'Some still living' disproves literal truth of the bible

No, he said proving the bible is true by saying the bible says it is true is circular reasoning.you can't use the bible to prove the truth of the bible.you CAN use external sources to corroborate the bible, and that's what you should be doing if you plan on proving the bible is true.saying that the bible is true because it is the word of god, which we know because god says so, as written in the bible, which we know is true because it is the word of god (etc etc) ...is circular reasoning.

an encyclopedia is very different from the bible. I know you don't believe it, but it is.an encyclopedia is a book of facts, researched and presented as facts (not as a story).An encyclopedia starts "Aa - aardvark" and carries on through to "Z - zebra" (more or less) listing dry, unbiased facts and theories.If, for example, one page on condoms describes what they do and how they do it (prevent pregnancy and the spread of STD's) and another page says (on the history of some African country, for example) that after the introduction of the condom program, unwanted pregnancies fell, as did the rate of STD transfer, you can probably surmise for yourself what did it.If the bible, on the other hand, says in one book "jesus walked on water to the fisherfolk" and in another book says "it said in the scrolls of hooplah that my mate jesus walked on water to the fisherfolk", that is not the same thing - here the bible is referring to itself (it's a made up but valid type-example).If the bible repeats itself that a certain city was destroyed, that also doesn't prove it really happened.Maybe you believe the bible to be of the same authenticity as an encyclopedia...but the latter has pictures and drawings from real life.Older books corroborate with other books written by other, unconnected peoples.the bible? It corroborates primarily and singly with itself.

did I read what you wrote?did you read what I wrote? What hooah212002 wrote? bold emphasis mine and what I replied: Now, there are probably some crossed wires here, but I was replying - to your quote in the middle - that what hooah212002 was talking about was that proving the bible is correct by quoting the bible at itself was circular reasoning.If the original objection you had was about something else, then I appologize, I was merely butting in (sorry) incase you'd misunderstood what hooah212002 wrote.

Yes, I think he is.The logic goes that if two unconnected people write about the same events in the same time period, that it increases by many-fold the chance of the thing having occured.The key is unconnected and independant witnessing of key events, places, objects, people - whatever.It's why police seperate people accused of certain crimes until they've got their independant statements written down - so that they can't later get together and change their stories until they agree, and why police often search for independant witnesses to a crime which would otherwise be a case of he-said-she-said.for example a robbery - if one person accuses another of stealing money, why should the police believe the victim?If, on the other hand, a disinterested third person says "yes, I saw someone looking like that taking money from somebody looking like this" then that's corrobative evidence that a crime (otherwise "invisible") occured.

your example, whilst possibly valid, isn't clear on what you mean and the relatedness between the two names.If Hawking lived in the UK (yay, he does!) and wrote about black holes via the Einstein-Rosencrantz bridge (yay for technobabble), and said "this complicated math shows X" and Guth, living in the US and working independantly wrote about black holes via the hyper-space n-dimensional string-theory (which is - in this example - entirely seperate to the einstein-rosencrantz bridge and is also technobabble) and said "this proves Y" ...and then you come along and say "X and Y are complementary explanations due to Brane transfer flux theory" then they'd be a very good example.If, however, some tinfoil hat wearing person said that multidimensional warp fold manifests to alpha centauri were made possible in his back garden by uniting these theories...and he then proceeds to pick selected facts out of the original theories, or even just plain make them up when in reality all he has is a toaster with aerials sticking out, this wouldn't put the warp fold manifest theory as dependable just because it talks about real (potentially entirely different) facts and figures.sorry for making it more complicated, but I've a nasty feeling where you're going, and I feel you're trying to set up a strawman which I wouldn't agree with.

did you get the bit where I said unconnected and independant?I specifically said that if their work was independant (in my overly-complicated example I suggested different methods entirely to arrive at the same mathematical conclusion) then they could be taken as corroboration.That's entirely different from two people who know each other writing about the same thing at the same time together.If they didn't know each other then you'd need to prove that the later work was not based on the earlier, and that the later author was not familiar with the earlier work.This is all really simple stuff...