exile

I'd like to tackle the basic question of how we can accept the Bible as evidence of anything at all, by looking at 2 claims made in it.

1. God created the universe in the fashion described in Genesis

2. Jesus was conceived by Mary by divine intervention rather than the usual method

1. Genesis starts like this:-

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

OK - who wrote this? Well - we don't know - but let's call the writer Moses
in much the same way as we call the author of the Iliad Homer, though we know nothing of him whatsoever.

So - how did Moses know that this was true?

Did God tell him? If yes - why doesn't Moses say so? Is an atheist or agnostic, or believer in other gods, meant to take this possibility seriously? Is it a tradition handed down from previous generations? If so, when did it start? With Adam? But even Adam was not present at the creation.

2. The virgin birth features in 2 out of the 4 gospels. (why only 2?). Again - how did the writer know that the story is true? Did Mary tell the writer? Was it hearsay? The one thing we can be sure of is that, other than Mary, there were no witnesses to the conception.

As Thomas Paine pointed out, if, say, a neighbour claimed to be pregnant owing to a miraculous event and not through "knowing" a man - we would certainly not believe her. So - why did the gospel writers believe this claim (ignoring the possibility they made up this story after this event to fulfil alleged prophecies in the Old Testament). Did they believe Mary was without sin and incapable of telling an untruth? Well, if they did, there is little evidence in the gospels, where apart from giving birth to Jesus, Mary features hardly at all.

Well - I could go on. Clearly you can pick holes in the likes of Plutarch, Caesar and Suetonius on similar grounds. However when we read them we do so with our critical faculties intact. If they claim something extremely unlikely (for instance - that Caesar is a descendant of Venus), then we are skeptical. If they claim something mundane or unremarkable, then we tend to believe them.

Can anyone here who believes the Bible is more or less inerrant make a case for these 2 claims to be accepted based on biblical evidence alone?

hatsoff

Why the qualifier, "based on Biblical evidence alone"?

David B

As I read the OP, he was asserting that there is no good reason to believe that the people who wrote the genesis account and the virgin birth account in the bible were there at the time either of Genesis or the conception of Jesus had good grounds for writing these accounts as true.

And further asserting that in itself, the (alleged) fact that that the biblical writers had no good grounds for asserting the truth of what they wrote, there are no good grounds for believing them true.

Of course, once one gets outside biblical evidence, there are all sorts of good grounds to doubt both the genesis account, and the virgin birth.

But the OP seems to think that there is no good reason to believe the biblical account, even without looking outside it.

David B (concurs, if he has intrpreted the OP correctly)

Amedeo

Moses [or Whoever] speaks and you believe not.
Jesus spoke and you [or many or his hearers in front of him] believe not.

So, you want evidence that the words you hear are true... But put yourself in the world 2000 or 3000 years ago. You are a youngster walking with your older brother. He tells you that you are approaching a cliff and that you should not look down, because it it dangerous: you may fall of the cliff and end up dead.

Obviously he did not fall the cliff and die. So, he is not speaking from experience. Maybe he learned that people looking down cliff have ended up dead. But you don't try to find out how he got his knowledge, and he does not have to say, "And now I am going to say something true:..." Your brother is simply telling you how things are and -- for you in the 21st century -- he tells the truth, because he loves you. The truth of his statement is guaranteed by his love. In some othe situation, a statement is true because it is authoritative: the speaker has had the experience of what he is talking about: he behaved in a certain way; he made something; he used a hook to lower a branch with fruits; and so forth.

You know; however, that sometimes people do not tell the truth (as to what they did or said). The falsity of their statements are due to the intent to deceive. So, an evil person may make false statements; a good person does not. Your brother will simply not lie to you.

Well, you may say, this is so as far as veracity and mendacity are concerned, but I want to know if the content of a statement or message is correct. ARE THINGS AS THEY ARE CLAIMED TO BE? DO THOSE THINGS HAPPEN THAT THEY ARE CLAIMED TO HAPPEN?

Now you know that some "innocent" (not vicious or deceptive) statements are based on experiences, while others are not. If Adam knew that God created the world and he was not there, then his information is not based on experience, and he did not get it from anybody who was there. If anybody got the message about the creation from the creator, then the receiver has to rely on the authority or on the love of the speaker. But if Adam or anybody else is not acquanted with God, he does not God as either loving or as an author. Consequently, he has no bases to accept the word on authority. If a man is told by Moses or anybody else that God is a lover of the creatures he authored, and Moses is not acquainted with God, then Moses claim is empty. But Moses's love of the listeners may convince the listeners that he speaks truthful. But You, like Thomas, need evidence; the
loving Moses' word is not enough.

Don't judge humans before youself and Thomas as being minded like you and Thomas, namely people who might doubt what was taught to them. Apparently some people denied the existence of God, but the prophet does not say that the deniers of God speak falsely; they say, "The fools says that there is no God." That is, the deceptive or evil-minded person (like a criminal) bears false witness. The prophet knew of veracity and of mendacity, and of the true statements which come forth from a loving person, but not of judgments (about God and divine deeds) that could be false.

To put the matter of true propositions of ancient time in our own terms:

Judgements about wordly [perceptible] things are based on experience (as about the dangerous cliff) and on fabrications about experiential things (such as: the heavier a body, the faster it falls). Such judgments are correctable by further experiences.

Judgmenents about unwordly (unperceptible] things emerge from thought about subjects under consideration. For example, if a child develops a hot body without his being near a hot object, then there must be something invisible that produces heat. We know from experience that water quenches thirst, but the water has an invisible power or "virtue" or spirit to quench thirst. And one falls asleep because the soporific power takes over. This is the "poetic (or mythic) metaphysics" of the ancients: there are invisible agents for whatever happens, and a mighty agent for the formation of the big things. They take the propositions to be true because they MADE the propositions that employ the idea of cause and effect. (Truth on the basis of experience belong to ... propositions of experiences.)

Not all humans were capable of thinking in terms of cause and effect; only the wise did. Poetical and scientific truths do not come out of the commonplace man. So, Vico the anthropologist/historian says that there is poetic wisdom, heroic wishom, and humanistic [philosophico-scientific] wisdom in the course of history. That's the reality of history. Don't demand humanistic wisdom from people of the age of poetic wisdom.

Amedeo

There are innumerable things to say about the "poetic" or Mythic (pre-critical) mind of humans, but here we have been concentrating on propositions which they take to be true (to be expressive of how things are, of what happens or exists, of how any reality or supposed reality behaves, and the like. I have pointed to types of judgments (propositions deemed to be truthful): propositions that state what has been experienced (and the stating itself involves conceptions about the situations or things that have been experienced -- even the identities of perceived things), and propositions which are really interpretations or theories about experiended things/people or situations.

Various attributions are made, and various caused or motives are posited, on a number of bases: (unwittingly) reasoning by analogy, making valid or fallacious inferences, culling information from what we call dreams and hallucinations, and, above all, having inspirations (that is, spontaneous ideations, which, however, may be explained as divine voices or influences. So, one may seek information or counsel from an oracle, or be the oracular speaker (a prophet): There is a surge of ideas in oneself which tell how things are or happen, and so forth. So, prophets, sibyls, and poets, are sages, as they are presumed to have true knowledge.

Of course, in the poetic Age, no one devices criteria of true knowledge. A sage may say that God gave things their true name. The name of a thing is the utterance of some speaker/thinker. The implication is that a name is true by the fact that it is the name of the nature of a thing. The utterer has -- in our terms -- true knowledge of the spoken thing. For us, a name/concept specifically depends the way a thing presents itself [and we call it empirical]; for the poetic mind, a concept is an understanding or knowledge which the mind generates on the occasion of the presence of an obect or situation. "Water" is a liquid thirst-quencher. The name "water" means or is the concept "liquid transparent thirst quencher. Clearly "water" is only in a small degree the name of something as it presents itself; the fact of its being a thirst quencher depends on our using that liquid, and the idea that the liquid is a power that removes one's thirst is purely supplied by the mind. So, the whole concept or definition is not a mereverbalization of what is present. Water does not reveal itself as a liquid transparent thirst quencher. We reveal it to be so. So, the truth-value of the name is something the speaker brings forth. But then, it is the original namer or utterer of the word that speaks the truth. Truth [or what is alleged as truth] lies in the proffering of his word. Later users of the word don't know how the word came about, and if they tried to understand its truth, they would probably investigate whethere there is a corresponded between what the word means and how the water reveals/manifests itself. (The theory of truth as correspondence is actually a theory to test the accuracy of a definition, not the theory that a correct definition describes the constitution of a reality.)

For the poetic mind, things are as a prophet reveals them. For the heroic mind, things are as they reveal themselves, wherefore (as Plato realized), people hold that things are as they are peceived, that perception is true knowledge. For the humanistic mind, true knowlege has been conceived in a triple way, either indirectly or directly, by Galileo, Bruno and Campanella, and Vico, as I have expounded elsewhere. (They are not the philosophy-book epistemologists you learn in school -- the rationalists, the empirists, the idealists, the synthetic a priori judgementalists, etc.) They initiated the true knowledge [=science] of the physical world, of Being, of the psyche, and of history.