How good is science as a religion?

[Five Solas]

“reliable”

able to be trusted

 

[Five Solas]

Perfect. You just proved what I said to be completely true! I couldn't have said it better. And that is the exact reason why it isn't reliable. Guess what, there are also hundreds of PhD theologians in ISLAM who also take the presupposition that Allah exists and that the Quran is reliable and the word of Allah!

How on earth did you jump to that conclusion?

Except there is NO GOOD EVIDENCE of the angel Gabrielle dictating to Muhammad the words of the Quran.

I do not defend Islam but your argument here exposes the fatal mistake you are making.

Simply stated - Proof does not make truth. Proof might confirm the truth but it does not make something true. It is true because it is true

Like it or not, the truth exists with or without proof.

As for me, I accept the truthfulness of Scripture as a presupposition. I feel no need to prove anything. I deal with what's on the table.

However, you could always aim to falsify my position. Be my guest...

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

How on earth did you jump to that conclusion?



I do not defend Islam but your argument here exposes the fatal mistake you are making.

Simply stated - Proof does not make truth. Proof might confirm the truth but it does not make something true. It is true because it is true

Like it or not, the truth exists with or without proof.

As for me, I accept the truthfulness of Scripture as a presupposition. I feel no need to prove anything. I deal with what's on the table.

However, you could always aim to falsify my position. Be my guest...

You really don't get the difference between the status of the "is" in:
The cat is black.
It is true.
That is okay, because I can still do the truth differently than you in some case and so in reverse and that is a part of the truth, but not all of the truth.

 

[Five Solas]

So you're drawing conclusions from unfounded premises?

My presupposition is as legitimate as any other. You could always aim to falsify it if you want. Be my guest...

 

[Valjean]

My presupposition is as legitimate as any other. You could always aim to falsify it if you want. Be my guest...

Define "legitimate."

No need to falsify it. The fact that it's a presupposition means it's poorly evidenced.
Presuppositions are unsupported assumptions, pending confirmation -- by evidence. Knowledge is derived from evidence.
Without evidence, everything's an assumption.

 

[joelr]

I find it amusing that so many critics of Christianity think that Christians are dimwits.

The fact is, nothing had been falsified. That implies your whole tirade falls flat.

The falsify argument isn't even a thing? This is a strawman. Historians are not saying "we have proven religion false". But they have demonstrated through literary analysis, comparative religion and historians that the theology is syncretic or re-worked myths, the writing styles are fictive and some of the characters are literary creations. In fact here is the author of he latest Jesus historicity study who finished a 700 pg scholarly monograph on the subject. This was the last peer-reviewed work on this since 1926.
Here he summarizes the VAST MAJORITY of where the Biblical historicity field is at.

Dr Richard Carrier:
When the question of the historicity of Jesus comes up in an honest professional context, we are not asking whether the Gospel Jesus existed. All non-fundamentalist scholars agree that that Jesus never did exist. Christian apologetics is pseudo-history. No different than defending Atlantis. Or Moroni. Or women descending from Adam’s rib.

No. We aren’t interested in that.

When it comes to Jesus, just as with anyone else, real history is about trying to figure out what, if anything, we can really know about the man depicted in the New Testament (his actual life and teachings), through untold layers of distortion and mythmaking; and what, if anything, we can know about his role in starting the Christian movement that spread after his death. Consequently, I will here disregard fundamentalists and apologists as having no honest part in this debate, any more than they do on evolution or cosmology or anything else they cannot be honest about even to themselves.

Here I will summarize the best arguments for historicity and the logic behind the best case for it. And this only means mundane historicity; not the Gospel Jesus, but the Jesus of honest mainstream scholarship. I am most interested in finding out if I have left any good arguments out. So please add more in comments, if any you think remain that aren’t ridiculous and can be taken seriously by mainstream experts. Likewise if you think the logic of any argument I do present can be better formulated.

“You say: As far as scholarship historians have been demonstrating the Bible is religious fiction and their work is growing.”


You do not understand the nature of academic scholarship. It would have been honest to say something like, “Some scholars regard Bible is religious fiction.”

It is simply wrong to say they ‘demonstrated’ something as if they have conclusively proven something. They argued, they proved nothing.

Wrong. Mary Boyce for example demonstrated that Persian mythology was the source of much of the myth in the NT. Now obviously she cannot go back in time and look over the backs of the Hebrew scholars but the Persians moved in and a few centuries later Christianity has a large amount of their mythology?
Same with Hellenism, it's KNOWN in scholarship that the Gospels were influenced by Greek religion. Here is one example.

The Hellenistic World: The World of Alexander the Great

Hellenistic thought is evident in the narratives which make up the books of the Bible as the Hebrew Scriptures were revised and canonized during the Second Temple Period (c.515 BCE-70 CE), the latter part of which was during the Hellenic Period of the region. The gospels and epistles of the Christian New Testament were written in Greek and draw on Greek philosophy and religion as, for example, in the first chapter of the Gospel of John in which the word becomes flesh, a Platonic concept.

 

[joelr]

You claim, “Thomas Thompson was one of the first archaeologists in the 70's to demonstrate that Moses and the Patriarchs were literary creations.”


Check your facts. What you say is factually wrong.


Thomas Thompson is a professor of theology, not an archaeologist. To claim that he demonstrated that Moses and the Patriarchs were literary creations is a lie.


Yes, he was critical of the historicity of the Bible as were all the others that belonged to the Copenhagen School. They were all minimalists who thought they had the right to rewrite or reinterpret Scripture.


You conveniently failed to mention that Thompson's arguments were criticized by many scholars.


If you did your homework, you would have noticed that he described King David and Jesus of Nazareth as mythical figures based on Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and Roman literature. He did that whilst part of the so-called ‘Jesus Project’ which consisted of highly critical scholars but that fizzled away very quickly. Even Bart Ehrman criticized him on that one.

You clearly went to some apologist site that tries to debunk Thompson. The Jesus Project was in the 2000's. Thompson work in the 70's - The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives", is what changed how scholarship viewed Moses and the Patriarchs and was the beginning of scholars being able to do honest work in the field because now his findings are consensus.

"Generally, Moses is seen as a legendary figure, whilst retaining the possibility that Moses or a Moses-like figure existed in the 13th century BCE.[14][15][16][17][18]"


Note, 5 sources on that.

Let's just let a Biblical historian tell theThompson story to clear this up. 43:55

No he wasn't an archaeologist but his work was on archaeology so I called him that. Moses and the Patriarchs are now largely considered mythical. If need be I'll get Carrier saying that exact thing.
In current times there are now around 25 sitting scholars who have switched to supporting mythicism, the idea that even a human Rabbi Jesus didn't exist.
List of Historians Who Take Mythicism Seriously • Richard Carrier

After that fiasco, the British New Testament scholar Maurice Casey dismissed Thompson as "an incompetent scholar". (P.R.F. Moorey, "A Century of Biblical Archaeology", p.114.)

Yes NT scholars are usually theologians/believers and won't take ideas that their religion is a mythology lightly. Thompson recieved much more than just that and had to move to Canada to work. Yet today his work is studied in classes and Moses is generally seen as a myth.

William Dever (University of Arizona) expressed harsh criticism of Thompson's views describing Thompson's theorems as dangerous because it tends to eliminate altogether any study of ancient Israel prior to the Persian period.

William Dever also says that archaeology isn't supporting the OT narratives at all. The origin of the Israelites were they came peacefully out of Canaan and the Biblical stories are greatly enlarged. He points out Yahweh had a goddess girlfriend in early Israel and that they (archaeologists) are "letting the public down slowly" to not upset people too much.

"Scholars hold different opinions on the status of Moses in scholarship.[57][58] For instance, according to William G. Dever, the modern scholarly consensus is that the biblical person of Moses is largely mythical while also holding that "a Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in the southern Transjordan in the mid-late 13th century B.C." and that "archeology can do nothing" to prove or confirm either way.[5
"

You can find most of that here:

NOVA | The Bible's Buried Secrets | Archeology of the Hebrew Bible | PBS

Profs. Kenneth Kitchen (Liverpool), Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III (Regent College), argued that the distrust set by the minimalists was unreasonable and that the Scriptures should be regarded as reliable unless directly falsified. Nothing had been falsified. That is also my position..

Yes there are hundreds of theologians who think the Bible is literal. There are also hundreds of Islamic theologians who thing the Quran is literal and the only true word of God. It also updated Christianity and Judaism with truth.

Hindu theologians also number in the hundreds/thousands and will tell you Prince Arjuna spoke directly to Lord Krishna in the B. Gita.


Why? They begin their training assuming their religion is true. Historical and comparative religious scholars do not. The Biblical historicity field is completely secular. Many like Ehrman and Pagels were fundamentalist Christian. They saw the lack of evidence and good evidence of syncretism and realized it's a mythology.

Avi Hurvitz (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) compared biblical Hebrew with the Hebrew from ancient inscriptions and found it consistent with the period before the Persian period, thus questioning the key minimalist contention.

The minimalist argument isn't even what I'm talking about. The OT was canonized in the 2nd Temple Period. Same period the Persians and later Hellenistic Greeks occupied. All the mythology is Greek/Persian. The early OT is Mesopotamian and a few other mythologies re-worked for Israel. It's mythology.

Mario Liverani (Sapienza University of Rome) has also been critical of Thompson's views. He believes that the minimalists have not truly understood that context nor recognized the importance of the ancient sources used by the authors.

Again, minimalism isn't important to demonstrate it's just a mythology.


The Genesis creation narrative is the creation myth[a] of both Judaism and Christianity.[1]

It expounds themes parallel to those in Mesopotamian mythology, emphasizing the Israelite people's belief in one God.

Comparative mythology provides historical and cross-cultural perspectives for Jewish mythology. Both sources behind the Genesis creation narrative borrowed themes from Mesopotamian mythology,[18][19] but adapted them to their belief in one God,

Genesis 1–11 as a whole is imbued with Mesopotamian myths.[

Genesis 2 has close parallels with a second Mesopotamian myth, the Atra-Hasis epic – parallels that in fact extend throughout Genesis 2–11, from the Creation to the Flood and its aftermath.



Religion, Identity and the Origins of Ancient Israel


K.L. Sparks, Baptist Pastor, Professor Eastern U.


As a rule, modern scholars do not believe that the Bible's account of early Israel's history provides a wholly accurate portrait of Israel's origins. One reason for this is that the earliest part of Israel's history in Genesis is now regarded as something other than a work of modern history. Its primary author was at best an ancient historian (if a historian at all), who lived long after the events he narrated, and who drew freely from sources that were not historical (legends and theological stories); he was more concerned with theology than with the modern quest to learn 'what actually happened' (Van Seters 1992; Sparks 2002, pp. 37-71; Maidman 2003). As a result, the stories about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph are


Enuma Elish - The Babylonian Epic of Creation - Full Text


The Enuma Elish would later be the inspiration for the Hebrew scribes who created the text now known as the biblical Book of Genesis. Prior to the 19th century CE, the Bible was considered the oldest book in the world and its narratives were thought to be completely original. In the mid-19th century CE, however, European museums, as well as academic and religious institutions, sponsored excavations in Mesopotamia to find physical evidence for historical corroboration of the stories in the Bible. These excavations found quite the opposite, however, in that, once cuneiform was translated, it was understood that a number of biblical narratives were Mesopotamian in origin.



Famous stories such as the Fall of Man and the Great Flood were originally conceived and written down in Sumer, translated and modified later in Babylon, and reworked by the Assyrians before they were used by the Hebrew scribes for the versions which appear in the Bible.




Both Genesis and Enuma Elsih are religious texts which detail and celebrate cultural origins: Genesis describes the origin and founding of the Jewish people under the guidance of the Lord; Enuma Elish recounts the origin and founding of Babylon under the leadership of the god Marduk. Contained in each work is a story of how the cosmos and man were created. Each work begins by describing the watery chaos and primeval darkness that once filled the universe. Then light is created to replace the darkness. Afterward, the heavens are made and in them heavenly bodies are placed. Finally, man is created.



Genesis/Enuma Elish

 

[joelr]

How on earth did you jump to that conclusion?

Because you said that theologians ASSUME the religion is true. They don't dare question or research it except for a cirriculum already set up by the church to leave out any clues that it's a highly syncretic religion. How do we know that? Because the historicity field is 100% in consensus on that. See the Carrier quote I provided.

I do not defend Islam but your argument here exposes the fatal mistake you are making.

Simply stated - Proof does not make truth. Proof might confirm the truth but it does not make something true. It is true because it is true

Like it or not, the truth exists with or without proof.

As for me, I accept the truthfulness of Scripture as a presupposition. I feel no need to prove anything. I deal with what's on the table.

However, you could always aim to falsify my position. Be my guest...

No way, someone just did the Falsifiability thing. It's the biggest fallacy ever? You also cannot prove that Big Foot isn't real or alien abductions or any myth for that matter. That doesn't make it even a little bit true?

But again, you just admitted presupposition. The hundreds of Islamic scholars do the same (they are wrong). Same with Hindu theologians (they are also wrong by Christian standards). Also every other religious theologian who uses presupposition who isn't Christian IS WRONG.
This demonstrates it's faulty.
Except of course it's faulty? The truth is NEVER found by assuming something is true and insisting you are right. But even worse is the NT is all borrowed theology with a Jewish spin on it.
Everything. Hellenism and Persian religious myths account for everything except original sin.
Baptism, eucharist, dying/rising savior demigods, logos

If you study history you find it's just a myth made up of other myths.
start with dying/rising savior gods
Dying-and-Rising Gods: It's Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. • Richard Carrier


you have to have EVIDENCE that something is true. Or you will just be fooled into believing a narrative because other people told you it was true. Then you emotionalize it and use confirmation and cognitive bias to block out anything that doesn't support your beliefs.

There is no "fatal flaw"? What you are saying about no need to prove anything isn't scriptural. The NT says to provide your reasons. I forgot the verse.

Your position is already flawed and has destroyed itself. One can pick any theology, myth, story, urban legend, cult, scientology, and make the same claim. "It's truth" In fact Christianity is 1/3 of all religious believers. That means 2/3 of all believers in religion are doing the same thing with the WRONG theology. 66% By Christian standards.
But, JW, Mormoms and a few others believe every other denomination in Christianity are wrong and going to hell. So even Christians are not united. So it's around 70%.

By Christian standards your method is wrong 70% of the time in humanity. Just right there there is little chance you are correct. But admitting you are just going with it because you assume it's true? Not a chance. Pure wishful, magical thinking.

 

[joelr]

My presupposition is as legitimate as any other. You could always aim to falsify it if you want. Be my guest...

HA HA. And you believe that all the others are fiction....so yes, your's is also as legitimate as those. Your belief in fiction is as legit as other belief in fiction.

 

[rational experiences]

If you owned basic human intelligence. Family.

And not use nor own evil man's civilisation status as an answer involved in humans question.

Science a man plus agreed brothers choice is evil.

Thesis and intent a human man knew everything. When they hadn't nor didnt. As dust converting was in vacuum void above.

Yet the practice science by intent religious heaven advice begins at earths planet bases. Which he changes man U all.

Said so himself science by religious ideal my consciousness is evil. Said it as a new title his religious ideal from medical life's harm.

Observed and witnessed....as science he says was only ever his human experiments. By machines.

In cosmic law a cold metal earth mass is deep down in a pressure seam.

So when he began practice of science he began removing earths bases layered mass to equals a machines seam position. Is his religious space laws.

How he once had destroyed all life on earth.

Then life of man returns on earth by iced conditions so he tries it once again. Old testimonials.

So as new ideas came from old religious sciences medical warnings. Science is really a very evil religion.

Natural human says once no machine existed.

Humans conscious very aware didn't choose dangerous acts. If however we got bodily hurt medical was in nature as mineral or herbal. We were religiously medically with nature only and astute.

Today religion with science contests that machine medicine and machines is everything again.

Yet most medical ideas....chemical only supply a money making venue.

And only particular medical machines are worthy.

As in fact humans sickness was caused by man with machine so medical machine science is a huge contradiction in natural life.

Why science made a very evil religion.

So said natural life first.

 

[Five Solas]

The falsify argument isn't even a thing? This is a strawman.

No, it's not. It means proving something wrong. So, it's up to you to prove my presupposition wrong.

But they have demonstrated through literary analysis, comparative religion and historians that the theology is syncretic or re-worked myths, the writing styles are fictive and some of the characters are literary creations.

Oh, many attempts had been made without much success.

If you disagree, please supply proof where they have conclusively demonstrated that.

Dr Richard Carrier:
When the question of the historicity of Jesus comes up in an honest professional context, we are not asking whether the Gospel Jesus existed. All non-fundamentalist scholars agree that that Jesus never did exist. Christian apologetics is pseudo-history. No different than defending Atlantis. Or Moroni. Or women descending from Adam’s rib.

Dr Richard Carrier?????? Oh my word, here we go again.
He claimed – very unsuccessfully - that Jesus is a mythotype.

Many contemporary scholars are critical of Carrier's methodology and conclusions.

Michael Grant stated, "In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary.” [Michael Grant (2004), Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels.]

Countless classicists and biblical scholars agree that there is a historical basis for a person called Jesus of Nazareth. [Ehrman, Bart (2011). Forged: Writing in the name of God.]


James McGrath says Carrier misuses Rank and Raglan and stretches their scales to make Jesus appear to score high on mythotype.


According to Christopher Hansen, Carrier misuses and manipulates Raglan's scale to make Jesus appear more aligned with a mythotype.

Patrick Gray posited, "That Jesus did in fact walk the face of the earth in the first century is no longer seriously doubted even by those who believe that very little about his life or death can be known with any certainty.” [Patrick Gray (2016), Varieties of Religious Invention, chapter 5, Jesus, Paul, and the birth of Christianity, Oxford University Press, p. 114]


For this reason, the views of Carrier and other proponents of the belief that a historical Jesus did not exist are frequently dismissed as "fringe theories".

Bart Ehrman criticizes Carrier for "idiosyncratic" readings of the Old Testament that ignore modern critical scholarship on the Bible. [Ehrman, Bart (2012). Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. New York: HarperOne. pp. 167–170.]

Reviewing On the Historicity of Jesus, Daniel N. Gullotta says that Carrier has provided a "rigorous and thorough academic treatise that will no doubt be held up as the standard by which the Jesus Myth theory can be measured"; but he finds Carrier's arguments "problematic and unpersuasive", his use of Bayesian probabilities "unnecessarily complicated and uninviting", and he criticizes Carrier's "lack of evidence, strained readings and troublesome assumptions."[6] Furthermore, he observed that using Bayes theorem in history seems useless, or at least unreliable, since it leads to absurd and contradictory results such as Carrier using it to come up with low probability for the existence of Jesus and scholar Richard Swinburne using it to

To conclude:- M. David Litwa of Australian Catholic University said that Carrier portrays himself "as a kind of crusader fighting for the truth of secular humanism", whose mission it is "to prove Christianity (or Carrier's understanding of it) wrong." He also notes that "Carrier's cavalier dismissal of the Bible and animosity toward the biblical deity would not seem to predispose him for careful biblical scholarship.” [Gullotta 2017, pp. 340–342.]

 

[Five Solas]

Your belief in fiction is as legit as other belief in fiction.

Hooray!!! You got that right!!

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Hooray!!! You got that right!!

Yeah and all fiction work totally equal. So I will test it now to see if it works.
By the fictional power of these words you don't exist now. See, that is true and thus all fiction works equally good. And if you disagree, that is your fiction, because you don't exist now.

 

[Five Solas]

No way, someone just did the Falsifiability thing. It's the biggest fallacy ever? You also cannot prove that Big Foot isn't real or alien abductions or any myth for that matter. That doesn't make it even a little bit true?

Ha, ha, you're all over the show.

Time for some education, my friend.

Falsifiability is a standard of evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses that was introduced by the philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934).

A presupposition (like mine), theory or hypothesis is falsifiable (or refutable) if it can be logically contradicted.

It is a way of demarcating science from non-science. It suggests that it must be able to be tested and conceivably proven false. science should attempt to disprove a theory.

My presupposition is that the historical accounts of Scripture are in fact historical and therefore reliable. You falsify that. Begin to prove that Jesus was not a historical person.

 

[Five Solas]

you have to have EVIDENCE that something is true.

No, you do not!!!!!!!!!!!!
Evidence does not create truth.
And that is a fact.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Ha, ha, you're all over the show.

Time for some education, my friend.

Falsifiability is a standard of evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses that was introduced by the philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934).

A presupposition (like mine), theory or hypothesis is falsifiable (or refutable) if it can be logically contradicted.

It is a way of demarcating science from non-science. It suggests that it must be able to be tested and conceivably proven false. science should attempt to disprove a theory.

My presupposition is that the historical accounts of Scripture are in fact historical and therefore reliable. You falsify that. Begin to prove that Jesus was not a historical person.

I can act differently. That is the actual falsification. You think X is Y. The falsification is that I can do non-Y. It is that simple.

 

[Five Solas]

Or you will just be fooled into believing a narrative because other people told you it was true. Then you emotionalize it and use confirmation and cognitive bias to block out anything that doesn't support your beliefs.

My presupposition is that the historical accounts in Scripture are reliable. I have found no proof to the contrary yet.
Millions of assumptions to the contrary, yes, but no solid proof.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

My presupposition is that the historical accounts in Scripture are reliable. I have found no proof to the contrary yet.
Millions of assumptions to the contrary, yes, but no solid proof.

Yet, all of us who act differently than you in effect act differently. You: X is Y. Us: Non-Y.

 

[metis]

My presupposition is that the historical accounts in Scripture are reliable. I have found no proof to the contrary yet.

Is the Qu'ran "reliable"?

 

[Valjean]

"Science is an investigative modality, and the most fruitful one ever developed." you said.

What scientific evidence do you have for this assertion?

The definition of "science?" The scientific method?