I’m a Christian, and I believe the Bible has zero authority. To steal a turn of phrase from Jesus, the Bible was made for man, not man for the Bible.
Can I ask what you base your faith on then? Why did you choose to be a Christian and not an Muslim? Why do you think Jesus in the way to salvation?
That depends on what you’re looking for. If you’re talking about literal, historical authenticity then the Bible is no more reliable than the Koran or the Rig Veda or the Dhammapada or the Homer’s Iliad. If you’re talking about spiritual or psychological insight or general wisdom, the Bible is as good as any other book but “authority” in that regard is purely subjective.
Faith in the Bible as “authoritative” is based on faith and tradition just like the sacred literature of any other religion. There is no empirical or scientific reason to suppose that it’s any more reliable than any other religious text and much of it can be demostratively disproven as historical. Symbolic or spiritual truths are another matter and such things are not subject to objective analysis.
That’s easy! “No.”
Sorry for that redundancy. I meant to say that characterizations of the Bible of the Bible as “authoritative” are based on faith and tradition
Blind faith, to me, sound like you have no basis for belief whatsoever, whereas faith simply menas it cannot be conclusively proven. Most of what we know is taken on some degree of faith: I’ve never seen Russia, but I have seen enough evidence to convince me, that it’s there.
“Faith,” IMO, means I beleive my (fictional) wife when she says she’s not cheating on me; we have a history and I think I know her and can trust her. If I come home and find her playing naked twister with the pool boy, I will lose my faith in her.
“Blind faith” would be trusting someone I had never met before and had no knowledge of.
Like God?
Hey, just throwing in my nickels worth, take it or leave it.
For what it’s worth, I was studying to be a preacher before I had a falling out with organized religion. I don’t usually throw around my knowledge of the Bible, but it comes in handy from time to time when someone makes a bogus claim or tries to justify horrible deeds in the name of God. (that always ticks me off)
Well, you either accept the Bible (or Torah in your case) on faith, or you don’t. If you feel the need to prove it, then I would say you need to reassess your faith.
The (Christian and/or Jewish) Bible is a collection of writings in a number of different genres. Some of it (e.g. the books of Kings & Chronicles) but certainly not all of it is meant to be history. How does this compare with the other texts you mentioned? Do any of them have parts that are meant as straight history?
I’d like to see you back up that claim (i.e. Cite?), or else soften it. How much is “much,” and how was it “demonstrably disproven”? When it comes to ancient history, it can be tricky to prove or disprove anything demonstrably.
Yeah! Which is why Christianity (and other theistic religions?) would say that it is better to have knowledge of God than to have blind faith in God.
Okay, then, so how do we have knowledge of God? The Bible (Christians claim) is a major source—which of course brings us back to the OP’s question: what’s the authority that what the Bible tells us about God is true?
Actually, this single question breaks down into a multitude of questions. For instance, the Bible purports to include the messages that God gave his people through the prophets: How do we know whether the prophets really got their words from God, and that we got an accurate version of what they said, and that we’re interpreting them correctly? And you could ask similar questions about Jesus, or the apostles.
If you ask people who do trust that what the Bible tells about God is true why they believe this, they might give you an anwer like one of the following (which I present without comment as to how valid they might be):
“It just rings true to me; it makes sense and seems right.”
“It matches up with what I know about God from other sources, like personal experience.”
“People I trust have told me so.”
“I believe that the people of biblical times faithfully recorded what they saw, heard, and knew, and that this has come down to us in a reliable form.”
“The Holy Spirit working in my heart leads me to believe.”
or “Well, you gotta believe something; this is what I choose to believe.” (the blind faith approach)
You left off:
“It helps me in my business.”
“I can meet babes.”
“It helps me get elected to office.”
All of them do…andb with the exception of Homer, all of them are also believed to be the literal word of God (or Buddha in the case of the Dhammapada).
The parts of the Bible which do purport to be “straight history” are the parts which are the most falsifiable.
Much" is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Here is a list of demonstrable falsifications for Biblical assertions:
-The earth is not 600 years old
-The sky is not a solid dome which “separates the waters.”
-The Earth was not “created” before the stars.
-Living species were not “created” separately, nor were they created simultaneously.
-Humans are not descended from one “created” couple.
-There was no global flood and no ark.
-The Jews were never enslaved in Egypt
-There was no “Exodus” of a half-million Jews out of Egypt.
-There is no archaelogical evidence of any human presense in the Sinai Peninsula. According to the Bible, several hundred thousand people spent 38 years at a camp called Kadesh-barnea in Eastern Sinai, yet repeated excavations at this site have failed to yield a single potsherd or fragment of any human occupation during the time of this alleged occupation.
-There was never any mass migration of “Israelites” into Canaan
-There was no conquest of Canaan by the Israelites.
-There was no united kingdom of Israel under David and Solomon. The archaeological evidence shows that, at most, David was a small local chieftain who had no dominion over the still mostly Canaanite “Northern Kingdom.”
-There was no census of the world under Augustus Caesar.
-There was no local census during the reign of Herod the Great in Palestine.
-No one was ever required to return to their town of birth under any Roman census.
I have stayed away from “miracles” (exceot for the “creation”) partially because I wanted to stick to stuff which was demonstrably false and partially because they do not rise to a level of plausibility which would demand any sort of negative evidence.
Hopefully, you’re not going to quibble about the historicity of the Genesis stuff but you probably will take issue with the stuff about the Exodus and David. I refer you to the work of Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman who have presented some extremely convincing evidence for their claims.
Oh no, not again.
Archaeological evidence against the bulk (but by no means all) of Biblical accounts literally fills books. It can’t possibly be covered on a message board. I suggest you begin w/ your local library (a university library, if possible), bookstore, or Amazon.com.
And please, let’s not get into failure to disprove a negative. That seems to be this board’s Achilles’ heel.
The problem with arguments like these…
… is that applying the same standards to other scriptures will lead you to believe that they are true as well, even if they make contrary claims.
But back to the issues at hand…
I say “issues” because two different questions have been asked by the OP, who for some reason seems to believe that one is a paraphrase of the other.
- Is there any “theological” evidence for the truth of the Bible which is not based on “blind faith”?
This seems nonsensical to me, since evidence not based on blind faith would be mundane rather than theological. I find furt’s distinction b/t faith and blind faith satisfactory, but as it applies to this question, informed faith simply means faith supported by observation, so it becomes a two-step process, and we might as well cut out the middleman (faith) and say that the evidence is based on observation, which makes it nontheological.
- The supposed rephrasing asked if there are “objective” reasons for believing that the Bible rather than other scriptures might be true.
The answer to this is simply: no. The fact that there are truths in the Bible (and there are) does not on its face support the proposition. If there were objective reasons for believing that the Bible is the preferred scripture, they would be known and well accepted by now among the modern scientific community, given the amount of research and scholarship that has gone into studying this matter.
Despite paranoid theories to the contrary, there is no scientific conspiracy against Christianity. The scientist who proved Christianity to be valid would be more famous (and rewarded) than Newton, Einstein, and Hawking rolled into one.
The answer to your question, Star Was, is no. Period. End of story. Good night.
I think we need to be a little suspicious of the concept of “Judeo-Christian” tradition, considering how far Christian readings and understandings of the Old Testament have split from Jewish tradition.
Blind faith means to believe in something in spite of (blind to) that which would not support that belief. I think faith itself is, by definition, blind. Once you weigh evidence, any evidence at all, you’re no longer operating on faith. You’re accepting a proven truth. Or not.
Look around you. This is it. Enjoy. 
Peace (on Earth),
mangeorge
I’m re-reading the Old Testament. Rather than a source of moral authority, it looks more like a history of what’s regarded as moral, and what a changing barometer this is.
In Genesis, the things that displease God (and the people he favors) include eating an apple, wanting greater knowledge, seeing your father naked. Things that don’t displease him include polygamy, incest, holding slaves, bonding your son into slavery, screwing your brother out of his birthright. God’s likes and dislikes waver between “arbitrary” and “whimsical.”
With Exodus, we get the Ten Commandments and a much clearer codification of what God (or society) wants and expects from us. And from each book onward, the people God favors are people with more and more traits that modern people can recognize as virtuous.
So my take is that the Bible documents the history and refinement of society’s notions of right and wrong over the passage of time, and from this, a sense of moral authority can be gleaned.
I think you’re using a different definition of the word “faith” than many of us are. I’d say that having faith in someone or something means trusting them, considering them to be reliable; and this does not preclude having reasons for doing so, reasons which may fall short of absolute proof.
Blind faith and proven truth are not the only two alternatives; they are two ends to a continuum. This is a good thing to keep in mind in any great debate. Sometimes you can’t have certainty, but you can have reasons for believing something to a greater or lesser degree.
Somewhat along the lines of Libertarian, the Bible supports faith- faith does not support the Bible. I believe scripture is divinely inspired, yet our faith does not hinge on historical accuracy. The world created in 6 days tells us THAT God created the universe, but it is not important that it describes accurately HOW God created the universe. Knowing we are in God’s image is enough, whether Adam and Eve were literally the first people is irrelevant. Before Jesus went to heaven, He didn’t tell the disciples “read the book”, He gave them authority to carry on His work (what you bind on earth is bound in heaven, etc.) Scripture is one tool in our box, but not the ultimate authority in and of itself. Church tradition and theological interpretations over the years are often as important or even more so than the Bible.
I believe that I am a Christian and a Muslim. I believe also that I am an atheist and a theist. These are all matters of mere intellect and therefore trivial. My faith is a gift from God. It is not that I chose to believe; it’s that my experience compelled me to believe. I could no more deny the existence of God than I could of my own mother. Jesus is the way to salvation because He is God. But that is an INclusionary, not EXclusionary, identity. It is not the case that there are gods in competition for godhood. It is not rah-rah for my team. It is that all who facilitate goodness are God. It is not possible both to be a follower of Christ and to use Him as a weapon to condemn and exclude. No one can be blamed for rejecting Him when He is presented as some sick caricature of God, hiding behind bushes near the gates of hell to ensnare those who happen by. God is love — the distribution of goodness. Goodness is the aesthetic that He values above all else. And all who value goodness above all else are God.
Cite?