As an atheist, I don’t believe in evil because it’s largely a religious concept. Here’s a definition from the web:
“Biblically speaking, moral “evil” is that which is opposed to God, that which is the opposite of God, and that which is contrary to God. Evil does not exist as a separate entity except in its relationship to God or good. All goodness originates in God and is from God. Anything that opposes God is evil. Evil denies that God exists or contradicts or perverts what God says.”
My use of the word “bad” is a more accurate substitute for the word “evil”.
I understand that I can’t ask you a religious concept. I am curious about your references for things being bad or not. How do you construct your scale?
We seem to have diverged from the original OP. There would appear to be a disagreement about what constitutes truth?
Is truth literal? I do not think it has to be so. And yet it would seem that to some people , not accepting the literal view is tantamount to claiming falsehood.
It seems pertinent to the OP to me. The question of if or how we believe the Bible is “100%” true very much hinges on all these questions - the first of which ought to be: If we aren’t 100% infallible readers / interpreters / comprehenders, then it’s already a given that the communication won’t be 100% truth (not by the time it’s received and knocked around in our fallible noggins. So even if it was totally true that scriptures give nothing but pure truth, that claim would be meaningless since there are no perfect receivers to receive, much less understand, much less apply it. If one adds the purest homemade vanilla extract to some pond water, one need not argue over how good or perfect the vanilla was - it’s in the pond water now.
I really like how Zahnd stated it in his poem … focusing on literal truth is just a not-very-subtle way to make sure you’re probably missing the entire point of the story. Learning to read the symbolism and metaphor isn’t a matter of a bit of ‘poetic dabbling’ … it’s even just learning how to read the genre being written - a basic skill hand-waved away by literalists of both fundamentalist and skeptical varieties.
The notion of good and bad (or evil) deals with acts by us human beings. Our acts may be understood as good or evil and because these acts more or less define who and what we are, we talk of good and evil as if these were “things”.
The distinction between good and evil is more or less similar for atheists and theists. The difference(s) are noticed when we talk of sin and repentance. A Christian defines sin as breaking the Law, which includes do not steal, kill, lie, commit adultery, and so on, summarized by the Ten Commandments and sections such as the sermon on the mount. This distinction includes consequences - the Christian is offered forgiveness if he repents and ceases to commit bad acts. This repentance requires a complete change both in act and intent. The Christian is also taught that if he intentionally sins he would cut himself of from God. God offers His forgiveness to all who seek it.
My understanding is that atheists regard bad acts as criminal and are content with society’s response of law and order administered by a system of justice. I think Christins are ok with this - they simply have another layer of faith. Going to heaven with a favourite puppy is not a serious notion.
The Apostle Paul doesn’t – he says that breaking the Law is sin, but he doesn’t restrict sin to breaking the Law.
Most sin is intentional, if only the failure to choose to do good. God has prepared good works for us to do, and if we skip them that’s usually intentional sin. Just as an example, where I live people think nothing of taking a shopping cart four blocks to put groceries in their car but don’t bother to take the cart back; if I come across a cart left like that it’s plainly a good work God has put in my path, and not wheeling that cart back to the store is a deliberate choice to not do that good work.
But it doesn’t cut me off from God to neglect that, it just darkens the relationship somewhat.
How would you know it is a good work put there by God? If we extend this, then everyone who does not return carts has darkened their relationship with God - but what if, by taking the cart back, you have used time needed to perform an important task? Your neglect may result in bad (sinful) outcomes.
I have stated the Law as summarized and also taught as becoming like Christ (such as, for example, blessed are the peacemakers).
Intentional acts need to be studied and a judgement by others if they are good or evil requires a rigorous assessment of facts. God otoh knows the heart and soul, and can determine if the person acted with good or evil intent.
Don’t they pay a person to do that? And at $8 for eggs they should if not!
I have actually done far worse and stolen two shopping carts. Occasionally stores don’t have bags and a big grocery haul at Walmart without bags is not fun to put in the minivan and drive home. So twice I just took the liberty of lifting and putting the whole shopping cart filled with groceries in my van and brought it home. I even brought it to school once the next day and used it to bring bowling balls outside we rolled down an incline as part of a lab.
I did bring them back to the store within a few days each time though so maybe “borrowed” is the correct term? Not sure. I think that ups my street credit though. I’m pretty much a hardened criminal. Hide yo kids, hide yo wide.
To roam town and find carts people left blocks away? I’ve never found a store that does so; they pay people to round them up in the parking around the store.
And yet you are convinced in literal evolutionary science as truth. Its not possible that a written historical account which dissagrees with your interpretstion of science has more credibility?
The story is a complete one…but not when you cut out the parts that dissagree with darwinian nonsense.
The entire theme of the bible is an eternal no death, no suffering creation ruined by the curse of sin…a saviour dying on the cross for atonement, redemption and restoration, in a new heavens and a new earth where there will be no more pain or suffering or death and where the wolf will lie next to the lamb.
The real error is that evolution by definition demands we evolve into our own salvation which is theological horse#$%@!
Its no wonder Hitler had this idea of a white skinned blue eyed super race ruling the world.
Adam, you need to pay attention: I have repeatedly said I don’t care about evolution. And Mervin’s post that you quoted had nothing to do with it either – we were both talking about the text of scripture, something you refuse to deal with.
What “written historical account”? Nothing in the Old Testament scriptures qualifies if you’re using the modern definition of history. Beside that, who was there to observe and confirm that the writers got their facts straight?
I cut nothing out; that’s the method of YECists who cut out the entire text by trying to make it something it isn’t.
You really ought to spend a few hours listening to Dr. Michael Heiser talk about scripture and inspiration – he repeatedly hammers home the point that we have to let scripture be what it is, not what we want it to be.
That’s not in the text – what’s in the text is about human suffering and death. And nowhere does it say that the Creation is ruined, only that it is burdened – and we are that burden.
No, that’s something you made up. No one here has said that, and I doubt you can find any scientist who says it either.
There isn’t some “credibility contest” between those two things - it isn’t some “zero-sum” game between history or science. Narratives from within both will stand or fall to their own methods (or ‘masters’). If you’ve learned anything at all from this site, please at least take that on board for consideration. Just because I choose to trust my eyes to help me avoid a pothole in the road doesn’t suddenly mean I’ve stopped trusting God for that moment in my life. There is no contest between these kinds of considerations. Only different contexts and methods.
People are convinced of evolution for the same reasons that they are convinced that:
–Germs cause diseases
–The Earth moves about the Sun
–Matter is made up of atoms with electron shells and positively charged nuclei
Evolution is as much a reality as those other scientific conclusions. If scripture says that evolution did not happen then scripture would be false in the same way scripture would be false if it said that the Sun moved about the Earth.
This is why YEC is such a problem. It demonstrates that the Bible can’t be 100% true. If the Bible says something about the physical world that is false it isn’t the physical world that is wrong. The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal.
The reason evolution is taught is because of the mountains of evidence backing it, the very same reason those other things are taught in science class.
With the advent of comparative genomics we can be very, very certain about common ancestry for large groups of species, such as common ancestry of vertebrates. With shared genetic and metabolic systems between all life, universal common ancestry is also well evidenced.
“Arguments against macroevolution, based on so-called gaps in the fossil records, are also profoundly weakened by the much more detailed and digital information revealed from the study of genomes. Outside of a time machine, Darwin could hardly have imagined a more powerful data set than comparative genomics to confirm his theory.”–Dr. Francis Collins, “Faith and the Human Genome”
That’s from the guy who ran the NIH Human Genome Project and former head of the US National Institutes of Health, the main funding agency for the biomedical sciences in the US.
How have you been forgotten?
YEC combines theology and science. For YEC, if the Earth really is billions of years old and if life really did evolve to the extent described by the theory of evolution then the Bible is false. @adamjedgar has said as much.
The approach taken by TE and EC is that the Bible doesn’t need to be interpreted in such a literal sense. This preserves the Bible’s accuracy. This is the approach taken by Cardinal Bellarmine during Galileo’s time. Instead of dying on the Geocentric hill, he admitted that if the Earth really does move about the Sun then he would have to revisit his interpretations of scripture rather than have demonstrable facts contradict Scripture.
" Third, I say that, if there were a real proof that the Sun is in the centre of the universe, that the Earth is in the third sphere, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and we should rather have to say that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true."–Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615
