Seriously? SFW!? The Hobbit says there were men on earth. That doesn't make it a history textbook, nor does it mean Sauron exists!
I'm not sure anyone claimed what the purpose of The Bible to be. But I thought this was in the context of testing the Christian God hypothesis.
The Bible is not a history book. So when it does not line up with history, I'm not sure that disproves or provides real evidence against the existence of the Christian God.
And when we look for the evidence that this happened and see quite clearly that it did not (there was no global flood, there was no exodus of 2 million plus people from Egypt), we can say definitively THIS DID NOT HAPPEN.
And that doesn't undermine the credibility of the Bible's central thesis?
Wha-wha-what? Are you for real? I can understand Jonah and Job, but Genesis and Exodus are kind of crucial. If they didn't literally happen, Israel has no articulated claim to be "chosen" and man has no need for a redeemer.
In the context of testing the God hypothesis, if a claim is made that God did ABC, and we are able to definitively determine that ABC never happened, then the hypothesis fails. So yes, that DOES disprove the existence of the Christian God. At the very least, it disproves that the people who made the claims were speaking for Him. Without those claims, there is nothing to support the assertions of the later people who claim to be speaking for Him, all of whom relied on the authority of the of those who spoke for Him before.
Moses never existed. He's as much a part of Israeli history as Paul Bunyan is a part of American history.
Dr. Suess wrote Yertle the Turtle. There is no evidence that any turtles ever behaved as extreme as described in that book. Has a study been done to show how an elephant could feasibly hatch an egg?
Is there some rule that says the Christian God must write only factual books?
Dr Suess wrote nonsense and it wasn't because he didn't exist.
I am not aware that all flavors of Christianity have as heavy an emphasis on The Bible as this argument does. If it we narrowed the definition to certain pockets of Christians that might help.
You're very nice, but I can't take this seriously as a defense of Christianity. You're making a better case against it than I am, comparing the writers of the Bible to Dr. Seuss.
No one is arguing that the writers of the Bible did not exist. The characters in it are another story.
Yertle the turtle does not exist. Turtles do.
A god may exist. But it's not the fictional character who performed the fictional deeds of Genesis and Exodus. And Joshua. And Jonah. And especially Job!
Yeah, someone wrote those stories. Never claimed otherwise. But you're claiming a character in those stories is the Author of them. There is no reason to believe that.
You're very nice, but I can't take this seriously as a defense of Christianity. You're making a better case against it than I am, comparing the writers of the Bible to Dr. Seuss.
1 hour ago, Raf said:
No one is arguing that the writers of the Bible did not exist. The characters in it are another story.
Yertle the turtle does not exist. Turtles do.
A god may exist. But it's not the fictional character who performed the fictional deeds of Genesis and Exodus. And Joshua. And Jonah. And especially Job!
Yeah, someone wrote those stories. Never claimed otherwise. But you're claiming a character in those stories is the Author of them. There is no reason to believe that.
My intent was to emphasize the purpose of the author's story. Dr Seuss' books are nonsense, but with constructive, useful, goals.
I am not defending Christianity.
Your argument was that The Bible does not hold up to known scientific and historical facts. That past events in the Bible can be proven false, therefore, the Christian God does not exist.
A: Genesis clearly did not happen factually as written.
My point was that it's easier to disprove the Christian God than it is to disprove the deist God because unlike the deist God, the Christian God makes testable claims. That fail. Genesis flood was ONE EXAMPLE. I listed a handful, and there are literally dozens more. My argument was cumulative. Your critique of my argument isolated one point I made, failed to debunk it, and then proceeded as though some rhetorical point had been made when it had not.
This may or may not be off topic, but Yertle DOES exist.
Fictional stories and the characters in them exist. They may not be tangible physical entities, but they exist.
The biblical stories in Genesis exist. But whether or not they represent historical fact is, for the most part, irrelevant.
They represent the Judeo-Christian creation story, or myth. Myth, as Raf (hopefully) knows, may or may not be true fact.
"A creation myth (also called a cosmogonic myth) is a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it.[2][3] While in popular usage the term myth often refers to false or fanciful stories, formally, it does not imply falsehood. Cultures generally regard their creation myths as true.[4][5] In the society in which it is told, a creation myth is usually regarded as conveying profound truths, metaphorically, symbolically and sometimes in a historical or literal sense.[6][7] They are commonly, although not always, considered cosmogonical myths – that is, they describe the ordering of the cosmos from a state of chaos or amorphousness."
Btw, Dr. Suess's published works aren't nonsense. Many of them are stories which, like Bolshevik indicated, have purpose.
Now, to address the issue of whether or not one actually can prove or disprove the existence of the Christian God... that's above my pay grade.
I did follow and do appreciate points that Raf made about a Deist god.
However, despite my aversion to reducing questions relating to the existence God to the severely limiting confines of human rhetoric, I thought TLC's comments surrounding Romans 8 to be inherently absurd.
The critique of my one point was itself pointless, as it failed to refute the one point I was making.
The Christian God makes historical claims that fail. This proves that those who claimed to be speaking for Him were not (assuming Him to be a God of truth). Changing his historical claims to intentional myths and fables designed to teach lessons is ad hoc revisionism. If you want to go in that direction, fine. Let's. The Christian God is Himself an intentional myth and fable, created by the authors (plural) of those stories to teach lessons, not to convey historical truth. He exists as surely as Superman, The Ants and the Grasshopper, and Bilbo Baggins exist.
You then went on to cite Romans as a way to establish that God (the Christian God, the God of the Bible) does indeed exist.
Of course it's a personal (subjective) means of establishing it. The verse doesn't say that it's His spirit bearing witness to the world. It's uniquely bearing witness to us (i.e., our spirit.) Do you (or anyone else here) honestly think that anything less than the experiencing of this really can, or ever will, establish (in your own mind) the reality of His presence?
On 3/14/2017 at 8:16 AM, Raf said:
The real intellectual crime here is that you ripped my original statement from its immediate context. I expect better.
Seriously? Given the topic of this thread, I guess I didn't consider it a crime to suppose that any reference intended to point toward the Creator (whether spoken of as "the Christian God," Allah, a deist God, the creative universalism, or by any other variegated forms) should be (or needs to be) thought of and addressed separately. But if so, then pardon me. If your intention was (or is) to say that a "deist" God is something other than the God that I spoke of, then I would undoubtedly agree with you that no such god can be established.
On 3/14/2017 at 8:16 AM, Raf said:
Remember the time God said he flooded the whole earth and saved just one family of 8? Testable claim. Genetic research would reveal a bottleneck. None exists. Because it never happened.
If none exists, then it's because your genetic research isn't complete or good enough. Because it happened.
You've simply chosen to accept the boundaries of what other men have (thus far) reasoned to be there, while I do not.
Delightful how you get to say it happened even though the evidence points against it. To quote or paraphrase Sam Harris, if someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to show them to show they should value evidence? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument are you going to make to show they should value logic?
It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to have a rational discussion with you, TLC, because a rational discussion requires two participants who value reason, logic and evidence, and you do not.
Sam Harris is a bit deterministic. Same reason I choose not to be Christian, lack of free will.
55 minutes ago, TLC said:
. . .
If none exists, then it's because your genetic research isn't complete or good enough. Because it happened.
You've simply chosen to accept the boundaries of what other men have (thus far) reasoned to be there, while I do not.
I would suggest both views are wrong. Creation myths are clues to human psyche (for lack of a better term at the moment) and science and archaeology is in constant change. These stories about the past are questions we will never fully have answers to.
I think you've started on a good point about choice, though.
"If none exists, then it's because your genetic research isn't complete or good enough. Because it happened."
So, now we're back to this. "It happened." That's a claim. As such, it requires substantiation of a non-circular variety.
It's not some claim that I originated, you already know that. Whether or not there will ever be an acceptable scientific substantiation of it, we don't know. If you want to take the position that it will never be substantiated, that's simply a choice you're making, perhaps based on "evidence thus far." I'm only making the point that whatever evidence you have thus far is not complete, finished, nor proven conclusive. If it happened, but (a) the "evidence" to date doesn't or can't verify it, it doesn't prove that it didn't happen. And if it did happen, but (b) the evidence to date indicates that didn't happen, then plainly there is something awry or wrong with said "evidence.
Delightful how you get to say it happened even though the evidence points against it. To quote or paraphrase Sam Harris, if someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to show them to show they should value evidence? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument are you going to make to show they should value logic?
It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to have a rational discussion with you, TLC, because a rational discussion requires two participants who value reason, logic and evidence, and you do not.
My perspective is different, I've already made or disclosed that point (however it's said.)
Because the premise I choose as the foundation for reason and logic differs from yours, you suppose and accept that your rational is good while mine is non-existent and/or bad. Perhaps if you could learn to see and think "outside the box" of your own limited perspective, you would at least recognize and acknowledge both the coherency and consistency of my stated thoughts.
This discussion is over. Your judgment is invalid. Your remises are false and your continued presence on this thread, barring a change in your appreciation of evidence, is trolling.
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Rocky
Just over two years ago (Feb 28, - March 2, 2015), I witnessed some big time arguing -- my first time sitting in on oral arguments at the Supreme Court in Washington. It was a thrill. On Feb 28, I tou
Rocky
May I suggest that some participants in this thread (esp. TLC) could benefit tremendously from this MOOC on the subject of understanding arguments. Think Again: How to Reason and Argue Reasoning
Raf
By all means, bring on the "future."
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waysider
Now, HERE's some bottleneck I can get behind.
Yeah, it's off-topic, but it does have Jesus in the title.....so there's that.
WARNING:
(Off-Topic....for entertainment purposes only)
Edited by waysiderspelling
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Raf
"The Bible says there is a river Nile in Egypt."
Seriously? SFW!? The Hobbit says there were men on earth. That doesn't make it a history textbook, nor does it mean Sauron exists!
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Bolshevik
I'm not sure anyone claimed what the purpose of The Bible to be. But I thought this was in the context of testing the Christian God hypothesis.
The Bible is not a history book. So when it does not line up with history, I'm not sure that disproves or provides real evidence against the existence of the Christian God.
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chockfull
I was just waiting for the punchline about "De Nile". But that's probably inappropriate humor.
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Bolshevik
You could just "Entwash" your hands of it"
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Raf
See if I've got this right.
The Bible can say "THIS HAPPENED!"
And when we look for the evidence that this happened and see quite clearly that it did not (there was no global flood, there was no exodus of 2 million plus people from Egypt), we can say definitively THIS DID NOT HAPPEN.
And that doesn't undermine the credibility of the Bible's central thesis?
Wha-wha-what? Are you for real? I can understand Jonah and Job, but Genesis and Exodus are kind of crucial. If they didn't literally happen, Israel has no articulated claim to be "chosen" and man has no need for a redeemer.
In the context of testing the God hypothesis, if a claim is made that God did ABC, and we are able to definitively determine that ABC never happened, then the hypothesis fails. So yes, that DOES disprove the existence of the Christian God. At the very least, it disproves that the people who made the claims were speaking for Him. Without those claims, there is nothing to support the assertions of the later people who claim to be speaking for Him, all of whom relied on the authority of the of those who spoke for Him before.
Moses never existed. He's as much a part of Israeli history as Paul Bunyan is a part of American history.
This isn't some trivial distinction.
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Bolshevik
Dr. Suess wrote Yertle the Turtle. There is no evidence that any turtles ever behaved as extreme as described in that book. Has a study been done to show how an elephant could feasibly hatch an egg?
Is there some rule that says the Christian God must write only factual books?
(If we are assuming the Bible was God's idea)
Edited by Bolshevikhomonym
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Raf
Holy cow.
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Bolshevik
Not cows, turtles.
Dr Suess wrote nonsense and it wasn't because he didn't exist.
I am not aware that all flavors of Christianity have as heavy an emphasis on The Bible as this argument does. If it we narrowed the definition to certain pockets of Christians that might help.
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Raf
You're very nice, but I can't take this seriously as a defense of Christianity. You're making a better case against it than I am, comparing the writers of the Bible to Dr. Seuss.
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Raf
No one is arguing that the writers of the Bible did not exist. The characters in it are another story.
Yertle the turtle does not exist. Turtles do.
A god may exist. But it's not the fictional character who performed the fictional deeds of Genesis and Exodus. And Joshua. And Jonah. And especially Job!
Yeah, someone wrote those stories. Never claimed otherwise. But you're claiming a character in those stories is the Author of them. There is no reason to believe that.
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Bolshevik
My intent was to emphasize the purpose of the author's story. Dr Seuss' books are nonsense, but with constructive, useful, goals.
I am not defending Christianity.
Your argument was that The Bible does not hold up to known scientific and historical facts. That past events in the Bible can be proven false, therefore, the Christian God does not exist.
A: Genesis clearly did not happen factually as written.
therefore
B: The Christian God does not exist.
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Raf
My point was that it's easier to disprove the Christian God than it is to disprove the deist God because unlike the deist God, the Christian God makes testable claims. That fail. Genesis flood was ONE EXAMPLE. I listed a handful, and there are literally dozens more. My argument was cumulative. Your critique of my argument isolated one point I made, failed to debunk it, and then proceeded as though some rhetorical point had been made when it had not.
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Bolshevik
I critiqued one point because all your points were redundant. Which I think you know.
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Rocky
Wow!
This may or may not be off topic, but Yertle DOES exist.
Fictional stories and the characters in them exist. They may not be tangible physical entities, but they exist.
The biblical stories in Genesis exist. But whether or not they represent historical fact is, for the most part, irrelevant.
They represent the Judeo-Christian creation story, or myth. Myth, as Raf (hopefully) knows, may or may not be true fact.
"A creation myth (also called a cosmogonic myth) is a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it.[2][3] While in popular usage the term myth often refers to false or fanciful stories, formally, it does not imply falsehood. Cultures generally regard their creation myths as true.[4][5] In the society in which it is told, a creation myth is usually regarded as conveying profound truths, metaphorically, symbolically and sometimes in a historical or literal sense.[6][7] They are commonly, although not always, considered cosmogonical myths – that is, they describe the ordering of the cosmos from a state of chaos or amorphousness."
Btw, Dr. Suess's published works aren't nonsense. Many of them are stories which, like Bolshevik indicated, have purpose.
Now, to address the issue of whether or not one actually can prove or disprove the existence of the Christian God... that's above my pay grade.
I did follow and do appreciate points that Raf made about a Deist god.
However, despite my aversion to reducing questions relating to the existence God to the severely limiting confines of human rhetoric, I thought TLC's comments surrounding Romans 8 to be inherently absurd.
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Raf
The critique of my one point was itself pointless, as it failed to refute the one point I was making.
The Christian God makes historical claims that fail. This proves that those who claimed to be speaking for Him were not (assuming Him to be a God of truth). Changing his historical claims to intentional myths and fables designed to teach lessons is ad hoc revisionism. If you want to go in that direction, fine. Let's. The Christian God is Himself an intentional myth and fable, created by the authors (plural) of those stories to teach lessons, not to convey historical truth. He exists as surely as Superman, The Ants and the Grasshopper, and Bilbo Baggins exist.
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TLC
Of course it's a personal (subjective) means of establishing it. The verse doesn't say that it's His spirit bearing witness to the world. It's uniquely bearing witness to us (i.e., our spirit.) Do you (or anyone else here) honestly think that anything less than the experiencing of this really can, or ever will, establish (in your own mind) the reality of His presence?
Seriously? Given the topic of this thread, I guess I didn't consider it a crime to suppose that any reference intended to point toward the Creator (whether spoken of as "the Christian God," Allah, a deist God, the creative universalism, or by any other variegated forms) should be (or needs to be) thought of and addressed separately. But if so, then pardon me. If your intention was (or is) to say that a "deist" God is something other than the God that I spoke of, then I would undoubtedly agree with you that no such god can be established.
If none exists, then it's because your genetic research isn't complete or good enough. Because it happened.
You've simply chosen to accept the boundaries of what other men have (thus far) reasoned to be there, while I do not.
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waysider
"If none exists, then it's because your genetic research isn't complete or good enough. Because it happened."
So, now we're back to this. "It happened." That's a claim. As such, it requires substantiation of a non-circular variety.
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Raf
Delightful how you get to say it happened even though the evidence points against it. To quote or paraphrase Sam Harris, if someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to show them to show they should value evidence? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument are you going to make to show they should value logic?
It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to have a rational discussion with you, TLC, because a rational discussion requires two participants who value reason, logic and evidence, and you do not.
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Bolshevik
Sam Harris is a bit deterministic. Same reason I choose not to be Christian, lack of free will.
I would suggest both views are wrong. Creation myths are clues to human psyche (for lack of a better term at the moment) and science and archaeology is in constant change. These stories about the past are questions we will never fully have answers to.
I think you've started on a good point about choice, though.
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TLC
It's not some claim that I originated, you already know that. Whether or not there will ever be an acceptable scientific substantiation of it, we don't know. If you want to take the position that it will never be substantiated, that's simply a choice you're making, perhaps based on "evidence thus far." I'm only making the point that whatever evidence you have thus far is not complete, finished, nor proven conclusive. If it happened, but (a) the "evidence" to date doesn't or can't verify it, it doesn't prove that it didn't happen. And if it did happen, but (b) the evidence to date indicates that didn't happen, then plainly there is something awry or wrong with said "evidence.
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TLC
My perspective is different, I've already made or disclosed that point (however it's said.)
Because the premise I choose as the foundation for reason and logic differs from yours, you suppose and accept that your rational is good while mine is non-existent and/or bad. Perhaps if you could learn to see and think "outside the box" of your own limited perspective, you would at least recognize and acknowledge both the coherency and consistency of my stated thoughts.
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Raf
This discussion is over. Your judgment is invalid. Your remises are false and your continued presence on this thread, barring a change in your appreciation of evidence, is trolling.
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