The Bible is the claim, not the evidence

[WesOlsen]

[quote='WesOlsen' pid='569817' dateline='1387967193']
Last time I checked the bible was penned by a bunch of scribes commissioned by Jewish tribal elders, and a bunch of Jesus cheerleaders. I didn't realise god authored the whole thing.

Are you really this ignorant of Christian doctrine?

Please elucidate. Last time I checked the authors of the new testement were writing things such as 'But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name', John 20:31. This tends to suggest that what we have is a piece of religious propaganda, written by men, referring to god as an agent other than themselves. Modern historians do not commit to their favourite supernatural deity and then declare that everything they write isn't for the purpose of giving a balanced overview of a period or nation, but rather to glorify a supernatural deity. The best historians keep things nice and objective. The bible isn't an objective piece of historical enquiry, it has a seriously heavy agenda. We could argue that all communication is political and informed by bias, but the degree to which the new testement is self-confessed propaganda is to the extreme side of this spectrum.

You know this how?

Because as mentioned already, it was penned by humans and compares to other scriptures from other religions, in that it contains nothing particularly unique, predicts nothing accurately and occupies itself with tedious, epoch relative desert dealings.

Nope, it postdates the alleged divergence between birds and dinosaurs so it cannot be a transitional form for that divergence.

It really doesn't

I reference a peer-reviewed journal, you reference Wikipedia? Nice. Did you notice the terrible assumption? They believe it had feathers because they argue that an absence of alpha-keratin indicates the specimen had feathers. Of course there is no empirical evidence to suggest any such keratin could survive for millions of years so an absence of alpha-keratin proves nothing at all.

Yes i'm sure you went exploring your huge collection of scientific journals that you keep. I actually have a massive collection of 'the biomedical scientist' because I work in a scientific setting, with keratin. The wikipedia article, which references the relevant scientific journal (btw I take it that you just used a search engine to find your journal right?), states that decay products of beta-keratin were detected, this suggests that keratin can be detected for millions of years.

Yes I value evidence and no my standards are not inconsistent at all. If I were making an evidential claim such as dinosaurs having feathers I’d at least provide an appropriate level of evidence to support this claim.

The slowly accumulating collection of evidence for feathered dinosaurs, by all rights and accounts, outweighs the evidence for the divine origin of the bible. The objective evidence shows that the bible was penned by men, with no clear way of establishing whether they were acting under the orders of a supernatural deity. To believe such a fantastic claim is faith, and faith alone. Your standards of evidence go far beyond inconsistent my friend. You decided what you wanted to believe, then cherry picked whatever you could find to fit that, whereas most scientists would happily drop their certainties if we could find ourselves a human in the cambrian or a dinosaur in the iron-age.

A piece of religious propaganda (which most historians view with rational skepticism) constitutes direct evidence of authorship from god himself, for you.

Nice question-begging epithet. Where did I say anything like this?

You said it when you said that the bible is evidence for the existence of god, oh mercy like here for example:

Again, this merely illuminates an overarching ignorance of Christian doctrine. God authored scripture by using physical human authors.

(you know, the bit where you said god authored the scripture, that suggests to most people that you believe, with some unusual degree of certainty, that god sort of authored the scripture.)

We’re never told how many people all were there, but we do know that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome, Joanna, and others were all there. As for the flying cross, I do not know what you are referring to.

That's right, the myth snowballing of the resurrection story, with each author adding details as they get further and further away from the events described. This constitutes contradictions, because each account of the resurrection is wildly different. The different writers do not complement each other, adding in the extra characters whom the other forgot to mention, rather they directly contradict each other, with the latest account of the resurrection appearing in say that a giant cross rises from the tomb, shouts "i do" and flies off in to the sky. We don't know whether the tomb was already open when the unknown number of witnesses arrived, we don't know if there was already someone sitting outside the tomb, or whether there was a guard there, or whether anything was seen to come flying out of it (cross or otherwise) or not. The different accounts are clear in their descriptions (well, that depends on mindset).

Just as well you're not right then

..but I am.

You don't really have any place implying the arrogance of others here. You're a complete quack.

BadWriterSparty says we do not know what the natural conditions were like 3.5 billion years ago but we can still prove RNA spontaneous generation could have taken place naturally back then so your proposal is not going to work.

I might use the Waldorf technique for asserting the certainty of my knowledge here > Yes it will.

Something taking place under certain conditions does not demonstrate it can take place under other conditions; that is a non-sequitur.

You can't demonstrate that god did anything under any conditions, so we're all good.

your god of the gaps theory, which can't be replicated, tested, measured or limited under any conditions, laboratory or otherwise.

Neither can the spontaneous generation of RNA 3.5 billion years in the past. You place your faith in man’s ability to perform induction; I place it in what we know to be deductively true through God’s revelation.

I'm sure i've heard Muslims and hindus using this one before. You can't demonstrate that god made a revelation, so any assumption beyond that is null. Your standards of evidence, not mine.

How do you determine that it is a statistical likelihood? It absolutely is faith. How do you know what the conditions were at that time period? Has RNA ever been observed to spontaneously generate in Nature?

Has god ever been demonstrated to do anything in nature? I know what your answer will be, but the real answer is no, just in case you're struggling.

I do not believe in any such deity so that was a rather useless analogy.

Phew, for a minute I thought you were a christian who believed in the christian god. Glad we cleared that one up.

Again, that’s an irrelevant point. That’s like saying since all the children in the classroom disagree on the solution to “2+2=X” that believing “X=4” is irrational.

No it's not, it's like saying that an author wrote a 100% perfect (let's say, divinely perfect) maths text book and a number of maths teachers can't agree on how to decipher it, each claiming that the text book is perfect and clear, but each claiming that the other's interpretation is wrong, suggesting that the text book isn't so clear, but rather is open to interpretation, and so may not be the perfect text book after all. The children in the classroom just sit around enduring the fallout from the squabbling, with their wellbeing suffering as a consequence. They're all literally covered in piss and shit. Quite a fitting reflection of the real world under religious insutrction in many ways.

There is more evidence for RNA forming under natural conditions, as stated above, than there is for an ill-defined deity creating matter where there was formerly no matter.

Demonstration needed.

God authored scripture by using physical human authors.

Demonstration needed.

Scientistis are constantly meeting their burden to progress and demonstrate. Christians on the other hand..........

According to whom? You?

The real, tangible world.

We have evidence that a great number of processes take place in spite of god, not because of him, this at least cuts a magic god finger out of many equations if nothing else....

How do such processes take place without God? Do explain.

Oh but we have, the burden is on you to explain how all processes take place because of god, and establish the mechanism of effect.

And different books of the Bible collaborate other books of the Bible. We are talking about your senses as a whole, therefore any appeal to any sense is a circular argument.

Nope, the existence of God is a necessary axiom within my conceptual scheme and if God exists then we can trust the reliability of our senses because He made both us and the Universe we live in.

So using senses to confirm other senses is a circular argument, unless your Waldorf who knows that his senses are in tact because god made Walford (but not WesOlsen). You're like a cat on hot bricks mate, none of this makes any sense.

Do you often get destroyed in debates by people whose brains do not function “very well” or is this a first for you?

Demosntration needed.

which scripture? They're all full of contradictions and ridiculous claims. Scripture was penned by humans.

All of original scripture.

What's the cutoff point for original scripture? Why can't we include the vedas or native american gods?

Again, are you saying that if we did not know anything about programming, we did not know any programmers we’d be justified in believing that Windows 8 arose through purely unguided natural processes? Yes or no.

To force an answer from an unlikely unnatural secenario demonstrates nothing, save your huge capacity for bullet dodging. But to answer, if there were no computers on this planet because we hadn't created them yet, but found one on the moon (or one came crashing through the sky) I would believe that it was likely extra-terrestrial in origin.

You’re partially right; DNA is far more complex and sophisticated than binary codes. However, that only supports my argument.

Once you've established the mechanism of effect and showed the process unfolding in spite of a scientific solution, then tested and re-tested the hypothesis, can we come back to this point. Demonstration needed.

DNA is not language because it does not follow a power law, it is cypher.

Even if this were true cyphers are still the products of intelligences so that was a poor example to use.

It is true, because DNA does not follow a power law. DNA is also much less flexible than a true language, translations can't be made from English to DNA or back again quite so rigourously. Until you demonstrate that cycpher must result from intelligence then we can't go any further here. Demonstration needed.

There is no reason to suspect a human was programmed because we cannot witness the programming process, replicate it, modify it etc.

I never witnessed the programming of Windows 8…

I did, I've got a friend who works for Microsfot. I've written my own basic scripts in visual basic, Java, html. Source code is quite easy to get hold of for a great many programming languages. To assume that Windows 8 was written by a supernatural deity just because you didn't witness the programming stage would be amusing, and I wouldn't put it past you.

Comparing Visual basic or C++ with human design is like comparing a goldfish to a turd.

No, it’s more like comparing a sun dial to an atomic clock. DNA is so much more sophisticated than either of those programming languages are.

LOL. So are rings in a tree cypher as well? DNA isn't a language, it can't be fully translated in to C++ or back again, so in that respect, it's not as powerful as C++

Besides what's wrong with an artist drawing a picture? It's just like a human writing some words, in a desert, for the purpose of consolidating tribal power..........idiot.

Classy. So you are admitting that believing that dinosaurs had feathers is like believing in the Bible?

No i'm merely admitting that all written claims warrant a degree of scrutiny. The ongoing framework of scientific investigation, for me, has its own built in error-correction techniques, because scientists scruitinise each other all the time, that's what makes it work. Jesus cheerleaders, who are well trained in the art of scrutiny, and who can scrutinise until the cows come home, rarely seem to reach consensus, and they certainly don't progress anything. When we scruitinse bible claims and call upon other branches of historical study (Archeology, Geology, DNA studies etc) we quickly find that most of it doesn't survive the challenge. I was simply drawing a comparison between your standards of evidence in some circumstances with your standards of evidence in other circumstances, that is, you'll happily accept some pen on paper with little rational scrutiny so long as it fits your pre-determined world view, but as soon as pen on paper arises that challenges these claims you dismiss it outright. This is because you've already decided what you want to believe, and aren't interested in the ongoing search for truth at all.

Huh? So you’re saying its fine to be irrational as long as you’re not a Christian? That makes a lot of sense. Secondly, I never said anything about a magic man in the sky; I think you are getting your conversations confused.

Yeah perhaps you're right, I must be mistaken, I thought you'd declared a belief i..............................oh wait here it is:

God authored scripture by using physical human authors.

I didn’t, I used it as evidence that God exists.

The supernatural deity that you don't believe exists, but definitely exists and that you believe in. Yours is a troubled world indeed.

Sorry I have to keep coming back to this one. You have no consistent standards of evidence. This is beyond humiliating.

This is what we call a bare assertion.

Not in light of all the letters that you shit out of your keyboard and crap all over this forum.

The bible has many authors, not one of them 'God'. So saying that the Bible proves the existence of God in the same way that the lord of the Rings proves the existence of Sauron is completely apt.

No, the Bible has many writers, it’s content has one single author.

Quack quack. Demonstration needed.

Unless of course you can prove that 'God' wrote the bible.

He authored it’s content.

Demonstration needed....

Oh and using the Bible as evidence that the Bible is true is just begging the Question.

I didn’t, I used it as evidence that God exists.

Demonstration needed.................yawn