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Member Posts: 3945 From: Duluth, Minnesota, U.S. (West end of Lake Superior) Joined: Member Rating: 10.0 |
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Author | Topic: The Bible was NOT man made, it was Godly made | |||||||||||||||||||||||
kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
jar writes: The support for the position that it is human made rests on several pillars. there are many absolutely factually false tales in the Bible such as the story of a world-wide flood, the destruction of all life with the exception of small groups of animals, the Exodus and the Conquest of Canaan. there is no one unique "Bible" but rather several different Canons that include from only five books, to over 80 books. most of the "prophecy" found in the Bible seems to be either post hoc reasoning, quotemining or just plain false. there is no one uniform depiction of God that is common throughout the Bible.material has been rearranged, newer material being inserted before older material. many of the stories, for example the creation myths found in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are mutually exclusive. These facts, particularly the fact that there is not one Bible, demonstrate that the Bible is but the work of man. Even if all of your points are true, this does not mean that the Bible is NOT also from God. This thread sets up a false dichotomy: either the Bible is man-made OR it is from God. This is too reductionistic. It is like asking whether Jesus was human or divine. The orthodox Christian position (spelled out at Chalcedon) is that He was both--fully human and fully divine. And the orthodox position on the Bible is that it is also both.
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
jar writes: Which Bible. The one with only five books or the one with over 80 books? Someone can call anything a "Bible" that he likes, but that doesn't make it so. As you said regarding the nature of Christ, this is a great topic for another thread. The present thread is not about canonicity, but about authorship.
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
Equinox writes:
Of course it would. But perhaps this is not what God intended to do?
I mean, if a supposed God is truly omniscient, all-loving, and all powerful, you'd think it would be trivially easy for such a god to make sure his message got to the intended audience uncorrupted, complete, and without harmful additions. It starts to sound a lot like the theodicy dilemma. The condition, content, and situation of the Bible shows that God could be any two of 1. all loving, 2. omniscient, or 3 all powerful, but not all three.
But this relies on lots of assumptions as to what God's love, knowledge, and power should look like. It is easy to set up a straw man and say that because God does not behave this way, He must not exist. (Or because the Bible does not fit our simple picture, it cannot be divine.) But perhaps He DOES exist (and DID author the Bible), yet acts in a much more complex way than we would like to imagine?
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
Ringo writes:
Do you really see these as the only two options? This is a version of the classic agnostic fallacy: "If God exists, He will behave in a certain way which I expect and understand. If I don't see this, I will not believe in God." Either the Bible makes sense in a human-understandable way or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it's either because God is incapable of expressing Himself or because He didn't write it. Let's modify your claim:"Either quantum mechanics makes sense in a human-understandable way or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it cannot be true." Perhaps, in both cases, reality does not follow our intuition or preconceived notions. Rather than insisting a-priori how reality MUST work, we should approach these questions more open-mindedly and investigate to see how it actually DOES work. Without such an approach we will never discover new things, whether in science, theology, or our personal lives.
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
Equinox writes: But now you are running away from the original claim. The original claim was that we can see that the Bible (which Bible?) was godly made, not human made, specifically by being able to look at it and see the evidence. 1) First, it was/is not clear to me that "seeing evidence" is part of the original claim. The OP says merely:
So, the repeat the topic title, Juraikken asserts that "The Bible was NOT man made, it was Godly made."
This is an assertion, but I don't see any insistence on specific evidence in the first few posts. 2) What in the world do you mean that I am "running away from the original claim"?? I have never embraced this claim nor defended it! It is not orthodox Christian doctrine. I disagree with it.
Equinox writes:
The danger is that this is implicitly claiming a-priori what constitutes evidence of divine authorship and what does not. It's virtually the same problem as some of the Intelligent Design (ID) arguments for nature, which rely on assumptions of what God's design must look like. A better approach is to study nature to see what God's design DOES look like rather than imposing a-priori requirements on what it MUST loook like. Are we going to make the claim that the evidence shows that the Bible is divinely inspired, or not? If so, we can look at the evidence. If the evidence is a divine mystery that we cannot examine, and we are not to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, then there is no point to this thread or indeed to any discussion of any sacred text. At that point, it becomes blind submission to whoever is using religion for whatever ends. Likewise, most of the arguments that I've seen here against divine authorship rely on a-priori assumptions of what God's authorship should look like. This is the same fallacy.
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
Ringo writes:
Obviously the problem could be with any of the three pieces (sender, channel, or receiver). That's exactly what I'm doing, investigating how communication DOES work. Is the receiver working? Is the channel clear? Is the sender transmitting a comprehensible signal? The responsibility for communication begins with the sender. If the message isn't getting through, it's reasonable to examine the sender and the medium, not just blame the receiver. But isn't the MESSAGE of the Bible relatively clear? What is being argued in this thread is not the message, but the author.
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
Equinox writes:
Why make the claim that the photon is a particle? We have lots of evidence that it is a wave. But providing more and more evidence that it is a wave does NOT negate its also being a particle. Worst of all, it is making a claim, then unmaking it when challenged. For instance, it’s like saying “the sky is green!”, then when presented with evidence showing that it isn’t green, saying “It may appear blue to us, but that’s only because it’s a mystery what color it is - we can’t really know.” So then why make the claim in the first place? Likewise, providing evidence that the Bible has human authorship does NOT negate its also being written by God.
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
Ringo writes:
I agree with you that if God is trying to communicate with us, at least the major points of His communication should be comprehensible. My point in Message 146 to you was that the God-moves-in-mysterious-ways excuse makes no sense if God is trying to communicate with us. But I don't see that this implies anything in particular about how He should go about generating this communication, or what specific form this communication should take.
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
Ringo writes:
Are the main points necessarily incomprehensible? Isn't it possible that they are comprehensible, but are intentionally ignored or misunderstood? To use your communication system analogy, is it possible that the receiver is filtering out the signal?
The topic is about the specific form that the communication (supposedly) does take - the Bible. The multitude of different interpretations suggests that the major points are not comprehensible. How can that imply anything but an incompetent God or a human origin? How could a competent God fail to communicate?
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
Equinox writes:
Close, except that the photon has ALL of the properties of a particle, and ALL of the properties of a wave. It is fully both. OK, let’s see if the analogy works in this case. The photon has some clear particle properties (the photoelectron effect, for instance) and some clear wave properties (diffraction, say). Similarly, nearly all of the bibles have some divine properties (saying nice things like love thy neighbor), and some human things (such as the barbaric morality and historical errors. Just as a photon is neither complete particle nor completely wave, but rather has properties of both, the bibles are neither completely human nor completely divine, but instead have properties of both. Did that work? Likewise, orthodox Christianity says that Jesus is both FULLY God and FULLY man. Attempts to limit either nature were declared heresies at Chalcedon. Similarly, the Bible is both FULLY human and FULLY divine according to orthodox Christianity.
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
Ringo writes:
So you would make man a deterministic robot, with no free will to ignore God's message? The biblical picture of God's communication is different. Transmission of God's message depends on the willingness (or absence of filtering) of the receiver:
No. The Creator of the universe would be capable of transmitting on all frequencies, so that no filter could remove everything. There would be no possibility for anybody to miss the message. All you're doing is changing "the message is incomprehensible" to "the transmitter is weak"quote:
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
Ringo writes:
How do you get any of this from what I wrote?? Do you really not see how ridiculous that sounds? You're using the message to determine whether or not the message is accurate: If the message says A, then A. That's like getting an email from somebody who claims to be your banker, telling you not to trust anybody else who claims to be your banker. That's no way to determine who the message came from. I said nothing about determining whether or not the biblical message is accurate; I'm talking about authorship (which is the topic of this thread, BTW). The point is that if someone doesn't want to believe something, they'll "filter it out" and deny it. This is true of biblical authorship as well as of most areas of life. Do you disagree with this?
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
Ringo writes:
So I presume you would class Jesus and the NT writers as "fundies"? Because this is exactly what the Jewish leaders in John 7 were doing--denying the revelation of God through Jesus.
Of course I disagree. That whole trying-to-deny-God thing is fundie bullshit.
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kbertsche Member (Idle past 2157 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
Equinox writes:
Point taken regarding mass. Perhaps I should have used an electron for the analogy rather than a photon? But photons don’t have all the properties of classical particles, NOR do they have all the properties of waves. For instance, classical particles have mass, photons don’t. But note that I did NOT claim that photons have all of the properties of "classical particles". You have changed my wording and meaning. I simply said that they have "ALL of the properties of particles." A "classical particle" is an approximation to reality which implicitly excludes wave properties. In other words, a "classical particle" is a particle with added restrictions which are not essential to its nature as a particle.
Waves require a medium for transmission - photons don’t.
I would disagree that this is an essential property of a "wave".
Many of the properties of photons are not those of a particle. Many are not those of a wave. If a book is by someone, then that shows in the book. Thus, if a book is by a trickster, or evil god, it would show those properties. Conversely, if a book were by a human idiot, it would show those properties. If a book were by a god with limited knowledge, it would show those properties. If you disagree, then what critieria would you use to determine whether or not the Illiad was or was not written by Satan?
Agreed, but I suspect that the evidence for divine authorship is not strong enough to persuade a hard-core skeptic. If someone is not willing to entertain divine authorship, they will find an alternative explanation which makes them comfortable.
Similarly, what criteria should I use to determine if my phone book is written by the Jesus almighty? If there is no way to know if my phone book as opposed to the Bible is written by Jesus, then why should I not start each day with a reading from my phone book, and base my life on it? quote: I’m still not clear on what you mean by OC. Many Christians today don’t hold that view, and even those who do hold that view disagree about which Bible.
Muslims and Mormons believe that God revealed himself through dictation, with absolutely no human involvement in authorship. This is not orthodox Christianity (though there is one small group of fundamentalist Baptists who hold this view). The orthodox Christian view is that all of the biblical words, phrases, grammar, etc. in the original manuscripts came from the human writers, based on their own cultural backgrounds, yet every word in the original manuscripts is also the inspired word of God.
Is the 66 book bible fully divine? How could that be if the 73 book bible is fully divine? Or is the NIV fully divine? How could that be if the KJV is fully divine, and dozens of verses were removed from it to make the NIV? Or is the MSG bible fully divine? How could that be since it has several hundred pages more text, including additional concepts (or if it is, then how could the KJV be divine)? Or is the Peshitta bible divine, or the Ethiopian, or Coptic one, all with different contents? Or what about the epistle of barnabas - it’s in our oldest bibles, but not the NLT? Which is divine? Are the all divine? If so, then why? Also if so, then is the Jehovah’s witness bible divine? What about the book of mormon? Does “orthodox Christianity” include them? Does it include Martin Luther, who didn’t like the book of James? Even the very claim that the Bible is divine makes no sense unless one first defines what they mean by “Bible” - unless all books are divine, which I guess I wouldn’t argue with, since God is all, right?
Good questions, but discussions of canon and translations should be in another thread (these topics would quickly derail this thread).
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