Oh god. EVERYBODY read Matsus post. Religion is not on the same level as science. Why can´t it just be right for you? Why does it have to be true?
Paul addressed this:
Quote:
12 But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15 More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. (1 Corinthians 15: 12-19)
Any Christian worth his (or her) salt knows very well the cliff they stepped from.
Why exactly is it bad science? Do you happen do believe in an alternative, empirically testable theory?
Would you care to explain how evolution is an empirically testable theory?
Theorys that are valid are testable and often have predictable results. I would be happy to see how evolution has given us the ability to predict when mutation will occur and what they results of that mutation are likely to be. By mutation I mean new traits of course and not manipulation of existing traits.
Theorys that are valid are testable and often have predictable results. I would be happy to see how evolution has given us the ability to predict when mutation will occur and what they results of that mutation are likely to be. By mutation I mean new traits of course and not manipulation of existing traits.
By that "reasoning", the so-called "laws" of probability are completely worthless, simply because you can't always predict which exact numbers with come up whenever a pair of dice are thrown. Never mind the wonderful power of statistical analysis and mathematical likelihood, Real Men demand a working crystal ball with which to view the future and won't be fooled by frivolous guesswork.
By that "reasoning", the so-called "laws" of probability are completely worthless, simply because you can't always predict which exact numbers with come up whenever a pair of dice are thrown. Never mind the wonderful power of statistical analysis and mathematical likelihood, Real Men demand a working crystal ball with which to view the future and won't be fooled by frivolous guesswork.
... watch him ignore this very good and salient point.
By that "reasoning", the so-called "laws" of probability are completely worthless, simply because you can't always predict which exact numbers with come up whenever a pair of dice are thrown. Never mind the wonderful power of statistical analysis and mathematical likelihood, Real Men demand a working crystal ball with which to view the future and won't be fooled by frivolous guesswork.
Shifting the point? The definition of probability is not to guess what the exact number will be. So to take a word redefine it, say "see it isn't that definition," and declare yourself right?
The definition of probability means..likelyhood, not exactness.
Yes, he'll probably be 'unavoidably detained' for a little while yet.
But he's wrong on other counts too - the Uncertainty Principle, Chaos theory and the Schrodinger's Cat model in quantum mechanics certainly would not give predictable results any time.
I suppose that now that quantum physicists acknowledge Chaos as the bedrock of the universal system, conservatives (whose drive is towards forcible impostition of order and subsequent black and white reductionism) must be regarded as representing some form of a glitch in the evolutionary blueprint
(Schrodinger's Cat) Actually it gives a predictable result. The result just isn't know until you observe it can be argued that part of the result is in fact you observing it. Likewise the fact that overtime (say past the hour) we would have an ever increasing probablity that the isotope had decayed would make a result more likely.
So you may not know whether the cat is dead or not or whether the radioactive material decayed or not until you crack open the box, but you wouldn't open the box and expect to find a dog.
Many of the things you have mentioned deal with how we can spot the trends but not know exactly what every little step is going to be along the way.
If evolution were anywhere near this, we wouldn't have a problem. I'm not claiming that we have to know exactly which amino acids are going to switch, at what time due to what cause. However for example we don't even have a rate of speciation of things of that nature. We don't have anything.
The subject of this interesting thread is The Copenhagen school of thouhgths and not Creationism VS Evolution. There is already threads about it, and people are free to ressuracte it, but not free to transform this one.
The Copenhagen issue essentially boils down to: the Bible - man-made or God-made ?
If it is the latter then we would expect some details revealing the inner workings of the cosmos. In the 3000 or so years since the earliest of the Bible books we would also expect some of these to be confirmed by science. This hasn't happened.
You don't even need to invoke contradictions or evolution - dinosaurs, non-earth centric views of solar system, round earth - all things we had to find out for ourselves when one would reasonably expect that the creator of the universe might mention them if he happened to write a book. He didn't because this book is demonstrably a product of the human mind and we should be proud of that.
So let's judge it as literature but first we need to split it up - these 66 books have almost no continuity and the vast majority don't even belong together. They're even from 2 different and contradictory religions, 3 if you count Paul's outrageous hijacking of the original Jesus teaching.
Time to see it for what it is - some of the greatest literature humankind has yet produced but nothing more.
For me the bible is hand human made by people who have the faith in god. Some people will argue that in this way, god speak directly via this people, and some others says it's just a fantastic compilation of theoligal thoughts.
Most of the people i know personally and who believe in god, do not take in a litteral sense the bible, and thus will not oppose bible and science or history and bible. Their faith is deeper than that, and is based upon a search for meaning in life and existence. God is the only absolute concept able to fill the terrible emptiness of life for them, and as they are human, their god has a human face (not in the litteral way). Some scientists like the astrophysicians are more friendly with sciences and will tend to discribe god (the only thing that can give sense to the whole thing) more in a abstract way.
I think that the more a people feel the emptiness, the more chances he will be inclinated to believe in god. But you don't need only to feel the emptiness to believe in god, this idear of god, must also bring you positive things. My idear of god is so abstract and non human that it doesnt bring me positive things, and thus does not change the way i view life. Even in time where i feel emptiness, the idear of god did not make feel me more confortable, thus i do not believe in it because it do not make a difference for me.
Anyway i respect people who believe in god, when it's bring them happiness and peace in their mind. Same naturally do not apply for those where their idear of god contains hate and pain.
I think the author himself makes the best case against the minimalist approach right here in his own article.
Quote:
((i) Firstly, it is a fundamental mistake to think that archaeology is an exact science. It is not. It is an inexact science. We cannot dig up an ancient city, take it into a laboratory, put it in a beaker, perform an experiment on it and come up with the history of Ancient Israel. The nature of what we are dealing with does not allow this. One of the catchcries of 'Minimalist' scholars, we will remember, is that biblical texts are biased and subjective, whereas artifacts are mute, unbiased, and objective. It is somehow assumed that what an archaeologist digs up is objective history, firm history. The truth of it, though, is that an archaeologist is just digging up something that exists in the here and now. The only real firm concrete conclusion that an archaeologist can arrive at, is to say, "This is the way we found the ruins". The job of archaeologists is to see if they can somehow piece together how the artifacts and the ruins got into the state that the archaeologists found them in. Archaeologists are digging up yesterday and only trying to figure out how things looked 3000 years ago from these items. In that way, archaeologists are not digging up the history of ancient Israel; they are digging up yesterday and hoping that it will lead them to what happened 3000 years ago.
(ii) That is a very philosophical point, but then we start getting into just how inexact archaeology is. Historians reach conclusions by looking at the data the archaeologists find and applying certain logical equations to them. For example, if a city was conquered, we should expect to find some evidence of this, like burnt debris from fires, bones strewn here and there, some walls knocked down, and so on. One of the points that actually led many scholars to claim that there was no such thing as an Israelite Conquest of Canaan under Joshua in about 1220 B.C.E., is that we do not find any evidence for it - no debris, no bones, no broken walls. How could it possibly have happened, this mammoth blitzkrieg, if we do not have the signs of one? This led to some scholars looking to other interpretations. Perhaps the Israelites came into Canaan peacefully and not with war? Perhaps they did not come in at all - maybe they were there all along as the Canaanites. Yet now, thanks to 'Minimalist' methods, more and more scholars are coming to the conclusion that there was no Israelite Conquest of Canaan under Joshua and that it is just epic myth or legend. But what 'Minimalist' scholars and those they have influenced have not considered is the possibility that a conquest can occur without debris, strewn bones, and broken walls.
In 1066, William the Conqueror conquered England. There are very few doubts about it. Yet there is no debris, no strewn bones, no broken walls to show us that that is indeed what he did. However, no one doubts it. In about 539 B.C.E., the Babylonian Empire which spanned a huge area, the biggest of its day, ceased to exist. The empire was conquered by another, that of the Persians, but we do not find any rubble or debris amongst the ruins of Babylon to show it. In fact, if the ruins are all we had to go by, we'd be forgiven for thinking that Babylon never was conquered because it continued to flourish as a city with hardly any change. Yet, it was conquered. It was conquered by Cyrus, king of Persia.
A note of caution is needed here. These equations that are used to extract meaning from the mute artifacts are actually very good. We have just picked on one very simple equation. But if we find so many problems and different possibilities with such a simple equation, imagine what can happen if the artifacts and the equations are complex. These equations can often have their limitations and these limitations might make an historian completely misconstrue what actually happened. If we apply 'Minimalist' scholars' own principle - "What would we say about the artifacts if we did not have the literary texts?" - to the example of Ancient Babylon or Medieval England, what would we come up with? We would probably never come up with the idea that either of them were conquered.
Then when you also consider what he cites that the Bible has been helpful in interpreting/finding, etc.
Quote:
And indeed, the first discoveries of archaeologists in the Middle East just seemed to confirm what the Bible said. Archaeologists found King Mesha of Moab's inscription on the Moabite stone, mentioning Omri the King of Israel and the Israelite tribe of Gad. The Bible in II Kings recounts a story of how this man, Mesha king of Moab, rebelled against his Israelite overlords and how the Kings of Israel and Judah marched out to war against him. It recounts how Mesha sacrificed his own son to his god, Kemosh, and in the Mesha Stele we read Mesha boasting of how he defeats Israel, recaptures territory and always boasts about his close relationship with his god, Kemosh. That was in the Bible. They found the dedicatory inscription for King Hezekiah's tunnel under Jerusalem. That was in the Bible too. They found a cache of clay tablets at places like Ugarit on the Syrian coast and at Mari on the Euphrates River which seemed to inform us about the customs of the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They found the Code of Hammurabi which contained certain laws that were very similar, if not the same, to those found in the Pentateuch. John Garstang found the walls of Jericho which crumbled at the war cry of Joshua and the Israelites. Solomon' s stables were found at Megiddo. Everything just seemed to fall neatly into place. It was just like picking up the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which just seemed to slip into place automatically.
He spends a lot of time harping on Jerico, the walls and the work of one scientist that dramatically changes the likelyhood that the walls weren't there, but the entire city wasn't there yet as well. Perhaps it was destroyed on an even greater scale that left no artifacts. Just as with William in England.
At any rate I don't think I would declare the Bible worthless to archeologists just yet.
I think you've hit on a really important point - why should God even be aware of our existence ?
This is an interesting point, it's depend of the representation of god. Is it an omni all thing aware only of the whole thing (past present and future in all the dimensions of spaces) or is he aware of the tiny details like human lifes and their uniques destiny ?
In other words, and pardon this comparison, is god multi-tasking and lets say infinite tasking, or is he only one tasking, but one infinitely huge and complex tasking ?
Quote:
The feeling of emptiness is there though as you say, but just because it can't be filled doesn't mean there's no-one there.
you are right, we may be, simply be blind.
Quote:
Real spirituality is (imo) having the courage to face this void - God exists but we can't make contact
Some people IMO, claims to have this direct contact, unfortunately i have no telepathic skills, and thus canno't have direct contacts with another human beings and thus cannot see what these kind of people means, if they see god really or if they are victims of an illusion.
Quote:
hat's why people need a Bible to fill that gap - it's also why the Bible is necessarily fiction
Right, it's because i don't 'buy' this necessary fiction, that the question of god is worthless for me. My representation of what could be god, seems to very near than your own representation. I even believe that it's possible that he could be not aware of us. As i am not a very mystic people (well only sometimes in AO for example) , this kind of thought do not passionate me, and thus i make the reverse bet of Pascal : god is so immetarial that believing in it or not won't change anything to my life or my after-life.
No I have no problem with Israel existence and this reading of the bible have absolutely nothing to do with what ISrael is today. What matters is the people living on the land today.
I disagree with the desition to form Israel but people have been born in the land and therefore it now have reality and I would probably join in the army if the existence of the land was threatened.
But the point of this thread is that the people behind the Copenhagen school have been accused of anti-semitism solely based on their method of reading the bible. One does not lead to the other.
Did you know that it is believed that the most of the population of Denmark is believed to decent from fleeing swedes? Should Denmark be given "back" to Sweden for that reason No. Because now we are Danes. Just like the population of Israel are israelis.
Hardly a "trap "old boy...
I know enough about your old bear baiting ways to see what was clearly on your mind....8)
Well maybe God is all the things we're not - totally 'other' in the way an alien race might be. Couple that with omnipotent powers and you have a being that is unknowable and a situation where anyone who claims to know cannot by definition. Belief is a different matter and as you say, should be respected because it may be just as correct as any other belief - we just can't know.
In a way it's like the infinite universe or eternity, we cannot concieve of it though we can infer its existence. The Bible is just a book about that inferring not the root cause of it.
I remember reading a chapter in a book that essentually attempted to explain how God could know everything that has occured and everything that will occur and yet we have free will.
It is very hard to sum up but I essentually boiled it down to this. Take a piece of paper. Draw an point and then an arrow leaving from that point. The arrow is how we experience time. The paper is how God experiences time. (essentually more than one dimension)
When you here how it gets hard to seperate time from matter and thus you get phrases like "space-time" this gets even more interesting to imagine.
And I wont post a picture of bones from a whale leg that was cut off a living whale back in July of 1919. No way. Will not do it.
Quote:
Originally posted by trumptman
Theorys that are valid are testable and often have predictable results.
You are absolutely right. All theories must be testable, or there?s no point in opening your mouth. And yes, theories that are valid often have predictable results. Often, but not always.
Here are some "mysteries" that science can't apparently resolve.
1: The sub-atomic world of particle physics keeps throwing up stranger & stranger families of sub atomic particles, but still hasn't touched bottom in its chase for the smallest particle.
2: 95% of the mass of the universe cannot be accounted for..excepting to call it "dark matter"
3: Despite over 50 years of trying, scientists are no closer to creating " Life " from "organic compounds" than they were when the experiments were first conducted.
4: No physicist can explain the way in which light appears to almost conciously interact with the person or persons conducting the experiments, so that depending on who is conducting what, light acts as particles or waves..
5: Further, no-one can satisfactorily account for the strange compressive behaviour of light in relation to time.
6: Or how it is possible (despite the speed of light being considered absolute), that things are known to break that law when travelling through a solid barrier...
I can't believe how religion can make people disregard evolution theory that much.
Just because a scientific theory isn't perfect, doesn't mean it has to be dismissed altogether in favour of interpretations of a religious book, written +1000 years ago by people that knew absolutely nothing about cell structures, genes, amino acids, geophysical events, symbiotic behaviour, etc..
Researchers have studied creation/evolution in a scientific contect (making hypotheses, testing them, reformulation, peer reviewing, etc) - theres a huge literature on the subject. Scientific theories are not 'true', they are 'better' than 'belief', at least when you are trying to discover facts about the world. And no, they are not just 'interpretations' that equals the interpretations of any religious fundamentalist. The knowledge created through natural science is what thousands of scientist and theorists can agree on.
It is of course perfectly possible to find some reasonably sound passage that could be applied to a natural science problem in just about any text.
That doesn't make this text any authority of the problem, or 'disprove' any theory.
Comments
Originally posted by Anders
Oh god. EVERYBODY read Matsus post. Religion is not on the same level as science. Why can´t it just be right for you? Why does it have to be true?
Paul addressed this:
12 But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15 More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. (1 Corinthians 15: 12-19)
Any Christian worth his (or her) salt knows very well the cliff they stepped from.
Originally posted by DiscoCow
Why exactly is it bad science? Do you happen do believe in an alternative, empirically testable theory?
Would you care to explain how evolution is an empirically testable theory?
Theorys that are valid are testable and often have predictable results. I would be happy to see how evolution has given us the ability to predict when mutation will occur and what they results of that mutation are likely to be. By mutation I mean new traits of course and not manipulation of existing traits.
Nick
Originally posted by trumptman
Theorys that are valid are testable and often have predictable results. I would be happy to see how evolution has given us the ability to predict when mutation will occur and what they results of that mutation are likely to be. By mutation I mean new traits of course and not manipulation of existing traits.
By that "reasoning", the so-called "laws" of probability are completely worthless, simply because you can't always predict which exact numbers with come up whenever a pair of dice are thrown. Never mind the wonderful power of statistical analysis and mathematical likelihood, Real Men demand a working crystal ball with which to view the future and won't be fooled by frivolous guesswork.
Originally posted by shetline
By that "reasoning", the so-called "laws" of probability are completely worthless, simply because you can't always predict which exact numbers with come up whenever a pair of dice are thrown. Never mind the wonderful power of statistical analysis and mathematical likelihood, Real Men demand a working crystal ball with which to view the future and won't be fooled by frivolous guesswork.
... watch him ignore this very good and salient point.
Originally posted by shetline
By that "reasoning", the so-called "laws" of probability are completely worthless, simply because you can't always predict which exact numbers with come up whenever a pair of dice are thrown. Never mind the wonderful power of statistical analysis and mathematical likelihood, Real Men demand a working crystal ball with which to view the future and won't be fooled by frivolous guesswork.
Shifting the point? The definition of probability is not to guess what the exact number will be. So to take a word redefine it, say "see it isn't that definition," and declare yourself right?
The definition of probability means..likelyhood, not exactness.
Nick
There's nothing testable. It is predicated on a "what if..." scenario.
Originally posted by segovius
Yes, he'll probably be 'unavoidably detained' for a little while yet.
But he's wrong on other counts too - the Uncertainty Principle, Chaos theory and the Schrodinger's Cat model in quantum mechanics certainly would not give predictable results any time.
I suppose that now that quantum physicists acknowledge Chaos as the bedrock of the universal system, conservatives (whose drive is towards forcible impostition of order and subsequent black and white reductionism) must be regarded as representing some form of a glitch in the evolutionary blueprint
(Schrodinger's Cat) Actually it gives a predictable result. The result just isn't know until you observe it can be argued that part of the result is in fact you observing it. Likewise the fact that overtime (say past the hour) we would have an ever increasing probablity that the isotope had decayed would make a result more likely.
So you may not know whether the cat is dead or not or whether the radioactive material decayed or not until you crack open the box, but you wouldn't open the box and expect to find a dog.
Many of the things you have mentioned deal with how we can spot the trends but not know exactly what every little step is going to be along the way.
If evolution were anywhere near this, we wouldn't have a problem. I'm not claiming that we have to know exactly which amino acids are going to switch, at what time due to what cause. However for example we don't even have a rate of speciation of things of that nature. We don't have anything.
Nick
Originally posted by chu_bakka
Plus there's no way to prove creationism...
There's nothing testable. It is predicated on a "what if..." scenario.
I'm sorry I'm not arguing this in an "or" manner. It doesn't have to be creation or evolution. It isn't creationism bad so evolution good.
Evolution should stand on its own.
Nick
Thanks in advance.
Originally posted by segovius
Maybe we can segue the two
The Copenhagen issue essentially boils down to: the Bible - man-made or God-made ?
If it is the latter then we would expect some details revealing the inner workings of the cosmos. In the 3000 or so years since the earliest of the Bible books we would also expect some of these to be confirmed by science. This hasn't happened.
You don't even need to invoke contradictions or evolution - dinosaurs, non-earth centric views of solar system, round earth - all things we had to find out for ourselves when one would reasonably expect that the creator of the universe might mention them if he happened to write a book. He didn't because this book is demonstrably a product of the human mind and we should be proud of that.
So let's judge it as literature but first we need to split it up - these 66 books have almost no continuity and the vast majority don't even belong together. They're even from 2 different and contradictory religions, 3 if you count Paul's outrageous hijacking of the original Jesus teaching.
Time to see it for what it is - some of the greatest literature humankind has yet produced but nothing more.
For me the bible is hand human made by people who have the faith in god. Some people will argue that in this way, god speak directly via this people, and some others says it's just a fantastic compilation of theoligal thoughts.
Most of the people i know personally and who believe in god, do not take in a litteral sense the bible, and thus will not oppose bible and science or history and bible. Their faith is deeper than that, and is based upon a search for meaning in life and existence. God is the only absolute concept able to fill the terrible emptiness of life for them, and as they are human, their god has a human face (not in the litteral way). Some scientists like the astrophysicians are more friendly with sciences and will tend to discribe god (the only thing that can give sense to the whole thing) more in a abstract way.
I think that the more a people feel the emptiness, the more chances he will be inclinated to believe in god. But you don't need only to feel the emptiness to believe in god, this idear of god, must also bring you positive things. My idear of god is so abstract and non human that it doesnt bring me positive things, and thus does not change the way i view life. Even in time where i feel emptiness, the idear of god did not make feel me more confortable, thus i do not believe in it because it do not make a difference for me.
Anyway i respect people who believe in god, when it's bring them happiness and peace in their mind. Same naturally do not apply for those where their idear of god contains hate and pain.
((i) Firstly, it is a fundamental mistake to think that archaeology is an exact science. It is not. It is an inexact science. We cannot dig up an ancient city, take it into a laboratory, put it in a beaker, perform an experiment on it and come up with the history of Ancient Israel. The nature of what we are dealing with does not allow this. One of the catchcries of 'Minimalist' scholars, we will remember, is that biblical texts are biased and subjective, whereas artifacts are mute, unbiased, and objective. It is somehow assumed that what an archaeologist digs up is objective history, firm history. The truth of it, though, is that an archaeologist is just digging up something that exists in the here and now. The only real firm concrete conclusion that an archaeologist can arrive at, is to say, "This is the way we found the ruins". The job of archaeologists is to see if they can somehow piece together how the artifacts and the ruins got into the state that the archaeologists found them in. Archaeologists are digging up yesterday and only trying to figure out how things looked 3000 years ago from these items. In that way, archaeologists are not digging up the history of ancient Israel; they are digging up yesterday and hoping that it will lead them to what happened 3000 years ago.
(ii) That is a very philosophical point, but then we start getting into just how inexact archaeology is. Historians reach conclusions by looking at the data the archaeologists find and applying certain logical equations to them. For example, if a city was conquered, we should expect to find some evidence of this, like burnt debris from fires, bones strewn here and there, some walls knocked down, and so on. One of the points that actually led many scholars to claim that there was no such thing as an Israelite Conquest of Canaan under Joshua in about 1220 B.C.E., is that we do not find any evidence for it - no debris, no bones, no broken walls. How could it possibly have happened, this mammoth blitzkrieg, if we do not have the signs of one? This led to some scholars looking to other interpretations. Perhaps the Israelites came into Canaan peacefully and not with war? Perhaps they did not come in at all - maybe they were there all along as the Canaanites. Yet now, thanks to 'Minimalist' methods, more and more scholars are coming to the conclusion that there was no Israelite Conquest of Canaan under Joshua and that it is just epic myth or legend. But what 'Minimalist' scholars and those they have influenced have not considered is the possibility that a conquest can occur without debris, strewn bones, and broken walls.
In 1066, William the Conqueror conquered England. There are very few doubts about it. Yet there is no debris, no strewn bones, no broken walls to show us that that is indeed what he did. However, no one doubts it. In about 539 B.C.E., the Babylonian Empire which spanned a huge area, the biggest of its day, ceased to exist. The empire was conquered by another, that of the Persians, but we do not find any rubble or debris amongst the ruins of Babylon to show it. In fact, if the ruins are all we had to go by, we'd be forgiven for thinking that Babylon never was conquered because it continued to flourish as a city with hardly any change. Yet, it was conquered. It was conquered by Cyrus, king of Persia.
A note of caution is needed here. These equations that are used to extract meaning from the mute artifacts are actually very good. We have just picked on one very simple equation. But if we find so many problems and different possibilities with such a simple equation, imagine what can happen if the artifacts and the equations are complex. These equations can often have their limitations and these limitations might make an historian completely misconstrue what actually happened. If we apply 'Minimalist' scholars' own principle - "What would we say about the artifacts if we did not have the literary texts?" - to the example of Ancient Babylon or Medieval England, what would we come up with? We would probably never come up with the idea that either of them were conquered.
Then when you also consider what he cites that the Bible has been helpful in interpreting/finding, etc.
And indeed, the first discoveries of archaeologists in the Middle East just seemed to confirm what the Bible said. Archaeologists found King Mesha of Moab's inscription on the Moabite stone, mentioning Omri the King of Israel and the Israelite tribe of Gad. The Bible in II Kings recounts a story of how this man, Mesha king of Moab, rebelled against his Israelite overlords and how the Kings of Israel and Judah marched out to war against him. It recounts how Mesha sacrificed his own son to his god, Kemosh, and in the Mesha Stele we read Mesha boasting of how he defeats Israel, recaptures territory and always boasts about his close relationship with his god, Kemosh. That was in the Bible. They found the dedicatory inscription for King Hezekiah's tunnel under Jerusalem. That was in the Bible too. They found a cache of clay tablets at places like Ugarit on the Syrian coast and at Mari on the Euphrates River which seemed to inform us about the customs of the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They found the Code of Hammurabi which contained certain laws that were very similar, if not the same, to those found in the Pentateuch. John Garstang found the walls of Jericho which crumbled at the war cry of Joshua and the Israelites. Solomon' s stables were found at Megiddo. Everything just seemed to fall neatly into place. It was just like picking up the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which just seemed to slip into place automatically.
He spends a lot of time harping on Jerico, the walls and the work of one scientist that dramatically changes the likelyhood that the walls weren't there, but the entire city wasn't there yet as well. Perhaps it was destroyed on an even greater scale that left no artifacts. Just as with William in England.
At any rate I don't think I would declare the Bible worthless to archeologists just yet.
Nick
Originally posted by segovius
I think you've hit on a really important point - why should God even be aware of our existence ?
This is an interesting point, it's depend of the representation of god. Is it an omni all thing aware only of the whole thing (past present and future in all the dimensions of spaces) or is he aware of the tiny details like human lifes and their uniques destiny ?
In other words, and pardon this comparison, is god multi-tasking and lets say infinite tasking, or is he only one tasking, but one infinitely huge and complex tasking ?
The feeling of emptiness is there though as you say, but just because it can't be filled doesn't mean there's no-one there.
you are right, we may be, simply be blind.
Real spirituality is (imo) having the courage to face this void - God exists but we can't make contact
Some people IMO, claims to have this direct contact, unfortunately i have no telepathic skills, and thus canno't have direct contacts with another human beings and thus cannot see what these kind of people means, if they see god really or if they are victims of an illusion.
hat's why people need a Bible to fill that gap - it's also why the Bible is necessarily fiction
Right, it's because i don't 'buy' this necessary fiction, that the question of god is worthless for me. My representation of what could be god, seems to very near than your own representation. I even believe that it's possible that he could be not aware of us. As i am not a very mystic people (well only sometimes in AO for example) , this kind of thought do not passionate me, and thus i make the reverse bet of Pascal : god is so immetarial that believing in it or not won't change anything to my life or my after-life.
Originally posted by Anders
HA. Finally someone fell into the trap.
No I have no problem with Israel existence and this reading of the bible have absolutely nothing to do with what ISrael is today. What matters is the people living on the land today.
I disagree with the desition to form Israel but people have been born in the land and therefore it now have reality and I would probably join in the army if the existence of the land was threatened.
But the point of this thread is that the people behind the Copenhagen school have been accused of anti-semitism solely based on their method of reading the bible. One does not lead to the other.
Did you know that it is believed that the most of the population of Denmark is believed to decent from fleeing swedes? Should Denmark be given "back" to Sweden for that reason
Hardly a "trap "old boy...
I know enough about your old bear baiting ways to see what was clearly on your mind....8)
Originally posted by segovius
Well maybe God is all the things we're not - totally 'other' in the way an alien race might be. Couple that with omnipotent powers and you have a being that is unknowable and a situation where anyone who claims to know cannot by definition. Belief is a different matter and as you say, should be respected because it may be just as correct as any other belief - we just can't know.
In a way it's like the infinite universe or eternity, we cannot concieve of it though we can infer its existence. The Bible is just a book about that inferring not the root cause of it.
I remember reading a chapter in a book that essentually attempted to explain how God could know everything that has occured and everything that will occur and yet we have free will.
It is very hard to sum up but I essentually boiled it down to this. Take a piece of paper. Draw an point and then an arrow leaving from that point. The arrow is how we experience time. The paper is how God experiences time. (essentually more than one dimension)
When you here how it gets hard to seperate time from matter and thus you get phrases like "space-time" this gets even more interesting to imagine.
Nick
Originally posted by Matsu
You Kant argue with him and you Kant argue against him.
I hate being Hegeled by the audience.
Nick
Originally posted by trumptman
Would you care to explain how evolution is an empirically testable theory?
Simple. Evolution makes claims. We test those claims.
I won?t go into specific claims because I?d be wasting my breath (or typing, whatever.)
No amount of evidence will convince you anyway.
And I wont post links to lists of observed speciation. Nope.
And I wont post a picture of bones from a whale leg that was cut off a living whale back in July of 1919. No way. Will not do it.
Originally posted by trumptman
Theorys that are valid are testable and often have predictable results.
You are absolutely right. All theories must be testable, or there?s no point in opening your mouth. And yes, theories that are valid often have predictable results. Often, but not always.
1: The sub-atomic world of particle physics keeps throwing up stranger & stranger families of sub atomic particles, but still hasn't touched bottom in its chase for the smallest particle.
2: 95% of the mass of the universe cannot be accounted for..excepting to call it "dark matter"
3: Despite over 50 years of trying, scientists are no closer to creating " Life " from "organic compounds" than they were when the experiments were first conducted.
4: No physicist can explain the way in which light appears to almost conciously interact with the person or persons conducting the experiments, so that depending on who is conducting what, light acts as particles or waves..
5: Further, no-one can satisfactorily account for the strange compressive behaviour of light in relation to time.
6: Or how it is possible (despite the speed of light being considered absolute), that things are known to break that law when travelling through a solid barrier...
The list goes on...
Just because a scientific theory isn't perfect, doesn't mean it has to be dismissed altogether in favour of interpretations of a religious book, written +1000 years ago by people that knew absolutely nothing about cell structures, genes, amino acids, geophysical events, symbiotic behaviour, etc..
Researchers have studied creation/evolution in a scientific contect (making hypotheses, testing them, reformulation, peer reviewing, etc) - theres a huge literature on the subject. Scientific theories are not 'true', they are 'better' than 'belief', at least when you are trying to discover facts about the world. And no, they are not just 'interpretations' that equals the interpretations of any religious fundamentalist. The knowledge created through natural science is what thousands of scientist and theorists can agree on.
It is of course perfectly possible to find some reasonably sound passage that could be applied to a natural science problem in just about any text.
That doesn't make this text any authority of the problem, or 'disprove' any theory.