Ancestral sin

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_sin

Ancestral sin, generational sin, or ancestral fault (Koinē Greek: προπατορικὴ ἁμαρτία; προπατορικὸν ἁμάρτημα; προγονικὴ ἁμαρτία), is the doctrine that teaches that individuals inherit the judgement for the sin of their ancestors. It exists primarily as a concept in Mediterranean religions (e.g. in Christian hamartiology); generational sin is referenced in the Bible in Exodus 20:5.

The classical scholar Martin West draws a distinction between an ancestral curse and an inherited guilt, punishment, adversity or genetic corruption.

Background

The most detailed discussion of the concept is found in Proclus's De decem dubitationibus circa Providentiam, a propaedeutic handbook for students at the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens. Proclus makes clear that the concept is of hallowed antiquity, and making sense of the apparent paradox is presented as a defense of ancient Greek religion. The main point made is that a city or a family is to be seen as a single living being (animal unum, zoion hen) more sacred than any individual human life.

The doctrine of ancestral fault is similarly presented as a tradition of immemorial antiquity in ancient Greek religion by Celsus in his True Doctrine, a polemic against Christianity. Celsus is quoted as attributing to "a priest of Apollo or of Zeus" the saying that "the mills of the gods grind slowly, even to children's children, and to those who are born after them". The idea of divine justice taking the form of collective punishment is also ubiquitous in the Hebrew Bible, e.g. the Ten Plagues of Egypt, the destruction of Shechem, etc., and most notably the recurring punishments inflicted on the Israelites for lapsing from Yahwism.

Teaching by religion

In Christianity

The Bible speaks of generational sin in Exodus 20:5, which states that "the iniquities of the fathers are visited upon the sons and daughters—unto the third and fourth generation." This concept implies that "unresolved issues get handed down from generation to generation", but that "Jesus is the bondage breaker ... [and] He is able to break the cycle of this curse, but only if we want Him to."

The formalized Christian doctrine of original sin is a direct extension of the concept of ancestral sin (imagined as inflicted on a number of succeeding generations), arguing that the sin of Adam and Eve is inflicted on all their descendants indefinitely, i.e. on the entire human race. It was first developed in the 2nd century by Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons, in his struggle against Gnosticism. Irenaeus contrasted their doctrine with the view that the Fall was a step in the wrong direction by Adam, with whom, Irenaeus believed, his descendants had some solidarity or identity.

Ezekiel 18:19-23 states "the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him."

Eastern Orthodoxy

Ancestral sin is the object of a Christian doctrine taught by the Orthodox Church as well as other Eastern Christians. Some identify it as "inclination towards sin, a heritage from the sin of our progenitors". But most distinguish it from this tendency that remains even in baptized persons, since ancestral sin "is removed through baptism".

Saint Gregory Palamas taught that, as a result of ancestral sin (called "original sin" in the West), man's image was tarnished, disfigured, as a consequence of Adam's disobedience. The Greek theologian John Karmiris writes that "the sin of the first man, together with all of its consequences and penalties, is transferred by means of natural heredity to the entire human race. Since every human being is a descendant of the first man, 'no one of us is free from the spot of sin, even if he should manage to live a completely sinless day'. ... Original Sin not only constitutes 'an accident' of the soul; but its results, together with its penalties, are transplanted by natural heredity to the generations to come. And thus, from the one historical event of the first sin of the first-born man, came the present situation of sin being imparted, together with all of the consequences thereof, to all natural descendants of Adam."

Roman Catholicism

With regard to breaking generational curses, clergy of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal have developed prayers for healing.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Greek translation of which uses "προπατορική αμαρτία" (literally, 'ancestral sin') where the Latin text has "peccatum originale", states: "Original sin is called 'sin' only in an analogical sense: it is a sin 'contracted' and not 'committed'—a state and not an act. Although it is proper to each individual, original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants." Eastern Orthodox teaching likewise says: "It can be said that while we have not inherited the guilt of Adam's personal sin, because his sin is also of a generic nature, and because the entire human race is possessed of an essential, ontological unity, we participate in it by virtue of our participation in the human race. 'The imparting of Original Sin by means of natural heredity should be understood in terms of the unity of the entire human nature, and of the homoousiotitos of all men, who, connected by nature, constitute one mystic whole. Inasmuch as human nature is indeed unique and unbreakable, the imparting of sin from the first-born to the entire human race descended from him is rendered explicable: "Explicitly, as from the root, the sickness proceeded to the rest of the tree, Adam being the root who had suffered corruption" (Saint Cyril of Alexandria).'"

Judaism

The Hebrew Bible provides two passages of scripture regarding generational curses:

The Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in loving-kindness and truth ... Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.

— Exodus 34:7

Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin.

— Deuteronomy 24:16

The Talmud rejects the idea that people can be justly punished for another person's sins and Judaism in general upholds the idea of individual responsibility. One interpretation is that, even though there is no moral guilt for descendants, they may be negatively impacted as a consequence of their forebear's actions.

Hinduism

Some holy writing in Hinduism states,

The thin bamboo rod in the hand of the Brahmana is mightier than the thunderbolt of Indra. The thunder scorches all existing objects upon which it falls. The Brahmana's rod (which symbolizes the Brahmana's might in the form of his curse) blasts even unborn generations. The might of the rod is derived from Mahadeva.

— Anushasana Parva

Hinduism has family curses, elsewhere.

Japanese Shinto

Although Shinto has its own view of sin, ancestral sin is not one opted for. Instead, Shinto pushes for all humans being inherently pure, with any accumulated sin, or kegare, being what is accumulated in one's current life. These are to be removed purification rituals, such as harae.

Greek mythology

In Greek mythology, the Erinyes exacted family curses. Certain dynasties have had tragic occurrences happen upon them.

The House of Cadmus, who established and ruled over the city of Thebes, was one such house. After slaying the dragon and establishing Thebes upon the earth that the dragon terrorized, Ares cursed Cadmus and his descendants because of the dragon's sacredness to Ares. Similarly, after Hephaestus discovered his wife, Aphrodite, having a sexual affair with Ares, he became enraged and vowed to avenge himself for Aphrodite's infidelity by cursing the lineage of any children that resulted from the affair. Aphrodite later bore a daughter, Harmonia, the wife of Cadmus, from Ares' seed.

Cadmus, annoyed at his accursed life and ill fate, remarked that if the gods were so enamoured of the life of a serpent, he might as well wish that life for himself. Immediately Cadmus began to grow scales and change into a serpent. Harmonia, after realizing the fate of her husband, begged the gods to let her share her husband's fate. Of the House of Cadmus, many had particularly tragic lives and deaths. For example, King Minos of Crete's wife fall madly in love with the Cretan Bull and bore the Minotaur. Minos would later be murdered by his daughters whilst bathing. Semele, the mother of Dionysus by Zeus, was turned into dust because she glanced upon Zeus's true godly form. King Laius of Thebes was killed by his son, Oedipus. Oedipus later (unknowingly) marries the queen, his own mother, and becomes king. After finding out he gouges his eyes and exiles himself from Thebes.

Another dynasty that was cursed and was subject to tragic occurrences was the House of Atreus (also known as the Atreides). The curse begins with Tantalus, a son of Zeus who enjoyed cordial relations with the gods. To test the omniscience of the gods, Tantalus decided to slay his son Pelops and feed him to the gods as a test of their omniscience. All of the gods, save Demeter, who was too concerned with the abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades, knew not to eat from Pelops's cooked corpse. After Demeter had eaten Pelops's shoulder, the gods banished Tantalus into Tartarus where he would spend eternity standing in a pool of water beneath a fruit-bearing tree with low branches. Whenever he would reach for a fruit, the branches would lift upward so as to remove his intended meal from his grasp. Whenever he would bend over to drink from the pool, the water would recedes into the earth before he could drink. The gods brought Pelops back to life, replacing the bone in his shoulder with a bit of ivory with the help of Hephaestus, thus marking the family forever afterwards.

Pelops would later marry Princess Hippodamia after winning a chariot race against her father, King Oenomaus. Pelops won the race by sabotaging of King Oenomaus’ chariot, with the help of the king's servant, Myrtilus. This resulted in King Oenomaus’s death. Later, the servant Myrtilus, who was in love with Hippodamia, was killed by Pelops because Pelops had promised Myrtilus the right to take Hippodamia's virginity in exchange for his help in sabotaging the king's chariot. As Myrtilus died, he cursed Pelops and his line, further adding to the curse on the House of Atreus.

King Atreus, the son of Pelops and the namesake of the Atreidies, would later be killed by his nephew, Aegisthus. Before his death, Atreus had two sons, King Agamemnon of Mycenae and King Menelaus of Sparta. King Menelaus's wife, Helen of Sparta, would leave him for Prince Paris of Troy, thus beginning the Trojan War. However, prior to their sailing off for the war, Agamemnon had angered the goddess Artemis by killing one of her sacred deer. As Agamemnon prepared to sail to Troy to avenge his brother's shame, Artemis stilled the winds so that the Greek fleet could not sail. The seer Calchas told Agamemnon that if he wanted to appease Artemis and sail to Troy, he would have to sacrifice the most precious thing in his possession. Agamemnon sent word home for his daughter Iphigenia to come to him so that he may sacrifice her, framing it to her that she was to be married to Achilles. Iphigenia, honored by her father's asking her to join him in the war, complied. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter and went off to war.

Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon and mother to Iphigenia, was so enraged by her husband's actions that when he returned victorious from Troy, she trapped him in a robe with no opening for his head whilst he was bathing and stabbed him to death as he thrashed about. Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, was torn between his duty toward avenging his father's death and his sparing his mother. However. after praying to Apollo for consultation, Apollo advised him to kill his mother. Orestes killed his mother and wandered the land, ridden with guilt. Because of the noble act of avenging his father's at the expense of his own soul and reluctance to kill his mother, Orestes was forgiven by the gods, thus ending the curse of the House of Atreus.

Witchcraft

The term witchcraft is not well-defined but, at least within factions, the belief in family curses persists. In paganism, the common belief is that curses passed down through family may present itself through personal misfortune, such as addiction and poverty.  Another includes karmic debt, a concept suggesting that actions in one's own past life--especially negative ones--carry on with them through reincarnation. Through personal self improvement and reflection on not only one's past, but their lineage, one may free themselves from a curse.

Skeptical views

Modern skeptics deny that curses of any nature, including family curses, even exist, even if some fervently believe in them.

Modern Western attitudes to personal individuality and to individual achievement do not always sit well with notions of inherited sin. Psychologists and philosophers tend to portray persistent human failings as part of human nature, rather than using "original sin" metaphors.

Historical examples

Nathaniel Hawthorne felt that his family was cursed because of the actions of two of his ancestors, John Hathorne and his father William. William Hathorne was a judge who earned a reputation for cruelly persecuting Quakers, and in 1662, he ordered the public whipping of Ann Coleman. John Hathorne was one of the leading judges in the Salem witch trials. He is not known to have repented for his actions. So great were Nathaniel Hawthorne's feelings of guilt, he re-spelled his last name Hathorne to Hawthorne.

Famous examples

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, with his wife, Jacqueline, and Texas Governor John Connally with his wife, Nellie, in the presidential limousine, minutes before Kennedy was assassinated. Some allege there may be a curse on the Kennedy family.

• The curse of the Alcmaeonidae
• The Curse of the Braganzas (from John IV of Portugal to Louis Philip)
• The Curse of Tippecanoe; not quite a family curse, as it relates to occupational succession, not genetic, but deserves mention
• The Kennedy curse (from Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. to Maeve Kennedy McKean)
• The Dangbar Family
• The Sedgwick family
• The Von Erich family
• The family of Bruce Lee, also known as "The Curse of the Dragon" (Bruce Lee and Brandon Lee)
• The House of Grimaldi is said to have been cursed for their conquest of the Rock of Monaco, although stories differ as to how they were cursed.

Family curses in fiction

As he lies dying, in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet Mercutio says, "A plague o' both your houses", blaming both the Capulets and Montagues. As the play progresses, his words prove prophetic.

There is a family curse in The House of the Seven Gables.

In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, it was thought that the Baskerville family had a legendary family curse, of a giant black hound, "... a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon."

In the 2007 South Korean psychological-supernatural suspense horror film Someone Behind You, a young woman named Ga-In (Yoon-Jin-seo) sees families and friends slaughtering and attacking one another and realizes that she is followed by an inexplicable curse causing those around her to get rid of her. Despite all of this she is constantly reminded by an eerie student never to trust her family, her friends, or even herself. Ga-In has hallucinations of those who would attempt to attack her, then sees a disturbing vision of a monstrous being warning her that the bloodshed will intensify. The film was also released in America retitled as Voices.

Biblical archaeology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_archaeology

The Levant and Canaan

Biblical archaeology is an academic school and a subset of Biblical studies and Levantine archaeology. Biblical archaeology studies archaeological sites from the Ancient Near East and especially the Holy Land (also known as Land of Israel and Canaan), from biblical times.

Biblical archaeology emerged in the late 19th century, by British and American archaeologists, with the aim of confirming the historicity of the Bible. Between the 1920s, right after World War I, when Palestine came under British rule and the 1960s, biblical archaeology became the dominant American school of Levantine archaeology, led by figures such as William F. Albright and G. Ernest Wright. The work was mostly funded by churches and headed by theologians. From the late 1960s, biblical archaeology was influenced by processual archaeology ("New Archaeology") and faced issues that made it push aside the religious aspects of the research. This has led the American schools to shift away from biblical studies and focus on the archaeology of the region and its relation with the biblical text, rather than trying to prove or disprove the biblical account.

The Hebrew Bible is the main source of information about the region of Palestine and mostly covers the Iron Age period. Therefore, archaeology can provide insights where biblical historiography is unable to. The comparative study of the biblical text and archaeological discoveries help understand Ancient Near Eastern people and cultures. Although both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are taken into account, the majority of the study centers around the former.

The term biblical archaeology is used by Israeli archaeologists for popular media or an English speaking audience, in reference to what is known in Hebrew as "Israeli archaeology", and to avoid using the term Palestinian archaeology.

History

The study of biblical archaeology started at the same time as general archaeology, the development of which relates to the discovery of highly important ancient artifacts.

Stages

The development of biblical archaeology has been marked by different periods;

• Before the British Mandate in Palestine: The first archaeological explorations started in the 19th century initially by Europeans. There were many renowned archaeologists working at this time, one of the best known being Edward Robinson, who discovered a number of ancient cities. The Palestine Exploration Fund was created in 1865 with Queen Victoria as its patron. Large investigations were carried out around the Temple in Jerusalem in 1867 by Charles Warren and Charles William Wilson, after whom Jerusalem's "Wilson’s Arch" is named. The American Palestine Exploration Society was founded in 1870. In the same year, a young French archaeologist, Charles Clermont-Ganneau, arrived in the Holy Land in order to study two notable inscriptions: the Mesha Stele in Jordan and inscriptions in the Temple of Jerusalem. Another personality entered the scene in 1890, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, who has since become known as the "father of Palestine archaeology". In Tell-el-Hesi, Petrie laid down the basis for methodical exploration by giving a great importance to the analysis of ceramics as archaeological markers. In effect, the recovered objects or fragments serve to fix the chronology with a degree of precision, as pottery was made in different ways and with specific characteristics during each epoch throughout history. In 1889, the Dominican Order opened the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem, which would become world-renowned in its field. Such authorities as M-J. Lagrange and L. H. Vincent stand out among the early archaeologists at the school. In 1898, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) was founded in Berlin, a number of its excavations were subsequently funded by Emperor William II of Germany. Many other similar organizations were founded at this time with the objective of furthering this nascent discipline, although the investigations of this epoch had the sole objective of proving the veracity of the biblical stories.
• During the British Mandate in Palestine (1922–1948): The investigation and exploration of the Holy Land increased considerably during this time and was dominated by the genius of William Foxwell Albright, C. S. Fischer, the Jesuits, the Dominicans and many others. This era of great advances and activity closed with a flourish: the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in 1947 and its subsequent excavation, which would in large part be directed by the Frenchman Roland de Vaux.
• After the British Mandate: 1948 marked the start of a new social and political era for the Holy Land, with the foundation of the State of Israel and the entrance on the scene of the Israeli archaeologists. Initially their excavations were limited to the territory of the state, but after the Six-Day War they extended into the occupied territories of the West Bank. An important figure in the archaeology of this period was Kathleen Kenyon, who directed the excavations of Jericho and the Ophel of Jerusalem. Crystal Bennett led the excavations at Petra and Amman’s citadel, Jabal al-Qal'a. The archaeological museums of the Franciscans and the Dominicans in Jerusalem are particularly notable.
• Biblical archaeology today: Twenty-first century biblical archaeology is often conducted by international teams sponsored by universities and government institutions such as the Israel Antiquities Authority. Volunteers are recruited to participate in excavations conducted by a staff of professionals. Practitioners are making increasing efforts to relate the results of one excavation to others nearby in an attempt to create an ever-widening, increasingly detailed overview of the ancient history and culture of each region. Recent rapid advances in technology have facilitated more scientifically precise measurements in dozens of related fields, as well as more timely and more broadly disseminated reports.

Schools of thought

Main article: Biblical archaeology school

Biblical archaeology is the subject of ongoing debate. One of the sources of greatest dispute is the period when kings ruled Israel, more generally the historicity of the Bible. It is possible to define two loose schools of thought regarding these areas: biblical minimalism and maximalism, depending on whether the Bible is considered to be a non-historical, religious document or not. The two schools are not separate units but form a continuum, making it difficult to define different camps and limits. However, it is possible to define points of difference, although these differences seem to be decreasing over time.

Summary of important archaeological sites and findings

The caves at Qumran, where one of biblical archaeology's most important findings of all time was found, in the valley of the Dead Sea

Selected discoveries

Detailed lists of objects can be found at the following pages:

• List of inscriptions in biblical archaeology
• List of burial places of Abrahamic figures
• List of Hebrew Bible manuscripts, List of New Testament papyri and List of New Testament uncials
• List of biblical figures identified in extra-biblical sources

Biblical archeological forgeries

Biblical archaeology has also been the target of several celebrated forgeries, which have been perpetrated for a variety of reasons. One of the most celebrated is that of the James Ossuary, when information came to light in 2002 regarding the discovery of an ossuary, with an inscription that translated to "Jacob, son of Joseph and brother of Jesus". In reality the artifact had been discovered twenty years before, after which it had exchanged hands a number of times and the inscription had been added. This was discovered because it did not correspond to the pattern of the epoch from which it dated.

The object came by way of the antiques dealer Oded Golan, who was accused by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) of forgery, but after a 7-year trial he was acquitted on the grounds of reasonable doubt. Another item that came from the same dealer was the Jehoash Inscription, which describes repairs to the temple in Jerusalem. The authenticity of the inscription is debated.

Biblical archaeology and the Catholic Church

There are some groups that take a more fundamentalist approach and which organize archaeological campaigns with the intention of finding proof that the Bible is factual and that its narratives should be understood as historical events. This is not the official position of the Catholic Church.

Archaeological investigations carried out with scientific methods can offer useful data in fixing a chronology that helps to order the biblical stories. In certain cases these investigations can find the place where these narratives took place, while in other cases they can confirm the veracity of the stories. However, in other matters they can question events that have been taken as historical fact, providing arguments that show that certain stories are not historical narratives but belong to a different narrative genre.

In 1943, Pope Pius XII recommended that interpretations of the scripture take archaeological findings into account in order to discern the literary genres used.

[...] the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use. [...]Let those who cultivate biblical studies turn their attention with all due diligence towards this point and let them neglect none of those discoveries, whether in the domain of archaeology or in ancient history or literature, which serve to make better known the mentality of the ancient writers, as well as their manner and art of reasoning, narrating and writing.[...]

— Pius XII, Encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, paragraphs 35 and 40

Since this time, archaeology has been considered to provide valuable assistance and as an indispensable tool of the biblical sciences.

Expert commentaries

[...]"the purpose of biblical archaeology is the clarification and illumination of the biblical text and content through archaeological investigation of the biblical world."

— written by J.K. Eakins in a 1977 essay published in Benchmarks in Time and Culture and quoted in his essay "Archaeology and the Bible, An Introduction".

Archaeologist William G. Dever contributed to the article on "Archaeology" in the Anchor Bible Dictionary. In the article, Dever reiterated his perceptions of the negative effects of the close relationship that has existed between Syro-Palestinian archaeology and biblical archaeology, which had caused the archaeologists working in the field, particularly the American archaeologists, to resist adoption of the new methods of processual archaeology. In addition, he considered that "underlying much scepticism in our own field [referring to the adaptation of the concepts and methods of a "new archaeology", one suspects the assumption (although unexpressed or even unconscious) that ancient Palestine, especially Israel during the biblical period, was unique, in some "superhistorical" way that was not governed by the normal principles of cultural evolution".

Dever found that Syro-Palestinian archaeology had been treated in American institutions as a sub-discipline of bible studies, where it was expected that American archaeologists would try to "provide valid historical evidence of episodes from the biblical tradition". According to Dever, "the most naïve [idea regarding Syro-Palestinian archaeology] is that the reason and purpose of "biblical archaeology" (and, by extrapolation, of Syro-Palestinian archaeology) is simply to elucidate facts regarding the Bible and the Holy Land".

Dever has also written that:

Archaeology certainly doesn't prove literal readings of the Bible...It calls them into question, and that's what bothers some people. Most people really think that archaeology is out there to prove the Bible. No archaeologist thinks so. [...] From the beginnings of what we call biblical archaeology, perhaps 150 years ago, scholars, mostly western scholars, have attempted to use archaeological data to prove the Bible. And for a long time it was thought to work. William Albright, the great father of our discipline, often spoke of the "archaeological revolution." Well, the revolution has come but not in the way that Albright thought. The truth of the matter today is that archaeology raises more questions about the historicity of the Hebrew Bible and even the New Testament than it provides answers, and that's very disturbing to some people.

Dever also wrote:

Archaeology as it is practiced today must be able to challenge, as well as confirm, the Bible stories. Some things described there really did happen, but others did not. The biblical narratives about Abraham, Moses, Joshua and Solomon probably reflect some historical memories of people and places, but the 'larger than life' portraits of the Bible are unrealistic and contradicted by the archaeological evidence.... I am not reading the Bible as Scripture... I am in fact not even a theist. My view all along—and especially in the recent books—is first that the biblical narratives are indeed 'stories,' often fictional and almost always propagandistic, but that here and there they contain some valid historical information...

Tel Aviv University archaeologist Ze'ev Herzog wrote the following in the Haaretz newspaper:

This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, YHWH, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.

Other scholars have argued that Asherah may have been a symbol or icon in the context of Yahwism rather than a deity in her own right, and her association with Yahweh does not necessarily indicate a polytheistic belief system.

Professor Israel Finkelstein told The Jerusalem Post that Jewish archaeologists have found no historical or archaeological evidence to back the biblical narrative on the Exodus, the Jews' wandering in Sinai or Joshua's conquest of Canaan. On the alleged Temple of Solomon, Finkelstein said that there is no archaeological evidence to prove it really existed. Professor Yoni Mizrahi, an independent archaeologist, agreed with Israel Finkelstein.

Regarding the Exodus of Israelites from Egypt, Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass said:

Really, it’s a myth,... This is my career as an archaeologist. I should tell them the truth. If the people are upset, that is not my problem.

Other scholars dispute these claims. In his 2001 book The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable and Relevant? Evangelical Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser, Jr. included a chapter entitled, "Does Archaeology Help the Case for Reliability?". Kaiser states:

[T]he study of archaeology has helped illuminate the Bible by casting light on its historical and cultural location. With increasing clarity, the setting of the Bible appears more vividly within the framework of general history.... by fitting biblical history, persons, and events into general history, archaeology has demonstrated the validity of many biblical references and data. It has continued to cast light, whether implicitly or explicitly, on many of the Bible's customs, cultures, and settings during various periods of history. On the other hand, archaeology has also given rise to some real problems with regard to its findings. Thus, its work is an ongoing one that cannot be foreclosed too quickly or used merely as a confirming device.

Kaiser goes on to detail case after case in which the Bible, he says, "has aided in the identification of missing persons, missing peoples, missing customs and settings." He concludes:

This is not to say that archaeology is a cure-all for all the challenges brought to the text—it is not! There are some monstrous problems that remain—some created by the archaeological data itself. But since we have seen so many specific challenges over the years yield to such specific data in favor of the text, a presumption tends to build that we should go with the text until definite contrary information is available. This methodology that says that the text is innocent until proven guilty is not only recommended as a good procedure for American jurisprudence, but it is recommended in the area of examining the claims of the Scripture as well.

Collins comments upon a statement by Dever:

"there is little that we can salvage from Joshua's stories of the rapid, wholesale destruction of Canaanite cities and the annihilation of the local population. It simply did not happen; the archeological evidence is indisputable."

This is the judgment of one of the more conservative historians of ancient Israel. To be sure, there are far more conservative historians who try to defend the historicity of the entire biblical account beginning with Abraham, but their work rests on confessional presuppositions and is an exercise in apologetics rather than historiography. Most biblical scholars have come to terms with the fact that much (not all!) of the biblical narrative is only loosely related to history and cannot be verified.

— John J. Collins

As a young student, I heard a series of lectures given by a famous liberal Old Testament theologian on Old Testament introduction. And there one day learned that the fifth book of Moses (Deuteronomy) had not been written by Moses—although throughout it it claims to have been spoken and written by Moses himself. Rather, I heard Deuteronomy had been composed centuries later for quite specific purposes. Since I came from an orthodox Lutheran family, was deeply moved by what I heard—in particular, because it convinced me. so the same day I sought out my teacher during his hours and, in connection With the origin of Deuteronomy, let slip the remark, "So is the fifth book of Moses what might be called a forgery?" His answer was, "For God's sake, it may well be, but you can't say anything like that."

I wanted to use that quotation in order to show that the results of historical scholarship can be made known to the public—especially to believers—only with difficulty. Many Christians feel threatened if they hear that most of what was written in the Bible is (in historical terms) untrue and that none of the four New Testament Gospels was written by the author listed at the top of the text.

— Gerd Lüdemann

Palestinianism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

See also: Palestinian nationalism

Palestinianism is a term occasionally used to denote either the national political movement or Identity of the Palestinian people. It gained currency by its use in the works of Edward Said to describe a certain vein of theology opposed to Christian Zionism and that challenges Zionism and the right of Israel to exist.

History of the term

During the British Mandate over Palestine, the word was used as a loose expression to either describe the integration of the Zionist Aliyah into Mandatory Palestine, or as an alternative to Non-Zionis

The word was employed as a term in its modern meaning as early as 1970 by Edward Said in his work "A Palestinian voice". It was also used by Alfred Sherman, the London correspondent for Haaretz at the time also in 1970, while expressing his surprise that the Palestinians' bid for independent statehood had garnered widespread support in the West.

Multiple observers in the early 1970s were under the impression that Palestinian national identity was a product of the late 1960s. Sherman was supportive of the view that it emerged after the disillusionment with the outcome of the Six-Day War, in the aftermath of which Palestinian Arabs realized that they had to rely on their own resources, rather than on the broader Arab world, to secure their aspirations. However others pointed to its prior existence in the early 20th century in Mandatory Palestine, as well as the period between 1948 and 1967.

According to Sherman, Israeli Jews were uncomfortable with Palestinian nationalism, since the aspiration of Palestinians for statehood ("Palestinianism") mirrored exactly what Jews had sought by Zionism. To challenge Palestinians on this ground would mean Israelis would find themselves querying a right they themselves had asserted and therefore implicitly question the legitimacy of the Israeli state itself.

In 1973, John B. Wolf made a similar diagnosis to that advanced by Sherman: the 1967 war had compelled Palestinians to recognize the truth of their isolation from allies, and their "Palestinianism" thereby developed two goals: to reintegrate themselves with the land they lost, and strive to change a politics that had excluded and "negated their presence", denying Palestinians a say in their own future.

Edward Said's usage of the term

The word assumed some importance in the 1980s when the Palestinian academic Edward Said, author of the influential book Orientalism which analysed bias in foreign representations of the Arab world, adopted it. For Said, Israel and its supporters had striven to deny Palestinians, with their long and fragmented history of dispossession, war, exile and ethnic cleansing, "permission to narrate" what they had undergone as a result of the establishment of the state of Israel. Said defined the term as "a political movement that is being built out of a reassertion of Palestine's multiracial and multireligious history." According to Adam Shatz, US editor for the London Review of Books, Said endeavoured to elaborate a "counter-myth" to that which underwrote Zionism, one written in counterpoint to the "dark historical fatalism and exclusionary fear of the other" characteristic of the Zionist narrative. "Palestinianism" for Said referred to a kind of open-ended dissident narrative testifying to the contradictions of exile and military occupation, one that was non-doctrinal, unobsessed with racial ontology, as a premise for the creation of a future for both Palestinians and Jews.

As construed by Ilan Pappé, Said's "Palestinianism" was a compromise between the narrow call of nationalist impulses and the universal values he subscribed to, consisting in striving to overcome both Zionism and Arab tyrannies by the three principles of acknowledgement, accountability and acceptance: namely, global recognition of the Nakba which was more important than achieving Palestinian statehood; in obeisance to universal principles, Israel should accept its accountability for ethnic cleansing, as a prelude to a future return of refugees; and, thirdly, an acceptance of the historic reality of Jewish suffering, a precondition for integrating Israelis into the larger Arab world within which their state was founded.

Haim Gerber, professor of Islamic history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argued in 2004 that, as one could see from the research of Rashid Khalidi on the press in Arabic before WW1, a national Palestinian sentiment, or "Palestinianism", was attested before the onset of fully-fledged Zionist emigration under the British Mandate.

Two years later, Jason Franks employed it to denote the ensemble of values, beliefs, traditions and history underwriting Palestinian nationhood. In his analysis, it stood in diametrical opposition to Zionism, and both it and Zionism were twin ideological codes competing in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, both accounting for the terroristic, nationalist and religious elements driving the conflict. The roots of Palestinianism lay, he further argued, in the Young Turks' revolt in 1908, which was crucial to the emergence of a Palestinian nationalist sentiment in that period because the revolution in Turkey freed up the press from Ottoman censorship, and enabled local assertions of a distinct identity to emerge. It developed thereafter "not only (as) a reaction against Zionism and British imperialism but also against the wider Arab world."

In her 2016 monograph on Palestinian film history, Chrisoula Lionis challenged the recency theory of Palestinian identity. In tracing the development of national awareness, she detects a transition via three core episodes from "Palestinianess", stirred by both the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the 1948 nakba, which crystallised this national consciousness of Palestinianess, to "Palestinianism" proper, which she sees as the outcome of the Battle of Karameh in 1968.

Palestinianism as a threat to Western civilization

A year after Gerber's article, in 2005, and writing in the context of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Bat Ye'or, in her book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab which peddled a conspiracy theory, dedicated a whole chapter to the word, entitled "Palestinianism: The New Eurabian Cult", where she claimed that Palestinianism, which she glossed as "Palestinolatry", was both a new vehicle for traditional European anti-Semitism, and "a return of the Euro-Arab Nazism of the 1930-1940s." In her view, it emerged with the works of the Anglican bishop and theologian Kenneth Cragg and the Palestinian Anglican priest Naim Ateek, director of the Jerusalem-based Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. Neither of these writers, however, had ever used the term at the time of her writing, but Bat Ye'or deployed it to characterize what she saw as ecclesiastical attempts to play on European consciences by depicting Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation. The impact of this "Palestinianism" can be discerned, she claimed further, in the positions of major politicians in Europe, ranging from Jacques Chirac, Javier Solana, Romano Prodi to Dominique de Villepin and Mary Robinson, who came to consider the Palestinian problem a central issue for world peace. For her, Christian evocations of the plight of Palestinians betrayed an underlying tradition of Christian demonization of Jews, and had assumed the status of a "modern Eurabian cult". More specifically, in theological terms, she interpreted this "Christian Palestinianism" as heretical, because she claimed that it was a variety of Marcionism.

The term was subsequently picked up as a negative description for the Palestinian cause, by British journalist Melanie Phillips in her Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within, where she claimed that the Muslim Association of Britain, in her view an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, had become the "spearhead" of "radical Palestinianism." in Great Britain.

In 2007, the idea that Palestinian national rights were a threat to Western civilization, and in particular to its religious values, was argued for in a book by evangelical theologian Paul Wilkinson, assistant Minister at Hazel Grove Full Gospel Church in Stockport, Cheshire and a member of Tim LaHaye's Pre-Tribulation Rapture Research Center. A British Christian Zionist, in that year he devoted a chapter in his book For Zion's Sake, to what he called "Christian Palestinianism", as the antithesis of Christian Zionism. He pursued his assertions in more detail in 2017, in the second volume, entitled Israel Betrayed – Volume 2: The rise of Christian Palestinianism, of his study of replacement theology.

Wilkinson's critique of Christian Palestinianism holds that Christians must acknowledge that God's "sovereign hand" established Israel in 1948. Only pro-Zionists are true Christians, since the ingathering of Jews to Palestine is a precondition for the parousia, or return of Christ the King. Unconditional support of the Jewish state of Israel is premised on a Christian anticipation of the Messianic end time. Wilkinson says that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, their nation, language, culture and religion are hoaxes perpetrated by anti-Christian liberals. The very idea itself is merely "another tactical manoeuvre in the Islamic war waged against Israel to effect her destruction." Other Christians, in particular Palestinian Christians who criticize Israel, speaking of the "perceived" suffering of Palestinians, foment Jew-hatred in favouring pro-Palestinian propaganda. Non-Zionists are anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizers. The book was excoriated by theologian Darren M. Slade. professor of humanities at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.

Modern usage

In 2010 Palestinianism was described by Israeli journalist Moshe Dann as an "ideology", that viewed Israel as a settler-colonial state, and one which had two immediate goals: Palestinian statehood in the Palestinian territories defined by the 1949 armistice lines, and the implementation of the right of return of Palestinian refugees. According to Dann, who repeated his claims in 2021, the long-term goal of the "elimination of Israel" was explicitly called for in both the Palestinian National Covenant, (nullified in 1996 after the Oslo Accords), and the Hamas Covenant (a provision officially cancelled in 2017, but still endorsed by Hamas). This "ideology" had been, he asserted, legitimized by Israel itself by the 1993 Oslo Accords. Dann claimed that Palestinian identity is a fiction contrived to oppose Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and that Israel was entitled to the Palestinian West Bank because it was full of Jewish archaeological sites, with no evidence for any Palestinian historical heritage, there or anywhere else in Palestine.

According to Tower Magazine journalist, and former advisor to The Israel Project Ben Cohen, Palestinianism is the core ideology informing recent antisemitism, one that assumes the guise of a social movement which, bundling together neo-fascists, liberals, extreme leftists, and Islamicists, is militantly opposed to the age of Jewish self-empowerment after 1945.

In 2018, a pro-Zionist English blogger David Collier, whose mission was described as one "show(ing) everybody how toxic our enemies are", claimed that Palestinianism was a threat to freedom of speech and the cause of human rights, an infective agent of anti-Semitism:

"Palestinianism" is a disease that is anathema to freedom, to debate, to openness and to human rights. ... It will infect those who catch the disease with anti-Semitism just as it provides them with a denial mechanism to protest their innocence.

Criticism of hostility to Palestinianism

In 2021, analyzing American bipartisan congressional attacks on Democratic Party colleagues ("the Squad") such as Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for their having criticized Israel's human rights record, the Zionist critic Peter Beinart, writing in Jewish Currents, rose to the defense of the latter. He argues that the allegations of the former, that such criticism was anti-Semitic, was itself evidence of bigotry – "treating people as inferior because of their group identity" – and takes the form of anti-Palestinianism, which is, he claims, commonplace throughout American society.

The bigotry of anti-Palestinianism, for Beinart, is "ubiquitous" notwithstanding the fact that, unlike "anti-Israeli" or "anti-Jewish", the word "anti-Palestinian" hardly exists. Any Google search, he found, will unfold an endless number of links associating such politicians with antisemitism, whereas Google yields no evidence that the congressmen he cites – Michael Waltz, Jim Banks, Claudia Tenney, Ted Deutch, Josh Gottheimer, Kathy Manning, Elaine Luria, and Dean Phillips – who repeat these accusations in the House of Representatives, are hostile to Palestinians, despite his claim that there is strong evidence for their bias in this regard. Beinart considers that the group of Democrats accusing Israel of apartheid practices or Jewish supremacist territorial ambitions (B'Tselem) are simply reflecting an opposition to violations of international law: a view shared by NGOs like Human Rights Watch. Beinart makes an historical analogy between anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinianism. There was no term to denote treating Jews as inferior before pressure for treating Jews equally gained some political traction in the 19th century. Once they had achieved legal recognition, the term anti-Semitism came into vogue to denote those hostile to parity of rights for Jewish citizens. A similar logic applies to the term (anti-)Palestinianism. Throughout the 20th century, American and Israeli discourse hardly tolerated a word like Palestinian. It is still unmentionable that Palestinians also deserve equality, and relentless allegations that those who advocate for Palestinian equality are ipso facto anti-Semitic constitute, for Beinart, a form of bigotry. The effectiveness of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism strikingly illustrates the way, thus construed, anti-Palestinian oppressive practices are silenced.

Uncertainty

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty

Situations often arise wherein a decision must be made when the results of each possible choice are uncertain.

Uncertainty or incertitude refers to situations involving imperfect or unknown information. It applies to predictions of future events, to physical measurements that are already made, or to the unknown, and is particularly relevant for decision-making. Uncertainty arises in partially observable or stochastic environments, as well as due to ignorance, indolence, or both. It arises in any number of fields, including insurance, philosophy, physics, statistics, economics, finance, medicine, psychology, sociology, engineering, metrology, meteorology, ecology and information science.

Concepts

Although the terms are used in various ways among the general public, many specialists in decision theory, statistics and other quantitative fields have defined uncertainty, risk, and their measurement as:

Uncertainty

The lack of certainty, a state of limited knowledge where it is impossible to exactly describe the existing state, a future outcome, or more than one possible outcome.

Measurement

Uncertainty can be measured through a set of possible states or outcomes where probabilities are assigned to each possible state or outcome – this also includes the application of a probability density function to continuous variables.

Second-order uncertainty

In statistics and economics, second-order uncertainty is represented in probability density functions over (first-order) probabilities.

Opinions in subjective logic carry this type of uncertainty.

Risk

Risk is a state of uncertainty, where some possible outcomes have an undesired effect or significant loss. Measurement of risk includes a set of measured uncertainties, where some possible outcomes are losses, and the magnitudes of those losses. This also includes loss functions over continuous variables.

Uncertainty versus variability

There is a difference between uncertainty and variability. Uncertainty is quantified by a probability distribution which depends upon knowledge about the likelihood of what the single, true value of the uncertain quantity is. Variability is quantified by a distribution of frequencies of multiple instances of the quantity, derived from observed data.

Knightian uncertainty

In economics, in 1921 Frank Knight distinguished uncertainty from risk with uncertainty being lack of knowledge which is immeasurable and impossible to calculate. Because of the absence of clearly defined statistics in most economic decisions where people face uncertainty, he believed that we cannot measure probabilities in such cases; this is now referred to as Knightian uncertainty.

Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of risk, from which it has never been properly separated.... The essential fact is that 'risk' means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement, while at other times it is something distinctly not of this character; and there are far-reaching and crucial differences in the bearings of the phenomena depending on which of the two is really present and operating.... It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or 'risk' proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.

— Frank Knight (1885–1972), Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (1921), University of Chicago.

There is a fundamental distinction between the reward for taking a known risk and that for assuming a risk whose value itself is not known. It is so fundamental, indeed, that … a known risk will not lead to any reward or special payment at all.

— Frank Knight

Knight pointed out that the unfavorable outcome of known risks can be insured during the decision-making process because it has a clearly defined expected probability distribution. Unknown risks have no known expected probability distribution, which can lead to extremely risky company decisions.

Other taxonomies of uncertainties and decisions include a broader sense of uncertainty and how it should be approached from an ethics perspective:

A taxonomy of uncertainty

There are some things that you know to be true, and others that you know to be false; yet, despite this extensive knowledge that you have, there remain many things whose truth or falsity is not known to you. We say that you are uncertain about them. You are uncertain, to varying degrees, about everything in the future; much of the past is hidden from you; and there is a lot of the present about which you do not have full information. Uncertainty is everywhere and you cannot escape from it.

Dennis Lindley, Understanding Uncertainty (2006)

Risk and uncertainty

For example, if it is unknown whether or not it will rain tomorrow, then there is a state of uncertainty. If probabilities are applied to the possible outcomes using weather forecasts or even just a calibrated probability assessment, the uncertainty has been quantified. Suppose it is quantified as a 90% chance of sunshine. If there is a major, costly, outdoor event planned for tomorrow then there is a risk since there is a 10% chance of rain, and rain would be undesirable. Furthermore, if this is a business event and $100,000 would be lost if it rains, then the risk has been quantified (a 10% chance of losing $100,000). These situations can be made even more realistic by quantifying light rain vs. heavy rain, the cost of delays vs. outright cancellation, etc.

Some may represent the risk in this example as the "expected opportunity loss" (EOL) or the chance of the loss multiplied by the amount of the loss (10% × $100,000 = $10,000). That is useful if the organizer of the event is "risk neutral", which most people are not. Most would be willing to pay a premium to avoid the loss. An insurance company, for example, would compute an EOL as a minimum for any insurance coverage, then add onto that other operating costs and profit. Since many people are willing to buy insurance for many reasons, then clearly the EOL alone is not the perceived value of avoiding the risk.

Quantitative uses of the terms uncertainty and risk are fairly consistent among fields such as probability theory, actuarial science, and information theory. Some also create new terms without substantially changing the definitions of uncertainty or risk. For example, surprisal is a variation on uncertainty sometimes used in information theory. But outside of the more mathematical uses of the term, usage may vary widely. In cognitive psychology, uncertainty can be real, or just a matter of perception, such as expectations, threats, etc.

Vagueness is a form of uncertainty where the analyst is unable to clearly differentiate between two different classes, such as 'person of average height' and 'tall person'. This form of vagueness can be modelled by some variation on Zadeh's fuzzy logic or subjective logic.

Ambiguity is a form of uncertainty where even the possible outcomes have unclear meanings and interpretations. The statement "He returns from the bank" is ambiguous because its interpretation depends on whether the word 'bank' is meant as "the side of a river" or "a financial institution". Ambiguity typically arises in situations where multiple analysts or observers have different interpretations of the same statements.

At the subatomic level, uncertainty may be a fundamental and unavoidable property of the universe. In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle puts limits on how much an observer can ever know about the position and velocity of a particle. This may not just be ignorance of potentially obtainable facts but that there is no fact to be found. There is some controversy in physics as to whether such uncertainty is an irreducible property of nature or if there are "hidden variables" that would describe the state of a particle even more exactly than Heisenberg's uncertainty principle allows.

Radical uncertainty

The term 'radical uncertainty' was popularised by John Kay and Mervyn King in their book Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future, published in March 2020. It is distinct from Knightian uncertainty, by whether or not it is 'resolvable'. If uncertainty arises from a lack of knowledge, and that lack of knowledge is resolvable by acquiring knowledge (such as by primary or secondary research) then it is not radical uncertainty. Only when there are no means available to acquire the knowledge which would resolve the uncertainty, is it considered 'radical'.

In measurements

Main article: Measurement uncertainty

See also: Uncertainty quantification and Uncertainty propagation

The most commonly used procedure for calculating measurement uncertainty is described in the "Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement" (GUM) published by ISO. A derived work is for example the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Technical Note 1297, "Guidelines for Evaluating and Expressing the Uncertainty of NIST Measurement Results", and the Eurachem/Citac publication "Quantifying Uncertainty in Analytical Measurement". The uncertainty of the result of a measurement generally consists of several components. The components are regarded as random variables, and may be grouped into two categories according to the method used to estimate their numerical values:

• Type A, those evaluated by statistical methods
• Type B, those evaluated by other means, e.g., by assigning a probability distribution

By propagating the variances of the components through a function relating the components to the measurement result, the combined measurement uncertainty is given as the square root of the resulting variance. The simplest form is the standard deviation of a repeated observation.

In metrology, physics, and engineering, the uncertainty or margin of error of a measurement, when explicitly stated, is given by a range of values likely to enclose the true value. This may be denoted by error bars on a graph, or by the following notations:

• measured value ± uncertainty
• measured value ^+uncertainty
  _{−uncertainty}
• measured value (uncertainty)

In the last notation, parentheses are the concise notation for the ± notation. For example, applying 10 1⁄2 meters in a scientific or engineering application, it could be written 10.5 m or 10.50 m, by convention meaning accurate to within one tenth of a meter, or one hundredth. The precision is symmetric around the last digit. In this case it's half a tenth up and half a tenth down, so 10.5 means between 10.45 and 10.55. Thus it is understood that 10.5 means 10.5±0.05, and 10.50 means 10.50±0.005, also written 10.50(5) and 10.500(5) respectively. But if the accuracy is within two tenths, the uncertainty is ± one tenth, and it is required to be explicit: 10.5±0.1 and 10.50±0.01 or 10.5(1) and 10.50(1). The numbers in parentheses apply to the numeral left of themselves, and are not part of that number, but part of a notation of uncertainty. They apply to the least significant digits. For instance, 1.00794(7) stands for 1.00794±0.00007, while 1.00794(72) stands for 1.00794±0.00072. This concise notation is used for example by IUPAC in stating the atomic mass of elements.

The middle notation is used when the error is not symmetrical about the value – for example 3.4+0.3
−0.2. This can occur when using a logarithmic scale, for example.

Uncertainty of a measurement can be determined by repeating a measurement to arrive at an estimate of the standard deviation of the values. Then, any single value has an uncertainty equal to the standard deviation. However, if the values are averaged, then the mean measurement value has a much smaller uncertainty, equal to the standard error of the mean, which is the standard deviation divided by the square root of the number of measurements. This procedure neglects systematic errors, however.

When the uncertainty represents the standard error of the measurement, then about 68.3% of the time, the true value of the measured quantity falls within the stated uncertainty range. For example, it is likely that for 31.7% of the atomic mass values given on the list of elements by atomic mass, the true value lies outside of the stated range. If the width of the interval is doubled, then probably only 4.6% of the true values lie outside the doubled interval, and if the width is tripled, probably only 0.3% lie outside. These values follow from the properties of the normal distribution, and they apply only if the measurement process produces normally distributed errors. In that case, the quoted standard errors are easily converted to 68.3% ("one sigma"), 95.4% ("two sigma"), or 99.7% ("three sigma") confidence intervals.

In this context, uncertainty depends on both the accuracy and precision of the measurement instrument. The lower the accuracy and precision of an instrument, the larger the measurement uncertainty is. Precision is often determined as the standard deviation of the repeated measures of a given value, namely using the same method described above to assess measurement uncertainty. However, this method is correct only when the instrument is accurate. When it is inaccurate, the uncertainty is larger than the standard deviation of the repeated measures, and it appears evident that the uncertainty does not depend only on instrumental precision.

In the media

Uncertainty in science, and science in general, may be interpreted differently in the public sphere than in the scientific community. This is due in part to the diversity of the public audience, and the tendency for scientists to misunderstand lay audiences and therefore not communicate ideas clearly and effectively. One example is explained by the information deficit model. Also, in the public realm, there are often many scientific voices giving input on a single topic. For example, depending on how an issue is reported in the public sphere, discrepancies between outcomes of multiple scientific studies due to methodological differences could be interpreted by the public as a lack of consensus in a situation where a consensus does in fact exist. This interpretation may have even been intentionally promoted, as scientific uncertainty may be managed to reach certain goals. For example, climate change deniers took the advice of Frank Luntz to frame global warming as an issue of scientific uncertainty, which was a precursor to the conflict frame used by journalists when reporting the issue.

"Indeterminacy can be loosely said to apply to situations in which not all the parameters of the system and their interactions are fully known, whereas ignorance refers to situations in which it is not known what is not known." These unknowns, indeterminacy and ignorance, that exist in science are often "transformed" into uncertainty when reported to the public in order to make issues more manageable, since scientific indeterminacy and ignorance are difficult concepts for scientists to convey without losing credibility. Conversely, uncertainty is often interpreted by the public as ignorance. The transformation of indeterminacy and ignorance into uncertainty may be related to the public's misinterpretation of uncertainty as ignorance.

Journalists may inflate uncertainty (making the science seem more uncertain than it really is) or downplay uncertainty (making the science seem more certain than it really is). One way that journalists inflate uncertainty is by describing new research that contradicts past research without providing context for the change. Journalists may give scientists with minority views equal weight as scientists with majority views, without adequately describing or explaining the state of scientific consensus on the issue. In the same vein, journalists may give non-scientists the same amount of attention and importance as scientists.

Journalists may downplay uncertainty by eliminating "scientists' carefully chosen tentative wording, and by losing these caveats the information is skewed and presented as more certain and conclusive than it really is". Also, stories with a single source or without any context of previous research mean that the subject at hand is presented as more definitive and certain than it is in reality. There is often a "product over process" approach to science journalism that aids, too, in the downplaying of uncertainty. Finally, and most notably for this investigation, when science is framed by journalists as a triumphant quest, uncertainty is erroneously framed as "reducible and resolvable".

Some media routines and organizational factors affect the overstatement of uncertainty; other media routines and organizational factors help inflate the certainty of an issue. Because the general public (in the United States) generally trusts scientists, when science stories are covered without alarm-raising cues from special interest organizations (religious groups, environmental organizations, political factions, etc.) they are often covered in a business related sense, in an economic-development frame or a social progress frame. The nature of these frames is to downplay or eliminate uncertainty, so when economic and scientific promise are focused on early in the issue cycle, as has happened with coverage of plant biotechnology and nanotechnology in the United States, the matter in question seems more definitive and certain.

Sometimes, stockholders, owners, or advertising will pressure a media organization to promote the business aspects of a scientific issue, and therefore any uncertainty claims which may compromise the business interests are downplayed or eliminated.

Applications

• Uncertainty is designed into games, most notably in gambling, where chance is central to play.
• In scientific modelling, in which the prediction of future events should be understood to have a range of expected values
• In computer science, and in particular data management, uncertain data is commonplace and can be modeled and stored within an uncertain database
• In optimization, uncertainty permits one to describe situations where the user does not have full control on the outcome of the optimization procedure, see scenario optimization and stochastic optimization.
• In weather forecasting, it is now commonplace to include data on the degree of uncertainty in a weather forecast.
• Uncertainty or error is used in science and engineering notation. Numerical values should only have to be expressed in those digits that are physically meaningful, which are referred to as significant figures. Uncertainty is involved in every measurement, such as measuring a distance, a temperature, etc., the degree depending upon the instrument or technique used to make the measurement. Similarly, uncertainty is propagated through calculations so that the calculated value has some degree of uncertainty depending upon the uncertainties of the measured values and the equation used in the calculation.
• In physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle forms the basis of modern quantum mechanics.
• In metrology, measurement uncertainty is a central concept quantifying the dispersion one may reasonably attribute to a measurement result. Such an uncertainty can also be referred to as a measurement error.
• In daily life, measurement uncertainty is often implicit ("He is 6 feet tall" give or take a few inches), while for any serious use an explicit statement of the measurement uncertainty is necessary. The expected measurement uncertainty of many measuring instruments (scales, oscilloscopes, force gages, rulers, thermometers, etc.) is often stated in the manufacturers' specifications.
• In engineering, uncertainty can be used in the context of validation and verification of material modeling.
• Uncertainty has been a common theme in art, both as a thematic device (see, for example, the indecision of Hamlet), and as a quandary for the artist (such as Martin Creed's difficulty with deciding what artworks to make).
• Uncertainty is an important factor in economics. According to economist Frank Knight, it is different from risk, where there is a specific probability assigned to each outcome (as when flipping a fair coin). Knightian uncertainty involves a situation that has unknown probabilities.
• Investing in financial markets such as the stock market involves Knightian uncertainty when the probability of a rare but catastrophic event is unknown.

Philosophy

Main article: Philosophical skepticism

In Western philosophy the first philosopher to embrace uncertainty was Pyrrho resulting in the Hellenistic philosophies of Pyrrhonism and Academic Skepticism, the first schools of philosophical skepticism. Aporia and acatalepsy represent key concepts in ancient Greek philosophy regarding uncertainty.

William MacAskill, a philosopher at Oxford University, has also discussed the concept of Moral Uncertainty. Moral Uncertainty is "uncertainty about how to act given lack of certainty in any one moral theory, as well as the study of how we ought to act given this uncertainty."

Artificial intelligence

Many reasoning systems provide capabilities for reasoning under uncertainty. This is important when building situated reasoning agents which must deal with uncertain representations of the world. There are several common approaches to handling uncertainty. These include the use of certainty factors, probabilistic methods such as Bayesian inference or Dempster–Shafer theory, multi-valued ('fuzzy') logic and various connectionist approaches.