The Bible is the claim, not the evidence

[Duck]

What evidence do you have that your senses are reliable? Do not appeal to your senses or else you’re using circular reasoning.
What evidence do you have that your memory is reliable? Do not appeal to memories or else you are using circular reasoning.
What evidence do you have that logic exists? Do not answer with a logical argument or else you are using circular reasoning.
What evidence do you have that your brain accurately perceives reality? Do not appeal with anything originating in your brain or else you are using circular reasoning.

You believe all of these are true and yet you cannot justify any of them without circular reasoning. How is it fair for you to do this but not fair for a Christian to rely upon the authority of scripture? Fair is fair.

I have evidence that my eyes are reliable. I see a wall. I can reach out a touch the wall. I can lean something against it. Obviously the only evidence I can gather comes in via my senses, so as a collective they can only evidence themselves via themselves. I operate under the assumption that my senses work. The fact that I am still here, able to walk and haven't crashed my car, is a form of evidence for the reliability of my eyes.

Again for memory. It is the way we study for tests. I read a textbook, try and remember the content, and then see if I can remember it. I can test my memory by answering questions on the topic. If I get stuff correct (I check by referring back to the book) my memory seems to be functioning.

Logic doesn't really exist, it is a concept. The validity of logic is hard to examine; in order for logic to function it requires you to accept its axioms.

On accurately perceiving reality, I refer you back to the idea that I haven't crashed my car, fallen down the stairs or burnt my house down. I appear to reliably interact with my surrounding and perceiving them accurately would seem to be a necessary condition.

None of these things is like using your senses to read a book and then divorcing yourself from reality and believing it is true without evidence. Using the book itself to justify the book is circular reasoning in that you have to assume your conclusion in order to make your argument. It is like you needing to assume a table is flat in order to show it is flat. It is silly. You can make assumptions before making an argument (often to simplify reality to allow it to be examined with more ease), but the assumptions cannot be the conclusion, or the argument is completely pointless; you are asking the person to assume you are right before you start the argument.

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Also, you said
"You believe all of these are true and yet you cannot justify any of them without circular reasoning. How is it fair for you to do this but not fair for a Christian to rely upon the authority of scripture? Fair is fair."

We cannot operate in any way, physical or mental, without operating under the assumption our senses are reporting reality. The same is in no way true about the bible.

Fair? What the hell are you on about. Are you a kid appealing to the teacher? its not FAIR!?! MIIISSSS! the nasty people are asking for evidence for my ludicrous belief in an invisible sky god! its so mean!

Scripture has no authority, and there is no reason to attach any to it. There IS reason for our senses. There is no justification to attach authority to scripture. It is just a sanctimonious pile of self serving BS that has caused pain, misery, suffering and death for 2000 years. Time for it to go.

[Bad Writer]

I will warn you that engaging SW in a discussion can lead to both sides spinning for countless posts, but more power to ya, all the same. The secret is that he considers himself the victor in any argument prior to reaching its conclusion, much like he considers god to be real before he has reached sufficient evidence. Good luck!

[Ryantology]

Waldorf is a huge fan of appealing to solipsism, because if his belief system is wrong, then by Jesus, so must everybody else's.

[Minimalist]

Are you a kid appealing to the teacher? its not FAIR!?!

An apt analogy, Duck. Waldork is quite childlike. He is terrified that his fairy tales might not be true.

[Statler Waldorf]

Poor phrasing there. There is no 'good' or 'bad,' in the process. Either a change is beneficial for the particular environment the organism finds itself in or it is not.

When our distant ancestors were climbing around in trees a mutation which allowed bi-pedalism would have done them little good. But once the trees die out do to climate change and they find themselves on a grassland such a change to bi-pedalism becomes useful in terms of increasing their field of vision. Same change. Useful in one instance and not useful in the other.

Fairy tales.

Barring my explanation at the start of this thread, where exactly is this missing evidence of mine, SW, or are you merely making an indignant assertion because we atheists get a little sleepy-eyed when you try to prove god with the Bible?

How do I point you to evidence you have not provided? You have done nothing to support your assertion that Christians are somehow disallowed from appealing to the authority of scripture. Merely asserting that they are does not do the job, I am sorry.

Your first sentence here is called the argument from personal incredulity, and it's a logical fallacy:

He did not commit that fallacy. He was merely saying that creation is a more likely explanation for what we observe. There is nothing logically fallacious about making such a probabilistic claim.

I understand, but to call the universe "creation" is to imply that it was created.

As is using the term creature, but it is used quite often in Biology.

Because to prove RNA can spontaneously exist, all that need be done is to prove that RNA can spontaneously generate: no matter their knowledge of the initial conditions, if it's proven to have happened, then there's no more excuse to posit a god, merely because spontaneous generation seems impossible. It's not.

This is ridiculous. You’d first have to demonstrate that you know what the conditions were at the time the RNA supposedly spontaneously generated which is impossible to do. Secondly, proving something is possible does not prove it in fact happened. You will never be able to bridge that gap. You’re living by faith yet again.

Likewise, when you get the chance, please do post some evidence for thinking RNA cannot spontaneously exist.

This is no different than saying, “Well prove that God does not exist.” I imagine you have no difficulty seeing the problem with this when it is the theist who does it.

Science will never provide the glib, seamless explanation to all life's big questions that boldly assuming God for no reason can.

This is correct. In fact, science itself boldly assumes that God exists as well.

Denying God leaves everything open to question.

…except apparently common descent, the age of the Earth, and anthropogenic climate change.

Assuming God allows you to get on with acting like you already know everything.

We do not know everything, but He who does has revealed many things to us.

You made the claim that the thread's title was unsupported by evidence without supplying any of your own in support of that claim.

Read the thread. He never provides anything other than his own opinion to support his claim that Christians cannot appeal to the authority of scripture.

I have evidence that my eyes are reliable. I see a wall. I can reach out a touch the wall. I can lean something against it. Obviously the only evidence I can gather comes in via my senses, so as a collective they can only evidence themselves via themselves.

Yes, you are appealing to your senses in order to try and justify your belief that your senses are reliable. That is no different than a Christian using the Bible to justify his belief that the Bible is what it claims to be.

I operate under the assumption that my senses work.

And I operate under the assumption that scripture is the infallible word of God. Fair is fair.

The fact that I am still here, able to walk and haven't crashed my car, is a form of evidence for the reliability of my eyes.

We’re talking about your senses. If your senses were unreliable there would be no way to know that you were here, walking, and driving your car so that is still begging the question. This is no different than a Christian using the Old Testament to support the New Testament or the writings of Paul to support the writings of Peter.

It is the way we study for tests. I read a textbook, try and remember the content, and then see if I can remember it. I can test my memory by answering questions on the topic. If I get stuff correct (I check by referring back to the book) my memory seems to be functioning.

How do you know you read the textbook? Do you remember doing so? How do you know you took a test? Do you remember doing so? How do you know how many questions you got correct? Do you remember the number? Again, you are appealing to the reliability of your memory to justify your belief that your memory is reliable. It’s no different than saying that the Bible is the word of God because the Bible says it is the word of God.

Logic doesn't really exist, it is a concept. The validity of logic is hard to examine; in order for logic to function it requires you to accept its axioms.

You’re trying to give a logical argument as to why you use logic? Circularity again. We accept the Bible’s axioms.

On accurately perceiving reality, I refer you back to the idea that I haven't crashed my car, fallen down the stairs or burnt my house down.

How do you know that you have not done any of these things? Circularity again.

I appear to reliably interact with my surrounding and perceiving them accurately would seem to be a necessary condition.

How do you know that you accurately interact with your surroundings? You perceive that you do? Circularity again.

None of these things is like using your senses to read a book and then divorcing yourself from reality and believing it is true without evidence.

Sure they are! You did not provide any actual evidence for believing any of the things above are true. Yet you believe that they are all true.

Using the book itself to justify the book is circular reasoning in that you have to assume your conclusion in order to make your argument.

As is using your senses to justify the reliability of your senses, using your memory to justify the reliability of your memory, making logical arguments to justify your use of logic, appealing to your perception of reality in order to justify the reliability of your ability to perceive reality. Why is it okay for you to use circular reasoning but not for the Christian to?

We cannot operate in any way, physical or mental, without operating under the assumption our senses are reporting reality. The same is in no way true about the bible.

Sure it is, everyone assumes the Bible is the word of God in one way or another.

Fair? What the hell are you on about. Are you a kid appealing to the teacher? Its [sic] not FAIR!?! MIIISSSS! the nasty people are asking for evidence for my ludicrous belief in an invisible sky god! Its [sic] so mean!

No, when I used the term fair I meant in a rational sense. If you are allowing yourself to engage in something (i.e. circular reasoning) that you do not allow the other side to engage in then you are committing the fallacy of special pleading. I was operating under the assumption that you valued rationality.

Scripture has no authority, and there is no reason to attach any to it.

Sure it does, it is the ultimate authority of all people.

There IS reason for our senses.

You have yet to provide any.

There is no justification to attach authority to scripture.

Sure there is, reality only makes sense if we do so.

It is just a sanctimonious pile of self serving BS that has caused pain, misery, suffering and death for 2000 years.

Now who is whining?

I will warn you that engaging SW in a discussion can lead to both sides spinning for countless posts, but more power to ya, all the same. The secret is that he considers himself the victor in any argument prior to reaching its conclusion, much like he considers god to be real before he has reached sufficient evidence. Good luck!

I am not the victor in every argument. You certainly have never gotten the best of me however.

Waldorf is a huge fan of appealing to solipsism, because if his belief system is wrong, then by Jesus, so must everybody else's.

My belief system cannot be wrong, that’s the whole point. I do not appeal to solipsism, I merely point out that anti-Christian Theism reduces to it. Fortunately Christian Theism is true and we actually can possess knowledge.

An apt analogy, Duck. Waldork is quite childlike. He is terrified that his fairy tales might not be true.

Why would I be terrified of that? If it is not true then I am merely future worm food like you. You’re a lot closer to feeding the worms than I am. Obviously you are the one who is terrified. You are terrified that I am right and that you will continue to exist after you die. This is why you treat people of faith with such unfounded animosity and rudeness; it’s so plainly obvious. You have my sympathies.

[Mister Agenda]

Biblical Christians believe the Bible to be truth. So when asked what the truth is, as you have stated, we use scripture. The other reason (speaking for myself) I do this is because when I quote the Bible I am speaking upon the authority of His Word. If I were to give you my own thoughts and perspectives I come upon my own authority. If you are looking for something outside of scripture to prove the inherrancy of scripture (or a proof that God exists) one still has to look to scripture to discuss it. That being said from a non-biblical theist perspective (and not using scripture) I would say that creation (namely the earth and all the plants, animals, people, etc) is my evidence for the existence of God. I realize atheists reject creation because it speaks to a creator and they don't believe in one.

I can't speak for everyone, but I reject 'creation' as evidence for a Creator because it affirms the consequent, which is a fallacy. When an argument is based on a fallacy, its conclusion doesn't follow from its premises.

If God, then the universe.
The universe, therefore God.

suffers from the same problem as

If I am Ken Ham, I am a felon.
I am a felon, therefore I am Ken Ham.

So the natural question then arises: Where did we come from? If we were created then we believe in a creator. If we don't believe in a creator we look for another explanation.

Or, if we're honest, we don't hold any proposed explanation as true until there is good reason to believe it is, in fact, the true one.

I will only discuss evolution here because it seems to be the most widely held argument in opposition to creation and thus God. I will define evolution as chance through time.

Do you really think you're qualified to define evoluion?

Evolution seeks to prove that through time (millions of years), and chance (things just happened to come together in just the right manner) life was created and then evolved and humans are the most recent of that evolution.

You left out natural selection, the filter that takes the chance out of the process. It's a bit more complicated than that, yet infinitely closer than your description.

My evidence through creation is that God has given the creation as an evidence/witness for Himself. As an analogy: you look through a telescope at the moon. You see the American Flag on a pole stuck into the moon's surface. What is the more likely scenario; that the flag got there by chance through time, that it just happed (evolution) or that someone put it there (creation). Similarly the empire state building. I didn't physically observe anyone design and build this building. Yet I believe it was created and built by an intelligent designer (creation), and the building itself bears witness to it's designer/creator. (much like the mayan ruins and Egyptian Pyramids bear witness to previous civilizations). I do not believe that the building got there by chance through time (evolution).

If I misunderstood evolution as badly as you do, I wouldn't accept it either.

So scripture aside, there are and have been people who have held to the view of creation that reject the Biblical account of it. And as such they believe in a creator but not the one spoken of in the Bible.

That's nice. I like chocolate ice cream.

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Perhaps I was oversimplifiying evolution. But the concept of chance through time is how I was taught.

Ever think maybe you were taught it that way for a reason?

Your quote is "The theory of evolution says that life originated, and evolution proceeds, by random chance." No where in your quote are the words "natural selection". It does say that: "evolution proceeds by random chance" (and it "proceeds" through time). I think we can all agree that evolution is said to have taken time and that it happened through chance. Would "chance through time and natural selection" be a better definition? I think either way to respond to the op my "outside of scripture" evidence is creation.

Natural selection is to chance as a coin separator is to a random pile of coins. It imparts order. It removes variations that are less reproductively fit, and among the less reproductively fit are those less well adapted to their environment. The phrase 'randomness through dumping coins into a sorter doesn't make sense'. The phrase 'removing randomness through dumping coins into a sorter' does make sense. So does 'reducing chance through time through natural selection', or, better phrased, 'the elimination of variations less fit to reproduce over time through natural selection.'

[Statler Waldorf]

I can't speak for everyone, but I reject 'creation' as evidence for a Creator because it affirms the consequent, which is a fallacy. When an argument is based on a fallacy, its conclusion doesn't follow from its premises.

This is true in formal deduction but inductive reasoning uses this form actually.

If God, then the universe.
The universe, therefore God.

I believe his argument would actually look like this…

1. If the Universe, then God
2. The Universe, therefore God.

Which is affirming the antecedent.

If I am Ken Ham, I am a felon.
I am a felon, therefore I am Ken Ham.

Not only does this suffer from a formal fallacy but premise 1 (and premise 2 I hope) are both false. Ken Ham is not a felon.

-SW

[Mister Agenda]

Do I have this right? Mutation is synonomous with chance. So mutation (chance) occurs, then natural selection eliminates the harmful or unbeneficial chance and the good chance survives to enter into another state of mutation (chance) and this cycle occurs for millions of years (time). So if I say chance through natural selection and time is that an accurate definition?

Among the synonyms for 'chance' I doubt 'mutation' should be concluded. Mutations follow the laws of organic chemistry, they're not entirely random. It's like picking a card out of a deck: you might get a three of clubs, but you'll never get a rock. Genes can only change in certain ways. But your third sentence wasn't far-off if you take out the attempts to make mutation and chance synonymous, it's about right.

If you said 'random natural variations due to genetic mutation that differentially affect reproductive success and thus are subject to natural selection forces which eliminate the variations that are consistently reproductively unsuccessful', that would be a pretty accurate description.

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I'm defining creation, as Simon Moon commented on, as existence. I called it creation instead. The earth, sun, moon, stars, animals, plants, etc. Everything we "percieve" through our senses. I pruposed that existence (creation) points intuitively to an intelligent designer.

I agree with you. We make things and when we wonder how other things came to be, it's natural (intuitive) to consider that someone besides us made the other things. A bigger 'maker', maybe. However, our intuitions are not reliable sources of information. A major part of science is preventing our intuition (bias) from influencing our findings. Much of what science helps us discover is counter-intuitive. The earth looks flat, but it's actually nearly a sphere. The earth is going around the sun, the sun isn't going around the earth. Time slows down for you when you go faster. The universe is made of stuff we can barely begin to imagine. And the apparent design and wonderful variet of living things is entirely explained by the differential reproductive success of living organism starting from simple microbes over about four billion years. I agree that intuition tells us otherwise. But intuition is often wrong.

I believe it to be far more likely things are created rather than they just happened. Simon Moon propsed that "existance is evidence of existance", that there cannot be any further deductions, conclusions, or intuitions to be drawn from that observation.

No valid deduction can be made from the mere fact that we perceive (on a very basic level) existence except the obvious tautology. We have to study and examine and discover and learn about existence, and we then can draw tentative conclusions from the things that we learn, subject to revision if we learn something new that shows our previous conclusions to be incorrect.

[WesOlsen]

As is using your senses to justify the reliability of your senses, using your memory to justify the reliability of your memory, making logical arguments to justify your use of logic, appealing to your perception of reality in order to justify the reliability of your ability to perceive reality. Why is it okay for you to use circular reasoning but not for the Christian to?

These actions can be corroborated by external agents. We can ask others to verify our coordinates, our appearence, our actions etc. Of course if our entire perception of reality is somehow skewed then we're talking a higher realm of philosophy and it would take away everything from your claims as well as anyone elses. If we assume that the present order of things is consistent however, and we're not running on the assumption that a piece of religious propaganda is evidence of its own bombastic claims, then we can demonstrate that the new testament has essentially no external corroboration, that is, we cannot ask others to test it in the hear and now because it is not an unfolding or interactive entity unlike a person. At least if I wanted to demonstrate the accuracy of my sensory perception of say, a coloured puzzle, I could at least corroborate interpretations with others. No need to remind you of how important the scientific approach is, with its openess to PEER REVIEW, so that others may REPEAT the test so as to evaluate the claim, and if so IMPROVE the test or CONDUCT another test to demonstrate alternative/supporting results........something you can't do with jesus or father christmas or Dave the pixie cat.

As I say, this is only circular reasoning if you want to be pedantic and assault the notion of perception directly, and as I say if this was indeed the case then it would be applicable to all of us, thus nullifying your arguments as well as ours. Using the bible as evidence for the bible is pure, unadulterated circular reasoning.

Sure it is, everyone assumes the Bible is the word of God in one way or another.

Speak for yourself

Fairy tales.

It becomes a much more valid hypothesis when it fits in to a wider framework of demonstratable, evidence based enquiry, which calls on many different branches of science to build a bigger picture. We may use terms like 'theory' in science but at least they can be tested and re-tested, unlike ludicrous bedtime stories about a flying and talking cross flying out of the tomb of Jesus, a fantastic and hillarious event which sadly cannot be replicated in the laboratory.

Sure there is, reality only makes sense if we do so.

I'm beginning to wonder. Maybe we can justify the authority of Islamic scripture using this same crude reasoning? I assume your critical reasoning skills are only suspended when it comes to your own religion.

Fortunately Christian Theism is true and we actually can possess knowledge.

Fortunately christian theism is baseless foolishness and we actually can possess knowledge.

We do not know everything, but He who does has revealed many things to us.

Joseph Smith did much of the revealing if I recall, entertaining stuff, or was it Mohammed? DERP DERP which one to chose?

You have done nothing to support your assertion that Christians are somehow disallowed from appealing to the authority of scripture

The evidence based approach allows us to develop medicine which demonstratably works. The religious appeal to authority makes a few predictions (depending on which bedtime stories you're reading) and not many of them were realised. We all draw our lines somewhere, you just drew yours in lah lah land.

[Mister Agenda]

This is true in formal deduction but inductive reasoning uses this form actually.

In inductive reasoning, we reason from details to generalities. The path from 'the universe exists' to 'God made it' is not inducively valid.

I believe his argument would actually look like this…

1. If the Universe, then God
2. The Universe, therefore God.

Which is affirming the antecedent.

And begging the question.

If I am Ken Ham, I am a felon.
I am a felon, therefore I am Ken Ham.

Not only does this suffer from a formal fallacy but premise 1 (and premise 2 I hope) are both false. Ken Ham is not a felon.

-SW

Please enlighten me as to which formal fallacy committed. It's only polite to specify. Ken Ham is not a felon, but if he were, me being one still wouldn't make me Ken Ham. For the purposes of the example, it does not matter whether the premise is true, it matters whether the conclusion follows. But P1 WAS a mistake on my part, I was actually thinking of Kent Hovind, thanks for catching that. P2 is also false, thankfully!