Sheshbazzar

...And there are many evident truths that reasonable and rational persons do all agree on, and work together with in perfect harmony in the real world. Otherwise we would still be living like those primitive religious loons of the NT fantasy tales.

PS. Your 'math' logic -really- sucks.

arnoldo

Adler puts it this way;

Horatio Parker

I would speak of, rather than the logic of truth, the *necessity* of truth.

Relativism is easy for educated people to grasp these days. Constants, not so much; the idea seems to have a bad reputation. My feeling is that people need to live as if there are constants, if only to make the judgement that there are no constants.

Vorkosigan

Yes, quite strange. One is forced to choose between two alternatives, (1) that you have only a dim idea of what you are doing and that all the respondents have, after engaging you, determined that you are unwilling to grow into a deeper understanding of the texts and methods or (2) you are simply vastly superior to us.

Vorkosigan

arnoldo

Wouldn't the constant be the prescriptive proposition you gave that "people need to live as if there are constants. "

Horatio Parker

Sounds right to me.

But is that a constant or the illusion of one? How much reality does an illusion have?

steve_bnk

yes, this is Biblical Criticism And History.

Your interpretation of biblical history has been thoroughly criticized and found lacking.

For the first part of the op, move it to philosophy if you want a response. they enjoy that kind of debate.

Horatio Parker

In vino veritas....

Adam

[Vorkosigan’s Post #14 gives us a false dichotomy between me being rather dense or else being far superior to everyone else here. There are other alternatives. It may be that members here are the rather dense ones, not that I’m particularly astute. Another is that I may not be very much now, but I was someone great in a prior life and am mostly utilizing that prior knowledge. The post below is largely about reincarnation, so that may be the better understanding of the case.

My OP for Truth Methodology gives an epistemology prefacing the gospel source-criticism in my threads such as Gospel Eyewitnesses and Significance of John. I had already been planning to place in the same thread a postlude that explores the Theory of Knowledge that uses the initial posts to derive a coherent scheme of knowledge and that builds on my major threads. (Hopefully you’ve all done your homework of reading the former thread for content and/or the latter for how I presented evidence for some of it.) This post simply copies all but the last item in my blog here at FRDB.]
Circle of Truth

a. A worldview that explains much and that is internally consistent readily qualifies for the Coherence Theory of Truth. Even better is if many of the various components can stand independently as entries points for establishing truth, that the system reinforces itself in a self-reinforcing circle, but without the reasoning being at all circular. Various points of entry include Epistemology, Reincarnation, Evolution Proof of God, Uncreated beings and the Problem of Evil, Ultimate meaninglessness unless Evil is preserved, Source-Criticism of the Bible, the Bible’s assumptions and teachings, and mutual coherence of all the above.

b. Truth starts from “I think, therefore I am.” Once a person is aware of his own existence, he suspects that more exists than just himself. Without taking for granted that all he beholds is necessarily real, the presumption is there. Extending farther it is reasonable that all that others see is also real. Let’s take in the commonly scientific knowledge. Few seem to really question it, apart of some people who already believe in God, mostly fundamentalists of various religions. Those who accept science to the degree of believing in Evolution tend to believe also in progress and that science can do wonders for us. For these people it seems evident that science is capable in the course of time in reaching powers that are usually associated with God. One who believes in Evolution should believe that it is possible for God to exist. Given how vast we know the Universe to be and that it has existed for billions of years, it is unreasonable to doubt that the ultimate ascent has already occurred. Thus God exists.

c. If the existence of God necessarily follows from Evolution, it probably follows that if this is the way God originated, other beings exist who came into existence apart from (presumably prior to) God becoming God. Let us call these “uncreated beings”. God is not to blame for them, but only for what He created. What the uncreated beings do with each other is not God’s fault, if the uncreated beings live according to their own systems they agree with. This solves the Problem of Evil as pertains to any beings from the Preexistent condition. If humans are among these beings, then the Problem of Evil is of no consequence, provided that we at some time agreed to continue with our states of beings.

d. Since the Problem of Evil is of real concern, it follows that we are among these uncreated beings. That we have existed so long implies that we have existed in-between and that Reincarnation of some type has been part of that long time.

e. It is possible that God found it best over billions of years to transform or do away with bad conditions among the uncreated beings. Carried to completion this would arrive at an state that all would find satisfactory. Satisfactory except for being boring and ultimately meaningless unless arbitrary problems and consequences were set up to make it seem that there was meaning. God would of course have foreseen this, so it’s not surprising that problems, even evils, exist in the world we know. Even in God’s own created Universe one would expect to see things that appear to be evil. Therefore we cannot know whether we live in God’s created Universe or in the realm where uncreated beings still are tolerated.

f. Yet our vantage point from Earth seems to reveal a world containing such extreme evil that it seems more likely that we dwell in the realm of the uncreated, or at least in a mixed state in which at least the Evil that we see stems from the uncreated.

g. To simplify, let’s assume that we are in (or at least enough in) the realm of the uncreated. In this realm we would expect to see what we see, that there is so much evil that we know stems from uncreated Evil that God has chosen to let continue in some presumably safely controlled form. This Evil that we know of prefers living among evil, even to the point of preferring to suffer evil in order to obtain its own opportunity to inflict evil upon other beings. The Hell we tend to believe in is presided over by a Satan that tortures even his own underlings even though knowing that by doing so he condemns himself forever to be defeated by God and thrown into ever worse conditions.

Thus the unreasonable part of the scenario so far is the motivation of Satan and his minions. But since this goes back before God’s Creation, we don’t have to account for it, though I’ll present a thought here. Evil beings may have originally outnumbered good beings, and by their nature kept triumphing over good beings they encountered. However, the evil beings would have equally liked to triumph over other evil beings, weakening themselves in the process. Good beings capable of cooperation and of winning allegiance would ultimately win--God arose in the amalgamation process.

h. Apart from the reasoning behind it and the nature of the world we presently see, is there other support for the above scenario? Yes. The Bible underlies Western religion. Quite early in the Bible we see an evil being, the serpent. Whatever earlier people thought of this, we would have to understand this today as teaching us that something else existed besides the Creation in Genesis 1. Nor does the Bible elsewhere describe the origin of Evil or Satan. Satan as Lucifer is described as an angel, but we are not told of the origin of angels, either. We can assume God is telling us that Satan is uncreated. And as for humans, Ephesians 1:4-5 tells us that God chose us before the world was, to be His adopted sons. Notice the “adopted”. God does not tell us that we are His natural children. Apparently we had to be transformed from uncreated beings when we were chosen. Either Satan and demons were not chosen, or they chose to reject being chosen. (Admittedly such a radical interpretation is novel. Such Church Fathers as Origen regarded human Preexistence as going back as far as the Creation, but not farther. But they thought they lived in a Universe that was just Earth and the air above it and the stars, planets, and Sun that circled around it.)

i. Preexistence of humans almost necessarily implies Reincarnation as the (or a) state between Creation and now. Reincarnation is implied in the Bible in the Old Testament in that punishments fell upon the descendents of evil-doers. People generations later could not be held accountable for the sins of their ancestors. Samuel told Saul that God wanted Amalek completely destroyed for what they had done at least two centuries before. (I Samuel 15:1-35) Not to mention that the whole concept of a Chosen people implied that the Hebrews continued existing as themselves. It was not a superior brand of people, superior culture, or even a consistently superior religion or morality that marked them off from other people. Their genetics could have marked them off from other people, true, but maybe the genes also pass the reincarnated souls.

j. The first explicit teaching of reincarnation comes from Elihu in Job 33:23-30, especi1lly verses 29 and 30
“All this is what God keeps doing again and yet again for human beings, to snatch souls back from the abyss, and to make the light of the living still shine.”
Jesus taught Reincarnation in Matthew 17:1-13, especially verses 12-13:
“Elijah has come already and they did not recognize him but…the disciples understood that he was speaking of John the Baptist.”

k. But what of the authority of the Bible anyway? It’s too easily assumed by Christians. For us moderns it’s more rooted in Jesus, but can we even confirm that? The Christians who accept Higher Criticism frequently claim no more that Atheists do about the people involved in the writing of the gospels and when they were written. This gives too much ground too cheaply, however, as the interrelationships among the Synoptic Gospels can be argued to show quite early dates for at least the sources. The Q Source underlying Matthew and Luke (and also non-canonical Thomas and most likely Mark as well) could even date (as least in part) back to the lifetime of Jesus. The main part of Mark most likely dates to 44 A. D., within fifteen years of Jesus’ death. Luke-Acts was probably completed before 64 A. D., as that’s when the narrative stops at an inconclusive point.
Even the Gospel of John, formerly scorned, has solid credentials now. It is no longer regarded as a late Greek accretion, but shows its early Palestinian base. Though John is very different from the other three gospels, it could derive from notes taken during Jesus’ lifetime by a theologian, most likely Nicodemus.

steve_bnk

True dat. Even Jesus turned water to wine. Must have been telling us something.