Lazy Atheism?

[Belacqua]

Well, "primitive" is kind of a tricky word.

It is just like the words long, short, heavy, light, ugly, rough, viscous, hot, hard, sharp.
These words mean whatever you want them to mean. They are relative words. They are subjective.

So, eventually, I gave a definition to make my earlier posts more clear.


It doesn’t matter if Paul, Jesus and the other primitive people didn’t have a printed copy of the tanakh. There were no high speed industrial printing machines then. All the members of the jewish faith were told the stories from a young age by their parents and their priests. All humans are going to be asking the Big questions. Like I said, some of those questions will be or are addressed by science.
Example: Why do we exist gets converted to how do we exist in Evolution theory (how does nature work, what happened in the past)

All religions try to answer how did it happen, what are the steps the gods took, what was the recipe, at what point did they felt was the best moment to create a human.

Like I said, even if Paul, St Augustine and a few of the guys were were non-literalist, this doesn’t mean that they accepted the Big Bang theory and Evolution theory. It would have been reasonable to them that the jewish god created everything from day 1, in 0 nanoseconds, in 1 nanosecond or whatever. In the end, they are YEC.

They were not aware of cavemen. They were not aware of humans being covered by thick body hair. They were not aware that all humans had dark skin and are from Africa. In their mind, humans are intelligent beings from the moment god creates them. They have a language. They know how to take care of animals and make tools and have a language from day 1. In their mind, humans have a memory from day 1.

In terms of science, humans have no memory for the entire block of 6 million to about 5000 BCE. All that time period has been forgotten.

See also BrianSoddingBoru4 comment.

It looks as though people want us to wrap this up, so I'll do a little summary here. I appreciate your willingness to talk with me about this is a civil tone. 

Early on, you said:

"The guy who made up the Genesis story and his colleagues who modified it over time know very well that they are making it up.
The listeners would not be told that it is a metaphor. The listeners would be literalists and the listeners would be in the thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions over the years.

In other words, the people want a scientific answer, an exact answer as to what happened in the past. They don’t want a fairy tail or some 3 little pigs story.

Certainly it's true that people want answers to the big questions, and that priests have tried to provide those answers. 

In the above, you have asserted that the priests' motives are malicious, that they intentionally tell false stories which they want their followers to take as true. While I'm sure many people have taken the stories more literally than they should have, I don't agree that the priests were trying to be tricky. As I've said, metaphorical and mythic explanations were common then, and I don't think that people were any more gullible than they are today. (Look at all the people who believe political propaganda and conspiracy theories.) Educated people have always known to be skeptical, but they have also known that different kinds of expressions work in different ways. Some lessons are told through quantified math, and some through evocative fictional example. 

For example, when Virgil wrote the Aeneid as the founding myth of Rome, everybody who was capable of reading it always knew it was fiction. Nonetheless, it did the job Augustus had asked for, and provided the kind of mythic foundation of the state that he wanted.

So I disagree that the priests were intentionally trying to fool people. 

As for the assertion that "people wanted a scientific answer," this may be projection on your part. Modern people want scientific answers, because we have come to the conclusion that only these are true. But what people will want will depend on what kind of "big question" we're talking about. If the big question is "how should I live?" this is not a question that science can address. And rather than worrying about how their DNA evolved, people may be more interested in knowing how to spend their time in a good way. So myths may address that issue better than science. (Ought not is.) 

So, does Augustine believe that Adam and some of the boys lived almost 1000 y like the Bible says?

Does he believe that Adam was the first human?

I don't recall if he addresses that question specifically. I do think that this would fall into the category I described before: that if an interpretation is proven wrong, then Christians shouldn't stick with it. Moreover, I think that the historical fact of Adam's existence is not the most important thing for Augustine or many other Christians. (William Blake, for example, said that Adam was a state that we may be in, not a historical individual.) For Augustine, the big question that the Adam story addresses is about ethics, and knowing the difference between right and wrong. So while many have no doubt been literalists, it is clearly no problem for modern Christians to give up on literal acceptance of that story when it becomes untenable. Its historical actuality is not what's important about it.  

Georges Lemaître is a 20 th century man.
Born = 1894
Dead = 1966

I don’t know much about him but a lot of christians these days seem to be OEC, they accept the Big Bang theory, Evolution theory, a 4.56 billion y old Earth. This is because they have been influenced by science and they try to keep science and the religion of their ancestors.

Right, because accepting scientific knowledge does no damage to their Christian belief. Lemaître knew more about physics than you or I, and knew more about Christianity than you or I, and had no trouble reconciling them. Only sola scriptura literalists are bothered by science. And neither you nor I is sure how many Christians in history have fit that description. 

All humans are going to be asking the Big questions. Like I said, some of those questions will be or are addressed by science.

Example: Why do we exist gets converted to how do we exist in Evolution theory (how does nature work, what happened in the past)

I agree that "converted" is the key word here. 

For Aristotle, "why" questions had four kinds of answer, and one of them was the Final Cause -- the goal or purpose. Science converted the asking of "why" by eliminating this part of the answer. 

So some people asking the big question about "why do we exist?" will want an answer that addresses goals. "Why" as in "what am I supposed to be doing with my life?" Philosophers since at least Nietzsche have been working on post-Darwin answers to such a "why" question. Freud's discussion of this problem is particularly relevant, if ultimately unsatisfying. Rorty, in the book I mentioned, attempts an argument for how we should live that doesn't rely on our evolutionarily-developed bodies having any pre-set telos. But we can still make arguments as to what the answer to that big question should be, and religions will supply some answers, and philosophy will supply different answers, and the all-enveloping capitalist world that we live in will supply different answers. And science will continue to supply none -- science works as well as it does because it doesn't address the sort of "should" question which is what so many people want answers to.

Anyway, that's my take on the conversation. Thank you again for being civil about it. I'll end it here so the others are not bothered by it any more.