Ed

If we are created in the image of that valuer it would make a difference. Especially if that valuer is also the creator and sustainer of the universe. Then we have objective and intrinsic value, unlike if atheism is true. If atheism is true then you are correct, the value of human life is subjective and Hitler's actions are no more immoral than any of your actions because they have the same source, ie feelings.

A 21 year old college computer geek and a Roman historian??? Yeah those are good biblical scholars, riiiight.


I think you are confusing education with intelligence. The more "educated" (read propagandized into secular humanism) someone is, the more likely they are to reject religion. Someone can be very intelligent and not necessarily well educated. Actually though studies have shown that theists still have a majority in the science field.

This is the end of part I of my response

Jack the Bodiless

We would have value TO GOD (as his playthings), but so what? That still isn't "objective value" to the Universe as a whole. The rocks don't care.
It is meaningless to discuss the morality of Hitler's actions without some idea of whose perspective is being used. The rocks STILL don't care.

However, evolution allows us to ground certain moral issues in objective, impartial reality. Actions can definitely be declared "bad" for the species if they threaten extinction of it.
Peter Kirby runs the website www.earlychristianwritings.com and is a Biblical scholar. You still haven't explained your bizarre theory that knowledge of Roman history erases knowledge of the Bible. And knowledge of computers doesn't erase knowledge of the Bible either.

But I doubt if you will find ANY Biblical scholars who will agree with your absurd claim that Deuteronomy 24:16 applies only to the Hebrew society and government. A claim that YOU have publicly abandoned ON THIS THREAD.
The survey rated scientists by their original contributions to science: the number of published papers, scientific awards, and so forth. They were judged by intelligence and ability, not by the level of education they had received.

The correlation stands.

Fiach

I have seen the dramatic statistics of Atheists/Agnostics (14% of Americans) being so underrepresented in American prisons as to make up only 0.06%.

Here are some studies that address the issue of Intelligence correlating with unbelief.

http://www.objectivethought.com/atheism/iqstats.html

Intelligence and religious beliefs - statistics


The following is a review of several studies of IQ and religiosity, parts of this page are paraphrased and summarized by Jim Tims, from Burnham Beckwith's article, "The Effect of Intelligence on Religious Faith," Free Inquiry, Spring 1986.


STUDIES OF STUDENTS

1. Thomas Howells, 1927
Study of 461 students showed religiously conservative students "are, in general, relatively inferior in intellectual ability."

2. Hilding Carlsojn, 1933
Study of 215 students showed that "there is a tendency for the more intelligent undergraduate to be sympathetic toward… atheism."

3. Abraham Franzblau, 1934
Confirming Howells and Carlson, tested 354 Jewish children, aged 10-16. Found a negative correlation between religiosity and IQ as measured by the Terman intelligence test.

4. Thomas Symington, 1935
Tested 400 young people in colleges and church groups. He reported, "There is a constant positive relation in all the groups between liberal religious thinking and mental ability… There is also a constant positive relation between liberal scores and intelligence…"

5. Vernon Jones, 1938
Tested 381 students, concluding "a slight tendency for intelligence and liberal attitudes to go together."

6. A. R. Gilliland, 1940
At variance with all other studies, found "little or no relationship between intelligence and attitude toward god."

7. Donald Gragg, 1942
Reported an inverse correlation between 100 ACE freshman test scores and Thurstone "reality of god" scores.

8. Brown and Love, 1951
At the University of Denver, tested 613 male and female students. The mean test scores of non-believers was 119 points, and for believers it was 100. The non-believers ranked in the 80th percentile, and believers in the 50th. Their findings "strongly corroborate those of Howells."

9. Michael Argyle, 1958
Concluded that "although intelligent children grasp religious concepts earlier, they are also the first to doubt the truth of religion, and intelligent students are much less likely to accept orthodox beliefs."

10. Jeffrey Hadden, 1963
Found no correlation between intelligence and grades. This was an anomalous finding, since GPA corresponds closely with intelligence. Other factors may have influenced the results at the University of Wisconsin.

11. Young, Dustin and Holtzman, 1966
Average religiosity decreased as GPA rose.

12. James Trent, 1967
Polled 1400 college seniors. Found little difference, but high-ability students in his sample group were over-represented.

13. C. Plant and E. Minium, 1967
The more intelligent students were less religious, both before entering college and after 2 years of college.

14. Robert Wuthnow, 1978
Of 532 students, 37 percent of Christians, 58 percent of apostates, and 53 percent of non-religious scored above average on SATs.

15. Hastings and Hoge, 1967, 1974
Polled 200 college students and found no significant correlations.

16. Norman Poythress, 1975
Mean SATs for strongly antireligious (1148), moderately anti-religious (1119), slightly antireligious (1108), and religious (1022).

17. Wiebe and Fleck, 1980
Studied 158 male and female Canadian university students. They reported "nonreligious S's tended to be strongly intelligent" and "more intelligent than religious S's."


Others :

Pratt (1937) among 3040 students at regional state college, taking denomenational affiliation as sign of religiocity, "found that non-affiliates recorded lower mean scores on the American council Examination than any students affiliated to any denomenational group."

Francis (1979)(using fequency of prayer and chruch attendence) 2272 school children between 9-11,"found no relationship between school assigned IQ's and religious behavior after controling for paternal social class."

Francis'('86 replication) findings replicated in second study among 6955 students.



STUDENT BODY COMPARISONS

1. Rose Goldsen, 1952
Percentage of students who believe in a divine god: Harvard 30; UCLA 32; Dartmouth 35; Yale 36; Cornell 42; Wayne 43; Weslyan 43; Michigan 45; Fisk 60; Texas 62; North Carolina 68.

2. National Review Study, 1970
Percentage of students who believe in a Spirit or Divine God: Reed 15; Brandeis 25; Sarah Lawrence 28; Williams 36; Stanford 41; Boston U. 41; Yale 42; Howard 47; Indiana 57; Davidson 59; S. Carolina 65; Marquette 77.
[Marquette is a religious school]

3. Caplovitz and Sherrow, 1977
Apostasy rates rose continuously from 5 percent in "low" ranked schools to 17 percent in "high" ranked schools.

4. Niemi, Ross, and Alexander, 1978
In elite schools, organized religion was judged important by only 26 percent of their students, compared with 44 percent of all students.

STUDIES OF VERY-HIGH IQ GROUPS

1. Terman, 1959
Studied group with IQ's over 140. Of men, 10 percent held strong religious belief, of women 18 percent. Sixty-two percent of men and 57 percent of women claimed "little religious inclination" while 28 percent of the men and 23 percent of the women claimed it was "not at all important."

2. Warren and Heist, 1960
Found no differences among National Merit Scholars. Results may have been effected by the fact that NM scholars are not selected on the basis of intelligence or grades alone, but also on "leadership" and such like.

3. Southern and Plant, 1968
Studied 42 male and 30 female members of Mensa. Mensa members were much less religious in belief than the typical American college alumnus or adult.

STUDIES Of SCIENTISTS

1. William S. Ament, 1927
C. C. Little, president of the University of Michigan, checked persons listed in Who's Who in America: "Unitarians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Universalists, and Presbyterians [who are less religious] are… far more numerous in Who's Who than would be expected on the basis of the population which they form. Baptists, Methodists, and Catholics are distinctly less numerous."

Ament confirmed Little's conclusion. He noted that Unitarians, the least religious, were more than 40 times as numerous in Who's Who as in the U.S. population.

2. Lehman and Witty, 1931
Identified 1189 scientists found in both Who's Who (1927) and American Men of Science (1927). Only 25 percent of those listed in the latter and 50 percent of those in the former reported their religious denomination, despite the specific request to do so, under the heading of "religious denomination (if any)." Well over 90 percent of the general population claims religious affiliation. The figure of 25 percent suggests far less religiosity among scientists.

Unitarians were 81.4 times as numerous among eminent scientists as non-Unitarians.

3. Kelley and Fisk, 1951
Found a negative (-.39) correlation between the strength of religious values and research competence. [How these were measured is unknown.]

4. Ann Roe, 1953
Interviewed 64 "eminent scientists, nearly all members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences or the American Philosophical Society. She reported that, while nearly all of them had religious parents and had attended Sunday school, 'now only three of these men are seriously active in church. A few others attend upon occasion, or even give some financial support to a church which they do not attend… All the others have long since dismissed religion as any guide to them, and the church plays no part in their lives… A few are militantly atheistic, but most are just not interested.'"

5. Francis Bello, 1954
Interviewed or questionnaired 107 nonindustrial scientists under the age of 40 judged by senior colleagues to be outstanding. Of the 87 responses, 45 percent claimed to be "agnostic or atheistic" and an additional 22 percent claimed no religious affiliation. For 20 most eminent, "the proportion who are now a-religious is considerably higher than in the entire survey group."

6. Jack Chambers, 1964
Questionnaired 740 US psychologists and chemists. He reported, "The highly creative men… significantly more often show either no preference for a particular religion or little or no interest in religion." Found that the most eminent psychologists showed 40 percent no preference, 16 percent for the most eminent chemists.

7. Vaughan, Smith, and Sjoberg, 1965
Polled 850 US physicists, zoologists, chemical engineers, and geologists listed in American Men of Science (1955) on church membership, and attendance patterns, and belief in afterlife. Of the 642 replies, 38.5 percent did not believe in an afterlife, whereas 31.8 percent did. Belief in immortality was less common among major university staff than among those employed by business, government, or minor universities. The Gallup poll taken about this time showed that two-thirds of the U.S. population believed in an afterlife, so scientists were far less religious than the typical adult.

Conclusion

The consensus here is clear: more intelligent people tend not to believe in religion. And this observation is given added force when you consider that the above studies span a broad range of time, subjects and methodologies, and yet arrive at the same conclusion.

This is the result even when the researchers are Christian conservatives themselves. One such researcher is George Gallup. He found 20% of scientists likely to believe in God.


Another site and study is as follows.

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/sci_relig.htm

93% of Scientists are Atheists or Agnostics.

The final site is this one:

http://members.tripod.com/humphrys2/....religion.html

The world is round
• By c.500 BC, the Pythagorean school in ancient Greece had come to believe that the earth was round.
• The astronomer and professor at Bologna Cecco d'Ascoli was burnt alive by the church in 1327 for daring to suggest that men may live on the other side of the world.
• The church has revised its earlier opinions and now believes that the earth is round.

The earth goes round the sun
• Around 1513, Copernicus first wrote down his discovery that the earth goes round the sun. This discovery, one of the greatest in the history of human thought, would be violently opposed by ignorant Christian churches for the next three hundred years.
• The philosopher and dreamer Giordano Bruno (and here and here and here) was burnt at the stake by Rome in 1600 for daring to suggest that the earth goes round the sun. See the weasel words of the Catholic Encyclopedia on this case.
• The persecution of Galileo (also here). This great human thinker was imprisoned, threatened with torture, and forced to recant his beliefs because they disagreed with Christian superstitions. Ever since, Catholic writers have told lies about him, and try to justify what happened.
• The thinker and writer Campanella was tortured for subscribing to the Copernican theory.
• While the Catholic opposition to Copernicus is well known, less well known is the violent Protestant opposition to Copernicus' evidence that the earth goes round the sun.Apparently, though, the Protestant churches now believe that Luther, Calvin and Wesley may have been wrong, and the earth may in fact go round the sun.
• The idea that the earth goes round the sun was explicitly prohibited in the church's Index of banned books in 1616 under Paul V, again in 1664 under Alexander VII and again in 1761 under Benedict XIV. Unbelievably, the Copernican theory remained on the Index until 1835. Apparently, though, the church now believes that the earth may in fact go round the sun.

[B]This last site is slighly off the topic but shows the persistent Christian religion's opposition to scientific leaning. The same applies to Fundamentalists today in America oppsing Evolution which to scientists has been proven while the complex mechanisms are being worked out.

My hypothesis is that those who cling to the simplistic bible myths may indeed do so because they are not able to understand complex ideas as presented in scientific data.

Fiach

Fiach

I have seen the dramatic statistics of Atheists/Agnostics (14% of Americans) being so underrepresented in American prisons as to make up only 0.06%.

Here are some studies that address the issue of Intelligence correlating with unbelief.

http://www.objectivethought.com/atheism/iqstats.html

Intelligence and religious beliefs - statistics


The following is a review of several studies of IQ and religiosity, parts of this page are paraphrased and summarized by Jim Tims, from Burnham Beckwith's article, "The Effect of Intelligence on Religious Faith," Free Inquiry, Spring 1986.


STUDIES OF STUDENTS

1. Thomas Howells, 1927
Study of 461 students showed religiously conservative students "are, in general, relatively inferior in intellectual ability."

2. Hilding Carlsojn, 1933
Study of 215 students showed that "there is a tendency for the more intelligent undergraduate to be sympathetic toward… atheism."

3. Abraham Franzblau, 1934
Confirming Howells and Carlson, tested 354 Jewish children, aged 10-16. Found a negative correlation between religiosity and IQ as measured by the Terman intelligence test.

4. Thomas Symington, 1935
Tested 400 young people in colleges and church groups. He reported, "There is a constant positive relation in all the groups between liberal religious thinking and mental ability… There is also a constant positive relation between liberal scores and intelligence…"

5. Vernon Jones, 1938
Tested 381 students, concluding "a slight tendency for intelligence and liberal attitudes to go together."

6. A. R. Gilliland, 1940
At variance with all other studies, found "little or no relationship between intelligence and attitude toward god."

7. Donald Gragg, 1942
Reported an inverse correlation between 100 ACE freshman test scores and Thurstone "reality of god" scores.

8. Brown and Love, 1951
At the University of Denver, tested 613 male and female students. The mean test scores of non-believers was 119 points, and for believers it was 100. The non-believers ranked in the 80th percentile, and believers in the 50th. Their findings "strongly corroborate those of Howells."

9. Michael Argyle, 1958
Concluded that "although intelligent children grasp religious concepts earlier, they are also the first to doubt the truth of religion, and intelligent students are much less likely to accept orthodox beliefs."

10. Jeffrey Hadden, 1963
Found no correlation between intelligence and grades. This was an anomalous finding, since GPA corresponds closely with intelligence. Other factors may have influenced the results at the University of Wisconsin.

11. Young, Dustin and Holtzman, 1966
Average religiosity decreased as GPA rose.

12. James Trent, 1967
Polled 1400 college seniors. Found little difference, but high-ability students in his sample group were over-represented.

13. C. Plant and E. Minium, 1967
The more intelligent students were less religious, both before entering college and after 2 years of college.

14. Robert Wuthnow, 1978
Of 532 students, 37 percent of Christians, 58 percent of apostates, and 53 percent of non-religious scored above average on SATs.

15. Hastings and Hoge, 1967, 1974
Polled 200 college students and found no significant correlations.

16. Norman Poythress, 1975
Mean SATs for strongly antireligious (1148), moderately anti-religious (1119), slightly antireligious (1108), and religious (1022).

17. Wiebe and Fleck, 1980
Studied 158 male and female Canadian university students. They reported "nonreligious S's tended to be strongly intelligent" and "more intelligent than religious S's."


Others :

Pratt (1937) among 3040 students at regional state college, taking denomenational affiliation as sign of religiocity, "found that non-affiliates recorded lower mean scores on the American council Examination than any students affiliated to any denomenational group."

Francis (1979)(using fequency of prayer and chruch attendence) 2272 school children between 9-11,"found no relationship between school assigned IQ's and religious behavior after controling for paternal social class."

Francis'('86 replication) findings replicated in second study among 6955 students.



STUDENT BODY COMPARISONS

1. Rose Goldsen, 1952
Percentage of students who believe in a divine god: Harvard 30; UCLA 32; Dartmouth 35; Yale 36; Cornell 42; Wayne 43; Weslyan 43; Michigan 45; Fisk 60; Texas 62; North Carolina 68.

2. National Review Study, 1970
Percentage of students who believe in a Spirit or Divine God: Reed 15; Brandeis 25; Sarah Lawrence 28; Williams 36; Stanford 41; Boston U. 41; Yale 42; Howard 47; Indiana 57; Davidson 59; S. Carolina 65; Marquette 77.
[Marquette is a religious school]

3. Caplovitz and Sherrow, 1977
Apostasy rates rose continuously from 5 percent in "low" ranked schools to 17 percent in "high" ranked schools.

4. Niemi, Ross, and Alexander, 1978
In elite schools, organized religion was judged important by only 26 percent of their students, compared with 44 percent of all students.

STUDIES OF VERY-HIGH IQ GROUPS

1. Terman, 1959
Studied group with IQ's over 140. Of men, 10 percent held strong religious belief, of women 18 percent. Sixty-two percent of men and 57 percent of women claimed "little religious inclination" while 28 percent of the men and 23 percent of the women claimed it was "not at all important."

2. Warren and Heist, 1960
Found no differences among National Merit Scholars. Results may have been effected by the fact that NM scholars are not selected on the basis of intelligence or grades alone, but also on "leadership" and such like.

3. Southern and Plant, 1968
Studied 42 male and 30 female members of Mensa. Mensa members were much less religious in belief than the typical American college alumnus or adult.

STUDIES Of SCIENTISTS

1. William S. Ament, 1927
C. C. Little, president of the University of Michigan, checked persons listed in Who's Who in America: "Unitarians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Universalists, and Presbyterians [who are less religious] are… far more numerous in Who's Who than would be expected on the basis of the population which they form. Baptists, Methodists, and Catholics are distinctly less numerous."

Ament confirmed Little's conclusion. He noted that Unitarians, the least religious, were more than 40 times as numerous in Who's Who as in the U.S. population.

2. Lehman and Witty, 1931
Identified 1189 scientists found in both Who's Who (1927) and American Men of Science (1927). Only 25 percent of those listed in the latter and 50 percent of those in the former reported their religious denomination, despite the specific request to do so, under the heading of "religious denomination (if any)." Well over 90 percent of the general population claims religious affiliation. The figure of 25 percent suggests far less religiosity among scientists.

Unitarians were 81.4 times as numerous among eminent scientists as non-Unitarians.

3. Kelley and Fisk, 1951
Found a negative (-.39) correlation between the strength of religious values and research competence. [How these were measured is unknown.]

4. Ann Roe, 1953
Interviewed 64 "eminent scientists, nearly all members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences or the American Philosophical Society. She reported that, while nearly all of them had religious parents and had attended Sunday school, 'now only three of these men are seriously active in church. A few others attend upon occasion, or even give some financial support to a church which they do not attend… All the others have long since dismissed religion as any guide to them, and the church plays no part in their lives… A few are militantly atheistic, but most are just not interested.'"

5. Francis Bello, 1954
Interviewed or questionnaired 107 nonindustrial scientists under the age of 40 judged by senior colleagues to be outstanding. Of the 87 responses, 45 percent claimed to be "agnostic or atheistic" and an additional 22 percent claimed no religious affiliation. For 20 most eminent, "the proportion who are now a-religious is considerably higher than in the entire survey group."

6. Jack Chambers, 1964
Questionnaired 740 US psychologists and chemists. He reported, "The highly creative men… significantly more often show either no preference for a particular religion or little or no interest in religion." Found that the most eminent psychologists showed 40 percent no preference, 16 percent for the most eminent chemists.

7. Vaughan, Smith, and Sjoberg, 1965
Polled 850 US physicists, zoologists, chemical engineers, and geologists listed in American Men of Science (1955) on church membership, and attendance patterns, and belief in afterlife. Of the 642 replies, 38.5 percent did not believe in an afterlife, whereas 31.8 percent did. Belief in immortality was less common among major university staff than among those employed by business, government, or minor universities. The Gallup poll taken about this time showed that two-thirds of the U.S. population believed in an afterlife, so scientists were far less religious than the typical adult.

Conclusion

The consensus here is clear: more intelligent people tend not to believe in religion. And this observation is given added force when you consider that the above studies span a broad range of time, subjects and methodologies, and yet arrive at the same conclusion.

This is the result even when the researchers are Christian conservatives themselves. One such researcher is George Gallup. He found 20% of scientists likely to believe in God.


Another site and study is as follows.

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/sci_relig.htm

93% of Scientists are Atheists or Agnostics.

The final site is this one:

http://members.tripod.com/humphrys2/....religion.html

The world is round
• By c.500 BC, the Pythagorean school in ancient Greece had come to believe that the earth was round.
• The astronomer and professor at Bologna Cecco d'Ascoli was burnt alive by the church in 1327 for daring to suggest that men may live on the other side of the world.
• The church has revised its earlier opinions and now believes that the earth is round.

The earth goes round the sun
• Around 1513, Copernicus first wrote down his discovery that the earth goes round the sun. This discovery, one of the greatest in the history of human thought, would be violently opposed by ignorant Christian churches for the next three hundred years.
• The philosopher and dreamer Giordano Bruno (and here and here and here) was burnt at the stake by Rome in 1600 for daring to suggest that the earth goes round the sun. See the weasel words of the Catholic Encyclopedia on this case.
• The persecution of Galileo (also here). This great human thinker was imprisoned, threatened with torture, and forced to recant his beliefs because they disagreed with Christian superstitions. Ever since, Catholic writers have told lies about him, and try to justify what happened.
• The thinker and writer Campanella was tortured for subscribing to the Copernican theory.
• While the Catholic opposition to Copernicus is well known, less well known is the violent Protestant opposition to Copernicus' evidence that the earth goes round the sun.Apparently, though, the Protestant churches now believe that Luther, Calvin and Wesley may have been wrong, and the earth may in fact go round the sun.
• The idea that the earth goes round the sun was explicitly prohibited in the church's Index of banned books in 1616 under Paul V, again in 1664 under Alexander VII and again in 1761 under Benedict XIV. Unbelievably, the Copernican theory remained on the Index until 1835. Apparently, though, the church now believes that the earth may in fact go round the sun.

This last site is slighly off the topic but shows the persistent Christian religion's opposition to scientific leaning. The same applies to Fundamentalists today in America oppsing Evolution which to scientists has been proven while the complex mechanisms are being worked out.

My hypothesis is that those who cling to the simplistic bible myths may indeed do so because they are not able to understand complex ideas as presented in scientific data.

Fiach

Ed

It may be because of man's rebellion against Him, that God allowed this to happen.

Quote:

Ed: No, actually I didn't go far enough. Studies have shown that Dogs ARE wolves and wolves ARE dogs. But humans are not apes and apes are not humans. jtb: Studies have shown that humans ARE apes. So you're lying again.

No, if that were true then humans and apes could interbreed like wolves and dogs. But they cannot. So maybe YOU are the one that is lying. Are you?

Quote:

jtb: I have, as a child, created humanoid figures from clay. NONE of them "came alive" as Adam supposedly did. So will you accept this as "strong evidence" that the Bible is bunk? You can't argue that the conditions weren't right, because this applies equally to Pasteur's experiment. Ed: The problem is that the cause is not sufficient, a child is not adequate to produce a human person. jtb: Nor was Pasteur's experiment adequate to produce microbes from non-living matter. However, in the case of Pasteur's experiment, you have chosen to utterly ignore this obvious fact and declare it to be "strong evidence" against primordial abiogenesis. Therefore my clay-figure experiment is EQUALLY strong evidence against Genesis. So don't be such a hypocrite.

Pasteur's experiment is not adequate to produce life from non-life because NO non-living matter is adequate to produce life.

Quote:

jtb: And there is no "Law of Biogenesis" in biology. This is a mangling of Pasteur's principle of abiogenesis which is used ONLY by ignorant creationists. Ed: Hardly, the Law of Biogenesis can be found in both the "Oxford Dictionary of Natural History" and "Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology". jtb: Read those again. If you still believe that they refer to a "Law of Biogenesis" which prevents the emergence of life from the primordial soup, then quote the relevant sections here..

"Aristotle to Zoos" states "In its affirmative form, the Law of Biogenesis states that all living organisms are the progeny of living organisms that went before them. In its negative form, the law can be taken to deny the occurence of spontaneous generation." IOW, life comes only from life.

Ed

No, because if there is no ultimate objective propositional communication that our propositional communication is based upon then all propositional communication is just the subjective making of sounds that are ultimately meaningless.

Quote:

jtb: I will use the recent thread Magus55: take the Prophecy Challenge! as an example. The Book of Daniel supposedly prophesied events that took place centuries after it was written (allegedly before 500 BC). However, Daniel was actually written AFTER the events it claimed to prophesy. Was this determined by "atheism"? No, it was determined by BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP, which allows us to date Daniel rather precisely, to between 168 and 165 BC. This contradicts the claims of the Bible itself, but is so firmly established by BIBLICAL SCHOLARS that it is used to date other Hebrew texts. Every competent Biblical scholar agrees that the Book of Daniel is apocalyptic fiction, NOT the prophecy that it claims to be. This is just one of MANY falsehoods in the Bible identified by BIBLICAL SCHOLARS.

No, the primary reason for redating Daniel is philosophical not any real textual evidence. Most biblical scholars like most modern scientists, conduct their studies with the assumption of naturalism thereby automatically ruling out any possibility of supernatural prediction. There is textual evidence that it was written much earlier than 168 BC.

Quote:

jtb: No competent Biblical scholars are inerrantists. NONE.

Your statement is based on a presumption of the philosophy of naturalism not based on any real competency test.

Ed

Most of the evidence points to the universe as having a beginning. This is a characteristic of an effect.

Quote:

lp: And waving around some supposed Law of Causality is begging the question.

Hardly. A Supposed Law of Causality? It is used everyday in science. An effect is discovered and then it is studied to determine its cause.

Quote:

Ed: Based on the characteristics of that effect, ie the universe, we can learn things about its cause. And most of the characteristics of the universe point to a cause that fits the Christian God perfectly. lp: Except that if the Universe had a creator, that entity had plainly not have had much interest in humanity -- look at all the Universe gone to waste..

Gone to waste? You could only know this if you were omniscient. The large size of the universe and all the wonders of nature demonstrate "His eternal power and divine nature"(Romans 1:20). Also, if man was part of small universe it would help feed the sin of pride, that man already struggles with even with the knowledge now of a gigantic universe that is rapidly expanding.

lpetrich

Ed:
If we are created in the image of that valuer it would make a difference.

I still don't see the connection; that to me seems like deriving an "ought" from an "is".

Also, even if our species was miraculously created, then we were created in the likeness of such species as Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus rather than some cosmic superbeing -- we are absolute wimps by comparison, we have a finite lifespan, we have two sexes, etc.

Especially if that valuer is also the creator and sustainer of the universe.

Why does the Universe have to have a sustainer? If this "sustainer" decides to slack off, will the Universe wink out of existence or implode or something?

(Peter Kirby and Richard Carrier)
A 21 year old college computer geek and a Roman historian??? Yeah those are good biblical scholars, riiiight.

Actually, Richard Carrier is very well-qualified to discuss the New Testament, since it had been written inside of the Roman Empire.

Actually though studies have shown that theists still have a majority in the science field.

Maybe, but those working in the history of life on Earth universally accept evolution, whatever their religious beliefs may be. So if they can do it, why can't you, O Ed?

lpetrich

Ed:
Pasteur's experiment is not adequate to produce life from non-life because NO non-living matter is adequate to produce life.

I don't see how one experiment is supposed to be absolute proof that abiogenesis cannot possibly happen.

lpetrich

No, the primary reason for redating Daniel is philosophical not any real textual evidence.

Except that the textual evidence is more consistent with it being written long after the fact -- Daniel is much more correct about Hellenistic politics than about the Babylonian politics of five centuries earlier. The main counterarguments I have seen have usually been that the words used are imprecise; however, if they are so imprecise, they would have been unusable.

Most biblical scholars like most modern scientists, conduct their studies with the assumption of naturalism thereby automatically ruling out any possibility of supernatural prediction. There is textual evidence that it was written much earlier than 168 BC.

Whatever "evidence" that is. Also, what DIRECT evidence do you have for such an alleged assumption?

Imagine a Hellenic pagan was to come to you and point out the historicity of the Iliad and the Odyssey and other documents usually dismissed as "mythology". And also point out how Greece survived the much bigger Persian Empire in ~500 BCE. And also point out how many people relied on oracles for advice and went to temples of Asklepios to get cured. Etc.

And point out how if you show disrespect to the deities of Mt. Olympus, you might end up in the depths of Tartarus when you die.

If you do not immediately make offerings to the deities of Mt. Olympus on account of all this, is it because of "naturalistic presuppositions"?