holmes writes:
I'm going to address an earlier post as well as this latest post of yours in this one reply.
faith writes:
we simply start with some facts we have in the Bible. They are no less facts for their being in the Bible. There is nothing unscientific about beginning with known facts,
First of all you do not start with "facts" in the sense of looking at raw data. You are looking at someone's written interpretation of events... perhaps raw data. They are not even highly descriptive.
That is correct, we are looking at known facts that are not raw data. They are facts nonetheless, the way facts in accurate histories are facts. Napoleon was a real human being who headed real wars in the name of a real national entity. Alexander the Great was a real human being who made tremendous conquests of a huge swath of territory in the name of Greece. That sort of fact.
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Second, you yourself admitted that initial "readings" of scripture may not be correct and that a person must come to understand what is actually meant, rather than just any possible interpretation. This raises the question of how you can call any of the interpretations of events in scripture as "facts"? In every case YOU (the reader) could end up being wrong.
There is nothing that requires interpretation in the facts given concerning the Flood. Noah was 600 years old when the Flood was upon the earth. Nothing to interpret there, it’s a statement of fact. It rained for forty days and forty night. Straight factual statement, no interpretation required.
Third, none of scripture is a direct communication from witnesses of an event.
This is simply false. Three of the gospels are predominantly direct witness reports, and Luke witnessed most of the events of the Book of Acts, Paul certainly witnessed events he speaks of in his various letters. In the Old Testament, Moses witnessed the events of Exodus, Nehemiah and Ezra witnessed the events they record in their books, and so on and so forth.
Scribes who copied or translated the original observations may have also been just as errant as any reader. This is not to mention that the creation stories were from oral traditions, making error more likely/probable.
There is a whole science devoted to the analysis of ancient texts, and there are thousands of ancient manuscripts of the Bible in many languages for these scientists to compare with one another. Nobody can get away with a sweeping assumption about errors when differences between the manuscripts have been investigated and compared to a microscopic degree by experts.
I wouldn’t be too hasty about judging an oral tradition in a time when there was no written tradition and accuracy would have been a strong concern, and there would have been many to correct each other. Their methods of memorization and transmission aren’t knowable. The whole history of Abraham was also transmitted orally. Even quite recently we’ve had oral testimonies of the life of slaves in America, or of the Civil War by oldtimers who lived through it. I believe for the most part their memories are trusted too.
Isn't modern science, by studying the raw materials and attempting to come to conclusions based on processes working on those materials, a valid way to double check the written interpretation of events found in scripture? Hasn't this already been proven in the past regarding other mistakes in reading scripture?
Sure, physical science has its role to play. Depends on the circumstances you have in mind.
wouldn't have been much in the way of empirical science at all in the West if it hadn't been for Christianity.
There is no basis for your claim .
This is a tangent I’m not going to pursue here, but I’ve defended it elsewhere.
Nobody is still alive who ever talked to Napoleon personally, and you expect us to believe mere witnesses? The mere written word? Don't you know that witnesses are notoriously unreliable?
I get what you are saying, and it makes sense as a logical possibility. Essentially you seem to be saying that everyone has to rely on books for statements about the past and so gain knowledge about it. Okay that's true.
Thank you.
But there is a difference between historical books regarding figures like Napoleon and scientific theories about geological/biological processes, versus religious texts.
They each have their strengths and weaknesses. The physical sciences are far from infallible, though you’d never know it to hear some talk.
The first two cases are not treated as full truth, but caveated based on level of corroborating evidence. While it would seem odd to doubt Napoleon existed given the amount of corroborating evidence, people can and many do doubt events or statements ascribed to Napoleon... even things written about him at that time. Same goes for scientific theories. In my life many concepts of geologic and biological development have changed.
Yes, both have strengths and weaknesses.
Evolutionary theory itself has changed based on level of evidence for specific processes, though nothing so far has emerged to challenge (indeed much has come to support) its basic principles.
This I would argue, but again it is a tangent.
In contrast, scripture does not have much corroboration. I'm not going to get into the "did Jesus exist" thing, because I think there is some evidence which suggests such a person could have. What I would doubt is actions and statements ascribed to him. There is essentially no corroborating evidence for it.
This is ridiculous really. The reports in the Bible were written by many different authors, most of them witnesses, who corroborate each other’s reports in their own. There were others who did not write reports who could have if there was something to dispute in these.
This is even worse for Creationist theories. There is nothing but the written translation/interpretation of an oral tradition handed down by generations of people which relate to events no individual human could have been party to. Even if we say God told somebody, the question is when, and how did that person and everyone else manage to get it right as they passed it down.
If God told it, He certainly would have made sure it got passed down accurately. But the veracity of the stories of creation and the flood is buttressed by the many factual reference points: who begat whom and how long he lived, and what age Noah was when the flood was on the earth, and who begat whom after the flood and so on, facts which were probably rehearsed regularly in that ancient oral tradition. There is nothing general or vague about the telling. The exact dimensions of the ark are given. There is an unusual degree of specificity in this story as compared to other ancient stories. And the others may likely have some truth in them too, but it is drowned in vagueness and embellishments by comparison with the Genesis accounts.
Even the Flood suffers from this problem. There is no real corroboration outside the text on a global scale.
Actually, the amazing fact that there are so many ancient stories of a gigantic flood is unbelievably strong corroboration. The attempts to reduce them all to local floods, as if they all just happened to experience these memorable local floods about the same time that made this huge impact on their consciousness, apart from all the OTHER big floods they must also have experienced over the millennia, is really laughable.
And even if we assume the authors were telling the truth as they saw it, couldn't they have been errant, or translations errant? Maybe Noah only meant that the whole of HIS world flooded, meaning the region in which he lived. Maybe two of every animal meant only domesticated animals for food and service, and descendants expanded it using dramatic license.
It doesn’t read that way, holmes, its specificity and exactitude are really remarkable for an ancient text. Certainly it leaves a lot of questions, but the facts that are given can hardly be disputed. As for translations, it was written in Hebrew and handed down in Hebrew for 1500 years before it was translated into the Greek by Jewish scholars, and it continued in Hebrew to the present, and for a test of the accuracy of transmission, the degree of correspondence between our current Hebrew Old Testament and that found in the Dead Sea Scrolls is nearly perfect, certainly perfect in meaning.
Hey, millions upon millions have believed in Jesus Christ
Unlike Napoleon, not at the time that he is claimed to have lived.
Well, there were thousands then, but it shouldn’t be hard to find other historical personages who were only known in their small circles, not known by millions, whose fame spread beyond their own circles only after their death, people we have no problem believing existed. Probably even Napoleon himself wasn’t known as widely during his life as he was later.
In any case, the actual INFLUENCE of Jesus Christ on millions since his time is astronomically far beyond that of any other historical figure.
And not nearly with the vast amounts of corroborating material Napoleon has to support that he interacted with the people of the time in the way that he is said to have done.
Oh, but plenty nevertheless.
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