The Bible's Buried Secrets

[Robert Tulip]

Stahrwe:
One point is that when you discover an obvious error how do you trust the rest of the material.

So we see here that you understand the concept.

Now, apply to your life.

No, what we see is the application of the military principle that you should attack an enemy at his weakest point. It is like siege craft, that if you can sap a wall at its weakest point you can take the castle. Stahrwe regards reason and logic as enemies of faith, so (at least as I read him) he is on a campaign against logic, trying to find chinks in the wall so he can prove that logic is illogical, and everyone can convert to gaga.

The fallacious theory, applying siege craft to philosophy, is that if you can convince readers that there is some small area of doubt regarding what some one says (eg Wright), then everything they say can be regarded as untrustworthy. I don't think Starhwe ever managed a serious hit against Robert Wright and The Evolution of God, but he continues to snipe as he retreats, the siege having failed miserably. Does anyone remember the comment from the castle wall in one famous military siege 'I fart in your general direction'? Or that other famous line 'Come back and fight you bastards'?

[DWill]

That reason and logic don't account for everything valuable in our lives seems to me easy to concede. We don't live at the level of analysis in many respects, and it wouldn't necessarily represent progress if we were to increase that level. The unconscious supports us in every way and may do so in a manner that we can't justify when we turn rational thinking loose on it. This is where religion comes in, explaining the "feelings" and "sense" people have of something they often call God. How that ties legitimately into a belief in religious doctrine is clear to me in some instances, but not in others, such as the willful blindness to areas of our knowledge that have changed so much in the centuries since the holy books were written.

What stahrwe appears to claim is different, that reason/logic doesn't need to apply even to areas to which it's ideally suited, such as the age of the earth and the development of life forms.

[Robert Tulip]

That reason and logic don't account for everything valuable in our lives seems to me easy to concede. We don't live at the level of analysis in many respects, and it wouldn't necessarily represent progress if we were to increase that level. The unconscious supports us in every way and may do so in a manner that we can't justify when we turn rational thinking loose on it. This is where religion comes in, explaining the "feelings" and "sense" people have of something they often call God. How that ties legitimately into a belief in religious doctrine is clear to me in some instances, but not in others, such as the willful blindness to areas of our knowledge that have changed so much in the centuries since the holy books were written.

Your comment about progress seems a non-sequitur. Progress, in the sense of making things better, always involves an increase in logic and rationality. We find that older ways of understanding had faults, in that they did not match to evidence or did not see logical possibilities, and we progress in an evolutionary way to new ways that do match better to reality.

However, it is fair comment that often logic is flawed; critics of religion often do not fully understand what they criticize, and fail to see the unintended consequences of their dream of reason. This is a big factor in the atheism debate, with many atheists failing to see the social value of ritual and symbol, including how these religious practices have benefits that operate partly at unconscious levels.

But nonetheless, a move to greater rationality produces more transparency and accountability, forcing a dialogue that opens the presuppositions of tradition in order to make it justify itself. My view is that reading the Bible as allegory and parable casts a rational lens onto texts that previously have been misunderstood as literal history, showing that these texts are not irrational, but conceal a deeper rationality.

[Dawn]

From Acts 17:26 "From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands"

we can see this account of history is incorrect, because it assumes that all humanity is descended from Adam.

And what was your problem with that?

The opening post, to which Stahrwe objected, states "history as we understand it wasn't what the Jewish writers of the Bible were up to." This example from Acts is the sole mention of the word history in the New Testament, but it appears to use the word to mean the same as myth. Modern history attempts to be objective and contestable. These values are foreign to the common use of the Bible, which at the surface level is all about shoring up predetermined belief.

My question is why do you automatically suppose that what you read in Acts 17:26 is myth? Can you not allow for a case where all humanity has descended from Adam? Why not? Truth does not devolve to myth just because it's not believed. Perhaps another example of inaccurate history in the NT would be useful to back up your position, one that isn't so closely tied to your personal preference for an evolutionary worldview.

[Dawn]

What stahrwe appears to claim is different, that reason/logic doesn't need to apply even to areas to which it's ideally suited, such as the age of the earth and the development of life forms.

Is this really ideal ground for reason and logic? Where do we then come up with things like this:

On a NOVA special a few years ago, an astrophysicist gushed, "We're descended from neutrinos!" Then, after a reverential pause, he added "They're our parents." (You can't make this stuff up!) And this from people that Pitts, and many like him, uphold as the gatekeepers of truth.
The gatekeepers have spun many an imaginative yarn about how the universe can to be and how matter "went live." But despite the intellectual charm of creative neutrinos, cosmic inflation, multiverses, emergence, abiogenesis, and the like, their ever-inventive tales remain, and will always remain, just that; tales with no more claim to truth than those of a court astrologer or ancient myth-maker.
The idea that "in the beginning were neutrinos" that went bump in the cosmos to form intelligent beings is as fantastic (more so, really) as the Mayan account that "in the beginning were only Tepeu and Gucumatz ...[who] sat together and thought, and whatever they thought came into being."--from "Are we Dumb and Getting Dumber" by Regis Nicoll

This seems neither reasonable nor logical. Speaking of myths, Robert...
Maybe we do in fact need some knowledge beyond what our mental capacities can concoct...
It's called 'revelation', and I for one am glad for it.

[DWill]

What stahrwe appears to claim is different, that reason/logic doesn't need to apply even to areas to which it's ideally suited, such as the age of the earth and the development of life forms.

Is this really ideal ground for reason and logic? Where do we then come up with things like this:

On a NOVA special a few years ago, an astrophysicist gushed, "We're descended from neutrinos!" Then, after a reverential pause, he added "They're our parents." (You can't make this stuff up!) And this from people that Pitts, and many like him, uphold as the gatekeepers of truth.
The gatekeepers have spun many an imaginative yarn about how the universe can to be and how matter "went live." But despite the intellectual charm of creative neutrinos, cosmic inflation, multiverses, emergence, abiogenesis, and the like, their ever-inventive tales remain, and will always remain, just that; tales with no more claim to truth than those of a court astrologer or ancient myth-maker.
The idea that "in the beginning were neutrinos" that went bump in the cosmos to form intelligent beings is as fantastic (more so, really) as the Mayan account that "in the beginning were only Tepeu and Gucumatz ...[who] sat together and thought, and whatever they thought came into being."--from "Are we Dumb and Getting Dumber" by Regis Nicoll

This seems neither reasonable nor logical.

This physicist doesn't claim to know (as in for sure) about origins. He and others are of course speculating. It's not hard to distinguish this activity from judging the age of the rock in the earth or of the animals in the fossil record. What you say here is similar to what many other Bible-ists say to deflect criticism: that since scientists don't know how matter came to be here, they can't know anything about what happened to it after it appeared. That is wrong on the face of it, as we've learned a great deal, enough to be able to say that young earth belief is simply willful blindness and enthrallment to man-created doctrine.

[Azrael]

There is nothing to back up he's right in his assessment of it.

Can you not allow for a case where all humanity has descended from Adam? Why not?

And wheres the evidence that we descended from this Adam? Do you have DNA evidence to prove that we came from Adam? Myth can contain history and still be myth. There are historical places in the bible but that does not mean the things that the bible purports actually happened. One good example is the town of Nazareth where this cloud boy was suppose to be from it never existed during the time that cloud boy supposedly walk the earth. Paul's idea of a Jesus is not the same as everyone elses he had his own agenda ( if he even lived)......

Truth does not devolve to myth just because it's not believed.

And what truth is that? Bible thumpers keep preaching truth I see it in all the forums I visit yet none know what the truth is. Is truth the word of a god that had others write nonsense for him because he could not write or was uneducated? If the bible has any truth to it at all it's shrouded in myth.

My question is why do you automatically suppose that what you read in Acts 17:26 is myth?

Can you prove its not? My guess is no. The books of the NT were written 70 to 130 years after the events that they purpose to speak of.

[lady of shallot]

Starburst:

And wheres the evidence that we descended from this Adam? Do you have DNA evidence to prove that we came from Adam?

On the Human Genome film we watched the other night the scientists did say that all males on the planet now are descended from a "scientific Adam" who lived in Africa some 60,000 years ago.

I wonder how strict Biblical literalists deal with a comment I heard today on t.v. that had nothing to do with either religious belief or disbelief. A man was showing rocks containing minerals to an expert and asked how old they were. The expert said "Oh millions of years" So what I wonder is do Dawn and/or Stahrwe think the man is lying, crazy, just plain wrong, ill informed or what?

They also say that all humanity is descended from the same "scientific Eve" who lived 120,000 + or - years ago. This does not of course mean that there were not other beings like Eve and Adam alive at their times only that their descendants did not pass their gene pools or DNA on.

[Azrael]

Starburst:

And wheres the evidence that we descended from this Adam? Do you have DNA evidence to prove that we came from Adam?

On the Human Genome film we watched the other night the scientists did say that all males on the planet now are descended from a "scientific Adam" who lived in Africa some 60,000 years ago.

I wonder how strict Biblical literalists deal with a comment I heard today on t.v. that had nothing to do with either religious belief or disbelief. A man was showing rocks containing minerals to an expert and asked how old they were. The expert said "Oh millions of years" So what I wonder is do Dawn and/or Stahrwe think the man is lying, crazy, just plain wrong, ill informed or what?

They also say that all humanity is descended from the same "scientific Eve" who lived 120,000 + or - years ago. This does not of course mean that there were not other beings like Eve and Adam alive at their times only that their descendants did not pass their gene pools or DNA on.

So what I wonder is do Dawn and/or Stahrwe think the man is lying, crazy, just plain wrong, ill informed or what?

Most likely all of the above.

On the Human Genome film we watched the other night the scientists did say that all males on the planet now are descended from a "scientific Adam" who lived in Africa some 60,000 years ago.

Africa huh.....

[Frank 013]

Robert Tulip
From Acts 17:26 "From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands"

we can see this account of history is incorrect, because it assumes that all humanity is descended from Adam.

Dawn
And what was your problem with that?

In simplest terms Dawn that assumption has been falsified beyond all reasonable doubt... that is our problem with it.

Later