(October 9, 2014 at 9:31 am)RobbyPants Wrote: I wonder why Christians trust the Bible as a valid source of information for what happened. I'm not talking about the obviousness of all the unsubstantiated accounts of magic happening. I don't mean how their apologetics show YHWH is untrustworthy (I already touched on that). I just mean the overall account of things:The first two bullet points show how the story is written by people with no accountability for their fantastic claims. Hell, people have analyzed the texts and know for sure that Paul didn't write all the epistles. The exact number of them is in dispute, but we know that people claiming to be someone who had a divine revelation from God got their books inserted into biblical canon, and that doesn't even speak to whether or not Paul actually did have any revelation. How do people know this? How would they even be able to check to see if he's telling the truth? They are warned about false teacher and prophets and to not listen to them, but they have no way to be able to check the veracity of the author's claims. They could be false teacher poisoning the well against dissenting points of view.
- Stories being told by authors who had no witnesses to the events.
- Books being written by people who had "divine revelations".
- Satan as "the Deceiver".
And on the topic of poisoning the well, what about poor Satan? We are told flat-out that he is wrong, he is a liar, and to never trust him. This is a one-sided story where we are told to never talk to the other side to try and figure out what really happened. In any other situation, this would be highly suspicious and it would look like someone is trying to hide something. Put it in the context of religion, and suddenly everything is fine and it gets a free pass.
Shouldn't this alone be enough to put doubt into any adherent? Ignoring the absurdity of all the claims, the total lack of evidence, and the demonstrable wrongness of parts of the Bible, the book itself looks sketchy as hell.
The scientific reason is that humans seek patterns, but like prior pattern seeking life, you do not always have time to stop and think and reason, like an antelope on the African plains doesn't have time to think if the swaying grass is wind, or a hiding lion.
Dawkin's describes this in "The God Delusion" as the moth mistaking the light bulb for the moonlight.
Our species fills in gaps, because it can even if it is a false answer produce a group that the numbers when greater can create more opportunity to create offspring and get resources.
For the same reason the Ancient Egyptians falsely believed for 3,000 years in their polytheistic gods.
