The Mythical Bible

I'm sorry, I don't see how that follows.Pretend I have an encyclopedia on my desk. It's perfectly accurate in every regard. I turn to page "M" and under the heading of Mars, I take a Sharpie and add "Mars is the ninth planet in the solar system."That's an obviously false statement. But how does it make the information in the rest of the encyclopedia any less reliable? How can changing one statement affect the reliability of the rest?The statements of the Bible must be taken individually, because statements are individually true or false. You can't judge the reliability of any particular statement based on the reliability of the whole.

It's kind of like the forum.If Ned says that something is true, well, he's usually right. If it's not too contentious I might accept it without argument. That might not be true for Whatever, for instance.But Whatever and Ned are under the same onus - supporting their statements whenever asked. It's just that, because of a combinantion of credibility and the contentiousness of the statement in question, we don't bother to ask, sometimes.The Bible is right about a lot of things. But supporters of the Bible should be prepared to offer more support than "the Bible is usually right" for any given Bible statement.

In other words, you could apply textual criticism techniques to determine who wrote what in your encyclopedia, where.So, apply it to the Bible. Does the Bible give a consistent account of all events? Or are there just as many inconsistences as you would expect for a written account of several oral histories plus some epistemological material from the early Church?Start with Genesis 1 and 2, if you like. There's another thread to discuss it - we shouldn't do it here. Do they agree on all counts? Again, I don't see how that follows. If suddenly the order of the planets came under dispute, it would be ludicrous to say that "no matter what we observe, Mars is the fourth planet from the sun because my encyclopedia says so."It's one thing to accept certain sources as credible enough to be generally above reproach. It's quite another to hold those sources up above evidence from the real world.No matter what the encyclopedia or the Bible say, evidence from observation is the final abiter of what is so, and what is not so. No matter how good your encyclopedias are, they're only as good in so far as they match evidence from the real world. The distance from Earth can be calculated by parallax, and once you know the distance to all the other bodies you can place them in order from the sun.

I agree, and I'm pleased that you do, too.I just want to nail down the scope, though. Pretend for a moment that the Bible consists entirely of two statements: Verse 1 and Verse 2.It's possible to know if these verses are reliable or not. But it's a mistake to prove the reliability of Verse 1 and then pretend that you've simultaneously established the reliablity of Verse 2.I'm not accusing you of doing this, yet. It's just that I'd like to pre-empt a situation where a creationist cherry-picks the accurate parts of the Bible and claims that, because the Bible is accurate for those statements, it must be accurate for all statements.Statements are accurate based only on their own merits. Agreed? Sure. I did it in Boy Scouts, once. And the trigonometry is pretty simple, and well-proven. Again, though, I don't have to trust that person. I can do it myself. I do choose to trust the astronomical authorities, but only because I'm satisfied that their methodology is valid, not because they're authorities.But I don't have that option with religion. I can't choose to be a prophet - no amount of study is going to get me a vision of/from God unless he chooses to send one.I don't trust anybody because they're an authority. If I do trust, it's because I'm satisified the methodlogy is valid, and because I'm sure that if I bothered to, I could replicate their results. I can't do that with the statements in the Bible.

Isn't that the purpose of faith, then? If their veracity cannot be established - if the statements aren't falsifiable - then they leave the purview of science and become a matter of faith. Arguing about if they're right or wrong becomes rather pointless, don't you think? No. But again, in principle, I could. That's the virtue of science - repeatable claims.Is there any principle under which I could repeat the experience of John the Baptist? Is there any situation where I could repeat the methodology of Jesus? Religion's nature is revelatory - unless God wills it I must forever take the claims of those men - assuming that they actually made those claims - anecdotally. Faith. But for some reason, faith doesn't seem to be enough for creationists - they need proof. I find that diminishes the religious experience but that's their choice, I suppose.

I read a book once where something that was predicted at the beginning came true at the end.It was called "The Lord of the Rings." Last I checked, hobbits didn't really exist.

How would you know if the laws of physics had been overruled?We don't get to know the real laws of physics, after all. All we can do is infer a physics model from observations of the universe.If the definition of a miracle is "something happens that is impossible", then miracles can't ever happen - if something happened, then it isn't impossible, now is it? That wouldn't seem to be true. You can take statements from the Bible, and each statement has a lesser or greater degree of verifiability - but the individual correctness of each statement has nothing to do with the correctness of any other. Why would it? Almost 40 different people wrote the Bible, over a period of centuries. How on Earth could you expect to validate or invalidate all the statements in the Bible at once?

Sure, but then, that's not evidence that a miraculous event has occured - it's evidence our models weren't as accurate as we thought they were. An intervention that, were it to even occur, would be undetectable, as we've just agreed. Yes, because the veracity of all their previous statements has no bearing on the veracity of this one. You would be committing the "genetic fallacy."After all, your parents could be lying. There's a first time for everything. Likelyhood has nothing to do with it. At the end of the day, one of these people is lying. The past has nothing to do with it.Let's try it again. Lets say I have Alice and Billy, who have each uttered opposing statements about something in the universe: A and not-A, respectively, to keep it short. One of them is a compulsive liar. The other is devoutly honest.Let's say that before we know which is which, it is independantly determined that not-A, uttered by Billy, is in fact the true statement. Now, if I reveal that it was Billy who had the nefarious past, does that suddenly change the universe so that what was true is now false?Of course not. The truth of the universe has nothing to do with who's telling it. Verifying some statements in the Bible does not improve the veracity of any others. Unless you wanted to commit the genetic fallacy, yes, you're supposed to ignore them.

Yes. If it happens, then the "likelyhood" of it happening in that situation is "1/1". In other words, it's very likely, because it happened. In the absence of evidence that could lead you to a conclusion, it's fallacious to arrive at a conclusion.What part of "I don't know" do you have a problem saying? Why is coming to unsupported conclusions better than an honest admission that you don't know? Then you can't come to a reasonable conclusion. You can only come to a fallacious one. Remember that "fallacious" doesn't mean "false", it means "not supported by the premises."I don't believe that making shit up is better than saying "I don't know", and I don't understand why one would disagree. You can't, though. A conclusion not supported by the premise is fallacious. It's no better than making things up. Why would you prefer that to just saying "I don't know" and being honest? There's nothing reasonable about a fallacious conclusion.

The same way you do. Email, facetime, he could even drop a letter in the post.It's not possible to have a "personal God" who won't communicate directly with you. That's a contradiction in terms. Ok, but that says absolutely nothing about what actually happened. The likelyhood isn't the reality; statistics are descriptive, not perscriptive. I'd jump out the upstairs window and onto Frank's garage.In other words I'd find the solution that didn't require me to come to a fallacious conclusion.I keep noticing this tenor of "life and death" in your questions, and clearly you think those are the stakes involved. Isn't it possible that you're letting your fear of death (or the hereafter) make you accept fallacious reasoning? Is that really a reasonable approach to spirituality?This message has been edited by crashfrog, 07-22-2004 04:15 PM

The same way you let me know that you're communicating with me. Well, that's not really how it's used when my church refers to a "personal god", so if you meant something different, I apologize for misunderstanding you. How about you say "I don't know if that's true or not?" Why is saying "I don't know" so hard? What reasonable people do; say "I don't know" and keep thinking about it. Well, I'm glad we agree on that, at least.At any rate, I find your "likelyhood" examples so far have been simplistic in the extreme. So far we've agreed that there's at least two kinds of statements in the Bible - those that are verifiable, and those that are not.Even if we grant, for a moment, that you can do the kind of "reasoning-by-trustworthyness" that you're proposing, just because one source is trustworthy for one kind of statement doesn't mean that they're more likely to be right about another kind of statement. For instance it doesn't matter how trustworthy Frank is in general if he knows nothing about bombs and how to recognize them - he may never have lied in his life but that doesn't mean I should trust his every conclusion about everything. The other neighboor might be a cheat and a liar but if I also know that he's a veteran of an elite mine-clearing squad, I'm much more likely to take his word over Frank's.Regardless of how trustworthy you might believe the Bible to be, how can that possibly substantitate the accuracy of things that the Bible authors couldn't possibly have known?This message has been edited by crashfrog, 07-22-2004 09:30 PM

I dunno, what's a "deity"? Sure.Could a being substantiate claims of omnipotence - infinite power - with demonstrations of finite power? Probably not. I don't go, no, but I'm still a part of that community and it still has an influence in my life. So I guess I still consider it "my" church. Sorry if it was puzzling to you. Yeah, that is what I meant. I should have been clearer; I know that the purpose of an example is to be simpler, but fundamentally the same in some crucial way. I felt that your examples were too simple to be the same as the situation we're describing. Ok, but then it's even worse - what possible human writer could possibly be qualified to make judgements about an ineffable God? Even if that were originally true, those original scriptures are not availiable to us. There's still the translation problem.

That doesn't help me much. What do those terms mean? Given a certain entity, how would I establish if it was a god or not? Maybe I'm not so sure now. Certainly a being could convince me it was communicating with me. I don't believe anything could convince me it was supernatural - it's not coherent with the definition of "supernatural" for such a being to be able to act in the natural world.The appearance of a deity-like being in the natural world would not be evidence that the supernatural exists; it would be evidence that there's some natural laws we didn't know about. I don't understand how you could expect to conclude something was supernatural without an exhaustive knowledge of natural law, which is something we'll never have. At such point as those systems were in place, yes.But much of the history of the text of the Bible predates those systems. In particular there's a considerable, unknown length of time in which the "text" of the Bible was transmitted only by oral history. If you've ever played "Telephone" you know what that can do to a narrative.In other words, I'm fairly sure that the Bible has survived relatively unchanged (except in some cases, I'm sure) since well before medieval times. Prior to that, however, there's little guarantee that the Bible resembles the "original", if there even is an original.As you said, it's an article of faith that God exists; the problem is that it's a different, separate article of faith that the Bible we have is his book, as he meant it to be. Literalist Christians often conflate these elements of faith but they are fundamentally separate. I guess maybe that's been my point the whole time.