RE: Can You Technically Disprove the God of the Bible?
April 30, 2015 at 4:21 pm
(This post was last modified: April 30, 2015 at 4:24 pm by Hatshepsut.)
One pink unicorn which has become invisible to us is how different ancient societies were from ours. They thought in a fundamentally different way than we do. Modern standards for evaluating documentary evidence simply did not exist in the Hellenistic world. And no, even were a miracle-worker walking about we shouldn't expect too much extant documentation about it. Few people read or wrote. Much of what was written has perished by now.
As far as I know, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is a product of the Reformation, particularly John Calvin, and was not original to the New Testament despite quotations of 2 Tim. 3.16. The word "reproof" has more to do with mothers scolding their kids than with formal academic proof. "Inspired" doesn't mean "inerrant." The notion of infallibility in our modern absolute sense did not exist then, so that a thing was considered "true" if the person reporting it was "truthful," that is, not intentionally lying.
So what we have on both sides of a Christian/atheist bible debate are two people who have been raised amid a torrent of written words in a culture of long childhood education and science, anachronistically projecting their views and standards back onto the ancient world, to determine whether a text should be considered "true" or not. A silly endeavor, doomed to failure from the beginning.
As far as I know, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is a product of the Reformation, particularly John Calvin, and was not original to the New Testament despite quotations of 2 Tim. 3.16. The word "reproof" has more to do with mothers scolding their kids than with formal academic proof. "Inspired" doesn't mean "inerrant." The notion of infallibility in our modern absolute sense did not exist then, so that a thing was considered "true" if the person reporting it was "truthful," that is, not intentionally lying.
So what we have on both sides of a Christian/atheist bible debate are two people who have been raised amid a torrent of written words in a culture of long childhood education and science, anachronistically projecting their views and standards back onto the ancient world, to determine whether a text should be considered "true" or not. A silly endeavor, doomed to failure from the beginning.
