Haha! That might get interesting. Shall we start with chapter 7?I thought you were going to start quoting from Song of Solomon
Pope Death Watch... WITH A PRIZE!!! Quart of Maple Syrup to the winner!
- Thread starter sirhrmechanic
- Start date
Are we picking dates and the odds for this one already? How much syrup on the line?
Betting he's worse than the previous one.
So that’s why the Catholics drink so much?On St. Patrick's day.
I will reiterate, ultimately any position you take requires faith. As you said nothing can be 100% proven, so any position you take requires you to trust or have confidence in your position. However some positions correspond to reality more than others.
That is not correct. There are many facts that we know about the Christian faith, facts that are historically verifiable.
Again in your original quotation, I was referring to Biblical truth. So through proper hermeneutics, you can come to factual conclusions of what the Bible and the biblical authors meant. Just as if you wrote a letter and your authorial intent was to tell people “you shouldn’t eat poison”. It would be true if someone said “he meant that you shouldn’t eat poison”. Just like it would be un true if someone said “he meant you should eat poison”. So to with the Bible, it is a Biblical truth if it corresponds to the authors intent, and it is not a biblical truth if it doesn’t correspond to the authors intent. This was the entire context of the last 4 or 5 pages before you launched into this line of conversation
So too you can have historical truth. That was something else I was drawing out in my previous arguments, specifically how it pertained to church history and historical theology. If someone makes a statement about history that can be shown not to have happened, then it is false. Just as if someone can make a stat about history that can be shown to have happened, then it is true. There were many people making verifiably false claims about history. I was pointing them to the facts of history.
Neither of these are points are solely belief. Additionally you reference testimony. Let’s talk about Jesus for example. It is true that Jesus was written about more than almost anyone from antiquity. It is true that only maybe Roman emperors were written about more. It is a historical truth that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilot (even skeptic Bart Ehrman agrees about this and everything else I write) It is true that Jesus’ followers believed they saw him alive after he was crucified. It is true that they believed this enough that they were willing to be martyred for their belief. Now yes it does take faith to believe all those truth claims means Jesus actually rose from the dead, but the correspondence of these truths (or internal consistency) seems to favor that he did. In fact most scholars who don’t think Jesus rose from the dead do so based on their unwillingness to accept miracles.
With that there is reasonableness that can assigned to beliefs. If I believe that the world is resting on the back of a turtle as the Hindus do, that is unreasonable. It is unreasonable because there is no verifiable truths that the belief rests on. If I say I believe Jesus rose from the dead, that is reasonable because of all the historically verifiable truths that belief is based on.
You are right, I am not looking for a metric for truth, nor did I ask anyone to try and give me one. When I said “ this shows that we need to have a metric for understanding truth other than someone's sole interpretation” I was not soliciting ideas for this metric, rather I was showing that one was needed and I gave that needed metric immediately after. I already have a metric and have spent much of my adult life pondering epistemology.
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I never said nothing can be 100% proven. You really do like moving the goalposts.
You keep adding words to statements where they didn't originally exist and deriving meaning from statements that isn't there. I can't figure out if this is intentional or a comprehension bias issue.
This doesn't falsify the statement that belief in the absence of fact is faith. (Careful here before you start substituting words again. Fact is not the same as reason or evidence.)
There are some verifiable truths in the bible, there are some claims that don't test as true under modern scientific methods and there is a lot of witness testimony.
Many facts that are verifiable isn't the same as wholly true. Let's revisit the hydrogen atom and say we had a document that read as follows. We'll have to pretend the quoted text is the document since I don't want to create a PDF and upload it as a separate document.
It would appear there are "many" facts in this document which are are verifiable. You conceded one of these statements to be true earlier.
Then there's a piece of it that is "mostly true" and, AFAIK at the time of this post, has not been "proven" to be false by observation.
There was a time when the entire document was accepted as wholly true. There also was a time when a document that didn't mention quarks at all was wholly true.
The bible has the same structure as the "document" above. A number of things verifiable, some things corroborated by other documents which support a different "truth" and some things posited as "fact" without corroboration or verification.
A thing isn't true just because a lot of people believed it for a long time.
I never claimed you asked for someone to give you a metric for truth. I said you expressed the need for one which kinda implies you don't have one.
What you're really looking for is a metric to measure the quality of interpretations for the things that can't be proven as truths. This is akin to looking for a metric to interpret the intrinsic or universal or absolute value of art.
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I never said facts were the same as reason. We reason based on facts and I have not conflated these terms. Additionally there are different types of evidence direct and circumstantial. One relies on inference, one does not
Finally it is not true that belief in the absence of fact is faith. What you are talking about is blind faith. Blind faith is faith devoid of fact or reason. Faith can absolutely be based on fact and reason. Without realizing it you are parroting a dead atheist talking point. You sound like a hipster who took a philosophy 101 class and is trying to sound cool in front of their friends at the student union. It’s sophomoric. Maybe the compression issues you highlight are coming from you. Read the whole below article.
Faith Supported by Evidence | Reasonable Faith
Dear Dr Craig, In many conversations with atheists and agnostics, they insist that
www.reasonablefaith.org
I will quote a few parts here but I suggest you read the whole article:
Question:
In many conversations with atheists and agnostics, they insist that "faith" means "belief without evidence".
Virtually every atheist I've known defines faith in that way.
It is like a axiom in the atheistic and infidel communities and it is one of the main reasons why they reject religious beliefs.
Answer form Dr. Craig (technically double Dr because he holds two doctorates):
I’m honestly surprised to learn that the attitude you describe is still prevalent among unbelievers! I thought this old canard had gone the way of the dodo. In our present generation the idea of having a reasonable faith supported by evidence seems to have much greater currency. I guess some people never learn.
In any case, all this is irrelevant to the rationality of Christian belief. For even if we accept the secularist’s claim that faith is belief without evidence, then the proper response is, “Well, in that case my acceptance of Christianity is not by faith. For I have good reasons to think that Christianity is true.” Given his idiosyncratic definition of “faith” (belief without evidence), one is not limited to “faith” for one’s knowledge of Christianity’s truth. So ask him, what does he think of your reasons for belief?
You are trying to play a game of semantics all the while not seeing the forest through the trees
So it's not true if you say it one way but the way I said it is true and I'm still wrong. That's pretty good.
Blind faith does not require proof OR evidence. Blind faith are your words not mine.
Still moving goalposts you are, substituting your own words and thoughts for mine. At least you're consistent.
If the first question and the answer provided are any indication of the quality of the content I'll pass.
It's an unsubstantiated claim that does not represent or accurately address what I said. This more accurately describes your injection of blind faith into the discussion about truth and facts since it only mentions "evidence".
Faith can take many forms. Faith can be belief without evidence but that's not what I said.
Why try to push the topic in the new direction of "blind faith"?
No semantic games from me. The words I'm providing are quite simple and straightforward.
Your the one who keeps adding words that aren't there originally and weaving new meanings for simple statements.
I even tried to bring things back to the original statements that started this merry go round. In response you took it off into weeds you can't seem to navigate.
Comprehension bias, cognitive bias ... these are not the tools that will help anyone navigate the text of the bible.
