Agreed that we can’t know everything that was going on in someone’s mind. It’s all guesswork when you are talking about what was going on in someone’s brain simply based on what they wrote in a different culture, in a different language, in a different time. But we can make observations about how humans typically use language or how certain forms of writing typically work. We can look for patterns in how certain forms and conventions were used in a community and make assumptions that people in that community were using forms and conventions in the usual way.
So the observation that a simple allusion to a figure typically does not tell you “the writer believes this figure is historical” is a valid observation. That observation in no way proves the opposite though.
On the other hand, when you have something like, “Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron…” It’s pretty clear the topic of the text is history, and the point of mentioning people (minus Theophilus, who might be symbolic of all who love God) is to support the historicity of the account and introduce the participants in the history. Could it be a work of fiction that is intentionally mimicking a historical narrative? Yes, but we would need to know other things from the context to make that supposition, it’s not something anyone would assume by the way it is communicated. The account of Adam and Eve has a lot of features that don’t sound like historical texts. There is a big difference between it and say 1 Samuel. " There was a certain man from Ramathaim, a Zuphite from the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Elkanah son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephraimite. He had two wives; one was called Hannah and the other Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah had none."
Thanks for that helpful response.
Again, this is not directed at you, at all.
I smell something else is going on. I get the sense that some are using this topic more as a forum to outdo one another intellectually. “Oh yea? Is that all you got? Watch this!” And an even longer, more esoteric, more exotic, more intricate response is proffered.
Different people have different gifts. Those who have a gifting for academic study like to compare a wide range of ideas and evidence as they sift through relevant data to reach a conclusion.
Sure, the process doesn’t sound like political speeches or sermons. But there is no reason to assume that people are being show-offs just because they like to analyze wide swaths of ideas and evidence.
Have you ever attended graduate school, @Ralphie? Grad students and faculty have these kinds of discussions all the time because, wouldn’t you know it, those kinds of discussions are what God called them to and gifted them for.
God’s blessings on your journey of faith, @Ralphie.
Thanks for your input. I love intelligent discussions. I love to learn. I want to be learning all the time.
Some times diversion is a tool used by regular folks and well educated types, too. Sometimes the heart of an issue is the last thing people want to discuss. It makes them uncomfortable. Dad, who was extremely well educated and much smarter than I am, used to criticize “the church” endlessly from every angle imaginable. I wanted to focus on Christ. But, his expertise was the bloody chains of church history and he could go on for hours denouncing it.
He wouldn’t admit his knowledge of Jesus Christ was minimal and so he condemned Christ through the evil of the church.
I sense the same thing going on here at times. You know what’s amazing? Once his name is brought up in the context of some serious interest, people change. Mentioning Jesus in passing is okay. Getting down to identifying who he was and what he was about, when one in the group has studied his person, his words, his mission, the opposition, his innocence, and can articulate intelligently those kinds of things–watch out! He is divisive. He does send a sword. He is a sword. There is power in his name, his very name. I never hear people say, “O Buddha!” Or “Confucius” as forms of cursing. I think it is very tough for most of us to focus just on him. Anything but that!
I’m sorry to hear that you had this experience. This sounds like a painful memory, and I can understand why you would focus so intensely on the person of Jesus.
Your zeal to encourage others to follow Jesus is palpable and commendable. I share that zeal! And I deeply regret the way I created stumbling blocks for my non-Christian friends in the days that I advocated Young Earth Creationism (i.e., a literalistic exegesis of the early chapters of Genesis).
Many of my scientifically knowledgeable friends scorned my testimony of Christ because I was scorning centuries of scientific knowledge. If they could not trust my judgment about science --something visible and verifiable through experimental results published in peer-reviewed journals – how could they trust my judgment about invisible and eternal things?
I shudder to think of the friends I drove away from Christ because of the misunderstandings about science that I parroted.
I hope you will be able to learn from my experience, @Ralphie. I would not want you to put yourself in a situation where you would share my regrets.
I appreciate your thoughts. I love science and respect scientists and wish I knew more because it is fascinating and to think I know personally the One who created the whole thing is beyond fantastic.
My desire, my longing, the burning desire of my heart is that people will discover on their own who this amazing guy was. Whatever else people do in life, find out if He is who He is described to be. Nothing is lost if there is nothing to him, you know? But, if it just so happens that He was indeed the Son of God, man, you don’t want to miss out on finding out what it’s like to know him personally.
It is the biggest of problems, it is the smallest of problems. At present physicists have two separate rulebooks explaining how nature works. There is general relativity, which beautifully accounts for gravity and all of the things it dominates: orbiting planets, colliding galaxies, the dynamics of the expanding universe as a whole. That’s big. Then there is quantum mechanics, which handles the other three forces – electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. Quantum theory is extremely adept at describing what happens when a uranium atom decays, or when individual particles of light hit a solar cell. That’s small.
Now for the problem: relativity and quantum mechanics are fundamentally different theories that have different formulations. It is not just a matter of scientific terminology; it is a clash of genuinely incompatible descriptions of reality.
This is greatly exaggerated. covered this above. This sounds like impressions of a journalist from reading popular science writings and going for as much hype as they can.
But the fact is that physics routinely uses completely different pictures for visualizing things. It is not a problem because in the end the pictures don’t really matter. It is the equations that matter in physics. One of the obvious examples are the opposing pictures of the elementary components (such as photons and electrons) as particles or as waves. The pictures are incompatible but the mathematics is one. So the fact that we have such different pictures of reality in general relativity and quantum mechanics doesn’t bother us. The real issue is the mathematical merging of the two and this has been done quite a few times in different theories. The fact that these theories haven’t worked out doesn’t change the fact that the mathematics can be merged together in quite a few different ways.
“All the things it dominates” is the key for me. My understanding is GR may not be a complete description of reality. Many find there to be a few signals of this despite its overwhelming success. Whether or not QM supplies this remains to be seen. This does not mean GR is “wrong.” It does an amazing job at describing “all the things it dominates” to a high degree of precision. Not being a complete theory of the universe does not make a scientific model useless or wrong in the colloquial sense. It is the best we have for understanding many features of our universe and experimentally speaking, its utility and predictive power is well evidenced.
But GR can also be extended to describe more of reality. This was first done in 1919 by Theodor Kaluza who redid the math in 5 dimensions to show that this produced the Maxwell equations for electromagnetism as well as Einstein’s equations for gravity. Oskar Klein then showed that this would work as a physical description of the universe if the 5th dimension was very small.
Later it was shown that this could be extended further to include the strong and weak nuclear forces as well by adding more dimensions. This was used in string theory to formulate an 11-dimensional supergravity. The current problem is that no experimental evidence has been found for supersymmetry and we haven’t found a way to incorporate fermions in a satisfactory way without supersymmetry. This just means that something is still missing from our understanding of things so we don’t have a working unified field theory yet, but we know how to merge GR with quantum field theory when we do find that missing piece of the puzzle.
Yes. And, at this point it cannot be reconciled with QM from my understanding. Anyway, I was trying to make a point using GR and QM as an example, that’s all.
