Evidence for God from Science

http://thehumanist.org/november-decembe ... t-to-know/

The whole article is quite interesting but this here is the "right to know" issue:

Being an intelligent believer means understanding the truth about the religion that one believes in, where it came from, how it became what it is, and the historical and cultural forces that molded it. As a biblical scholar, I’m especially concerned with highlighting the truth about the Bible, and I think everybody has the right to know which of its views can’t be squared with the findings of science. People have the right to know that we don’t have the original writings of the New Testament but only later copies, all of which have mistakes in them. People have the right to know that there are discrepancies in the Bible, both major and minor, scattered throughout the entire thing, Old Testament and New Testament. People have the right to know that the historical Jesus appears to have predicted that the end of history as we know it was going to occur in his own generation. People have the right to know that many of the stories about Jesus in the New Testament were fabricated by well meaning but misguided Christians who wanted others to believe in him. People have a right to know that a large number of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, as many as eleven or twelve of them, were not written by their alleged authors, the Apostles, but are in fact forgeries written by other people lying about their identity in order to deceive others.

People have a right to know Bart is seriously deluded.

PaulSacramento wrote: http//thehumanist.org/november-decembe ... t-to-know/

I clicked on the link you provided, above, and stopped reading when it described Bart Ehrman as a ''former born-again Christian'' because no such thing can exist. It is like saying ''a square circle'' or ''2+3= 7''.

FL

Furstentum Liechtenstein wrote:

PaulSacramento wrote: http//thehumanist.org/november-decembe ... t-to-know/

I clicked on the link you provided, above, and stopped reading when it described Bart Ehrman as a ''former born-again Christian'' because no such thing can exist. It is like saying ''a square circle'' or ''2+3= 7''.

FL

Yay!! Absolute Assurance, FTW!!!

Bart Ehrman (and it's really fun to share first names with him) is a Moody Bible Institution Grad who went to Princeton Seminary and then did Doctoral work in Scotland I think and is now the NT Chair at University of North Carolina. He went from Conservative Evangelical to Liberal Christian and now is an Agnostic.

He's a pretty strong Biblical scholar. Most of what he says in that quote is more or less factually accurate but there's more there than facts. There's Bart's interpretation of the significance of things and he's found a receptive audience for his books in the general reading genre. As a scholar, he's pretty much run of the mill and easily addressed by strong evangelical scholars who take the same information he does and interpret it differently.

I have a spotlight review on Amazon for one of his books, Misquoting Jesus.

I see him as mostly honest at least, unlike many other "secular humanists". Otherwise how easy would it be to join most of the rest of the crowd and say that Christ never existed, despite it being a ridiculous assertion it still has gained some following in popular atheistic circles. At least you can point to a few secular guys who (supposedly) don't have "rooting interests" and can point to his existence at least (good starting point).

But I agree with Bart (meaning Canuckster), people tend to think that you uncover the facts and then you have the story, while so much of it is interpretation of facts. Atheists and theists and agnostics could probably agree on 99% of the known facts about the universe, and yet interpretation of those facts can lead to completely opposite conclusions. Should be obvious whose interpretation I think is correct, and several New Testament scholars have done more than well enough against Ehrman in debates and academic responses. To be honest I see some of his interpretations to be stretching the facts to fit his interpretation to fit his beliefs. That doesn't mean that everything he says is impossible, but I definitely don't consider what he says to be true more likely than the Christian alternative.

But I still don't mind him like a Dawkins/Harris, that's for sure.

Just one more thing that might sound unimportant but I have to latch on to it. Assuming atheism or agnosticism, why do humans have the "right to know" these things? No real reason at all. If you look for it, its so easy to spot over and over again, the theistic basis for the use of language and ideas and ideals for the secularists. They really don't have a "systematic atheology" so to speak, yet the assumptions are made that this has some sort of significance or that people have rights... an assumption made out of thin air with no real basis under their worldview. And yet these sort of emotional appeals are a huge part of atheistic rhetoric.

I've read Barts' books and he tends to "over sensationalize" what HE thinks are the issues that should make one question the NT documents.
Probably because that is what happened to him.
He viewed the bible as inerrant and infalliabel and to be take ALL as literal and ALL as inspired.
His faith in Christ was base don his faith in the inerrant bible.
When his faith in the wrong thing was compromised, his whole faith was.
And now he is on a mission to do the same and show believers that their faith in the bible and Christ ( to him one in the same) is misplaced because the bible is NOT inerrant ( at least not in the way that HE believes it MUST be for a person to base their faith on IT).
I don't think that Bart learned as much from his mentor, the late Bruce Metzger, as he should have.

It's probably not a popuar point to make, but Ehrman's departure from the faith, based upon his belief that he's been lied to before he could know better of the challenges to inerrency, is a good argument, as you note Paul, for keeping the focus on Christ and not taking things like Greek Philosophy and building logical constructs that then demand more than we can provide to even honest skeptics, who are quite likely to accept our arguments that inerrency is the foundation of the Christian Faith and then when that can't be established to the degree we claim, they feel justified in rejecting the entire construct as placed upon a faulty foundation.

This is one of the reasons why I'm passionate about pointing out that today's evangelical and fundamentalist movements have departed in some areas from the early church by elevating scripture to the level of Christ. The term Word of God in the early church referred to Christ and the Gospel message, not the Bible as we hold it today.

A lot of Augustinian and Thomistic theology is heavily influenced by Greek Philosophy and without careful examination we end up adding to the Gospel and expanding to things like the need for an inerrent scripture even through we don't have the originals. The need for that has more to do with Plato's Cave than it does the claims of Scripture and Christ themselves.

Canuckster1127 wrote:It's probably not a popuar point to make, but Ehrman's departure from the faith, based upon his belief that he's been lied to before he could know better of the challenges to inerrency, is a good argument, as you note Paul, for keeping the focus on Christ and not taking things like Greek Philosophy and building logical constructs that then demand more than we can provide to even honest skeptics, who are quite likely to accept our arguments that inerrency is the foundation of the Christian Faith and then when that can't be established to the degree we claim, they feel justified in rejecting the entire construct as placed upon a faulty foundation.

This is one of the reasons why I'm passionate about pointing out that today's evangelical and fundamentalist movements have departed in some areas from the early church by elevating scripture to the level of Christ. The term Word of God in the early church referred to Christ and the Gospel message, not the Bible as we hold it today.

A lot of Augustinian and Thomistic theology is heavily influenced by Greek Philosophy and without careful examination we end up adding to the Gospel and expanding to things like the need for an inerrent scripture even through we don't have the originals. The need for that has more to do with Plato's Cave than it does the claims of Scripture and Christ themselves.

Agreed 100%.
Just as we NOW debate and discuss things in our 21st century language and understanding and influences, so did the early church fathers and theologians.
A "point of reference" is crucial in this discussions and it makes sense that with the influence of greek philosophies and thought that this mode of understanding was very commonly used.
The trinity is a fine example, it probably made a lot more sense in the Hellenized world than it does in our with their notions of "persons" and such.

I found this discussion interesting because I am pleased to discover that you don’t believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. Once it is recognised that the Bible was written by men and not dictated by God, we can discuss each sentence to try to discover where it is likely to have come from and if we should apply it to how we live our Christian life.

Hi Amalric,

Amalric wrote:I found this discussion interesting because I am pleased to discover that you don’t believe in the inerrancy of the Bible

I believe the bible is inerrant.

Amalric wrote:Once it is recognised that the Bible was written by men and not dictated by God, we can discuss each sentence to try to discover where it is likely to have come from and if we should apply it to how we live our Christian life

In other words we can pick and choose which bits we find palatable and be on our merry way?

Amalric wrote:I found this discussion interesting because I am pleased to discover that you don’t believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. Once it is recognised that the Bible was written by men and not dictated by God, we can discuss each sentence to try to discover where it is likely to have come from and if we should apply it to how we live our Christian life.

Gotta becarefull with that my friend, not everyone views inerrancy the same way.
For some it means that the bible, IF taken LITERALLY, is without any error.
For others it means that you will nt find any error in it in the way it represents God.
And for others that it is without error in describing the relationship and work of God in the lives of the people who wrote the books of the bible.
I could go on, but the point is that inerrant doesn't mean the samething for everyone.

Is the bible without error?
I would say that, taken each book by itself and taken into account their genre and what the writer(s) were trying to convey that yes, the bible is without error.

Some people nitpick at what they view to be "factual errors" in the bible, and others liek to nitpick at what they view as errors based on THEIR interpretations of a given verse but I think those people are looking for things that weren't their to begin with, nor were they written to be viewed as they are viewing it.

DannyM wrote:
I believe the bible is inerrant.

I was just happy that I didn’t have to believe that the bible is inerrant to be able to post here. I consider myself a liberal Christian.

DannyM wrote:
In other words we can pick and choose which bits we find palatable and be on our merry way?

Oh how I wish I could just pick and choose which bits I find palatable rather than study them to decide if they go back to Jesus or agree with what I believe goes back to Jesus. This is not something for the faint-hearted. Sometimes I am very unhappy with what I reject and wish I could just take it on human trust. Sometimes I just have to decide I can’t decide.

PaulSacramento wrote: Some people nitpick at what they view to be "factual errors" in the bible, and others liek to nitpick at what they view as errors based on THEIR interpretations of a given verse but I think those people are looking for things that weren't their to begin with, nor were they written to be viewed as they are viewing it.

From what I have seen some people stretch their interpretations to fit their belief in the inerrancy of the bible. To quote from a tutor of Bart Ehrman, “Maybe Mark just made a mistake”.

From what I have seen some people stretch their interpretations to fit their belief in the inerrancy of the bible. To quote from a tutor of Bart Ehrman, “Maybe Mark just made a mistake”.

For sure, though I tend to see that more in the OT than in the NT.