How can the scientific individual believe God exists when Bible claims surrounding the notion of salvation are unscientific?

Faith & Science Conversation
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my understanding of the beliefs here is that we know God exists because we can see evidences of Him through science and that the complexity of what we observe around us is such that God must exist.

The trouble is, science tends to disallow almost everything in the bible related to God and also to salvation!

for example, the bible claims:

  1. that God spoke things into existence
  2. That God is spirit…consciousness without a physical body
  3. a spirit is able to incarnate into bodily form and dwell among us, then die physically and turn back into a spirit again whilst retaining consciousness (examples; Christ, the angel of the Lord, man fighting with Jacob etc)
  4. that spirit consciousness (God) claims that physical forms can be transformed in an instant and be gathered up to meet him in the sky and then, against the fundamental scientific absolute called gravity, travel off into space, also where there is no atmosphere.

Now it gets worse…

How does God the Father talk without a physcial voicebox given he is a spirit?

If he uses telepathy of something like that, given our experiences with Information Technology, “WIFII” requires a physical device to both generate the information and then broadcast it!

Google AI
The human voice box, or larynx, produces sound when air from the lungs vibrates the vocal cords, which are two bands of muscle within the larynx. These vibrations create a “buzzy” sound that’s then shaped and amplified by the vocal tract (throat, mouth, and nasal passages) to form speech

From what I’m reading in the description of the human voice box, it seems to me that it is not scientifically possible for a spirit to talk.

So science doesn’t appear to support the following:

  1. A spirit God can talk without a physical voicebox air being forced through it to form sound waves
  2. real testable evidence of human consciousness existing outside of a body
  3. floating off into space without propulsion in defying of the laws of gravity
  4. a human that breathes air surviving in a vacuum (whilst floating off into space against the laws of gravity)
  5. that sin came into this world and brought only spiritual death with it (The New Testament specifically states that Christ died physically on the cross and was physically raised…" the empty tomb")
  6. that every eye will see him (given billions are dead at the time, they wont see anything…theyre rotted dead corpses, bones, and/or chemicals inside the bodies of predatory animals that have eaten some of them
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But … God does have a voicebox! Millions of them in fact! As the Creator of voice boxes there is a virtually unlimited supply! Now … as to how obedient each of us is in speaking God’s words in any given situation … that’s an excellent question for each of us to be reflecting on for ourselves. But God will always reserve some prophets to speak the necessary warnings to each nation and community that needs to hear it.

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That does not address the question Mervin…how did those individuals “hear it” from God in the first place?

If you claim:

  1. visions/dreams - im going to respond by again saying, our experience in Information Technology tells us that “WIFI” requires a physical device to facilitate data flow
  2. If you claim God spoke to them directly (face to face as he did with Moses) - he is spirit…no scientific means of communication because a spirit cannot push air, a liquid which has mass and volume, through vocal chords producing sound waves that travel outside the body through that same air.

I suspect that science based Christians really havent thought about the significant dilemma there. The notion of a talking spirit is a scientific myth.

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Well there are books that exist and podcasts and thousands of comments in these threads that basically addresses this “issue” in several different ways.

So some of those things are simply claims I don’t believe in whatsoever. Like taking revelation literally. It seems to me that it’s obviously not meant to be taken literally and I think the left behind series led more to those interpretations than the Bible itself.

Some of those things are clearly mythicized history. Some is hyperbolic. Some is simply a byproduct of accomondationism.

Some of it simply is supernatural and we have to accept it by faith not evidence.

Some of us also don’t agree in general with your premises.

Such as I don’t think god became a human. I don’t think Jesus was god the father playing dumb in human form. I think Jesus was 100% man, was born with a biological father that was not Joseph. I think he was given a name above all by god. I think the word became flesh, which is the wisdom of god being manifested in Jewish man.

I think spirit just means life and is understood as breath and wind. I think soul just means a living body, not a corpse.

I obviously don’t believe in the rapture.

How did God talk. No idea. Has nothing to do with science. Until he does it himself with me it’s faith based. I lean more towards it’s probably hyperbolic. And if not… guess what…. The theory of evolution is still true and it’s based on hundreds of thousands of facts.

Bible also says god came down from above to see what Babel was about…… so is heaven literally above our flat earth beyond the dome. Could God not really see what was happening from so far away and so he had to come closer,

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these are all good points, however a couple of issues:

  1. Evolutionary Creationism cannot explain the notion that not a single shred of the biblical salvation story is either scientific or even supported by science. Science denies the entire plan of salvation story for the reasons listed in the O.P and many more. Examples:
  • young earth creationism promoted by the genealogies in scripture,
  • Noah’s Flood,
  • The Exodus,
  • Pigs becoming demon possessed and drowning themselves in the sea,
  • Paul shaking off a poisonous snake bite and suffering no ill effects ( a claim debunked by the scientific fact there has never been poisonous deadly snakes on the isle of Malta)
  • The apostle Peter causing a married couple, hours apart, to drop dead at his feet because they lied to God in front of him
  • John the Revelator claiming we shall see the Lamb coming in the clouds of Heaven (Rev 1:7…he was shown this in vision and given the prior statements in the New Testament regarding the Second Coming, including from Christ Himself, this is 100% a claim of a literal future event that even has direct theological ties to Genesis Chapter 4 when God told Eve and the Serpent “you shall bite his heal, he will crush your head”
  1. It is a seriously deficient statement to simply pass this off as requiring faith. The reason that is untenable is because if biblical genealogies and patriarchs/prophets/kings based timeline for young age earth, Noah’s flood, destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses, the Exodus, Tabernacle in the Sinai Desert, conquest of Canaan…that these are all nonliteral because science says so…how can TEism with its scientific foundations have no problem with the notion that a spirit can talk despite it having absolutely no capacity to manipulate air through vocal chords in order to even make sound!

Let me add, this isn’t really a question of YEC vs TE…its far bigger than that. This question demands a serious answer to the scientific dilemma of God and in particular, the notion of Salvation. We cannot pretend there is a Santa Clause, we know he doesn’t exist and that can be demonstrated using science very easily:

  1. reindeers cant fly
  2. a fat man in a red jacket cannot fit down brick chimneys
  3. a sleigh being towed by ropes wont “float along” behind anything that isnt travelling at a very great speed…so how the heck does it land on and take off from a pitched house roof?
  4. Elves - Google AI states…There is no scientific or historical evidence to support the existence of elves as a real species.
  5. i hope no one makes the suggestion that spirit can mean wind. That only creates another dilemma…wind cannot got through walls unless it essentially destroys said walls first…so God as wind going through walls is untenable scientifically. Oh and then we have

1 Kings 19:11-13 All at once, a strong wind shook the mountain and shattered the rocks. But the Lord was not in the wind… And after the fire the sound of a low whisper … And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”.*

The above story of Elijah strongly suggests almost certainly any biblical figure who heard voices can be defined by modern medical science as:

google AI again here…

AI Overview

Learn more

A person who hears voices that others cannot is experiencing an auditory hallucination, which can be a symptom of various mental health conditions, but not always.

Here’s a more detailed explanation:

  • Auditory Hallucinations:

These are perceptions of sounds, specifically voices, that are not actually present.

  • Mental Health Conditions:

Auditory hallucinations can be associated with conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and severe depression, among others.

So the point of this entire O.P is challenging us to consider that following the writings of the bible in a scientific manner is also placing ones faith in the “auditory hallucinations” of ancient individual’s and that therefore, the entire story is just that…a story (of hallucinations) from which an entire world view has erupted.

a caveat - my faith isnt scientific…just like many here, i recognize faith and science don’t mix. I have a strong faith in God and I am committed to Christianity.

My aim here is to challenge myself and others here by very directly, bluntly, and uncomfortably arguing with some pretty sound evidence, that the notion of God is scientific nonsense!

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I think you are misunderstanding science. Science does NOT say that God is scientific nonsense. If someone claims that, he has jumped from science to an ideological worldview - it would be an attempt to seriously distort and abuse science.

Science is limited by the methods it uses. If you cannot observe, measure or calculate something, it is beyond science until someone invents a novel method that extends the limits of science. Currently, science does not have a reliable way to observe, measure or calculate an invisible God. As long as God does not act like a slot machine, always answering in a similar manner when someone puts a coin (/prayer, etc) into the machine, it is not possible to show scientifically that God exists or does not exist, or that He acted vs. did not act. The best scientific research could do is to show that a miracle is a statistical outlier, far from the other observation points, but science could not conclude what was the cause of that single miraculous event.

Honest scientists respect the limits of science and do not try to abuse science to claim that God either does not exist or exists. Some scientists are atheists, some are believers, some are agnostics but the reasons for their faith or lack of faith are something else than what science can conclude.

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No this is only a question of YECism versus just accepting logic.

So YECism is a specific form of Christia and how someone essentially reads Genesis 1-11. It’s concordism built off of bad plain text reading of the Bible that ignores all and any contextual analysis coupled with not having any significant grasp of science to the point I literally know 6th graders with far superior comprehension and application of logic.

So you mentioned that science and faith has absolutely nothing to do with proving or disproving the other unless someone crested a contentious belief between them.

So like you said , science has absolutely nothing to do with my faith. Not with ethics, not with anything. I think modern ethics is far superior to Biblical ethics. The Bible is not holy to me. The stories are not special to me.the Bible is not any more truthful than Harry Potter, lord of the Rings, the Hindu texts or whatever religious belief shows up 10,000 years from now if any. I take every story in the Bible with a grain of including what they wrote about Jesus. I take almost nothing in the Bible literally.

For me, I simply have faith and always have and I doubt it’s ever going anywhere. I will most likely always believe in God even if it plays next to no role in my life. The god I believe in is not the Christian god. The god I believe in is not the Jewish god. The god I believe in is not the Hindu god, a Viking god, or any god from any faith to ever exist. The god I believe in is the god of all those faiths. A god who revealed himself to all people of all kinds and those people includes not just ancient Jews and Hindus, not just indigenous people in America and throughout Asia, but also Neanderthals, but not just ancient humans but chimpanzees and gorillas and more than just primates but wolves, fish, jellyfish, barnacles, and not just animals, but the god of trees and mushrooms and slime molds. The god of anything that shows some form of wanting to survive.

I think this god is real and that there is no scientific , historical or any thing of any significance to support it. All evidence is unverifiable, ancedotal and able to be dismissed and that’s ok. I don’t believe in God because of evidence. I believe in God simply because I believe in God. Does not matter how illogical I think it is. Does not matter if I want to or not. Logically, I think all of it is a lie. I think when we die we are dead and that’s it. There is no ghosts or afterlife or reincarnation. So I hold this annoying position and there is nothing that can be done about. No pill, no therapy, no logic exercise.

So I think this is probably the truth.

I have a delusion that is not going away and that delusion is that I believe in a god despite all logic pointing towards there being absolutely no god. But just because I recognize it’s a delusion does not change the fact that I have it and since I have it and since it’s not going anywhere subconsciously my default is to view the world through it. As I’ve came to understand this fact more and more, that my faith is a delusion, but it’s not going anywhere. It has lead me to understanding religion in different ways that grows increasingly let literal day by day. But none of this bothers me because I live on a planet where this delusion comes at no cost to me. It’s even beneficial. The overwhelming majority of people share in a similar delusion. They believe in this or that god, this prayers or that ritual or that the number 13 is unlucky and you need to leave rice out for the board of your ancestor and so on. Even open hardlined atheists often admit they too feel the pull of this delusion.

Those who don’t believe , the agnostic atheists, also realize that the bulk of this world believes in these delusions and they often have little delusions of their own. Hope in something to be true even if there is non evidence for it. Yet… no evidence to support this yet but my hypothesis is… type of stuff.

So overtime my faith has changed. Not quite as much as you think. Even as a teen I realized that prayer seems to do nothing for anyone. But yet you believe and you believe that by communicating with this being you are able to better organize your thoughts and meditate on it.

Anyways. That’s what my faith is so completely intact.
I don’t even remotely struggle with is god real. I don’t wake up and ever feel any dread about it. The reason why pisses off everyone’s. Christians and atheists alike.

My faith is indestructible because i simply choose to believe it despite how absolutely stupid it is, I choose to believe and it does not matter that it’s delusional lens because it has no negative side effects in my life.

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I think you have it wrong, in terms of finality. Science can spark a curiosity for God but it cannot confirm or deny Him. Christian faith is still based on Scripture, because that is where we find the Gospel.

The “trick” is to get past the objectivity and empiricalism of science

It would appear that some replace that with their view of Scripture. Scripture becomes the “true” data that they can build on, but always it will be validated by Science ,so that when Scripture confronts science, science over rules it. (Because Scripture is not about science)

The net result is that all the quotations in creation will not affect them because they do not consider Scripture as a valid crit of science.

“Salvation!” is not a valid subject for science so it is not accessed when considering it.

The only problem I perceive is when Scripture is imposed on other aspects of life like morality and/ or sinfulness. Because, then they are doing exactly whqt you do and imposing Scrioture over what can be seen and understood, and it makes no sense to me how they can do it. (and still criticise YECs)

Richard

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Nope – some people claim that science can do such a thing, but it is an unscientific claim every time because science only deals with what it can detect and measure.

Attention to detail: the statement is “God is spirit”, not “a spirit”. Using the indefinite article suggests that God is just one member of the class “spirit” and thus has limits by which He can be defined. But it is lesser spirits that have such limits; they are finite spirits, but He is infinite, and thus just “spirit”, no indefinite article.

That’s a scientific nonsense statement for the simple reason that science cannot detect or measure spirit (or a spirit) and indeed cannot even define such a thing!

Of course science doesn’t – it has no way to detect or measure any of it.

Why do you insist that science must do things it has no capacity to even address?

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Why is this relevant to anything theological?

Really? Why?
Consider angels: they are “ministering spirits” yet appeared in the OT in solid form. Since those spirits can take solid form, why can’t they “push air”?

Air is a fluid, but not a liquid.

I suspect that “science based Christians” would mostly think your “dilemma” is an effort to invent a problem where there isn’t one.

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I read all the replies. As for me I separate the natural from the supernatural. Science has no place in the supernatural as many of these replies seem to say. Remember science tells us how things natural came about . The Bible tells us that they did. When it comes to the supernatural events in the Bible faith in a supernaturalk omnip[otent and omniscient God takes prescedence as an explanation. Do not expect science to explain everything.It cannot.

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Adam, why do you continually ascribe powers to science that it doesn’t have?