Many when reading these sources. President Polk and Congressman Lincoln refer to the Del Norte River. That is
another name for the Rio Grande. The Nueces River was the boundary between
the Republic of Texas and Mexico; on the map in Out of Many, it forms the
border between the Republic of Texas and an area labelled Disputed by Texas
and Mexico.

1.

2

HIST 120 Dr. Schaffer

2.

3

HIST 120 Dr. Schaffer

Polk and Lincoln excerpts from D. Yancey, Retrieving the American Past (2007), pp. 25053.

3.

4

HIST 120 Dr. Schaffer

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The Worlds Antislavery Convention In 1840 essay help: essay helpFull Question: Why was Cady Stanton’s attendance at the World’s Antislavery Convention in 1840 important to her development as a women’s rights advocate? And how did Stanton’s life between the World’s Antislavery Convention in1840 and the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 deepen her commitment to women’s equal rights?

– Needs to be at least 300 words and using the references I uploaded.

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Excerpt from Eighty Years and More history essay help
HIST 120 Dr. Schaffer
Excerpt from Eighty Years and More, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the Seneca
Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions

1. Excerpt from Eighty Years and More, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1898)1 This is Cady Stantons autobiography, published when she was 83 years old. In these excerpts,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton looks back at the fateful events of 1840, as well as the challenges she faced
trying to combine her interest in gaining greater rights for women while also being a full-time wife and
mother and running a household.
Our chief object in visiting England at this time was to attend the World’s Anti-slavery Convention, to
meet June 12, 1840, in Freemason’s Hall, London. Delegates from all the anti-slavery societies of
civilized nations were invited, yet, when they arrived, those representing associations of women were
rejected. Though women were members of the National Anti-slavery Society, accustomed to speak and
vote in all its conventions, and to take an equally active part with men in the whole anti-slavery struggle,
and were there as delegates from associations of men and women, as well as those distinctively of their
own sex, yet all alike were rejected because they were women. Women, according to the English
prejudices of that time, were excluded by Scriptural texts from sharing equal dignity and authority with
men in all reform associations; hence it was to English minds pre-eminently unfitting that women should
be admitted as equal members to a World’s Convention. The question was hotly debated through an
entire day. My husband made a very eloquent speech in favor of admitting the women delegates.
When we consider [the] many remarkable women [who] were all compelled to listen in
silence to the masculine platitudes on woman’s sphere, one may form some idea of the indignation of
unprejudiced friends, and especially that of such women as Lydia Maria Child, Maria Chapman,
Deborah Weston, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, and Abby Kelly, who were impatiently waiting and
watching on this side, in painful suspense, to hear how their delegates were received. Judging from my
own feelings, the women on both sides of the Atlantic must have been humiliated and chagrined, except
as these feelings were outweighed by contempt for the shallow reasoning of their opponents, and their
comical pose and gestures in some of the intensely earnest flights of their imagination.
The clerical portion of the convention was most violent in its opposition. The clergymen seemed
to have God and his angels especially in their care and keeping, and were in agony lest the women
should do or say something to shock the heavenly hosts. Their all-sustaining conceit gave them abundant
assurance that their movements must necessarily be all-pleasing to the celestials whose ears were open
to the proceedings of the World’s Convention
One of our champions in the convention, George Bradburn, a tall thick-set man with a voice like
thunder, standing head and shoulders above the clerical representatives, swept all their arguments aside
1 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More. Reminiscences 18151897 (Boston, 1993), pp. 7983 and 14350.

2

HIST 120 Dr. Schaffer
by declaring with tremendous emphasis that, if they could prove to him that the Bible taught the entire
subjection of one-half of the race to the other, he should consider that the best thing he could do for
humanity would be to bring together every Bible in the universe and make a grand bonfire of them.
It was really pitiful to hear narrow-minded bigots, pretending to be teachers and leaders of men,
so cruelly remanding their own mothers, with the rest of woman-kind, to absolute subjection to the
ordinary masculine type of humanity. I always regretted that the women themselves had not taken part
in the debate before the convention was fully organized and the question of delegates settled. It seemed
to me then, and does now, that all delegates with credentials from recognized societies should have had
a voice in the organization of the convention, though subject to exclusion afterward. However, the
women sat in a low curtained seat like a church choir, and modestly listened to the French, British, and
American Solons for twelve of the longest days in June, as did, also, our grand Garrison and Rogers in
the gallery. 2 They scorned a convention that ignored the rights of the very women who had fought, side
by side, with them in the anti-slavery conflict. “After battling so many long years,” said Garrison, “for
the liberties of African slaves, I can take no part in a convention that strikes down the most sacred rights
of all women.” After coming three thousand miles to speak on the subject nearest his heart, he nobly
shared the enforced silence of the rejected delegates. It was a great act of self-sacrifice that should never
be forgotten by women
As the convention adjourned, the remark was heard on all sides, “It is about time some demand
was made for new liberties for women.” As Mrs. Mott and I walked home, arm in arm, commenting on
the incidents of the day, we resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and form a
society to advocate the rights of women. At the lodging house on Queen Street, where a large number of
delegates had apartments, the discussions were heated at every meal, and at times so bitter that, at last,
Mr. Birney packed his valise and sought more peaceful quarters. Having strongly opposed the admission
of women as delegates to the convention it was rather embarrassing to meet them, during the intervals
between the various sessions, at the table and in the drawing room.
These were the first women I had ever met who believed in the equality of the sexes and who did
not believe in the popular orthodox religion. The acquaintance of Lucretia Mott, who was a broad,
liberal thinker on politics, religion, and all questions of reform, opened to me a new world of thought.
As we walked about to see the sights of London, I embraced every opportunity to talk with her. It was
intensely gratifying to hear all that, through years of doubt, I had dimly thought, so freely discussed by
other women, some of them no older than myselfwomen, too, of rare intelligence, cultivation, and
refinement
IN the spring of 1847 we moved to Seneca Falls. Here we spent sixteen years of our married life,
and here our other childrentwo sons and two daughterswere born
2 Solon was an Athenian politician, war-hero and poet who lived c.600 BC. His reforms helped make Athens more
democratic. Garrison is the fiery abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison.

3

HIST 120 Dr. Schaffer
The house we were to occupy had been closed for some years and needed many repairs, and the
grounds, comprising five acres, were overgrown with weeds. My father gave me a check and said, with
a smile, “You believe in woman’s capacity to do and dare; now go ahead and put your place in order.”
After a minute survey of the premises and due consultation with one or two sons of Adam, I set the
carpenters, painters, paperhangers, and gardeners at work, built a new kitchen and woodhouse, and in
one month took possession. Having left my children with my mother, there were no impediments to a
full display of my executive ability. In the purchase of brick, timber, paint, etc., and in making bargains
with workmen, I was in frequent consultation with Judge Sackett and Mr. Bascom. The latter was a
member of the Constitutional Convention, then in session in Albany, and as he used to walk down
whenever he was at home, to see how my work progressed, we had long talks, sitting on boxes in the
midst of tools and shavings, on the status of women. I urged him to propose an amendment to Article II,
Section 3, of the State Constitution, striking out the word “male,” which limits the suffrage to men. But,
while he fully agreed with all I had to say on the political equality of women, he had not the courage to
make himself the laughing-stock of the convention. Whenever I cornered him on this point, manlike he
turned the conversation to the painters and carpenters. However, these conversations had the effect of
bringing him into the first woman’s convention, where he did us good service.
In Seneca Falls my life was comparatively solitary, and the change from Boston was somewhat
depressing. There, all my immediate friends were reformers, I had near neighbors, a new home with all
the modern conveniences, and well-trained servants. Here our residence was on the outskirts of the
town, roads very often muddy and no sidewalks most of the way, Mr. Stanton was frequently from
home, I had poor servants, and an increasing number of children. To keep a house and grounds in good
order, purchase every article for daily use, keep the wardrobes of half a dozen human beings in proper
trim, take the children to dentists, shoemakers, and different schools, or find teachers at home, altogether
made sufficient work to keep one brain busy, as well as all the hands I could impress into the service.
Then, too, the novelty of housekeeping had passed away, and much that was once attractive in domestic
life was now irksome. I had so many cares that the company I needed for intellectual stimulus was a trial
rather than a pleasure.
There was quite an Irish settlement at a short distance, and continual complaints were coming to
me that my boys threw stones at their pigs, cows, and the roofs of their houses. This involved constant
diplomatic relations in the settlement of various difficulties, in which I was so successful that, at length,
they constituted me a kind of umpire in all their own quarrels. If a drunken husband was pounding his
wife, the children would run for me. Hastening to the scene of action, I would take Patrick by the collar,
and, much to his surprise and shame, make him sit down and promise to behave himself. I never had one
of them offer the least resistance, and in time they all came to regard me as one having authority. I
strengthened my influence by cultivating good feeling. I lent the men papers to read, and invited their
children into our grounds; giving them fruit, of which we had abundance, and my children’s old clothes,
books, and toys. I was their physician, alsowith my box of homeopathic medicines I took charge of the
men, women, and children in sickness. Thus the most amicable relations were established, and, in any
emergency, these poor neighbors were good friends and always ready to serve me.

4

HIST 120 Dr. Schaffer
But I found police duty rather irksome, especially when called out dark nights to prevent drunken
fathers from disturbing their sleeping children, or to minister to poor mothers in the pangs of maternity.
Alas! alas! who can measure the mountains of sorrow and suffering endured in unwelcome motherhood
in the abodes of ignorance, poverty, and vice, where terror-stricken women and children are the victims
of strong men frenzied with passion and intoxicating drink?
Up to this time life had glided by with comparative ease, but now the real struggle was upon me.
My duties were too numerous and varied, and none sufficiently exhilarating or intellectual to bring into
play my higher faculties. I suffered with mental hunger, which, like an empty stomach, is very
depressing. I had books, but no stimulating companionship. To add to my general dissatisfaction at the
change from Boston, I found that Seneca Falls was a malarial region, and in due time all the children
were attacked with chills and fever which, under homeopathic treatment in those days, lasted three
months. The servants were afflicted in the same way. Cleanliness, order, the love of the beautiful and
artistic, all faded away in the struggle to accomplish what was absolutely necessary from hour to hour.
Now I understood, as I never had before, how women could sit down and rest in the midst of general
disorder. Housekeeping, under such conditions, was impossible, so I packed our clothes, locked up the
house, and went to that harbor of safety, home, as I did ever after in stress of weather.
I now fully understood the practical difficulties most women had to contend with in the isolated
household, and the impossibility of woman’s best development if in contact, the chief part of her life,
with servants and children. Fourier’s phalansterie community life and co-operative households had a
new significance for me. 3 Emerson says, “A healthy discontent is the first step to progress.” The general
discontent I felt with woman’s portion as wife, mother, housekeeper, physician, and spiritual guide, the
chaotic conditions into which everything fell without her constant supervision, and the wearied, anxious
look of the majority of women impressed me with a strong feeling that some active measures should be
taken to remedy the wrongs of society in general, and of women in particular. My experience at the
World’s Anti-slavery Convention, all I had read of the legal status of women, and the oppression I saw
everywhere, together swept across my soul, intensified now by many personal experiences. It seemed as
if all the elements had conspired to impel me to some onward step. I could not see what to do or where
to beginmy only thought was a public meeting for protest and discussion.
In this tempest-tossed condition of mind I received an invitation to spend the day with Lucretia
Mott, at Richard Hunt’s, in Waterloo. There I met several members of different families of Friends, 4
earnest, thoughtful women. I poured out, that day, the torrent of my long-accumulating discontent, with
such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare
anything. My discontent, according to Emerson, must have been healthy, for it moved us all to prompt
action, and we decided, then and there, to call a “Woman’s Rights Convention.” We wrote the call that
evening and published it in the Seneca County Courier the next day, the 14th of July, 1848, giving only
five days’ notice, as the convention was to be held on the 19th and 20th. The call was inserted without
3 Charles Fourier was a French socialist. A number of utopian communities based on his ideas of communal division of labor
were established in the United States in the early 1800s. (They were all short-lived.) 4 Quakers.

5

HIST 120 Dr. Schaffer
signatures,in fact it was a mere announcement of a meeting,but the chief movers and managers were
Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann McClintock, Jane Hunt, Martha C. Wright, and myself. The convention, which
was held two days in the Methodist Church, was in every way a grand success. The house was crowded
at every session, the speaking good, and a religious earnestness dignified all the proceedings.
These were the hasty initiative steps of “the most momentous reform that had yet been launched
on the worldthe first organized protest against the injustice which had brooded for ages over the
character and destiny of one-half the race.” No words could express our astonishment on finding, a few
days afterward, that what seemed to us so timely, so rational, and so sacred, should be a subject for
sarcasm and ridicule to the entire press of the nation. With our Declaration of Rights and Resolutions for
a text, 5 it seemed as if every man who could wield a pen prepared a homily on “woman’s sphere.”
6 All
the journals from Maine to Texas seemed to strive with each other to see which could make our
movement appear the most ridiculous. The anti-slavery papers stood by us manfully and so did
Frederick Douglass, both in the convention and in his paper, The North Star, but so pronounced was the
popular voice against us, in the parlor, press, and pulpit, that most of the ladies who had attended the
convention and signed the declaration, one by one, withdrew their names and influence and joined our
persecutors. Our friends gave us the cold shoulder and felt themselves disgraced by the whole
proceeding.
If I had had the slightest premonition of all that was to follow that convention, I fear I should not
have had the courage to risk it, and I must confess that it was with fear and trembling that I consented to
attend another, one month afterward, in Rochester. Fortunately, the first one seemed to have drawn all
the fire, and of the second but little was said. But we had set the ball in motion, and now, in quick
succession, conventions were held in Ohio, Indiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and in the City of
New York, and have been kept up nearly every year since.

5 That is, the Declaration of Sentiments.
6 A reference to the cult of domesticity.

6

HIST 120 Dr. Schaffer
2. The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions (1848) The events of 1840, when women were denied permission to speak at the Worlds Antislavery
Convention in London, England, led some female abolitionists to begin agitating for womens rights. 7

Prominent among these women were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, who helped organize
the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. This convention produced the Declaration of Sentiments and
Resolutions, which was based on the Declaration of Independence. Newspapers lambasted the
convention, poking fun at the participants and their goals. However, the convention marks the
beginning of the womens rights movement in the United States, and was already bearing fruit by the
1860s. In 1860, the state of New York granted married women control over their own wages and over
property they had brought into a marriage; and in 1869 Wyoming became the first territory in the US to
grant women the right to vote.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to
assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied,
but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of
mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these
ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution
of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form,
as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that
governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all
experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right
themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and
usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute
despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future
security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the
necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man
toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this,
let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
7 Printed, with corrections, from The Modern History Sourcebook at Fordham University:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/senecafalls.html.

7

HIST 120 Dr. Schaffer
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men–both
natives and foreigners.
Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her
without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with
impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is
compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master
the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.
He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of
separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the
happiness of women–the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and
giving all power into his hands.
After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has
taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable
to it.
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to
follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most
honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed
against her.
He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinate position, claiming apostolic authority
for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the
affairs of the church.
He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men
and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated,
but deemed of little account in man.
He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a
sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.

8

HIST 120 Dr. Schaffer
He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to
lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social
and religious degradation in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel
themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that
they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the
United States.
In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception,
misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our
object

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Moral Reform Movements cbest essay help

Document Interpretation 5: Moral Reform Movements

22 unread replies.22 replies.

Overview
One of the most important skills a historian develops is the ability to evaluate historical documents. This evaluation concerns asking questions of the documents that allows a historian to have insight in a particular topic or period being investigated. This week’s documents relate to the weekly module topic. This week’s documents relate to the weekly module topic of culture and cultural interaction. If you still need help prioritizing your questions of the document go to the. Use the questions below to learn how to analyze various types of sources and to become an historian yourself.
Directions
In this weekly discussion assignment you will need to:

Choose one of the documents below to read.
Write a 250-500 word initial post andand present your interpretation of the document and the material you have been introduced to in this module.

Frederick Douglass,,Fellow citizens to the end of the section (The Internal Slave Trade)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton,

Why would the authors of the Declaration parallel the Declaration of Independence?
What is their major demand?
Why would people reject and actively fight against the ideas of this document?

Charles G. Finney,(Read only: the last paragraph of the introduction (It is altogether improbablecannot contain themselves any longer.; What a revival is section; The third remark at the end, You see the error of thosedamnation of the world)

The purpose of the revival was to change the individual and society. What does Finney fear in American society? What changes does he expect tas a result of the revival?
What does Finney mean by, excitement? Why would this concept bother other ministers?

What is the picture of the ideal wife portrayed in these two letters? Of the ideal husband?
To what extent do you think these images correspond to reality for most Americans in the 1820s? To what extent do they correspond to contemporary realities?

Writing Guidelines
Step 1 — Summarizing
A summary is a short paragraph telling what themain ideaof a reading/lecture/video is about. These are some basic steps to follow in order to create a summary:

Read the text andunderlineorhighlightthe main idea and the main details.
Put the text aside and write down the main idea and details in a separate document/on a separate piece of paper.DO NOT LOOK AT THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENT!
Write your summary using your typed/handwritten notes.
Check your summary and the original article to be sure you have included only the mostimportant informationand that you have notdirectly copied from the article.

Step 2 — Interpretation
Keep in mind these guidelines for analysis of your document from the.
Questions to ask of any source..

Who is the author?Who wrote or created this? Is there a single or multiple authors? An author’s identity sometimes helps youanswerthe later questions.
What type of source is this?Is it aphotographor a poem? A biography or a government document? This is a simple but crucialstepbecause you must consider what you can expect to learn from the document.
What is the message of this source?What is the author describing? What is happening in the text or image? What is the story?
Who is the intended audience?Who is the author addressing? Was the source intended for private or public consumption? Identifying the audience will help you answer the next question.
Why was this source created?Does the author have an agenda, a larger purpose? Is the author trying to persuade the audience? Is the document or source simply a compilation of facts, or does it include opinion, inference, or interpretation?
Is this source credible and accurate?Historians must examine every source with a critical eye. What do you know about the author? Does the document make sense? Do the facts presented by the author or what you know about the time period support the thesis, statement, assertion, or story the author is conveying? Why should youtrust, or distrust, this source?
How is this source valuable to me?How does the source relate to other sources from the time period or along the same issue or theme? Does it support or contradict them? Does it repeat information from other sources or add new information? How relevant is the source to your topic of inquiry? Does it extensively cover your topic, or only marginally or not at all? Remember, you should explore enough sources to obtain a variety of viewpoints.

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Processes of State Formation in the Inca Heartland college admissions essay help: college admissions essay help– Brian S. Bauer and R. Alan Covey, Processes of State Formation in the Inca Heartland (Cuzco, Peru),American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 104, No. 3 (Sept., 2002), pp. 846-864 check attachment

And then discuss: How does the story described in the essay you chose relate to the theme of isolationism and the fate of civilizations? That is does it support what we covered in class, or not? Also consider these prompts in your essay:
a. What methods do the authors use to investigate the history of state formation in theMeso-American civilization (historical, ecological, anthropological, ethnographic, archaeological etc)?
b. Are you convinced by their arguments? That is, does their evidence support their claims?
c. What is the Late Intermediate Period and would you consider these civilizations isolated or not?

Each week students will post a comment of 250-350 words on a question related to the weekly readings or other materials. It requires specific references and citations to the readings or other assigned materials (e.g. films).

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Empiricism in Babylonian Omen summary and response essay help
Empiricism in Babylonian Omen Texts and the Classification of Mesopotamian Divination as Science Author(s): Francesca Rochberg Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 119, No. 4 (Oct. – Dec., 1999), pp. 559- 569 Published by: American Oriental Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/604834 . Accessed: 03/01/2011 11:59
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EMPIRICISM IN BABYLONIAN OMEN TEXTS AND THE CLASSIFICATION OF MESOPOTAMIAN DIVINATION AS SCIENCE
FRANCESCA ROCHBERG
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE
This paper reevaluates the empirical content of Babylonian omen protases in the light of more recent discussions among philosophers of science of the relation between observation and theory, and argues against separating observationally derived phenomena, understood as physical objects of ordinary sense perception, from those derived by use of schematic symmetries. The goal of this paper is to ascertain the criteria of observation implied by omen texts in order to evaluate the “empirical” nature of Mesopotamian divination in the wider framework of the history of science.
To the memory of John A. Phillips
INTRODUCTION: THE CLASSIFICATION OF
BABYLONIAN DIVINATION AS SCIENCE
THE STUDY OF ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN SCIENCE has
been largely devoted to the reading and analysis of the
many astronomical records, both observational and com-
putational, found in the southern Mesopotamian cities of
Babylon and Uruk, dating mostly from the period after 500 B.C.] Earlier texts of astronomical interest, found in
Assyrian sites such as Nineveh and Assur, provide evi- dence of the incorporation of astronomical events within a vast system of divination that predicted the future on the basis of natural and other events of many kinds.2 Such events were viewed as signs produced by the gods by
Portions of this paper were presented at the 208th meeting of the American Oriental Society in New Orleans, April 1998. I want to thank Sir Geoffrey Lloyd and Prof. Ernan McMullin for their insightful and encouraging readings of the paper.
1 See 0. Neugebauer, Astronomical Cuneiform Texts, 3 vols. (London: Lund Humphries, 1955); idem, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, 3 vols. (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1975), with bibliography.
2 See S. Parpola, Letters from Assyrian Scholars to the Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal, vols. I and II, Alter Orient und Altes Testament, vol. 5.2 (Kevelaer: Verlag Butzon & Berker, 1970 and 1983); H. Hunger, Astrological Reports to Assyrian Kings, State Archives of Assyria, vol. 8 (Helsinki: Helsinki Univ. Press, 1992); and S. Parpola, Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars, State Archives of Assyria, vol. 10 (Hel- sinki: Helsinki Univ. Press, 1993).
means of which humans were forewarned of future events.
Foreknowledge could therefore be obtained by systematic consideration and interpretation of the omens.3
Assyriologists have considered the omen texts a form of science in Mesopotamia primarily because many of the phenomena of interest in these texts are of the phys- ical, natural, world.4 Thus many of the omen protases of
3 For general studies of Mesopotamian divination, see A. L.
Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civiliza- tion, rev. ed. E. Reiner (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977); and J. Bott6ro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning and the Gods, tr. Z. Bahrani and M. van de Meiroop (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992). Editions of Babylonian omen texts may be found in E. Leichty, The Omen Series Summa Izbu, Texts from Cune- iform Sources, vol. 4 (Locust Valley: J. J. Augustin Publisher, 1970); Erica Reiner and David Pingree, Babylonian Planetary Omens, vols. I-II, Bibliotheca Mesopotamica, vols. 2.1 and 2.2 (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1975 and 1981); F Rochberg- Halton, Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divination: The Lunar Eclipse Tablets of Enuma Anu Enlil, Archiv fur Orientforschung, Beiheft 22 (Horn: Verlag Ferdinand Berger & Sohne, 1988); Wilfred H. van Soldt, Solar Omens of Enama Anu Enlil: Tablets 23 (24)-29 (30) (Leiden: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 1995); A Leo Oppenheim, The Interpreta- tion of Dreams in the Ancient Near East, Transactions, vol. 46.3 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1956); F. R. Kraus, Texte zur babylonischen Physiognomatik, Archiv fur Orientfor- schung, Beiheft 3 (Osnabruck: Biblio-Verlag, 1939).
4 Note the discussion of omens under the rubric “science” in the general overview of Mesopotamian culture by W. von Soden,
559

Journal of the American Oriental Society 119.4 (1999)
the celestial omen series Enuma Anu Enlil, parts of Summa alu dealing with fauna, of Summa izbu focusing on anomalous animal and human births, of Alamdimmu, that deal with the variable forms of the human anatomy, and even parts of the Ziqiqu dreambook, have come to be
inspected as sources for understanding the Mesopotamian attempt to grasp the workings of nature. Because the diverse systems of Mesopotamian divination all stemmed from a belief in the gods’ involvement in the physical, as well as the social worlds, and because of the close rela-
tionship of divination to apotropaic ritual magic, the body of knowledge represented by the omen texts has not al-
ways been classified as science, particularly by historians of science who prefer to see in this material a form of pre- or proto-science.5
Beginning in the 1960s, however, philosophers and
anthropologists have argued about the similarities and dif- ferences that relate or distinguish traditional (religious/ magical) and modem (scientific) thinking. As well, they have also discussed the implications of accepting a rela- tivism of “modes of thought” for defining both science and the criteria of scientific truth.6 Those disposed to- ward relativism extend the term science to divination
The Ancient Orient: An Introduction to the Study of the Ancient Near East, tr. Donald G. Schley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1994), 153-57; celestial omens under the heading “Astronomy in Mesopotamia,” in H. W. F Saggs, Civilization
Before Greece and Rome (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 236-38; and the chapter entitled “Divination and the Scientific
Spirit,” in J. Bottero, Mesopotamia, 125-37. 5 A. Aaboe, “Scientific Astronomy in Antiquity,” in The Place
of Astronomy in the Ancient World, ed. F R. Hodson (London: Oxford Univ. Press for The British Academy, 1974), 21-42; O. Pedersen, Early Physics and Astronomy: A Historical Intro-
duction, rev. ed. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993): see ch. 1 “Science Before the Greeks,” under the subheading, “The Myth- ological Explanation of Nature,” pp. 7-9.
6 See Robin Horton, “African Traditional Thought and West- ern Science,” Africa 37 (1967), reprinted as ch. 7 of Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion, and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993); and Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), ch. 6:
“Rationality, Relativism, the Translation and Commensurability of Cultures.” See also the collection of papers edited by Bryan R.
Wilson, Rationality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970); the now classic collection edited by R. Horton and Ruth Finnegan, Modes
of Thought (London: Faber and Faber, 1973); and the more re-
cently edited collection by David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance, Modes of Thought: Exploration in Culture and Cognition (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
and magic. This discussion becomes relevant to the study of magical, alchemical, and astrological sources in the
history of Western science, with the result that the cri- teria defining science “in general” established by Boyle and the Royal Society of London in the seventeenth cen-
tury have at long last been rejected, as Barnes, Bloor, and Henry put it, “not least because philosophers and historians have now demonstrated repeatedly that the contents of the accepted, authentic history of science are not capable of being demarcated by this criterion, or indeed by any other.”7
For historians in the current post-positivistic climate, science has ceased to be the exclusively logical and em-
pirical inquiry it once was, clearly and cleanly separable from theology, metaphysics, and other speculative or
“mythic” forms of thought.8 The impact of this histori-
ography is such that many philosophers of science no
longer exclude all but “matters of fact and ratiocination” from science and have even come so far as to call into
question the old demarcation game itself.9 Historical con- siderations aside, on purely epistemological grounds some have argued that “there is apparently no epistemic feature or set of such features which all and only the ‘sciences’ exhibit…. It is time we abandoned that lingering ‘scien- tistic’ prejudice which holds that ‘the sciences’ and sound
knowledge are coextensive; they are not.”‘0
7 Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and John Henry, Scientific
Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 149.
8 The following are merely a suggestion of what is now an enormous literature: Ron Millen, “The Manifestation of Occult
Qualities in the Scientific Revolution,” in Religion, Science and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall, ed. M. J. Osler and P. L. Farber (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 185-216; the collection of papers edited by David C.
Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990); also the
papers of Keith Hutchinson, “What Happened to Occult Quali- ties in the Scientific Revolution,” B. J. T Dobbs, “Newton’s Al-
chemy and His Theory of Matter,” and other papers collected in The Scientific Enterprise in Early Modern Europe: Readings from Isis, ed. Peter Dear (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997).
9 See “Introductory Remarks” of Marx W. Wartofsky in Sci-
ence, Pseudo-Science and Society, ed. Marsha P Hanen, Margaret J. Osler, and Robert G. Weyant (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier Univ. Press, 1979), 1-9. See also Barnes, Bloor, and Henry, Scientific Knowledge, ch. 6, “Drawing Boundaries,”140-68.
10 L. Laudan, Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory, Method, and Evidence (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 85-86.
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ROCHBERG: Empiricism in Babylonian Omen Texts
Where ancient Mesopotamian traditions are concerned, it would seem that the “scientistic prejudice” does linger and old demarcations prevail. Otherwise, why do ideas
persist such as that science begins only with the Greeks and continues to evolve to the present day?11 Or that
genuine science in Babylonia begins with the mathemat- ical astronomy at the end of the sixth century B.C.? The reason for this surely has to do with the fact that the cuneiform “scientific texts,” whatever these are taken to include and however they are defined, are our earliest known historical sources for science; and so, inquiring into Mesopotamian science carries the extra burden of
inquiring into the origins of science. To raise the question of when science begins already implies a demarcation between science and pre-science, or non-science, but the “scientistic prejudice” becomes explicit when, as von Staden said, “the quest for the ‘origins’ of science often is tacitly accompanied by a search for ancient motivations that resemble modern scientific ones.”‘2
If, however, classification of the omen texts is not to be based on an argument from affinity with modern or other known sciences, on what set of criteria is it to be
11 Despite the sizable body of work by O. Neugebauer and A. Aaboe showing the debt to Mesopotamia of Greek astro- nomical science, statements from the wider field of history and
philosophy of science still frequently assume, as Philip Kitcher
does, that “scientists in the tradition that extends beyond the seventeenth century to the ancient Greeks have been moved by the impersonal epistemic aim of fathoming the structure of the world.” See P. Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 94.
12 Heinrich von Staden, “Affinities and Elisions: Helen and
Hellenocentrism,” Isis 83 (1992): 588. This tendency can be found in serious scholarship which carries over into less sophis- ticated work, where it does even more damage because of its wider and less knowledgeable readership. One example (there are many) is the following from a collection of readings in an- cient history where James Breasted is quoted as saying about the Edwin Smith surgical papyrus: “Here we find the first scientific observer known to us, and in this papyrus we have the earliest known scientific document.” Breasted’s comment was typical in
1930, but what follows from the editor ought now not to be: “The unknown author, who lived sometime during the Old Kingdom [sic], has written a treatise on surgery in which he inductively draws conclusions from a body of observed facts.” He goes on to
point out that magic was only used in one of the forty-eight cases described and he asserts that “a truly scientific attitude” is exem-
plified for the first time by this document. See Readings in An- cient History, ed. Nels M. Bailkey, 3rd ed. (Heath, 1987), 37.
based? We may strive not to distort ancient systems of
thought by the imposition of our own definitions and criteria and may try to determine the content, aims, and methods of such systems “from within.” But surely if the
discipline of scholarly divination bears no relation to the
discipline we have defined and determined by our own social and cultural concensus to be science, why do we seek to classify the native discipline of omens as “sci- ence” at all? Without attributing any necessary universal criteria to science, I think a simple answer is that, cor-
rectly or incorrectly, we recognize in this Mesopotamian tradition aspects of what we term science in our, i.e., the Western tradition. However carefully we may try to re- construct the terms of an “alien” system on the basis of primary texts, the meaning of the term science is not entirely recreated in every scholarly historical investi- gation. Though our classification of Mesopotamian divi- nation as “science” probably would make no sense to a
Babylonian, it serves to make comprehensible to us some aspects of this ancient intellectual tradition by connoting a number of features: among them, empiricism and sys- tematization of knowledge. Within the wider framework of assessing cuneiform sources in terms of the criteria by which Mesopotamian divination might be classified as science, the present paper tackles only one such criterion, namely, the empirical character of the omens.
THE EMPIRICAL CHARACTER OF OBJECTS OF
(MESOPOTAMIAN) SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
Most would agree that the desire to comprehend natu- ral phenomena is the common denominator for science
regardless of its cultural manifestation. However, in ref- erence to the Mesopotamian omen texts, to equate omens with an inquiry into such phenomena does not fairly represent these sources and seems to lose sight of the fact that Mesopotamian omen texts concerned signs of many kinds, of which natural phenomena formed but one. That Enima Anu Enlil and its companion piece, MUL.APIN, have generally been understood as the chief sources for Babylonian physical science before 500 B.C. takes these astronomical sources out of their broader in- tellectual context just to satisfy modern Western tastes. In an effort then to appreciate the full range of interests comprising the discipline developed for the study of phenomena, it seems important not to limit the general discussion of Mesopotamian divination as science to those parts of it, such as the astronomical omens, that have the greatest similarity to more familiar sciences. The “Babylonian” approach seemingly makes no episte- mological or methodological distinction between astro- nomical omens and other items of scholarly divination,
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Journal of the American Oriental Society 119.4 (1999)
as we see clearly in the letters and reports of the Neo-
Assyrian diviner-scholars.13
Beginning with Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, the dis- cussion of scientific knowledge has taken sense perception as fundamental to science and the basis for generaliza- tions about the natural world:
… we cannot employ induction (irmayoyri) if we lack
sense-perception, because it is sense-perception that
apprehends particulars. It is impossible to gain scientific
knowledge ( ntcriuTil) of them, since they can neither be apprehended from universals without induction, nor
through induction apart from sense-perception. (Posterior Analytics, I.xviii)
Speaking strictly of the protases, the arrangement of
subjects into categorical groups within the various lists of omens seems to point toward an empirical foundation for the lists in general, since any sort of classification of sub-
jects would be difficult to imagine without such a founda- tion. The study of signs, in the form of Babylonian omen
series, however, does not exhibit the same empirical constraints as are found in the study of some natural
phenomena, particularly astronomical phenomena that be- have in accordance with certain limited parameters. The
organization of tablets in the series Summa alu, for exam-
ple, assembles and classifies phenomena of widely dispar- ate subjects. The omens that deal with human phenomena would seem to be endlessly and unsystematically variable, as in the series Summa alu, which defines its interests rather broadly; Alamdimma, which focuses on the physi- ognomic characteristics of people; and SA.GIG, which studies the symptoms of the sick. Clearly there is some
overlap in what is of interest from series to series, but each series of so-called unprovoked (or non-impetrated) omens establishes a field of phenomena deemed appropriate for
study within its particular confines. The scope of the series Summa alu encompasses things of “real life” relating to
13 In a letter from the celestial divination expert Marduk-
sapik-zeri to king Assurbanipal, the scribe describes the breadth of his learning: “I fully master my father’s profession, the dis-
cipline of lamentation; I have studied and chanted the Series. I am competent in [.. .], ‘mouth-washing’ and purification of the
palace […] I have examined healthy and sick flesh. I have read the (astrological omen series) Enuma Anu Enlil [. ..] and made astronomical observations. I have read the (anomaly series) Summa izbu, the (physiognomical works) [Kataduqqui, Alam- dimmti and Nigdimdimmu, . . . and the (terrestrial omen series) Sum]ma alu.” Translation of S. Parpola, Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars, 122, no. 160: 36-42.
cities and houses, flora, fauna, water, fire, lights, or to an individual’s thoughts, prayers, actions of daily life (sex, sleep, family quarrels), and his perception of demons and
ghosts. This last subject, contained in tablets 19 and 21, raises
our primary question about the empirical nature of the omens. What does it mean to state that a demon was seen in a house?14 Or to construct omens from footprints of
gods or from cries of a ghost?15 The omens about super- natural entities are constructed in precisely the same way as are other physical appearances in omen protases, i.e., as subjects of the verb amdru (the basic meaning of which is “to see”) in the N-stem (nanmuru). In translations of omen protases, the passive forms of amaru, meaning “to be seen,” are often rendered as though active, “to appear,” as in the example: summa ina bit ameli hallulaya innamir “if a hallulaya-demon appears (literally, “is seen”) in
somebody’s house….”16 When phenomena we do not
regard as “observable” in the normal way, i.e., by ordinary sensory perception, are included in the list of omen pro- tases, such protases necessitate a reexamination of the cri- teria underlying observables in the Mesopotamian view.
And what of the omen protases that refer not to “super- natural” but to purportedly natural phenomena that cannot occur in nature? Unless we have totally misunderstood what is said in the following examples, these few omens
may serve to illustrate such non-occurring or unobservable
phenomena:
If the sun comes out in the night and the country sees its light everywhere: there will be disorder in the coun-
try everywhere (EAE 25 I 1).17
If the sun comes out in the night and lasts until the
morning: Enlil [.. .] the rumor of [.. .] if Erra speaks the people of the land will be diminished, the entire
country will not [ . .] rain (EAE 25 I 2).
If the sun comes out during the evening watch: an
uprising in the land [. ..] (followed by omens for the sun
coming out in the middle and morning watches, as well as the sun rising during various watches with other as- tral bodies “standing in front” of it) (EAE 25 I 5-10).
14 [DIg ina E NA MA]SKIM GIM UZ IGI E.BI BIR-ah “If a
goat-like demon appears in a man’s house: that house will be
dispersed” (CT 38 25). 15 See Summa alu tablet 19: 16-22 and 36-47, respectively;
see also CT 38 25 and KAR 396 dupl. lines 36-41. 16 CT 38 25b: 6 = Summa alu 19 6, also lines 7-12; see Sally
Moren, “The Omen Series ‘Summa Alu’: A Preliminary Inves-
tigation” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1978), 71. 17 Wilfred H. van Soldt, Solar Omens of Enuma Anu Enlil, 32.
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ROCHBERG: Empiricism in Babylonian Omen Texts
If we assume that the criterion for observability is access by ordinary sensory perception, then omens are problematic. The editor of the above text has translated, “If the ‘sun’. .. ,” in each case, implying that Samas, here, wr. with the normal logogram 20, does not refer to the sun, but perhaps something else we have not properly identi- fied. This demands that the something else we have not identified be observable by the criterion of ordinary see- ing. But he also notes that these omens continue the topic of the previous tablet, in which the protases of the final section deal with the unexpected appearance of the sun.18
Another example may be found in the omens that provide predictions for lunar eclipses “occurring” on days 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, and even istu UD.1.KAM adi UD.30. KAM” (on any day) from the first to the thirtieth (of the month).”19 These omens indicate a schema for eclipses on days of the month beginning with possible days of opposition, 14, 15, and 16, and continuing until con- junction at the end of the month. If we think the omen schemata refer only to what we take to be empirically observable phenomena, such a schema, setting out days 14-30 for “observing” a lunar eclipse, does not “make sense,” but may be excused if we assume it was not yet known that in the lunar calendar, days 17-30 (as well as days 1-13) are excluded as possible lunar eclipse days. Even if such limits on eclipse occurrences were not known when the Enuma Anu Enlil series was first com- piled, certainly by the Neo-Assyrian period the scribes knew well what were the possible days for the occurrence of a lunar eclipse. Many copies of Enuma Anu Enlil were made during this period, yet the faulty omens were still not deleted from the series.
If our goal as interpreters of this body of texts is to pre- serve the practical rationality of the Babylonians, we may choose to interpret these “eclipses” in accordance with Neo-Assyrian commentaries that gloss the term AN.KUlo “eclipse” with an explanation that clouds darken the moon.20 But given that the same term, attali sin, seems to be applied to astronomical, meteorological, and unob- servable eclipses, can the idea of a universal and objective empirical description really be a criterion for deciding when the text means an eclipse “occurring” on a physi- cally impossible day, or an eclipse caused by a cloud?
18 Ibid.. 32. 19 See my Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divination, chs.
7-9, 11-12 (in EAE 17-18, 19, 21-22). 20 E.g., summa sin adirma istenis irim /I attalu ina erpeti sa-
limti raqqati izzizma “if the moon is dark and is totally eclipsed (literally: covered)” (text writes salimtu raqqatu syllabically, without indicating the genitive); see my Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divination, 285, appendix 2.4 rev. 3-4.
The question of such veracity was raised by Erle Leichty in his treatment of the series Izbu. His determi- nation was that, indeed, most of the birth anomalies de- scribed in the protases could be identified with attested birth abnormalities, but that some could not. He adds, “from this we do not wish to argue that all the omens in the series were actually observed. This is simply not true. In addition to the cases where omens were obviously added in an attempt to make the series all-inclusive, there are also occasional omens where the anomaly is naturally impossible.”21 Leichty makes the point, and others (my- self included) have as well, that in the expansion and redaction of omen collections, additional omens were introduced, not on an empirical basis, but on the basis of the requirements of formal schemata into which phe- nomena were arranged.22 Most recently, John Britton and Christopher Walker have said that a method of “extrapo- lation from observed experience ad absurdum”23 charac- terizes Mesopotamian divination, citing as an example the series of lunar eclipse omens for days 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, of which only the fourteenth to sixteenth days are possible in a lunar calendar.24
This approach, to quote Sahlins, is “a common or gar- den variety of the classic Western sensory epistemology: the mind as mirror of nature.”25 It presumes the existence of a distinction between fact and fiction, “real” knowl- edge and fantasy, in the omen protases. Accordingly, the compilers of the series worked from an “empirical” core of actual observations of phenomena, but included phe- nomena of their own conceptual devising for the sake of completeness or the symmetry of certain scholastic sche- mata. Although omen protases have been analyzed this way, no Assyriologist has suggested that the Babylonians could not tell the difference between “true” and “made- up” phenomena. On the contrary, the emphasis has been that the fabricated phenomena were later introductions into lists of empirically established signs and that the late introductions served scholastic purposes of comprehen- siveness.26 Such an interpretation salvages Babylonian
21 E. Leichty, The Omen Series Summa Izbu, 20. 22 See J. Bott6ro, Mesopotamia, 134-35. 23 J. Britton and C. Walker, “Astronomy and Astrology in
Mesopotamia,” in Astronomy before the Telescope, ed. C. Walker (London: British Museum Press, 1996), 42.
24 See my Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divination, 38-40. 25
Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), 6.
26 Britton and Walker, “Astronomy and Astrology in Mesopo- tamia,” 42-43, have suggested that the absurdities in the lunar eclipse sequence could have stemmed from a scribal error which was then perpetuated in the canonical text.
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Journal of the American Oriental Society 119.4 (1999)
practical rationality, but leaves open the question of why, if the scribes indeed thought that some omens were plausible and others not, all the omens were formulated identically “if x, then y,” and why all the protases appear to be signs of equal mantic validity. The omen texts made no distinctions between empirically true signs and “con-
ceptually fabricated” signs. As pointed out above, even
supernatural entities are formulated as “if x is observed (innamir).”
It strikes me that to designate some omen protases as ‘absurd” or “impossible” both begs the question of what it was the diviners were trying to observe, and reduces the criterion of empiricism in Babylonian divination (as in all sciences) to simple sense data presupposed as hav-
ing a basis in a reality apart from the observer. Not only can we not make this claim on the basis of any evidence, but such a reduction reflects an approach characteristic of a simple empirical inductivism that is no longer credi- ble.27 Yet many of our translations of omens and our com- ments on their meaning reflect just such an approach.28 To speak of the criterion of observability as one of untem-
27 The following represents but a small selection from the dis- cussion of the interaction of theory and observation, ongoing since the 1950s: N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1958), ch. 5; K. R. Popper, The Logic of Sci-
entific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1968), appendix 10; idem, Objective Knowledge, 341-61; T S. Kuhn, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), ch. 10; Mary Hesse, “Is There an Independent Observation-
Language?” in The Nature of Scientific Theories, ed. R. Colodny
(Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Univ. Press, 1970), 35-77; the collection
of papers in Images of Science: Essays on Realism and Empiri- cism, ed. Paul M. Churchland and Clifford A. Hooker (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985); and Philip Kitcher, The Advance-
ment of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Il-
lusions (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), ch. 7 . 28 A parallel may be seen in the criticism offered by Robin
Horton in Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on
Magic, Religion and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1993), 99, who points out that moder social anthropologists’ views (he names L. Levy-Bruhl, B. Malinowski, E. E. Evans-
Pritchard, M. Gluckman, R. W. Firth, E. Leach, and J. Beattie) assume a positivistic tone when it comes to defining science as
against magical-religious thought. These anthropologists, he says, “have made it plain that they regard science as an extension of
common sense; as based on induction from observables [defined as ‘occurrences in the visible, tangible world’ (p. 98)]: and as
limiting itself to questions of how these observables behave. Once
such a position has been taken up with respect to science, it is
inevitable that the magico-religious thinking of the traditional
cultures should be seen as radically contrasted with it.”
pered sensory perception, mainly of “seeing,” takes no account of the role of cognition in perception and observa- tion,29 nor the relativity of culture, history, or language in the expression of what is observed.30 It also creates a prob- lem by applying to Babylonian omen protases a modern (though derived from a classical Greek) epistemological distinction between “empirical” and “rational” phenom- ena, a distinction that does not seem to be made in the texts. All the signs entered in the omen lists were ostensi-
bly accepted as having equivalent mantic significance. To have an interest in the observable effects of unob-
served phenomena is certainly not strange in science, but in the omens, the “observable effect” refers to the event predicted in the apodosis and has as its only con- nection to the unobserved phenomenon the fact that it is associated with that phenomenon in the particular line of the text. Still, the interest in phenomena for what they indicate about future events in the world of human
enterprise creates a context in which a range of non-
occurring, hence unobserved, phenomena can be included. Some examples stem from a physically correct under-
standing of the phenomenon in question, for example, a lunar eclipse that was known to occur but was not visi- ble from the scribes’ geographical reference point, such as one occurring elsewhere, but not visible in Nineveh. Others stem from an incorrect understanding of the
physical behavior of phenomena, for example, a lunar
eclipse in which the shadow travels across the moon the
wrong way, from west to east, a behavior extrapolated schematically.
All omens refer to “observables,” in the sense of being phenomena of interest to the diviners, because in the event of the actual observation of any one of them, their mantic meaning would be known. The things formulated as “observed” depended in part upon a conceptual (the- oretical) framework, and reciprocally theoretical schemes which applied to the phenomena depended, in part, upon observations. A category of “observables,” therefore, is
posited that is not limited to material things seen in the world, but includes unobserved entities that nonetheless could be imagined by extension or extrapolation from observed phenomena (such as eclipses on days of the month other than the days of syzygy, as well as demons that look like goats). What counted as empirically valid in the series of omens, i.e., what could or could not be an
29 Note, however, the argument (against, as he puts it “Han-
son, Kuhn, Churchland, Goodman and Co.”) for the neutrality of observation with respect to theory as well as the neutrality of
perception with respect to cognition in J. Fodor, “Observation
Reconsidered,” Philosophy of Science 51 (1984): 23-43. 30 Valerie Gray Hardcastle, “The Image of Observables,”
British Journal of Philosophy of Science 45 (1994): 585-97.
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ROCHBERG: Empiricism in Babylonian Omen Texts
event that presaged, stemmed from the presuppositions of divination.
That the system of divination itself determined what the diviner should attend to in the world of phenomena, natural and otherwise, illustrates the by now commonly held notion that observation is “theory-laden.”3′ Here, “theory” refers to the conceptual schemes evidenced in the omen texts that organize and systematize the diversity of phenomena. In view of the interdependence between observation and theory, the omen schemata become clues to the empirical aspect of divination. In the absence of sources making explicit what the Babylonian scribes’ cri- teria of observation were, the schemata themselves must indicate to us what was deemed “observable.” Indeed, div- ination itself provided the framework within which pro- tases were expressed in a certain observation language, functioned as observation statements, and determined what was observable. The mere inclusion of phenomena within omen series, and the regular use of the verb “to observe” (amdru) in the protases, defines the items of the protases as observable objects, and objects of knowl- edge, regardless of their physical status.
The use of an ancient divinatory language, whose mean- ing reflects accepted notions of what was observable, parallels other scientific observation languages attested in various periods and pertaining to different “conceptual frameworks.”32 “The observable,” as Wartofsky put it, is “the index of the whole framework of science, or of the standard beliefs of the scientific community … if the
31 See Norwood R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery, ch. 1, for a definition of theory-ladenness. The idea has deep roots in the
history of philosophy. The logical positivist H. Reichenbach said in 1924: “Every factual statement, even the simplest one, contains more than an immediate perceptual experience; it is
already an interpretation and therefore a theory…. We shall have to make use of the scientific theory itself in order to inter- pret the indications of our measuring instruments. Thus we shall not say, ‘a pointer is moving,’ but, ‘the electric current is increas- ing.’ The most elementary factual statement, therefore, contains some measure of theory” (apud Michael Friedman, “Philosophy and the Exact Sciences: Logical Positivism as a Case Study,” in Inference, Explanation, and Other Frustrations: Essays in the Philosophy of Science, ed. John Earman [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992], 86).
32 For the construct “conceptual scheme,” see Donald David- son, “On the very idea of a conceptual scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1974): 5-20; and the discussion in Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), ch. 12. See also his “Language Truth and Reason,” in Rationality and Relativism, ed. M. Hollis and S. Lukes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 48-66.
sense of observable shifts from one to another frame- work, it may also be seen that the frameworks of science also shift, historically, so that the standard observables of one period are either augmented or replaced by those of another.”33 It follows from this notion that if we study what it was that Babylonian diviners considered observ- able, we will understand something of the “conceptual framework” of the system of divination. The evidence for such a study must be the omen protases, which either state plainly that something was “observed,” or which are formulated as observation predicates, i.e., protases in the form “if x is red,” or “if x is like a goat,” or “if x stands in front of Jupiter.”
OMENS ARE NOT “OBSERVATION STATEMENTS”
Although formulated frequently as observation predi- cates, phenomena recorded in omen protases were nec- essarily only potentially observable, because in no case do the omens function as a record of observations of identifiable (i.e., datable) instances.34 They represent ab- stractions from experience and cognition, (mere) even- tualities, “ifs.”35 The diviner watched for occurrences of
33 Marx W. Wartofsky, Conceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (London: MacMillan, 1968), 120.
34 See P. Huber, “Dating by Lunar Eclipse Omina with Specu- lations on the Birth of Omen Astrology,” in From Ancient Omens to Statistical Mechanics: Essays on the Exact Sciences Presented to Asger Aaboe, ed. J. L. Berggren and B. R. Goldstein (Copen- hagen: University Library, 1987), 3-13. Huber demonstrates a statistically probable correlation between some lunar eclipses described in omen protases and actual datable historical eclipses. He argues that textual “unreliability” due to transmission or scribal manipulation will not matter if one holds as an initial hy- pothesis that no such correlations exist between omen eclipses and historical eclipses. If a fit between the description of the eclipse in the protasis and a historical datable eclipse is “implau- sibly good,” that hypothesis must be rejected and correspond- ingly, the claim that some omen phenomena refer to specific historical and datable events is supported. Huber’s analysis poses a historical dilemma in that the eclipses he has determined as “real” date to the third millennium (2301, 2264, and 2236), long before the occurrence of any extant textual evidence of celestial divination or astronomy in Mesopotamia.
35 Note the occurrence of the Sumerogram SUM.MA.rME?l “the ifs,” in the summary to a catalogue of SA.GIG ND 4358 + :93, published by I. Finkel, “Adad-apla-iddina, Esagil-kin-apli, and the Series SA.GIG,” in A Scientific Humanist: Studies in Memory of Abraham Sachs, ed. E. Leichty, M. deJ. Ellis, and P. Gerardi, Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund, no. 9 (Philadelphia: The University Museum, 1988), 152 and note 82.
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Journal of the American Oriental Society 119.4 (1999)
phenomena, but the written omens in his handbook stood for general cases of such phenomena whenever such occur.
The difference between phenomena recorded in omen protases and observations of phenomena is made clear in the so-called reports of the Babylonian and Assyrian astronomers of the Neo-Assyrian kings. This corpus spans the period from 708 to 648 B.c. and documents the systematic observation and reporting of heavenly phe- nomena together with the appropriate omens for the ob- served phenomena.36 In the following report, dated to Apr. 15, 656 B.c., a solar eclipse was observed and re- ported, and “its interpretation (pisersu),” was included, i.e., what such an eclipse portended according to omens of the Enuma Anu Enlil series:
On the twenty-eighth day, at two and one-half ‘double- hou[rs’ of the day….] in the west […. ] it also cover[ed ….] two fingers towards [….] it made [an eclipse], the east wind [….] the north wind ble[w. This is its inter-
pretation]: If the day [becomes covered] with clouds on the north side: [famine for the king of Elam]. If the day be[comes covered] with clouds on the south side: [famine for the king of Akkad]. If the day is dark and r[ides] the north wind: [devouring by Nergal; herds will diminish]. If [there is an eclip]se in Nisan (I) on the twenty-eighth day: [the king of that land will fall ill but recover]; in his stead, a daughter of the king, [an entu-priestess, will die]; variant: in [that] ye[ar, there will be an attack of the enemy, and] the land will panic [….].37
As is clear in this report, an entry in an omen text records an event which-if or when such was “observed” (using this term to refer to all “observables” in the Babylonian framework)-warned of another event. The relationship between the observable phenomenon and its predicted event was expressed in the form “if x, then y” (summa x, y). In the astrological reports, the observa- tions are stated declaratively, as in the following: “This
night, the moon was surrounded by a halo, [and] Jupiter and Scorpius [stood] in [it],” which is then followed im-
mediately by a series of relevant omens, viz., “If the moon is surrounded by a halo, and Jupiter stands in it: the king of Akkad will be shut up. If the moon is sur- rounded by a halo, and Neberu stands in it: fall of cattle and wild animals.”38
However their connection came to be made, the sign and associated event, once recorded as an omen, were related
36 See Hunger, Astrological Reports to Assyrian Kings. 37 Hunger, ibid., no. 104: 1-rev. 1. 38 Hunger, ibid., no. 147: 1-6.
to one another in an invariant correlation.39 The omen, expressed by “if (or, ‘whenever’) x then y,” recorded the recurrent invariant association of one thing with another. Whether the omens reflect a conception of invariant se- quence, “if x occurs first then y occurs next,” or, alterna- tively, a conception of invariant coincidence, “whenever x occurs y also occurs simultaneously,” is difficult to deter- mine. Regardless of whether x and y were sequential or coincident, the important element is their subsequent re- currence, i.e., particular instances of x and y were assumed to recur thereafter together. This must be the case because the essence of omens is their predictive aspect. Y may be predicted on the basis of x because the two have been des- ignated as invariantly associated.
If the omens recorded in the scholarly lists are inter- preted as recurrent invariant associations, they cease to be observations as such, becoming rather abstractions resting upon empirical as well as theoretical foundations. And if it is true that Babylonian diviners determined that x and y were recurrently and invariantly associated, then those associations were products of something like in- ductive (or empirical) generalization, or were extrapola- tions from such empirical generalizations. On this basis the omen lists would represent the arrangement and codi- fication of a wealth of past experience in which the occur- rences making up the omen protases were “observed” to be associated with certain human events.40 The formu- lation “if/whenever x, then y” points to the necessity of recurrence.
General formulations “if/whenever x then y” are a spe- cies of causal statements. In the case of the omens, I view this causal connection between protasis and apodo- sis as a function merely of the relationship created by their invariant association. Such a causal relationship is like the statement “if/whenever the teapot whistles, the water is boiling,” without entertaining the question of what causes the teapot to whistle or the water to boil. The formulation itself gives the omens a lawlike appearance, especially when it is further evident that predictions derivable from the relation of x to y are the goal of the
inquiry into the set of x that bear predictive possibilities. If we regard the omens as lawlike abstract statements,
39 My discussion here is influenced by M. Wartofsky, Con- ceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought, ch. 11 (on causality), pp. 291-315, especially sub (a), 293-95.
40 This was termed “circumstantial association” by E. A.
Speiser, “Ancient Mesopotamia,” in The Idea of History in the
Ancient Near East, ed. R. C. Dentan, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), 61; and see also J. J. Finkelstein, “Mesopota- mian Historiography,” PAPS 107 (1963): 463ff.
566

ROCHBERG: Empiricism in Babylonian Omen Texts
however, it must be said that any actual instances of such “laws” are limited to the unique, and as such trivial, co- occurrence of just that particular x and y stated in the omen. Although a formal similarity may be seen between the omen statements and so-called scientific statements of empirical generalization, both of which enable predic- tion of phenomena, there is something fundamentally different in the extreme limitation of the domain of the omens as predictive statements.
Also to be taken into account is an aspect of the method whereby a sign (omen protasis) was paired up with an event (omen apodosis), which in fact undermines the idea that the link between the sign and its prediction necessarily involved an observation of the simultaneous or sequential occurrence of those two elements.41 It seems that associations between the sign and the predicted event could be purely linguistic and independent of any obser- vation, as, for example, in cases of paronomasia, where the apodosis plays upon the sound of a word in the pro- tasis. In Ziqiqu, a dream in which a man eats a raven (arbu) portends income (irbu) for that man. Similarly, a dream which presents fir wood (mihru) portends no rival (mdhiru) for the dreamer. Such a method appears to be a result of scribal imagination, presumably when the omens were being compiled and set down. In Summa alu an omen from tablet 15 (line 16) concerning spilled water links the appearance of the puddle-if it looks like “someone holding his heart”-to a prediction that the person “will experience heartache.” This indicates rather persuasively that while empiricism was a factor in the formation of omen protases it does not always come into play in the decision to associate certain apodoses with certain protases.
Another common method used in the correlation of protasis to apodosis was that of analogy. For example: “If someone’s firstborn is short: his house will be short (lived).” Simple analogies from form and appearance are found in the physiognomic omens, where, for example, a short face means a short life, and its opposite, a long face means a long life. A clear example from Enima Anu En- lil is the omen which correlates the “entering” (usurpa- tion) of the king’s throne by the crown prince to the “entering” of the plant Venus within the moon, an ex- pression used to describe the occultation of the planet by the lunar disk.
41 This has been discussed by I. Starr, The Rituals of the Di- viner (Malibu, Calif.: Undena Publications, 1983), 8-12, who jux- taposes “theoretical” methods of relating protasis to apodosis against “empirical.” In Starr’s analysis, the empirical method of divination is equivalent to Speiser’s “circumstantial association,” for which, see note 40.
Even where the connection between protasis and apo- dosis stems from an empirical consideration, symbolic as- sociation by analogy could be used to determine whether the sign was to have a favorable or unfavorable predic- tion. The lion, for example, was regarded as good, the dog as bad. Or, for example, the predictions for the first two omens of the series Summa alu are “if a city is sit- uated on a high place: the inhabitants of that city will not prosper,” and “if a city is situated on low ground: the in- habitants of that city will prosper,” suggesting that from a Mesopotamian point of view, high ground was bad, low ground good. This may, however, be an example of per contrariam prediction, like that in Ziqiqu tablet IX col.i: “if (a man) ascends to heaven: his days will be short,” and “if he descends to the netherworld: his days will be long.” Other forms of symbolic association can be identified, such as the simple distinction of good and bad with the common polarity of right and left. Something on the right indicates a good outcome while left indicates a bad, and bad is sometimes signified by the outcome being good for one’s enemy. Examples from the anomalous birth omens of Summa Izbu are illustrative: the presence on the mal- formed newborn of a right ear but not a left is good, while a left ear without a right is bad.42 A deformity to the right ear is bad, to the left ear is good.43 Two right ears are good whereas two left ears are bad.44 The same is applied to nostrils (having only a left nostril is bad, only a right is good45), hands and fingers,46 feet and toes.47 If an izbu has horns (tablets V and IX), something pertaining to the right horn is good, the left bad, in the same way as with other features of the body. Similarly, in lunar crescent omens from Enuma Anu Enlil, in which the moon has “horns,” if the moon’s right horn “pierces the sky” there is a good outcome,48 or if the moon’s right horn is long and the left is short, this is a good omen.49 The same prin- ciple is evident in the medical diagnostic omens. Symp- toms observed on the right or left will be interpreted as less severe or more severe, respectively: “if a man’s right ear is discolored, his disease will be severe but he will re- cover,” versus “if a man’s left ear is discolored, he is in a dangerous condition.”50
42 Leichty, The Omen Series Summa Izbu, Izbu III: 20-21.
43 Leichty, ibid., Izbu III: 5, 11, 14 and 16 and 9, 12, 15, and 17. 44 Leichty, ibid., Izbu III: 18 and 19. 45 Leichty, ibid., Izbu III: 30-31. 46 Leichty, ibid., Izbu III: 48-58. 47 Leichty, ibid., Izbu III: 58-62. 48 Hunger, Astrological Reports to Assyrian King, p. 35, no. 57: 5. 49 Hunger, ibid., p. 212, no. 373: 5; p. 284, no. 511: 5′. 50 R. Labat, Traite akkadien de diagnostics et pronostics
medicaux (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1951), 68: 1-2.
567

Journal of the American Oriental Society 119.4 (1999)
These forms of empirical judgment, loaded with cul- tural content, belie the facile construction of the “empiri- cal” as “the objectively true.” As Sahlins puts it, “One
simply cannot posit another person’s judgments of ‘reality’ a priori, by means of common sense or common humanity, without taking the trouble of an ethnographic investiga- tion.”51 Assyriologists are at an obvious disadvantage here. But decisions regarding boundary lines between “reality” and “fantasy” in this case are not simply a matter of how relativistic we are about the validity of certain beliefs in the context of particular world-views.52 It is the way em-
piricism itself is construed that will determine whether
interpreters of Babylonian omens view the unobserved
phenomena incorporated within these texts as empiri- cally “valid” or simply absurd. Limiting the empirical to
sensory perception is as inadequate and distorting in relation to ancient sciences as it is to modern.
OBSERVABLES IN MESOPOTAMIAN DIVINATION
It has become commonplace to admit that theory and inference are embedded in observations and that, in fact, one observes a field of phenomena, not blindly, but for the purpose of discovering evidencefor something. The
conceptual context of an inquiry as a whole defines the interests and the problems for inquiry, including defining what is taken to be empirical for a particular inquiry. As discussed above, the most basic of all premises of Meso-
potamian divination, namely, that “signs” in nature are
produced by deities for the purpose of communicating with humans, suggests that ominous phenomena belonged to a conceptual framework representing the world as cre- ated and manipulated by deities. The expectations of what kinds of “signs” might occur resulted from this very inclusive concept of possible divinely produced phenom- ena. Therefore, dreams, lunar eclipses, puddles, disease
symptoms and malformed fetuses, could all and equiva- lently be “signs.” No category of phenomena had greater or lesser epistemological status, as all of the signs yielded “predictions” of what was in store for the observers. The
periodic nature of astronomical phenomena rendered this
category of signs amenable to prediction, which, from our point of view, distinguishes celestial divination from other forms of scholarly divination. It seems likely that the predictability of the signs themselves would be
advantageous to the practice of divination, giving the di-
51 Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think, 162-63. 52 For an interesting discussion of this problem and its impli-
cations, see Dan Sperber, “Apparently Irrational Beliefs,” in Hollis and Lukes, Rationality and Relativism, 149-80.
viner advance knowledge of the occurrence of signs and
accordingly more time to prepare for their anticipated consequences.
In the absence of sources making explicit what the
Babylonian scribes’ criteria for empirical entities might be the schemata themselves indicate what was deemed “observable.” The schemata typically exhibit symmetries of direction (right and left, high and low, up and down, or north, south, east, and west), temporal relationships (beginning, middle, end), or other descriptive features and their opposites (bright and dull, light and dark, thick and thin), all, in principle, observable features of phe- nomena. One such scheme is found in the omens refer-
ring to the color of the object of interest, for example, the color of ants crossing the threshold of a house, the color of a lunar eclipse, the color of a sick person’s throat, or the color of a dog that urinates on a man. These items from the series Summa dlu, Enuma Anu Enlil, SA.GIG, and Izbu, respectively, are all organized similarly, i.e., white, black, red, green-yellow, and variegated. Simple numerical expansions are also characteristic, e.g., the
multiple births running from two to ten,53 or parhelia (mock suns) numbering from one to four,54 some of which seem to be beyond the range of the empirically verfiable. Such patterns are also characteristically found in impetrated omens, such as lecanomancy (oil divina-
tion): “if (the oil) becomes dark to the right/left,” or “if it dissolves to the right/left”; or libanomancy: “if the smoke, when you scatter it, rises to its right, but does not rise to its left,” or “if the smoke, when you scatter it, rises to its left but does not rise to its right.” The formal patterns into which phenomena could be organized in omen lists indicate that the goal was to determine whether a phe- nomenon appeared in a particular configuration (e.g., up, down, to the right, left, etc.) in accordance with such pat- terns. One may argue that it would only have been in terms of established ideas about the behavior of phenom- ena that any phenomenon would have been interpretable. Or, put another way, the kinds of phenomena under ob- servation were shaped by the scribes’ traditional ideas of what was deemed ominous. In and of themselves, strictly sensory impressions would have been meaningless. The
phenomena collected as omens in the series include both those potentially accessible to the senses and those that were not, but both were apparently considered (poten- tially) meaningful in conjunction with apodoses.
Within the diviners’ conceptual framework, what was “observable,” in the sense of being worthy of observation,
53 Leichty, The Omen Series Summa Izbu, Izbu VI: 46-58.
54 See the samgatu omens in ACh Suppl. 2 32.
568

ROCHBERG: Empiricism in Babylonian Omen Texts
was not limited to what could be seen. Of course, this statement requires that we make no distinction between omens as factual or fanciful and simply take the evidence of the omen lists “at face value.” We can imagine that, in the process of compiling the omen series and out of the scribes’ consideration of empirical symmetries, logical possibilities were raised of “phenomena” that had not been observed, but yet were conceivable and could ra- tionally be included within the omen series. Since the omens do not seem to recognize a categorical distinction between observed and unobserved phenomena, both be-
longed to the category of “observables,” in that the divin- ers watched for them all in order to predict the future.
CONCLUSION: THE CLASSIFICATION OF BABYLONIAN
DIVINATION AS SCIENCE
If the character of observables is indeed “the index of the whole framework of science” (Wartofsky), then the system of Babylonian divination as science encompassed a broad spectrum of the phenomenal world. Its interests spanned a diversity of natural and human phenomena. A classification of Babylonian omens on the basis of crite- ria of scientific truth currently accepted can only lead to a view that this system is a non-science, from its premises to its approach to the observable. Aspects of this ancient system, however, find many parallels with other historical sciences, and to the extent that the system had as its chief interest the phenomenal world, and indeed many natural phenomena, it shares something fundamental with other sciences, including modern.
Whether or not one classifies Babylonian divination as science seems to me best pursued, as Hesse put it, “in the spirit of the principle of no privilege.”55 As far as the omen protases referring to (for us) ontologically suspect
55 Mary Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philos-
ophy of Science (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1980), 147.
or even impossible entities are concerned, these were ap- parently an important part of the scientific enterprise of
Mesopotamian divination, which suggests to me that we need to consider them if we are to engage not in a judg- ment, but an investigation of the nature of this system. The presumption of a commonsense empiricism defined in terms of categorical distinctions between the real and the fantastic and predicted on a notion of an objective re- ality corresponding to sense data does not take adequate account either of the evidence collected in omen protases or of the meaning of empiricism in any other scientific context. Even if we are able to explain away some phe- nomena, such as the lunar eclipses that are “observed” when they cannot occur, treating these not as astronomi- cal, but rather as meteorological eclipses, we are still left with the “observations” of ghosts, gods, and three-headed sheep. On the basis of the omen series themselves, we can only note that the status of such phenomena as observ- ables was as legitimate as those we recognize as empiri- cally true. To bracket these protases, designating them as “absurd,” and then going on to discuss the empirical core of Babylonian omen science, limits our ability to under- stand what phenomena the Babylonian scribes regarded as subjects for observation. It limits our ability to pene- trate, if it is at all possible, something about their per- ception of the world and what it meant within their own “conceptual framework.” If we do not regard contempo- rary physical science as “just a systematic exposure of the senses to the world,” but “a way of thinking about the world,”56 I wonder why we have not approached the sci- ence of Babylonian omens in the same way. It seems to me perfectly reasonable to apply the term empirical in a characterization of Babylonian divination, and to view all the subjects of the protases as “observables,” because these things belonged to the domain of their inquiry.
56 N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery, 30.
569

Article Contents

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Issue Table of Contents

Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 119, No. 4 (Oct. – Dec., 1999), pp. 559-734+i-xiii

Volume Information [pp.i-xiii]
Front Matter
Empiricism in Babylonian Omen Texts and the Classification of Mesopotamian Divination as Science [pp.559-569]
A Sh-Jewish “Debate” (Munara) in the Eighteenth Century [pp.570-589]
The Fourth-Century B. C. Guodiann Manuscripts from Chuu and the Composition of the Laotzyy [pp.590-608]
The Doctrine of the Three Humors in Traditional Indian Medicine and the Alleged Antiquity of Tamil Siddha Medicine [pp.609-629]
Review Articles

Christian Palestinian Aramaic and Its Significance to the Western Aramaic Dialect Group [pp.631-636]
Artisans and Mathematicians in Medieval Islam [pp.637-645]
Remarks on the “Person of Authority” in the Dga’ ldan pa / Dge lugs pa School of Tibetian Buddhism [pp.646-672]

Brief Communications

A Note on the Authenticity and Ideology of Shih-chi 24, “The Book on Music” [pp.673-677]
Addendum to JAOS 119.2: On the Amenhotep III Inscribed Faience Fragments from Mycenae [p.678]

Book Reviews

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In more than 40 countries, atheists or nonreligious make up more than 10 percent of the population (World Christian Database). The following are just a few of those countries: Austrailia, Britain, Canada, China, Cuba, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, North Korea, Mongolia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden, Uruguay and Vietnam.
Defining the Terms
An atheist is one who says there is sufficient evidence to show that God does not exist. An agnostic is one who says there is insufficient evidence to know whether or not God exists. The functional atheist is one who is apathetic concerning Gods existence. For the purposes of this profile, the term secularist will be used to indicate all three.
The Rise of Secularism
The Renaissance (Ca. A.D. 1400-1600)
In the early 1400s, Gutenberg invented the printing press with movable type. As a result, the writings of the past became much more accessible to the public, and this increased accessibility sparked two responses. One was a greater awareness of and obedience to Gods Word, which led to the Reformation. The other was a pursuit of humanistic themes, which drew upon the writings of Greek and Roman thinkers and served as the foundation for the Renaissance. The word renaissance means rebirth, and that which was reborn was mans sense of independence and individualism.

In the way that philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) responded to a movement call Pyrrhonism (named after the Greek skeptic Pyrrho, 365-275 B.C.), he contributed to the trend of moving the source of truth away from the Church. Pyrrhonism was a form of utter skepticism whereby every- thing was doubted. As a result, nothing could be known for certain. The significance of Descartes cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is that he had used Pyrrhonists own method of questioning everything in order to establish one fact: The doubter could be certain of his own existence (Brown, p. 184). Descartes had no intention of being a religious reformer; nevertheless, his new method of approaching truth shook Christianity to its core. It was used to shift the basis for certainty from God to man.
The Enlightenment (ca. A.D. 1600-1800)
The success of science ushered in the Age of Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment, people began to elevate science to being the ultimate test for truth.
The discoveries of the laws of science by men like Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Robert Boyle (1627-1692), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727) gave support to the analogy that the universe was like a machine. Such an analogy, when misapplied, tended to dismiss the need to believe in a God who sustained the universe.
Other challenges to the Christian worldview came through philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), David Hume (1711-1776), and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Hobbes drew out the implications of a materialistic philosophy in which matter was the ultimate stuff of the universe. Hume, in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, presented arguments against the veracity of the miracle accounts in the Bible. And Kant encouraged people to assert the power of their own intellect and to throw off the shackles of ecclesiastical authority (Brown, pp. 286-287).
Still, even with the onslaught of the Enlightenment, most people in the nineteenth century, including scientists, believed in the existence of a rational and personal Creator. The reason was that there was no alternative theory to that of creation that adequately explained the existence of an orderly universe. That changed with Charles Darwin.
The Modern Age (ca. 1800 to present)
In 1859, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In it, Darwin theorized that life forms had resulted from natural, random processes and not from the pre-design of an intelligent Creator. The gap that had previously been filled with a religious faith in a Creator could now, through the theory of evolution, be filled with a purely scientific and
naturalistic explanation. Many scientists became enthralled with the theory of evolution, and began to apply it to every field of study, including history (Marx) and psychology (Freud).
The result of Darwinism was that, for many, the belief in God became an unnecessary hypothesis. If mankind was to find solutions for its problems and hope for its future, people must look inward, not toward God.
The Beliefs of Secularism
The Denial of God
The most fundamental tenet of secularism is the denial of the existence of the supernatural. According to secularism, belief in God is nothing more than a projection of mans own thoughts and desires. God did not make man in His image; instead, man made God in his image.
The Denial of Miracles
After having denied Gods existence, its logical then to conclude that miraclesthe result of Gods interventionare not possible. The miracles recorded in the Bible, secularists surmise, must have been the embellishments of the authors who were promoting their particular religious agenda (Geisler and Brooks, ch. 5; Geisler, 1992).
The Fact of Evolution
Secularists assert that the existence and complexity of the universe can be sufficiently explained through naturalistic principles as set forth in the theory of evolution. Personality and mind also have resulted from the evolutionary process and are sufficiently explained through the interaction of chemical and biological elements. Thus, there is no ghost in the machine.
The Potential of Man
Secularists see religion as being restrictive and escapist. Religion does nothing more than to assuage the fears of an ignorant people. If humanity is to survive, secularists say, mankind must face problems squarely and find the answers within itself, reason, and science. Secularism begins and ends with man.
Man will be able to face the issues squarely only when freed from the shackles of religion.
The Centrality of Science
Secularists are confident that the scientific method of inquiry is the only reliable avenue by which to discover truth and knowledge. According to the secularistic point of view, there
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The Finality of Death
At death, the individual ceases to exist in any cohesive or conscious form. As the signers of The Humanist Manifesto II wrote, There is no credible evidence that life survives the death of the body (Lamont, p. 293).
is an irreconcilable antagonism between reason and faith, science and religion, empirical observation and revealed authority.
The Stress on Relativity
Secularists deny that there is an absolute moral reference point beyond man (i.e., a holy God). They contend that humankind does not need an absolute moral standard beyond itself in order to have a sufficient foundation and motivation for moral behavior. Humanity is by nature good, and all that is needed to realize that innate goodness is education, not religious transformation.
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Secularism
God
Matter, in one form or another, is all that has existed from eternity.
Humanity
Humanity is by nature monistic in that man consists of only one substance: matter. Humanity represents the high- est point of the gradual and random processes of evolution.
Humanitys Problem
The problem is that humanity depends on the escapist promises of religion, rather than facing problems squarely and believing that humankind has the potential to create a world in which peace and justice will prevail.
The Solution
The solution is in extending the scientific method of ratio- nal inquiry into all aspects of life, while at the same time maintaining a sense of compassion for the individual.
Jesus Christ
At most, Jesus was a good moral teacher. Because the bib- lical authors embellished the details of Jesus life, though, we can be certain of very little concerning what is histori- cally accurate.
After Death
There is no personal survival after death.
Christianity
God alone is infinite and eternal. The material universe is finite and has not always existed. God created it out of nothing.
Humanity is by nature dualistic in that man consists of two substances: body and spirit. Humanity, being made in the image of God, represents the highest point of Gods creation.
The problem is that man has rebelled against a personal and holy God. As a result, man lives for himself and places hope in false gods, such as success, money, nature, science, education, etc.
The solution is in man being restored to a right relationship with a holy God through faith in Jesus Christ. While Christianity encourages the rational inquiry of science, it opposes scientism, which goes beyond the limits of science in that it claims that the scientific method is a sufficient avenue to all truth.
Jesus was the very embodiment of God on earth. The Bible meets the qualifications for being authentic history. It records that Jesus lived, died for our sins, and rose from the dead.
There is personal survival after death, either to eternal life with God or eternal separation from Him.
Secularism and Christianity Contrasted

Suggestions for Evangelism
What Kind of God Did the Student Reject?
Dont assume that all secularist international students have rejected the personal God of the Bible. Since they came from cultures influenced by various non-Christian religions, they might not have considered the possibility that a personal God who loves them exists. Ask questions to discern their concept of God.
Offer Evidence for Gods Existence
In the following section, some evidences for Gods existence is listed. Notice how each new bit of evidence tells us a little more about the nature of Godfrom Cause, to Intelligent Cause, to Moral Being, to Fulfiller of our Longings.
The Origin of the Universe and of Life The second law of thermodynamics says that while the total amount of energy remains constant (the first law), the availability of usable energy is constantly decreasing. Energy, then, inevitably moves toward a state where it is increasingly unusable and inaccessible. The inevitable cooling of a cup of hot tea typifies the constraints impressed by the second law.
What are the implications of the second law with respect to the origin of the universe? It means that the universe had a beginning. Why? Because if the universe has always existed, then an infinite amount of time would have already passed until this present moment. But this cannot be true because, according to the second law, the universe would then be in a state of equilibriuma cold and lifeless state of absolute rest.
The question that obviously follows is: If the universe has not always existed, then who or what caused it to come into existence? We can appeal to science for the answer. Scientists understand that the universe was tuned in at its inception to a precision of greater than sixty decimal places, which is a precision equal to the number ten multiplied by itself more than sixty times. Unless the universe had been finely tuned, it would not have worked. But all known natural processes are not tuned that finely, only to several decimal places. Only a First Cause with supreme intelligence could have produced such phenomenal accuracy.
Further questions include: What is life, and how did it originate? Could life have arisen from the gradual changes that resulted from the interaction between natural forces over billions of years?
To help answer such questions, try doing a simple experiment. Pour salt and pepper into a clear container that can be covered, and keep the salt and pepper separate. Then shake it. What happens? The salt and pepper become mixed. Now continue shaking the container to try to separate the two. Do they become unmixed? What would be the best way to separate the salt from the pepper?
What does this experiment illustrate? First, that the ran- dom processes of nature destroy, not create, patterns. Sec- ond, that it would take an intellect (by physically separating the salt from the pepper) to restore the pattern (see Gange, ch. 7).
Living cells are like the pattern of the salt and pepper being separated, except that the patterns in such cells are much more complex. They are not only complex but also viable, in that not just any pattern will do; living cells must maintain a particular pattern that will produce and sustain life. Such a pattern, moreover, contains a vast amount of information, such as is found in DNA. Life is not the mere repetitive pattern that is contained in crystals, which the random processes of nature can produce, but it is like the pattern contained in a blueprint, which can be produced only by an intelligent being.
The question of origins, then, concerns the issue of what is a sufficient source for the informationthe coherent and viable patternscontained within living cells? To say that the information contained in a complex living cell came from the random and gradual evolutionary processes of nature is to believe that one can separate the salt from the pepper by shaking the containeran outcome that, being unobserved, is a matter of faith and one that goes against the observed second law. The best explanation for the source of information in living cells is not blind nature, but a Supreme Intellect. After all, it is an everyday empirical fact that people, not random forces, are the source of meaningful and coherent patterns (e.g., words, cars, buildings, etc.). Also, it is not mere coincidence that the theme of separationthe instilling of informationis found in the creation account of Genesis 1, where God separated light from darkness; the waters above from the waters below; sea from land; time into days and years; sea, air, and land life, each after its own kind; man from dust; and woman from man.
The Presence of Design The argument from design is built on the premise that design indicates the work of an intelligent designer (see Ps. 19:1, Rom. 1:20). The classic example is that of a watch. Obviously, the intricate inner workings of a watch could not have come about as the result of random chance, but
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Approaching Secularists

doubt that lingers. For example, Corliss Lamont, who was voted Humanist of the Year in 1977, wrote, Even I, disbe- liever that I am, would frankly be more than glad to awake some day to a worthwhile eternal life (Lamont, p. 98). Atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell, too, expressed some hesitation concerning the idea that this life is all there is: It is odd, isnt it? I care passionately for this world and many things and people in it, and yet…what is it all? There must be something more important, one feels, though I dont believe there is (Heck, p. 224). What would be the source of our yearning for an existence beyond? Perhaps the uni- verse has played a cosmic joke on us. Or, our yearning is a mistake of evolution. What, though, if its not a joke or a mistake, but a pointer to that which is real?
The Deeper Issues
People make decisions based not only on their intellect, but also on their emotions. So, one should also try to pluck those deeper chords.
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only by the thoughtful planning of an intelligent designer (see Olsen, pp. 26-27, and Denton, ch.14). The same is true of the relationship between the creation and the Creator (e.g., the intricacies of the human eye).
The Stirring of the Conscience Our consciences and feelings of guilt give evidence to our moral nature. Such moral feelings are like currencythey are worthless unless backed up by something of value out- side themselves. They also indicate that the best explana- tion for why we have moral sensibilities is that our Source must be both moral and personal, for impersonal natural forces do not have moral sensibilities. In other words, since there is a moral law binding on all of that insists we do what is just and good, there must be a Moral Law Giver (see Geisler and Brooks, ch.13).
The Longing for Something Beyond While secularists might say publicly that they accept death as being the final end, there is nevertheless that private
Secular Assertion
There is no absolute truth.
Life is meaningless.
Science is the only avenue to truth.
All morality is relative.
Each individual determines his or her own purpose in life. There is no ultimate purpose.
The theory of evolution, which is lauded as a natural law, contends that complexity (life) arises out of simplicity (non- life) without the aid of intelligence.
Humanity is, by nature, good.
What is needed today is rational and logical thinking.
Contradiction or Problem
Such a statement itself claims to be an absolute truth.
The person who says this claims to make a meaningful state- ment (Zacharias, p. 73).
Such a statement cannot itself be proven to be true by the sci- entific method.
How can we tell if a person who makes such a statement is telling the truth, since he or she might consider it convenient to lie? Plus, such a person often does not hesitate to make moral judgments concerning social issues, or concerning his or her view of God (e.g., Why did God permit evil?)
If theres no ultimacy to any purpose, then even the individual purposes are meaningless. How does anyone know there is no ultimate meaning unless he or she has an ultimate perspective?
Contradiction or Problem: But the law of entropy, which is an indisputable law of nature, says that complex things disinte- grate to a state of simplicity (see Noebel, pp. 330-333).
Such a statement lacks meaning since there is no moral refer- ence point in secularism by which to gauge goodness.
How can our thoughts be trusted to reflect reality if they are the product of nothing more than chemical and biological elements?
Contradictions and Problems within the Secularistic Worldview

responding to their objection directly, ask them to consider something: What is the source of their sense of justice?
Some might answer that each individual is his or her own source. Others might say that the moral foundation for our sense of justice is to be found in social consensus.
The problem with such answers is that they derive the sense of ought from that which is. But that which is is an insufficient basis for our sense of ought. Just because most people have told a lie does not negate our sense that lying is morally wrong. If we base our sense of justice on nothing higher than ourselves or social consensus, then we will be mired in moral relativity. But is not relative justice a contradiction in terms?
In order for ones sense of justice to have meaning, it must be based on a firm moral standard. What we observe is that moral sensibilities are properties of personal beings, not natural forces. But what kind of being would be 1) personal, 2) beyond humanity, and 3) have moral sensibilities? The answer: God! Therefore, the sense of justice raised in the objection actually affirms the existence of the very thing that is being questioned, for only a personal, holy God is a sufficient moral basis for our sense of justice. In brief, then, things cant be ultimately unjust unless there is an ultimate justice (God).
But will God indeed judge those who have never heard of Jesus? No and yes. No, in the sense that He will not judge us on the basis of revelation that we have not received. Yes, He will judge us, though, on the basis of how we respond to the knowledge that we have received (Rom. 2:12). God has given everyone an awareness of who He is. By what means? Through what is called general revelation, which includes the disclosure of God through creation and conscience (Lewis and Demarest, ch. 2; Rom 1:19-20; 2:14-15; cf. Ps. 8:1, 3; 19:1-4; Isa. 40:12-14, 26; Acts 14:15-17; 17:24-25).
The Bible Is Not Worth Serious Consideration
Secularists dismiss the Bible, contending that it is filled with myths, contradictions, and scientific inaccuracies. Because of space limitation, only a few responses to this objection will be summarized (see Boice, ch. 5; Geisler and Howe, ch.1).
First, ask if they have read the Bible, and if they have not done so, challenge them to read it. Its very possible that their attitude toward the Bible was received through someone else.
Second, every educated person should be familiar with the Bible. Why? Because, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the Bible is the number one bestseller of all time (MacFarlan, p. 383). Also, the Bible has had a signifi- cant influence on Western literature. One book on literature says, Great authors commonly show a familiarity with the Bible, and few great English and American writers of the
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Show That You Care Floyd McClung of Youth with a Mission articulated this prin- ciple in a catchy way: People dont care how much you know until they know how much you care (Aldrich, p. 35). Obviously, part of what it means to care is being concerned about peoples needs.
Caring also means building a friendship that is unconditional. While we should not be shy in sharing our faith with an inter- national student, neither should our friendship be conditioned on how a student responds to the message of Christ.
Another way of showing that you (and God) care is by praying for your international friend. Ask how you may pray specifically for him or her. For many international students, it will be news that God cares about their individual needs.
Responding to Hindrances and Objections
The Problem of Evil
The problem of evil is that if there is an all-powerful and all-good God, then He wouldnt allow evil. But evil does happen, so God is either not all powerful or not all good.
One may respond to this objection by pointing out, first, that the problem of evil actually assumes the existence of an abso- lute standard of goodness. That standard can be found only in a holy God, the very thing that the argument is trying to deny (see Geisler and Brooks, ch. 4; Zacharias, pp. 174-178).
Second, identify the source of evil (see Kreeft, pp. 49-56). We are talking about moral evil, not natural disasters or physical diseases. With respect to moral evil, we are persons, and per- sons have the ability to choose between good and evil. Evil is the result of persons having chosen wrongly. God cannot be held responsible for the way His creatures have chosen to go against Him, since their ability to choose is real.
Could God have made a world where the people were programmed to choose to do only that which is good? Yes, but such creatures would have been automatons, not persons, and they would not have had the ability to make real choices.
Third, when a person cites the problem of evil as an objection, he or she is assuming that God has not dealt with evil. The Bible declares, however, that God has dealt with evil through the atoning death of Jesus Christ. The real issue, then, is that He has not dealt with it in a way they expected or as soon as they desired. But if God is all good and all powerful, then we know that if evil is not defeated, it eventually will be, because Jesus Christs resurrection demonstrated that victory.
How Can a Just God Judge Those Who Have Never Heard of Jesus?
This objection raises the issue of justice. So, before

seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries can be read with satisfaction by one ignorant of Biblical literature (Holman, pp. 61-61).
Third, the Bible should be given serious consideration because it is historically accurate (see Bruce; Geisler and Brooks, ch. 9; Kitchen; Wilson; and Yamauchi).
Fourth, the secularist should give the Bible serious considera- tion because it is unique among religious scriptures in that it speaks of a God who is absolute in His holiness and who judges sinners. In light of that fact, would bad men write such fierce judgments against their own sin? Or, on the other hand, would good men put Thus saith the Lord on something that they had devised themselves? Isnt it more likely that it came from God (Boice, pp. 57-58)?
Other approaches to this objection include: 1) the Bibles amazing unity, considering it consists of 66 books that were written over a fifteen-year period (see McDowell, p.18); 2) the biblical authors being led to avoid scientific misconcep- tions about the body, the heavens, and the earth that were pop- ular in the cultures and religions of its time (see Barfield; Montgomery, part 3); and 3) the fulfillment of prophecy (see McDowell, ch. 9; Montgomery, part 4, chs. 3-4).
Evolution Sufficiently Explains the Origin of the Universe and the Diversity of the Species
Most of us dont have the expertise to present the evidence against evolution with any sense of scientific sophistication. How, then, should we respond to the objections raised by those who believe in evolution?
1. Keep it Simple Keep the meaning of creation basic. Your definition of creation should include nothing more than the belief that an intelligent Creator is necessary to explain the origin of the universe. Anything more will divert the discussion away from the core issue.
2. Evolution Is Also Based on Inference Evolution is based on faith just as much as creationism. Be aware that evolutionists move from the observable to the theoretical in a way that is not warranted by the evidence. They observe that minor changes occur within species (microevolution), but they then extrapolate from those observations the theory that such changes eventually add up to the formation of entirely new species (macroevolution). While microevolution is empirically verifiable, the extrapola- tion to macroevolution is only a theory that has never been observed and that is a matter of faith (Johnson, p. 115).
3. Belief in Creation Is a Reasonable Inference Creationism is a reasonable alternative to evolution. After all, one of the principles of science is that every effect has a sufficient cause. Creationism posits a sufficient cause for our
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existence as persons: a personal God who is morally holy, intelligent, and self-existent. Evolution, on the other hand, posits what appears to be an insufficient cause in that the complex (human life) comes out of the simple (nonlife), or that the universe arose from nothing without a cause.
Creationism is reasonable, moreover, because it is able to make a distinction between operation science, which has to do with the principles that govern the continued operation of the universe, and origin science, which has to do with the principles that caused the universe to begin. By saying that science can make statements about the origin of the universe, evolutionists are assuming that the very same laws involved in the operation of the universe are adequate to explain the origin of the universe. Such an assumption is similar to saying that the very same laws that explain how a car functions are sufficient to explain how the car was designed and built. They arent, because the origin of the car needed the guidance of intelligent beings (Geisler, 1983, pp. 137-138).
If you want to garner evidence against evolution that is of a more scientific nature, the following are fruitful lines or argumentation (see Noebel, ch. 14).
the fossil record: the sudden appearance of complex life forms and lack of transitional forms,
the problem of life coming from nonlife (see Gange, ch. 9; Thaxton),
the problem of complexity arising out of simplicity without the aid of intelligent intervention,
the immense amount of information encoded into the DNA, which would indicate an intelligent source rather than that of a random chance (see Grange),
the lack of beneficial mutations, the limits to the amount of change possible within a species.
For books that address the theory of evolution from a scientific perspective, the following three are recommended: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton, Darwin on Trial by Philip Johnson, and Of Pandas and People by Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon.
Recommended Resources
For books that address most of the common objections raised by secularists, see Copan, Geisler and Brooks, Gish, Kreeft, Moreland (1987), and Strobel (2000 and 2004).
For books that give scientific evidence for the existence of an Intelligent Designer, see Broom, Dembski and Kushiner, and Moreland (1994).
For books that could be given to secularists for them to con- sider arguments for the existence of God, see Boa, Geisler and Turek, and Strobel (2000 and 2004). For DVDs that could be shown to a secularist, see ColdWater Media and Illustra Media (2002 and 2004).

tmatthews
Text Box
1500 year

Kreeft, Peter. Yes or No: Straight Answers to Tough Questions about Christianity. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991.
Lamont, Corliss. The Philosophy of Humanism. New York: Continuum, 1988.
Lewis, Gordon and Bruce Demarest. Integrative Theology, Vol. 1. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1987.
MacFarlan, Donald (ed.). Guinness Book of World Records. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.
McDowell, Josh. Evidence that Demands a Verdict. San Bernardino, Calif.: Campus Crusade for Christ, 1972.
Montgomery, John (ed.). Evidence for Faith: Deciding the God Question. Dallas: Word Publishing, 1991.
Moreland, J. P. Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1987.
Moreland, J.P. (ed.). Creation Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1994.
Noebel, David. Understanding the Times. Manitou Springs, Colo.: Summit Press, 1991.
Olsen, Viggo. The Agnostic Who Dared to Search. Chicago: Moody Press, 1990.
Ross, Hugh. The Fingerprint of God. Orange, Calif.: Promise Publishing Co., 1989.
Strobel, Lee. The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2004.
Strobel, Lee. The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Questions to Christianity. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2000.
Thaxton, Charles, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen. The Mystery of Lifes Origin: Reassessing Current Theories. New York: Philosophical Library, 1984.
Wilson, Clifford. Rocks, Relics and Biblical Reliability. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zonder- van Publishing House, 1977.
www.worldchristiandatabase.org. 3/20/05.
Yamauchi, Edwin. Archeology and the New Testament. The Expositors Bible Com- mentary, Vol. 1. Frank E. Gaebelein (ed.). Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1979.
Zacharias, Ravi. A Shattered Visage: The Real Face of Atheism. Brentwood, Tenn.: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1990.
Christian Apologetic Websites
Apologetics Research Network www.arn.org All About God www.allaboutgod.com Discovery Institutes Center for Science and Culture www.discovery.org/csc Genesis Foundation www.genesisfoundation.org Josh McDowell www.josh.org Reasons to Believe www.reasons.org
Bibliography and Resources
Aldrich, Joseph C. Life-Style Evangelism. Portland, Oreg.: Multnomah Press, 1981.
Barfield, Kenny. Why the Bible Is Number 1: The Worlds Sacred Writings in the Light of Science. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1988.
Barrett, David and Todd M. Johnson. Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission.. International Bulletin of Missionary Research. January 2002. http://www.wnrf.org/cms/statuswr.shtml. 1/26/04.
Boa, Kenneth and Robert Bowman, Jr. 20 Compelling Evidences that God Exists. Tulsa, Okla.: River Oak Publishing, 2002.
Boice, James M. Foundations of the Christian Faith. Downers Grove, Illl. InterVarsity Press, 1986.
Broom, Neil. How Blind Is the Watchmaker? Natures Design and the Limits of Natural- istic Science. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2001.
Brown, Colin. Christianity and Western Thought: A History of Philosophers, Ideas and Movements, Vol. 1. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1990.
Bruce, F. F. The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1978.
ColdWater Media. Icons of Evolution: The Growing Scientific Controversy over Darwin (DVD). Palmer Lake, Colo.: ColdWater Media, 2001.
Copan, Paul. Thats Just Your Interpretation: Responding to Skeptics Who Challenge Your Faith. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 2001.
Davis, Percival and Dean Kenyon. Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Bio- logical Origins. Dallas: Haughton Publishing, 1989.
Dembski, William and James Kushiner. Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2001.
Denton, Michael. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis: New Developments in Science Are Challenging Orthodox Darwinism. Bethesda, Md.: Adler & Adler, 1985.
Gange, Robert. Origins and Destiny: A Scientist Examines Gods Handiwork. Dallas: Word Publishing, 1986.
Geisler, Norman. Is Man the Measure? Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1983.
Geisler, Norman. Miracles and the Modern Mind. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1992.
Geisler, Norman and Frank Turek. I Dont Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2004.
Geisler, Norman and Ron Brooks. When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook on Christian Evi- dences. Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1990.
Geisler, Norman and Thomas Howe. When Critics Ask: A Popular Handbook on Bibli- cal Difficulties. Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1992.
Gish, Duane. Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No! El Cajon, Calif.: Institute for Creation Research, 1995.
Heck, Joel (ed.). The Art of Sharing Your Faith. Tarrytown, N.Y.: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1991.
Holman, C. Hugh. A Handbook to Literature (third ed.). Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1975.
Hummel, Charles. The Galileo Connection: Resolving Conflicts Between Science and the Bible. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1986.
Illustra Media, The Privileged Planet: The Search for Purpose in the Universe (DVD). La Habra, Calif.: Illustra Media, 2004.
Illustra Media. Unlocking the Mystery of Life: The Scientific Case for Intelligent Design (DVD). La Habra, Calif.: Illustra Media, 2002.
Johnson, Phillip. Darwin on Trial. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991.
Kitchen, K. A. The Bible in Its World: The Bible and Archeology Today. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1977.
PO Box C Colorado Springs, CO 80901 Toll Free: 1-800-ISI-TEAM Phone: (719) 576-2700; Fax: (719) 576-5363 Email: [email protected]; www.isionline.org
For International Students: www.internationalstudents.org
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Written by Dean Halverson, Director of Apologetics for International Students, Inc.. Copyright 1992, 2005 by International Students, Inc.

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An explanation of how your personal safety plan might differ from your agency safety plan during your field education experience

Required Readings

Birkenmaier, J., & Berg-Weger, M. (2018).The practicum companion for social work: Integrating class and fieldwork(4th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.Chapter 3, Safety in Social Work Settings (pp. 63-77)

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Main purpose of the Hajj in the Muslim faith essay help site:edu
Describe the main purpose of the Hajj in the Muslim faith, and identify two (2) specific aspects of the Hajj that you find fascinating or significant. Next, explain the association between Muhammad and the area of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Lastly, describe the sacred art of Islams key qualities, and explain the fundamental reasons why Muslim artists of sacred works are reluctant to include images of humans (i.e., at least in sacred areas). Think of a place of worship (of any religion) today, and explain which type of artistic tradition would be more conducive to worship: Byzantine art (Chapter 8), Hindu art (Chapter 7), or Muslim art (Chapter 9).

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Animal Welfare Assignment cheap essay help: cheap essay helpMy topic is Animal Welfare.
My subtopics I am doing this annotated bibliography on are
MAJOR ETHICAL CONCERNS and SEMEN TECHNOLOGY in regards to animal welfare.
This week, you will assemble at least five scholarly academic references that will be used to write your section of the research paper for the team Course Project. This is an individual assignment, and each team member must submit an original document that identifies potential sources for their subsections of the team Course Project. These sources will be the building blocks for your draft, so be sure to spend time searching for sources, reading critically, and considering your selected source material in relation to the team preliminary thesis.
You will need to list your references using APA format and provide a brief explanation of each resource indicating how that resource will be used in your portion of the Course Project. Please also evaluate the sources in relation to their credibility using four criteria: Author, Bias, Evidence and Timeliness, Please keep in mind that Wikipedia is not generally considered a credible academic source.
Citations should be academic or industry based in nature and gathered from reputable sources. The focus should be on your specific research assignment and connections to your thesis. An approximate length for this bibliography is two to three pages.

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Late Medieval Art, Literature and Plague my assignment essay help london
Week 4 Discussion 1 Option 1

“Late Medieval Art, Literature, and Plague”/Please respond to the following,using sources under the Explore heading as the basis of your response:

Quote a one (1) or two (2) line section that you enjoy from Petrarch, Chaucer, Boccaccio, or Christine de Pisan, and provide your reason(s) for the choice.
Next, describe the historical significance of the writer whose work you have chosen.
Comment on the degree to which the Black Death epidemic (1347-1350 CE) impacted that writers work.
Compare the writer you chose to a specific writer (whether prose writer or poet or lyricist) ofmoderntimes.

Explore
Late Medieval Art, Literature, and Plague

Chapter 13 (pp. 449-453, 456, 462-3), Boccaccio; (pp. 453-4), Petrarch; (pp. 454-6), Chaucer; (pp. 455-457), Christine de Pisan
Chapter 13 ( 449-451, 458), The Plague
The Plague at

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Instructions Review This Unit’s Readings, And Include Specific Information With Citation Within Ib History Essay Help

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