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Thursday, December 20, 2007

Reasonable Doubt That God Is Intentionally Mysterious

[Revised Dec. 11 to provide the "moral of the story" and provide information about "A Code of Conduct for Reasonable Discussants" to enhance clarity.]
Referencing the same article Doctrinal Disagreement to the Glory of God that John did here from the "Parchment and Pen" Blog I want to provide a rejoinder to the theological pile of rhetoric that God is deliberately mysterious and that is why Christians can't agree on doctrine.

Here's a little "parable" to illustrate the flaw in the principle that argument depends on. Puzzle lovers, get your pencils out. The solution is embedded in the text of the rest of the article. Give yourself a chance to figure it out before you expand the article.

A steel tower went up in a neighborhood with the following sign on it.
herkiv lmkl zspxeki. hs rsx gsqi amxlmr jmjxc biix.

People debated day and night about what the sign could mean. Then one day people heard a blood curdling scream to find a person dead and badly burned next to the tower. One of the results of the investigation turned up that the sign was encrypted to read "Danger High Voltage. Do not come within fifty feet." The person was at fault because they did not take the time to figure out that each of the letters was offset by five positions. The person died before it could be figured out that the alphabet started at W and ended at V.

Now is it clear why Gods mystery is a silly principle to adhere to?

It was irresponsible and silly not to make the sign easy to understand.
Anything important that should be imparted to another should be clearly stated.

Therefore, it would follow that the supreme intellect in the universe would not do something as irresponsible and silly as making his instruction ambiguous, then it would naturally follow that anything important that needed to be imparted to us attributed to the supreme intellect in the universe that was ambiguous could not really be from the supreme intellect in the universe, and that would mean the bible is man-made and subject to all the problems inherent to man-made texts.

In day to day life as in the study of Argumentation and Informal Logic the Principle of Clarity is essential and is one of a set of rules in a "Code of Conduct for Reasonable Discussants" developed by Frans H. Van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst and published in their book A Systematic Theory of Argumentation: The pragma-dialectical approach.


"Discussants may not use any formulations that are
insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous, and
they may not deliberately misinterpret the other
party’s formulations."

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