Who cares what the bible says anyway.
On the back of what I wrote yesterday Mordant, I’m going to ask you some impossible questions.
Excepting William Lane Craig, the other four are all men of science. As such, whatever research they do and whatever science papers they write and submit for peer review, they must surely do so in good faith. That is, they must abide by the ground rules and principles of science and they do not falsify or fabricate their results. Otherwise they will simply be found out. If they performed their science in bad faith then other scientists would have discovered their skulduggery when trying to replicate their experiments or when trying to replicate their observations. I know of no evidence that points to any of them being anything other than competent scientists.
That being so, what’s going on?
Yesterday I listed three ways in which they were making apologetic arguments in bad faith. The vital point linking these three ways is this. The argument makers CANNOT BE ignorant of the bad faith in which they are making their arguments. They are too intelligent and too expert in framing these arguments for them to not know what they are doing. To be blithely unaware that they are practising deceit, evasiveness and obfuscation when making these apologetic arguments. These are scientists! They know full well what they are doing!!
So why the FUCK are they lying for Jesus like this?
I don’t expect you to be able to answer this btw, Mordant. I’m just asking because the questions need asking.
Even if there are no answers that don’t add up to anything more to speculation on our part, what’s been discussed recently in this thread does illuminate something very troubling.
It looks as if a belief in Jesus somehow turns otherwise honest and upright men into scheming, two-faced, morally bankrupt peddlers of half-truths, disinformation and falsehoods.
What gives? Have you any ideas how this can happen, Mordant?
My own personal hypothesis:
The short answer is, I suspect, cognitive dissonance. It is much easier to stick to a belief you have, even in the face of contradictory information than to admit to yourself (and your surroundings) that you have been mistaken. And if you are convinced enough about this belief, I suspect that the end justifies the means, especially if credibility and social status within your family, among your friends, and the religious community at large is at stake. Perhaps it can also be viewed as some sort of sunk cost fallacy, where they have invested so much into their religious belief and persona, that giving it all up is just too much for them to handle.
Scientists [lose] their minds all the time (just like everyone else). For what it is worth: Lennox isn’t a scientist.
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I hear you Nyarlathotep…
But there is a pattern to this.
This is not some random loss of sanity by various scientists with nothing connecting them and no similarity as to HOW they have lost their minds. They are all making the same kind of argument, in similar ways, (mis)using their particular fields of science to do so. They all motivated by the same beliefs and all have similar aims. There’s nothing haphazard or arbitrary about what they are doing, how they are doing it and why they are doing it.
Despite what Dick says, since we DO care about being lied to and DO care about others being taken in by such lies, it falls to us to shine the spotlight on the bad faith of these people.
About Lennox…
According to Wikipedia he’s a mathematician.
John Carson Lennox (born 7 November 1943) is a Northern Irish mathematician, bioethicist, and lay theologian. He has written many books on religion, ethics, the relationship between science and God (such as Has Science Buried God and Can Science Explain Everything); he has also participated in public debates with atheists, including Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
Lennox earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Cambridge, followed by second and third doctorates from the University of Oxford and Cardiff University, respectively. As a professor, Lennox specialised in group theory. He is emeritus professor of Mathematics[1] at the University of Oxford, where he is also Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, and has worked as adjunct lecturer at Wycliffe Hall and at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Saïd Business School and a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum.
True, he’s disgraced himself by using his scientific knowledge to lie for Jesus, but unless there’s been some recent development, I’m still persuaded that he is a scientist.
Thank you,
Walter.
I suspected that Cognitive Dissonance would play a role, Goml.
But I knew that I was asking impossible questions about this issue.
Anyway, the other scientists obliged to work with these four must have a difficult time of it too. If they disagree too vehemently or publicly with this Gang of Four, they run the risk of the Religious Persecution card being played on them. Cancel culture will do the rest and before you know it there’s a bandwagon to be leapt on, putting their current and future careers at risk.
Better to keep your head down and stay under the radar.
Which is probably why wherever these four work, they do so confident in the knowledge that their close colleagues will never call them out for unprofessional conduct or for bringing science into disrepute by (mis)using it in their outreach ministry.
That’s probably why they only ever get called out in public debates by the likes of Matt Dillahunty, Richard Dawkins or Alex O’Connor.
Thank you,
Walter.
“To handle cognitive dissonance” is certainly in play. I’m not sure it’s ALL that’s in play.
Earlier this morning I responded to another post that there’s an essential hubris in conservative / authoritarian religion which says in essence, “what I claim God says trumps everything” and so they get to ignore laws, empathy, common decency and honesty in their zeal because “God says so”. God is seen as so above everything, that he alone can do evil that good may come of it, and if they see great evil (say, IDK, some genocide being committed) then in supporting that they are just agreeing with God, who can get away apparently with literally anything.
Combine this with another way to handle cognitive dissonance, namely, compartmentalization, and you have the spectacle of a scientist wearing his scientist hat professionally while wearing is “lay theologian” hat when he’s obliged to undermine science in that role. This is fairly common when you have someone who is not in a field that conflicts overtly with their dogma of choice (e.g. they are a YEC but not a paleontologist; I don’t know how you’d credibly function as a paleontologist and hold such extreme religious ideations). Mathematics can be seen as a reflection of god’s “orderliness” and “design” at the same time as it’s seen as a beautiful theoretical construct so one can think they are “thinking God’s thoughts after him” if that makes them feel better but there’s usually nothing in abstract mathematics that conflicts with their god-conception and they can do their job without being led to erroneous mathematical conclusions by their religious faith, and vice versa.
To shorten and summarize all the above, it’s a form of the “I was just following orders” excuse for doing Bad Things for which you somehow shouldn’t be held responsible. Divine Command Theory gives you a lot of permission to be an asshole for Jesus. And because conformity and obedience are highly valued in these religious circles, they really see no personal responsiblity for “being a good soldier” so to speak. Just Following Orders is a highly prized virtue. You’re being a Good Boy or Girl.
You’re taking a step in the right direction. People need to grow up and out of their delusions about life being governed and controlled by a “daddy in the sky.” The beauty of being a critical thinker is that YOU get to direct and create the kind of life you want for yourself. It’s a wonderful freedom knowing that there’s no gistapo daddy monitoring your every thought word and action. There’s no hell either if you make mistakes along the way…which you’re going to do from time to time. So relax and enjoy your freedom!
Oh I’ve been out of the faith for over 30 years now so have enjoyed plenty of freedom, believe me.
It’s great .. ain’t it!! We are some of the most free people in the world! I have always said that the only true freedom that exists is the freedom that resides between our two ears. All other “freedoms” are fleeting.
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Hi I’m Dan. Meaning in the Bible is subjective, and open to interpretations influenced by our social constructs. Here’s a Bible verse which gets misunderstood. Here’s the proper interpretation the translators intended. But don’t be fooled, there is no inherent meaning behind the message intended by the authors. It’s a collection of symbols with no properly interpreted meaning. All meaning is constructed by biases within our subconscious. Thus every reading of the Bible is a different interpretation. Even the authors were unsure of what they meant when they put the words down. And the sooner we discard the Bible the sooner we can go about our lives interpreting everything subjectively without the fear that there is any objective truth to morality. I’m Dan. And I’m a post modernist. Thanks for listening.
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What makes you think there isn’t one?
I’d personally respond to you by saying that a scientifically inaccurate book may still be qualified to talk about God through the use of myth and symbolism. The scientific inaccuracies of the Bible do not mean that their representations of God and His nature, His plans, and His morality are false representations. I’d wager that a group of ancient people who knew very little about natural science would be more likely to know quite a lot about the Supreme Being. And a scientifically accurate world view which does not account for a Supreme Being in any direct way available to the methods of science is not evidence for the absence of One.
That would work if you were happy to mythologise what the Bible says and to see its writings only through the lens of the minds of its writers.
But there are many Christians today who take a literalist approach to scripture, so that when it says the world is flat and has four corners, they take that at face value, rejecting any scientific evidence to the contrary. So science can and does play a useful role in demolishing the literalist approach to the Bible.
But that then raises a question. Aside from matters of personal preference, what reason do you have that justifies a mythologic / symbolic approach to scripture?
Just curious.
I agree that CapriMark1’s statement is insufficiently clear.
Perhaps what he should have written is that the Bible is only relevant if the supernatural being described in its pages actually exists?
That better?
He didn’t claim there wasn’t, not in that quote anyway? Disbelieving a claim a deity exists is also not itself a belief / claim that no deity exists. I’d need a reason to believe a claim, all i need to remain doubting is that the claim is insufficiently supported by appropriate evidence, and this is and has always been the case for any deity.
if the book is claimed to be the immutable word of infallible deity, then I’d say it being roundly contradicted anywhere by objective scientific facts suggest that core claim is wrong. Or it’s a devious deity that lied to ignorant superstitious humans a few thousand years ago, in which case Occam’s razor would apply.
Based on what?
That was not what was claimed, either the bible is infallible and divinely inspired, or it is not, and if it is contradicted anywhere by scientific facts then it is demonstrably not.
I can’t speak definitively for anyone else here Dan, but I’d suggest that many, if not most of us, have already discarded the Bible. I’d further suggest that many, if not most of us, aren’t troubled over the issue of there being any objective truth to morality, either.
Oh and btw, what’s the fit today, Dan?
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Exactly this. All holy books are vague templates on which to project the needs of the moment.
It isn’t the “what” that makes me think there isn’t one, it’s the “lack of what”. No evidence can be pretty convincing if there isn’t any over a wide breadth of space and time. The fact that you admit the evidence is only in your mind, says more about your mind.