(March 13, 2013 at 10:37 pm)FallentoReason Wrote: To sum up: a book whose truth-value depends on time, place & culture for it to be verified and deemed as the plausible Ultimate Truth should always be discarded.
I think the corollary to this is that if there was a hyper-everything being that created all that exists and had specific plans for us, he'd have provided us with a user manual that was so brilliant that no one could find cause to deny that it was from such a source. The Bible doesn't come anywhere close to that, with its disjointed narratives and a god that is at times mystical and benevolent and at other times (or even at the same time) very human in his actions and barbaric attitudes. Read without the "god is real" mental filter, you can more easily see the various writers and how their disparate versions of certain stories were slapped together to form an incoherent whole.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
