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Merged (edited) General thoughts about Christianity and the bible

Rusty Tyler said:
Couldn't I say that about the Bible?
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Only to a certain extent. As I wrote in the post you're responding to:

JayUtah said:
The Bible makes claims, some of which can be tested. Among its testable claims are those that are evidently false; you have acknowledge those. Among its untestable claims are ordinary claims and supernatural claims. Supernatural claims are inherently improbable on their face. You seem to accept all of them at face value, regardless of facial likelihood. Since the claims are untestable, we can make a reasoned decision regarding believe solely according to the prima facie plausibility standard. Claims that purport to violate known laws of natural behavior have a low a priori probability of being true, and there is no testable evidence with which to arrive at a better posterior probability.
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The Bible is not on par with scientific literature. Scientific publications have a standard of reproducibility that the Bible does not meet.

Certain claims can be tested which affect our a priori assessment of the Bible's claims. For example, when we test the alleged effect of intercessory prayer on medical outcomes, we find no effect. Therefore the claim in James 5:15 is improbable on its face. Of course this does not and cannot refute any claim made in the Bible to the effect of faith healing. But as those claims stand merely as affirmative assertions and provide no testable objective evidence by which to investigate cause and effect, we fall back to what we understand from our foundational research.

Rusty Tyler said:
Plenty of believers out there.
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Asked and answered. The existence of any number of believers is not objective, testable evidence that the believed-in proposition is true.

Rusty Tyler said:
Plenty of unbelievers out there as well.
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Yes.
 
Rusty Tyler said:
Miracles have a mind of their own, it seems.
They don't warn us ahead of time so that we can set up an experiment.
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Special pleading.

Rusty Tyler said:
Nor are they usually repeatable.
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Red herring. I'm sometimes called upon to assist in investigate accidents. Naturally I was not there when it happened. But we are frequently able to determine the cause of the accident to the degree of certainty necessary to compel relief at law. It is almost always a degree of certainly sufficient to compel changes in how people behave. These determinations arise from a reliable, proven understanding of how the natural world behaves and consequently how it behaved in a way that gave rise to undesirable operations. This kind of understanding allows us to assign a priori likelihood to claims.

In most cases we can develop objective, testable evidence by which we can test the relative likelihood of competing claims. But where no such evidence is available, our finding (tentative as it may be) must come from that a priori reasoning. Just because it is a tentative conclusion drawn upon congruence does not mean it lacks evidentiary force or must yield to some alternative simply because the alternative exists.

Your arrival at a different explanation comes from your different priors. And because your priors are simply a warm-fuzzy belief in a particular class of causes irrespective of anything extrinsic or testable, they fail to convince.
 
Rusty Tyler said:
Couldn't you apply that to the Bible?
Broadly accepted.
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We do accept that some works in the Bible were around as far back as the second century (we gots pieces of them), and some are generally believed to have existed earlier than that (referenced by others, etc). What we have no reason to give it is historical accuracy, especially in light of internal historical inaccuracies and evidence of editing.

And as we all know, thd Bible as we know it today is a compilation of works that Constantine and the Council of Nice thought were pretty nifty. There were a variety of other works kicking around at the time, all subject to Constantine erasing them from history. How much faith do you really have in Constantine and the wsidom of his selections? Cuz I've got like zero.
 
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Rusty Tyler said:
You weren't there for the Big Bang, right?
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Depends what you mean by "there". We're bathed in the isotropic blackbody radiation originating from the Big Bang. It saturates the universe. It's hard to imagine being more present for the Big Bang than having its light shining on your face every time you go outside. It's far more predictable, detectable, measurable, and reliable than God's presence, which is supposed to be similarly ubiquitous.
 
Rusty Tyler said:
Couldn't you apply that to the Bible?
Broadly accepted.
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I rather think I do apply that to the bible. There's corroborating evidence that several ancient cities it mentions existed, to take a trivial example. So I'm content to believe they were real places. There's a pointed lack of evidence for some stories though. The Egyptians don't appear to have left any record of the Exodus for example.
 
Rusty Tyler said:
The title refers to the type of evidence you want.
Sworn eye-witness with notary stamped documents.
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No, we've been pretty consistently clear on what kind of evidence we want. We want evidence that is objective. Evidence is objective when its meaning does not legitimately vary from person to person. An example of objective evidence is a temperature reading of your hands while you're performing a faith healing. If that temperature is 39 ºC when measured, it's 39 ºC for my purposes as well as yours. An example of subjective (non-objective) evidence is a near-death experience. If a doctor, a nurse, and patient are all in the same room and the patient has an experience invisible to the others and confined only to her brain, that's not objective. Evaluating that evidence requires the trier of fact to be that person.

We want evidence that is testable. Evidence is testable when we can apply methods to it that preclude bias and certain commonly encountered errors. It is testable when the methods that we use to obtain it and evaluate it are transparent to an observer. It is testable when a different tester following the same methods can obtain the same result.

No, we don't not expect to rely on people's claims and various pinky promises that things really did happen as claimed.
 
Rusty Tyler said:
Do you have proof for evolution?
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Proof is a mathematical act.

Evolution is probably the most demonstrably proven fact in science. It is proven probably thousands of times every day in laboratories. You almost certainly have evidence in your home. Mankind has been proving evolution for probably two millennium. Ever hear of breeding? This is foundational evidence that proves evolution. The animals that are your pets, the livestock ranchers raise, the fruits, vegetables and grains you eat are all the result of evolution. EVOLUTION is THE bedrock principle of modern biology.

Rusty Tyler said:
You weren't there for the Big Bang, right?
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So? Now I'm,laughing.

You almost certainly don't understand the Big Bang and what it is. The Big Bang is a theory first thought up by a Catholic priest. It was an explanation for the visible expansion of the universe. The pope at the time was so impressed with the idea that he proposed to the priest that the church teach it as dogma. The priest declined.

It is not an explanation for anything other than the beginning of that expansion. It doesn't prove the beginning of everything.
 
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Rusty Tyler said:
The title refers to the type of evidence you want.
Sworn eye-witness with notary stamped documents.
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Further to Jay's #620 and PJ's #551, it has been made very, very clear what the folk you are inter-acting with accept as evidence and eye witness statrements without a bunch of objective support and the rest just don't cut it.
 
Since you asked about "proof" for evolution (much having been provided) how about you explain what it is that you find problematic about it?

I'll be surprised if we see anything beyond the tired old creationist or ID nonsense we've all heard and read ad nauseam over the years. But I'm willing to be shown wrong.
 
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