This may be old news to some, but maybe not to others, so here goes!
A valid conclusion is tied to the truth or plausibility of its supporting premises. The truth of the three Abrahamic religions is tied to the presumption that scripture is true.
Premise: The Bible tells us about God.
Premise: The Bible comes from Divine Inspiration, God.
Premise: The Bible must be true.
Conclusion: God Exists.
The faulty premise that I am talking about is the proposition that the various religious scriptures came from Divine Inspiration. To say that "God exists and all we know about him comes from the Bible and the Bible comes from God, therefore it is true" is circular reasoning, AKA begging the question. The argument begs us to accept the presumption that God Exists in order for the propositions to be true.
If we accept the proposition that the Bible comes from Divine Inspiration, then we must necessarily presume (already believe) that (1)God exists, and that (2)scripture came from him and Scripture must be correct because it came from God. These are two unstated premises that the argument depends on. The critical questions in this argument are "how do we know that God exists" and also "How do we know the Bible came from God". Since it doesn't follow logically to say that we believe in God because the scriptures tell us that they came from God and the Scriptures tell us about God, then we need "corroborating evidence" to support the conclusion that God exists. To support a claim such as this I presume would be an easy matter since the preponderance of evidence should overwhelmingly support the creator. I would suppose that a careful analysis of the Tanakh, the New Testament and the Quran would reveal a preponderance of evidence supporting their validity. But in fact this is not the case.
As I understand it, in these three faiths, the scriptures are considered Divinely Inspired. To avoid linguistic confusion, we need to define what "inspired" means. To the faithful, I think we can say that they believe that "Inspired" means more or less by "Revelation from God”, but in another context, the term "inspiration" means more or less the “motivation to describe or portray" an idea. We can be motivated by Godor we can be motivated by the Idea of God.
If we stipulate that the Scripture came to us through divine inspiration/revelation, then we would expect it to have some characteristics of documents that came from one mind, assuming that God only has one mind. And we can check to see if these characteristics exist. We can check for consistency and continuity. For example if a Dan Brown novel contained inconsistencies such as exist in the gospels regarding the 'empty tomb' (only because Easter is around the corner, but you can insert your own example here), I don't expect it would be a bestseller. I expect people would not take it seriously since it would lack consistency and continuity.
And if we stipulate that the scripture came to us through ideological inspiration then we would expect other types of characteristics consistent with documents that were the result of many minds, such as the types of inconsistencies and problems of continuity that we all know exist in the Bible.
What is needed is some corroborating evidence that lends support to the idea that a God exists and he had an active part in the creation of scripture. We need something besides the Bible. Lets look at some characteristics of the Bible and think about what they may mean.
- Generally speaking, over the years churches have more and more assumed the position that the effective understanding of the Bible comes from interpreting it as metaphor. For example, I have heard devout protestant Christian ministers say that the Bible is not a "science book" or "a History Book" in response to the criticism that there are inconsistencies in these areas.
- Forgive me for dredging up a tired example, the Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant his belief in the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the Sun. This was later demonstrated through science to be the case as we all know. I would not have expected the creator to have been so ambiguous about this.
- The Laws of Deuteronomy and Leviticus are likewise minimized and rationalized away as only being applicable in a different time. Some of them were insightful, some of them common sense (Deut.23:12-14) but I expect that a God, rather than saying that excrement should be buried outside camp because it is indecent and he would turn away from them, I expect a God would have explained that there were properties of excrement that were dangerous and life threatening. Maybe an introduction to germ theory. In fact, in all cases where Christians and Muslims point to this or that as evidence that God gave advanced knowledge of this or that, It could have been done better. These days, we explain science to children better than God did to his beloved.
- Slavery was supported in large part by Jesus' advisement to slaves to obey their masters. Logically, I don’t see why slavery would be permissible in those days and not now if Jesus advocated it.
- The faithful concede that there necessarily must be copyist errors in the Bible to explain some difficulties. I would have expected that the alpha and the omega would have wanted his word as error free as possible and would have been able to make that happen, even across languages. Maybe he could have made a holy language, which was perfect that would have preserved everything perfectly.
- Archeological discoveries in the Near East and specifically in Ugarit of documents that were written about and in praise of other Gods pre-date the Bible scriptures which paraphrase or match verbatim. It seems that some of the Biblical scriptures were borrowed. It seems that the story that I grew up with, that David wrote the Psalms and Moses wrote the Pentateuch, can't be true. Is this still being taught in Sunday school?
Internal inconsistencies exist, regarding all sorts of things including the most important event in the history of mankind. The resurrection of its Savior, God incarnate. And all this from scripture that were supposedly given to us by inspiration or revelation from one mind.
The discussion above does not support the claim that scripture was the revelation from one mind, but more neatly supports the assertion that scripture was the result of many human minds through ideological inspiration. The closer you get to the original documents, the less likely it is that scripture was the product of one supernatural mind, through human beings. It was put together out of lots of little pieces written at different times and places and is similar to other writings from other times and places from other cultures. And It is clear that those authors did not write them with the intention of them being put into one volume. Scripture is, in a word, Folklore; In two words, Oral Tradition. As John W. Loftus said "the Bible debunks itself".
So, if we concede that the scriptures are not the product of God, then we really don't know anything about God, including if he exists or not.
- I will write at least one researched "Featured" article a month. When I do that, I'll put it and related content in the months Featured Presentations group on the right. News articles are added to the main page daily.
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