Is the Bible Inspired?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Well, it DOES correctly describe it. Are you saying that the Euphrates, the Tigris, the NIle and Pison had nothing to do with Eden? Is that your position, that the Bible doesn’t mention them in relation to Eden? If so, I need to be sure I have a good translation for me to use. lol

I know the geological world far better than almost anyone here. Maybe Martin is a geologist I don’t know. I also can read the words of the Bible, Euphrates, Kush, pison, and Gihon (which encompasses Cush–and only one river does that–the Nile). I know that the Biblical story is saying that those rivers were involved with Eden. Fluvial dynamics requires that a river coming out of Hatay province Turkey, into the Med, HAS to include the upper part of the Euphrates.

I can also read in the Bible that Havilah is near Shur and up against Egypt. That is the Arabian peninsula. Sheesh, you seem to want no connection ever made. Science is about making connections between disparate facts. Einstein connected the disparate facts of what a guy on the train station saw vs. what the guy on the train saw. That brought about relativity. Science isn’t stamp collecting as you seem to think it is; it is theory building, postulation of new ideas. Unfortunately, in this area of thology, Christianity hasn’t had a new idea in about 150 years.

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Don’t try to tell me what I think, please. You’re exceptionally bad at it.

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In case you missed it, I said 'SEEM to think". that word seem means ‘appears to me’, so I didn’t tell you what you think.

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Here is one issue that I feel always disproves , at least to me, the idea that the words God gave were more than just a mythological account at times. But proves that he did inspire humans who used their own world view to explain something.

Joshua 10:13 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

13 So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped,
Until the nation avenged themselves of their enemies.

The ancient Jewish people did believe that the sun was tiny and that it revolves around earth.

So when they saw this and recorded it they did believe that the sun stopped rotating around earth. But we know the sun is huge and we revolve around it. It was not a figure of speech for them. It was not God replying in a way that satisfied their worldview while also speaking to us nowadays.

This is not a problem for me. It does not cause me issues with god or the word to know that the inspiration was not always scientifically exact.

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Well, Bible scholars dispute that one. I’ve looked that one up before. A good commentary will explain that in Mesopotamia, the language describing the sun or moon “stopping” or “standing still” related to a full moon being visible while the sun was in the sky. If this happened on the the fourteenth day of the month, it was a good omen and the days of the month were said to be the right length. If it happened on the fifteenth or thirteenth day of the month, it was a bad omen, and could mean cities would be destroyed or enemies would overrun the land. So Joshua was asking for the sun and the moon to be in the position that would lead the pagan astrologers in the enemy camp to take it as a bad omen for battle, giving the Israelites a psychological advantage. Joshua asked for a sign that was meaningful to the people watching, and God listened to his prayer. A miracle is something that is interpreted by the people watching as a sign of God’s power, it doesn’t matter if there is also a natural explanation.

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We’ve talked about this before, starting at about comment 25.

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Is the Bible Inspired? Yes. By God? Yes.
Is the Bible the only thing inspired by God? No.
How do we know? Some do and some don’t. Personal experience is the only way. There is no objective evidence that this is the case. All evidence for this is subjective.

So is there anything special about the Bible compared to other things inspired by God? Yes.
It has authority for the Christian religion given by God and man. This is the word of God, written by God using human authors and history as His writing instruments.

Is the Bible inerrant? No. But that there are errors which mar its intent. Nor does it mean people should correct it. God has all the proprietary rights.

Is the Bible infallible? Nothing written in the highly fallible languages of human beings can be infallible. It can be used to lead people astray. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t reliable as communication from God, for those who read themselves with some sincerity. This is a fine life, to be sure. But life is full of them.

Is the Bible self-interpreting? No. Nor should we accept any claim that the Bible is only from God if interpreted correctly that would be too presumptuous as a revision of God’s word as if the interpreter could write the book better than God. How then do we deal with the fact that people interpret the Bible differently? We should not presume that such diversity of interpretation is not God’s intent. It is part of how the best of writers communicate with many different people – they write so the reader hears what they need to hear most.

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Especially if the timing and placing are especially remarkable* – that is God’s providential M.O., denied by unbelievers of course, but recognizable by Christians.
 

*edited to add: (and also possibly to an extraordinary degree or extent of a natural occurrence, more typically seen in Biblical instances of God’s providence)

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And how, exactly, does “turbulence” cause air to rise? You know physics surely you can describe the process.

That is the speed in the horizontal direction. What imparts a rather large upward motion to the air?

Warm air rises when it covered in cooler air. It’s call convection.

But it has to rise high enough for the water vapor to condense for this process to start. You have yet to propose a reasonable mechanism to get this initial lift started and then maintain it for a year.

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I would have to read it and see what sources they site to back it up because so far everything I have read shows that ancient Jewish people , and many other Mesopotamian faiths, believed that the earth was flat and that the sun and moon revolved around earth.

They did not believe that the earth was spinning and rotating around the earth. They had no idea the sun was huge, that the moon was merely reflecting light and that sun was not moving around us.

I have seen no reason to believe when the tribe was with Joshua that they believed anything other than the sun stopped moving.

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Before I do another thing this morning I want to thank Bill. He didn’t like my arrangment of things. Well, one of the bad things about this chemo is that I don’t sleep well. The good thing about that is that I have lots of time to lay in bed thinking about things and last night, I thought of Bill’s criticism and thought, I can do better. So, I re-arranged things. Scripture says:
“And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads” Gen 2:10

That description can be matched precisely so long as one treats the word translated as ‘heads’ as meaning “primary or chief or main”. Making it read,

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four main [rivers].

Doing that, moving Eden in relation to the rivers, making the area west of Eden into something that resembles the Okovango Delta of the Kalahari desert,then one gets the following picture.

Eden Revision 3
Eden Revision 31989×1265 147 KB

The Red arros marks a hill upon which artesian springs source a river, which comes out of Eden, and separates west of Eden. Distributaries of this river flow into each of the four main rivers. In this way, there is a much closer match to the Biblical description and I have Bill to thank for making me think more about this. I thank you profusely Bill.

I grew up on the Sac and Fox Indian reservation and went to an 8-grade, four teacher 4 room school. Our 5th and 6th grade teacher taught us chess–to teach us logic and consequences of bad moves. She always said, “there is always a move that advances your attack while defending your position–find it.” This fits.

Edited to add this picture of the Sudd, the swampy area of the White Nile, in which the river divides and channels go all sorts of direction. Low flat lands like the Sudd and the Mediterranean basin are prone to doing this to rivers. This is what I envision to the west of Eden in the new map (thanks again Bill)

Sudd as example of Med floor
Sudd as example of Med floor1115×1047 365 KB

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[quote=“SkovandOfMitaze, post:75, topic:42491”]
I would have to read it and see what sources they site to back it up because so far everything I have read shows that ancient Jewish people , and many other Mesopotamian faiths, believed that the earth was flat and that the sun and moon revolved around earth.

Skove, that does seem to be the common misconception today. Historians of philosophy have been denying that the ancients beleived in a flat earth solid dome for well over a century, and theologians just keep ignoring them.The only guy I have found who believed in a flat-earth domed sky was Cosmas Inicopluestes, He lived in 550 AD. It was in the 14th century that you find some of the Christians moving to a solid sky–not back in Greco-Roman world.

Historians of science have been proving this point for at least 70 years (most recently Edward Grant, David Lindberg, Daniel Woodward, and Robert S. Westman), without making notable headway against the error. Schoolchildren in the US, Europe, and Japan are for the most part being taught the same old nonsense. How and why did this nonsense emerge? "Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Myth of the Flat Earth, Myth of the Flat Earth

Russell’s article shows that it was Washington Irving, and Antoine-Jean Letronne who got the vaulted dome and flat earth going around 1800. Irving wrote the fraudulent story about Columbus being told that he would fall off the flat earth if he sailed west, when in fact Columbus was being told that China was far to far away for his ship to make it. Letronne was an academic with anti-religious biases’ who misrepresented the early church fathers, portraying them as believing in a vaulted domed sky and flat earth.

This falsehood became an easy story for Christian opponents to use on us. “Look how dumb those Christians are!” And as academia turned more and more away from Christian culture over the past 2 centuries, few want to look into this, change it, or tell the truth. Even Christian academics love this game

There is a book called Inventing the Flat earth. by Russell which every one who believes the ancients held this should read–not that they will because it is so much fun to make those ancient folks look stupid.

In 2011 Younkers and Davidson of Andrews University Seminary wrote an article entitled "THE MYTH OF THE SOLID HEAVENLY DOME: ANOTHER LOOK AT THE HEBREW [:yqir); (RĀQÎA‘) https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3130&context=auss

Of course, their article was ignored as well and will continue to be ignored with the likes of me recommending it… It is extremely difficult to get us humans to question our own viewpoint. The most difficult thing I ever did was leave YEC. Change is hard, but truth which matches the data is far more important, even if it is a truth that the ancients didn’t believe in a solid dome/flat earth. This article above also says that the Babylonians didn’t have a flat earth solid dome either–but their view of the sky was indeed very strange.

Edited to Add a quote from this last article:

“Still there have been some who continue to suggest that the ancient Hebrews borrowed cosmological concepts, including the idea of a solid domed heaven, from the Mesopotamians. However, even this idea had to be scuttled when more recent work by Wilfred G. Lambert could find no evidence that the Mesopotamians believed in a hard-domed heaven; rather, he traces this idea to Peter Jensen’s mistranslation of the term “heavens” in his translation of the Enuma Elish. Lambert’s student, Wayne Horowitz, attempted to piece together a Mesopotamian cosmology from a number of ancient documents, but it is quite different from anything found in the Hebrew Bible. Horowitz’s study suggests that the Mesopotamians believed in six flat heavens, suspended one above the other by cables. When it came to interpreting the stars and the heavens, the Mesopotamians were more interested in astrology (i.e., what the gods were doing and what it meant for humanity) than they were in cosmology. There is no evidence that the Mesopotamians ever believed in a solid heavenly vault.” Randall W. Younker and Richard M. Davidson, " THE MYTH OF THE SOLID HEAVENLY DOME: ANOTHER LOOK AT THE HEBREW [:yqir); (RĀQÎA‘),Andrews University Seminary Studies, No. 1, 125-147, p. 127

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Yes. But it doesn’t follow from that fact that the linguistic expression “the sun stood still” was meant literally. It’s an idiom.

But that’s probably more because you have only read in translation, and haven’t investigated the language and culture to understand the expression than because it’s the only logical conclusion. The people did not have to understand the earth spun and orbited the sun to use figures of speech about the sky.

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It could have literally stood still, à la my massive superior mirage scenario. Is the Red Sea parting a “linguistic expression” too?
 

That’s absolute. “You weren’t there.” :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Maybe someone already said much the same thing, but…

We can never (in this life) “know” it is inspired. But we can believe it is inspired, with, in my opinion, the necessary and sufficient cause being the supernatural intervention by the Holy Spirit.

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Also by that reasoning, God is not knowable in this life. He is.

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Maybe. But I would say that I do not know God exists or know his attributes, but rather I believe that God exists and I believe that what I have gleaned from scripture and creation about his promises and attributes is true. I don’t think that makes God unknowable, but we can agree to disagree.

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We cannot ‘know’ scientifically of course, but we are speaking about epistemology.

When I was a child, I freely accepted the testimony that Japan existed. I was given it from trusted sources – my parents, teachers, pictures, books, maps and globes. I was a “believer” in the existence of Japan, or maybe more accurately a “believist”, a “Japanist”, making a somewhat esoteric and technical distinction. Now that I have been there and have seen it firsthand, I am not going to deny its existence, and I am a “believer” – a “Japaner”.

A Christian believer, then, being someone who has had something irrefutable happen in their life experience and which they will never deny as being legitimate evidence. That evidence can be as personal and intimate as a recognition of a change in heart and a change in their heart’s desires, or it can be events that can be documented. Either can certainly be denied as being evidence by others, as flat earthers deny any and all evidence that the earth is spherical, but denial does not constitute proof of the contrary fact. There are many who count themselves as believers, or say that they used to be believers, when in fact they are now or used to be merely “believists”.

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I would suggest that Maggie knows and is not merely a believist.

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I’ll have to set aside some time in the future to dig more into it. I’ve tip toed into it a few times and everything I’ve ever read, has always pointed towards this belief.

The majority of the world, including the ancient Jews, believed in a flat world. Multiple texts from multiple sources all show this belief. Throughout history though, even ancient history, in and off different people and groups believed in a spherical earth. But that seems like it was more of the exception.

It seems like the prevailing thought of ancient nations, besides China, believed in a flat circled world with water, and usually a water monster, ringing around the land. In Asia it seems they believed in a flat square world and a circular heaven. Seems that depending on if it was a Jewish or gentile Christian, they also believed in a flat or spherical world.

Maybe in mid winter this year I can set aside a month or two to dig more into it by continent and established nations.

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