Disproving the Bible

[Fidel_Castronaut]

This is untrue (people reading this please refer to the beginning of the thread).

There is no 'legitimate' reason found with the bible aside from the mental gymnastics employed in apologetics to presume that the genesis myth is referring to anything other than a literal 6 days.

As to the other things. Our understanding of reality suggests that all of the things listed by godslayer are impossible. As there is no evidence to corroborate the claims found in the bible regarding these, then they can be dismissed.

The Presbyterian Church conducted a survey of the different interpretations. Four major and six minor. You can see them here: http://www.pcahistory.org/creation/report.html

Regarding the list, if God exists, these can easily happen. If God does not exist, they did not. You want me to show proof of the positive yet you don't have proof of the negative. Leaving the Bible out of it, it is still more plausible there is a God then not. There are 5-6 cogent arguments for the existence of God that do not rely on Genesis.

1. Yes, I want you to show definitive, verifiable and testable evidence that your version of whatever god it is you worship exists.
2. See: burden of proof. Your inability to satisfy 1. Means I am under no obligation to either disprove your thesis, believe it, or take it seriously. It does not factor into my life in any way until you satisfy 1.
3. Show your working whereby you have come to the conclusion that "it is still more plausible there is a God then not." As you have thus far failed to satisfy point 1, I am perplexed as to how you've concluded this?

From the link:

Out of all of this literature it is possible to distinguish two general schools of thought on the nature of the six days. One class of interpreters tends to interpret the days figuratively or allegorically (e.g., Origen and Augustine), while another class interprets the days as normal calendar days (e.g., Basil, Ambrose, Bede and Calvin). From the early church, however, the views of Origen, Basil, Augustine and Bede seem to have had the greatest influence on later thinking. While they vary in their interpretation of the days, all recognize the difficulty presented by the creation of the sun on the fourth day.

Apologetics ahoy. Interpretation means that no other interpretation can be viewed is inherently correct or incorrect, and as the genesis story mentions only a literal week of creation, with no qualifier, it would still be illogical to interpret those days as anything other.

Of course, people are free to interpret it however they want. But we need to recognise that it is entirely guesswork, as evidenced by the entire section of the article dealing with the illogical timeline of genesis on light and the sun.

Rather than employ mental gymnastics to absolve oneself of the cognitive dissonance inherent in believing that there can be light without a source, it's much easier to conclude that the author of genesis either made an error when writing the mythology or was ignorant of how light emissions from a standard main sequence g-type star works.