Archaeology or Faith?   This may seem like a tough question but in reality it really isn’t.  You probably heard many times over words like: ‘The experts say…’ or ‘According to the experts…’  or something similar.  The problem is that the experts do not have all the information they need to make such judgments.   This is true not only for some areas of science but for archaeology as well.  K. A. Kitchen, in his book ‘The Bible in its World’, has laid out the minute amount of actual evidence, artifacts, written records that have been uncovered  through 150 years of exploration.   Dr. Bryant Wood has echoed this assessment in his lecture, ‘Defining Biblical Archaeology’, with the following:   - A small fraction of past societies actually survives - A small fraction of ancient sites are actually excavated - A small fraction of an ancient site is actually excavated - A small fraction of information is published   Most experts are ‘interpreting’ what evidence they find and such interpretation is influenced by the personal beliefs of the archaeologist, his/her personal bias, the lack of competing evidence, subjective dating systems and so on.   With such sparse information the ‘expert’ is not a reliable source.  They can present an idea of the past but since they are trying to look back 20, 30 or more centuries with incomplete data it is just impossible for them to present an accurate picture.   These experts then (if they are unbelievers) trash the only record written by the only eye-witness to all the events of the past and they expect you to take their word based upon incomplete physical evidence over God’s word.     The world will never get all the physical evidence it needs or wants no matter how hard the demand it.  Time has taken its toll on it and it is just gone.  So all a person is left with is –faith.  For the believer this is an easy option for we know that God is pleased when we use faith and that is exactly what we are left with when it comes to things like the past.   We can reject God’s words because an ‘expert’ says differently than the Bible or we can please God and believe Him, even though science or archaeology says differently.  The choice is left up to the person,  as God wants those with Him who are willing to take His word for it over those who are finite and corruptible.   It is not a hard choice, we need to choose faith and keep archaeology in perspective, in that it is only a tool which will provide information that will strengthen and shore up our faith when the enemy to tear it down.     In reality, we cannot listen to those experts who are not believers because they do not believe in God and demand physical proof for every event that has been recorded in the Bible while dismissing the only physical evidence that tells them the truth—the Bible.   The double standard that exists in the unbelieving world is immense as not only is the Bible dismissed as evidence (solely on the reason that it is religious writings) but it is subjected to strict standards and criteria that are not applied to any other ancient work.  This is done in spite of the massive amounts of ancient mss. for both the Old and New Testaments plus the thousands of artifacts and other records which support the Biblical accounts.   One must be discerning, informed and holds fast to their faith if they want to get to the truth and avoid the mis-leadings of those who claim to be experts in the past.  In this case, the experts do not know it all nor can they guess, if they leave the Bible out of the equation.