To all athiests out there: bring it on

[troodon]

So every single person who read this book thought it was nonfiction

No, in fact, very few people believed the story was historical as the narrator of the story claims. The point of this entire pointless arguement is that Swift never textually says the work is fiction (sure he may have said it was fiction in some sort of conversation with some of his contemporaries,  but this is not documented. If some Christians feel there is not enough evidence to believe in evolution [which I assume you are one, forgive me if I am mistaken], then there is certainly no evidence to believe that he ever told anyone that it wasn't a true, factual story).
Here are the facts regarding this example of using text to support text:
1) The narrator of A Tale of a Tub claims to be a "historian" and says the story is "historical"
2) The book is so accepted as fiction that it is treated as fiction by all libraries and bookstores.
3) Neither the bookseller (publisher) nor Swift ever published anything stating that the work was fictional. Ergo, the only thing to base the story's fictional status on is the absurdity of the text.

I personally find many stories in the Bible just as absurd as the story in this book. That is why I don't believe the Bible when it claims to be factual. Why should I trust the Bible's statement that it is factual when I do not do the same for A Tale of a Tub? Why should you?

I hope that this clears any doubt on the subject because this is frankly the most rediculous arguement ever

 

[Outspoken]

"The point of this entire pointless arguement is that Swift never textually says the work is fiction"

Because it was published under nonfiction or Swift himself told people it was fiction.

 

[DaisyDay]

Outspoken,


Do you consider "A Pilgrim's Progress" to be fiction?


Check out A Tale of a Tub for yourself: 

www.literatureclassics.com/etexts/478  (I'm under the 15 post limit, but this is relavent to the thread) 

It's not exactly fiction - the table of contents alone give some hint of that:

SECTION III--A Digression Concerning Critics

SECTION V--A Digression In the Modern Kind

SECTION VII--A Digression In Praise of Digressions

SECTION IX--A Digression Concerning Improvement of Maddness In a Commonwealth

SECTION X--A Farther Digression


With all the digressions, dedications, prefaces and notes, there isn't that much tale told.  I haven't read very much of it yet, but my impression (troodon, correct me if I'm wrong) is that the tale itself is not the point of the piece, but a part of the point.


Anyhoo, before insisting that it was published as fiction - which I doubt - check it out for yourself.

 

[Outspoken]

it was published as fiction, else people would have believed it was not when it was first published, same instance happened in the broadcast of war of the worlds.

 

[ifriit]

Outspoken: it was published as fiction, else people would have believed it was not when it was first published, same instance happened in the broadcast of war of the worlds.

So, your entire argument is that people were too stupid to understand the difference between fiction and non-fiction? Also, you are aware that very few people actually thought Welles' broadcast was real, right?

 

[Outspoken]

"were too stupid to understand the difference between fiction and non-fiction? "

No, authors tell you the difference as well as publishers. Their view is that people are too stupid to notice the difference.

 

[DaisyDay]

Originally posted by Outspoken
it was published as fiction, else people would have believed it was not when it was first published, same instance happened in the broadcast of war of the worlds.

This was about 230 years before that broadcast.  Swift was a bitter satirist who did not suffer fools, so if anyone "believed" the book - you didn't look at it, eh? - he would undoubtedly have skewered him. Swift's audience was well able to recognise a satirical allegory.

Can you offer any proof that the work was published "as fiction" in 1704? I mean, other than "it must have been".

 

[troodon]

the tale itself is not the point of the piece, but a part of the point.

Very correct. In fact some people believe that the Tale itself was only inserted to provide a forum for his digressions.
Now, to Outspoken, any further arguments I make will just be repeating myself even more than I have but I'm going to make one last try to explain to you my point. Please bear (or bare, not sure) with me.

it was published under nonfiction

This is probably the main point that we're stuck on. Books at this time in history were not published as nonfiction. Nor were they published as fiction; they were simply published. Many people who published things (such as the very first publishings of Shakespeare's plays) published them without the authors permission. There was virtually no regulation or standards in the mainstream printing industry. The Tale was published with Swift's consent (I assume at least) but there was no outward clue given to the public that it was fictional. It was published together with two other works which I believe I have mentioned earlier. Once again for good measure, no where in the text of the Tale is it mentioned that A Tale of a Tub is fictional.

or Swift himself told people it was fiction

I will here give you a benifit of a doubt and admit it is POSSIBLE that Swift did such a thing. However, as there is no evidence, it is just as likely that Swift himself told people it was nonfiction. The fact is there is no evidence either way so such an argument is invalid as anything but mere speculation.
As to why people realized that the narrator of the story so obviously not telling a historical account is because the story is so blatantly allegorical of the history of the reformation that most everyone realized that the three brothers; Peter, Jack, and Martin; represented the Papacy, Protestants, and the Church of England (Swift distinguished between the CoE and other Protestants) respectively. Granted, I'm sure a few people may have believed the story to be true, but this did not deter the literary world from classifying the work as fiction without the author's input.
Therefor, the literary world, in this instance, classified a work that claims to be historical as fictional without any input from the author. That is my point put in as simple terms as I can make it. I hope I have finally explained my view point but regardless I don't plan on responding again because all I would be doing is repeating my points. Take care.

 

[Outspoken]

"Can you offer any proof that the work was published "as fiction" in 1704? "

Can you prove it wasn't?

"The fact is there is no evidence either way so such an argument is invalid as anything but mere speculation. "

So then I guess this is an invalid example, for there is no proof either way according to you, but seeing as no one believed it was true DEFINATLY lends itself to the publisher or swift himself telling people it was fiction. thus I'll settle for it was published as fiction until more evidience surfaces to say otherwise

 

[troodon]

Jeeze Outspoken...

So then I guess this is an invalid example, for there is no proof either way according to you

So since there is no evidence either way you are going to say that the work is fictional? Am I correct? It must have been fictional because there is no report of Swift saying it wasn't?

 

[Pete Harcoff]

Originally posted by troodon
Jeeze Outspoken...

Heh, now do you see why I gave up trying to discuss things with him?

 

[troodon]

now do you see why I gave up trying to discuss things with him?

Yup

 

[webboffin]

Science has not proved the "big bang" it has assumed it. There is a big difference between assume and prove.

Assumption requires faith.

I assume that God exists but like any other I cannot prove him to you.

 

[The_Josiah]

"Science has not proved the "big bang" it has assumed it. There is a big difference between assume and prove.

Assumption requires faith.

I assume that God exists but like any other I cannot prove him to you."

Wow, scientists must be very imaginative to just assume, out of the blue, that the universe started from an extremely small volume of space following a period of exponential growth known as inflation.

Guess they just assumed Hubble's Law, the observed ratio of elements, quasars, everything we know about the evolution of galaxies, and last but not least, cosmic background radiation too.

It's really no different from faith in God, I suppose.

 

[DaisyDay]

Originally posted by webboffin
Science has not proved the "big bang" it has assumed it. There is a big difference between assume and prove.

Assumption requires faith.

I assume that God exists but like any other I cannot prove him to you.

It's true that science has not proven the "big bang"; however,  it does have a big wad of evidence - facts about the universe which have been proven - which points to the "big bang".  There may even be some faith, ie. "a confident belief", involved that no new, contrary evidence will be discovered, that any new evidence will support it.

But it's not an unquestioning faith or faith in spite of the evidence - it's faith because of the evidence.

It's far more than just an assumption based on faith, it's a conclusion based on evidence.

 

[lucaspa]

Originally posted by webboffin
Science has not proved the "big bang" it has assumed it. There is a big difference between assume and prove.

This is such a common misconception of science that I guess we have to go into it again.

Initially all hypotheses start out as imaginative statements. The imagination may be triggered by a piece of data, or it may not. In the case of Big Bang, the theory was triggered by the Hubble expansion.  Simple logical extrapolation of that into the past put all the matter/energy/spacetime at one point sometime in the past.

The next step in science is to take the hypothesis and test it.  In an attempt to show it false.  To do this you must first assume the hypothesis is true.  You do this in order to generate deductions from the hypothesis -- deductions that will have consequences you can observe. It's standard deductive logic. True statements can't have false consequences.

You then go looking for the observations.  In the case of Big Bang, there were several deductions: microwave background radiation, ratio of hydrogen to helium, and a stable neutrino at 100 million electron volts being just 3 of them.  NONE of this data was available when Big Bang was first proposed.  Instead, Big Bang predicted this data should be there.

All the data mentioned was found.  The fact that it was there, but unkown and predicted by Big Bang, gives very strong support to the theory.  We are now way past the "assume" stage, into the "survived rigorous testing" stage.

You can easily see that no theory can be "proved" by the hypothetico-deductive method.  Theories can be falsified, but not, strictly speaking, proven. Because no matter how many tests we run, there are still an infinite number of tests to run, and the theory could conceivably fail one of them.

What happens is that theories gain a lot of support and their rivals are falsified, such that it becomes perverse to withold provisional acceptance.  This happened about 20 years or so with Big Bang. 

So, Big Bang is no longer an assumption.  It is rigorously tested and repeated attempts to falsify it have failed.  In addition, rival theories (such as deity popping the universe into place in present form in the recent past) have been falsified. So we accept -- provisionally -- that Big Bang is true unless and until some evidence comes along to falsify it.  And we use Big Bang to construct other hypotheses. The testing of those hypotheses is also testing of Big Bang and increases our confidence that the theory is correct.

I should point out here that there is dissension in the creationist ranks. Hugh Ross thinks that the only possible objectors to Big Bang are atheists.  www.reasons.org  YECers think Big Bang somehow is a danger to the existence of God.

 

 

[lucaspa]

Originally posted by Outspoken "Luke 1:1-4 simply declares that Luke is writing an accurate account. "

It shows it was ment to be taken as literal. That's very easy to see, 

Where does Luke1:1-4 say "literal"?  And, of course, the parables are not literal, are they?  So not all of Luke can be taken literally, can it?  

"But how did they decide it was fiction? "

Its pretty apparent you're not using your thinking cap here bro. The author and the publisher decide what its published under so we can safely assume that it was the authors intent for it to be a fictional story. Mystery solved...great job watson, but next time try to keep up.

Hmm, you are using ad hominen. Sure sign that your case is weak.  So the author and publisher decide to publish under fiction. Could they be lying?  Sir John French and his publisher published under non-fiction and the autobiography was fiction. Why can't the reverse happen? There are books on Bigfoot out there, published under non-fiction, but pure fiction. 

So, we have the Bible published under non-fiction.  Why? Because people say it is.  However, people have said other books were non-fiction when they were, in fact, fiction.  So why do you think the Bible is different? You can't use the criteria of what it states within the Bible, because the other cases also stated they were non-fiction.

"So, where it is published is not a criteria to decide whether the account in true or not. "

Yes it is, it is one of many context clues to show the account is literal or not. the pictures of embryos where ment to be taken literally, not as a methaphor for the state of the world.

But they weren't accurate, were they? So how do you know the accounts in Genesis are accurate?  And there you do have internal clues that they were meant to be a metaphor for the state of the world. And I'll take your silence on those clues that you can't find a reasonable argument against them.

 

[chickenman]

I was about to tell you guys to stop arguing with outspoken a couple of pages back

 

[webboffin]

evidence, evidence, evidence yet Jesus was evidence too

 

[lithium.]

Originally posted by webboffin
evidence, evidence, evidence yet Jesus was evidence too

Of what?