(August 2, 2023 at 7:13 am)Belacqua Wrote:(August 1, 2023 at 11:01 am)FlatAssembler Wrote: If it was a word of God, God wouldn't allow his word to get corrupt.
Are you sure you're allowed to say what God would and wouldn't allow? I thought that was supposed to be up to him.
I'm wary of people arguing that they know exactly what an omniscient omnipotent being would do.
Quote:If God really had something to say to humanity, why wouldn't it magically appear in everybody's native language? They are people living in small tribes speaking only some small language who haven't even heard the God's word, much less believe it. At the very least, God could somehow make mistranslations not be a problem.
It's interesting to me that your view is exactly like the strict atheists here. They also say that if God wanted to give us a book, he would make it precise and clear and full of useful and unambiguous instructions. The model seems to be an engineering textbook, or maybe instructions for assembling furniture from Ikea.
I'm not sure if that's really the best kind of book, or if people in biblical times thought it would be a good kind of book.
Maybe the best type of book is like Plato's Symposium, in which people propose a half dozen answers to a hard question, and then a bunch of drunk people show up, and then it's time to go home. Or maybe it's like an Emily Dickinson poem, which won't give us a clear message no matter how hard we squeeze it. Or maybe it's like one of Blake's book-length poems, in which all the words are spoken by the characters, and Blake's own opinion appears nowhere -- he believed that a book which is clear must also be wrong.
If God sees all time as eternally present, then he knows exactly what interpretation will appear at what moment. Since I'm not omniscient or omnipotent, I can't say that I'd rule out providing a book that's a puzzling fizzing jumble, with which people struggle.
Well, it is difficult to predict what God's message might be, but we can easily tell what it is not. Maybe it wouldn't be a book of useful instructions, but what we would expect it is not to contain blatantly wrong instructions. The Bible says, among things about preventing the spread of infectious diseases, not to touch a woman while she is having her period. That's obviously wrong now, but it would have probably seemed plausible to the people at that time. Similarly, Leviticus 14 says that some skin disease (whatever disease the Hebrew word "tsaraath" referred to) should be treated with bird's blood. That was obviously ineffective, but it would have probably seemed plausible to the people at that time. If the Bible were the God's word, we wouldn't expect it to be filled with what's simply incorrect empirical data.
