David Gould

But you do make yourself the standard for truth, Theo - you after all have decided that the Bible is true! The standard that determined the Bible was the truth was you, my friend.

There is no difference between us, so your last question is meaningless the way you phrase it.

If you are asking 'Which belief system, materialism or Christianity makes knowledge possible and best explains life as we experience it?' the answer is obviously materialism.

There is no information on modern physics in the Bible, after all. By modern, I guess I mean any physics at all, really. No, wait - there is some wrong information. The world is not flat, after all.

I somehow do not think that you want to argue this way, though...

hinduwoman

Theo, what exactly do you mean by realisitc human experience and historical accuracy? all religious texts deal with human experience: they try to answer the big questions and lay down day-to-day code of conduct. Again, Muhammad is definitely more historical than Christ. All myths contains smatterings of past hisotry.

Please take a look at the hindu notion of origin of the universe in the Upanishads. It doesnot contradict any scientific theories!.

Peter P.

"Before you attack Christianity, Hinduwoman, perhaps you might defend the caste system and what it does to India's poor?"
Epitomer (or something like that"

To quote my Hindi friend on the caste system, "no officially, but there are still some dumbass hardliners" on the question to whether or not the caste system was still practiced.

Peter

lpetrich

[quote]Originally posted by theophilus:
[QB]

The Bible is full of miracles, so it loses there. I've noticed that Christian apologists almost universally reject miracles that occur outside the Bible. They believe that Pythagoras, Plato, and Alexander the Great did not have any deities among their parents, they believe that Apollonius of Tyana had not resurrected a certain dead girl, they believe that there was no divine intervention in the Trojan War, they believe that Mohammed and his followers had invented the Koran, etc. But they never explain why they switch off all critical sense regarding the Bible and its miracles.

"Hung" on a giant bowl that they imagined the sky to be. Thus, in the Book of Revelation, the stars will someday fall from the sky. There is nothing about what we've learned over the last half-millennium, which can easily be summarized in terms that the writers of the Bible could have understood.

The Earth is a big ball with its surface being 6371 km from its center. Most of its bulk is rock, but inside of it is a great sea of liquid iron.

The Moon is another big ball of rock; its phases are due to the Sun's illumination of it at different positions relative to the Sun. The glow of the crescent Moon is due to illumination by the Earth.

The Earth moves around the Sun, which is a giant fireball 100 times the size of the Earth; the Moon's path can fit inside the Sun. The wandering stars are either balls of rock and iron (Mercury, Venus, Mars), or balls of cloud (Jupiter, Saturn).

Shooting stars are small specks of dust that glow because of their rubbing against the air as they arrive at the Earth; the Earth's air trails off and essentially vanishes at a few hundred km.

The "fixed" stars are giant fireballs like the Sun; they look dim because they are very, very far away.

Also, evolution by natural selection is easily described in such nontechnical terms. Charles Darwin deserves a lot of credit for formulating the idea, because it looks very simple after it is presented. Thomas Huxley had allegely explained "How stupid of me not to have thought of that!"

Finally, the turtle theory of the Earth's support offers a nice explanation for earthquakes: the turtle sometimes twitches.

So it's all a matter of will to believe?

lpetrich

What's especially interesting is that this is part of an attempt to point out which animals are OK to eat and which ones are not; the author starts off by carefully examining the feet of various domestic animals, but then moves on to make some careless mistakes.

Grasshoppers having four legs could be a naive extrapolation from familiar animals with a horizontal body axis; they all have four legs. One pictures that author extrapolating from dogs and cows and sheep and donkeys and lizards to grasshoppers.

A bat has the overall size and shape of a small bird, but a close look reveals a bat to look much more like a small rodent. So one wonders why that author did not classify bats as some sort of freak of nature, as some sort of mouse-bird.

Not to mention both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 getting the order of appearance grossly wrong. Fruit trees before sea animals? Flying animals before land animals? Genesis 1 gets the late appearance of humanity correct, but Genesis 2 is worse -- why is a male the first member of our species created, and not a parthenogenetic female?

It's clear that the Earth originated after the Sun; there is a chemical-composition gradient going out from the Sun, with the inner planets being composed of relatively refractory materials like iron-nickel and metal silicates (rocky materials) and with the outer planets being composed of ices, which are relatively volatile. This is consistent with the inner planets forming in an already-heated area.

The Moon most likely originated after the Earth, as a result of a "Big Whack" collision with a Mars-sized object. This hypothesis successfully accounts for some oddities in the Moon's chemical composition -- it is mostly rock, but it had once been heated enough to deprive it of nearly all its volatiles.

lpetrich

I wonder what intelligence Theophilus has gathered on Mr. D. Surely there is much that the Bible did not discuss.

Occam's Razor - why is the Bible supposed to be special compard to the sacred books and doctrinal statements of other religions?

Hume's Essay on Miracles proposed this criterion for establishing that a miracle had happened: if that miracle's not happening would be an even bigger miracle.

theophilus

I have no problem. You are the one who is faced with the dilema - how can you know anything for certain. Even the "scientific" knowledge that forms the basis for your beliefs cannot be depended on since it changes from day to day.

theophilus

Hate to bring this up so late in the discussion, but was this a "real" book, or just an illusion?

David Gould

How did you decide that the Bible was true? This is actually a 'have you stopped beating your wife' question but I have no other way of putting it. As such, it seems to me that you must have made such a decision based on something.

This something seems to be in answering the question 'Which authority makes knowledge possible and best explains life as we experience?'

As there is a value judgement inherent in that question (the word 'best') and that judgement must be made by the person answering the question, fallible old you must have used some standard external to the Bible to determine if it best explains life - you compared it with what you independantly knew about life and the possibility of knowledge and determined that it was the 'best'. Therefore, you used an evidentiary method to arrive at your conclusion of truth.

It seems to me that Christian Pressupositionalism does not actually exist...

theophilus

The "truth" may lie somewhere else, but there is no possibility of you knowing where or what.
"Pearls before swine," is your description, not mine.
Your entire argument is based on the unproven assumption that you have an adequate standard by which to judge the Bible or any other truth claim. You, of course, are unwilling to address this issue because it makes all your argumentation meaningless. Nevertheless, it is fundamental and your avoidance of it is telling.
Please don't respond with some juvenille claim that your reason/senses alone are an adequate standard, as both are known to be fallible.