(July 1, 2015 at 5:37 am)robvalue Wrote: I'm wondering if the people who wrote and edited the bible simply didn't care about contradictions.
I think that it's a product of the times. When everything was hand-written, how often were you likely to make revisions? If other religious mythology was equally spotty, did it even matter? If very few people were able to read, then the opportunity to pore over the works to find inconsistencies was rare. There are probably a few other factors that make it so that the book can be rife with inconsistencies and nonetheless be considered a legitimate religious tome, inspired by god. The more creative apologetics have to be applied in later times, when everyone has access to the book and criticism can easily reach anyone --a process that has become easier and easier at the same time that religious power has eased sufficiently to reduce the risk of being critical (unless you decide to draw Mohammad, anyway).
"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
