Religion or Science - How do they compare?

He made a mistake when he decided to trust the apologists. A more scientific attitude would have helped him.

He’s fallen for questionable or even outright false arguments.For example, the number of Bible manuscripts is not good evidence that the Bible is reliable or not. It only helps to deal with corruption to the text - it can’t tell us that the original text was reliable at all. Even then we don’t have many really early manuscripts and the earliest are just tiny fragments.So yes, if he is interested in the truth he does need help. Too baD that he placed his trust in people interested only in pushing their own beliefs.

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Group R can only slip inevitably away from the truth and has no mechanisms in place to prevent that outside of the unspeakable.

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Assuming that they had the truth in the first place. And generally they have no way of telling that, either. Revelation really isn’t much good as a way of knowing.

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At its core religion is simply mankind’s attempts to understand the nature of an external intelligence that is responsible for our existence and then, what that means to our lives.

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Aside from the fact that religion is far too diffuse a phenomenon to be characterised so simply, aside from the fact that religions don’t even need any sort of God, let alone one responsible for humans, the religious attitude far too often opposes understanding in the name of dogma. And that very much includes you.

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As a Christian I’ll simply deal with the question from that perspective. The Bible itself is obviously a group of books which depicts a progressive revelation, with that part of the revelation climaxing in Jesus of Nazareth

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Except there is nothing obvious about that. There is a lot of revisionism, but whether it constitutes revelation is far from obvious. That the pre-Christian books were building up to the supposed climax seems more likely false than true. You may say that you were answering from the perspective of Christian belief, but that simply takes it back to my previous point - dogma is taken as more important than understanding.

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I contend that mankind is continuing to gain a more focused understanding of God all the time.

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I am not sure how you would measure focus, nor how you would count the increase in the number of people - at least in the West - who don’t associate with any formal religion. Moreover a more focussed view is only beneficial if it is focussed on the truth and there is no way to judge that (except, perhaps, in the way that religionists often avoid inconvenient truths, perhaps)

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That sounds good, but from my observation I'd say that some scientists can be just as dogmatic as some theists.

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Regardless of individual,weaknesses, scientists as a group are likely more open-minded about science than religionists are about their religion. And, as an institution Science has a much better record than religion.

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Remember that by definition religious "understanding" does not require nor even seek evidence in the way that science has to do. Belief involves chosen ideology that supports dogma.

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Mere adherence to belief without full comprehension - which includes the implications is not understanding. Inventing excuses - themselves poorly understood - to cling to belief is not understanding.Religion is often opposed to understanding - and that is one of the things that makes it very different from science.

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"Lean not unto your own understanding" is good advice to fallen humanity so prone to error

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It’s also a convenient saying for false religions out to enslave people. Like your ChristianityToo bad for you that you are one of the most error-prone people I’ve ever met and your religion seems to encourage it.

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OK, the theistic religions. I'm wondering what understanding that I have that opposes understanding.

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I didn’t say that it was understanding that opposed understanding. It is the wilful ignorance of dogmatic belief that opposes understanding, such as your rather desperate attempts to minimise and downplay the differences in the Appearance stories.

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simply said that it is obvious that The Bible shows an evolving understanding or a progressive revelation. I wasn't arguing that was evidence of its accuracy. I'm only saying that taken from a Christian perspective it is obvious.

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The Bible certainly shows changing views. Whether any of those changes are Revelations is another matter altogether, and certainly not something that can be considered obvious.

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Of course we don't KNOW the truth. We all choose what we believe to be true. We can look at the world where the idea that sacrificial love is valued in a culture, the better the culture has done

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And yet we see Christians complaining of persecution when they aren’t given special privileges even today. Let alone all the abuses of the past, the anti-semitism, the murderous conflicts between the adherents of different denominations.

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Ultimately science can usually prove or disprove there ideas so it is easier to move on than it is with religion. However, as near as I can tell, there certainly are numerous theories in the field of QM that scientists vigorously disagree on and are pretty dogmatic in their beliefs.

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Which only illustrates that science as an institution is not dogmatic, since it tolerates the differing beliefs.

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It is a fact that we exist. It is a fact that ultimately there is a reason we exist. It is a fact that science has discerned processes by which life as we know it evolved. There is no discernible evidence that these processes were the result of other mindless processes going back to the point of the Big Bang. Therefore the rational default position is that we are the result of processes that are the result of pre-existing intelligence

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You will note that this argument is a massive non-sequitur.By parsimony the rational default certainly does not involve making up a pre-existing intelligence. And that is before we even considered the demonstrated ability of non-intelligent forces to produce so much.

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This story is very common these days. I don't understand how anyone could ever have considered himself to be a Christian without knowing at least what is IN the Bible from hearing sermons on it.

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People who rely on sermons will have a very poor understanding of the Bible. You’ll get opinions and doctrines mixed up with the text - which is selectively quoted if at all. Reading the Bible will let you find that it isn’t as the preachers present it - especially the preachers you prefer.Perhaps you would be more accurate in saying: One of the big things of the Reformation was encouraging people to read the Bible. You seem to think that was a bad thing.

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Perhaps the fault is in those churches that don't preach the Bible?

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Wouldn’t preaching the Bible mean admitting to the problems ?

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When I was becoming a Christian in my mid-to-late forties in the late eighties, entirely from reading books about religion, I found the doctrine of the Fall/original sin to be the most amazingly illuminating thing I'd ever heard. It explains just about everything about our current condition, our propensity to sin, to disobey all God's laws, and our lack of communication with God, it explains war and violence and murder, just about everything. Nothing makes sense without

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According to Calvinism, God deliberately arranged the Fall. How does it make sense to you that God wanted all the things you attribute to it ?Indeed, even if we discount Calvinistic ideas it is hard to see how it could happen without God at least laying in the groundwork (for no apparent reason) and intentionally allowing things to play out as He knew he would.Maybe you think repurposing the Genesis story as an excuse to blame people for the state of the world was a great idea. But it doesn’t really work with Christian ideas of God. Which is really obvious if you read it.

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I'm talking about the practice of preaching the Bible through, that some preachers do, usually taking a book and working through it over a long period of time, in some cases years

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Which is still not a good way to understand it. Even if the preacher sticks to the text rather than adding interpretations to it. It’s too episodic and too spread out.

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They preach on only one segment for a sermon or may even take a series of Sundays on that one segment and it may be just a few verses. If you hear this kind of preaching you will note that they often refer to various commentaries they've been studying about the passage, discussing where they agre

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Given the abysmal quality of some of the commentaries quoted here that is not obviously a good thing. And even the less bad ones are liable to be affected by doctrinal commitments.

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You do learn a lot of Bible this way

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When it can take weeks to go through a few verses ?

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There is another approach that is just as good I think, which is to take a topic, say original sin or anything you like, and preaching on all the texts that apply to that topic in various ways, quoting them all and discussing them all.

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I can see that going very badly - at least in terms of generating real understanding.You need to understand that the Bible is not a coherent text. You get a lot of cherry-picking, misinterpretation and harmonisations that ignore problems. Especially if you are an inerrantist.

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Of course we should all read the Bible for ourselves. I was responding to the fact that Paboss apparently didn't know the Bible although he considered himself a strong Christian, so when he sat down to read it he discovered all these things about it that offended him. So I figure he wasn't getting any preaching on it either.

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But they were the things that preachers typically do ignore. How many tell you about the contradictions, for one ?

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Instead of pontificating from your position of knowing nothing, why don't you find out how it works. Pick a topic or a Bible book and go listen through a series of preachings on it at Sermon Audio.

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But I do know that listening for a relatively short time every Sunday is slow and episodic. I do know that it doesn’t take weeks worth of sermons to simply read a few verses. I do know that commentaries are biased and unreliable. And that’s the good ones.Because reading is better and faster than listening, point me to a transcript of one of your sermons and I’ll read it. I simply don’t want to spend hours listening to recordings which aren’t likely to be of any value to me anyway.

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Lots of preachers discuss the supposed contradictions.

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And I bet they try to cover them up, too. And that’s my point. Real understanding is sacrificed on the altar of doctrine.

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They would most likely show how they aren't contradictions.

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I’ve read enough apologetics to know how that goes. There are real contradictions. Anyone who denies that opposes understanding of the Bible (but then we already know that you oppose that)

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I added an edit to Message 48 to refer you to Sermon Audio for talks on the subject.

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Have you got transcripts? That IS what I asked for.

I’ll look but if I don’t see them I’m not going to waste time on it.I did watch a video of one of Sproul’s talks and I was thoroughly unimpressed. Message 66