Adam and Eve also don’t have time in the Garden to “be fruitful and multiply”, which suggests they didn’t spend huge amounts of time there.
That’s a good point, and one I have never considered!
The bible does say that if he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, he would die. And it then took hundreds of years for him to die after eating it.
Logically speaking, if not for eating the fruit, he wouldn’t have died.
Which is why Romans 5:12 is a verse worth reading.
Curious too is how the average age of people in the bible (who had their ages recorded) does drop the farther from Adam they are in time. Their “genetic defect” of death was catching up with them, until we get to our recent past, with lifespans of about 40-50 years until medical science caught up and staved off some of the causes for our premature death.
And for a nugget really worth chewing on - if the only way to get to heaven is to die, then why was death Adam’s punishment for disobeying God? Why not, “Upon your inevitable death, which I was gonna get around to telling you about eventually, you’ll go to Hell to suffer for eternity instead of coming to hang out with me in Heaven. Because that’s how I roll, present evidence notwithstanding.”
Unending life on Earth is the hope God holds out to all of us, but not until the Earth is restored to the paradise Adam and Eve were 'sposed to make it into…and now we’re into GD territory.
Eh, I don’t think there’s really any reason the to suspect the writers of the Bible didn’t mean day literally. They knew roughly how old the Fertile Crescent cities were (Ur had written records going back to 4000 BC), they imagined man had figured out agriculture and city building more or less right away and so that the oldest cities were more or less the same age as the world, give or take a few centuries.
There isn’t any reason to think some iron-age Jews knew about pre-history. And if they did, its kind of bizarre that they wouldn’t mention it in their creation account just for the sake of “poetry”.
The Bible writers believed the world was created 6000 years B.P.
There is no other historical account of Herod’s massacre of the innocents. Absolutely none.
This is probably better suited to Great Debates than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
How do you falsify it?
One can say the Bible is the literal word of God and intended to be interpreted literally, and argue that the term “day” didn’t necessarily mean a 24 hour period, as the word was used at the time, by those who transcribed the text from divine inspiration.
Likewise, one can assume the Bible is a collection of myths written by men, and still argue whether the term “day” was intended to mean a 24-hour period, or something more generic such as “age”, “era”, etc., as in the expression “back in my day”.
In either case, the argument wouldn’t regard the English word “day” but rather the ealiest written versions available, IIRC from the “Priestly” source, written in Hebrew, but that work draws on earlier ones which may include the story, possibly in Greek.
But how does this relate to falsifiability?
That miracles could happen strikes me as a good example of the kind of claim that is not falsifiable.
You can argue it, but given the writer of Genesis goes on to specify exactly what he meant by “day” (“and there was evening and there was morning…”) it’d be a pretty heavy lift.
have you seen him?
And even if you discount the story vs history aspect, the Bible was written by humans and errors could be made that way. For (a not very good) example, I had someone insist Jonah was not swallowed by a whale because the Bible says “a great fish” and a whale is not a fish. Discounting the other issues with the story, how many people now let alone at that time before our taxonomy system would have called a whale a big fish?
“Falsifiable” is not the same thing as “false”.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
(Third mention in this thread.)
Also, keep in mind that “metaphorical” language isn’t necessarily going to translate easily or have an easy equivalent in another language. Perhaps someone 2000 years in the future will try to read an a translated anthology of the early days of blogging and come across a passage saying that “Obama is making a mountain out of a molehill and wants to catch the Republicans in the eye of the storm.”, they might actually think it means that the writer thought that Obama could physically construct mountains and alter the weather at will, perhaps with some sort of sorcery or lost technology. We know that these are idioms. We need to be aware that the idioms used in everyday writing in days of old were not necessarily ones that we are familiar with - perhaps any reasonable ancient Israelite would have realized that “making the sun stand still” is a metaphor for events that take a long time and don’t seem to be getting anywhere.
sure sherlock. fact versus fiction.
the world is a shitfest and what is god doing upstairs? masturbating? if the devil were dead would god create another one?
between you and i, i worship the monkey king.
Good point, yet I’ve read what seemed to me to be some very good debates on this point. I wish I could find them now, but can’t.
In any case, the OPs question doesn’t make sense unless we interpret the Bible literally.
The age of the Earth works for the OP’s purpose only if the concensus of opinion among Biblical scholars is that the term “day” was intended to mean what we generally mean by it today. I don’t know if there is such concensus. There might be: it’s certainly the concensus among literalist websites, but I don’t want to use them as a proxy for scholars!
Archaeological evidence shows that Jericho was destroyed circa 1800-1400 BCE. Joshua, according to Josephus, lived circa 1355-1245 BCE, too late to blow a horn and break its walls.
I think the OP’s question is an interesting one. You’ve weighed in with your suggestion, thanks.
Let’s proceed with answering the OP’s question, which is listing potentially falsifiable statements in the major texts, rather than discussing whether the Bible is fact or fiction. Most of us agree with you that it’s mythology, but that’s beside the point.
If you just want to bash religion, please take that to a relevant thread, or start your own. IMHO, it’s like shooting fish in a barrell, which can be fun, but not what I think we want to do in this thread.
I’m an atheist, Sherlock.
And you need to brush up on your definition offalsifiable.
(Second mention in this thread.)