It’s not just a few Protestant sects. It’s pretty much mainstream Christian theology, e.g.:
[QUOTE=The Roman Catholic Church]
107The inspired books teach the truth. “Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.”
[/QUOTE]
The Bible says that God, not some advanced alien technology, made the donkey speak. You’re the one who is bringing stuff in from left field, or should I say, outer space.
Right. Paraphrasing, Robert163 said that it would be “delusional” to believe that a donkey could speak. You said that the person need not be delusional, because the person might be honestly, lucidly reporting that the donkey was speaking because of a misunderstanding of what was “really” happening.
I am suggesting that your proposition, although sympathetic, should probably be discounted because a strict reading of the Bible would not allow for your interpretation.
Yours is a creative argument. But, we shouldn’t plumb those depths, in my opinion. Why not?
If you are allowed to suppose an error in reporting here, you can assume an error in reporting everywhere, which tends to erode all miracles, which rather drains the story.
But, if you did allow the error in reporting here & not anywhere else, we end up with a mistake in the Bible that really is 100% ignorable. Fine. The person isn’t deluded. You win this point. I agree with your logic. But, this, in my opinion, isn’t very helpful, because a deluded person isn’t the most likely explanation for the passage.
The most likely explanation, in my personal opinion, is that the whole passage is fictional. Made up.
So, the choice I am suggesting isn’t whether for not the author of the Biblical passage was deluded. That’s not very interesting. I’m suggesting that we must accept the passage as being factual or fictional. Any compromise is weaseling and tedious.
I am not trying to oppose your view; I am trying to expand the overall thought process without bringing aliens into it.
I mean as the story is told. The donkey did not just talk, like Mr. Ed or maybe Francis the Mule, but spoke very specific things in a specific context - and said no more. That’s as close to impossible as I think we can get. Close enough that we are a sim is a more plausible explanation. Ed Fredkin, an early believer that the universe is a simulation, said that miracles might be bugs.
By your definition scientifically impossible has no meaning, since we can always invent powerful aliens to explain away anything. Is that what you mean?
I could not choose one of those answers.
I do not know about deities, the probabilities any exist are extremely slim, and I do not think it matters anyways because if they exist, none of them show anything other than utter indifference to this universe or its contents.
And I think that most people believe in deities, but at their own convenience.
Most of us would go a little farther, and say “No hypothesis could account for the claim without violating a very large part of our understanding of the physical world.” It would violate too much of what we know about biology, anatomy, zoology, etc.
It doesn’t “violate the natural physical laws of the universe” for there to be a 800 foot tall giraffe. But it violates whole gobs of physiological laws. Such a creature cannot exist, and there are hundreds of reasons why. Ditto for talking donkeys.
(Just for one, they don’t have the mouth-parts, palate, vocal cords, etc.)
(That said, I’ve heard some remarkably articulate braying — and no, that ain’t a shot at anybody! I’m serious. Donkeys can make some really complex vocalizations.)
Yes. But you’re not understanding what your quote means,
In The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, then-Cardinal Ratzinger published, as part of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, a worthwhile read on the subject. As this document teaches:
Actually, no, this is not an accurate summary of the discussion.
As you may recall, Robert averred that the talking donkey story was an example of a “scientifically impossible,” event.
To this, I responded, disagreeing: I suggested that the observations related to the donkey could be explained in ways that don’t violate the laws of the universe as we understand those laws, nor is it “impossible,” in the other ways discussed above.
So please be clear on what I am arguing, and what I claim: I don’t say the donkey talked, much less that God made the donkey talk. I say that the reported observation of a talking donkey is not a scientifically impossible observation, because I can advance several hypotheses that could explain what was seen without recourse to the supernatural.
No, your paraphrase elides a key exchange. You have quoted the word delusional, as though the crux of disagreement was the possibility of delusion.
It’s not.
My key, and pretty much only, heartburn arises from the use of “scientific impossibility.”
Yes, I agree. But since I am not debating “the most likely explanation,” I am unmoved by this. I am debating whether other, very unlikely explanations are “scientifically impossible.”
Yes, I’ve read it. It goes to the Wikipedia article about Social Desirability Bias. That article alone certainly does not give us any certain reason to believe that the poll result which is at the center of this thread is inaccurate. The 86% figure or thereabouts holds for anonymous polls, in which no one has any motivation to provide answers that are social desirable. An unconscious bias is possible, but certainly there’s no solid evidence of such. Some people seem to think that they know exactly how respondents are being socially pressured, in what direction, and by what means, but nobody has backed up such statements.
The United States isn’t the only country out there. In the Soviet Union, identifying oneself as religious could be punishable by death or other very bad things. Nonetheless throughout the Soviet period vast numbers of people continued to believe in God and state publicly that they did so. The pressure in the Soviet Union was certainly entirely in the direction of pushing people to not believe in God, so it can scarcely explain why people would believe.
If this were true there would be no orthodox churches or mosques, no priesthood, no relics.
And yet Miraculously, every country allied to or part of the soviet union has thousands of perfectly preserved medieval churches, some painstakingy rebuilt by the Russian communist government after their destruction at the hands of Germans.
hundreds of thousands of trained priests, millions of faithful, not just one pope either, but a patriarch in every other country.
It’s Miraculous, that is, unless you live in our shared reality where your death sentences for church going never actually happened. Even the most repugnanty abusive cults, such as those primitive orthodox who castrated themselves and loved to run riot and physically attack other cults were given the option of emigrating to Canada, instead of being ‘killed’.
Shall we now talk about what happened to the Mormons in America? Why did they end up all the way over there ? lol
It certainly holds for anonymous polls, especially ones that require respondents to supply answers in real-time to a person (rather than mailing in a paper survey).
Really? The central tenants of Christianity (and Islam for that matter) inherently pressure people to believe through the coercive idea that eternal damnation awaits those who don’t. But you can’t even accept that there is social pressure to believe? I guess proselyters and missionaries are mythical creatures like Sasquatch. I guess my parents and in-laws and other family members, who regularly remind me that God exists and it’s crazy to believe otherwise, are just isolated cases.
Yes, but it is the only country relevant to the poll under discussion. I would expect self-reported belief in God to be lower in countries where religiosity has not been promoted by the state.