And neither is Adam living to age 930… not relevant. Not true. No pics.
Jesus being crucified? No pics.
Galileo looking through a telescope? No pics.
Napoleon fighting the Battle of Waterloo? No pics.
But we do have historical records of
Adam living to age 930
Jesus being crucified
Galileo looking through a telescope
Napoleon fighting the Battle of Waterloo
Interesting reasoning used by a lot of Christians:
1
Personification of God?
It’s OK. They use modern human characteristics to describe God or explain what God thought and did, and expect you to “get”.
2
But when you use some modern things (the life expectancy, the circumstance under which you would die, discovered natural laws, etc.) to question the Biblical stories, they tell you that in the ancient times that’s possible, which means you can’t use the modern things to understand the Bible, you must imagine those ancient times. But how could they know the “ancient natural laws” which are different than the modern ones? And why can’t the modern things be used to explain the stories in the ancient times just like they use the modern human characteristics to help you understand God?
Really interesting.
Dear Chris,
The Bible is not a history book, it is a spiritual legacy given to us by God. There are some historically verifiable facts in the Bible, but that is not its purpose. A historical fact is defined as being verified by three independent sources and this is the case for Jesus, Galileo and Napoleon, but no-one has even a second independent source claim Adam died at 930 years old.
The Bible is not exclusively a history book, it is a historical narrative supplemented with non historical material. Quite clearly Ecclesiastes is not a history, nor is Proverbs. However Genesis is written as a historical narrative.
A historical fact remains a fact even if there is no source whatsoever. It remains a fact even if it is completely unknown. Neither does having only one source mean that something is not a historical fact. Sometimes having a single reliable source is better than several independent but unreliable sources.
Of course having several independent reliable sources does increase confidence in an event being true and a historical fact.
There are several cases where biblical events or places have been disputed and as a result it was claimed that the Bible was unreliable, only to have evidence emerge that showed that the Bible is correct and reliable.
You do not seem to understand the scientific method. Everything is a theory until it is proven to fact or Law. This goes for current events, history and the Bible. There is plenty of evidence that man never lived longer than 130 years and none that he lived over 600.
Since much of the Bible is inspired spiritual text, you cannot claim every word is meant to taken literally, like the world was created in seven days.
I don’t think Chris was describing the scientific method, so much as he is describing basic reality and using the basic definition of the word. In the year 647, Pluto’s existence was a fact, whether or not anyone had discovered it yet.
Fact (n.) “something that actually exists; reality; truth.”
Yes, if something actually exists, regardless of what it is, becomes reality when it can be proven from independent sources. Until then it is theory or belief. God may actually exist, but until it can be independently proven, then it is just my belief.
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Becomes reality when it can be proven??! Do you subscribe to some sort of solipsism, then? Pluto very much existed whether or not people had discovered it yet.
That is an extremely simplistic view of modern science. You seem to be using “theory” in a diminutive sense where words like “hypothesis” or “conjecture” would better apply. Yet even those words carry some status, so that not everything could qualify as even a hypothesis, for example.
“Law” is not really a very scientific word except in popular perception of science.
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First law of thermodynamics is not scientific? I was explaining to Chris the nature of reality regarding what is written in the Bible. It is not reality until it third party verification, just us a theory, no mater its level of acceptance, is not a Law until it represents reality.
It is scientific, definitely. It is a “law” in popular discourse and entry-level classrooms. There are different contexts … one at the popular and entry-level science courses in schools, and then there are places like this forum, where often we are presuming a deeper philosophical discourse when we are often stepping back to taking a look at and discuss science itself.
Trying to apply mathematically air-tight deductive proof to the more inductive and evidence-based sciences is already problematic - but becomes so in the extreme if you are going to treat the Bible that way. Doing a geometric proof is not like doing science, much less theology. Different tools are good for different contexts.
I am trying to keep it simple, especially when people claim bible inerrancy. YEC take the seven day creation to be fact, when it is only a belief or theory. Many take the 930 year age of Adam to be fact, again only a belief with no scientific support. I was hoping it was time to get back to a logical basis where science and the Bible meet, without wild spun theology, unsupported by the laws of nature that God created.
When Origen compared the five OT texts, he found many discrepancies - errors, omissions, and falsifications. He used this simple logic to resolve them. He could never support inerrancy.
I do not support “different tools for different contexts” for the simple reason that all the Laws we have discovered share one common trait - elegant simplicity.
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Perhaps @Shawn_Murphy is using a particular definition of fact
fact [ fakt ] ### noun
- something that actually exists; reality; truth: Your fears have no basis in fact.
- something known to exist or to have happened: Space travel is now a fact.
- a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true: Scientists gather facts about plant growth.
- something said to be true or supposed to have happened: The facts given by the witness are highly questionable.
I have been using the first definition while Shawn has been using the 2nd or 3rd.
However you can’t say that something does not exist or is not true just because it has not been observed or because there aren’t 3 independent witnesses/sources.
My grandfather was fined in court for writing a rude word on a building. There is only one source for this; court records; but that source has high credibility and it can be accepted as establishing the fact that this was a fact.
An ancestor on my mother’s side supposedly made Ned Kelly’s armour. This is family history and while it might be true the evidence is not such as to be highly confident that it is so.
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Yes, without this supposition, any statement could be true, because people can simply tell you “at that time”, or “in that place” (things are governed by another law. ) You can’t try to understand the statement by the laws you know now. You can’t say a statement is false.
If things are really governed by different laws in different places or at different times or even depend on who does, then we could never make any accurate theories because contradictory theories all can be true. So the small bang theory? The age of the Earth? Witnesses? All become unreliable. The only reliable narrative seems to be the “one holy text”, someone’s narrative is higher than that of any others no matter how it contradicts facts. They reason only because they try to pretend to be objective.
It’s also about you accept natural laws then examine what people say or you accept what people say to find what theories can explain whatever they say.
This is certainly not the case. Perhaps my quibbling over vocabulary here is spreading more confusion than light - and I shall desist if confusion persists, but not before one more attempt.
I was not objecting against our confidences in things we consider very well-established - what you are labeling as “law”. That confidence and alleged universal applicability over time is not one whit lessened by anybody’s insistence on clarifying our vocabulary around it. We all want our clean distinctions between well-sorted and distinct categories. We want to imagine that there is, in the scientist’s world, a “holy-of-holies” where the undisputed Laws dwell, attended just outside by all the surrounding lesser (but still proud) “theories” not bereft of a status of their own. And milling about in the outer courtyards of the gentiles we find the lowly hypotheses and conjectures.
While this neatly organized world may exist in your imagination, it doesn’t for the scientist. There is rather, the dreaded gradient, where to be sure, some things have much higher status than others. But everything is held up for examination and there is no sacred preserve. There are merely those things that have survived (often with major modification) sustained attacks for so long that we begin to afford them a major respect as an enduring edifice - but never one that is permanently immune from overthrow, and certainly not immune from renovation.
So the necessary “sorting” function of our popular vocabulary notwithstanding, I will suggest here for at least this moment longer, that real science in practice is no respecter of these hard divisions, but is very much a respecter of survival and “lumps earned” over much time and prodding.
I think when we question if something is true (a fact) or not, theory, hypothesis, conjecture, mathematical model, mathematical analysis, etc. all belong to the same group: not a fact (until every deduction is proven a fact).
When every deduction of a theory can be proven a fact, then the theory itself could be a fact. But usually it’s an impossible task. When after intensive questioning and verifying we haven’t found any fact that falsifies the theory, we accept the theory as a law, while still open to the possibility that it needs to be modified. We trust it more but it’s still not a fact.
The below process could help make theories more objective.
Facts (that exist independent of the observer) ---- observation (at least 3 independent sources to reduce the chance of subjective error) ---- mathematical model and analysis based on the observation ---- hypothesis, conjecture, any wild idea crossing your mind ---- try to verify ---- If successful based on the known facts, then call the most successful one a theory. ---- Verifying all deductions ---- If newly discovered facts falsifies the theory, then repeat from model to verification, until no challenges in a while, then this theory could survive until being challenged by newly discovered facts again.
I don’t think @Shawn_Murphy’s view is simplistic, but very scientific. There’s a difference between existence of something and our knowledge/observation/theory/belief, also between a possibility and a fact.
Something doesn’t “become reality” once it can be observed or otherwise proven by a human. If something in fact exists, then it is reality, whether or not any human has observed it, proven it, or disputes its reality.
By your stated logic, the existence of the universe before the appearance of man was neither reality nor a fact, as there was no one around to prove it?
I guess, probably “reality” @Shawn_Murphy meant “the narrative we can believe more”, not “something that exists” because he already said “if something actually exists”.
Sometimes, we have to sacrifice something to avoid more problems. For example, if we don’t require at least 3 or 30 independent sources to believe the stories about history, there could be no credibility in any history. But what if something really happened and nobody knows? It’s still a fact but unknown. And, one person could tell the truth also lies. But when two people (independent sources) tell the same thing, the chance of being lied about is reduced. Not perfect but we have no better choice.
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Let’s say there could be two laws, the existence of natural law and our theories.
If you can observe something’s behavior is strictly following “if certain conditions met, then some behaviour pattern can be observed”, then you can guess the object is ruled by some law, which could be a fact, something exists independent of you. And you can guess further, maybe other things follow the same law and you can test and verify. But what you get may not be the law as a fact but a verified theory.
The belief that natural laws don’t change over time is vitally important for without which we could never know how old the earth is, and whether or not a narrative is true or false especially when we only have one source.
Let us take the discussion back to the flawed bible, the topic of the thread. The claim of biblical inerrancy violates the discussion above. The best that one could do is claim that the Bible is unsubstantiated fact.
God did not write, edit nor print the Bible and therefore any claimed divine exception is invalid. I prefer a more precise theory. The theory is simply that God inspired men (prophets), who then attempted to explain God’s Word with their human mind and language. These texts were then interpreted, edited and copied by priests and scribes. Most importantly, the text suffers from survivor bias, becuase not all inspired texts have been retained. Like any democracy, the results of the selection process was a compromise - not absolute truth.
Given this theory, to establish biblical fact requires at least two other reliable, independent sources. Science helps us with a number of the physical aspects in the Bible like age of the Earth. But the spiritual meanings in the Bible cannot be enriched by science. The only way that the spiritual meanings can be established as fact is to find two other, reliable spiritual sources that verify the spiritual teachings.
I use five main, independent sources of inspired texts to test the biblical interpretations made by the many sects of Christianity. I mostly refer to Socrates and Origen of Alexandria on this forum becuase of the their strong scientific foundation. The other three I have mentioned in some posts are modern, independent inspired works that pass the tests in 1 John 4 and fulfill Jesus’ promise:
I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. (John 15:12-13)
This is how Jesus promised to establish spiritual fact, by sending multiple, independent teachers into the world in various times, countries and languages. It is our job to investigate them scientifically to help establish God’s true intension. Don’t just dig through the ancient texts that are a product of corrupt men. (Malachi 2:7-9, Jeremiah 8:8-9, Ezekiel 2:1-7, Matthew 3:7 and Matthew 12:34)