A challenge to Statler Waldorf

[Angrboda]

Oh that's cool, I taught debate for a little bit, had a lot of fun doing it. Well I don't believe you can logically have such a thing as a "neutral" position when it comes to theological matters I am afraid. It really is one of the most brilliant aspects of the Bible; it effectively cut out any middle ground logically. If it really was written by just dumb sheep herders and fisherman they seemed to have a pretty advanced understanding of logical argumentation. :-)

A little off topic but do you believe science has limitations?

Erm, how is "God did it" a logical argument?

Science is only as limited as the creative imagination of the person using it.

First off, I don't believe the bolding emphasis was in Statler's original post; please, if you change bold, italics or elsewise in a poster's text when quoting, alert your reader that you have done so. Arguably, it doesn't change his meaning any, but that's his decision to make, not yours.

I understand the point you are trying to make, but there is a better one to be made.

Kantian Idealism, the framework developed by Kant and still largely accepted today, posits that we come "pre-equipped" from the factory with certain abilities, ideas, and ways of understanding; we don't so much reason how the world is, in some ways, as it is our reason dictates that we conceieve and think in certain ways -- many of which we uncritically accept as "features of the world" [note 2]. These ideas include rudimentary logic, spatial reasoning, basic math, and so forth. Refuting the empiricists who contended that we learn everything from experience -- including logic, math and so on -- Kant reasoned that our experience is constituted in ways which presuppose certain ideas (the existence of 3 dimensions for example; it is not possible to "think in 2, 4, or 16 dimensions" -- the number 3 is built in).

So the larger question he asks is answered that it is not unusual for a man -- even an ignorant man -- to reason certain ways; it's simply a part of his mental landscape which he vomits forth as revelation or magic. The more interesting question may be, how does a mind get these things wrong, if indeed they do? The only cases I can think of off-hand belong properly to the field of mental pathology and known defects of the mind (e.g. optical illusions). But the idea that ignorant sheepherders and fishmongers in the Levant are capable of human insight is impressive, but not requiring of special explanation (especially when it is filtered by the censors of the priesthood and the body politic; those things our sheepherders got gloriously wrong were buried and forgotten [note 1]; these people weren't rocket scientists, but they weren't idiots either).

Indeed, there are plenty of examples of works that are comparable in the same general era: Zoroaster, Laozi, Zhuangzi, the Upanishids and Baghavad-Gita, the Dhammapada and the Tripitaka, the Analects, the philosophy of the Greeks such as Plato and Aristotle [which make the Bible look like a grade school primer], the Romans like Cicero [and Rome in general --Jews and Christians were still laboring under the defects of hereditary kingship while Greece and Rome had Democracy and the Republic (until Caesar, but they still had the Senate)]. The simple fact is that the human animal has been developing mentally for several million years, in response to environmental challenges which favor those who "think straight" about what is around them. It's postulated that homo sapiens faced a population bottleneck on the order of 100,000 years ago, and it's likely that modern humans as we know them existed at that point. There's only scant evidence for culture at that age, but if man had language and the rudiments of early technology at that point, then the semites of Judaism and Christianity are at the end of a very long string of thinkers (which likely got a massive boost in efficiency with the invention of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago which lead to a sedentary lifestyle and the formation of cities and civilization).

Yes the bible is remarkable, even wonderful. Is it requiring a special explanation? No. Man was built for this, and in the grand scheme, it isn't even the most polished apple in the bunch. (I will however note that I have a great respect for the Jewish legal tradition and its rabbinical scholars, whom Christians overlook, but without whom we likely would not have nearly as sophisticated a theological tradition as we do.)

I wonder though. Statler, do you believe man existed 100,000 years ago?



[note 1]: Not all the things they got gloriously wrong were buried; the Bible as a whole is riddled with errors and inconsistencies, which eluded the censors (usually because they required a critical hermeneutic which they did not have (both "lower criticism" and other standards which we now assume when reading a text), a comprehensive view of the entire document(s), and the modern methods of science as applied to both textual criticism and historical research. It's hard to fault later writers and scholars for being ignorant of the fact that Jericho didn't fall as described, or that Daniel was not written when it was claimed -- they had no media, no organized system of publication and reference, and no internet search engines.

For example, many find Ezekiel's inconsistency in foretelling the sack of Tyre, and then later noting it didn't happen mind boggling; however it's entirely plausible that if a modern reader pointed this out to him, he'd look at you and not have a clue what you were on about (but then, I'm no expert on the hermeneutic of that era).

[note 2]: I don't want to get in a realist vs. anti-realist, or Kantian vs. Idealist debate, but most people take for granted that the real world exists -- tangibly, palpably and demonstrably (e.g. GE Moore; though even Kant avoided this path, largely so he could fit "God" into his 'world'). The simple question here is are "facts of experience" -- our perceptions, the 'seeming' response of body to our will, etc. -- are these also "facts of the world"? When it appears that I move my arm, is there an actual thing called an arm which is moving, or do I simply perceive my will, and then a moment later perceive the "arm" moving; and, said arm is also nothing more than a perception, like that of my will, or anything else -- does a pain correspond to a real thing? No. According to Kant (excluding his backdoor demonstration via God, in a move ironically echoing Berkeley's Idealism), not. The answer is, we don't know.