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RE: Any Text Claiming to be from God is Very Likely Not
April 1, 2010 at 10:41 am
(March 30, 2010 at 12:09 am)tackattack Wrote:
(March 28, 2010 at 10:30 pm)CHOOCHOO! Wrote:
Suppose there exists an all knowing, all powerful, all loving god.
Suppose said god might want to communicate with its creation.
Consider the method of inspiring a person or a small group of people to write texts containing his word:
- The text created by this method does not contain information that legitimately distinguishs the text as being from the god, such as, for example, advanced scientific knowledge that was unknown at the time.
- As such, there is no way of distinguishing it from a text written by any random person.
- Hence, any number of people can write such texts and have them claim to be from the god, and its impossible to say which one, if any, is actually from the god.
- In addition the text can be edited to contain a completely different message, and the original version lost forever.
It is fair to say that such a method is an extremely unreliable way of communication, close to the point of being worthless.
For example, on Wikipedia there are over 30 religious texts listed. None of these distinguish themselves as being from a god so it cannot be decided which one, if any, is from a god.
It's practically impossible to choose "God's" text from this list... if it's even in there at all.
Hence if an all powerful, all knowing god ACTUALLY wanted to communicate with us, it's very likely he would not choose this method.
Therefore any text that claims it is from a god is very likely to not be from a god.
Any thoughts?
hmmm first theist to reply.. goodie.
Thoughts? I agree. The Bible itself was not requested or written by God. It was simply man's attempt to document an idea of what they thought God wanted and the life and teachings of Jesus. Jesus also did not request that it be written down. This however doesn't do anything to adress the truthfullness of the text regardless of the author. God doesn't communicate by handing out books. God communicates through revelations, miracles and visions. Those are usually subjective or local in nature.
See this was the fallacy in my argument. God would be unlikely to try and definitively communicate through a text like I described, but such texts are not necessarily attempts at definitive communication. Hence the final premise of my argument doesn't hold.
