That may be, but a scientifically inaccurate book tends to make people think that the rest of the book is inaccurate as well.
No, but it does mean people have to be careful in evaluating such.
Funny, I’d wager that a group of ancient people who knew very little about natural science would not likely know much about a Supreme being.
Quite the contrary! A scientifically accurate world view which does not account for a Supreme Being in any direct way available to the methods of science IS evidence for the absence of one.
I agree. rat_spit would have been more accurate to say that science not describing a supreme being doesn’t rule a supreme being out. But if empirical observation methods don’t see a supreme being, the best you can say about it is that it’s not designed for that purpose and the worst you can say is that it strongly suggests the absence of any such being.
I would not in any case expect science to have anything to say about the a presumed supernatural ream because it deals in the natural realm. Since so far as we are aware, the supernatural is purely a construct of the human imagination, it’s no great loss.
As to the ancients knowing “a lot” about deities, I would suggest that they lacked our vocabulary and framing and so in trying to describe what they had no tools to quantify, they resorted to language about the divine. It’s the same reason the Bible can only speak of kings and despots and can only envision God as a glorified version of that. It’s all they knew. It’s also why the Bible speaks of slavery as a given rather than a moral wrong to be eradicated – there was at that time no coherent way to frame a discussion of slavery other than to assume it as a given.
The rationale that one’s own entirely subjective experiences are real, would also leave no unbiased reason to dismiss those of others, and not just for deities people have imagined.
I think I like Jordan Peterson’s general approach that there is extreme value in trying to understand the moral of the myths and symbols. They are a to the Christian thinker what Zen koans are to the Zen Buddhist.
So you withhold your belief because there is a lack of evidence?
Sure. The Bible was written by men. Men are fallible. Even men who say “this book is fallible” are fallible. So, who would trust what they say. I think the value in the stories told in the Bible are symbolic.
When The Supreme Being intervenes in a man’s life He can convince Him of whatever He pleases to whatever end satisfies Him. However When a civilization is aware of the true natural order of the world, then it’s possible that God will choose not to simplify the message for the sake of import. Pick any item in the Bible which you think was revealed to man by God and simultaneously turns out to be objectively contradictory to what we now know about the world. The seven day creation, for example. It turns out not to be true. This it is a weak form of evidence for the existence of God or the nature of God. The question that remains is: why would God have revealed Himself as such to the author of Genesis? What purpose would it have served at that time?
It can be divinely inspired and still fallible. It was created by men.
Why would I believe any claim without sufficient evidence.
This is not evidence, it is a subjective unevidenced claim.
You evaded the question, and offered up a straw man? A lack of supporting evidence is the best reason I can think of to disbelieve any claim.
So it’s based on several more bare unevidenced claims, you can’t prop up an unevidenced caim with more unevidenced claims.
I am an atheist, if I thought that then I’d not be an atheist, so this is a rather glaring straw man.
There are many parts of the bible that are roundly contradicted by scientific fact. Something cannot be immutable truth from an infallible deity, and be wrong.
I don’t accept the premise of the question, as it assumes without any objective evidence there is any deity to reveal itself.
You need to demonstrate any deity exists to inspire anything first, with something more than unevidenced claims.
“Evidence of absence and absence of evidence are similar but distinct concepts. This distinction is captured in the aphorism “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” This antimetabole is often attributed to Martin Rees or Carl Sagan, but a version appeared as early as 1888 in a writing by William Wright.[1] In Sagan’s words, the expression is a critique of the “impatience with ambiguity” exhibited by appeals to ignorance.[2] Despite what the expression may seem to imply, a lack of evidence can be informative. For example, when testing a new drug, if no harmful effects are observed then this suggests that the drug is safe.[3] This is because, if the drug were harmful, evidence of that fact can be expected to turn up during testing. The expectation of evidence makes its absence significant.[4] “
So an absence of evidence where one might expect some is significant, and certainly a good reason to withhold belief from any claim, why would one invest belief in a claim unsupported by evidence, and what other than bias could one cite then for disbelieving anything?
Because the evidence may not be available at the time but your gut instinct or your conscience tells you it’s true.
Do you appreciate artwork Sheldon? Do you think an abstract painting can convey truth?
Maybe your question was malformed. You may accuse me of evasion, but i answered the question in good faith. Perhaps your subjective interpretation of my meaning does not align with my intention.
I just did. Try to stop me.
Ah. I misspoke. Any story in the Bible where the assumption is that God revealed it
I’ve already admitted that the authors of the Bible were fallible.
Would you accuse the author of the Bible of complicit dishonesty and tale bearing?
I am not a supreme being. I do not have the supreme power, will or wisdom to “demonstrate” the existence of a supreme being.
No they don’t, they might simply involve subjective bias, without any evidence that’s not an open minded rationale.
You claimed that:
I didn’t say you can’t appreciate the bibles stories as symbolism, only that your claim they “had value as symbolism” is not evidence they were true.
I disagree, the original claim is not “propped up” by making more unevidenced claims.
Is just that an assumption, and if the assumption is that these “stories” are the immutable word of an infallible deity, then they cannot be ever be wrong, and some of there demonstrable are, as they contradict scientific facts.
I don’t care to speculate without evidence, this also is not relevant to my point.
Again then I don’t accept any deity exists, that no one can demonstrate any deity exists with anything beyond bare subjective claims, is why I remain disbelieving.
Treating claims by one’s parents any differently to any other claims is again simply bias. So no, bias is never a good reason to believe unevidenced claims, if one cares about the truth. Science uses the absence of evidence to confirm ideas, as it does in the example above, so it is overly simplistic to assume that an absence of evidence if never evidence of absence. As that quote explains.
If your name isn’t Dan, and you wrote the above in a thread about someone called Dan, calling yourself Dan (twice) then that leaves me doubting the sincerity of ALL that you write. An open admission of lying to me isn’t what I would consider to be the best basis of an open and honest dialogue between us.
On the basis of that logic, the gut instinct and conscience of anyone is of equal value to anyone else’s. Which leaves us understanding nothing new and understanding nothing better than when we first started. Therefore relying only on one’s gut and one’s instinct is of little value.
That is why the objectivity of science is so much more useful and of more value. The principle of trying to minimise subjectivity and to maximise objectivity is what has made science so successful at accurately describing the natural world and the wider universe.
So, while going with the subjective may be more personally satisfying, doing so rarely tells us anything useful about reality.
Would you call your conscience a subjectively biased source of belief?
Where do I claim that the symbolic stories in the Bible are true. I’ve made no such claim.
Why not?
God can’t be wrong? He’s omnipotent. He can be anything He likes.
Have it your way
Yeah. I don’t disagree. I think the only thing which would convince you is a demonstration from God Himself.
Well, feel free to hold on to your lack of evidence. I would also likely withhold belief in God had I not been given evidence. In science all it takes is one piece of evidence to disprove a hypothesis. You’re essentially committing the black swan fallacy.
To answer your question (and seeing the answer is obvious - not your strongest suit so it seems) - a limited being cannot do what a supreme being can do because it is LIMITED.
thus the demonstration of a supreme being would require a supreme act of power, will or intelligence. (Not something limited bent can do).
How else are you going to comprehend the nature of a supreme being except via a supreme demonstration?
Not if you haven’t received a revelation from them and you are just making any old shit up, no it wouldn’t.
I don’t believe the moral conclusions I arrive at are objectively true, only reflective of how I should like the world to be and people to behave.
If you read the exchange carefully you will see that I never once said you did, you said they “have value to you”, and of course one could say the same for Harry Potter novels, I merely pointed out that subjectively attaching value to the texts does not make any claims in them true.
Because 0 plus 0 remains 0, no matter how many 0’s you try to add, no evidence remains no evidence, extra unevidenced claims don’t add anything.
I don’t believe in any deity or deities, but if one makes the claim a deity can’t be wrong, and the bible is demonstrably wrong, then it follows that it (the bible) is not the immutable word of that deity, and that was my original point.
I will accept sufficient and sufficiently objective evidence, where it comes from would be less important than the quality of that evidence. If any deity exists and can demonstrate its existence to me, then it has failed to do so, and this is true of theists claiming deities exist. If I were to accept a bare claim for subjective experience from you, I’d have to accept it from all such claims, a preposterous notion, to accept one or some and not others is simply bias, and as I said this would not be an open minded rationale. Disbelieving all such claims is objectively consistent.
No. You are wrong and you do not have access to my thoughts.
I believed (past tense, please note) that you were Dan, not because of any flaws in any arguments he might have made, but because I did the honest thing and took you at your word. Just as you have taken me at my word and have believed that my middle name is Walter.
Therefore, the above was not an example of reductio ad absurdum (please note how to spell that properly) but was simply a demonstration of the trust that I put in you.
