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.
Correct.
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 important point is that it's possible to reconcile _all_ of the
above scenarios with science. One can also accept the latter two
without accepting the Bible as the word of that supernatural creator.
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.
.... and there is no proof that those stories are true, or that the
people who wrote them (whoever they were) weren't raving lunatics or
hallucinating after eating the wrong mushrooms. And there's no proof
that they were. Enter faith--or agnosticism.
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."
Right, but that points out the primary fallacy in religious arguments:
one must accept as valid the tenets of the faith before arguments trying
to prove the validity of the faith can work. Using the Bible to prove
God exists, much less thinks a certain way, is fundamentally flawed;
those who accept the Bible as a valid argument necessarily already
accept the point you're trying to prove, and those who don't won't.
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,
Of course it is, since faith is the decision to believe something in the
absence of evidence.
for how could one choose to believe one thing over another.
The vast majority of people choose to (continue to) believe what their
parents taught them when they were children and had not yet developed
independent, rational thought, leaving them susceptible to circular
logic of the form "God is real because the Bible says so, and the Bible
is real because God wrote it."
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.
It _claims_ to be accounts of people who _claim_ to have experienced
what they _claim_ were miracles. That, in my book (no pun intended), is
not proof of anything.
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.
Of course; confirmation bias is a powerful force. If you choose to
believe in God, then it's very easy to see anything unusual happening as
the work of God.
OTOH, there _is_ a reasonable scientific explanation. Modern research
has identified that it was the _Reed_ Sea (now Ballah Lake) that the
Israelites crossed. Given the topography of the area, above and below
the estimated water level of the time, it's entirely possible that an
earthquake temporarily removed enough water from the lake for a land
bridge to appear, then have it come crashing back in as a tidal wave,
wiping out the Egyptian army following them.
Unlikely, perhaps, but it's scientifically viable. If one wants, one
can say it was God that caused the earthquake to happen at the
particular moment necessary. I find that significantly more likely than
God literally pushing the waters aside and holding them back against
gravity.
(More generally speaking, if you dig deep enough into scientific
explanations, you'll eventually arrive at a "random" process, with some
things being more likely than others. There is room for God to direct
that "random" process to a particular outcome He desires, which is
merely "severely unlikely" but not actually "impossible".)
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.
We've only been observing for a very, very short period of time, and
conditions on the planet today are quite unlike they were back when life
supposedly spontaneously began anyway. Or maybe it happens all the time
but the existence of more-evolved life forms either prevents the
spontaneous formation of ones or destroys all the evidence.
However, scientists _have_ done tests where they throw a bunch of
chemicals into the water, hit it with enough electricity to simulate
lightning, and observed individual molecules that resemble primitive
cell structures. If that happened enough times, and the molecules
combined in just the right ways, you'd get primitive life. Considering
we're told there are billions of years and zillions of molecules
available in the primordial oceans, this sounds reasonable--and doesn't
require a God, though he could have certainly helped the process along.
So it remains from my point of view that the belief of the origin of
life still requires the proverbial "leap of faith".
Of course, since you've already accepted the leap of faith is necessary,
you're naturally going to find examples of scientific unknowns as proof
of supernatural intervention.
I'll grant science doesn't have a perfect explanation for how the first
cell formed, and we haven't managed to pull it off in a lab yet.
However, I don't need to blame everything I don't understand on God.
More importantly, micro-evolution has been _proven_ both in the lab and
in the wild, and there is excellent evidence that macro-evolution is
also correct, which makes sense since it's just an extension of
micro-evolution to longer time periods (which are very difficult to
collapse in a lab). Genesis is, at most, a metaphor for these
processes. The only real debate is a fabricated one, because certain
folks are scared that questioning their literal interpretation of one
part of the Bible means people will start questioning all the other parts.
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.
Of course. But it is quite obvious that if _our_ universe had different
properties, we would not exist to observe them. Our very asking the
quertion proves the existence of the universe.
Or maybe not, and our observed universe is actually just a computer
simulation, and God is really some alien child who has grown up and lost
interest in playing with his toy... All of the "evidence" we can
observe is also part of the simulation, so how could we "prove" anything?
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 ;-)
_I_ can't even prove that I exist, so they'd be right to question it.
For all you (or I) know, I'm actually a super-advanced AI.
S
