What about the piss shivers? Science can’t explain them. Does that add support for the idea that a little imp is dancing around in one’s bladder?
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Which is not something that I have done, so how can you accuse me of making an ad hominem attack?
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And “Jesus science” is exactly what ID is. Behe, for example, is a Christian who clearly wants to use ID as religious propaganda.
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“Remedial lessons” is entirely appropriate. For the umpteenth time, we’ve gone over all this discussion of evolution and ID before. If you want to want to participate, and clearly you do, then I suggest you read some old threads in order to get caught up. Your refusal to do so indicates that you want one-on-one remedial lessons.
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Like I said, we’ve gone over this topic several times, and it’s not my job to give one-on-one tutoring to someone who needs remedial lessons. I never said I had disproven your ideas several times in this thread.
Aside from the fact that you’ve juxtaposed posts from two different people, your argument holds no water.
The IDists are claiming that despite all the evidence for abiogenesis and evolution proceeding naturally, if scientists haven’t yet explained every little detail, then you can sieze upon one of the details they haven’t explained yet and claim that that’s where God must have stepped in. Even if I dug up references on the production of RNA in nature, dreadnougat could just shrug and say, “oh, well, RNA can be made in nature, but that doesn’t prove anything. What about DNA? You can’t explain that, so there’s still evidence that God did it.”
I call this argument the “Tower of Why,” after a Roz Chast cartoon in which a woman is speaking to her teenager. “You can’t go out tonight.” “Why?” “Because your grandparents are coming to town.” “Why?” Because we haven’t seen them in a while." “Why?” “Because your Dad’s been too busy at work.” “Why?”
That’s the classic way that the God-of-the-Gaps argument always operates. As soon as one thing is answered, they scuttle God off like a cockroach into something else that hasn’t been explained yet.
“You can’t explain why living things are different from dead matter- so the soul must exist!”
“Actually, there’s no fundamental difference. It’s just the way the matter is organized.”
“Ok, but you can’t explain how all those different living species came to be. Isn’t that evidence for God having created them?”
“Actually, it was evolution.”
“But evolution can’t explain the origin of extremely complex features.”
“Actually it can, because blah blah blah…”
and after a few steps,
“But what about RNA? You can’t explain how RNA formed in nature, so that’s evidence that God did it.”
Come on. RNA? That’s what God’s role in the creation was? “I created a universe in which the origin of life can proceed on its own, but I just can’t figure out how to get the RNA to form without suspending the laws of nature. Oh well, I guess it won’t hurt to fudge that one little bit with a miracle.”
The situation with Christianity is completely different. There’s no evidence for Christianity, period. There’s a lot of evidence against it. So, I just don’t believe it. I don’t point to that lack of evidence as automatically being evidence for some contrary view, like Islam. I just feel that if Christianity isn’t backed by any evidence, then I don’t have a reason to believe it.
To make the argument against Christianity as asinine as the arguments for ID, you would have to have massive evidence for Christianity, against which Muslims could only point to some tiny, irrelevant detail of Scripture and say that mysteriously that’s the one tiny detail on which the entire case hinges. “You don’t know the exact location of Jesus’ tomb, so that provides at least a little evidence for Islam, doesn’t it?”
by me:
As creationist Ken Ham put it, if the bible got it wrong on astronomy, geology and biology, why should we trust it when it talks of redemption and salvation?
But it does address the above sciences. Just because understanding of the people at the time was poor and they got it all wrong doesn’t mean it wasn’t addressed.
I think Ham’s argument addressed quite correctly how much faith we can put in the writings of the bible, be the errors lies, myth or metaphor. None of that uncertainty puts the important miracle acts in a more favorable light noting that many of the disprovable miracles have already been disproved.
He was probably trying to justify why his prayers weren’t getting answered.
What’s that supposed to mean? That the bible will make more sense if you convince yourself it’s divine ahead of time?
Considering you admit that all this is possible without divine effort don’t you think it is a bit unreasonable to posit a divine influence?
So why would god inspire the keeping of all those writings on baby killing and such?
Also sorry for the belated response, I got a little distracted in the pit.
The bible does not address the science. To attribute any mythmaking to an attempt to express a scientific understanding of the world is to simply fail to understand how myth works. The old “thunder is the god dancing/expressing anger/farting” claims of some early examiners of mythology is, itself, a myth–one that simply tries to show how much more enlightened we are. There is no evidence that people actually believed the myths as scientific.
For example, the two creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2 set out theological principles. In the first story, the world is formed from chaos in an organized pattern, with the activities of the first, second, and third days paralleled in the activities of the fourth, fifth, and sixth days. This demonstrates that God is the author, that God has provided order in the universe, and that the universe, as created, is inherently good with all of creation building to the creation of humanity. In the second story, the creation of man is presupposed and the actions show that God has granted humanity dominion. There is no scientific attempt to reconcile the pre-existing (but barren) earth with the formless void of the first story. Those points are irrelevant to the theology.
The notions of the waters separated by the firmament and the earth are not laid down as principles of reality in Genesis 1; they are accepted as the then current understanding of the world from outside scripture. There is no effort to declare that one must accept that description as true. Rather, beginning with that understanding of the physical reality, Genesis 1 simply points out the theological principles that God ordained whatever we found.
Whatever intent you would like to invent for Augustine of Hippo’s remarks, it remains that his comments have never been challenged or put aside by the church. His claim that the bible is not a scientific document remains a part of church tradition. Others in the church have, indeed, held out scripture as intending to explain physical reality, but they are minor voices who have not had a major impact on theology.
It means that the bible is the repository for religious truths that are held by the community of the faithful. It is not “unreasonable” to posit divine influence; it is simply the difference between approaching it with faith or with skepticism.
If you want to dismiss faith, that is your perogative. However, your skepticism puts no burden on me to share that skepticism unless I attempt to use my scripture to change your view of the world. A so-called “liberal” approach to spreading the word of God relies on meeting people in their own world-view and sharing our faith or leading people by example, not by preaching verses at people to convert them. Since scripture reinforces my belief, regardless of your skepticism and since I have no intention of trying to convert you based on making you accept certain verses of the bible, any attempts to dismiss my faith by attacking scripture are irrelevant to my faith.
As to the verses in which it appears that God acted in unjust ways, there is no need to remove them from scripture. Leaving them in the work avoids mangling or bowdlerizing the original and allows us an insight into how earlier peoples perceived God. We may not share that perception, but the understanding is valuable, regardless.
tomndebb, could you go into more detail? When (to choose the worst example I can think of) the Israelites committed genocide, what, if anything, was the role of divine influence?
Okay … but then wouldn’t you want to extend that prayer to something like:
“In the end, O Lord, not my will, but Thy will be done. So, couldst Thou please please pretty please with sugar on it let me know precisely what Thy will actually is? I mean, completely unambiguously, not just by sending a few little ‘signs’ that I have a darned good chance of misinterpreting?”
Tracer, I think your argument holds better for Christianity (particularly fundamentalist Christianity) than for, say, Deism, in which God’s will might be simply for you to figure it out for yourself.
The thing that troubles me is that we have a heck of a lot of Christians in this thread saying, “I have received a communcation from God that I have interpreted perfectly with no chance of error on my part. Therefore, there is no need for me to even consider changing my mind, and it is laughably ridiculous for me to even consider the possibility that you might be right.” But when I ask what they make of other people whose “communications from God” are different, I get a deafening silence.
Bear in mind that that’s banworthy behavior. I have, quite literally, seen the mods ban people for going into GD and saying, “I’m going to try to convince you of my point of view, but nothing you could say could possibly convince me that I’m wrong.”
Let no one ever claim that GD is biased against Christians. The fact that ten or so of the participants in this thread haven’t been banned shows that the mods are cutting Christians some slack.
As one of the most churchified people on this board, I disagree strongly.
I have led home groups from my church, pointing out that everyone’s testimony boils down to: “And that’s how I found out this was the truth.” If Jesus is not the truth, I don’t want to bother with this anymore. No one in the group of this evangelical church disagreed. How can you?
I also made the point that our conceptions of God and the Bible and the church are inherently slightly off, because we aren’t omniscient. We have to be open to the idea that we might be holding on to conceptions that are just our personal colorings of the truth.
That’s nothing more than an assertion. It sure looks like it addresses science when it says things like people living to be 900 years old or dead rising from the graves, blind people seeing etc. These are all observable phenomenon, or at least are said to be so. Are there any miracle stories in the bible you take as literal, Tom?
See exhibit A) His4ever arguing for creation over evolution, or exhibit B) any of you who believe you’re really going to eternal paradise.
When you say “the church” don’t you really mean “your church?”
So are you saying that Hippo didn’t believe in the reality of any of the miracle stories? If so why place his faith in Jesus?
Ok, imagine for a second that you weren’t taught from childhood (I’m taking an educated guess here) that any of this supernatural stuff were true with regards to the various religions, spoon bending, telepathy, telekinesis, talk to the dead, or whatever. Are you really going to argue with me that approaching supernatural claims with faith rather than skepticism is really on par with regards to reasonableness? Do you think that faith will be more successful strategy for finding reality?
I’m not sure what kind of burden it places on you but just because you aren’t trying to tell me that Uri Geller really bends spoons with his mind and Jeff McBride really pulls money out of the air, does not make you belief that they do (if you held it) reasonable. The same goes for the supernatural religious claims.
What I learned from it is that people have been using god to justify killing since the beginning of recorded history to the present date. What valuable understanding do you gather from god instructing the Jews to kill babies?
Just as your claim that it was written to address scientific positions is an assertion based on no facts. If the assertions are scientific in intent, then why is there no effort to reconcile internal discrepancies in the text, itself. Any “beginning” atheist can rattle off a dozen or so clear internal contradictions in the bible. While some later Christians and Jews have made efforts to reconcile some of those contradictions, the original authors appear to have been quite comfortable with the contradictions. In my reading of the texts, I see in each story a separate meaning that stands, regardless of the way in which that story may seem to contradict a different telling of the same tale. There is no attempt at complete reconciliation because the stories were not intended to be scientific in nature. Each story expresses one understanding of the faith of the people and the details can be in conflict because the details are not intended as (20th century) history or (20th century) science.
His4ever is arguing a literalist position that was anachronistically developed in the last couple of hundred years. Her ignorance has no bearing on how the works were created or collected.
A belief in an afterlife is not a scientific position (since it does not address the natural world, in any way), so that is irrelevant to a discussion of scripture as science.
Faith will more successfully address that which is believed. If your reality is grounded in the immanent, then it will have nothing to say to you. I have no idea what “par” you are seeking (especially as I find golf to be a fairly subhuman entertainment).
I do not believe that God inspired genocide. I believe that the Israelites remembered (or invented) a complete and overwhelming victory over a people whom they considered to have committed abominations against God and that they attributed their victory as having been ordained (both as ordered and as guaranteed) by God.
Regardless whether such an event even actually happened or was a tale invented to make a point, it almost certainly arose from a period in which the Israelites’ culture would have been described by Mary Douglas and Basil Bernstein as having Socially Restricted Speech and Positional Family Control. Among the attributes of such a culture, virtues are expressed as piety and honor and sin is described as any violation of a formal rule, regardless of motive or intent. Thus, in the story of Uzzah in 2 Samuel 6 and 1 Chronicles 13, Uzzah is punished with death for trying to keep the Ark of the Covenant from falling because (under the culture of the period) the formal rule was that Uzzah was not permitted to touch the Ark and his good intentions were irrelevant. Tales from Greek mythology recorded when their culture was at a similar point also invoke the images of the Furies taking vengeance on hapless heroes who have transgressed against formal rules for even the best motives.
Our current culture is quite different, having moved (under the Bernstein/Douglas model) to more Elaborated Speech and more Personal Family Control where virtue and sin are no longer seen as black and white events that either conform to or break with the letter of the law. We see the actions against the Amelekites as horrors and the action against Uzzah as spiteful. To me, the stories do not represent the actions of God, but the flawed interpretations of the will of God by flawed people. And I quite recognize that there are some Christians who behave in abominable ways, today. I believe that Faith is evolving and that future generations will look on some of our interpretations with the same alarm that we view 1 Sam 6. However, keeping the stories while recognizing that the understanding has changed provides us with clear evidence that we need to continually compare the messages in Scripture against our understanding of how God works in our lives. Neither faith nor understanding can be static–and in the longer Christian tradition, scripture is informed by faith; it does not dictate belief.
No. I left out the irrelevant stuff. This is Great Debates where you have asserted claims about what “liberal Christians” do or believe or say. I have engaged you on the points that deal with the expression of non-Fundamentalist biblical theology. I have no real interest in getting into a discussion about my personal beliefs on specific issues, except on those occasions where it may illuminate the general theology.
If I gave a list of miracles or mysteries that I believed (may have) happened, you would (based on your earlier actions) then challenge me to defend why A and not B. Since that would be an inspection of my personal beliefs, rather than the overall theology that is under discussion, I’m leaving the irrelevanrt stuff out of the discussion.
Of course I would. Should I take this as your admission that you don’t have a good reason to defend A over B or A at all?
BTW, I think this is quite relevant to the conversation. It says here comes Tomndebb, one of the most articulate of the “liberal Christians” and even he has insufficient reason for believing what he does (considering the magnitude of the claims), other than he was brought up with it since childhood and he finds the thought of heaven comforting. Again my assumptions are probabilistic so please correct them if wrong.
One does not come to belief through logic. So what is your point?
My particular expression of belief is quite possibly a result of my having been raised in a particular faith. However, my beliefs are the result of comparing my experience of life against various mythologies and selecting the one that seems most clearly to match those experiences. Just as your view of the world is shaped by you comparing your experiences against other ideas of the world and selecting beliefs (not, necessarily, religious beliefs) that resonate with your experience. Whether you look on humanity as inherently altruistic or inherently selfish; whether you see people as basically “good” or “evil”; whether you see a point to your existence or see your existence as a random fluke: are all beliefs that you have come to by experiencing your life and finding the explanations that feel the most comfortable. To the extent that any of those views are shared with others who have stories to describe them, you are using mythology to establish a worldview. (Note that I am not claiming that atheism is a religion; I am pointing out that everyone develops a world view and, in my experience, adopts a mythology to support it in their own mind.)
However, that personal belief is separate from the anthropological error in which you are indulging: that a system of belief addresses, or needs to address, explanations of physical realities. The fact that your mythology requires that people who follow a set of scriptures must pretend that they are descriptions of physical reality does not put any burden on me to accept your myth any more than my belief in an ordered universe created by a loving God puts any burden on you to discover my loving God in your world. My personal beliefs remain irrelevant to this discussion until such time as I attempt to impose my belief on you.
Oh contraire. Many come to a good number of their beliefs through logic. I think I could make the claim that both of us believe in evolution over creationism by logically weighing the evidence of one over the other. It’s where you believe in nameless miracles that took place thousands of years ago based on no other evidence than being written in a book (which you concede has errors) that you are using something other than logic. My skepticism is quite logical in this regard and it does not seem that you disagree.
As I said earlier that you believe in extraordinary claims on sub-par evidence is unreasonable. Also that in matters of determining the reality of just about anything, faith is inferior to reasoning and skepticism.
Quite probably I would suggest.
Leaving aside the obvious bias as selecting the myth of your parents, who says it is a good idea to select any myth to choose as your own?
I don’t agree. I feel most comfortable believing that the next lottery ticket I buy will be the big winner but probability suggests that it won’t be, as such I save money by not buying it and probability suggests that I will be a richer man for it, though only by a buck. Also none of the above constructs requires that I believe any of the laws of nature have been broken to demonstrate a genuine according to Hoyle miracle. As such I think you are comparing apples to oranges.
I suppose some beliefs do not need to address physical realities, however if you believe that any of the biblical miracles really took place then you are making some kind of statement about some reality somewhere. If you don’t believe in any of the miracles then why believe in the deityship of Jesus and why call yourself Christian?
I never said you must pretend anything. Rather I asked you what miracles you thought were actual descriptions of reality and you seem rather insecure to answer this.
So I’ll take it you won’t accuse me of making a straw man argument anymore.
tomndebb, perhaps I’ve misunderstood you. Do you believe that the stories of genocide in the Bible were divinely inspired? I’m already aware that you do not believe the genocides themselves to have been divinely inspired.
No. I believe that they were part of the mythology of the people at that time. The books in which they were recorded were incorporated into the collection of works that explained that group’s belief. I believe that inspiration occurs at the level of selecting overall works that provide context for belief, not that every verse in every work has had the hand of God guiding the author.
Maybe you do. I come to an understanding that evolutionary theory better explains the natural world than a creation myth. You may choose to relegate that to belief in your personal understanding of the world, but I do not. Do you “believe” that 2 + 2 = 4? Or do you know it? I suspect that you are (perhaps unknowingly) simply playing a semantic game regarding the word belief in this context.
You seem to be the one with problem identifying fruit. Do you truly “believe” that you will win the lottery? I doubt it. I will repeat: how you view the world and whether you believe certain fundamentals regarding Truth, Love, Human Relations and other concepts has far more to do with matching your personal experiences against your expectations and drawing a belief based on where they seem to match. They are generally accomplished without studying probability, but are based on intangibles relating to expectations met or failed. One does not come to belief through logic.
As long as you pretend that religious mythology is simply bad science, I will point out your straw man.
