The Bible and its fallacies and contradictions

[Minimalist]

Wait till you get to be my age, lad. That happens all the time.


Out of Africa has taken a few hits, lately. Not least of which have come from the Neanderthal genome project.

[superstarr]

According to the Bible, the earth is about 9,000 years old.

Please show me where the Bible states this.

According to the Bible, the first two humans were Adam and Eve.

And this is false?

Biblical professionals have come to claim that [Adam and Eve] were alive 4004 BC.

Please explain how a "Biblical professional" being wrong equals the Bible being wrong. (Unless you think the Bible states that the first two humans were alive at 4004 BC, in which case, please show me where the Bible states that.)

According to the New Testament, Jesus was God in some way.

And this is false?

And if [Jesus] is as perfect as many percieve him to be, then he doesn't tell lies.

Did Jesus say the person will always receive the answer they wanted, immediately, and without condition? Please show where.

Praying to God is just nonsense, since you don't ever get an answer.

I would be interested to find out just how much study you've done on what the Bible says about prayer, which never portrays God as a genie lamp we rub using prayer. The "Santa Claus" mentality that your comments appear to indicate about prayer is simply not supported by the biblical texts, which makes me suspect you haven't studied very much at all.

Alright.
1. The bible doesn't state it directly, but if you do add up the times from adam and noah, and the events later as Archbishop Ussher claimed, it is said to be about 9000 years old, and that's pretty much how people like you see it today.

2. We have scientific proof that tells us of human involvement on earth long before Adam and Eve. And in the bible, adam and eve were created 4004BC. Impossible since we have evidence of human existance that dates back even 25000 years BC. Can you disprove that? And you can't tell me that our dating methods have a percent error like 50% or greater, because if that was true, then why would we use them to date? They might be off by a few years, but not off drastically like by 10,0000years to date by radiodecay or by carbon14.

3. Well think of it this way, I never said that because dates are wrong, the bible is wrong, and that date was given from the Archbishop Ussher, which is what most people like you claim to be the actul age that they were "alive."

4. Well, if indeed Jesus Christ was god in the flesh, what stopped him from creating himself? He didn't.

5. Let me list a few:
Matthew 21:21-22
Matthew 7:7-8
Mark 11:24-25
There are a lot more, but I'm not going to read an entire bible just to find them.

6. Ok, then. The bible states indirectly that prayer creates a relationship with God to listen and speak with him. Since Jesus clearly states that prayers will be answered, then why don't people get answers? Any answer? No.

[Watson]

6. The voice of God is not the same as, say, your voice or mine. Therefore, the answers one gets from God are not always in the form of sthe spoken word, or even a physical occurence. Through prayer, one sets themselves up to better perceive and understand the answer given to them. This is the relationship and conversation with God it is refering to.

[Minimalist]

The voice of God is not the same as, say, your voice or mine.

Ah....so perhaps this guy is right after all?

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/arti...gD9FQP6983

THIBODAUX, La. — A man who told police that God told him to walk the streets naked to save his soul has been arrested.

Maybe the cops should let him go.

[Joe Bloe]

the Bible...never portrays God as a genie lamp

Why don't you describe him for us - otherwise we won't know what you're talking about. And then maybe you could show some proof for his existence - or is he beyond proof?

The "Santa Claus" mentality that your comments appear to indicate about prayer is simply not supported by the biblical texts, which makes me suspect you haven't studied very much at all.

I've noticed that whenever somebody resorts to personal attack, they usually have no (sensible) response to the subject under discussion.

[tackattack]

@superstarr-

in your point of 1 who exactly are the "people like you" the see the earth as 9000 years old?

[Caecilian]

@superstarr-

in your point of 1 who exactly are the "people like you" the see the earth as 9000 years old?

Apologies to superstarr for answering this one for you.

As you're probably aware, Arcanus is one of the staff writers for the Aristophrenium, where he goes under the name of ryft. Arcanus is mainly responsible for the philosophically-oriented articles over there, which imo are a cut above the rest of the tripe that they produce, but still pretty bad.

One of the other staff writers is duane. He's responsible for most of the theological articles, and is a hard-line young earth creationist. His insane ramblings on young earth creationism are one of the staples of the Aristophrenium.

I haven't seen Arcanus/ ryft disagree with duane.

[fr0d0]

If anything Arcanus seems to always go further. I'm surprised that you sum up Arcanus's output as 'pretty bad'. Have you had discussions with him before?

[Caecilian]

If anything Arcanus seems to always go further. I'm surprised that you sum up Arcanus's output as 'pretty bad'. Have you had discussions with him before?

No. I've just read some of what he's written on the Aristophrenium site. Example of what I mean by 'pretty bad':

In a recent article that tavarish critiqued, he claimed that christianity is to science like a battery is to a flashlight. He went on to say that post-Darwin, the link between flashlight and battery had been broken. This, he claimed, was a bad thing for science.

For starters, this is an incredibly misleading metaphor. If you take the battery out of a flashlight, the flashlight simply stops working. But since Darwin, science has gone from strength to strength. The loss of the 'battery' has had no apparent effect at all on the working of the 'flashlight'.

There is also a bit of historical revisionism here that borders on the grotesque. We Europeans are the heirs to 2 major cultural traditions- the Judaeo-Christian and the Classical. Science is very much part of the latter heritage, not the former. Mathematics, which underpins all of Science (and perhaps constitutes the real battery for the scientific flashlight), is a discipline that was developed by the Greeks (Pythagoras, Euclid etc). Modern Science also has as its precursor the work of the hellenistic scientists; to what extent the scientific revolution of the 15-17th centuries drew on hellenistic work is a matter of historical debate. And philosophically, the dominant influence on the renaissance scientists was Aristotle.

There is also at least one glaring inconsistency in the same article. Arcanus states that science is not a worldview- its a set of tools for investigating the world. This is generally accepted, and imo very sound. But then he goes on to say that science makes certain metaphysical assumptions.

Now if those assumptions really were metaphysical, rather than just working assumptions based on repeated observations, then that would make science a sort of worldview. Which, as he says himself, it isn't. As a matter of historical record, the fundamental assumptions of science have been repeatedly revised. For example:
Darwin: immutable species -> mutable species
Einstein: linear time -> space-time
Quantum Mechanics: everything has a deterministic cause ('clockwork universe) -> microphysical events are not determinant
Interestingly enough, the assumption of uniformity is now being questioned; there is some evidence that the value of g may have varied in the past.
All of which points towards the obvious: there are no metaphysical assumptions with science, just working assumptions based on observation.

So the article is a load of tosh, based on misleading metaphor, falsified history and philosophical confusion. Am I supposed to find that impressive?

[fr0d0]

Hmm I agree and I wasn't impressed so much by that article, and you highlight it's weaknesses admirably. But I give Arcanus credit knowing him from previous encounters. Thanks for your answer.