The Scriptures have been shown to be a rock ... They are stable, eternal, true, solid, indestructible. No one can destroy them, no matter how hard they try.
That's a flaw, not an endorsement. They're fossilized now that they have been written down and widely disseminated as unchanging truth, which is why they just aren't relevant today.
Consider the sexual proscriptions Let's see - every young maiden needs to get married at the age of fertility, she must not withhold sex, they must not use the rhythm method, masturbate, or have gay sex, nobody gets a divorce, and when technology made it feasible, they were never to have elective sterilization, use birth control, or get abortions.
Those are the values of people whose continued existence depended on every fertile womb is generating another baby at all times. Their men died in endless war, their women in childbirth, their babies often died before two years of age, and everybody was dying of infection and accidental poisonings at a significant rate.
This fossilized scripture is still informing believers today, who are still trying to force unwanted birth for reasons they don't understand and when that is a counterproductive value.
In close to 2 millennia those who tried have not been able to
We have no need to eliminate any scriptures. Please enjoy them even as others ignore them.
Nor can anyone eliminate the people who fully trust them: the Nazis, the communists, the atheists, and an endless number of brave ones (???) tried it... Why do you think they couldn't?
Likewise, there is no need to exterminate believers. It's enough to keep them out of government and to insure freedom from religion as an option.
scientists are not infallible, they do not always agree with each other, they cannot know everything, they rectify many times, etc.
And that's a feature, not a bug, for the same reason that fossilized scripture is a flaw. We need to be flexible and adapt to new evidence.
Believing that science is God is like believing that a house can be built on sand.
I guess you assume that we need a god, and if it isn't yours, it's something else. The house of sand is belief by faith. What could be a less firm foundation for belief than the will to believe? Unexamined belief is guessing.
even without the originals, it is the most published and widespread book in all of human history
I bet you think that that means that people can't wait to get a copy and read it. Christianity is the most marketed religion in history, and those Bibles are mostly unread and often given at no charge by those promoting the religion to sustain it.
"To most Christians, the bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll down to the bottom and click "I agree." - anon
The important truth is what God is like. God is love, God forgives those who forgive others etc.
That's not truth as I use the word. For starters, if gods exist, nobody know that or anything about them, because knowledge is acquired empirically, not by believing unfalsifiable claims like the above.
I use subjective criteria of course.
Then what value are your conclusions to those using objective criteria?
we were talking about how science and academic history deal with claims of the supernatural and not about science in general. Supernatural claims in history are supposed to be dealt with in a neutral way but are not and international academic bodies don't seem to be able to see that.
Science makes no comment about anybody's claims except those of other scientists in peer review. Their job is to investigate nature, which is all there is as far as we know, and though they're not looking for gods like the ID people were, if they find one, they'll let us know right away. That has to be good enough for the religions. If they want more, they'll have to do it themselves. Complaining about the scientific method is pointless.
When it comes to prophecies, ignoring the prophecies means presuming that they have been written after the fact. This is not neutral. You would think that academic societies could see that.
They do understand that, and they ARE unbiased in their rejections. When prophecy is called fraud (after the fact), it's because of evidence. Most prophecy is rejected for other reasons, usually vagueness or lack of specificity.
I am a Geologist with over fifty years of field experience. One of my specialties is geomorphology the study of how landforms and rocks form. We can actually see the natural processes that formed the ancient rocks of the world happening today all over the world. What is your academic background in geology?
He's a creationist. He's spent years studying his Bible and hearing sermons. Academics is just the worship of science. Truth is acquired by faith.
That some idea is based on reality, doesn't make it necessary true.
The critical thinkers criteria for belief require that it accurately map some aspect of reality sufficient to allow one to make accurate predictions. That makes it based in reality and can be considered correct unless falsified by failing in prediction. That is the sine qua non of a correct belief. You can't falsify (successfully refute) a correct idea.
If there was Noah's flood, we should find:
1. Vast sediment formations
2. Orogenic mountains
3. Oil, gas and coal fields
4. Marine fossils on high mountain areas.
5. modern continents and signs of breaking of original single continent.
Those are objectively verifiable evidence for the flood.
Others have already told you why none of that makes a global flood likely. We have evidenced, naturalistic explanations for them all. Number 4 is my guess why we have this unflattering (to the deity) myth, who is depicted as an intellectual and moral failure for failing as a creator, blaming his creation, torturing most of it with drowning deaths, and then using the same breeding stock to repopulate the earth. One needs a very good reason to tell such a tale, and what else could it be but finding marine fossils on mountaintops?
Remember, many of these myths (expulsion from paradise, Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah) exists to explain reality as the ancients found it under the belief that their world was ruled by a tri-omni god. How did those shells get up there? Global flood, obviously. Why would a good god do that? Man must have deserved it. It was punishments for sin - the same reason he doesn't live in paradise, can understand foreign speakers, and likely found two cities obliterated by a meteoric impact. The answer is always the same under the imagined reign of a good, all-powerful god. Bad human!
fossils are evidence for that at some point there was such a living thing that for some reason died and was fossilized. Fossil is not evidence for anything more.
You are offering yourself as a competent evaluator of evidence as if your conclusions ought to be meaningful to those who see themselves as competent at that.
Sorry, I don't believe that. And I think it goes against everything that can actually be observed in nature. I say there is no intelligent reason to believe in 3.7 billion years. I think nature looks exactly what it would be after the flood.
And again. What you believe is only relevant to critical thinkers if you show your work and it convinces. Those beliefs are for you and others willing to believe by faith.
To explain why it is there and why it died and was fossilized, we would require more information/observations. I believe it is there because of what happened during the great flood.
We have that evidence. You don't, and that's by choice. If you'd like to see it yourself, you'll need to do a little open-minded investigating.
explanation is not the same as evidence.
Explanation is the narrative unifying all relevant evidence, and we prefer the most parsimonious narrative that can do that.
Explanation can be wrong and rejecting it is not the same as rejecting the evidence.
The difference between the two camps is the reason for rejecting a narrative. If your reason is that it conflicts with your religious beliefs, that's of no value to those who only reject narratives when they fail to account for all relevant observation as parsimoniously as possible, as when a new relevant observation not predicted by the narrative surfaces. At that point, the narrative is modified to account for the new observation.
Biblical flood would have caused many different layers
Why do you believe that? Have you never seen the aftermath of a flood? The layers of sediment deposited can be shoveled away as we are seeing in the aftermath of a violent flood following a hurricane storm surge. Contrast that with the Grand Canyon, which represents orders of magnitude more sedimentation than a flood produces.
