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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Thu, 20 Sep 2001 15:24:06 GMT
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1290 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Ian Warfield writes:
> > Yes and no. They are capable of presenting a faithful account of their own
> > recollections and of their interpretations of other people's recollections,
> > but that's not the same as a record of fact. In addition, many of the alleged
> > miracles are second-hand accounts allegedly reported to the Gospel authors by
> > alleged first-hand witnesses.
>
> I can think of only two miracles that were not personally witnessed by the
> entire Twelve. The Resurrection was one, but this is accounted for by the
> fact that they witnessed Jesus alive after the crucifixion squad confirmed
> He was dead. The Transfiguration was the other, witnessed only by Peter,
> James, and John.
Sorry--your knowledge of scripture is more complete than mine. I'll need
to re-check my sources.
> > In any case I stress once again that the mundane record is not sufficient
> > evidence for miraculous events, especially considering the obvious problem
> > of circularity, since the Gospels are the only "evidence" of these miracles,
> > and only the Gospels report them.
>
> Well, the Old Testament predicts them, and the rest of the Bible expounds on
> them, but this requires accepting the Bible as an authoritative source.
That's not a bad point, but it is a fundamental sticking point for some
people. The notion that the OT was a book predicting Christ's arrival is in
many ways equivalent to historical revisionism--that is, a book about one
thing is re-interpreted to apply to something else.
> I don't see that "notions of historical fact" were any different, unless I
> missed a corollary of one of the arguments.
Lindsay addressed this more eloquently than I am able to do, but he
pointed out, for instance, that our notion of history decends from a
Greco-Roman model, while Luke's did not. I defer to Lindsay for elaboration
if necessary.
> Interviews and painstaking research would seem to lend themselves naturally
> to the creation of a reliable historical document.
Not necessarily. Even assuming a good-faith effort on Luke's part, his
good intentions are no guarantee of a reliable document. Further, the
eyewitnesses he interviewed must themselves be considered; their memories
were not fool-proof, nor were they credible interpreters of apparently
supernatural events. Many people on TV are sure that David Blaine
levitated, but that doesn't mean that he levitated.
> Is five hundred eyewitnesses to a ressurection not proof enough? Any lawyer
> would be overjoyed to have five hundred eyewitnesses for a case.
Only if that case dealt in mundane and not supernatural events. Frankly,
it is not sufficient proof. More than 500 people have claimed to see the
Loch Ness Monster, and far more than that have claimed to have UFO experiences.
> > > When they are compared with this in mind, the inconsistencies quickly
> > > resolve themselves.
> >
> > I believe they do, but not in the way that I think you'd like them to.
>
> There are no inconsistencies in the Bible that cannot resolve themselves
> from a different perspective.
Ah! Now we're getting somewhere! I submit, as you'll probably agree, that
the "correct" perspective is a matter of faith.
> Let me cite one: The death of Judas Iscariot is reported two different ways.
> One, he threw the thirty silver coins into the temple and hung himself
> (Matthew 27:5). Two, he bought a field with the money, where he fell
> headlong and his body burst open (Acts 1:18-19). These two accounts can be
> reconciled in the following series of events:
> -Judas threw the money into the temple and hung himself
> -The priests couldn't decide what to do with the money, so they bought a
> field to bury strangers (Matthew 27:6-8). Judas therefore bought the field
> indirectly. The money never entered the temple treasury.
> -No one went to bury Judas, so after his body hung for a while, it became
> detached from wherever it had been hanging, and fell. Since it had begun to
> decay, it burst open.
But don't you see this as an example of playing with the data to fit the
hypothesis? I recommend "Gospel Fictions" by Randle Helms for an elaborate
and well-reasoned discussion of this very sort of issue, as well as a great
examination of the Gospels as a succesion of revisions.
> > You are, in essence, saying that since fundamentally simple particles
> > cannot spontaneously arise (or cannot always have existed), then an
> > infinitely complex Creator must have spontaneously arisen (or always
> > existed). That's called the ontological argument, and it's a falacy.
>
> (I thought the ontological argument was that "God has placed within us a
> knowledge that He exists and cares for us";
> http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/godexist.html; but I don't have a
> dictionary handy.)
The ontological argument can be summed up as "A perfect being that does
not exist is less perfect than a perfect being that *does* exist; therefore
God, the Perfect Being, must by His very nature exist."
Here's one discussion (and there are zillions) on the net:
http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/nogod/ontology.htm
> I'm saying that, if you accept that fundamentally simple particles cannot
> have always existed and cannot spontaneously generate, then something had to
> have created them; and if that creator could not have always existed or
> spontaneously generated, it had to have been created too. Confined to the
> universe, this reduces to the chicken-and-the-egg problem. But the Bible
> describes a God who has always existed and is outside the universal bounds
> of space and time. A Creator of this nature is supported by the finite
> universe model.
>
> > In addition, if you're able to say that "God always existed, nuff said,"
> > then I can say that the universe always existed, nuff said.
>
> But modern science argues for a finite universe that had a beginning.
Not all of modern science. Hawking, for instance, has postulated (though
not made much effort to prove it--it's more of a thought model) that the
universe may go through countless expansion/collapse loops. In other words,
the current universe is finite, but what about before and after the current
universe?
Recent data does indeed suggest that the universe is on an endless
expansion. I'm not an astrophysicist, though, so I can't give you a
technical response.
> > > -The anthropic principle. Science has found that the laws of physics and
> > > chemistry are extroardinarily convenient for matter, let along life, to
> > > exist as it does. The degree of precision is astronomical. Even one
> > > parameter were to be different by as little as 10^-5, life could not exist.
>
> (I apparently was going too fast when I wrote this. 10^-5 isn't nearly as
> small as some of the other tolerances such as the 1:10^120 tolerance, and
> some are even smaller.)
But even that is irrelevant after-the-fact, even if it were 1:10^10000000.
We're here, so we're possible.
> > > This leads to the conclusion that a Creator had His hands meddling in the
> > > works.
> >
> > Actually, that leads to a conclusion that the postultor of such an argument
> > does not understand statistics, as Lindsay has also ably demonstrated.
>
> "Leads to" does not mean "proves".
Well, that applies to your argument as well as mine! 8^)
> Naturally, the existence of a Creator
> cannot be proven with 100% certainty from the confines of the universe. But
> if you establish the probability of all the necessary conditions being
> randomly satisfied for the universe to exist as it does, it is extremely
> small. But from the confines of this universe, the existence of a multiverse
> cannot be proven and must be accepted on faith, just as the existence of God.
But again, the multiverse (even the "omniverse") is irrelevant. *This*
universe has spawned life, so conjecture about the likelihood makes no
difference.
If, however, someone had set out by saying "I want life to arise with this
set of characteristics," then the chances of the universe being compatible
with that proposed life would indeed have been vanishingly small. However,
we have arisen in direct response to the strictures and conditions of the
universe as-is; we have, in effect, been tailored to our environment. The
chance of our existence (as you have previously agreed) is 100%, so the
initial unlikelihood (if such it may be called) makes no difference.
> On the other hand, if you are referring to the "lottery" scenario, or the
> "drawing 8 cards in a row" scenario, see my previous response at
> http://news.lugnet.com/off-topic/debate/?n=12941.
I reject the notion that in the universal lottery "somebody will win," if
by "win" you mean that somebody will come into existence. Somebody (namely,
us) did win in that way, but that doesn't have anything to do with the proof
of a Creator.
Your quote by Gould is especially interesting, since he is directly
opposed to the model of life's origin that you suggest. Further, his quote
may be paraphrased in this way:
If we traced backwards the evolutionary history of homo sapiens and then
replayed it, the likelihood of the exactly same environmental conditions
occurring a second time is remote. Another organism would certainly have
evolved in response to those environmental conditions, but it wouldn't have
been homo sapiens.
Dave!
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