Hopeful Monsters

IF-

The Holy Bible is ‘God’s’ ‘Special Revelation’ to the people of his created order

And-

This ‘Special Revelation’ is the ‘foundational source of knowledge’ and the 'epistemological ground' for the people of ‘God’s’ creation

THEN-

Interpretation-Reliability

How reliable is a ‘foundational source of knowledge’ that requires exegesis, hermeneutics, scholarship, explication?

Whose exegesis, hermeneutics, scholarship, explication is to be relied upon?

And why?

Why does assimilating the 'foundational source of knowledge’ require resorting to the combining of literal translations, multiple other translations, lexicons and study guides?

Is an American Christian's ‘foundational source of knowledge’ reliably identical to the one in French or to the one in Danish or to the one in Mandarin or to the one in Icelandic?

How reliable is the 'epistemological ground' when most of its readers do not read, write or fluently speak all three together of: Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Aramaic?

Why has ‘God’ rendered an overwhelming majority of his created peoples unable to read and speak the language of his ‘Prophet’? - was ‘God’ thereby enhancing or damaging the reliability of this ‘foundational source of knowledge’?

If the ‘foundational source of knowledge’ is reliable, do different readers of the ‘foundational source of knowledge’ determine to an identical extent, in comparison to each other, which parts of the reliable ‘foundational source of knowledge’ are: parable, allegorical, poetical, historical, literal, metaphorical, symbolical, propositional?

Significant Difference in Knowledge?

Are people and civilisations who have never encountered the Bible substantially and materially less knowledgeable than those who have?

If 'yes' – prove it.

Do people who have never read the Bible suffer an epistemological crisis?

If 'yes' – prove it.

Distribution-Promulgation

Why was ‘God’s’ ‘Special Revelation’ promulgated so slowly, randomly and patchily throughout his created order to his created peoples?

Note that:

- Scripture first spread as hand written copies. It promulgated thus in written form for nearly one & half thousand years only as hand written copies (real God-like efficient distribution there of the 'foundational source of knowledge’ )

- It may have been read out at gatherings, but this did not include everyone on the planet

- The printing press wasn’t even invented until 1452

- No mass broadcast media until into the 20th century (two millennia later)

- The Internet did not take off as a global phenomena until the mid 1990s

What happened to the 'epistemological ground' of people in China, India, South America, Australasia, South East Asia, Mongolia, Greenland, Iceland, Russia, Japan and so on while the ‘foundational source of knowledge’ slowly, randomly and patchily spread around the world?

Why did whole lifetimes come and go without benefit of the ‘Special Revelation’ to provide their ‘foundational source of knowledge’ and 'epistemological ground'?

Was ‘God’ unable to do a better job of promulgating this crucial part of his ‘created order’: namely the basis for the ‘epistemological ground' of those ‘made in his image’?

Explanation

Is this 'God' merely a geographically constrained man-made cultural artefact of a bronze age goatherder society: and so such oversight and manifest inconsistency in the promulgation of the 'epistemological ground' is therefore inescapable?

Not the 'Word of God' - spread by Grace of His Infinite Power - but a parochial book of fantasy. No 'God' anywhere to promulgate it - but merely a localised creation of men which inevitably took millennia to spread (hand written copies only for nearly one & half thousand years)?

OR

Can someone explain?

-
[ With thanks to greyline, Classical, BadBadBad, Stephen T-B and others in the: Why would anyone want to be an atheist? Thread ]

-

Classical

These are the questions that anyone who claims that the bible is the inerrant, infallible word of god has NO CHOICE but to face and answer IF they expect anyone of intelligence to listen to them.

Stephen T-B

Excellent summary, TruthIsTold.
I don’t suppose I’ll get an answer, but I do wonder in what way some of the better-known Biblical stories furnish us with a foundational source of knowledge (and with that knowledge, our concept, I suppose, of good and evil, of justice and in-justice).
There have been endless discussions here at II on the somewhat peculiar moral message we get from the Old Testament atrocity stories, but the story I keep coming back to is “Noah, the Ark and the Great Flood.�?
I really cannot imagine what moral lesson this provides.
God, it seems - and despite being all-knowing - set his Creation off on such a skewed course that quite soon things had gone so badly wrong with it that he had to wipe the slate and start again. But instead of really starting again, he adopts the same flawed ground-plan as before, and one is bound to wonder what made him think it wouldn’t go as badly wrong a second time as it had the first? Was it a case of hope triumphing over experience? Also, he punishes terrestrial life by drowning practically all of it, but lets off the aquatic life. So are we to conclude that fish, whales, molluscs etc were better behaved than ants, sparrows, antelopes and human beings etc?
Even as a metaphor, the image it presents of god conflicts with our sense of justice - yet if we have a sense of justice it is because he gave it to us. Apparently
Is this another example of his all-knowingness being less complete than his worshippers state to be the case? In other words, he must have known that the sense of justice he gave us would be offended by some of the things he did in Olden Times when he made a habit of regularly interfering, in a very personal way, with proceedings here on Earth and thus provided us with a better picture of what he’s actually like than at any time since.

Even more puzzling to me is that some Christians don’t regard the Flood as a metaphor but as an historical event.
In terms of Genesis, it does, of course, make perfectly good sense. In terms of the 21st Century it is as sensible as Cinderella.
The Semitic Creation Myth tells of god “dividing the waters�? and setting a firmament between the two halves. In the lower half, he creates dry land. He puts the stars, the moon and the sun in the firmament, and when he decided to drown the earth, all he had to do was open the hatches in the firmament and let the water above it flood through. What could be simpler?

The story also makes sense in terms of Judah’s need - at a time when the Jewish people were divided and half of them had been carried off to bondage in Babylon - for a bit of confidence building. By incorporating legends of a great flood into their mythology, the propagandists of the time can present their god as being more powerful than the gods of their neighbours and their enemies. Judea might be a small, weak and insignificant kingdom, but it’s god is so mighty it can flood the entire world and kill practically everything on it - just on a whim.
In this and other OT stories, the Judean god is presented with the characteristics a subject people might ascribe to a legendary military leader and king. He is more powerful, way more powerful, than any rival king, and like any great ruler, he is arbitrary and extremely dangerous. But despite being able to decree life and death on a whim, he possesses a distinctive (Jewish?) characteristic which makes him available for discussion and amenable to reason. It was an astonishingly sophisticated concept for the time, and may account for the ability of Yahweh to evolve into the Christian and the Muslim gods of today, while its primitive contemporaries lie buried beneath the sands of time.

Hopeful Monsters

Thanks for your Posts Classical & Stephen T-B - I expect we'll get some answers soon as to why the provision of the ‘foundational source of knowledge-epistemological ground' throughout 'God's' creation seems so erratic and arbitrary that it strangely resembles not a God-like promulgation at all -

- but exactly what would be expected for the distribution of a bronze age fabrication, solely created by men.

A crucial 'foundational source of knowledge' - yet technically, geographically and physically limited and constrained exactly like man-made artefacts of the time.

greyline

Ooh, yes, that one! That one!

Hopeful Monsters

Is it too much to ask for some answers on the manner in which this 'special revelation' the crucial, indispensable ground for the 'revelational epistemology', was promulgated throughout the 'created order'?

Given the importance of the 'revelational epistemology' that supposedly derives from scripture, what about its erratic, arbitrary, limited promulgation?

What is the answer?

And will the “foundational source of knowledge�? assist in the answering the 32 questions in This Post by Alf?