there is an article linked at the bottom of Mr. Fish (does he have a doctorate?) that is humorous, but more so for the comments, which prove Mr. Fish's and Mr. Campos' point quite well.
ok, this was written to be a comment on the article but the comments section is closed so i though i would post it here. i am interested on peoples reaction what i've said. the last half was intended for the people on the forum, not for the regular readers of Ryan's blag:
i am unfamiliar with the nuances of the arguments for and against the existence of God, but i do know that the Bible offers the miracles as proof of Godhood, but those proofs are dismissed as irrelevant by claim of conflict of interest, or no one of modern ilk was there so it can't be trusted or something like that. but none-the-less, the bible still offers concrete proof.
if you really say it must be reproducible proof, then one must apply the same skepticism to all of recorded history, and all of journalism, for that matter: we must take what is said in the media and most scientific journals on faith cause you can't reproduce the events that make up history and most folks lack the financial resources to reproduce any (much less all) of the peer-reviewed journal studies and experiments.
but all that aside, how about the overwhelming number of believers? just the fact that despite the hundreds of years that Reason has had to inoculate humanity against the ill effects of religion, it has failed to do so? that is reproducible. happens every day.
i guess it strikes me as odd that some people get so bent out of shape that there are other people that have Faith in a Deity of some sort. if you want to say the religion has caused pain, suffering and death, so has atheism: Stalin. if one is upset that people attribute supernatural causes to things they don't understand, that's fine, but the majority of people still don't understand simple Newtonian physics beyond what goes up must come down so there's no difference to them between physical explanations and supernatural ones.
and lastly, if you think that it was religion that stymied scientific inquiry, please, stop whatever you are doing/studying/researching and go read history. take at least 2 or 3 semesters worth of only history, you are operating with corrupted initial conditions.
So, I won't argue that faith is good or bad, or that faith is supportive or destructive to science, or even that faith and reason are antithetical or cooperative. (Although I think at best they are cooperative). I won't even argue with you about whether or not the "average person" can reproduce scientific discoveries (which I think, on a certain level, they can). What I will argue about what I read as your inferred assumption that "Everyone knows the Bible is a literally true account in the same way a newspaper, or a scientific journal, attempts to be literally true."
One thing that Fish quotes in his first article is this: “Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”
What I take this to mean is, basically, that the Bible wasn't meant to be true in the same way that the journal Nature is meant to be true. It's going for something entirely different -- something more overarching, something more True than true. Basically, it's a metaphor, and in that metaphor lies the whole Truth of human existence.
I don't think this takes strength away from faith and religion. In fact, I feel like it adds strength to religion, because it means that all the petty stupid things that people nitpick the Bible about don't matter. I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but it seems to me that if you say "The Bible is literally true, and offers up all these miracles as proof of God's existence," then you also have to say "The Bible is literally true, and the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a perfect circle is exactly three." (Even the ancient Egyptians thought it was 22/7, which is closer).
Finally, maybe what this comes down to is what Fish talks about in his second article: namely, the idea that what counts as evidence (or doesn't) is determined by your hypothesis. I hypothesize that the Bible is True in a metaphorical sense, and that it aims to explain big philosophical questions. As such, I find statements like "Well, this specific thing happened in the Bible" to be dubious at best as evidence. You, perhaps, hypothesize that the Bible is literally true, and is the faithful and accurate recounting of the story of God. As such, those same statements could not possibly be better arguments for you.
But as I think we were saying earlier, it's really hard to have a debate when our hypotheses are at cross-purposes, as they are in this case. More likely, everyone just gets upset.
oops, i didn't mean to imply that the bible is literally true. i meant the bible is an accurate portrayal of the person of Jesus Christ and attests to the character of God, at least, the Judaeo-Christian God.
and as to miracles, they aren't reproducible because they violate the laws of nature and the only one who should be able to violate such laws is a Being that is above or beyond such laws, which is precisely why the occurrence of miracles is evidence for God. as to why God does not do them for every generations... who knows? but it is interesting that a god who has the capacity to demonstrate his existence (assumes the miracles of the Bible are true) chooses to do so only a few times and records them in a book of poetry with the expectation that humanity accept what is recorded by faith.
i'm kind of rambling. but i do apologize for implying that the Bible is literally true or the same as a scientific journal.
also, i don't think there is kind of in scientific pursuit, it is or it isn't and there can be no gray area in the application of the principles of science. the gray area is only in our attempts to understand what the results of the scientific process yield.
that last line i wrote sounds harsher than i wanted it to, i meant that it is my impression that the gray area in science is brought by humans, not by the process of science.
4 Comments:
there is an article linked at the bottom of Mr. Fish (does he have a doctorate?) that is humorous, but more so for the comments, which prove Mr. Fish's and Mr. Campos' point quite well.
ok, this was written to be a comment on the article but the comments section is closed so i though i would post it here. i am interested on peoples reaction what i've said. the last half was intended for the people on the forum, not for the regular readers of Ryan's blag:
i am unfamiliar with the nuances of the arguments for and against the existence of God, but i do know that the Bible offers the miracles as proof of Godhood, but those proofs are dismissed as irrelevant by claim of conflict of interest, or no one of modern ilk was there so it can't be trusted or something like that. but none-the-less, the bible still offers concrete proof.
if you really say it must be reproducible proof, then one must apply the same skepticism to all of recorded history, and all of journalism, for that matter: we must take what is said in the media and most scientific journals on faith cause you can't reproduce the events that make up history and most folks lack the financial resources to reproduce any (much less all) of the peer-reviewed journal studies and experiments.
but all that aside, how about the overwhelming number of believers? just the fact that despite the hundreds of years that Reason has had to inoculate humanity against the ill effects of religion, it has failed to do so? that is reproducible. happens every day.
i guess it strikes me as odd that some people get so bent out of shape that there are other people that have Faith in a Deity of some sort. if you want to say the religion has caused pain, suffering and death, so has atheism: Stalin. if one is upset that people attribute supernatural causes to things they don't understand, that's fine, but the majority of people still don't understand simple Newtonian physics beyond what goes up must come down so there's no difference to them between physical explanations and supernatural ones.
and lastly, if you think that it was religion that stymied scientific inquiry, please, stop whatever you are doing/studying/researching and go read history. take at least 2 or 3 semesters worth of only history, you are operating with corrupted initial conditions.
So, I won't argue that faith is good or bad, or that faith is supportive or destructive to science, or even that faith and reason are antithetical or cooperative. (Although I think at best they are cooperative). I won't even argue with you about whether or not the "average person" can reproduce scientific discoveries (which I think, on a certain level, they can). What I will argue about what I read as your inferred assumption that "Everyone knows the Bible is a literally true account in the same way a newspaper, or a scientific journal, attempts to be literally true."
One thing that Fish quotes in his first article is this: “Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”
What I take this to mean is, basically, that the Bible wasn't meant to be true in the same way that the journal Nature is meant to be true. It's going for something entirely different -- something more overarching, something more True than true. Basically, it's a metaphor, and in that metaphor lies the whole Truth of human existence.
I don't think this takes strength away from faith and religion. In fact, I feel like it adds strength to religion, because it means that all the petty stupid things that people nitpick the Bible about don't matter. I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but it seems to me that if you say "The Bible is literally true, and offers up all these miracles as proof of God's existence," then you also have to say "The Bible is literally true, and the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a perfect circle is exactly three." (Even the ancient Egyptians thought it was 22/7, which is closer).
Finally, maybe what this comes down to is what Fish talks about in his second article: namely, the idea that what counts as evidence (or doesn't) is determined by your hypothesis. I hypothesize that the Bible is True in a metaphorical sense, and that it aims to explain big philosophical questions. As such, I find statements like "Well, this specific thing happened in the Bible" to be dubious at best as evidence. You, perhaps, hypothesize that the Bible is literally true, and is the faithful and accurate recounting of the story of God. As such, those same statements could not possibly be better arguments for you.
But as I think we were saying earlier, it's really hard to have a debate when our hypotheses are at cross-purposes, as they are in this case. More likely, everyone just gets upset.
oops, i didn't mean to imply that the bible is literally true. i meant the bible is an accurate portrayal of the person of Jesus Christ and attests to the character of God, at least, the Judaeo-Christian God.
and as to miracles, they aren't reproducible because they violate the laws of nature and the only one who should be able to violate such laws is a Being that is above or beyond such laws, which is precisely why the occurrence of miracles is evidence for God. as to why God does not do them for every generations... who knows? but it is interesting that a god who has the capacity to demonstrate his existence (assumes the miracles of the Bible are true) chooses to do so only a few times and records them in a book of poetry with the expectation that humanity accept what is recorded by faith.
i'm kind of rambling. but i do apologize for implying that the Bible is literally true or the same as a scientific journal.
also, i don't think there is kind of in scientific pursuit, it is or it isn't and there can be no gray area in the application of the principles of science. the gray area is only in our attempts to understand what the results of the scientific process yield.
that last line i wrote sounds harsher than i wanted it to, i meant that it is my impression that the gray area in science is brought by humans, not by the process of science.
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