(February 4, 2015 at 4:00 pm)SteveII Wrote: It also assumes that, presumably Paul, was familiar with the details of each of the examples of ancient myths you give.Or that he was familiar with whichever handful of versions of those were being recycled by the local cults-du-jour. Or Christianity was already partly (mal)formed from bits and pieces over the preceding decades and he had a wet lump of clay to work with. Paul didn't have to know each of those older myths and legends, and he didn't have to have created Christianity out of whole cloth. He needed whatever was at hand and a vivid imagination.
"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
