Subject:
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Re: Mercy? (Was Re: My Prayer on this National Day of Prayer)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sun, 16 Sep 2001 05:51:58 GMT
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Viewed:
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1082 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Ian Warfield writes:
> God has a reason for not intervening.
When you make that non-falsifiable assertion, you are presumably implying
that We Cannot Know His Ineffable Plan, and therefore we must assume that
everything will work out for Good. However, if We Cannot Know His Plan, then
we certainly can't know that it's all for Good--it could as easily (and as
feasibly) work out for Evil. "Wait and See" just isn't a real answer.
> > How are we supposed to know what to obey? There are so many versions and
> > translations of the Bible (which was written by men anyway) that his original
> > messages have long been lost. And don't even get me started on the Pope and
> > priests...
Obviously, the failures of men aren't proof of God's nonexistence, any more
than the failures of some scientific theories invalidate all of science.
> I heard somewhere that there are probably five surviving accounts of
> Caesar's military campaigns, all rife with inconsistencies; yet no one
> argues that they happened. The Bible has much more internal agreement than
> those accounts. The Dead Sea Scrolls further reaffirm that the Bible has
> been copied accurately for thousands of years.
No one really denies the existence of Jesus the man, since the Gospels are in
themselves sufficient evidence for his mortal existence. However, the Gospels
are manifestly insufficient proof of his divinity for a number of reasons.
First among these is the obvious time gap between his life and the Gospels, not
to mention the lack of solid first-hand witnesses to the events. Second, we
are not able to rely solely on eyewitness testimony in this case, since the
people of that time were not (through no fault of their own) reliable witnesses
able to report on supernatural dealings. The functioning of a magnet would
have mystified them, but that doesn't make it a Divine Magnet. Even today,
creditable observers are fooled by sleight-of-hand magicians into believing
that psychic phenomena are at work, but that doesn't make them true. Third,
the divine events of the Bible have left no direct physical evidence, and they
are entirely in contrast to everyday experience. The life of Caesar, though
unusual, contains nothing in direct contradiction to mundane observation, and
as such can be reliably accounted for by mundane records, even if those
records are somewhat contradictory. The Divinity of Jesus and his miracles are
in fact in direct contrast to everyday experience, and as such require more
than mundane records to verify their occurrence. Fourth, we can discuss the
inconsistencies between the Gospels (which are, in fact, entirely consistent
with the process of revision and re-editing by each subsequent Gospel authors
in pursuit of a more effective work of propaganda.) Many Christians assert the
alleged internal consistency of the Gospels as proof of their validity, but I
see it much more clearly as evidence that each successive book of the Gospel
was based on those before it.
> Not only that, but we have external evidence as well. We know that Rome
> conquered Europe because of the evidence it left behind. Likewise, we can
> find out about God from the universe He created.
That's called Argument From Ignorance, and it's a falacy; we can't prove
Thing A, so therefore it must be Thing B.
From the existence of the universe we can only deduce that the universe
exists--we cannot prove that God created it unless we assume that God created
it, which I'm sure you recognize to be a circular argument.
We've all been down this rhetorical road before, but it's a particular
favorite, so I'm happy to travel it again.
Dave!
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