Topic: Scientific proof that God exists? - page 271. (Read 845650 times)

No internal inconsistency in the Bible. Often more than one discussion about the same topic. The discussions overlap, showing some info that is the same, and other info that is additional to each discussion, and other that is deleted fro each. In other words, some witnesses recall some points while other witnesses recall other points.

At times the Bible seems to talk about something that another part of the Bible seems to talk about differently. The Bible is a writing that does not cover every topic under the sun in detail. It also does not always say when it is talking about two similar points rather than the same point from two different views.

For example, the little bit that we see in the Gospels where Jesus' words are quoted, are certainly not the only things He ever said in His life. We simply do not know whether the things He says in one Gospel were always those things that were recorded in another Gospel, even though they look very similar. They could have been said twice, on different days.

I like to rationally evaluate the likely origin of texts. I have some experience with reading inspired writings, so I will not hold back with what I understand to be the truth in this thread.

I can disagree with BADecker for the reason that the Bible lacks internal consistency; that makes that book invalid.


You can evaluate inspired writings by reading them entirely and evaluating their consistency; some writings have a better degree of consistency than others. The below papers are discussing the content-source problem and are helpful for understanding the problems involved in the evaluation of inspired writings and Scripture:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11150396

What an excellent post. My thoughts exactly. It is dangerous, very dangerous indeed. That's why I cringe inside when I read BADecker promoting it so casually (a few posts up unfortunately.)

It could be THE WORD OF GOD, but much more likely just THE WORD OF MAN. There is a third much more dangerous scenario however, it could be THE WORD OF THE DEVIL.

I'm steering clear at all costs.

All you need to do is to look at a jury trial to find that among people there is often a disagreement about what evidence actually is proof.

Get into the Bible with sincere question to God about him showing you the proof of His existence. This is the only way. Proof among men differs.

I've got no issues with people pointing to the bible or the Quran or whatever as a general guide for moral behavior, although that can be a slippery slope also, and leads to 'interpretations' that can often be nothing but manipulations to support a given viewpoint or purpose.

Anyhow, without getting to far into parsing any particular book, plenty of people would likely agree that the basic underpinnings of 'love thy neighbor' and 'don't kill that other guy', etc. are fine as generalities.  I've got no problems there, and wish our societies could find some moral balance between "if you do that you'll burn in hell" and "there is no hell so I'll just screw everyone for my own benefit"

the problem for me arises when people point to it as "THE WORD OF GOD"- and this goes for all religions and holy books.  

I think this is extremely dangerous for a lot of reasons, chief among them that we don't know that this or that is indeed the word of this God or that prophet instead of manipulations of some long ago A-holes that wanted to scare the crap out of people to keep them in line and/or subjugate them.  

The other is that these things are then too easily manipulated, as there is no arguing "THE WORD OF GOD"  taken from any holy book, even if it is batshit crazy.  I guess what I'm driving at is that this sort of finality removes any common sense from any sort of analysis, which just opens the door on way too much manipulation by people that desire to manipulate others for their own ends.  

Without conclusive proof then that this is indeed THE WORD OF GOD this takes this general guidebook for basically not peeing all over everyone else and turns it into what may arguably be the deadliest weapon in the history of the planet.  

I'm not sure I like the sound of this. They are human, and humans are corruptible.
The church could pull the strings what they said easily, just a few little quiet brown envelopes would see to that. A wise investment with a good potential return for the church.
Also if the scholars had "caught" religion themselves, their opinion would be immediately bias and highly suspect.

I mean listen to what they have to say sure, but take it with a large pinch of salt to be on the safe side.

The bible is real because it exists, what is wrote in the bible is not because it never happened and there are no proofs of it other than the bible, if you cant prove what it says in the bible its true you cant use the own bible as an argument or proof of anything since the bible itself is already not proven to be true

Today's machine learning would not be learning if learning necessarily entailed conscious (i.e., non-preprogrammed) reason. (Hence, I quoted a portion of the text that [at least, implicitly] implied that an unconscious "artificial neural network" [Cleeremans 3, 6] has learned.)

Which part of my post indicates that confusion?  I thought this was covered when I acknowledged "learning from emotional experience," where learning is to "conscious experience begotten thereof," and the emotional experience itself is to "patterns of activation over processing units."

There are three basic ways that I see that we can test how authentic the Bible is.

1. Read it and see how it makes sense (or not) regarding life. One need remember that the Bible was written for all people, but was also written for the people who lived at the times that it was written. Thus, it has many different customs and ideas in it that don't fit our times and customs completely, and certainly not exactly. Yet there is content that fits all human beings because all people are basically similar.

2. We need to look at the traditions of the nation of Israel regarding what they think about the Bible. When we do this, we need to know enough about this nation to see that they officially incorporate into "their" Bible, the Talmud and other writings, that we don't consider to be part of the Bible... and the whys for these differences. In addition, much of Jewry doesn't consider the New Testament to be truth at all.

3. Since most of us are not scholars of the history of the Bible, we need to see what the scholars say. We need to look at the real scholars, not simply the Internet scholars (like myself?) who produce second hand scholarly info, or who neglect the sense of the Bible in the documentation of its history. We need to examine the consensus of the best Bible scholars. And, that might take a bit of work.

My though is to read the Bible, especially the New Testament, slowly, not trying to pick it apart the first few times reading it, just to get the feel of what it seems to speak to one's heart. BibleGateway - https://www.biblegateway.com/ - has loads of English translations and multitudes of other language translation so that one can read the Bible right online if so desired.

The dead sea scrolls are only evidence that the bible is old. But we knew the bible was old anyway, which was never in dispute.
However, don't make the classic mistake of believing because something is very old, it must be true.
Lies do not age and mature into truth.

I mean that we don't know who wrote it.  nothing more and nothing less, but that's a huge thing all the same.

while the Dead Sea Scrolls may be the most ancient version we have of the Old Testament, we do not know when it was written, really ( the scrolls 300 BC-100AD most likely) or by whom, although it is assumed to be a copy of earlier texts in any case, so we don't know when it was originally written, or by whom, or what their motives were.

Further to that, the scrolls have nothing to do with what most people think of as the Bible, and what I was talking about in the first place, which is the New Testament.

I've simply seen too much manipulation by 'men of God' to think they didn't bend things more than a little bit when putting these materials together.  

My mistrust of the media and politicians goes back well beyond the current era, as I do not think the crazy things we see today are new games at all, really.  I think men are corrupt and will do anything to grab and hold power and I think that has always been the case.  

Why are there so many different religious texts then and which one is right? I'm partial to the King James Version of the Christian bible because there's lots of sex and violence in that one. Is the Quran right? What about the Torah? Are the Vedas, Egyptian Book of the Dead, Tao Te Ching, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, or the Buddhist Sutras correct? Do you really believe there are billions of people believing in the wrong religion and the wrong God? Why did God ignore those parts of the world? Were they not worthy of the attention and weirdness he inflicted on the 1/4 of the world he played with back then?

What can you mean by, "We do not know who wrote it." Of course we don't know them. They are long gone.

We do know, however, that the Bible was barely changed. The Dead Sea Scrolls show that the variations are minor, even from the Bible of today.

The Roman Catholic Church doesn't maintain the Bible. God does.

The Bible "copies" that have been changed by people to use false writings to control people, have fallen away. Just because science (which many people worship) has changed greatly in the last 300 years, as shown by its writings, doesn't mean the Bible has. In fact the evidence of the "sameness" of the Bible is so much greater than that of scientific writings that it blows science right out of the water regarding accuracy.

No, it could not be destroyed, but it could be 'versionized', edited, massaged.

This is my main issue with the Bible.  Well, a large one anyhow. 

We do not know who wrote it.  We do not know who changed it.  We do not know the intent of any of them.

After watching the the Catholic Church during my short time on the planet, and how they have operated as a political machine, it boggles my mind to think what was done to the Bible over the last several hundred years.

I don't believe this book or any 'holy' book, as there is zero doubt in my mind that, regardless of their original origins and contents, these things have been bastardized by people for their own purposes for literally hundreds of years.

The writing of historical events is done by the conquerors, those who have the authority to decide what gets into the history books.

The Old Testament is a history of Israel. While Israel was a nation of reasonable strength at times, God limited their conquests to this tiny strip of land at the east end of the Mediterranean. Besides this, their existence as a nation lasted only about 1,500 years (2,000 if you want to include all the way back to the time of Abraham), most of which time Israel was a fledgling nation. And it has been about 1,900 years since their destruction in 70 A.D. by the Romans until they became a nation again in modern times. In other words, Israel has never really been one of the great nations except that they are one of very few that have ever been resurrected after a period of almost 2,000 years.

Besides this, for whatever reason, the nation of Israel was mostly feared, hated and despised. We see many posts in various threads right in this forum that talk about killing the "Joos."

The point? Why would any conqueror maintain a history of Israel? Rather, the conquerors of the world would eliminate as much mention of them as possible.

In addition, the Jewish leaders are in a bit of a quandary about the history of Israel. The history includes much looking forward to the Messiah. Too much history would help to prove that Jesus fulfilled the Messianic prophesies. Yet the Jews traditionally don't want Jesus as the Messiah, because He wasn't the great earthly leader that they were looking for. God wants a leader who will lead people to salvation for the New Universe. That's Who the Messiah would be, and that's Who Jesus was and is.

The point about this? Even Jewish leaders don't want the history of Israel to exist too clearly before the world. It might take away from their position as leaders if their people saw the truth.

Now, this whole thing is the thing that makes the Bible very strong. Much of the Bible is history. It is history not corroborated by other history except in a small way. But, if you search for it, you can find other history that shows that the Bible is correct, like the ruins of ancient Jericho, or the land bridge across the Red Sea where Israel crossed when they came out of Egypt in the Exodus. More history will come out into the open as time goes on.

Why does this make the Bible strong? Because the conquerors, although they could cover up the other history, couldn't destroy the Bible. Not only could they NOT destroy it, it is one of the greatest writings of all time, translated into dozens of languages around the world. The reason for this is that God is holding the Bible in place against all the evil forces of the world so that people worldwide can see the way to be saved.



EDIT: The miracle that is the Bible helps to prove the existence of God.

like yo u's a fag

You confuse the development of consistent “representations (patterns of activation over processing units)” (Cleeremans 6) with the phenomenology of a conscious experience begotten thereof.

1) It would be a logical and theoretical impossibility for there to be any "historical facts" about the "Bible God."  Such an entity falls outside the scope of Empiricism, and there could never be any physical evidence for such a thing even if you assume outright that it exists.

2) If the "Bible God" really existed, according to what/whom does it follow that Jesus necessarily should have existed?  The Bible?

Logically, if we assume "Bible God" exists, Jesus is plausible (both as only a human and as a "Son of God" human).

If God (Bible God) really existed, jesus should have existed aswell, how come there are not historical facts about any of them? There are some vague mentions in some papers but real historical facts, i havent seen any.