Believing Scripture is 100% true

Faith & Science Conversation
41

Nope. That is not a part of the definition of Christianity in the earliest creed from the ecumenical council of Nicaea.

We accept it as authoritative for Christianity. That much is true. But the exact view we have about scripture varies considerably. Jesus endorsed scripture but He did not even define what that meant, and He urged caution in regards to it as well (John 5).

I believe they did exist. And whether you think they were the first people depends on your definition of people. I think our humanity is more than just a biological species, for we often say of some people that they are inhuman. I think the communication of Adam with God brought the human mind to life, and I think that is our humanity.

That is a misreading of the text. Nowhere in the Bible is there a concept of a planet. The picture of the earth was a flat disk, which only makes sense if the earth refers to something much smaller than a planet.

No. That would be the expectation of those using religion as a tool of power.

Science is not based on proof. But it is based on what is reasonable to believe. So inconsistency with science makes something unreasonable. Furthermore, if you don’t believe God is a liar then you should believe what He is telling us in all the data He sends us from the earth, the sky, and even in our own bodies.

It is what this forum is all about. It was founded by a scientist who became a Christian and many of those here are the same. We see something of value in Christianity but we are not going to let people abuse it for something unreasonable.

42

There are different levels of truth aside from the material factual. A mythical story can convey a dramatic and symbolic truth about ourselves without being a fact of history.

It’s hard to reconcile the idea of real worldwide flood in the Noah story with so many species in the Americas unknown to the biblical writers in the middle east, impossible to fit on a human construction of any reasonable size. There is also evidence that many of the other stories of the kings etc are not factually accurate either when examined by archaeology. That does not detract from certain messages the bible can convey when we read them.

The point is the bible written in different eras with different cultural environments is Sufficient to lead us to the knowledge we need to find salvation and change for ourselves and society, rather than being factually correct in all parts.

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43

That’s something I love about Dr. Michael Heiser – he just goes with the text and doesn’t try to force anything into it.

44

No, it was part of the Fertile Crescent. I’ve read two books about the Black Sea flooding and one did a flow rate analysis through the straits there and concluded that at most the water level rise was possibly a few feet a day at the peak. That’s slow enough people would have seen the water rising and could have packed up and migrated – in fact one book portrayed this slow but steady migration as spreading a bunch of common cultural and technological items. It also noted that people would have noticed fish dying – due to the rapid increase in salinity – which would have added impetus to going somewhere else. But the slow rise – it would have slowed to inches a day as the sea spread out – couldn’t provide the rapidity seen in the Flood accounts, though the inexorable rise and the dying fish (and possibly other creatures) would fit.
That article was interesting especially because one of the books I read reported evidence of villages at levels around 60m below the present sea level, which is about twice what the new data show. The remains found seemed to indicate that lake levels increased at 20cm to 30cm a year for a long time and it was still fresh water, then at some point the Bosporous Sill was overtopped and the rate surged to that much in a day. So the major flood event would have been at the time of the overtopping and prior to that it was just a slow steady rise. That earlier rise would have presumably been due to increased flow from the Danube as continental glaciers melted. This scenario gives a two-stage flood event, which doesn’t fit the Genesis version at all except possibly in that the changing climate could have dumped continual monsoon-style rains, enough so that forty days and forty nights would have been a fair summary.

I’m going to have to see if I can find that other article.

45

The Vulgate hasn’t served as a source since Erasmus published his critical New Testament edition in 1516, except for Roman Catholic versions that stubbornly ignored the better sources.

This reminds me of a Bible translation outfit that had people translating from English into native tongues. I remember reading about that and thinking, “How stupid!” They eventually got their act together and started teaching their teams about two years worth of college-level Greek, but I still shudder at the deviations those earlier efforts would have inevitably produced (and I’m not encouraged by the improvement resulting in a mere two years of Koine Greek).

I forget the verses but I remember in New Testament Greek Readings courses encountering places where adding a comma drastically changed the meaning. How to do punctuation was a big challenge when working with continuous script where the first task is to divide it into words!

= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =

“World wide” doesn’t necessarily mean “planet”. The word choices in the Hebrew text indicate it was a “world wide” flood, but in that phrase “world” means the world known to the writer or possibly to those who experienced it.

This is a serious problem with translators who tend to stick with familiar translations in well-known readings: it inhibits them from changing to match what is known – though in the Flood narrative it was known that the text meant “known world” even back in Newton’s day.

46

Having had 2 years of German and knowing how pitifully poor was in it, I suspect translating from an English translation produced by true lifetime scholars of the language might actually be far superior to the translations from the Greek by those with two years training. Same with Hebrew. I see preachers who had a couple of semesters of seminary Hebrew (or Greek) expound on the meaning of scriptures “in the original Hebrew” as authorities, and the work of who have made a career of it is either not acknowledged or is pushed aside. I know you have extensive training in the languages, so would be interested in what you think the utility of the usual minimal seminary instruction has, and whether it is help or harm.

47

2 Timothy 3:14-16 is a great example of the power of punctuation. This is the ASV:

14 But abide thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a babe thou hast known the sacred writings which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness: that the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every good work.

Here it is without the is which is not in the Greek:
14 But abide thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a babe thou hast known the sacred writings which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. Every scripture inspired of God also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness: that the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every good work.

Here it is without the is which is is not in the Greek and with different punctuation (which is also not in the Greek):
14 But abide thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a babe thou hast known the sacred writings which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus: every scripture inspired of God also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness: that the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every good work.

Just switching a colon for a period changes the meaning completely. With the change, it refers only to the sacred scriptures that Timothy had known since a babe (wouldn’t that be the Septuagint?).

The ubiquitous doctrine of “all scripture is inspired
” relies on the word “is” being added to the text once or twice (while not in the Greek text) and specific punctuation (also not in the Greek text).

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48

Perhaps you are thinking of what Sir Leonard Woolley found during his excavations:

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49

I had fellow students in grad school who’d had just two years of Koine Greek, and it was obvious that they were seriously deficient. On that basis I’ve never been impressed by people getting two years of Koine at a Bible college or seminary. I agree with the approach my first Greek professor used: we learned early Koine that was more like Hebrews that anything else in the New Testament, we broke our teeth on Xenophon and Aristotle, on Plato and Aesop, and only once we could pick up a random Koine text and essentially read it did we tackle reading Mark. One benefit was that this approach gave us perspective that let us see differences in style and vocabulary so we could get the “flavor” of each Gospel in ways that just reading English, or just having the bare essentials for reading Koine, just can’t give.

So I subscribe to the view that two years of Koine is enough to make someone able to screw up in style, and it’s even worse when they start out by reading from the New Testament: they are more treating the Greek as a sort of code for the English they know and never really grasp the thinking behind the Greek. One huge difference is that we learned to read the Greek and think along with the sentence structure while those with only two years of Koine looked at a sentence and set about finding the (primary) verb, using that to determine the subject, and so on, essentially dismantling the Greek and turning it into English. Ive kind of lost much of that knack; I can no longer follow Paul’s run-on sentences in the Greek and the length of what I can read straight out keeps getting shorter.

I’ll just add my story of why I decided to learn to read Greek: as I told the professor when he asked why I wanted to learn Greek, I got tired of hearing a dozen preachers say, “What the Greek means is . . . .” and hear thirteen different interpretations. The only explanation I could figure from that was that they had learned only enough Greek to really screw it up but also to impress people, so I set out to really learn it.

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50

One of the hardest things to learn is how to figure out where an unstated verb – usually a verb of being – should go in a long sentence. It’s more of an art than a science, and there have been numerous doctoral dissertations on the matter. I got fairly good at it but am extremely out of practice – I really envy a couple of friends who ended up working together near the college where we first learned Greek; they got to sit down once a week for an hour and a half with our old Greek professor. I should add that major universities had made offers to him, trying to get him to come teach there, but for several reasons he preferred the small college. He had multiple Master’s degrees and a pair of PhDs, all having to do with Greek (I think he wrote one doctoral dissertation on Homer), and during one of those he learned to not just read the ancient words but to compose and write in Greek (the story goes that he wrote love letters in ‘high’ Koine to his future wife, including some poetry).

Anyway, it’s pretty obvious in the Greek () why the verse is clumsy as usually set down: the “and”, sometimes translated “also”, is missing in a bunch of ancient manuscripts. The sentence reads far better without it, which is in its favor for being genuine, but it also changes the meaning of the verse, which is in favor of it being introduced and not original. Without it, the verse pretty plainly says, "All God-breathed scripture . . . " followed by an understood verb of being, and not “Every scripture is God-breathed”. It’s easy to see why someone would insert it since its presence supports a high view of inspiration, but harder to see why someone would drop it.

So here’s how it reads if you take out the “and”/“also”:

" wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus: every scripture inspired of God profitable for teaching . . . ."

In that version it’s obvious where the understood “is” belongs!

BTW, speaking of punctuation, that’s one of my biggest complaints about online interlinear versions; with some it’s obvious that they have an agenda – one is definitely following the KJV. The best interlinear I’ve ever seen had no punctuation, which forces the reader to think through the Greek and figure out where punctuation belongs (which brings me to a pet peeve about modern translations: They chop a lot of Paul’s long sentences up into pieces, which all too often loses the point he’s making or at least the tight links in his argument. I forget the longest sentence he wrote, but my favorite is the opening of Romans; the first sentence there is around 120 words, and chopping it up kills some of the point Paul is making).

At any rate, my gut reaction on this passage is that the “and” doesn’t belong there because the sentence reads far more smoothly without it and there’s a clear theological reason why someone would insert it. So “All scripture is inspired” isn’t correct; it should be “All inspired scripture is . . . .”

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51

That’s very familiar; I think I first read that as a student in a university geology course – the professor was also a deacon (or something like that) at the nearby Episcopal church who taught a Sunday School class on the Pentateuch, and he would present things like this in class for us to do extra reading. At the time he was an advocate of the Black Sea flood as Noah’s but saw some problems with it. This is darned close to the map he showed us:

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My memory is saying that what I saw was more like this – I added in what I recall:

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Of course there’s Ballard (of Titanic fame) who claims undersea evidence that the Black Sea expanded at a rate of a mile a day and reports evidence of structures along an ancient shoreline.

Though even if there was a flood that ‘only’ covered the “Minimum Extent” shown, that’s a pretty massive event and as Woolley put it, that would have covered their whole world.

Interestingly, I came across an article that claimed that II Peter indicates the Flood was local/regional; I’m going to have to wade into the Greek on that.

52

II Peter refers to the flood being on the world of the ungodly, the “world” being kosmos, with its wide range of meaning even within the NT. The most common usage seems (from the perspective of one whose Greek is limited to looking up in a concordance) to be “world” in the negative theological sense of humanity collectively oppose to God and thus not geographically informative at all.

Carol Hill (Grand Canyon Caving and Other Adventures: An Interview with Carol Hill - BioLogos) has some detailed models of how a flood covering Mesopotamia could work, with articles in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith and her book on a worldview approach to science and scripture.

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53

Can i suggest that there is a big problem with your theory here


  1. Do you honestly believe that God came down and was born a baby, died on the cross, was ressurected, and then ascended back into heaven?

Isnt that all a physical impossibility?

  1. Have you ever seen the devil?

  2. Do you really believe that a man who rose into heaven will oneday come back in the clouds of heaven and that all the good people will rise up into the sky to join him
incl those who have been dead and rotted away to mere bones in the ground? What about those whove been eaten by animals, or burned and their ashes scattered? Are these not physical impossibilities?

  3. Next time you are on a high hill or mountain, take a look at the horizon
do you honestly think a man can come down from out of the sky and every eye will see him all at once?

Yours is an illogical argument of faith
as is Noahs flood and yet there is a vast amount of evidence for the flood
the biggest being the huge amounts of sedimentry deposits, fossil fuel deposits all around the globe, enormous amounts of evidence for catastrophic flooding
the argument is really over time not that there was a catastrophic event at some point. There are a number of secularists who claim a large meteorite hit the earth at some point in the past, the impact causing a massive tidal surge and dust cloud, volcanic activity etc. Even if that were true, wouldnt you as a TEist make the connection God must have caused that to happen? Then the question even for you is, why did a loving God allow an uncontrolled event to wipe out almost all life on earth and practially destroy the planet
and yet His word says He plans on doing it again (read the Old Testament book of Daniel, then go and read Revelation).

Something doesnt add up with your theory here. The bible preaches global aniihilationism due to sin.

54

At its base “kosmos” is the organized world. Here’s the important phrase:

ᜁ τότΔ ÎșÏŒÏƒÎŒÎżÏ‚

Literally, “the at that time organized world”, which becomes “the known world at the time”.

Given that the meaning of the Hebrew word in Genesis 6 in context is “known world”, I’m landing with the above translation.

That’s another good option; as I recall, that’s how we went with it in grad school.

My headache is too bad at present to delve into the article you linked.

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55

Not in the Hebrew it doesn’t, and probably not in the Greek – the best rendition is “the known world”.
Heck, an argument could be made that the Flood only covered the parts of the Earth where the Nephilim lived, since they are portrayed as the source of the upwelling of wickedness.

Besides which, they didn’t know the Earth was a globe. If you want to be an actual literalist, you have to maintain that the Flood covered the Earth-disk and the waters backed up against the bronze dome.

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56

That article has a great definition of worldview:

At that time I had never heard of worldview, but came to understand that by “worldview” they meant “the basic way of interpreting things and events that pervade a culture so thoroughly that it becomes a culture’s concept of reality—what is good, what is important, what is sacred, what is real.

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57

The problem for the common reader is that we have little or no knowledge of the translator or the texts they used
 Probably 99% of Christians have not even queried the validity of the texts they read or use.
Christ talked about us needing to have the faith of a child. Intellect is often detrimental to faith
If you haven’t even seen the discrepancies between modern knowledge and Scripture you won’t worry about it.

Richard

58

This is exactly the kind of thinking that I had to deconstruct in order to progress my career above a minimum wage.

Jesus’s command to become like little children is NOT an anti-intellectual manifesto. To portray it as if it were is to take it right out of context and miss the point that He was actually making. Here are the relevant verses—Matthew 18:1-5:

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

Jesus’s command to become like little children was in response to a specific question that His disciples were constantly bickering about: “Who is the greatest?” His point about little children was to tell them to stop thinking in terms of jockeying for power and position. Children are anything but in charge. They are accountable to everyone and responsible for no-one. They have rules and restrictions that adults don’t. They lack rights that adults enjoy. They have to go to bed early. They are not allowed to drive or to vote. They have to go to school. All in all, they are Just Another Brick In The Wall.

Describing intellect as “often detrimental to faith” is to turn faith into the glorification of gullibility and wilful ignorance. The Bible tells us that we are to move beyond childish thinking and on to a mature faith, informed and tempered by wisdom (e.g. Hebrews 6:1-3). We are also told elsewhere (e.g. 1 John 4:1) not to believe every spirit, but to test the spirits to see which are from God. Pastors and Bible teachers should be teaching us to exercise faith and intellect together in ways that complement each other and build each other up, not to view them as some sort of dichotomy where you can only have one but not the other.

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59

Ouch.
Talk about jumping.

Just as it is harder for a rich person to reach the kingdom of Heaven, Intellect can be a hindrance as well. This is not claiming that you cannot use intellect if you have it, just as Jesus was not necessary claiming that if you have money you can’t be a Christian. It is about using what you have. However, there are those who try and bamboozle others with their learning and intellect and in doing so cause more harm than good. Like minds and all that.
Recently several preachers at my church have tried to emphasise the way the Christmas story has been exaggerated or enhanced as if they are trying to debunk the Nativity. For what purpose? It wasn’t clear. It was more like information for information’s sake. Criticism for criticism’s sake serves no purpose. Likewise honing in on apparent conflicts between science and scripture. Rectifying it may be easy for you, but it can cause a stumbling block to others and that is something Christ warns against.
It is similar to the journalistic sensationalism approach. Sometimes it is better not to know but once you do know then you have to resolve it. Ignorance really can be bliss. It is only when you try and brush away what you know, or put your head in the sand that it becomes a problem

Richard

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60

Intellect in itself cannot be a stumbling block. Paying attention to and valuing the wrong things is what causes people to stumble. Maybe folks with higher intellect just have more things that can distract them from what they should be paying attention to. Those who vaunt their own prowess and opinions are only obvious examples of that (gifted with intellect or not ; - ).

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