Reading the Bible does not equate to reading the mind of God. At most,
it gives you insight into the minds of the mortal men who wrote it.
It depends on how you look at it. First off, I'll say that how you
perceive the Bible depends on how you *choose* to look at it. The
existence of choice is a fundamental component of faith. Let me give
you three possible scenarios.
1. There is no supernatural creator that exists outside the rules and
laws of the observable universe.
2. There is a supernatural creator that exists outside of the
observable universe, may have created the universe and possibly life,
but no longer interacts with us in any way.
3. There is a supernatural creator that exists outside of the
observable universe, and while not directly observable, has revealed
himself through interactions at given times within his creation.
The Bible purports to be a collection of stories relating the
experiences of a relatively select few people who have had somewhat
indirect (but still miraculous) interactions with God, ultimately
culminating in the most direct experience with the persona of God
claimed in the form of Jesus Christ.
Prove that it was authored (or even inspired) by God.
The Bible doesn't try to prove itself. Hebrews 11 in particular
reflects on this with statements like
"And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who
comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who
earnestly seek him."
In fact, it explicitly presupposes that belief in God relies on a
decision of faith. But faith is not a decision to be made in the
absence of evidence, for how could one choose to believe one thing
over another. What is that evidence the Bible uses to buttress its
faith? It's based on the accounts of people experiencing miraculous
things. And by miraculous, I mean things that could not happen within
the normal observable framework of the universe we live in.
Of course one can take the stance that there are no miracles, only
unexplained natural phenomenon. Let's say that you witness something
dramatic, like the parting of the Red Sea. Would you believe that was
of supernatural origin, or not? With an attitude where you don't
believe in miracles, it's easy to throw that experience away as an
illusion, a trick of the mind, or maybe some astounding unexplained
interaction of the laws of physics. Other people may take that one
experience and believe that the God of the Jews is real and he is the
"true" God. The point is that your attitude frames how you view and
experience the world.
I believe the strongest evidence of a supernatural interaction with
our universe is the existence of life, including ourselves. This is
in my opinion why evolution vs creation seems to be the recent focal
point of the debate on the existence or non-existence of God. The
question of faith goes down to, do you believe that there is a
naturally occurring environment that allows the properties of life to
evolve? Most of these positions for or against are arguments of
incredulity. Whether it's complexity, the number of species, or the
huge amount of time needed, the fact remains that the origin of life
has not been observed and continues to be difficult to observe. (The
best we're doing now to my knowledge is to throw DNA in the proverbial
blender and trying to fit the jigsaw puzzle pieces together. We're
going to need to do much better than that to recreate an environment
to create life. The ability to read a DNA strand without destroying
it is the minimum step to even think about creating life as we know
it. And the kicker is that as the process to manipulate life becomes
more and more complex, the less likely a "natural" environment can be
found to derive it, hence the reason to append an arbitrary amount of
time as a fudge factor to get evolution to work.) So it remains from
my point of view that the belief of the origin of life still requires
the proverbial "leap of faith".
It's simplest to fall back on the anthropic principle here. There may,
in fact, be (or have been) millions of different universes, all with
different properties; we see the properties of _this_ universe as they
are because it's the only one that would allow us to exist and ask the
question.
Sorry, but this in my opinion is no better or worse than scenario
number 2 above, since it's without any tangible evidence that this is
the case. Have you or anyone you know or any historical records of
people who claim to have traveled to or interacted with these
alternate universes (at least the Bible has that)? Nick might as well
add this to his list of fairy tale stories.
But feel free to keep theorizing. If you write enough interesting
things, usenet scholars 2000 years from now can argue about who you
really were or even whether you really existed or not ;-)
Best regards,
John D.
