(November 17, 2013 at 5:05 am)Avodaiah Wrote: This is good, I think we're getting to the heart of the issue. (I mean us, I haven't been following Ron, Tex, and RM much)
7) Christianity speaks of an absurd, impossible history.
Zazzy Wrote:The stories in it are so absurd that I have never even seen why so many people find them so important and ennobling.This seems to be begging the question a little once we take a look at what exactly is so absurd. I assume you're mainly referring to the miracles that God/Jesus did in the Bible.
But the fact that they can't happen in the world, at least without God, is exactly the point: They imply that God must have had a hand in them. To say that their absurdness proves that the Bible is unreliable implies that the God of the Bible is not real, which is what you're trying to prove.
You're saying because something is absurd, it must prove god. But let us assume that these things actually happened, for a while. Absurd doesn't prove god if your understanding of reality isn't complete. Just because you do not understand how something could've happened doesn't necessitate the existence of an all powerful being who cares about you and talk to you. It necessitates an unknown force perhaps, and through experimentation you could probably figure out what this force is. This is how lightning, thunder, fire, rain, flood has stopped being manifestations of god's will and simply became part of life, because we now understand how it works.
But I was being generous there. You don't know that any of these things even happened. So you're basically positing an all powerful being to explain things that did not even happen. The bible's record of history and creation is not in line with what we now know actually happened. The bible furthermore, makes truth claims about nature and reality that we now know to be false (flat earth, anyone?). To say that it is a book written by god is absurd.
