(January 2, 2018 at 1:43 pm)Dan Brooks Wrote: Well if it says it is and it isn't, then it is lying. If it's lying then none of it should be believed.
This is the sort of all-or-nothing thinking that I tend to reject. There are some true statements in the bible, and if you find a false claim in there, that doesn't make the true statements any less true. The same goes for false claims. They are false because they are false. My favorite book is the Republic. I think, overall, the book contains a lot of truth. Are there false claims in it? Youbetcha. I think it would be rather unwise of me to assume everything in the Republic true and live my life according to its dictates until it is "indisputably known" to contain falsehoods. There is a proper way to approach ancient texts, and "true until proven otherwise" isn't it.
Quote:But since it's hard to know whether or not that particular claim is a lie, the only thing we can really do is look at the rest of it and see if anything in there is absolutely known to be a lie. If there is an indisputably known lie in it, then we know it can't be the revealed word of God, because it says that God cannot lie. And no it's really not a debate I wanted to get into. I was just trying to answer the question.
That's why you have people pointing out incongruencies in the text, trying to find that one false claim that would apparently send the whole house of cards crashing down. On the other side there are teams of apologists intent on lawyering the text in what ever way they can to make sure they can paint the bible as irrefutable. It isn't really an honest debate, so (like you) I have little interest in it.
Quote:But how could a layperson verify its claims as to whether they are true or not? What layperson is going on paleontological excavations or testing things in a lab? The layperson has to choose whether to believe it or not believe it. There really isn't a way to prove it true or false unless you're doing the experiments and studies yourself.
All kinds of lay people collect fossils and observe astronomical events as a hobby. It would take some time and effort, but anyone is free to form their own hypotheses, make their own observations, and do their own experiments.
I don't know if you're a YEC, but if you are, you can go buy a telescope and using a few simple formulas found online, determine that many celestial objects are more than 6,000 light years away. If your going to doubt the validity of the formulas etc. you begin to go down the road of flat earthers who assume science is a grand conspiracy meant to deceive people. Otherwise, you have to say that God intentionally made it look like the universe is billions of years old, giving anyone with the necessary instruments to observe the night sky very good reason to doubt the accounts in Genesis.
