What falsifiable claims do the holy books make?

Great Debates
81

I said “kernel of truth”. Not “They got Joseph’s story wrong and everything else was true!” I even said " I’m sure the tale of their downfall was an equally…artistic deviation from the truth."

They WERE in Egypt, and they WERE deposed and persecuted and fled Egypt. And while it’s not “The same people!” it’s similar to our founding from England: Our US common history is rooted in England and we brought many of our English ideals from there. We have since diverged. It was a similar divergence between the Canaanites and the eventual Israel (obviously without an apple-tree-chopping General freezing his gonads off while traversing a Delaware river in the winter.)

Scholars researching the original five books have been able to trace about four or five different authors based on the differing composition styles in the text. Different time periods progressively had different information put into the document that became the first five books of the Christian Bible and Jewish Torah. The earlier references to “Yahweh” were implanted in later revisions, some of these scholars believe. It is considered likely that in earlier revisions, Ex 6 was the first place that “Yahweh” appeared. Hence, “I have never told anyone this…except that one time.”

And if you want to talk about senility: if I hate my son can I axe murder someone and make his life suck right before I die? The first reference is yes in Ex 20:5 where four generations are going to suffer. The second reference is no in Ezk 18:20 where the child will not share the guilt of the parent. I NEED SURE FIRE REVENGE TIPS HERE!

It’s better to look at the milleu each writing was taken in context to: In Exodus (outside of the whole, you know, romp in the desert for a couple of days) the earlier style of mostly rural “Households” was the rule: You had four generations living with you as a rule. So if you did bad, the evil was on you AND your household in general. You would all suffer.

In Ezekiel, it was after the Assyrian occupation/subjugation period of the Jewish states and was, in general, closer to the nuclear city-living unit we are familiar with. The rural “household” wasn’t as much of the population base as it used to be. At that point, your household included you and your wife(-ves) and any minors, who were ostensibly not punished. Your children moved out after attaining the age of majority to their own lodging or circumstances. They didn’t carry the cooties with them when they left.

You cannot read the Bible without understanding that the past is different from us. Not only in how they thought, but how they understood their literature. A “historical retelling” contained a bit of history and a lot of fluff. That’s why the Bible is so hard to decipher. But the Bible isn’t the only book that goes this way. Most “historical” books do the same thing. The drama and the hook is more important than the historical actual fact that it’s based upon. :slight_smile:

82

Burden of proof set me off. It is interesting to ask about what can be falsified, but little in history can be unless there are ample opposing documents. It is more what level of credence should we put into a historical even. Much of the Bible is given a lot more credit than is historically reasonable.

Now if we all considered the Bible a nice set of myths with some good lessons and some bad lessons but with a very tenuous grasp on historical reality, all would be fine. But we see lots of people who condemn literalism still basically believe.
I’ve never gotten a good indication of where the dividing line between clear allegory and fiction and truth is. Defaulting to things being true until they are demonstrated false by science seems a poor one, since we don’t give other religions that pass.

83

This is a big problem with looking at something regarded as scripture. Some people have a literal understanding of the Bible. They go “Hey! The earth is 6,000 years old and the world is flat!” The problem is that a lot of these positions are decided and then evidence is sought in the Bible.

For instance, the “6,000 years old Earth” is something that was posited by Christian scholars by working back from known events (Jesus was born at 0 and then…) and then hit " 6000 years old". The problem was that old Judaism considered 20 and multiples of 20 holy. So the “400 years” of enslavement in Egypt in the Bible was really someone inserting the “holiness” into the scripture, usually where there wasn’t a time reference before. That makes for terribly hard work to count backwards. The lesser Judges in the book of Judges also follow the 20-is-holy fashion. They all reigned for 20 or 40 years. The greater Judges in the same book tend to reference closer to “real” times, such as 12 years or 4 years or such.

There is an additional…er…“theory” about the 6,000 years and the 7,000 year master plan, but there is even less Biblical backing for it. The 7,000 year master plan is a plan by God to have recreated the earth 6,000 years ago and, since Peter said “To God each day is as a thousand years” it obviously means that since God created the earth in 6 days and rested the 7th, we will man our own devices for 6,000 years and in the 7,000th year, God will bind Satan and give us 1,000 years of peace! Obviously! (I’ve never actually understood this argument, so my rendering of it is probably flawed.)

By a similar notion, the world was declared flat by Roman Catholics (I believe it was originally brought up by a priest, which then went viral and was eventually stamped as canon by the Pope) who persecuted some that disputed the flatness and earth-centric-ness of our planet and the cosmos. The Bible doesn’t say “Thou hast a pancake earth” anywhere and yet, it was decided as true and everyone who spoke against it was speaking against God himself.

I discount these sorts of statements because they really aren’t based on scriptural reference. It’s one thing to go “As a matter of faith, I believe God somehow created the universe is 6 days and then rested for a 7th day.” than to go “The earth is the center of the universe!” The first one, despite scientific evidence, can at least be considered Faith. The second one is just an extrapolation or assumption that someone wanted to enforce.

Probably, in a strict “this is an actual fact!” sense. But it’s one of the most expansive books we have that relates to the time period in that area. Finding how it correlates to the real world is fun. It helps inform us about who the people were behind the creation of the books of one of the most influential documents of the Western world’s history.

84

Oh I completely agree. And your comment about historical context and the symbolic meaning of numbers (40 in particular is associated with rebirth - I suspect from the 40 weeks of typical pregnancy - 40 years in the desert to create a new people out of slaves, rained for 40 days and nights after which the earth was reborn, the Jewish mikvah must contain 40 se’ah of water, etc.) is spot on. Why certain stories, certain historic events, certain versions of historic events, become the chosen stories to become part of a lasting mythos, is fascinating and something that I know way too little about.

The issue for the op is literal factual truth though. For that it is simpler to assume mythos (no trite thing a culture’s mythos) at most loosely based on some actual events unless proven otherwise rather than assuming truth unless falsified. IMHO.

85

IIRC, Genesis contains two different mutually incompatible stories.

Also, I could be wrong but I’m reasonably certain that the Jews don’t worship Ezra the the Christians worship Issa Al Massiah.

86

You’re agreeing with me. I was saying in reply to Simplicio, that you cannot take the dual use of “evening and morning” and “day” to mean that Bible’s definition of a day is what we commonly think of as a day, because there was no day of that type then. "Day, “evening” and “morning” cannot be taken literally in the beginning of Genesis.

87

True. But then, I suspect we’d get a long list of kernels of truth. The problem is discovering which tidbit of the story was true. :slight_smile:

What we have direct evidence for, right now, is not much beyond basic cultural details. Sadly, that part of the world has seen more blood than grains of sand, thus making it difficult for archaeologists to suss out the finer details.

88

Hmmmmm. In those days, only the man would have had significance. Usually, women were regarded as “property” of their father/ husband. In England, that continued till Victorian times.
Even now, in the Muslim religion, a woman is counted as being of less worth than a male, even a young boy.

89

:rolleyes: When bring snark, place in BBQPIT k’thnxbye

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.

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 is fine, but you don’t get to snark at me for telling you what the literalist narrative actually says.

90

You are not looking at it the way a historian or archaeologist has to.

The issue isn’t what is striking or memorable; the issue is what shit gets written down in a way likely to be preserved.

Obscure Roman Governors are orders of magnitude more likely to have stuff written down about them in ways likely to be preserved, than miracles and portents - unless, of course, those miracles and portents are of interest to future generations (as in the New Testament, etc.). If the zombies aren’t taken up as proof by some religion or other, why would an account of them survive? It would just be a bizzare happening that may or may not be true, to people not on the spot.

Think of the reams of orders, reports, and associated paperwork associated with governing a Roman province. Sure, most of that stuff gets thrown out, but some of it lodges in archives -for a time. Then again, even assuming no paperwork survives, what about stuff like carved dedications and monuments? Romans loved putting that shit up (and in fact, one of them survived).

The fact that all we have is a single dedicatory fragment and a mention in Josephus of the guy who governed the province for decades demonstrates just how thorough the destruction of Roman records of that time has been.

91

There’s nothing “potential” about this problem.

Only if you want to make up things that the narrative doesn’t say. All the other Patriarchs are listed by their ages from birth, sometimes with how old their dad was when he had them. You need to provide a narrative reason to extend an exception for Adam.

92

You’re making the (all too common) mistake of confusing average life expectancy with adult lifespan. Even the Bible doesn’t do this (unless you’re saying “threescore and ten” dropped 20-30 years, from the Psalmist’s times to the Enlightenment?)

93

No, that wouldn’t falsify it - what would, would e.g. be records showing Jesus was tried and executed by beheading.

94

It can, given the right circumstances. Tens of millions of years, even…

95

Just to explain this confusion a bit:

“Life Expectancy” is a calculation that is done based on what age people died at. If you take 1000 people, 500 of which lived to 60 and 500 of which lived to 0 (died in child birth/before their first birthday), the life expectancy of these 1000 people is 30 years.

This is obviously over-simplistic, but infant mortality decreasing has done way more to increase our modern life expectancy than the medical life extensions at the other end.

96

But that’s assuming the following:

Which I don’t. In fact, I’ve been advocating against literal interpretations in this thread.

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. :stuck_out_tongue:
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.

97

What? I’m confused as to your point. What scripture are you referring to? Maybe that one?

98

Note that a Canaanite origin for the Hyksos is only one interpretation, with other scholars favouring a partial Indo-European origin for them (composite bows, horses, chariots and horse burials being a big clue IMO - these are very IE things (compare e.g. Indo-Aryan horse sacrifice and many others), but not cultural components that scream “Canaan” to me.)

99

My point is that human lifespan has never been “40-50 years”

Yep.

100

Then your argument is that none of it is falsifiable. Which is fine, as it goes.