New Blog post: "Mysterious Steganography"- a Damning Observation

[Koen G]

My point is that... real or fake... most if not all of the unidentified languages and scripts in the 17th century were, by 1912, at least identified if not read. So for any language or characters to be both unidentifiable in the 1600's, AND then still be unidentifiable in 1912, is staggeringly unlikely. It strongly implies to me that... in order for this to be the case... the 1912 script and language would have to be invented around 1912, in order to fulfill the 17th century descriptions of "unknown" and "mysterious".

This argument feels fallacious to me as well. Yes, we can observe that many scripts which baffled people in the 1600's are better understood now. The reason for this is probably a more systematic and scientific approach of scripts and science in general, the development of the scientific method. The development of systematic ways to understand forgotten scripts, to reconstruct lost languages. But the fact that we still don't understand the VM will at most highlight its exceptional status. And exceptional artifacts are allowed to exist: it is not because something is a unique find, that it is therefore inherently fraudulent. The Antikythera mechanism is an easy example.

Your argument boils down to this: "X has a property A which is unique, therefore X is fake". But the problem is that nothing inherent to this property A points towards X being fake. And "uniqueness" in itself is also not a good reason for something to be fake, because then we would be able to call lots of things fake.