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A thing about the creation account is that there was no-one around to witness it and record it. So.....
Ok, so literalists then say 'inspired word of God'. But that 'word' is so full of human errors that it must surely be obvious it is NOT the inspired word.
That it is full of errors and primitive ignorance and superstition about God and the world doesn't indict everything in it as uninspired. The thing about inspiration is that it is entirely dependent upon the knowledge and understanding of the receiver of the inspiration. Clearly, the receivers were extremely limited in knowledge and understanding.
Ah. The 'Radio Reciever' apologetic in another form. We get things wrong, not because there is no input from a god and we are limited to our own knowledge an understanding, but there is an input from a god and we are still limited to our own knowledge and understanding.
Are you familiar with the term: "A difference that makes no difference, IS no difference"? And I know you have heard of Occam's razor.
That it is full of errors and primitive ignorance and superstition about God and the world doesn't indict everything in it as uninspired. The thing about inspiration is that it is entirely dependent upon the knowledge and understanding of the receiver of the inspiration. Clearly, the receivers were extremely limited in knowledge and understanding.
Actually, even the dumbest Bronze Age desert nomad could sit down and write out the exact procedure on how to build the Hadron Collider, the most complex machine ever built by Man, if God was funneling that information to said nomad.
I would say that the receiver of the inspiration has nothing to do with it. He is just a tool ... a secretary taking dictation. And even if the secretary has no idea on how to run a business, it doesn't stop him or her from writing down whatever the boss wants her/him to ... whether the secretary understands the memo or not.
God could have made the Bible more timeless by writing to the future as well as the present, but for some bizarre reason, God appears just as limited in his knowledge as the human writer. You can only write what you know. That's what the Biblical authors did. I don't find anything divine or inspired about anything written in that book -- most of which was stolen and plagiarized from other cultures.
Considering Judaism is an offshoot of the Canaanite god El, the Hebrews needed their own god and their own cultural identity pronto, rapido, as in the very minute after the split. So the Bible was written, El's name was changed to Yahweh, and a brand spankin' new god was created complete with its own hot-off-the-presses holy book. Ta da!
And then the Christ cult tacked on their stuff to the Old Testament to legitimize their growing religion.
And Islam was tacked onto Christianity -- as was Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormon church.
That it is full of errors and primitive ignorance and superstition about God and the world doesn't indict everything in it as uninspired. The thing about inspiration is that it is entirely dependent upon the knowledge and understanding of the receiver of the inspiration. Clearly, the receivers were extremely limited in knowledge and understanding.
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Originally Posted by TRANSPONDER
Ah. The 'Radio Reciever' apologetic in another form. We get things wrong, not because there is no input from a god and we are limited to our own knowledge an understanding, but there is an input from a god and we are still limited to our own knowledge and understanding.
There are far too many advances in human knowledge that were the result of dreams or intuitions by gifted individuals in their fields of knowledge for you to so cavalierly dismiss the idea, Arq.
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Are you familiar with the term: "A difference that makes no difference, IS no difference"? And I know you have heard of Occam's razor.
The Friar's razor has been debunked far too many times for it to be so universally relied upon.
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Originally Posted by Shirina
Actually, even the dumbest Bronze Age desert nomad could sit down and write out the exact procedure on how to build the Hadron Collider, the most complex machine ever built by Man, if God was funneling that information to said nomad. I would say that the receiver of the inspiration has nothing to do with it. He is just a tool ... a secretary taking dictation. And even if the secretary has no idea on how to run a business, it doesn't stop him or her from writing down whatever the boss wants her/him to ... whether the secretary understands the memo or not.
That might be true if inspiration was dictation, but it is not. Even visions or witnessing actual events are constrained by the knowledge and understanding of the receiver, Shirina. The following descriptions compare the way a modern man would interpret what he has seen with the way the same event would have been interpreted by a Viking intellectual. First, the actual event as it would be described in the modern interpretation:
A man lands a helicopter in a clearing of the forest, takes out a .45 caliber automatic pistol, shoots it at a rabbit, then returns to the helicopter with the rabbit and flies away into the clouds.
The Viking, on the other hand, would probably describe it in a manner similar to the following:
Thor came hunting in a flying chariot with his hammer that throws lightning bolts, and then went back to his home in the clouds.
It is important to recognize that the Viking's interpretation is not the result of low intelligence, but is the result of a lack of valid information. The previous description would probably have been produced by a Viking genius, as long as he lacked any knowledge of gunpowder and helicopters.
I am not defending the texts in the spiritual fossil record and the religious nonsense they spawned, per se, Shirina, Just the concept of inspiration itself, something I consider to have been ongoing throughout human history to this very day.
There are far too many advances in human knowledge that were the result of dreams or intuitions by gifted individuals in their fields of knowledge for you to so cavalierly dismiss the idea, Arq. The Friar's razor has been debunked far too many times for it to be so universally relied upon.
(I'll let Shirina answer her own post)....
Mystic, perhaps you could substantiate those airy claims. But in any case, people who get good ideas 'out of nowhere' (I've had a few myself) are reasoning falsely, or rather, theistically (which comes to the same thing) if they claim that it was God putting the ideas into their head. Are you going to tell me that the brilliant ideas criminals or murdering dictators had were from God?
And say what you like, Occam's razor is a basic logical tool, and if it fails, it is because it was misused (it often is) or because the caveat always that you can't rule out unknown factors coming to light. But it is unsound logic to appeal to a particular unknown that you happen to believe in without valid evidence for it. That is why you dismiss the friar's dictum as you dismiss the burden of proof, the validity of negative evidence and in fact any aspect of logic that doesn't suit you.
Mystic, perhaps you could substantiate those airy claims. But in any case, people who get good ideas 'out of nowhere' (I've had a few myself) are reasoning falsely, or rather, theistically (which comes to the same thing) if they claim that it was God putting the ideas into their head. Are you going to tell me that the brilliant ideas criminals or murdering dictators had were from God?
ALL evil is the result of human perversion and human Will, period.
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And say what you like, Occam's razor is a basic logical tool, and if it fails, it is because it was misused (it often is) or because the caveat always that you can't rule out unknown factors coming to light. But it is unsound logic to appeal to a particular unknown that you happen to believe in without valid evidence for it. That is why you dismiss the friar's dictum as you dismiss the burden of proof, the validity of negative evidence and in fact any aspect of logic that doesn't suit you.
Then there are firmaments which science hasn't even discovered yet
That sounds a damn' interesting planet you're living on, Gramps.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
ALL evil is the result of human perversion and human Will, period.Here is a non-technical discussion of the Razor that you should find enlightening, Arq. The Tyranny of Simple Solutions
Your first was total evasion. Your second - I was asked to Sign up, so I closed it. If there is a point to be made, you could perhaps make it. Occam's razor is not a tyranny, not even a tool. It is, in a dictum I formulated some years ago: 'A safety barrier against the misuse of logical tools in order to avoid intellectual injury". I perceive that you misuse the tools and ignore the rules and have indeed damaged your reasoning, but you are ok with that, so long as you can get the tools to do the job you want them to do.
Then there are firmaments which science hasn't even discovered yet
So you would admit that those 'firmaments', if and when discovered, could bury religious belief about gods even deeper in the caca than it is now?
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