To get back to the original question. I think that we can start with Philo of Alexandria who was writing around the time of Christ. What’s interesting about Philo is that he was a Jewish philosopher, but he basically has been ignored by Rabbinical Judaism and is actually much more influential on modern Christian thought, particularly on Augustine and Origen. I think that firstly we need to understand that most of the ancient writers were not Genesis literalists. Genesis literalism is a more recent invention among theologians and non-laity. We don’t really see a whole lot of them before the Second Great Awakening. Most scholars throughout the history of Christianity have been Genesis allegorists, but I digress. What we find is that Philo thought that the ‘day’ was simply a unit of time given to this period of Creation. As all good allegorists go, he understood that Creation didn’t need to occur in phases and it would be ridiculous to think that a God that can instantaneously populate the universe with stars and planets would somehow need to wait a day to figure out plants and fish. He instead saw the six days as arbitrary stopping points that pointed toward the perfection of Creation. As any good Jewish scholar does, he immediately got into numerology. He saw six as a ‘perfect’ number being the first even number times the first odd number and as was common at the time, he equated males with odd numbers and females with even numbers. He saw God as both the bearer and begetter of all things - both male and female, so six days was seen as being indicative of the full completion of both male and female. The point of all of this wonderful Sophistry is to say that those ‘days’ were simply arbitrary periods of time and had no relation to a solar day on earth.
More modern literalists will sometimes echo a similar interpretation. There is a passage in 2 Peter 3:8 that says a thousand years for the Lord is as a day and a day is as a thousand years. This is sometimes used to mean that concepts like ‘day’ in Genesis do not necessarily resemble a 24 hour period and are simply indicative of a finite and defined period of time in which something occurred.
DavidwithanR, one could just as easily say that there’s no legitimacy in the debate until the atheists bring evidence that God isn’t real. There isn’t any of that, either. At best, you can invoke things like Occam’s Razor, but then that just shifts the debate to the question of whether a Universe with a God or a Universe without a God is simpler.
If someone says “I can prove that God exists”, then it’s a valid counterargument to point out the inevitable flaws in their proof. But if someone just says “I believe that God exists”, or “I have faith in God” (note: Those two statements are completely different), then it’s no counterargument at all to say “You have no proof”.
Atheists bring evidence that God isn’t real all the time. Historical arguments and philosophical arguments both exist. The problem of course is that “God” is a moving target - it doesn’t exist so, since it has no fixed qualities or history, its defenders can claim they were talking about a different god, which is not omnimax and didn’t create the world in six literal days, the whole time. And thus the goalposts evade the football.
Unless of course you’re dealing with literalists who therefore can’t move the goalpost, in which case fun is had by all.
Huh, I can’t think of what historical evidence against the existence of something would look like. I guess it would be some guy writing that something is a lie. Historical evidence for let’s say Julius Caesar is a bunch of different authors in close proximity and time to Julius Caesar saying that he did stuff. Historical evidence against would probably consist of attacking all of those authors as liars and since it would be pretty hard for someone to actually know all of those authors to actually bring evidence against their claim, I think it would by nature be weaker than historical evidence for somethings existence.
A good example is the Exodus. Supposedly many, many people camped out in the Sinai for extended stretches of time, but archeological research there found no evidence of any such encampment.
That many cultures have continuous historical records before and after the supposed time of the Flood is good evidence that it didn’t happen.
I dunno, the Bible isn’t supposed to be a literal transcription of God’s words, right? It’s more like a smart guy speaking dumbed-down to a bunch of bird-brains, then the bird-brains interpret and write down what they think the smart guy said for the benefit of slightly more advanced bird-brains to debate centuries later. Kind of like:
*Old McGoddald Had a Flock: *
*In the beginning I made this farm, y’see. Wasn’t much of a farm at first, but I busted my tail feathers making it a good roost for y’all.
I put a quack quack here
And a quack quack there
Here a quack
There a quack
Everywhere a quack quack…
Then, waddaya know, somehow I created day and night! I said, that’s cluckin’ awesome! Lemme see what I can do with water, and whales and whatnot…
… whew, 6 days of this crap, time to take a siesta, amigos. *
You’re cool with a jury convicting someone of murder when the prosecutor stood up on the first day of the trial and said “We’re sorry, Your Honor, the prosecution has no evidence to present” ??
This would be an example of creating a straw man argument.
I made no claim that a fundy atheist would call for making religious belief illegal. I only noted that such a person would wish to impose their views on the world. The law is hardly the only way in which to do that. (See, for example, post 80 following your response to me.) I also made no claim that fundy atheism was prevalent or widespread, only that it existed. I specifically noted that it was not a common belief.
Taking a materialist view of the world and arguing against the existence of a being for which there is no physical evidence is one legitimate expression of atheism. It is probably the most prevalent sort. Claiming that there is no possibility of a non-physical entity or that all religion is created for the sole purpose of fleecing naive believers or (particularly) that all religious belief has a malevolent aspect in which all believers are deliberately choosing to express a lie for the purpose of subjecting others to their will, (all ideas that have been expressed on this board at one time or another), parallels the expressions of fundy religious types that anyone who does not share a particular religious belief is willfully choosing to “disobey God.”
Religious people make a claim, a massive, non-evidence based, unnecessary claim that is contrary to the empirical experience we have of the earth. An atheist is someone who simply doesn’t accept that and has no burden of proof on them.
As for the argument from simplicity? in one case you have an eternal universe or one created from nothing, in the other you have an eternal god or one created from nothing…who *then *creates a universe that looks like it was created from nothing or has always existed.
And if the religious merely state a purely personal belief akin to a favourite football team then there is no *need *to advance a counterargument at all.
They produced more than those three. Genesis 5:4 - “After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters”
From Noah’s sons and their wives. The Bible gives a detailed lineage in Genesis Chapter 10.
In the case of Adam’s children, yes, and no Bible-believer disputes that; the first generation was a special case. In the case of Noah’s children, no, unless you consider first cousin marriage to be “incest” (by Biblical law, it’s completely fine).
That’s not evidence against the existence of God, but rather the existence of the Exodus which are two completely different things (of course, you’re also confusing archaeological and historical evidence and you’re also making a logical mistake that ‘absence of evidence equals evidence of absence.’)
To get back to our Julius Caesar example, Plutarch paints Brutus and Cassius as the leaders of the plot to kill Caesar. In popular culture, thanks to Shakespeare, we have largely followed that lead. Other historical evidence particularly from Nicolaus of Damascus and letters between Decimus and Cicero suggest that it was actually Decimus that led the plot to kill Caesar. All this is simply to say just because the historical evidence falls against Plutarch’s specific account, it does not then provide evidence that Caesar didn’t exist or that Plutarch is completely untrustworthy in regards to most of what he wrote.
I’m the one who used the term “historical”, so any terminological criticism like that falls on me. And for the record I consider all archaeological stuff to be part of history - sure it’s before recorded history, but technically so was what I had for breakfast yesterday, since nobody recorded that either. (Somebody was recording history before exodus, they just didn’t record that, so the breakfast thing is indeed a direct analogy. Particularly if somebody later figures out what I ate by doing ‘archaeology’ in my trash bin.)
Ahem, enough digression. When you say that evidence against the exodus is not evidence against God, I disagree with you. This is because all God is is the stories around him. Every single thing we know about God, every single thing that defines his identity such that we’re able to tell that the dude manning the Texaco on the corner isn’t him, comes from the stories people tell about him. Does God have the power to part seas? How do we know? Well, he does it in a story, so we now know that God is a sea-parter. If God was real, of course, we could just aim some cameras at him and see what he does with the next sea he runs into. But he’s nowhere to be found; he’s a character in a story. So the stories are all we have to go on.
Everything we know about Sauron comes from the writings of Tolkien; if you want to identify or describe Sauron, you refer to those writings for your information. If it’s methodically shown that all your books actually weren’t written by Tolkien and are actually crappy non-canon fanfiction, then it turns out you don’t know anything about Sauron at all - for all you know he could be a self-insert mary-sue OC that doesn’t actually exist in the Tolkien universe at all!
That’s what God is to the real world. We have a bunch of stories. According to those stories God is a canon character - a real character within the world of “the real world”. But to us atheists he sure seems like a mary-sue OC.
Right. But what if all we had was Plutarch’s writings? What if there was no historical evidence at all, and Julius Caesar only appeared as a character in his stories?
And was invulnerable and had superpowers and was like, totally awesome guys! How can you not love him!
I’ll disagree with that assessment. The reason why is that I think that you’re falling into the same trap that religious archaeologists fall into. Instead of seeing those stories as accounts of happenings, you see them in black and white terms to be accepted or rejected en masse. That’s a foolish way to conduct history and a foolish way to find truth. Your argument is not terribly different than an archaeologist that comes across the Tel Dan Stele sees that it refers to David and then jumps from that to the Biblical Account is true, there must be a God, QED. Accepting or rejecting a single proposition within a text does not render the entire text invalid. I would no more claim that the Tel Dan Stele is evidence for God any more than I would claim that lack of archaeological sites in the Sinai is evidence against him.
Your story analogy breaks down because the Bible is not a story written by a person. It’s a compilation of 12 centuries of stories. The Torah alone was likely pulled together from 6 centuries of oral traditions that were combined into multiple documentary sources which were then compiled in the 6th century BC into its more current form from competing narratives. Finding inaccuracies in the text should be expected, not evidence of a completely worthless narrative. I think that what we find with the Bible is that it’s a history document that becomes more flawed ther farther we get from the 6th century BC. It compiles a great deal of oral history and exaggerates the importance of certain happenings and downplays the importance of others. It likely reconciles multiple competing narratives. I think that much of what it says has a grain of truth with embellishment and combining non-related oral traditions into a single narrative. I don’t think that finding out that say David was likely a minor chieftain in Judea rather than a mighty ruler over a Greater Israel is particularly surprising nor particularly harmful to the main narrative.
Myths happen. Just-so stories happen. Large chunks of the bible, with their detailed records of conversations from decades and centuries previously, are obviously myths or just-so stories. (Who the hell was standing there to record the conversation between God and the Satan about Job?)
Gods are common subjects of myths and just-so stories.
Literally everything about the christian God reads like myth, most definitely including the collection of myths about him in the bible. To claim that he deserves special consideration as possibly being a real super-fiction-like mary sue not-appearing-in-real-life-but-is-real-anyway superhero character, more than say Sauron or Thor or the Flying Spaghetti Monster do, is a claim that requires some reason for anyone to accept it. I’m not seeing a reason.
I’m not really trying to convince you or give you a reason to believe in a Christian God. I’m sure you’re able to make your own decisions regarding that. I was commenting on the historical evidence against God’s existence and I don’t see it.
I do want to say that I don’t think the Bible or the Christian God reads like myth. That’s a gross oversimplification. The New Testament doesn’t read anything like contemporaneous myth writings and reads much more like a combination of Greek philosophical treatise, Hebrew exegesis and historical document with a touch of Apocalyptic literature thrown in at the end. The Aeneid and Livy’s Histories are the primary sources for Roman myths and they read completely differently than the New Testament. The New Testament has much more in common with Josephus’s works than it does the Aeneid. The Old Testament certainly has elements that read like myth, particularly Genesis which has some parallels with the Enuma Elish - although I think those are overblown, but I digress. Most of it though reads like law books, religious poetry that was fairly ubiquitous at the time and its own category of prophetic literature that I think is fairly unique among ancient writings. It actually reads very differently than most religious documents from the time period, if you compare it to the Avesta for example or any of the various Egyptian texts from the time period it doesn’t read like those in the least. Job is an interesting case because it reads similarly to Greek philosophy. I don’t think the words of God to Satan or Job to his friends are meant to be taken any more literally than those of Socrates to his pupils. In the same way that Plato wasn’t sitting around transcribing Socrates and simply using him as a vessel to advance Platonic ideas, Job wasn’t being transcribed by an unknown author, but rather a vessel to advance the author’s ideas regarding suffering.
That’s why I specifically included the “about the christian God” part when I said “Literally everything about the christian God reads like myth.” The bible is a loosely assembled collection of many documents, ranging from myths and legends to straight-up lists of laws. I freely concede that much of the factual information in that book is probably 100% accurate in what it says about events and society at the time. However literally every single reference to God, and most of the stories about Jesus too for that matter, read like bullshit. Myth and legends and epic fantasy tales the lot of them. The fact that they’re adjacent to an architectural description of some building or another doesn’t make the miraculous bits more true.
It’s definitely worth remembering these stories weren’t created in a vacuum; any apparent consistency in the stories (and there’s remarkably little of such consistency, considering that they’re allegedly talking about the same singular real thing) can easily be explained by the fact the people inventing the later stories had heard the earlier stories. It’s one big rolling ball of mythology, all piled on top of one another. (Interestingly, you can also track how the mythology evolved over time in that book - the satan changes quite a bit from one appearance to the next.)
And as for you not seeing historical/archeaological/physical evidence against God, it’s not because the evidence doesn’t exist. It’s because you selectively alter your God story to try to fit it in the gaps. Yes, I went there. Science tells a very different tale of creation than the bible; one of them is wrong. Different people handle this differently; perhaps you declare that the bible’s creation story is myth. (And yet he’s still a creator, somehow.) The flood? Myth? The Exodos? Myth? A census relocating much of Israel? Myth? Herod killing all the babies? Myth? Pontius Pilot being all timid and apologetic? Myth? Jesus being resurrected? Myth?
Reality and the Biblical myths clash rather a lot, because those myths are fictional. Arguments can be made to try and bend either reality or the myths enough so that they don’t conflict, or to straight out say that this bit of myth or that bit of reality aren’t really true and we should pretend that doesn’t weaken anything’s credibility. But to claim there are no conflicts, no evidence against, at all? Yeah, right.
He saw six as a ‘perfect’ number being the first even number times the first odd number and as was common at the time, he equated males with odd numbers and females with even numbers. He saw God as both the bearer and begetter of all things - both male and female, so six days was seen as being indicative of the full completion of both male and female. The point of all of this wonderful Sophistry is to say that those ‘days’ were simply arbitrary periods of time and had no relation to a solar day on earth.