Posted on 02/04/2010 2:42:12 PM PST by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
Paul was a super naturalist. A person who is free to interpret amazing events as either being super natural, or of not being so (albeit he was of a faith that interpreted certain specific events as necessarily being super natural).
A naturalist (at least the way I use the word--which I think is pretty conventional) holds a doctrine that super natural interpretations of events are universally invalid. They will usually never express it this way, because people like to think of themselves as open minded et al. But the fact is, if you hold that there is no super nature, then you hold that no event is super natural.
However this doctrine is arrived at, once in place it is quite immune to any contrary evidence. For any remotely feasible alternative explanation to a super natural explanation is automatically preferred. Moreover, even when no apparent natural explanation seems remotely feasible, a naturalist holding such a doctrine will presume that there is some unknown trick, mistake, lie, error, or something else that invalidates an otherwise convincing proof of super-naturalism.
Now firmly held unshakable doctrines are nothing new. But the really funny thing about this doctrine, is that the people holding it think of themselves as being skeptics and great believers of following evidence and reason.
This comparison is a canard.
In the game of "telephone" a message is whispered once in an ear.
In Hebrew tradition, the message is taught, memorized, and continuously repeated back by the student over a life time, within in a community of people that can correct errors in each other.
Try this kind of game of "telephone":
1) Take 100 people in a room. Spend several hours working with them until you are positive they have the message correct.
2) Have 50 of them teach the same message to a room full of another room of 100 people for hours until they are convinced it is correct.
3+)Continue for a few dozen times...or if your simulating the number of generations until the NT was written you were done before step 2!
The message will be dead on. Because the mechanism is far more reliable then whispering once into an ear.
Even as someone who is no textual critic I know enough to recognize the quackery involved in the "telephone" game analogy!
The evidence for the big bang theory seems to be a severe counter example to this idea.
Everybody seems to agree that nothing comes from nothing. Before the Big Bang theory, naturalists simply considered the universe to be eternal. Super naturalists were divided on the point.
But the Big Bang evidence suggests that the entire universe and all its laws and physical properties did not not simply always exist. It doesn't prove this absolutely, but it gives us a point at which it is hard for any science to look beyond.
But to defend against the God-centric notions of the Big Bang theory in secular academia, it is now supposed that the entire natural universe is not the entire natural universe...so the word "cosmos" came into common use, and some very intriguing notions took shape. The most amusing being the multi-verse view, in which every possibility is balanced out in some alternate universe invisible to us. Now the multi-verse "theory" seems to be a bit of a stretch for me. But if it is true, presumably there must be an infinite number of other universes, with an infinite fraction of them having life, with an infinite fraction having horse-like life, with an infinite fraction of them having horse-like life which is pink and horned.
Of coarse such pink, horned, horses can not be seen or studied, because they are invisible to us in this universe. You just have to have faith in them I guess.
Nobody likes being fooled by a charlatan, and I'm all for exposing them. I have many Christian friends who don't appreciate them either. I will grant that it is certainly easier for a religious charlatan to temporarily fool those of the same religion. Just as it is easier for a "missing link" hoax to temporarily fool Darwinists. But don't mistake that for acceptance in either case! An exposed charlatan has no credibility. Although the point at which they are "exposed" is debated with various biases.
However, it seems you are taking the existence of religious charlatans as evidence against religion. Certainly you must understand this is hardly any kind of valid argument.
There have been cottage industries of all kinds of charlatans, some with fake cures like snake oil, or whatever else. Yes many have been religious. Now science charlatans are somewhat newer. They have only been around sense science has been around. But face it, they are around in spades. They usually fool the non-erudite in any case. Good theologians can spot phony Christianity better than the more gullible common Christian, just as a good scientist can spot scientific quackery better than the gullible public in our science-respecting culture.
Charlatans use fake science, because real science has credibility with people. They also use fake religion because real religion has credibility with people.
No Ender, bringing up charlatans gets you no where except as another distraction.
” But you do not ask the obvious question.... which John? John the Presbyter? John the Evangelist? John the Apostle?”
Not an important question since all three names may refer to the same man. But assuming that each name applies to a different individual, just to give your latest straw a chance, they were still three first century Christians close to the events that had just transpired.
It’s only within the confines of your little game of telephone that it would be hard for a first generation to pass on their knowledge to the next. In the real world I’ve never seen a teacher who whispers his knowledge to a student in one sentence and then tells him to pass it on. I always experienced that as a child’s game. Your experience evidently is different, which should explain why you think that argument has any merit.
Oh I wish. Its been many years since I got to fight in an SCA battle.
The Qumran and the Masada scrolls show that the Old Testament text was still not stabilized near the end of the first century AD.
One of the many things I am not an export on are the dead sea scrolls. However, from everything I do know, your conclusion sounds pretty zany. So I googled it, and found tons of dull dry info that gave me no relevant insight before I ran out of patience.
So I must ask, do you have a source you can point that lends support for this non stabilization.
As for asking who I am arguing with. I make it a habit to try to refine and/or correct my views to be more in line with truth. Since I believe it is truth that sets us free. So any argument that you have made that seems it might have merit, I have tried to consider. So far I think you make a much worse case for naturalism then I had already made for myself...and not found as convincing as that for Christianity.
Sorry if some of that arguing with myself spilled over. I think we all do that a little...or it at least I would like to think that.
“His argument focuses away from the NT itself, and focuses on how the NT was interpreted by “the church fathers”, who seemingly to be any proclaimed Christian in church history with an anti-semitic slant. “
Maybe he finds the NT inconvenient for his purposes.
” On the other hand, I kind of thought of the writers of the NT and their contemporaries as the “church fathers”.”
You should, because they are. Those would be “the Apostolic fathers”. Theologians up to about the 500s tend to get included in lists of the church fathers, depending on who makes the list.
“My own position has been that following Christ’s commands to and ethical example are the epitome of what it means to be Christian, “
You’d soon find yourself embroiled in a debate over works versus grace with that position, although neither side would disagree that the moral precepts are worth emulating.
“It is my experience that the “conflict between religion and science” is not generated by the scientists. The history of that conflict is invariably one of reaction by religionists to scientific knowledge they object to… not any active effort by scientists to prove religion false. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but they prove the rule rather than call it into question”
It appears that your knowledge of the subject is conventional and not very informed. Rather than open such a large subject I’ll just recommend the works of Stanley Jaki. The question is of course epistemological, and not one of science versus religion. It’s metaknowledge. Science doesn’t and can’t define itself, a point Jaki develops in his writing on Goedel. Moreover if non-repeatable events happened in Christ’s life then science would record them as data, it wouldn’t simply discard them because they don’t fit an imposed paradigm of naturalism. In fact at that point naturalism would reveal itself as rigid and non-scientific, choosing repeatability over data it can’t explain within the limitations imposed by naturalism.
“The simple truth is that the more and more we learn about the universe, the less and less there appears to be for God to do.”
“The evidence for the big bang theory seems to be a severe counter example to this idea.”
A good choice, Andy. Mathematician/ astronomer Fred Hoyle coined the term ‘Big Bang’ to disparage the idea. He refused to accept the Big Bang as being good science because he recognized its odd similarity to the opening of Genesis, and he was going to have none of that. That would eventually change for Hoyle, one of the pioneers of the anthropic principle.
Piltdown Man.
Piltdown Man was even used as evidence by Clarence Darrow in the Scope’s Monkey Trial, which is certainly amusing. The hoax ran for 40 years.
And of course right now we have ‘anthropogenic global warming’, which the high priesthood of the science establishment has been selling us for a good number of years. AGW is science, you know, or so we’ve been told, and doubters have been held up as the heretics they are.
Alas, it now seems that some of the AGW evidence has, er, been faked. The Church of Scientism is being surrounded by superstitious peasants wearing Hayek and Popper masks, jeering cries of “Positivism!” as they hurl rocks and garbage at the hunkered down high priests of scientific charlatanism.
http://isv.org/catacombs/isaiah_MT_vs_1QIsa.htm
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Why Use the Dead Sea Scrolls instead of the Masoretic Text to translate Isaiah?
Why is the base text for Isaiah the Great Scroll of Isaiah? Why was 1QIsa substituted for the MT?
In our view 1QIsa is more reliable than the two surviving Masoretic Text manuscripts. More on this, below.
It is completely out of accord with the 1st principle of translation posted on-line.
At best, this accusation misunderstands the principle. Our answer is that or use of the Great Isaiah Scroll is fully in accord with our first principle: Here’s what our first principle states, as quoted exactly from our Principles of Translation page:
For the Tanakh, or Old Testament, the Masoretic text as published in the latest editions of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and Quinta is used as the base text, in consultation with other ancient Hebrew texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and a select number of ancient versions (the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta, and the Targums). All significant departures from the base text, as well as all significant textual variants, are indicated in footnotes.
With respect to Isaiah’s famous book, the operative phrase “in consultation with other ancient Hebrew texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls” is applicable. In the case of Isaiah, we consulted with 1QIsa so much that it became quickly evident that in translating the book of Isaiah, the MT must be supplanted by 1QIsa, aka the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran Cave One because 1QIsa is more reliable than the MT.
We make no statement as to the comparative reliability of the MT to the other MSS of the DSS. For now, we only comment on the contents of Qumran Cave One.
It is not commonly known to lay Bible readers that the entire ancient corpus of Old Testament Hebrew manuscripts consists of only two texts: Codex Leningradensis and the Aleppo Text. Both date from within 100 years of each other, give or take a decade or so, and in round numbers we date them from about 950 and 1050 AD.
In contrast, the DSS Great Isaiah Scroll dates from mid-2nd century BC, at the latest, and maybe as early as the mid-200’s BC. It’s 1200 years or more older than the MT manuscripts that have survived over the centuries. In our view, 1QIsa is the more reliable manuscript.
Along the way to rendering one of the first high-quality English language translations of 1QIsa with scholarly footnotes that will be made generally available to the public, a suspicion that’s grown on us while making the ISV OT rendering has come to the forefront of our analysis of the MT text: this is our growing theory that certain parts of the MT tradition came about during the Middle Ages as a polemic response to the Christian interpretation of the Tanakh as that tradition is sustained in the NT MSS.
The explanations of the events of the NT (as depicted by those NT writers) have a tendency to cite the LXX, since the NT was largely composed originally in Greek, or when citing the Tanakh, NT writers occasionally proffer what appears to be a Targum; i.e., a dynamically produced, spontaneously crafted translation from the original Hebrew or Aramaic Tanakh into Greek, somewhat after the fashion of a modern United Nations-like dynamic translation. In doing all of this, NT writers who are citing the OT as proof of a prophecy fulfillment
sometimes make citations that are inconsistent with the MT readings. But these renderings do not appear to have been inconsistent with the LXX or with their Targum-like personal translations. Nor, it would appear, are these citations by NT writers inconsistent with 1QIsa in the DSS, even though occasionally the NT writer citations of the OT are inconsistent with the MT. So we’ve been wondering why the MT says things that the DSS don’t contain. We think the anti-NT interpretational grid for the MT arose during the 4th century as a response to Constantine’s somewhat anti-Semitic influence on the Jewish Hebrew scholarly community. So we’re relying on 1QIsa over the MT’s Aleppo Text and Codex Leningradensis. To sum up, when we can use a Hebrew MS that is 12 centuries older than the MT, we’ll use it rather than MT.
Good point.
But its kind of a continuum. Seems scientific method needs to get less rigid the closer it gets to studying the actions of intelligent beings. Sociology and psychology are softer sciences than biology which is softer than chemistry and physics. For understanding people, having relationships and using intuition and empathy work better.
Theology is most at the extreme. We can not understand God through science any more than an microscopic organism can understand us through science. However we can have a relationship with Him.
The problem many have with this is that God is more sophisticated than us and out of our control. He refuses to be what we imagine he ought. And He stubbornly persists at being what we can't comprehend. And yet we can "get" Him when we love Him.
I have only seen or read of the "anthropic principle" in terms of an argument used to defend naturalism against the apparent design of this particular universe to produce "observers".
The argument seems completely fallacious to me by the way...but I have a freaky ability with logic and abstraction (got me through college even though I never studied)...so I understand how people could be fooled by it.
Is this where Fred Hoyle was coming from?
bttt
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