I'm going to be quoting you a little out of order. I'll start with this:
Not true. If you could prove to me beyond reasonable doubt that Jesus never really existed, or that he did not physically rise from the dead, that would surely do it.
You also said,
You are wrong. I start with facts on the ground (completely apart from religion) and try to work my way to discovering truth from there.
So I would like to ask why it is that I have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Jesus did not rise from the dead. Is that the starting point, and we have to appeal to the facts to move away from there? This requirement is not compatible with your claim that you
"start with facts on the ground (completely apart from religion) and try to work my way to discovering truth from there."
Also, the request itself is a bit unreasonable. Jesus' resurrection does not contradict known facts of history, so how can I show beyond reasonable doubt that this did not occur? This is like trying to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the unfalsifiable events in a historical fiction did not occur.
Lastly, it is regrettable that some atheists take such a foolhardy stance such as that of the mythical Jesus. I do believe Jesus existed, and asking me to prove otherwise is an unreasonable request.
Ummm... Excuse me, but I marvel in that it has somehow managed to escape your notice that in this very section of your post which I am presently addressing, you are claiming that I am “not justified in believing in scripture, fallible or otherwise” -- by which you apparently mean that I'm not justified in believing it in any sense whatsoever -- because, as you say, it “come(s) nowhere near meeting the burden of proof.”
Now, I have granted (if but for the sake of argument) that the Bible contains errors and contradictions, and by this point I think I have made that quite clear. So please support the assertion you have just made that I still am not justified in believing that there is some inspired meaning behind the Bible, even with its errors and contradictions. To press you to support a claim that you quite clearly have made is not shenanigans.
Again you seem to suggest that we are starting with the assumption that it is reasonable to believe that the Bible was divinely inspired, and we have to drudge through logic to move away from that starting point. This again flies in the face of your claim that you
"start with facts on the ground (completely apart from religion) and try to work my way to discovering truth from there."
Imagine a house with a lamp in the basement. We cannot know whether the lamp is on or off. Suppose you make the claim that the lamp is on. I say that you have no basis for this. You then say that because I am making the claim that you have no basis for saying that, I need to provide evidence for my claim. This is quite backwards. So when I say that you have no basis for a reasonable belief in the Bible, or in its divine inspiration, the burden is squarely on you. This is how the burden of proof actually works.
And even if you want to put the burden of proof on me in this situation, I would think that my exposure of contradictions in the Bible at least casts quite a bit of doubt over the claim that the Bible has been watched over by some deity because it is a matter of irrefutable fact that this deity has not done a perfect job in watching over the Bible despite being perfectly able to do so. The ball is in your court now to at least come up with something to fight for your side. You don't have a shred, a scrap, a sliver, and your
"I think there's a plan behind everything, and because I'm not God, I can't tell you absolutely every detail that that plan entails. That's about as far as I care to elaborate," doesn't do a thing to further your position. Instead of saying that, you could simply admit that you don't understand what the plan for these contradictions could possibly be because it makes absolutely no sense.
Perhaps most notably, I fundamentally reject nihilism and take it as a given that statements of value can be either true or false, depending on whether or not the objects being referred to objectively merit such evaluations, and one way I reason to the existence of God is that I take it that if there objectively exists, apart from ourselves, a hierarchy of goods, which we can either recognize or fail to recognize, then it would seem to make sense that there is a highest Good. This draws directly from the fourth of Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways.
Fundamentally reject nihilism all you want, but you are not citing any good reason.
Firstly, no axiomatic system can verify its own axioms, meaning that mathematics is, at the absolute best, a system comprised of nothing but assumptions, definitions, and then the conclusions that follow. Nothing, and I mean nothing, can be proven from assumptions and definitions. There are only conditional proofs; every proof ever demonstrated is conditional upon the truth value of its axioms. We generally make good use of mathematics because we chose axioms which seem to be congruent with reality, but we already see that our system of logic does not apply to the quantum world because electrons can and do interact with themselves, and interfere with themselves, meaning we have to relinquish either the law of excluded middle or the law of identity. That is, these laws not only fail to be true in any absolute sense, but they fail to be true even in our own universe. It only follows that the law of non-contradiction, while seemingly being unfeasible as false in this universe, is still nothing but an assumption which need not be true in all possible realities.
Secondly, you will notice that in every spoken language on earth, all words are defined in terms of other words. So if we have a sentence like, "The ball is red," and we replace "ball" with its definition, then we have a longer sentence; since we will never arrive at a word which requires no definition, it follows that this process iterates indefinitely. Logic and mathematics avoid this by employing primitive terms that have no definition. So in mathematics, the equality "2+2=4" can be expressed as the function
+:
Zx
Z -->
Z such that
+(2,2)=2+2=4. This decomposes further because we construct the natural numbers where 0=Ø, 1=Øunion{Ø}={Ø}, 2={Ø}union{{Ø}}={Ø,{Ø}}, and etc., and also an ordered pair (
a,
b) is defined as {
a, {
b}} so that
+(2,2)=2+2=4 is expressed entirely in primitive, undefined terms:
+({Ø,{Ø}},{{Ø,{Ø}}}) is contained in {Ø,{Ø},{Ø,{Ø}},{Ø,{Ø},{Ø,{Ø}}}}, and vice versa.
So we see that logic and mathematics are the use of terms that have no meaning which are said to be expressing an unverifiable assumption that is then used to conditionally prove another arbitrary statement which also decomposes into terms that have no meaning. Not quite seeing where "truth" comes into play, nor do I see where you are founded in rejecting the formalization of the meaninglessness of mathematics.
And yet another claim. Why will it be devastating?
But if you are prepared to utterly demolish that (as you seem to imply above), then let's have it.
How will it be devastating to scrutinize the Bible with your own reasoning? Provided you have a conscience - which, regrettably, is not related to reason - you will have a hard time explaining how the barbaric Jews were justified in slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people and occasionally taking their virgins as booty for no apparent reason other than that they were "squatting" on land that had been vacant for centuries. We can start with that, and there is a ton more.
(So much for the just-showing-contradictions-and-asking-questions canard.)
Nice little quip there. Except that you refused to provide an actual answer to either of my questions other than an "I'm not God so I don't know," and then you went on to say that these contradictions are of no actual significance, forcing me to explain the obvious fact that if the Bible is not entirely true then it must be tediously scrutinized, line by line, because that's what any rational person does with anything that is partially true and partially false. And after all this, you claim I'm driving the conversation off topic. Well, if you want to actually address the topic and give a real answer, I'm all ears.
I believe that there is some reason or other for that information being there, and yet I do not believe it detracts from the inspirational nature of the Bible's compilation by the Church.
Off topic, as defined in the OP. Although you do go on in the next sentence to issue a challenge, so I'll "give you a pass."
I find this to be a rather curious statement, given some other statements you've made. What do you mean by it?
Just trying to meet you in the middle. I don't actually think it's reasonable to believe in a divinely inspired book that contradicts itself for no good reason whatsoever.
Well, my all-too-short answer is that if God exists (which I believe there is sufficient reason to believe he does), then it seems to me that it would befit his character that he should express his love for humanity in such an event as the Christian Incarnation. I cannot see sufficient reason to doubt that this Incarnation did in fact occur in the area we today know as Israel/Palestine roughly two millennia ago in the man we know as Jesus Christ, and that his followers in the Church have faithfully preserved the authentic Christian Tradition to the present day, along the way compiling a select group of texts we know as the Bible. I see the Bible to be a product of the sacred Tradition of the Church, and its authority to derive from that of the Church, and one way we can test the authenticity of the Tradition we receive is by seeing if it has remained faithful to what we can determine the very earliest Christians believed, as per what is known as the
Vincentian Canon. I cannot see sufficient reason to doubt that those who compiled the Bible were doing so in faithful accordance with the authentic received Tradition.
I do believe the burden of proof is on you, entirely. I will address this and even make a positive case for atheism if you like, but I prefer you address the things I've said here first.
The Bible might not be perfect insofar as being logically consistent throughout its entirety or free from any sort of error, but it nevertheless serves its purpose as an instrument to reveal to us who Christ is and who we are to be as his followers.
Off topic as defined in the OP.
I don't believe the author of the “suffering servant” passage in Isaiah had the Christian Passion anywhere in mind when he wrote it, but nevertheless, that passage is pretty much universally recognized by Christians as a prophecy of Christ's Passion. My point is that the inspired meaning of a passage of Scripture can differ dramatically from the intended meaning of its author.
Off topic.
I think you may be underestimating the acumen of the early Church Fathers who compiled the Bible. I highly doubt they were stupid, and they probably knew the Bible far better than you and I do. It seems to me highly unlikely that any but perhaps the very most subtle of errors and contradictions would have escaped their notice, and yet for some reason they chose to put them into the canon anyway. Rather odd for them to do that if they were especially concerned with avoiding errors and contradictions, wouldn't you say?
I also highly doubt they were transparent with the illiterate public about contradictions and atrocities existing in the Bible, wouldn't you say?
Well, in fairness, you must see that it might be kinda hard to write a practical and edifying sermon on some obscure royal genealogy.
Agreed, but why is it that when I bring it up in private with elders of the church, they drive the conversation away from my topic and toward Jesus?
To attempt an adequate explanation of precisely what I believe and why I believe it would require FAR more time and space than I presently can afford, I'm sorry to say. But since I can't write a book for you, perhaps you could answer a related question for me instead within a somewhat more reasonable space: Why do you doubt that I can have rational belief in Christianity?
Like I said above, I can do this but I'd rather hear your answers to what I'm saying here first.
The legs of the stool are supposed to represent the epistemic resources that we rely upon to try to determine truths about the authentic Christian faith. Thus, we rely upon extra-Biblical sources of information on the Christian Tradition going back to its very earliest days, upon our God-given faculties of reason, and also upon the Bible, which we believe to have been produced by the authentic Christian Tradition. That we rely upon the Bible to convey to us accurate information on the life of Jesus does not in any way imply that we don't also rely upon extra-Biblical resources as well as our God-given reasoning faculties.
OK. Still sounded quite like one pillar was resting on another.
