Insightful.
Is this really true? I mean, I certainly haven't seen any convincing evidence that there was a single broadly accepted model for the shape of the earth before the time in antiquity when not only was it proven to be round, but its size was reasonably well approximated.
This is strange considering all of the reworks that the bible went through even up until the 400's. It seems like if it were something widely accepted by scholars or even laymen that it would have been something to correct. You can see regional differences in the bible as it was being written and spread across the middle East, but the knowledge of the spherical Earth must not have spread quickly enough to this area in which copies of the bible were being made.
Not sure what you are referring to being disproved. It is true that a person's interpretation of the Bible may be disproved, but I am unaware of any source that has truly disproved the Bible. The same cannot be said for many of the theories that are taken as fact.
> If god exists and was on Earth then he is very vindictive desperate for destruction and violence, humanities aim should be to destroy him.
I can understand why you may think that; however, we have to keep in mind that our viewpoint, as humans, is incomplete and imperfect. Further, we have a very limited view of who God is. That is why we need the Bible - to help us see things as He does. It is simple enough for a child to understand, but it is beyond the ability of scholars with years of study and advanced degrees to fully comprehend on their own.
God is a truly just God. He cannot let sin (going our own way instead of following God's path for us) be left alone. That is why He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross and conquer death. Jesus took the wrath we deserved onto Himself, so that we could be free.
"For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 6:23
So, even His justice has mercy mixed in. The one who is "very vindictive desperate for destruction and violence" is Satan, as Jesus Christ states:
"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly." John 10:10
One reason God waits to finally deal with Satan, is so that others can come into a loving relationship with God:
"The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance." 2 Peter 3:9
Note: All references are from the NASB.
And given that that's all we really have, it's a sufficient analogue.
Why are there no more prophets, judges, or anointed kings? Why are there no more miracles? Why do people need a book translated into English to reach the divine? I am so baffled by how Christians are okay with such a distal relationship, as if the closest relationship to God is a textual one, followed by emotions of a vague relationship to the divine.
If one were to look at the severe intimacy that Jews and the first Christians experienced with the sacred, a natural thought is to think that Christians have been excommunicated from all spiritual reality. Not even the Accuser will have his intellectual sparring with God anymore, raining hellish miracles down to earth. There are no more court magicians. This world is an excommunicated world, and people are left talking of an invisible gardener, and the feelings they experience when they engage in textual analysis with varying lenses, such as a historical lens on Hebrew life conditions... this is modern spirituality.
How can this be a spiritual relationship with the Father to all things? How can that be a profession of a connection to spiritual reality?
Because people can be mistaken, misguided or plain wrong. We need an objective standard from God Himself, to know what is right and true. (Though, He does also provide some basic understanding of truth and beauty through nature, too.)
> Why is it that Christians are so skeptical of actual communication via prayer, that anyone who strongly professes to hear the divine might be suspiciously regarded as mentally ill?
May I suggest the word "Christians" be replaced with "people"? I for one am a Christian and know that people can interact with the supernatural. No need to consider someone mentally ill just because they are more attuned to the spiritual than others (even if not a Christian). One of the longstanding core of the Christian life is to spend time in prayer with God. The Bible acts as a point of reference to know whether our experience is of God or not. There are spiritual beings out there that seek to turn us away from the truth. These are the fallen angels, demons.
> Why are there no more prophets, judges, or anointed kings? Why are there no more miracles?
I for one know of several prophets. I have personally experienced or witnessed miracles. Just because one may not recognize something as a miracle or someone as a prophet does not mean there are none. The unseen world is ever present, both the good and the evil. Our modern society has in the recent past ignored (and some continue to ignore) that it is real just because we have not figured out a way to empirically prove it. The supernatural has the prefix of "super-" because it goes beyond the natural. This does not invalidate science, just as science does not invalidate the supernatural.
> Why do people need a book translated into English to reach the divine?
The Bible has been translated into many more languages than just English. Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic are the original languages used, not English.
> If one were to look at the severe intimacy that Jews and the first Christians experienced with the sacred, a natural thought is to think that Christians have been excommunicated from all spiritual reality.
I'm not sure I disagree with you. There are many examples that would seem to back you up. There are many examples that also refute this. The relationship comes from committing oneself wholly (fully) to follow Jesus Christ. How God chooses to work through and in that person may look different for each person. Just as each person has a unique combination of personality, talents, experiences and opportunities. We can say, though, the trend of a follower of Jesus Christ will be to look more like Him.
> How can this be a spiritual relationship with the Father to all things? How can that be a profession of a connection to spiritual reality?
Perhaps not all who say they have a relationship really know what that even means? This is one more reason we need the Bible - to help us know what God's standard is. If it were left up to me, my standard would not be good enough. My mercy would not be strong enough. My justice would not be complete enough. My ability to see things as they really are and still choose to love would not be pure enough.
Edit: corrected spelling and grammar.
I'll give an example where the scientific facts as described in the Bible do not appear to be reconcilable with historical or archeological evidence: the Exodus story. Quoting from http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/The-Exodus-D... :
> So that makes archaeologists reluctant to have to tell our brethren and ourselves that there is nothing in Egyptian records to support it. Nothing on the slavery of the Israelites, nothing on the plagues that persuaded Pharaoh to let them go, nothing on the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, nothing.
> Nothing at all. There are three Pharaohs who said they got rid of the hated foreigners, but nothing to say who the foreigners were, and no Pharaoh is named as having persecuted foreign slaves or suffered unspeakable plagues.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evidence_for_the_Exodus summarizes more of the historical and archeological details. While that can be perceived as having a built-in bias against the Bible, it proves to be hard to find other sources which are not merely hand-waving apologetics pages.
That is a straw man argument. It either is proved wrong or it is not.
> Only the parts which overlap with science can be proved or disproved by science.
I am speaking to all of the above.
I am not an archaeologist, so I will have to defer to someone else for supporting evidence. I can say, though, that a lack of corroboration does not mean something did not happen.
I do not understand what you mean by that.
Consider an 800 page physics textbook, where on page 234 it says that glass is super-cooled liquid. This is wrong. Does that one wrong statement prove the entire book to be incorrect? Certainly not.
So why would showing one thing to be incorrect in the Bible "prove" that the entire book is wrong?
After all, the 'Wicked Bible' from the 1600s, which says "Thou shalt commit adultery", is obviously wrong, but that doesn't somehow prove wrong the rest of that copy of the Bible.
> lack of corroboration does not mean something did not happen
That is the non-scientific view held be many Christian apologists. Is there anything besides the Bible where you use that argument, even when all physical and historical evidence strongly points just the opposite?
Do you also believe the ancient continent of Mu exists? Or that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were members of some of the Lost Tribes of Israel? Or that it's possible to communicate with the spirits of dead people during a seance?
If not, why not?
The Bible is not merely a physics textbook or work of fiction, it is the very Word of God. It is on a different level. It is reasonable to expect it to be held to a higher standard. Having said that, I do not claim to be a scientist. Still, with the Bible being in English since at least the late 1300's, not to mention the dates of the original text ~1,300 years before that, there has been plenty of time to demolish the Biblical accounts. This is well before the Scientific Revolution [1]. One example is the account of the worldwide flood in Genesis 6-9 [2]. I have yet to come across anything that definitively proves this to be false. There are plenty of theories to explain things that could also be explained by a worldwide flood, such as the layers of sediment; however, these remain theories.
PaulKeeble stated: "Almost everybody believed the world was flat, then they were proved wrong. So many of the objective "facts" in the bible have been proved scientifically wrong and no such inaccuracy should exist given divine input. If god exists and was on Earth then he is very vindictive desperate for destruction and violence, humanities aim should be to destroy him. Thankfully there is no evidence to say he does beyond a book with obvious flaws."
He is making a positive statement that the Bible has been proven scientifically wrong without providing any supporting evidence. The flat earth argument does not hold water, in my opinion. The following article provides a modern Christian viewpoint on the flat earth vs. round earth as found in the Bible: [3].
It is not until your answer, dalke, that the whole Exodus account is brought up. In it your "proof" is that there seems to be no evidence of millions of Jewish people wandering the the desert for forty years. To which I responded:
>> lack of corroboration does not mean something did not happen
And your responded with:
> That is the non-scientific view held be many Christian apologists. Is there anything besides the Bible where you use that argument, even when all physical and historical evidence strongly points just the opposite?
This is not a "non-scientific view", it is just the truth. (One could even say it is a scientific view, since science should be objective, not making leaps of logic where it cannot be supported. Lack of evidence is not evidence, even if it is surprising.) I am just pointing out that this does not disprove anything. It may be that our techniques, abilities and approaches just aren't up to the task yet. To suggest that this is somehow "unscientific" is to paint folks in a negative light without any substantive reason to do so; it is uncharitable.
> After all, the 'Wicked Bible' from the 1600s, which says "Thou shalt commit adultery", is obviously wrong, but that doesn't somehow prove wrong the rest of that copy of the Bible.
I think it is disingenuous to compare the Holy Bible to the "Wicked Bible".
If you are interested in continuing this conversation elsewhere, please let me know here. Otherwise, I will discontinue following this thread in the near future.
I do appreciate you taking the time to respond to me. Thank you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_revolution [2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6-9&ver... [3] http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-c015.html
There is literally no trace of a worldwide flood, and people have been looking hard for such a trace. The early geologists expected to find such a trace, so it's not like their eyes were closed to that possibility.
When do you think this worldwide flood took place? The written history of Egypt goes back some 5,000 years, and while they refer to regular floods, they make no mention of a world-wide flood.
The geophysical methods we have are able to detect the tsunami from the Storegga Slide that hit Scotland 6,000 years ago. The methods we have are able to identify tens of Missoula Floods which took place from 15,000 to 13,000 years ago. How can geologist find all of these less powerful events, but not something like a worldwide flood? Perhaps because no world-wide flood occurred?
Similarly, with the Exodus story, archeological methods are good enough that if there had been 1+ million people wandering in the desert for 40 years, it would have been noticed. They have been able to find trace of nomadic emplacements in general, so the methods do work. There's been over 100 years of attempts to something which confirms the Exodus story. Those in the early 1900s certainly believed the Biblical narrative was accurate history, only to find it wasn't. After the foundation of Israel, the Jews had even more incentive to show the validity of the events in the Torah, and they too not only found nothing, but are sufficiently confident that they say no such evidence exists.
Again, the Egyptians kept records. When do you think Exodus took place, and why is there no record of 1 million Jews working in or leaving Egypt, or of the empire being affected by plagues?
At what point do you conclude that we lack evidence not because we haven't been able to find it, but simply because it isn't there?
Except for the few which require the Bible to be correct, and view everything through that lens, archeologists of Near East have concluded that the story of Exodus is not historical but was written many of hundreds of years later for religious purposes (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus#Historicity ), and geologists do not believe there was any global flood (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_geology or http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Global_flood ).
Jumping topics, you wrote: "I think it is disingenuous to compare the Holy Bible to the "Wicked Bible".
I don't think you bothered to understand what I was talking about, but instead jumped to a conclusion. The "Wicked Bible" is the tongue-in-cheek name for a reprint of the King James Bible where the publisher omitted the word "not" from Exodus 20:14. It has its own Wikipedia entry, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible . I can absolutely compare them because it is the Holy Bible (for Protestants; other branches of Christianity of course have different Holy Bibles)
It was a humorous point meant to show that I do not think that one publication mistake invalidate the rest of that Bible, just like I don't think that centuries of people believing the literature truth of Noah's Flood or of the Exodus invalidates the entire Bible.