While I'm happy to continue to try to address all points, this is getting excessivly long. I might help if you picked out some key ones.
You're right, that was JasperJackson who said that,
here.
However, do you agree or disagree?
Poetry doesn't necessarly imply metaphoric, but it ought to alert one to the possibility.
If it isn't a factual account, how can we be sure that God created the world?
How does whether the account is intended to be factual or not affect its reliability? A text can be factual in nature but utter bovine waste, or a text can be symbolic in nature and profoundly true. Genre and reliability are independent characteristics.
The exact number of people doesn't matter. What matters is that it is a non-trivial proportion.
Matters for what?
As an atheist, I can't take it as a given.
I'm not expecting you to, but that doesn't mean you can take every Christian statement and treat it as though it is trying to prove God exists.
Then I'll rephrase it - is the Bible a reliable account of what happened?
In so far, and only in so far, as it is trying to be an account of what happened.
We're not talking about events that could be happening at several different locations within a city.
Neither was I - I could have chosen a much more localised incident but I wanted one that was highly significant in meaning and that sprung to mind. Seriously, you need to do some reading up on how much independent reports differ from each other.
And anyway, if you read several accounts of the Hiroshima bombing and one said that it happened at dawn and the other said sunset, wouldn't you thinkl that something fishy was going on?
Probably you wouldn't notice, because they wouldn't say it that obviously - one might, for example, talk about the aeroplane coming out of the sun, and another talk about it in terms of, lets say, a school bell, and unless one was trying to look up that information you'd never notice, let alone worry about the fact that the two didn't match up. Its only when you go looking for that level of fact that you start to worry about it.
I know I would, and I certainly wouldn't accept either account as truth untill I have found several other sources which agreed.
Now our two hypothetical accounts of the bombing might the most important thing one could possibly read on the significance of the bombing on Hiroshima, but you're going to suggest (in our hypothetical world) that it never even happened because they've told the story to bring out that significance. That's your choice, but its your prejudice about the relative importance of fact of meaning leading to an inappropriate measure of the texts. You might as well say "one of them wasn't written on pink paper, and I only take things seriously if they are written on pink paper".
Unfortunately that leaves us with no way to be sure that the whole thing isn't just a completely ficticious story.
Again, a naivity that belies the complexity of the real world. We are never faced with texts that even try to be precise in every possible way - rejecting texts because the don't do that means rejecting every single text ever written. Seriously, if a court heard 4 detailed eyewitness accounts of an event and there are no discrepancies collusion will be very seiously suspected. If there are discrepancies that will not be taken evidence that the accounts are not describing a real event, but as evidence that they are independent. I refer you again to Wittgenstien's Poker.
If we want to decide whether the Resurrection stories are describing a real event we need to look elsewhere to determine that.
You'll find that it exists to that degree in the scientific method - which I have found to be an excellent way to learn about the nature of the universe.
It exists to a degree in the scientific method, but even there it cannot check the basic assumptions on which that method is based, nor assumptions about the universal appropriateness of that method, nor does anybody apply it in all manner of other areas of life or one would never get anywhere. It certainly would not work in a courtroom, or in the study of history. Or even reading the newspaper - pick up a decent sized real, very recent event and read three independently written newspaper stories on it and you'll find discrepancies
if you go looking for them - that does not indicate that the event did not happen.
So God can't do things that are logically impossible?
The question is meaningless.
No, I am not taking everything you say as though it'seant to be a proof of God.
Well, that's what it seems like some of the time.
I take everything you say as though it's meant to be evidence that the Bible is an accurate account of what happened.
Most of it is response to what you say, not necessarly evidence for anything.
Not quite. At the moment, i reject the Bible for many reasons. Not one of them is that I say, "I think that if God was involved, it should look like such-and-such but it doesn't!"
Instead, I say, "If the Bible was written solely by men, it will have such-and-such characteristics, and when I look at the Bible all the characteristics I see fit the written by men and men alone idea."
And that's fine as far as it goes, but that doesn't exclude the possibility that God was involved - the sorts of criteria you are looking at should show it up as a human creation because it is, and what shows it as a divine creation is much more subtle that you're expecting.
A fundamental tenant of the Judeo/Christian tradition. One of our positions basic assumptions if you like.
Have you got any non-Biblical support for that claim?
Unless there was something we could agree was/is the work of God how could I possible have any. But as soon as we are talking about a god who works primarily by overriding rather than working with and through then, whether that god exists or not, it's not YHWH, the Judeo/Christian idea of God; we would be into debating some other vision of god.
As it should? The Bible should look like it had no input whatsoever from God?
It should look fully human. When you come to know it, and to know something of God, it starts to look more than that in subtle ways, but (should) never seem less human for that.
So how can you be sure that the whole thing isn't just a ficticious story, along the same lines as Aesop's Fables?
Because I find what it teaches to be profoundly true in a way I don't find for Aesop's Fables.
Apart from the fact that accepting this idea makes the Bible unfalsifiable
It's not the bible's job to be falsifiable. Blaming the thing you want to test because it doesn't suit the test you want to use is childish.
and thus no way to know if it is true or just a ficticious story, this violates quite a few things known to be scientific fact.
does it? What? Which of my first set of bullet points violates something known to be scientific fact?
We are the pinacle of creation? Then why do we find it so hard to survive when we get lost in the wilderness?
Genesis 3 and following.
And what's the rest of the universe for? If all of creation is for us, don't you think it's an awful big waste of space? I mean, what are all the other galaxies for?
YHWH is an extravagant God. This line always baffles me - why do you think creation needs to be so darn minimalist?
When it comes to finding out what actually happened, i'd rather a list of testable facts.
tough, basically. You can want what you like, but you'll have to deal with what you have.
They are when it comes to the truth about what happened.
Facts are still just facts.
My point is that if that is what you mean when you speak of "truth", then the Bible has no more truth in it than Aesop's Fables.
That truth is more than just facts does not imply that all stories are equally truthful. Lots of fictive stories have a good deal of truth to them - like the Illiad. Lots of others are utter garbage. I suggest that Genesis 1, Genesis 2-5 and Genesis 6-9 are the truest stories ever written - providing you 'get' what sort of truth they are about. Saying that fiction can be true in no way implies that all fiction is equally true.
But there is still no way to determine what changes were made between the earliest copies we have and the original texts.
If you go that route of excessive suspicioun you dump all historical texts - almost every text written before the invention of the printing press.
Apply that kind of hermenutic of suspision and you don't believe anything (and therefore its unsustainable).
We have way more manuscripts for the New Testament than any other ancient texts, and way closer in time to the original. We can be orders of magnitude more certain about them than any other ancient text. Every worthwhile historian (secular as well as Chrstian) - people for whom this is bread-and-butter stuff - don't dispute that we can be extremely confident about the vast majority of the New Testament texts.
And given that we don't have the original texts, we have no way of determining when they were written.
We can nail some of it down almost exactly to within a year or two - including most of Paul's letters and Mark's gospel. There is more variation in the rest, but there is good consensus for most books to nail them down to within a 20 year period.
So how can we know that the Gospels were written in the lifetime of people who could have seen what is being discussed.
We know Paul's letters - were written between 49AD and 64AD, and Mark's gospel probably between 64-68, maybe 70. But if you want to follow up on this kind of historical stuff one needs to get into a level of detail that's beyond the scope of discussing all the other stuff as well.
But when you come to conclusions on the basis of "That's what everyone else thinks", then you aren't going to be able to find the truth.
That's not what I said either.
But as you said, we don't have much in the way of texts from those times.
There's a whole heap to learn from what we do have. This is what historians do - its not a faith question as such, but a question for historians that can then inform the faith question. If you don't like it, well, your problem is with history not theology.
They didn't write down what the Bible actually meant but rather left it for people to figure out for themselves? Hardly increasing clarity in my view.
Again, you presume that for something to be important, or even worthwhile, it should reduce to simple propostional statement.
You might just as well ask why we keep kids in schools for 15 years instead of just listing the facts they need to know on their 5th birthday and then letting them get on with something else.
But they lose precision. If I am going to do something as life-changing as convert to a particular religion, I;d want a bit of precision.
What you want may not be what you get. What we desire is rarely what will satisfy us, let alone what we need.
Hang on - you're telling me that the individual authors change the story depending on what message they wanted to get across - and you don't see this as an agenda?
We can call it an agenda so long as that word isn't prejudicing what we are talking about. If we recognise that all writers have an agenda (or they wouldn't write) and that all writers shape what they say to that agenda, then fine.
