newtype_alpha

You would have to ask the YEC crowd that. However, I can't think of a better example of that point than Kent Hovind, the founder of "Creation Science," who has virtually no educational background in science that I know of. Hovind and his gaggle of pseudo-scientists have been discredited more times as Howard Stern has been fired.

bfniii

given the fact that the biblical account of the flood can't be accurately dated at this time, there is no reason why this flood couldn't have been the biblical one. i presented it merely as an option. in regards to the extent of the flood, there is a dichotomy of interpretation on this passage; some say local, some say global. until there is hard evidence one way or the other, the extent is not the most important aspect of the account. the primary reason for such an account and occurrence is the outcome, to wipe the slate clean.

in addition, if an omnipotent God created the flood, then progressive creationism could be an option, right?

you're missing the point. CNN or whatever media you care to choose, is a source of information. any source of information is considered reliable until proven otherwise. people who have posted on this thread have made statements that agree with that. here's an example: X is a reliable historian yet X makes no mention of biblical event (be1), therefore (be1) must not have happened. that is a case of trusting the source because it has been reliable in other ways. on the whole, though, i think there is a confusion of implausible or unlikely with untrue.

there are at least 24000 copies of portions of the NT in existence. what other historical work can make the same claim? so if there was such a preponderance of oral and written tradition, wouldn't that suggest that there is truth in it? how could a work as voluminous as the Bible get propogated so thoroughly (before constantine became emporer) if much of it were untrue and based on a sham? it would be so easy for people to dismiss it by invalidating the stories with the true version of events.

interesting. why would there be such meticulous detailing of laws and history in the OT? what about the genealogies in the NT? what about the accuracy of places? it would be more accurate to say that the Bible is BOTH a historical document AND a religious text.

i guess we'll have to agree to disagree because what you just said sounds plausible to me. i agree there are things in the Bible that heretofore remain mysterious. i guess some people have a problem with that. i'm not saying i dismiss them, but i don't just reject the Bible or christianity out of hand because of it.

i read your statement and i see the italics, but i disagree with your supposition.

that's not what i have said. i have said that given the fact that the Bible "got some things right" and is not proven false by other works leaves little reason to doubt it.

how complete and reliable are those historical documents? archaeology seems to be a more accurate and telling advocate of biblical reliability. Noted archaeologist Nelson Glueck writes, "it may be clearly stated categorically that no archeological discovery has ever controverted a single biblical reference. Scores of archeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or exact detail historical statements in the Bible."

wouldn't that "something else" also be needed to invalidate the account?

matthew and john weren't eyewitnesses?

is there a reason why john shouldn't be dated 80-95 ad?

textual comparison to other works of antiquity

as you yourself have said, the bible "got some things right". i guess that's why it would be.

so if a document is internally consistent, is that not additional credence?

Vorkosigan

Discussions of the Flood and Evolution are inappropriate for this forum. All posters are asked to take this portion of the discussion to the E/C forum.

Thanks

Vorkosigan
Moderator

I think there is some confusion about how historians actually work here. No text should automatically be accorded reliability....it is the historian's job to confer reliability on the text through careful inspection of its internal and external circumstances. A good work on this is Van Harvey's highly influential The Historian and the Believer

Also, the way you've presented judgments about silence in the sources is extremely simplistic. For example, if US pilots claim to have shot down 6 Zeros in during a Japanese raid on Henderson field on a certain day in 1942, while Japanese internal documents do not mention any lost Zeros from that raid on the same day in 1942, the Japanese silence most definitely trumps the US pilot claims, and for sound reasons. Context is everything.

This contains two errors: first, that the number of copies of a text means anything as far as its validity as a historical record...and second, that the NT documents are a "historical" work.

No, because I can easily call up much larger volumes of text from antiquity from Japanese and Chinese sources (recall that printing began at least 700 years earlier in the East than in the West). Also, the oral tradition appears not to have survived, and some scholars do not see any of it in the texts we now have extant.

This is a nonsense argument. Do you think that the ancients had the same understanding of these documents that modern evangelical fundamentalists had? Do you think they wasted resources checking out claims? Was there Google? Did everyone have access to local and Imperial government records? Did any ancients regularly go around debunking the miracle claims of their fellow citizens? Claims like this waste everyone's time and energy.

No, it would be most accurate to say that the New Testament is a collection of disparate texts, some of which attempt to look at current history in terms of an apocalyptic future (Revelation) while others attempt to locate religion in history (the Gospels) while other appear to be creating history (Acts) and others appear to address particular theological concerns and are indifferent to historical concerns (epistles). Pretty much the same thing could be said about the OT. Its "history" is highly suspicious.

"the Bible" rarely gets anything right, is often proven false by other works -- for example, Josephus specifically denies what Mark asserts, that John the Baptist baptized for forgiveness of sins -- and in general is not a very reliable text in many parts. Some parts are of course better than others.

Glueck died in 1971 and did most of his work in the 1950s. It is a good idea to check out modern sources, not sources half a century out of date. In Glueck's time there was much more belief that ultimately archaeology would prove the Bible. As the mainstream is now aware, Exodus never occurred.

Matthew copied Mark, and John was written by at least three different hands. Why don't you read a good introductory text, like one by a Christian like Bart Ehrman, Udo Schnelle, Raymond Brown, or Luke Timothy Johnson? Then you would understand why no one outside a few archconservatives feel that Matt and John were eyewitnesses.

Is there any reason it should be given that date? What evidence indicates such a date. By evidence of the Church fathers themselves, John did not achieve its final form until the third century. See David Ross's wonderful website on the end of John for a good discussion of this:

http://pages.sbcglobal.net/zimriel/Mark/

Scroll down to the "Missing ending of Mark" and read carefully.

Vorkosigan

Amaleq13

Says who? This is not my understanding of how historians work and it certainly isn't how reporters for organizations like CNN are supposed to operate.

Have you ever read a biography that was considered to be 100% accurate by all other experts on the given individual? I don't know of any. The fact that portions can be shown to have substantiation from outside a text says nothing about portions for which no similar substantiation has been produced.

That is just as much an example of faulty reasoning as your repeated attempts to generalize support for the reliability of a specific claim to an entire collection of texts. The best that can be said from the above is that Mr. X fails to support the specific biblical claim. Likewise, it is illogical to generalize from a single example of inaccuracy to the conclusion that the entire Bible is unreliable.

If you want to establish the reliability of your entire Bible, you cannot be lazy about it.

And that is a case of logically flawed thinking.

What about them? They disagree and the one in Matthew appears to have been deliberately constructed to create a symmetrical appearance.

What about the inaccuracy of descriptions of places? The archeological evidence, which even IVP's New Bible Dictionary acknowledges, indicates the city of Nain never had a wall let alone a gate (contra Lk 7:12).

Many logical fallacies seem plausible given a superficial consideration. That is why so many are common.

Only when some people assert that such "mysterious" claims should be considered true for no other reason than some unrelated claims have been supported by outside evidence.

I agree that "mysterious" claims are not a good reason to reject either. There are much better reasons to reject both.

Yes.

Yes, an absence of reliable evidence. Unless, of course, you have some.

bfniii

i have read accounts that date the flood as late as 2300 and some earlier than 4000 bc. but the most sensible conclusion is that, as of now, there is no way to accurately date the flood. this is, of course, beside the point right now. until there is hard archaeological evidence one way or the other, the moral of the story is what is pertinent. at any rate, since the flood can't be accurately dated, this flood story could indeed be the biblical one.

bfniii

i disagree that more than the claim is required to establish sufficient reason to believe extravagant claims. sometimes people see something they don't understand one bit, but they know they saw it. the implausibility makes it no less real. they may even seem kooky by adimantly insisting what they saw was real. what would make you believe or not believe such a claim? the credibility of the claimant. if the person isn't known as a liar and isn't given to spouting off nonsense, there would be little reason to doubt their claim. what if multiple people make the same claim? wouldn't you doubt it less? what if strange things continually happen to the same group of people and these events are witnessed by people who aren't in their group? i do not disagree that if the Bible made no statements that were verifiable at all and then made a grandiose claim, there would be much reason to doubt it because the Bible had not staked a reputation of trustworthiness. but this is not the case.

i have read and responded to this article before. for what it's worth, here is my previous response:

The article makes interesting points but omits some critical facets of Christ’s life that separates Him from the examples provided. I did not see the author mention any fulfilled prophecies about the examples he used or quote any prophecies made by them that were fulfilled. The author did not mention throngs of people who saw these people alive post-resurrection. The miracles ascribed to these people aren’t of the same order or magnitude that Jesus performed. There was mention that one claimed he could part the Jordan, but no realization of it. Others could heal, but so could the apostles (based on authority given to them by Jesus) which is hardly damaging to Christianity. The closest that one of the examples comes to the salvific nature of Jesus is Apollonius being an “absolver of sins� which is ambiguous compared to that aspect of Jesus’ ministry which was well documented. It seems obvious that because these religious figures did not have the longevity that Christianity had, they must not have had the same level of substance. What is even more damaging is that he admits we know even more about these people than we do Christ. Maybe this abundance of information caused people to know for sure it wasn’t a religion worth following for any length of time. Certainly there have always been misanthropes and their claque, but the author makes no specific case against Christianity in that regard. He makes the amusing generalizations that Christianity is solely responsible for the dark ages and that Christians are and have been unquestioning dupes. It’s as if atheists believe Christians have never once given critical thought to what they believe, they are stupid and obstinate. What about people who opposed Christianity who were converted? They would have a prior bias against Christianity and therefore Christianity would not be a placebo to them as it would be to someone who was actively seeking a religion that matched Christianity. The gist of the article is that there wasn’t very much critical examination of religious figures in biblical times however, biblical accounts of Jesus’ ministry show that people did question Him and His role. In addition, Jesus appears to have no malicious motive in His lifetime and many people followed Him. It’s an interesting article and the author has done admirable research, but the conclusions are, even by the author’s own admission, less than compelling.

no specific knowledge of christian beliefs would be necessary to grab a person who was there and say "you are a liar because this person/these people completely contradict your version of events".

yet the jews go to the trouble of forming a mob for the express purpose of crucifying Jesus. hmm. that doesn't sound like dismissal. then when christianity begins to grow, not one of them decides to put a stop to the nonsense christians were babbling? in fact, no one at all anywhere goes to the trouble of investigating these outrageous claims? at some point wouldn't you expect the "dismissal" to stop? wouldn't there be at least one investigative journalist who would have an easy time refuting the claims of christians? interesting theory but it doesn't seem plausible at all. if christianity had begun to grow and were based on lies, it would be reasonable to expect that the resistance to or opposition of it would grow in nearly equal proportion. we know that to be true from other cases of "religions" that were not based on verifiable truths as outlined in carrier's aforementioned article.

what information would that be?

Mageth

There will never be any hard archaelogical evidence for the Flood as described in the Bible, for such a flood never occurred. And Noah and Co. never built a Biblical Ark, and never loaded two (or seven, there's a contradiction there) of every land animal on the Ark. It's a myth, and obviously so. A myth perhaps based on earlier Sumerian/Babylonian myths, which themselves may have been based on earlier myths or stories which may or may not have been based on some actual, local flood, such as the conjectured flooding of the Black Sea some 7000 years ago or periodic floods of the Tigris and Euphrates.

Exactly right, and that moral is accessible from the story whether the story is mythical or not. And when people back then wanted to teach a moral, or teach something about the human condition, or form a "story" for how the earth and humans came to be, they did so in mythical form; similarly today, we often use fiction to do the same. The myths were sometimes, but not always, embellishments of or generalizations about real-world experiences, just as today's fiction is.

A mistake made by far too many today is when they insist that these myths must be interpreted as literal, linear history, and not recognized for the myths they are. People too often try to interpret poetry as prose, you might say, or myth as history (at least for the myths of their religious texts - they correctly recognize the stories of other religions as mythical). They fail to recognize that, when those myths were written, the mythic form was the norm, and that the stories were not written or intended to be read as literal, linear histories.

And the moral of the Biblical Myth? YHWH is a wrathful God to be feared? YHWH is ready, willing, and able to kill everyone on the earth, man, woman, child and infant, save eight?

No; the possible Black Sea flood of 7000 years ago may have been the basis for earlier myths that were later co-opted into the Biblical myth. That's as far as we can go with this. The Biblical Flood account is mythical, not historical.

bfniii

wow. that's a loaded question. different people become christians for different reasons. i have recently read an article that iconoclastic atheist Antony Flew just announced his turn to theism due to "scientific evidence for God". other people wholeheartedly believe in the miracle of the resurrection. other people have a "miracle" happen to them and attribute it to God. i know i may not have answered your question, but perhaps it's not pertinent to this thread. we can discuss offline or in another thread if you like.

Mageth

So, do you believe John Edward is really channeling the dead on his show "Crossing Over"? How about the "Pet Psychic"? Is she really conveying the inner thoughts of Fifi and Fluffy to their owners?

Mageth

What other reason is there to become a Christian than to accept the "Gospel" message, to accept Christ's salvation by grace through his death, and eternal life through his resurrection? Because you like wafers and wine? Don't you have to do that to become a Christian? (Well, I guess in some sects baptism is enough, and many people are "born into" Christianity and never consider having to "become a Christian", but that's beside the point).

You read the wrong article, then, or read poorly. Flew "turned" to deism, and now apparently believes that some form of "deistic" god may be the best explanation for the origin of life; he still lacks belief in any form of theistic, personal God such as the Christian God. He certainly didn't become a Christian. But let's not get into that here; there are several other current threads on the topic if you're interested.

Even so, why or how would one become a Christian without the reasons that the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus was for? An experienced "miracle" attributed to God may be a reason why one considers the Christian God and Christianity, or a "design argument" may convince you that a god exists, and other arguments may convince you that that God is the Christian God, but why become a Christian if not to accept Christ's sacrifice and the promise of his resurrection? I see no other reason in the NT presented for becoming a Christian, that's for sure.

It seems you're talking about reasons to believe in the existence of the Christian God and to believe Christianity is the right religion; I'm talking about the reason or reasons one becomes a Christian. Merely believing in the Christian God and Jesus isn't enough; the Bible says that even the demons believe.