Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
I gave an answer to that question much earlier to that in this thread, back when you first asked it. I’m running late, so I don’t have time to go back and find what I’d written. Something about how violence and anger prevent us from loving each other as much as God wants us to love each other, and something about how the impulse to commit violence cannot be eliminated from human nature, so the really important ethical project is how to control that impulse, not to eliminate it. That’s why we get the first covenant between God and humanity after God has realized His mistake.
Is this sarcasm?
Learning to control impulses is a useful project for toddlers. I do not see any connection to religion.
At any rate, that’s a frightening picture of god. Worse than anything I’ve come up with on my own.
If you are suggesting I am being disingenuous, I suggest you post in noyau.
I have said the flood occurred, right? And I’m not taking this back. But your pressing point “8 people”, even “8 Hebrews” meanwhile, are a different question. One question is about the flood (which occurred according to me), the other is about what the text says about the flood, and how to interpret it (which I have been reluctant to discuss with you).
Let’s put it this way. The flood occurred. Why do I think so? Because there are accounts of it all over the place. But I have not yet made any claims about which account comes historically closest to the actual events, that of the Chinese or of Indians or of Babylonians or of Mayans. You have been presupposing I was defending Genesis. No, I’m defending the textual universal.
Two corollaries to this. What does “literal” mean, in this context? It means consistency of the text, letter by letter. “Literal truth” is “true interpretation” – being true to the text, regardless of “literal correspondence to reality”. Since “reality” is a highly contested notion whenever a theist and a non- or anti-theist meet (and also whenever a philologist and a physicist meet), I am quite cautious about this point. Further, “true interpretation” means reading closely, with comprehension, observing the genre. “Observing the genre” means, e.g. when it’s poetry, you don’t translate it into physics a la law of gravity. If you miss this, your interpretation is NOT TRUE to the text.
Second corollary, since you are obviously highly interested in the text’s correspondence to the physical reality. In these terms, I’m defending the textual universal, not the Genesis account specifically, so any assumptions about Noah specifically, Mount Ararat specifically, etc. don’t apply. The name of the dude who survived the flood could just as well have been Utnapishtim or Manu – it’s probably not even a personal name in our modern Western passport sense. And the point that the survivor is a patriarch, basically father of mankind (as in Genesis) or a major sage raised to the status of demigod (as in other accounts), is a pretty sure sign he was not a mere dude like you and me.
If we take the genre to be folklore (since we never got around to analysing it in terms of scripture, and never will in this company), then you have to apply what normally applies when you are reading folklore. If you don’t, and instead you expect it to be a history book in modern terms, then you are misinterpreting. If you keep doing so after I call your attention to it, then you are doing it deliberately. Folklore reflects history, this is true, but it reflects it strictly through the perspective of the people who hold and convey the folklore – and the latter aspect (ethnic specificity) is more important than the first aspect (historicity). If you want to discuss the history only, then you have to take away the ethnic specificity in the text. Since the ethnic specificity is integrally embedded, the removal of it is the job for a careful surgeon, not for an axeman. Since the ethnic specificity is integrally embedded in folklore, a good way around it is the comparative method – take other texts with the same story from other peoples and you will be able to separate the various embellishments and accidentals from the invariant story. But this would force you to concede that philology is a science, and you don’t want this, do you?
I think it’s an equally unfortunate position to hold something like “Well, archeology concerning the places and events indicated in the Bible consistently confirms what the Bible says, but then there are events that are not confirmed by archeology – and those events didn’t happen!”
The emphasised part profoundly misunderstands the abilities of archeology, and that’s unfortunate. Archeology can only confirm stuff that you can dig up from the ground. Not everything can be dug up like this. And absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Correct. I say at times something like “I’m never speaking to you again” and then soon enough I speak. It’s rather embarrassing to myself. However, the so-called criticism is not even criticism, because it does not address what I actually said (and meant, because it should be evident by now that our respective backgrounds are half a globe apart in every sense). And this should be embarrassing to the critics.
KN is well versed in the Hebrew tradition. My very limited point here is that the Hebrew tradition concerning Hebrew scriptures does not equal spiritual truth(s). Hebrew tradition concerning Hebrew scriptures provides a stepping stone to spiritual truth(s) the same as any other religious tradition provides a stepping stone to spiritual truth(s) when the person in question is spiritually motivated. It’s a(n unfortunate, you could say,) feature of spirituality that in order to have a clue about it you have to be spiritually motivated. Yet this is not unique to spirituality – in order to be able to ride a bicycle, for example, you have to be motivated for it, to overcome your initial fear, put your hands and feet in the right places, acquire the coordinated momentum, etc.
Erik,
Thank you for the detailed response. It helps identify the root causes of our lack of communication.
This is one of those causes. I’m not asking about what the text says, I’m asking what you claim actually happened historically. Here you say that the biblical flood occurred. This is consistent with your earlier claim that “Anyway, of course it occurred. The Bible has been found historically reliable.” However, later you write:
The context of your original claim was the biblical flood. That, combined with your claim that the Bible has been found historically reliable made my inference that you were speaking of the biblical flood reasonable, I believe.
That leads to the clarifying questions I’ve been asking. Again, I am asking about what you, personally, assert about actual historical events. Once I understand that, your reasons for your position (e.g. textual analysis) may be pertinent, but first I would like to fully understand your claims about reality:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
The last two are essential to the biblical flood story. Without them I don’t know what it would mean to say “of course it [the biblical flood] occurred.”
Thank you again for the detailed response. I look forward to your clarifying answers to better understand your actual claim.
But we disagree what “historically reliable” means – particularly when there’s no undisputed archeological or geological confirmation. For example, let’s say that I take that Queen of Sheba met Solomon because the Bible is otherwise historically reliable. You can then ask questions like: Where is Sheba? Was it really a kingdom, not a republic? If it was such-and-such place, is there any evidence there ever was a queen there, instead of a tribal chief? Etc. These questions are beyond my scope, really. They are admittedly interesting questions to both of us, but they are questions for an archeologist, not for a philologist. Anyway, even when the questions are not answerable in terms of archeology, they cannot undermine my belief, because (1) absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and (2) whenever there is evidence (for other biblical stories), there’s correspondence, and you better acknowledge it first if you want me to take you seriously on points where we are discussing non-evidence – or, more properly, non-archeological evidence, because comparative folkloristics is such evidence.
Anyway, of course it [the Biblical Flood] occurred. The Bible has been found historically reliable.
No, Erik. You, me and Patrick agree on what “historically reliable” means. Further, I understand that you wish to take the [archeologically demonstrated] historical accuracy of parts of the Bible and extend it to infer historical accuracy for Genesis. I dispute the validity of this extension, and I am entertained that a philologist would make this particularly sloppy claim:
You have also made wonderfully vague allusions to other pieces of evidence that you claim support the historical accuracy of the Bible Flood story (ice age, mammoths wtf).
We are merely trying to understand the specifics of your claim “of course it occurred”. Were there, in fact, 8 survivors? Why are you suddenly reluctant to apply your “historically reliable” extension to the number of survivors?
This last question is rhetorical.
I can’t believe that the flood story is still being discussed this way.
Of course a flood occurred. Floods occur all the time. It’s possible that some really big ones (bigger than any in the last couple of millennia) have occurred and have created legends.
But Noah’s flood is not just about a lot of water. It is a story with and entity that causes the flood. For a reason. The specifics of the flood are also rather remarkable, and physically implausible. As are the implications for genetics — not just in humans — but in all living things that have breath.
Exactly. The appropriate answer to Patrick’s question would have been “I don’t know. That’s not an area in which I have any particular expertise.”
Then we could have been done with all the evasive bullshit a lot sooner.
As DNA_Jock says, you always understood perfectly what he was asking you.
Erik,
We’re not at the point where evidence or lack thereof is the issue. I still do not understand what specifically you are claiming when you say “Anyway, of course it occurred. The Bible has been found historically reliable.” There are some characteristics of the biblical flood story that appear to be essential, namely that it was global and that only the people and animals on the ark survived. Hence my questions to you:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
If you could please answer these then your claim would be less vague and we could possibly get on to the more interesting discussion of the evidence supporting your claim.
When you say that I “extend [the archeologically demonstrated historical accuracy of parts of the Bible] to infer historical accuracy for Genesis”, I take it that you are saying that the latter “historical accuracy for Genesis” is the same as the former “archeologically demonstrated historical accuracy”.
It’s correct that this is how I infer or extend historical reliability to the entire Bible, but it’s not correct that I assume archeological tracks all the way. Archeology does not verify everything, and I don’t expect it to. Rather, the parts that are found to be historically reliable because of archeology (among other evidence) give reason to trust other parts of the document, to not dismiss lightly. Even when some story there has no external evidence, there’s reason to look for a meaning, because other stories have evidence. The flood story, specifically, has external evidence – there are other flood stories, there are ice ages and such, if you are looking for that kind of historical accuracy. The term I used was historical reliability rather, which is not the same as accuracy.
A further point, which I unfortunately didn’t reaffirm in my previous post (even though I clearly enough raised it two posts ago), is that I don’t relent from respecting the genre. It’s absolutely central to respect the genre. There’s historicity in folklore, but historicity is not the purpose of folklore. The purpose of folklore is to provide expression to collective memory and ethnic perspective, so the relationship to the past is definitely there, but it’s incidental, strongly coloured by the ethnic perspective which is precisely the purpose of folklore. The focus of interpretation is correct when you understand the secondary (historical) aspects as secondary, not primary. Add to this that the Bible is not just folklore and it should be clear how profoundly past each other we talk.
Except that in such a case you would never have learned how folklore and scripture can be absolutely reliable and trustworthy, while not being CNN-style reporting. When you are expecting one thing and not getting it, of course it looks like evasion to you, while to me it looks like you are deliberately missing the point, because it’s about a different thing.
ETA: Oh, and Patrick actually has restated that he is not interested in what the text says, but in a (global) flood (with eight survivors). Which means that we are not interpreting the text, but attributing characteristics to a global flood so we can then move on looking for the flood, and when we don’t find it, we can eventually dismiss the text, even though we were not looking at it in the first place. Which means that even if we are talking about the same thing (which we are not) we are going on about it in irreconcilable ways.
When I say the Bible is historically reliable and therefore the flood occurred, I mean that I’m sure that we could find the flood that the story is about. Finding floods is not a problem, not even when looking for global floods. You can dig up fossils around Ararat and in Himalayas and that’s your evidence. Relating it to the text is a matter of interpreting the text though.
I think what some of us are saying is that your private definition of absolute reliability and trustworthiness is uninteresting.
Except in the sense that the Time Cube was interesting.
The connection was that I was reading the thread I linked to on Ed Feser’s blog and it made me think of you. It meant something to me but possbly only me. 🙂
The key idea I took from Vaal was a clear articulation of something that has niggled me for a while. Arguments for God such as Plantinga’s and Feser’s restatements of Aquinas don’t support a religious viewpoint. Accepting, for the case of argument, a God created this universe and everything in it gets you precisely nowhere towards either a Calvinistic God of Plantinga or a cartoon Catholic God of Feser.
Forgive me. I don’t always have time to carefully read all comments in all threads.
The devil is in the details. I don’t think anyone here is disputing the possibility that the story of Noah and the flood may be, to some extent, based on some catastrophic flood event in the Tigris – Euphrates basin.
Why wouldn’t they? Catastrophic flooding must have happened in many other areas susceptible to flooding. Indus valley, the Nile, the Yellow river.
I’d say that is impossible for anyone to achieve though apparently many literalists believe this in spite of evidence of the impossibility.
Saying what exactly? That folklore is likely to incorporate real history into the story telling. Sure, no problem. Except there is no reason to consider claims of supernatural events as other than embellishments.
No promises but I might have time to put up something along those lines this weekend.
From subsequent comments I see this ground has been covered. 🙂
Oh boy. I am having a hard time maintaining the required assumption. Is this, perhaps, others’ experience?
[Takes deep breath]
You.Have.Been.Lied.To.
Let’s have a statement like “Of course black holes (or antimatter or whatever) exist. Physics has been found (scientifically) reliable.”
What are the differences between this statement and mine?
DNA_Jock,
I still have a Poe feeling about this. 🙂
Literally, nothing.
😉
If, however, we start talking about correspondence with reality, which means that we are not interpreting the text, but attributing characteristics…
I don’t have a problem taking Erik seriously. That is to say, I believe he is serious about what he writes.
But I do wonder what he has been smoking.
Oh, Erik, honey, you need a nap. And when you wake up from your nap, you need to rub the sleep out of your eyes and read a beginning geology book.
Fossils around Ararat and Himalayas are not evidence of any flood within human history, much less of a flood serious enough to have been some basis for some folk tale about the tribe’s ancestors surviving the big bad flood.
Please don’t be an idiot. We’ve known this for more than three centuries, and the first scientists who confirmed it were devout christians specifically looking for evidence of a Noah-magnitude flood. But they could have been Chinese scientists and they would have confirmed the exact same thing: that folk tales of devastating floods are not supported by fossils in mountains, fossils which are not in fact the result of any big bad (global, or nearly global) flood in humanity’s memory.
Or you can keep throwing pasta at the wall, hoping some of it sticks somehow. Good luck with that!
What would ancient people have thought about those fossils?
Can you elaborate on this? Who lied and what’s the lie? And what’s your preferred version instead of the lie?
How would you know what ancient people thought about fossils? How would I know? How can I give you a better answer than speculation?
It’s probably true that ancient peoples thought fossil seashells in their inland/mountainous homelands deserved “an explanation” (and surely, many inland cultures knew that seashells come from water animals, because they would have contact/trade with seashore peoples) so we can further speculate that some of those cultures invented a great wave/great flood which washed seashells up to their locations as their preferred explanation. Why not — our ancestors were intelligent and reasonable enough — they would have had no idea how physically impossible that would have been.
But other cultures could equally have invented a great battle between the gods where troops of monkeys carried baskets of shells up to use as ammunition. Existence of fossil shells, physically, does not provide evidence to support either the fairy tale which was sorta reasonable (big flood) nor the fairy tale that was sorta silly (monkey troops).
Remember. those people never did live through an actual traumatic big wave/big flood incident, which contradicts Erik’s other claim, elsewhere in thread, that the reason why The Flood story is passed down (from whenever/wherever it supposedly happened in the real world) is because the survivors were so affected by what they had witnessed that they impressed upon their descendants to keep re-telling it through thousands of years.
NOTE: fossils other than obvious shells are not relevant even for this mere speculation, because – although large vertebrate bones might have contributed to legends of dragons etc – inland/mountain peoples know that the more likely cause of animal deaths was hunting / illness / landslide / earthquake / freezing to death, whatever. Anything would be more likely than them imagining that a big wave/big flood had killed land animals and moved their bones up. Right, we can’t know exactly what they thought, but I assure you, if you were out hunting in the hills and found some big bones on top of a rocky outcrop, the very last thing you would assume was that a flood had pushed them there. Only seashells, specifically, might have seemed more out-of-place and more in need of “explanation”.
But even this seashell speculation is hopeless for Erik’s ignorant case. Because he said:
So he’s making the statement that mountain-area fossils are our actual evidence of the actual global flood which we can find. He doesn’t say that mountain fossils are evidence that our ancestors were reasonable if they imagined a big flood — he says we can find The Flood, ie locate The Flood on a map by finding the fossils.
And that is simply not true. Inland/mountain fossils of marine organisms are never the result of (global/nearly global) floods depositing them inland. That’s just not how our real world geology works. For him to continue to believe in that flood nonsense requires an amazing level of ignorance or willful blindness to the settled science.
He’s not anywhere near as reasonable as our ancestors were.
Well, Erik will answer for himself, but to me his quote is ambigous on who he thought the fossils would be evidence for.
One thing I am interested in understanding is why so much folklore uses flood stories. The possibility you outline seems a reasonable one. I can think of ways to move it beyond speculation, eg look for contemporary texts that talk about the fossils and their possible origin.
Another possibility is that real, catastrophic floods were mythologized. That’s the theory outlined on Nova for history of the Babylonian flood myth; it was then copied as a starting point for the biblical flood.
Sure, why not. Lowlands, known for regular floods. Believable enough even without proof. (Dunno what the scientific consensus is towards that Nova hypothesis; seems plausible if not provable.)
There have been plenty of real, larger-than-expected floods in human history around the world. Even if almost every family survives in reality (rather than the miserable everyone-dies Noah version) the trauma of loss of livestock, loss of food storage, loss of hard-packed dirt roads between villages, could lead to memorializing a particularly bad spring flood or typhoon surge.
Add in a little vicious moralizing by the village elders that this all happened because the young folks were disrespectful, or having the wrong kind of sex, whatever, and you could get scripture as a result that lasts more than a few generations.
But as Petrushka keeps pointing out, we’re waiting for anyone to let us in on the moral that Noah’s tale is supposed to convey … unless it’s merely “don’t piss off the big guy”. Which is a goddamn filthy moral if that’s what they want to say.
And evidence that real, serious, floods physically have occurred in places with flood tales is irrelevant to any meaning of those flood tales. It’s as irrelevant as finding Platform 9 in King’s Cross is to any moral meaning of Harry Potter tales. Sure, it’s fun, but … it’s orthogonal to the claim that tales/scripture have (other than literal) meaning (which of course we atheists are too hardheaded to understand. Bah. )
The “fossil evidence” is completely irrelevant to any possible moral of folktale/scripture — as Erik is so fond of demanding that we admit, it stands in a different level of “meaning” than literal history — so why the hell is a supposed non-literalist like Erik even mentioning “fossil evidence”.
Well, it’s actually a good thing for Abrahamists that geological evidence completely proves there never was a global flood, because that exonerates their god from the total genocidal slander they have laid upon their god with Noah’s tale. Bad enough if their god murdered piles of people on the plains of Babylon with a historically-significant flood.
PS if you mean this Nova:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-noahs-ark.html
I found it unlistenable – ghastly narration and music – and I can’t find a transcript. Too bad.
I don’t see this as particularly insightful. To me it’s quite self-evident that Christianity with all its specific miracles requires a different argument than a generic creator God. And then there’s God-of-the-philosophers (or God of classical theism proper, not necessarily of Feserian A-T Catholicism specifically) who has next to nothing to do with creation. Different Gods. Even OT and NT have quite evidently different Gods. Each requires a different set of arguments and is believable to different people.
Concerning Christian apologetics:
Nobody in this thread has done Christian apologetics, as far as I’ve seen. Mung has been only sniping a bit, not defending Christian propositions.
If nobody is disputing the flood, then what is the fuss about? The details? Which details? The God “detail”? Are you saying the flood occurred, but God didn’t do it?
Have I been claiming God-did-it? Or have I been claiming there is literal and spiritual reading, these two are different, and the relationship of the story to external history is incidental, subject to interpretation, and there are a host of reasons why this cannot be otherwise?
Now, the God “detail” is one of the things that makes scripture scripture, not just the fact of mentioning, but what is being told about God and how and why. Which is a major exercise in interpretation and it will be coloured by whether you are a Jew, Christian, Babylonian, theist or anti-theist. Is this the detail where you see the devil or are there other details?
Erik,
We are disputing the Flood. The Flood, as described in Genesis, is a ridiculous story that is invalidated by modern science.
The fuss is over your claim that the Genesis Flood story is literally true. Are you any closer to abandoning that goofy position?
And of course you bring in your own notion of reality, which is a topic of epic proportions by itself.
There are all sorts of questions that can be asked about black holes. Is there physical/empirical evidence for them? What’s the evidence? Where are the holes? What are they holes of, i.e. what’s the fabric that broke so that there are holes in it now? What’s inside the holes? If there can be something inside the holes, why call them holes? Why black and not some other colour or colourless? Etc.
Some of these questions represent a misunderstanding of what physicists take black holes to be. Similarly, Patrick’s questions represent a misunderstanding how to approach folklore, not to mention scripture.
I have the same impression.
The Genesis flood story allows for direct historicity to such an extent that Alan Fox here managed to say that nobody here is disputing the possibility that it’s based on some catastrophic flood. You are not saying his position is goofy, are you?
ETA: And no, I didn’t say that the Genesis flood story was literally true. Tough case when you got the opposite impression. I said that different kinds of interpretation, which I identified, are all true at the same time. It’s so because we are talking about a synthetic genre whose substance is layered and nuanced accordingly.
I agree that Nova is lightweight stuff; it is more about human interest than anything academic (in this case, can those intrepid scientists really build a big round boat using the materials the Babylonians might have had?).
I only posted the link because the program happened to air at the same time as this thread was active.
I’d recommend a book like James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible for serious academic discussion of what archaeologists think of the bible text and of what the people who wrote it were trying to accomplish from the point of view of folklore. I cannot say whether that book addresses a philologist’s approach; it’s been a while since I read it and I would not have known what to look for at the time or even now for that matter.
I have not investigated how the flood story has been interpreted morally. I do think that such a question cannot be answered outside the framework of a particular religion. A standard example of this is the Garden of Eden story: its moral relates to Original Sin for the Christian, but there is no such concept in the other Abrahamic religions.
There is also the philosophically interesting meta-discussion of whether one can completely appreciate the moral of the story without being an adherent of the religion under which you are trying to understand that moral — without being a member of the community playing that language game, so to speak. I suspect the answer is no, you cannot.
I don’t think it needs any effort to say people here can allow that the Genesis flood story may have included some elements of an actual flood event. We can however make a distinction between plausible elements and physically impossible elements. We can reject the idea of a global flood on the grounds there is not enough water on Earth to rise to the level of mountain tops. We can reject the idea of all humans and animals having passed through the bottleneck of the ark on evidence from genetics. We can reject the idea that an ark of dimensions described is physically impossible to build from wood or be seaworthy on this evidence.
Erik,
No, my questions are an attempt to understand what you are claiming as historical fact.
You made this statement about the biblical flood some time ago:
You further emphasized that more recently:
Two of the distinguishing, essential features of the biblical flood story are that it covered the entire planet and that only the people and animals on the ark survived.
I’m trying to understand what you are claiming actually happened. I’m not at this time interested in analyzing the story. It is necessary to understand your claim before it makes sense to consider what evidence you can provide to support it. To be sure I understand your claim, I’ve asked three simple questions:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
Please answer these questions directly and clearly.
Erik,
Erik: “Anyway, of course it [the biblical flood] occurred. The Bible has been found historically reliable.”
Erik: “I have said the flood occurred, right? And I’m not taking this back.”
You can easily clear up the confusion you are causing by directly answering three simple questions:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
I look forward to your clear and unambiguous response to these.
Yes, you can reject all the ideas you like for whatever “reasons” you can contrive. Is it physically impossible for a dead man to be raised back to life?
Mung,
Yes
Mung, that’s stupid.
We don’t reject a global flood for “reasons we contrive” — we reject a global flood for impartial reality, the science of which was settled three centuries ago. And, remember, settled by faithful christians who went searching for evidence of their storied flood, only to be compelled by their personal and scientific integrity to tell the truth: no global flood ever occurred.
On the other hand, the determined-to-believe religious person certainly can “contrive” whatever reasons necessary to continue to believe. Global flood impossible according to scientific evidence? Then science must be wrong (in spite of the consilience of literally every particle of physical evidence from physics, geology, biogeography). Okay, science too hard to refute? Well, then, contrive a miracle explanation.
Yes, indeedy! It was a miracle! God created all the flood water out of nowhere. Miracle! Then afterwards, God removed not only the excess water but all traces of its untimely presence, rearranged the turbulent mixed sediments of the flood into ancient-appearing orderly layers, distributed the animal survivors across the continents back to their apparently-ancestral territories … Miracle upon miracle!
I guess once we’re in the realm of miracles, there may be no qualitative difference between believing in the miracle of dead man’s resurrection and the multitude of unwarranted miracles of Noachian flood. I guess you can swallow ’em all, indiscriminately. But I know which I chose to believe when I was a church-goer, and it never was the craziness of Noah.
Unless you want to push the backwoods every-word-literally-true Bible-bangers version of (un)reality, there is no need to profess faith that Noah’s flood happened as written. It’s not a requirement to be a faithful christian. It’s stupid to twist yourself into pretzels to believe something which is refuted by everything we collectively know from three centuries of science.
What do you gain by saying that we have to contrive “reasons” to disbelieve, while you have to contrive “miracles” to keep believing?
I agree, which means that conversations between believers and non-believers are not going to be productive for either.
In my view, when the result of the discussion is the identification of that which prevents further rapprochement, it’s already been very productive.
Alan, I’m guessing you also believe it is physically impossible for the universe to have been created or to be sustained in it’s existence by God. I don’t suppose you see how problematic the “physical impossibility” argument might be.
I say it’s not physically impossible for a dead man to be brought back to life. So there.
Jesus said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Mung reduces his own comments to bumper sticker level. Well done, Mung.
Jesus said it’s physically impossible for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
😉
This is even more stupid.
Noachian flood is physically impossible within the universal laws of physics supposedly created and sustained by your god. NOTE: these are the same universal laws of physics which christians claim prove that god fine-tuned our universe for our ultimate existence. Maybe we are delusional to think that those laws make some things “physically impossible”, but christians are the ones who claim those laws must necessarily exist because god is the law-giver. Christian physicists, geologists, biologists all agree that The Flood as described is physically impossible within the given laws of our universe.
Of course your god, if it exists with the characteristics you attribute to it, could break its own physical laws and miraculously both cause then clean up a total genocide global flood on some insignificant planet somewhere in one of its boring little galaxies. Why not? Well, a better question is, why?
Why would your god break its own created-and-sustained universal laws to miracle up a flood? Just to test us whether we really believe in every alleged miracle or not?
Christianity depends on the miracle of resurrection. Christianity does not depend on the miracles which would have been necessary for Noah’s flood to have been real, to have been anything other than a particularly Jewish fairy tale.
Rejecting the necessarily-miraculous and normally-physically-impossible flood events is quite reasonable, even for faithful christians. Rejecting the fairy tale of the miraculous flood has nothing to do with accepting either the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection nor the concept of a god which creates/sustains our physical universe.
What are you getting out of continuing to confuse those issues?
.
.
.
.
.
edit: note
Actually He didn’t
I’m pretty sure Mung knows that.
Which leaves me wondering what Mung thinks the relevance of his comment is. It’s hard to guess what the point would be of something Jesus never said, in a discussion of whether we should believe in miracles.
In any case, here’s the scripture as a memory refresher:
Matthew 19, KJV
Well, I don’t know how the universe we inhabit came to be. I’m not even sure that it has not always been and the big bang was in fact a near miss. Created by God translates for me into “created by human imagination”. Not sure, don’t know. Does the universe need sustaining at every moment in every corner by the creator? Don’t know. How could we test that?
Ah but we can poke at bits of the universe. We can observe and experiment with it. We can do this because we make the pragmatic assumption that the properties of matter and energy are fixed and regular. This is constantly reinforced by observation and just by the facts of daily living. So we can say, in our experience, living organisms sustain themselves by maintaining their chemical processes away from equilibrium by exploiting energy sources. Once an organism ceases to function, it quickly returns to equilibrium with its immediate environment. This is irreversible.
OK. Then we must agree to disagree. I say it never happens – has never been observed and no credible case of such an event exists. You don’t have any evidence that people have ever been resurrected, do you?