kaidi06

Evidence That Demands A Verdict by Josh McDowell.

I read on another messageboard (volume.com) that this book "answers all the questions you ever want to know about the Bible from how it was formed, why some books werent included, the languages and translations, to recent physical/archaeological evidence that all are in favor of the Bible; and thats just a small portion of the book."

The author of the post claims McDowell was an atheist until his christian friends challenged him to disprove the Bible. He decided not only was he gonna disprove the Bible, he was gonna write a book about it just to be smart. But when he started his research, suprise suprise! The more evidence he found, the more he found in favor of the Bible. Now he is Christian because he supposedly knows the Truth.

Anyone read or heard of this book? Sounds like an interesting read, but I'd rather get a rational opinion on it before wasting my hard earned money.

Prince Ashitaka

<A HREF="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/jury/" TARGET=_blank>The Jury Is In:
The Ruling on McDowell's "Evidence"</A>

Prince Ashitaka

<A HREF="http://www.islandnet.com/~luree/evidence.html" TARGET=_blank>A Critique of
Evidence That Demands a Verdict
a book by Josh McDowell
</A>

Kosh

You mean, the truth that there's a lot
of money to be made writing and talking
about apologetics to a crowd of people
who listen to (and buy) anything
that seems to
support their unfounded beliefs?

Toto

Christians consider this a good book for beginners. After all of McDowell's points are refuted, they say, well, McDowell isn't very good, actually. You have to read this really good apologist . . .

hezekiah jones

That indeed would be a very small portion of any book.

Bill

Oh, I don't know about that, really. A good apologist could probably take the exact same evidence used to debunk the Bible at book length, such as The Bible Unearthed, and rework that evidence in some way(s) to make it align with the literal word of the Bible. It's been done that way before.

Of course, any open-minded person would have to agree that the Bible wasn't written anywhere near the time of the events described in it's pages (regardless of whether you are talking about the Old or New Testaments). Instead, we have an oral history that was handed down for some number of generations by word of mouth and was then transcribed (edited and redacted as necessary) into the earliest written form we have for each book of the Bible.

As a case in point, take Noah's Flood, by Walter C. Pitman and William Ryan. That book concentrates on just the flood myth, tracing it back to an actual flood (of the area around what is now the Black Sea, which used to be a fresh water lake a couple of hundred feet below sea level) that happened about 7,500 years ago. The story of that flood was passed down through oral history in many cultures, all of which have similar flood myths. One of those myths was the Gilgamesh story of ancient Babylon, where the Jews lived about the same time as the Gilgamesh flood story was part of popular Babylonian culture. It is little wonder, then, that this story appears, with amazing similarities, in the Jewish Torah.

Still, you have to ask yourself: "Is a 7,500 year old flood of the Black Sea really confirmation of the story of Noah and the Flood in the Bible?" I don't think so!

== Bill

zenman

This McDowell, is a farse, he knows nothing, compared to real knowers, such as F. Homer Curtiss, and Randolh Stone.

Zenman

joedad

RE:
Evidence That Demands A Verdict by Josh McDowell.

I received the book as a gift and read most of it. It was entertaining and pathetic.

I concluded that a better title would have been, "A Verdict That Demands Evidence" by Josh McDowell.

JohnR

In the History of Civilization by Will Durant he says there is not mountian in Asia where some drenched Noah hasn't crawled out of some beached craft after a flood. One myth that seems to tie all the old cultures together. Wherever there is people living near a river there is a flood myth. When you live in a part of the world at 0' sealevel you are going to get floods.