One question for Christians

[Bad Writer]

…science is self-correcting and has a process of peer-review to ferret out faulty experiments and conclusions. Scripture can neither correct itself nor is there any peer-review process. For this reason, I trust science over any scripture.

So you’re using science to justify your use of science? Nice circularity. Scripture is self-attesting and infallible, science is fallible. Go ahead and take a fallible source over an infallible one, but that just makes you irrational.

So, in your mind, because science can fail sometimes, would that make faith healing better than decades of research into medical science? Can god cure amputees, or should we continue our research into bionic limbs? There are gaping holes in this argument, SW. Just because the Bible says its infallible, does not make this automatically true. Just because thousands of people claim to have been abducted by aliens and can recount their experiences in vivid details, corroborating the stories of everyone else abducted throughout the years, does this make their claims true?

Thirdly, to say we can't use science to dispute scripture is like saying we can't use reality to disprove fantasy. OK, what can I use then, since reality and facts are pesky things that I'm not allowed to use?

You’re using question-begging epithets to try and prove a point, which again makes you irrational. You cannot use a source that we know is fallible to try and prove another source is also fallible, that’s pretty basic reasoning.

No, he’s getting to the source of the issue, and since you’re all but dodging his “question-begging epithets”, that puts you in the awkward chair, not him.

This means that the Andromeda Galaxy is at least 2 million years old.

Nope, it’s impossible to know that, you can stipulate it, but that does not prove anything.

You know what’s interesting? You seem stuck on the idea that science can fail sometimes. This is true, but to a certain point. For instance, since we’re talking about the age of large bodies such as galaxies, do you know how old scientists think our universe is? Before we had the means to truly measure it, the Biblical account was thought to be the correct age, for there was no other explanation beyond that book for a while. And then we found out that earth was older than previously thought, and we learned about how planets were created, how suns were created…all because we observe these things all the time through things called telescopes. We can see the different phases, calculate the time it takes for these things to happen…and in doing so, we could find out other things, like the age of stars, of galaxies, and even the universe itself. 6000 grew to 10000 grew to 100000 and eventually we reached into the millions of years, as new evidence became available. Eventually, we came to the number that we have today: approx. 14 BILLION years for the age of the universe. You see…the age never decreased or fluctuated in its calculations. In fact, as our science and instruments became better and more fine-tuned, so did our understanding of the cosmos. And, to be honest, if we’re STILL wrong about the age of the Universe, it only means that it’s older than 14 billion years, not younger.

So…okay, it’s impossible to truly know, but to go and accept what you seem to believe as fact, that is, the Biblical account, then that would be very irresponsible of us.

The sky is not a dome.

Why not?

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The absolutely needless redundancy of the sun in this scenario demonstrates an example of the lack of understanding and thought that went into this myth. You're trying to account for the bad writing of people who obviously didn't know what they were talking about.

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Light can exist without the Sun; tell me you knew that….please.

Of course, as long as there’s a source to shine it. Which light would this be? The light god reflected off his ass cheeks?

…if scripture isn’t inerrant all of reality is rendered unintelligible.

So if the Bible were wrong, we would fall off the earth? Is that the gist of what you’re saying?

Telling me that something is God-breathed (and thank you for defining this term for me) is the same as telling me that Santa Claus called you on the telephone and told you to write down his naughty and nice list, after which you proceeded to propagate this information to everyone. I can't take you on your word because, first, you would need to prove that Santa is real, and, second, I don't care who Santa thinks is naughty or nice. Even if the god of the bible were real, I still would not worship him because I don't like with what people have written about him.

No, this falsely assumes that the existence of God is something that is reasoned to, rather than the foundation for all reason.

So I should believe there’s a Bigfoot just because someone showed me a photo of him and had on hand a plaster mold of his foot? I see TV ads about Messing with Bigfoot all the time…are they trying to tell us something new about ol’ Sasquatch?

Why should I believe anyone when they tell me there’s an invisible, grumpy old man in the sky? Why do you?

…do you apply the same standard that you use to believe in the Bible to Al-Quran or the Bhagavad Gita?

Yes, I actually hold scripture to a higher standard than any of those.

Why do you hold your scripture to a higher standard than the holy books of other nations? That seems a little…odd. If the other two mentioned are at a lower standard, then why don’t you believe in them first before the Bible? Do you even understand what I was asking here?

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You're right. I was misappropriating my words. Let me take a step back and instead say instead that smart men were making the best approximations at how their world works. Due to discoveries of our days, their assertions look really dumb.

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Or, smart men of the day were inspired by God to write down His words, and therefore nothing you read in scripture is actually wrong when interpreted in accordance with its literary purpose.

Anything that needs to be interpreted should be held with a high level of scrutiny. How the fuck is this a loving god if he leads his children to him through the most baffling of clues? You would think he’d do a better job of spreading his message. Katy Perry does a better job of getting her message across to the world than god ever could. She is more powerful than He.

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I would say that sometimes we appeal to special knowledge without realizing that we do so. Any assertion that says that there is an invisible god and the justification for believing such a concept always takes special knowledge, or special pleading. The belief itself is special, as it cannot be proven with demonstrable evidence.

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Belief in God doesn’t require special knowledge though; billions of people get to that point without knowledge unavailable to anyone else.

And so do Alien Abductees, and believers of Big Foot, and those who have sighted the Loch Ness monster.

Christians believe that God cannot contradict Himself, so if you can provide an actual real straight-up internal logical contradiction (“A” and “Not A” at the same time and in the same sense/relationship) then it would refute Biblical inerrancy. The problem is nobody can provide one because all the examples they give do not fit the definition.

You’ve already shut me down from making any attempts to show you proof to the contrary, since you mentioned a 30-plus page thread that you think failed to do so. I guarantee you that any one of the contradictions presented there were genuine on some level or another, even though you chose to ignore the evidence proferred. I’m going to stay in different territory with you.

Were you raised Mormon?

Yes. Were you raised in a religion?

…I do not feel the Creator of the Universe is in the same category as an invisible dragon or invisible pink unicorn (still trying to figure out how something that is invisible can also be pink ).

It’s pink because I know it’s pink, and you just need more faith in order to fully understand just how pink it is! (Sound familiar?)

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Jimmy John from the office tells you that he ate a sandwich for lunch. Even though this is entirely plausible, it doesn't make it automatically true. We believe Jimmy though, because our experience tells us that eating a sandwich for lunch is not only possible and probably true, but there's also no reason to disbelieve him, as it doesn't really matter in the end if he ate a sandwich or a burrito. Our standard of evidence is very low, and the evidence is our human experience with hearing claims like this.

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You believe Jimmy ate a sandwich because there’s no reason to disbelieve him? Well, now that sounds like all claims are assumed to be true until a reason to doubt them is given….no?

I didn’t say all, but it seems that you wish I had.

I’m sure many people see claims that way, which is true about claims concerning god. I’m saying that just about these small time claims that require a lower standard of evidence. If Jimmy tells you he had chips on his lunch break, but then you find out later that he actually ate crackers because you found the empty wrapper on his desk, is it really that big of an issue? So Jimmy was false on his claim, but there was no need to call him out on it. The same cannot be said for bigger claims, such as someone who tells you that he/she can read minds.

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On the other hand, Susan Simpson tells us that she rode a dragon to work. Hopefully we don't take her claim at face value. Experience tells us that there is nothing that can give automatic credence to her claim, for there is no evidence readily available to have us believe that she rode a dragon. The standard of evidence, therefore, needs to be higher.

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What if 2.3 billion people told you that dragons were real? I think that’s a better example.

That actually doesn’t change the status of the claim one iota. Whether one person or two hundred or even one billion claims that a dragon is real, the facts always speak for themselves, not majority rule. There is no democracy when it comes to pure, undeniable fact, and the fact is that claiming the existence of dragons when there has been no proof of them in the past still makes the claim an outrageous one, if not a silly one.

Think back to what I said about Alien Abductees. Do you believe they were all abducted by aliens? Why or why not?

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This is how I see the claims about god, Bigfoot, Loch Ness, Alien Abductions, you name it. It's fine that everyone doesn't have the same standard of evidence for everything, because it's not always necessary to do a full investigation into whether or not little Timmy stole a cookie from the cookie jar. If your standard of evidence for believing in an invisible god is as low as Timmy's theft, then that's your prerogative. I'm saying your standard is low for all things, but that maybe you should reexamine claims as important as belief in an invisible god whose only reference are 2000 year-old books written by people with limited knowledge about the world.

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I still think that lumping God in with such finite entities, events, and creatures is a category error. I do not believe in God simply because a book says I should, I believe in God because without this belief and book I cannot make sense of anything else in the world. To me, questioning whether God exists or not is like cutting the very branch you are sitting on.

It was a rotten branch to begin with. You need to get off the tree entirely.

Are you really suggesting plants can survive only if the light they are receiving comes from the Sun?

Oh, sorry, I forgot that God also made a temporary Greenhouse all over the earth that turned artificial light into something beneficial to all the new little plants he was growing for his fun, fantastic garden in Eden.

How could I possibly know that?! I DON’T because I made it up. Man, it feels good to lie!

Science is fallible, but the point of science is to give us the best approximation given the available evidence. An appeal to science is exactly what the doctor ordered here.

Not if you’re trying to prove another source of information is also fallible, that won’t fly. I’ll give you an example, I have two children, one named Science and one named Scripture (you like what I did there? ). I know that Science is prone to error, I know that not everything he says is true, and in fact I know that he’s changed his story hundreds of times over the years. As for Scripture, well he claims to never tell a lie, and his story has never changed through the years. Using only these two sources of information is it possible for me ever to prove the Scripture is lying based solely on what Science tells me? (For the record I do not have any children and I’d never name them Science and Scripture).

That’s putting on the assumption that Science deliberately lies. Therein lies your problem, no pun intended. (That little guy you named science in that story actually sounds more like the Catholic Church; the science community isn’t out to hide anything, and if you believe they do, then I know a few doctors who can help you overcome your delusions and paranoia.)