If you have a series of documents that all can be traced to non original texts, that can be decisively dated as non contemporary to the claims made therein then it cannot be a reliable indicator of truth.
When many of the most important claims rely on “magic” related by writers writing many years after these alleged events , and in a different language to the protagonists, it is most definitely open to questions of reliability.
I appreciate you sharing your views. Going to the heart of the matter, in the 66 there are few that speak to the life of Jesus. However, I want to get this right. Are you saying that the lack of this information is what lowers biblical reliability? I am not well verse in all of the Church of Rome but I do know that they produced their own books (with modifications) and I do believe that speaks their attempt to have influence.
No, what I wrote was quite clear and understandable..
In fact there are many texts that write of a messiah figure, their childhood and later life (some evn after the alleged crucifixion) however all date to a much much later time and cannot therefore be regarded as any sort of eyewitness accounts, in fact the contradictions between them are so great that it is no wonder that they were excluded from modern versions of the “Bible”. These exclusions highlight the unreliability of the “gospel” texts and their sources.
There is not one contemporary to his alleged life of the Jesus figure as described in the gospels. Not one mention in one of the most recorded eras of ancient history.
I don’t dismiss it any more than any other book. I do, however, dismiss some of what is said about it.
BTW, you didn’t say if you believe it is inerrant.
The bible, as well as other “holy” texts such as the Torah and the Koran and the beliefs surrounding them form a circular argument that can be distilled down to “the text is true because the text says it is true”. Also, there is the claim about magic and supernatural beings offered up without any evidence except the self-referential hype surrounding the text. So, to make the bible or any other “holy” texts believable, the first step is to present reproducible empirical evidence for the existence of the magic man (“god”) spoken of in the texts. Short of that, they’re just a collection of myths from ancient times (bronze age, iron age, etc.)
What are YOUR thoughts about “the bible”?
both and much more. Take for example the book of Exodus. Israelites were indigenous to Canaan. They were not escaped slaves from Egypt. While the Bible is mostly fiction, Exodus is 100% fiction (which I’m sure you have already realized, suggests the 10 commandments are pure fiction as well).
As the initiator of this thread I’d like to answer this, even though it was not directed specifically at me.
I dismiss the Bible and do not believe what it says because if I take Jesus’s words from the gospels as truth, then I have to apply that measure to what he says about the Old Testament as truth. In Mark 10:6 he refers to Genesis 1:27 and 5:2, where God made them… “male and female”, thus substantiating the creation narrative we read in the early chapters of that book as true and historical.
Which therefore means, that unless we engage in some textual and historical shenanigans, the Bible tells us, through the very words of God himself, that the world is less than 10,000 years old.
And if I have to accept that as true, then I have to reject everything physics, geology, palaeontology, astronomy, cosmology, oceanography, archaeology, genetics and evolutionary biology tell us that it isn’t. Seeing as these sciences have delivered everything that I use to enjoy my comfortable 21st century life I cannot say that I don’t rely upon them and have secular confidence in them. So, to reject what they say about the universe being 13.7 billion years old would be a monumental act of hypocrisy on my part. And I won’t do that.
It’s like a line of dominoes, where, once the first one falls, they all fall. Because I cannot square what the Bible says about reality I cannot accept it as truth. There are other reasons for my rejection of course, some of which have been touched upon in this thread.
Thank you,
Walter.
Which parts are you claiming are true, and why?
What king of documentation is credible for supernatural claims, and why?
You seem to be putting you cart before your horse, as you’d need to demonstrate that any deity exists, before asserting it has offerred a message.
No, the question is why do you believe it to be divinely inspired. You don’t get to reverse your burden of proof, not here anyway. You will also need to be far more specific about which parts you think are true, and why? As some of the claims and myths are demonstrably at odds with objective facts.
If the Bible is inspired by God and that god desires reconciliation with us then indeed it would logically have been his intent to have it “properly” presented.
My point about the different hermeneutics (and this would to an extent also apply to the countless denominations) is that Christianity clearly can’t agree on what’s “proper”. It is of course the conceit of each sub-sect that it has figured that out, but realistically, if there were a correct or proper interpretation / practice then what would be left would differ only in unimportant ways that were left to us as matters of personal preference.
For example one can be “high church” or “sawdust trail” Bible-thumper and still teach essentially the same evangel. And when individual groups of Christians want to make various argumentum ad populum arguments they are happy to embrace that.
But.
Ignoring the denominational and historic differences, just the question of whehter one believes the bible to be “verbally and plenarily inspired” vs that it is an imperfect human authored reflection of some sort of divine narrative that’s presumably more metaphorical / symbolic rather than relentlessly literal, will have profound impacts on things like whether you accept the non-conformant (LGBTQ, brown skin, strange customs) as fully as human as yourself, and to what degree you will obsess in imposing conformity on even those outside your in-group. It is the difference between embracing diversity and pearl-clutching about it. It is the difference between building cathedrals for the ages as multi-generational projects and building pole-barns for the rapture. It is the difference between questioning authority, or granting it an unassailable status as a societal elite. It is the difference between faith in the eventual manifestation of god’s kingdom through advancing righteousness over time, and the attempt to impose it by force on the reprobate and evil Other.
More broadly of course differences in a few base assumptions produce Christianity vs Judaism vs Islam – all of the Abrahamic religions with the same root, often fighting with each other for temporal power and authority. Or Catholics vs Protestants in Ireland and elsewhere. The labeling of specific wars as “holy” to justify the unjustifiable.
Like you probably do, I used to sort of ignore all this. My teachers on more than one occasion smugly referred to Christians of other persuasions as “our weaker brothers in Christ”. And since fundagelicalism is all I knew, it seemed to me that we were in the majority, when in reality, on a worldwide basis, even evangelicalism writ large – the kinds of relatively liberal evangelicals who would bristle at being called a “fundamentalist” – are only about 17% of Christianity. It just doesn’t look that way to you when you’re embedded in a Bible Belt region where that particular ideology has strong social hegemony.
It is probably down to the highly idealistic and triumphalist character of fundamentalism that, when I began to move away from it for various reasons, did not leave me feeling very attracted to some more liberal form of Christianity where there were a few vague core nuggets everyone can agree on mostly in principle: love God and your neighbor as yourself, do your best to mean well and do well – but what this means is even up for debate. You end up with basic human empathy and respect that is the foundation for civil society, but for which God is not even a necessary ingredient, and IMO not a clarifying one, either.
It doesn’t read like it has anything to do with a god
Exactly, can anyone really imagine it is a coincidence that it is exactly what one might expect primitive superstitious human societies to cobble together.
I find it to be an interesting literary work that mixes myth, exaggeration, history, philosophy, ethics, and survivalism.
The Bible (along with the Koran, Baghavid Gita, the Lotus Sutras, and so forth) is a reflection of our wishes and fantasies . . . and a desire to understand the world.
It is not a textbook on biology, physics, mathematics, cosmology, and/or astronomy.
I might also add that as well as Jesus declaring that the entire human race descended from a mud man and a rib woman, he also declared the historical truth of a global flood.
Matthew : 24
36 “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.
37 As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.
38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark;
39 and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.
Once again, in complete contradiction to the evidence gathered from many different sciences.
Thank you,
Walter.
I treat the bible like any other book, and its claims like any other claims, and there is a simple rule that applies to all claims….always leave room for reasonable doubt.
@JDMatt28 … can you explain why the mythology you cling to, contains assertions about the real world that have been utterly destroyed by scientific discoveries?
Don’t pretend this isn’t the case, I’ll destroy the requisite apologetics without drawing breath.
Calilasseia,
If JDMatt28 actually does as the Bible instructs him (unlikely) his beliefs should not depend on any evidence from the real world. Hebrews 11:1 - 3, John 20: 30-31 and Proverbs 3:5-6, when taken together confirm this. So your kind offer to destroy his apologetics is, I’m sorry to say, irrelevant.
Irrelevant to his beliefs, because, by looking to evidence-based apologetic arguments to support his beliefs, he’s not following what the Bible tells him to do - to believe by faith and without evidence.
This issue lies at the heart of ALL Christian apologetic arguments that are evidence based. ALL such arguments are unbiblical, unscriptural and sit in complete contradiction to the basic tenets of the Christian belief system.
Would that Christian apologists understood this! 
Thank you,
Walter.
I believe that most apologists would subscribe to “let God be true, and every man a liar” and so when faith and evidence conflict, for them, faith always wins.
I regard apologetics as a bad-faith (and misbegotten) attempt to entice skeptics into religious views by suggesting that really, if you will just squint a little bit, there are some rationalizations that will allow you to hold religious beliefs alongside an at least pro-forma attempt to anchor your thinking to reality.
More practically, I think it is just a way to quiet the weakened, three-fourths asleep grumblings of doubt within practicing Christians about things in the dogma that fly in the face of established science and sometimes even casual observation.
In other words I submit that apologists do not, at a deep level, believe in their own BS. It is just there to keep people in line, and maybe to draw in the occasional convert despite the prospect’s better judgment. Secondarily, it’s a way to play the pseudo-intellectual, and a performative religious version of “owning the libs” (proving oneself right).
In “proving” themselves right they also manage their own subtle stirring of Doubt.
I regard apologetics as a bad-faith (and misbegotten) attempt to entice skeptics into religious views by suggesting that really, if you will just squint a little bit, there are some rationalizations that will allow you to hold religious beliefs alongside an at least pro-forma attempt to anchor your thinking to reality.
I quote you Mordant, because, on the back of my reply to Calilasseia, I cannot agree with you here. Please understand that my disagreement is not a bad-tempered or rancorous one. Rather, I think we agree in general, but differ on specifics.
Beginning from a point we agree on, I concur that apologetics is misbegotten. The reason for this can be seen if we view the Bible, not from the sceptic’s p.o.v. (it’s just a disparate set of supernatural ancient stories cobbled together into a loose narrative) but from the true believer’s p.o.v. The true believer’s take on the Bible, if they take it’s contents seriously, should be this.
The Bible is a complete and unified whole, detailing events from man’s first disobedience, through the eras of prophecy and nation-building to culminate in a time when Israel was ready for God himself to come in the flesh. He did this in the gospels, putting right what went wrong in Eden. The epistles that follow the gospels detail how true believers should live and how God’s message is for the whole world and not just for Israel. The Bible ends with a call to have patience and to persevere until God returns to judge the world and bring everything to its proper and planned ending.
As such, the Bible is self-contained and requires nothing further to be added to it. No apologetic arguments are necessary. No extra-Biblical data or evidence are needed. Everything any believer needs for their salvation is there within the unchanging words of scripture.
The ancients knew that.. ‘the heavens declared the glory of the Lord’ not by using the First Cause argument, the Fine-Tuned universe argument or the Thermodynamic argument. They believed this by faith and without evidence, just as described in Hebrews 11:1 & 2. Just as Proverbs 3 : 5 & 6 instructed them to. They trusted in the Lord and leant not upon their own understanding.
So, by definition, to use an apologetic argument IS to lean upon your own understanding - in direct contradiction to what they are told to do in God’s Word.
Here is my case, Mordant.
Rather than apologetic arguments being used entice wavering sceptics, I would submit that they are more like desperate attempts to shore up the crumbling edifice of Christianity in the face of the natural world evidence that contradicts it. There’s so much evidence contradicting it that simply believing by faith becomes an act of wilful denial.
Faced with this crisis, Christians can take two different roads. Stick with faith, just as the Bible commands, or step away from a faith-only position. YEC’s tend to follow the first path but those who cannot live by faith alone take the second. In some ways the YEC’s are being more honest to scripture, even if that means being dishonest with the facts, data and evidence.
Mordant, I agree with what you say in the rest of your reply, but diverge from you as to whom we think the target audience is. You claim that apologetic arguments are for the eyes of wavering sceptics. I claim that such arguments are the for the eyes of OEC Christians who have already shifted away from a faith-only position. These arguments are face-saving and faith-saving exercises for people who first believed without evidence - but who must now continue to believe in the face of too much contradictory evidence.
I submit that this is the purpose of apologetic arguments and that their target audience are the Christians themselves. Not wavering non-Christians.
Thank you,
Walter.
I led with the point about wavering skeptics but I also suggested it was at least illicitly to buck up any nascent doubts in believers (though I didn’t have old earth creationists specifically in mind). In fact my post was really more about the latter than the former.
I suppose it depends on the apologist you are talking about. What springs to mind for me when I hear that word is Josh McDowell and his book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict and by its very title that is attempting to put “evidence” in front of an unbeliever to convince them that God is real, the Bible is accurate, etc. A believer after all has already rendered a “verdict” on that score. Early in his career, Josh pushed YEC arguments, although later he de-emphasized then without ever really forswearing them. However his son, Sean, is much more engaged with OEC thinking, so maybe that’s been a general trend. TBH I haven’t really kept up since probably the mid 1990s. Do modern apologists target primarily Christians? I wasn’t aware of that.
Regardless of the intended audience, apologists make bad faith arguments and even when the objective is to provide rationalizations for Christians who are somewhat liberalizing their views, it is still lipstick on a pig because God has no explanatory power compared to the relevant science.
Re your question about modern apologists Mordant, I can only speak about the ones I’m aware of - William Lane Craig, Hugh Ross, Francis Collins, John Lennox and John Polkinghorne.
As far as I’m aware they have two prime audiences. OEC Christians who struggle with their faith and the undecided, ordinary Joe’s who are considered to be ‘low hanging fruit’ and can be easily persuaded (i.e., tricked) into believing that godidit. I use the word ‘tricked’ here in its proper meaning. All of the above are, as you say, engaging in bad faith arguments, for the following reasons.
First, by definition, ALL apologetic arguments begin by committing the informal logical fallacy of begging the question. That’s because all apologists begin with the conclusion they want their arguments to reach. If an argument’s premises assume the truth of a conclusion from get go then, unless the argument maker is blind to this fact, the maker is complicit in this act of chicanery. That act of intellectual dishonesty demonstrates they begin from a position of bad faith.
Second, by definition, any apologetic argument using scientific evidence cannot use religious faith at any point in its process. That is because science does not employ religious faith and is totally silent on matters of faith, religion, theology and the supernatural. Conversely, religious things accepted by faith are done so without evidence. So, any apologetic argument that uses scientific evidence cannot use faith or vice versa. These are two mutually exclusive systems of thought that cannot be made to work together. Once again, the argument makers will not be unaware of this, but they will always seek to leave this inconvenient fact out of sight. The doing of this, the deliberate withholding of vital information about an argument’s weakness, means that the argument makers are consciously arguing in bad faith by practicing deceit and concealment.
Lastly, because scientific evidence is devoid of any and all religious content, the followers of any faith or religion can use it equally well to make arguments for their particular gods. Which is why we see Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and Hindus all employing the same evidence to claim that their godidit. This means that apologetic arguments using scientific evidence do not point to one and only one specific god. It means that the playing field is levelled by such evidence - as you would expect from science, which has no allegiance to any god or gods. The fact that the argument makers do not reveal this fact simply confirms that they start, continue and finish their arguments in bad faith. Not wishing to let the evidence and the logic of the argument speak for themselves but to move it from it’s inception to the intended and desired end.
In my book Mordant, what makes this especially egregious is that four out the five people named above are (or were) scientists. Hugh Ross is an astrophysicist, Collins a physician and geneticist, Lennox a mathematician and Polkinghorne was a theoretical physicist. No scientist worth their salt should ever propose an argument where they know the conclusion they want that argument to reach. They should always be lead by the evidence and not by their personal choices and preferences. But sadly, these people have traded in their professional integrity and honesty for the sake of their religious beliefs.
In case you are interested, here are some helpful links.
BioLogos - Faith and Science Belong Together - BioLogos Francis Collins
Reasons to Believe - Home Hugh Ross
Thank you,
Walter.