How can we trust the Bible if it's not inerrant?

[otseng]

From the On the Bible being inerrant thread:

How can you trust something that's written about god that contradictory, contains errors and just plain wrong at times? Is there a logical way to do so, or do you just want it to be god's word so much that you overlook these things like happens so often through the history of christianity?

The Bible can still be God's word, inspired, authoritative, and trustworthy without the need to believe in inerrancy.

For debate:
How can the Bible be considered authoritative and inspired without the need to believe in the doctrine of inerrancy?

While debating, do not simply state verses to say the Bible is inspired or trustworthy.

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Thread Milestones

• Case study of Hezekiah
• Start discussing global flood / Flood Model summary
• Recap arguments of authority of the Bible
• Start discussing Tower of Babel / Tower of Babel summary
• Start discussing archaeology / Philosophy of science / Origin of alphabet / End of discussion on archaeology
• Start discussing cosmology / Concluding cosmology
• Start discussing Shroud of Turin / Summary top TS imaging theories / Created DefendingChristianity.com and TS subforums / Shroud of Turin summary
• Start discussing Bible and resurrection
• Start discussing the Messiahship of Jesus / Messiahship of Jesus wrap up
• Start discussing Old Testament ethics
• Summary argument of atheism and morality / God basis for objective morality
• Start discussing genocide / Genocide summary argument
• Start discussing slavery / Slavery summary argument
• Start discussing homosexuality / Homosexuality summary argument
• Old Testament ethics summary argument

[otseng]

Maybe this is why the thread’s over 130 pages long.

I think the primary reason is because there is an abundance of evidence to support the trustworthiness of the Bible. As a matter of fact, I've had to hold back in each subject we've covered otherwise we'd spend forever in each area.

It could also be due to a deep need to defend one's religious text, no matter how illogical, sense assaulting, and unscientific that text may be.

As evidenced in this thread, it's more the opposite. Skeptics have to resort to beliefs unsupported by evidence. And we'll continue to see that as we discuss cosmology.

[JoeyKnothead]

Maybe this is why the thread’s over 130 pages long.

I think the primary reason is because there is an abundance of evidence to support the trustworthiness of the Bible. As a matter of fact, I've had to hold back in each subject we've covered otherwise we'd spend forever in each area.

It could also be due to a deep need to defend one's religious text, no matter how illogical, sense assaulting, and unscientific that text may be.

As evidenced in this thread, it's more the opposite. Skeptics have to resort to beliefs unsupported by evidence. And we'll continue to see that as we discuss cosmology.

Cause we all know the breeding of humans and gods can create viable, hybrid offspring?

Cause we all know a planetary flood can leave critters to navigate vast distances back to where their own fossil ancestors just happened to've drowned?

Cause we all know the dead rise after em being three days of it?

While I grant that we're all left to trust our own perceptions, and our own conclusions thereof, I find your comment here dismissive of the reams and volumes of data that directly refute biblical claims.

[otseng]

Cause we all know the dead rise after em being three days of it?

I promise you we'll get to this later.

While I grant that we're all left to trust our own perceptions, and our own conclusions thereof, I find your comment here dismissive of the reams and volumes of data that directly refute biblical claims.

We've covered many topics in the past 140 pages that affirm the claims of the Bible, such as:
- Assyrian siege on Jerusalem
- Global flood
- Origin of languages and tower of Babel
- Archaeology and Egyptology
- And now cosmology

The supposed volumes of data to counter the Bible I've found to be quite minimal. Case in point is the area of cosmology that we're discussing now. Many claims are made that have no empirical evidence to support them - not being at the center of the universe, curved wrapped topology of the universe, inflation theory, multiverse, et al.

[William]

[Replying to otseng in post #1400]

But, reasoning alone cannot lead to a full understanding of YVHV In addition to reason, we also need evidence. We'll never have enough evidence to conclusively prove anything, but it should be at least enough to determine what is the most reasonable explanation to choose from.

Essentially you appear to be arguing that having a full understanding of YVHV cannot be obtained while being human in this environment [the Universe].
The most reasonable explanation re the existence of the bible, is that it relates biographies about individuals who apparently had enough to go on in their subjective experience to have developed relationship with YVHV.

Their understanding of YVHV - re you comment - would not have been complete. But adequate to the task at hand, re their position in linear spacetime/creation/simulation.

Or one can take the pieces which constitute the whole scope of religions and from those, form a picture which shows altogether what no religion alone is able to show, that way avoiding confirmation bias.

In a sense I agree. But the parts taken from all religions must form a cohesive and consistent belief.

It doesn't stop there either. There is also the existence of non-religious materials such as OOBEs, NDEs - a great deal of information-threads which can be woven together to produce a coherent garment of many 'colors' which is evident of their being a mind - for the most part - quietly involved in the unfolding process of the Simulation experience.

Christianity is a fractured entity in regard to the many different denominations and interpretations of the Bible and not the greatest example to be pointing to re truthfulness and reliability so it pays to be careful not to conflate and to test all things before declaring - with evidence - the truthfulness of anything.

Just because something has a multitude of viewpoints does not automatically invalidate the source.

Just because there is a source doesn't validate a fractured entity. The fractures [re all theological beliefs] are still threads which altogether can give a far better picture of what is actually going on than any one of the threads alone is able to do.

We can even go up a level and say that all religions are fractured, therefore there's no truthfulness in the concept of God. Or there's fracture in politics, therefore politics is suspect. Or historians are fractured, so all history is suspect.

We could, but I wouldn't and am not arguing that we should.

Trusting the Bible is one thing. Understanding the nature of a Living Creator{s} a whole other thing.

Of course. To be clear, I'm not claiming the Bible is YVHV. The Bible is a way for us to know about YVHV.

Knowing about someone is not the same thing as knowing someone.

Now with the Bible we have stories - especially in the OT - which speak of the Nature of YHWH.
I think it reasonable to compare those stories with nature itself - with the artifacts of nature which YHWH is claimed to have created, as an indication of the creator's nature.

And this is the approach I've been taking in this entire thread. What we observe in nature must be consistent with what is written in the Bible.

My approach is different. What we observe in the Bible as to the nature of YVHV must be consistent with Nature/Creation/Simulation.

This because, Nature is measurable and we have relationship with it.
Biblical biographies are second-hand at the most, and are examples of those it is claimed had relationship with YVHV. Those claims have to stack up with what is observed in nature, not the other way around.

The Bible - with all its stories - certainly points to it being the case that we exist within a created simulation.

Depends on what you mean by simulation. You mean we do not actually exist?

No. How could we experience a simulation if we did not actually exist to experience it?

If we exist within a created thing, then the created thing must have to be a simulation.

If it is a real thing, then there is no requirement to call it a created thing unless in doing so one is saying it is a simulation.

This because, there is no difference between something which has been created and experienced as real, and a simulation which is experienced as real, as far as any evidence goes.
I am certainly open to viewing any evidence/hearing any logical argument which supports that a supposed real created universe is demonstrably different from a supposed real simulated universe.

Otherwise bushes which speak and which appear to be burning but are not, and other miraculous happenings are not so easy to explain other than with the vague gap-filler word "supernatural" and since the Bible itself doesn't contain the word, it is best to examine what word the Bible does use, to which the word 'supernatural" is substituting, even if just to see if there is any true correlation.

The reason the word supernatural is not in the Bible was there was no such distinction between the natural and the supernatural in the minds of the authors. To them, it was all just reality.

More than this.

To them, reality was a created thing. The creator of the created thing was called YVHV [among other titles et al]
They were alleged to have experienced things [which you say they did not distinguish as being non-ordinary] and here in our time, the non-ordinary is referred to as "Supernatural" - apparently because we are better at distinguishing what is and is not ordinary?

If we exist within a creation and non ordinary things occur, there is no need to think of those things as being 'supernatural occurrences' when the better explanation is that saying that we are existing within a creation is the same as saying we are existing within a simulation and therefore such things as mentioned - although not ordinary - are nonetheless natural enough that they are experienced as real in that context.

[otseng]

[Replying to William in post #1408]

It's going a bit off topic, so need to get back to discussing cosmology...

[otseng]

More on design found in the universe...

Today, our deepest understanding of the laws of nature is summarized in a set of equations. Using these equations, we can make very precise calculations of the most elementary physical phenomena, calculations that are confirmed by experimental evidence. But to make these predictions, we have to plug in some numbers that cannot themselves be calculated but are derived from measurements of some of the most basic features of the physical universe. These numbers specify such crucial quantities as the masses of fundamental particles and the strengths of their mutual interactions. After extensive experiments under all manner of conditions, physicists have found that these numbers appear not to change in different times and places, so they are called the fundamental constants of nature.

Since physicists have not discovered a deep underlying reason for why these constants are what they are, we might well ask the seemingly simple question: What if they were different? What would happen in a hypothetical universe in which the fundamental constants of nature had other values?

There is nothing mathematically wrong with these hypothetical universes. But there is one thing that they almost always lack — life. Or, indeed, anything remotely resembling life. Or even the complexity upon which life relies to store information, gather nutrients, and reproduce. A universe that has just small tweaks in the fundamental constants might not have any of the chemical bonds that give us molecules, so say farewell to DNA, and also to rocks, water, and planets. Other tweaks could make the formation of stars or even atoms impossible. And with some values for the physical constants, the universe would have flickered out of existence in a fraction of a second. That the constants are all arranged in what is, mathematically speaking, the very improbable combination that makes our grand, complex, life-bearing universe possible is what physicists mean when they talk about the “fine-tuning” of the universe for life.

The universe we happen to have is so surprising under the Standard Model because the fundamental particles of which atoms are composed are, in the words of cosmologist Leonard Susskind, “absurdly light.” Compared to the range of possible masses that the particles described by the Standard Model could have, the range that avoids these kinds of complexity-obliterating disasters is extremely small. Imagine a huge chalkboard, with each point on the board representing a possible value for the up and down quark masses. If we wanted to color the parts of the board that support the chemistry that underpins life, and have our handiwork visible to the human eye, the chalkboard would have to be about ten light years (a hundred trillion kilometers) high.

Another approach to the fine-tuning problem comes from the discipline of cosmology, the study of the origins and structure of the universe.

Some of our theories of the very earliest states of our cosmos may imply that we live in a large, variegated “multiverse.” Further, some theories that extend the Standard Model show how the constants could be shuffled in the early universe. But the physics of the multiverse hypothesis is speculative, as is its extrapolation to the universe as a whole. And there is no hope of direct observations to verify these ideas and help turn them into mature scientific theories.

Is this science? On the one hand, multiverse hypotheses are physical theories that make predictions about our universe, namely, about the constants of nature. These constants are exactly where our current theories run out of ideas, so coming up with a theory that would predict them, even as a statistical ensemble, would be an impressive achievement. On the other hand, the main selling point for multiverse theory — all those other universes with different fundamental constants — will forever remain beyond observational confirmation.

Naturalism is not the only game in town when it comes to explaining why some law of nature might be the ultimate one. Its competitors include axiarchism, the view that moral value, such as the goodness of embodied, free, conscious moral agents like us, can explain the existence of one kind of universe rather than another; or, in the words of John Leslie, the theory’s chief proponent, it is “the theory that the world exists because it should.” Theism is another alternative, according to which God designed the universe and its fundamental laws and constants. These two views can trim the list of candidate explanations of the fundamental laws of nature, heavily favoring those possible universes that permit the existence of valuable life forms like us. By suggesting that fundamental physical principles are calibrated to make the existence of beings like us possible, investigations into fine-tuning seem to lend support to these kinds of theories. A full appraisal of their merits would also need to consider their relative simplicity, and other aspects of human existence, such as goodness, beauty, and suffering.

Facts can be special to a theory. That is, they can be special because of what we can infer from them. Fine-tuning shows that life could be extraordinarily special in this sense. Our universe’s ability to create and sustain life is rare indeed; a highly explainable but as yet unexplained fact. It could point the way to deeper physics, or beyond this universe, or even to principles beyond the ultimate laws of nature.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicat ... tures-laws

[William]

[Replying to William in post #1408]

It's going a bit off topic, so need to get back to discussing cosmology...

Too soon?

[otseng]

The fine-structure constant is another example of fine-tuning and design:

In physics, the fine-structure constant, also known as Sommerfeld's constant, commonly denoted by α (the Greek letter alpha), is a fundamental physical constant which quantifies the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between elementary charged particles.

The definition of α in terms of other fundamental physical constants is:

where:
e is the elementary charge (= 1.602176634×10−19 C);
h is the Planck constant (= 6.62607015×10−34 J⋅s );
c is the speed of light in vacuum (= 299792458 m/s);
ε0 is the electric constant or permittivity in vacuum or free space.

In the early 21st century, multiple physicists, including Stephen Hawking in his book A Brief History of Time, began exploring the idea of a multiverse, and the fine-structure constant was one of several universal constants that suggested the idea of a fine-tuned universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant

Richard Feynman, one of the originators and early developers of the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), referred to the fine-structure constant in these terms:

There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e – the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.)

Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by humans. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed His pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out – without putting it in secretly!
— Richard P. Feynman (1985). QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton University Press. p. 129. ISBN 978-0-691-08388-9.

"When I die my first question to the Devil will be: What is the meaning of the fine structure constant?"
~ Wolfgang Pauli

[otseng]

Another example of fine-tuning is the Penrose number:

According to Penrose, universes “resembling the one in which we live” populate only one part in 10^10^123 of the available phase space volume.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/



More quotes on the fine-tuning in the universe:

Physicist Paul Davies has said, "There is now broad agreement among physicists and cosmologists that the Universe is in several respects ‘fine-tuned' for life". However, he continued, "the conclusion is not so much that the Universe is fine-tuned for life; rather it is fine-tuned for the building blocks and environments that life requires."

Stephen Hawking has noted, "The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. ... The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life."

"One reaction to these apparent enormous coincidences is to see them as substantiating the theistic claim that the universe has been created by a personal God and as offering the material for a properly restrained theistic argument – hence the fine-tuning argument. It's as if there are a large number of dials that have to be tuned to within extremely narrow limits for life to be possible in our universe. It is extremely unlikely that this should happen by chance, but much more likely that this should happen, if there is such a person as God."
— Alvin Plantinga

Theoretical physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne has stated: "Anthropic fine tuning is too remarkable to be dismissed as just a happy accident."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe

“As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency—or, rather, Agency—must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?”
– George Greenstein, The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos (1988), 27. Quoted at Today in Science.

https://mindmatters.ai/2022/08/how-fine ... d-boggles/

[otseng]

To account for fine-tuning, scientists have broached their own principle of naturalism and invoked the extranatural explanation of the multiverse.

“We cannot explain all the features of our universe if there’s only one of them,” says science journalist Tom Siegfried, whose book The Number of the Heavens investigates how conceptions of the multiverse have evolved over millennia.

“Why are the fundamental constants of nature what they are?” Siegfried wonders. “Why is there enough time in our universe to make stars and planets? Why do stars shine the way they do, with just the right amount of energy? All of those things are questions we don’t have answers for in our physical theories.”

“Our understanding of reality is not complete, by far,” says Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde. “Reality exists independently of us.”

If they exist, those universes are separated from ours, unreachable and undetectable by any direct measurement (at least so far). And that makes some experts question whether the search for a multiverse can ever be truly scientific.

Even though certain features of the universe seem to require the existence of a multiverse, nothing has been directly observed that suggests it actually exists. So far, the evidence supporting the idea of a multiverse is purely theoretical, and in some cases, philosophical.

Scientists argue about whether the multiverse is even an empirically testable theory; some would say no, given that by definition a multiverse is independent from our own universe and impossible to access. But perhaps we just haven’t figured out the right test.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... multiverse

The theory of the multiverse has seductively great explanatory power (while it has almost no predictive power), which is a major reason why many physicists and cosmologists find it attractive. On the other hand, other physicists dismiss it as pseudoscience because it is practically untestable.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmology-theology/

As Richard Swinburne sees it, “To postulate a trillion trillion other universes, rather than one God in order to explain the orderliness of our universe, seems the height of irrationality”

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmology-theology/