# What falsifiable claims do the holy books make? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 16, 2013, 6:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-falsifiable-claims-do-the-holy-books-make/668952 "2013-09-16T06:02:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 96
**Author:** ![Uber\_the\_Goober](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/58956e/32.png) [@Uber\_the\_Goober](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Uber_the_Goober)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-falsifiable-claims-do-the-holy-books-make/668952/96 "2013-09-17T14:10:18Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > It _very much_ implies it - take the fact that it’s an unbroken lineage, in years, from Adam himself, combined with the inclusion of Adam in the 7 days narrative - that’s as direct an implication as you can get. But that’s assuming the following: > [@MrDibble](#): > > Now, you could quibble that the 7-days narrative refers to “adam” as “mankind” and the Adam in the genealogies is a different Adam, but you’d have to toss out the rest of the Eden narrative to do so. And if you don’t, then you can’s say the narrative as literally written speaks to a history of the physical Earth - hell, not the Earth, the whole damn Universe.The inclusion of the evening+morning formula makes any such gloss highly suspect. Any literal reading gives 5 days before man, no more, no less. So “some religions” are just admitting it’s all allegorical. Which I don’t. In fact, I’ve been advocating against literal interpretations in this thread. > [@MrDibble](#): > > Which is fine, but you don’t get to snark at me for telling you what the literalist narrative actually says. Hey now, until a mod says otherwise, I’ll be snarking. If it hurt your feelings, maybe the internet is too rough of a place for you. 😛 It goes like this: if you stick to the literal rendering of the bible, then it all falls apart. If you want that to happen, good for you. You’ve successfully shown that bears do shit in the woods, paper will ignite when it hits 451 degrees, and water is in fact wet. If you don’t want the whole bible to fall apart, and your faith and religious system with it, then you can’t take the bible literally. Some of it, sure; most of it, NOPE. It just wouldn’t grok with the physical laws that the bible says were set in place by god himself. And to go back to the point of the OP, which claims are falsifiable - it really depends on how you’re looking at the claims. If you’re going to say as a premise that “miracles” must occur within the physical laws that already exist (think: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” - but with a “holy” component) then the claims become falsifiable once you identify which portion of them can’t occur based on what we know to be the physical laws. If you’re going to say that “miracles” can’t happen, simply because that’s “magic”, then all the miracle claims are falsifiable, because we know that “magic” isn’t real. But there’s just too much we DON’T know about the nature of the miracles due to incomplete reporting (there were no forensic detective available to record important details). So we can’t properly falsify enough of the claims to say categorically “The bible is pure rubbish, cover to cover”. But I’m willing to bet that we (humans) are gonna keep right on trying, because we just can’t beat the dead horse enough, or miss the point of the book by a wide enough margin. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-falsifiable-claims-do-the-holy-books-make/668952)._