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

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

Post #1

Post by otseng »

From the On the Bible being inerrant thread:
nobspeople wrote: Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:42 amHow 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?
otseng wrote: Wed Sep 22, 2021 7:08 am 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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Re: How can we trust the Bible if it's not inerrant?

Post #1411

Post by William »

[Replying to otseng in post #1410]

There is enough evidence to support that this universe is caused by something else, and so the something else can be regarded as 'another universe' from which our own derives. The math alone should convince the doubters who would rather call the idea 'pseudoscience' and of course, there is the other thing...if we exist within a creation, then such implies a creator/creators - so easier to label it 'pseudoscience' than to accept that possibility - as accepting the possibility also gives legs to theistic claims.

However, it also gives one reason to doubt the validity of certain theistic claims to do with the nature of the creator(s) of our universe...and those types tend to want to support Emergent Theory while attempting to superimpose their religious beliefs into that by saying a certain type of God did it.

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

Post #1412

Post by JoeyKnothead »

On fine tuning and design, folks might also find the following informative...

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

Post #1413

Post by otseng »

JoeyKnothead wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 1:58 pm On fine tuning and design, folks might also find the following informative...
I fail to see your point. What are you claiming?

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

Post #1414

Post by otseng »

Image
Pale Blue Dot is a famous photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), as part of that day's Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System.

In the photograph, Earth's apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight reflected by the camera.[1]

Voyager 1, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and take one last photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan.[2] The phrase "Pale Blue Dot" was coined by Sagan in his reflections on the photograph's significance, documented in his 1994 book of the same name.
On Feb. 14, 1990, famed scientist Carl Sagan gave us an incredible perspective on our home planet that had never been seen before.

As NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft was about to leave our Solar System in 1989, Sagan, who was a member of the mission's imaging team, pleaded with officials to turn the camera around to take one last look back at Earth before the spaceship left our solar system.

The resulting image, with the Earth as a speck less than 0.12 pixels in size, became known as "the pale blue dot."

Astronauts had already taken plenty of beautiful photos of our planet at that point, and this grainy, low-resolution snapshot was not one of them.

But instead of beauty, this one-of-a-kind picture showed the immeasurable vastness of space, and our undeniably-small place within it.

Voyager 1 took a series of "family portraits" from nearly 4 billion miles away, before its camera was turned off for good. The spacecraft is now the most-distant human-made object in space at roughly 12 billion miles away, and it takes about 17 hours for it to transmit data back to Earth.
https://www.businessinsider.com/pale-bl ... gan-2016-1

What Sagan later wrote about the pale blue dot:
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner.

How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.

Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
https://www.businessinsider.com/pale-bl ... gan-2016-1
In the now-iconic image, a small, unobtrusive pinprick of light hovers amid a ray of scattered sunlight, appearing cosmically inconsequential. The photo’s legacy is that it has inspired the opposite response: a deep recognition of Earth’s importance, its fragility, its uniqueness.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... e-blue-dot

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

Post #1415

Post by otseng »

The earth is truly unique. Not only do we see design in the fundamental laws of physics, there is also design exhibited for life to exist on our planet. As we learn what is required for life to exist on any planet, we find our earth is special.
In planetary astronomy and astrobiology, the Rare Earth hypothesis argues that the origin of life and the evolution of biological complexity such as sexually reproducing, multicellular organisms on Earth (and, subsequently, human intelligence) required an improbable combination of astrophysical and geological events and circumstances.

According to the hypothesis, complex extraterrestrial life is an improbable phenomenon and likely to be rare throughout the universe as a whole. The term "Rare Earth" originates from Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (2000), a book by Peter Ward, a geologist and paleontologist, and Donald E. Brownlee, an astronomer and astrobiologist, both faculty members at the University of Washington.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis

Some conditions required for any life to exist:

- The right location in the right kind of galaxy
- The right orbital distance from the right type of star
- The right arrangement of planets around the star
- A continuously stable orbit
- A terrestrial planet of the right size
- Plate tectonics
- A large moon
- An atmosphere
- One or more evolutionary triggers for complex life
- The right time in evolutionary history
But, to date, neither an international armada of robotic spacefarers nor alien-seeking scientists have found any evidence of extraterrestrial life. Indeed, while our exploration of the solar system has been nothing short of staggering in terms of the images and scientific data obtained, the worlds we’ve visited beyond Earth all appear to be completely sterile.

Even the most dedicated SETI researcher would have to admit that, at least so far, our efforts to find life elsewhere in the universe have been met with an uncomfortable stony silence.

Ward and Brownlee challenged many widely held notions that supported the idea that complex life is out there waiting to be found. For example, while astronomer Carl Sagan often opined that our Sun is an unremarkable star, in reality, about 80 to 95 percent of stars are significantly different from our own in terms of size, mass, luminosity, lifespan, and many other factors.

Furthermore, prior researchers who had attempted to answer the question of why life on Earth was so plentiful yet so rare in the universe had not included plate tectonics in their thinking at all. Indeed, an entire chapter in Rare Earth is devoted to the topic, going to great lengths to explain the role of plate tectonics in shaping Earth into a good place for life. Earth is, to the best of our knowledge, the only body in the solar system with active plate tectonics. And there are many other features of our life-friendly planet that we haven't seen replicated anywhere else in the universe, too.

With regard to these criticisms, Ward is understanding, encouraging challenges to his ideas. “Good science does a couple of things," he says,"but the most important thing it does is it stimulates other science; good science makes people angry. It makes some people angry enough that they go out and do something about it.”
https://astronomy.com/news/2022/07/rare ... e-universe
There are two ways to test the Rare Earth hypothesis. Both involve the continued search for life beyond our home. Finding either living microbes or their fossils on other worlds would help confirm that single-celled life appears easily and perhaps even frequently on warm worlds with liquid oceans. The second test is the search for advanced alien civilizations. Large telescopes in space would help us part the heavy and mysterious curtain of uncertainty.

"Far from any of us being common creatures in the lush of common landscapes, we are each of us an anomaly. What seems everyday to us is a treasure in the cosmic web. Our planet’s oceans glimmer like jewels. Its colors are the colors of riches we won’t find anywhere else. This does mean that we are alone — alone in our extraordinary existence."

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

Post #1416

Post by brunumb »

otseng wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 6:59 am Some conditions required for any life to exist:

- The right location in the right kind of galaxy
- The right orbital distance from the right type of star
- The right arrangement of planets around the star
- A continuously stable orbit
- A terrestrial planet of the right size
- Plate tectonics
- A large moon
- An atmosphere
- One or more evolutionary triggers for complex life
- The right time in evolutionary history
What is your basis for saying that Earth is truly unique in regard to those conditions?

Our galaxy has some 200 billion stars that we know almost nothing about. Then there are at least 200 billion more galaxies in the universe we are able to observe and we know even less about them. With trillions of planets out there and everything constructed from the same limited number of elements all governed by the same laws of chemistry and physics, it's hard to reach the conclusion that Earth must be unique.

P.S. Why is plate tectonics important?
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Re: How can we trust the Bible if it's not inerrant?

Post #1417

Post by otseng »

brunumb wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 6:51 pm What is your basis for saying that Earth is truly unique in regard to those conditions?
It has nothing to do with my basis of the claims. I'm simply summarizing what the authors of the Rare Earth hypothesis claims. I provided the link above which discusses more in detail of all the factors, but here it is again. Note, I do not agree with all of their points, but I do agree with the main thrust of their arguments that the earth is special and uniquely suited for life to exist.
With trillions of planets out there and everything constructed from the same limited number of elements all governed by the same laws of chemistry and physics, it's hard to reach the conclusion that Earth must be unique.
Well, I can also claim that since so many people believe in a God, it's hard to believe that God does not exist. Because it's hard for someone to believe something does not necessarily mean it cannot be true.

We can look at it from another viewpoint. Do you believe life does exist on other planets?

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

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

Post #1419

Post by brunumb »

otseng wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 7:54 pm Well, I can also claim that since so many people believe in a God, it's hard to believe that God does not exist. Because it's hard for someone to believe something does not necessarily mean it cannot be true.
The difference is that we have an awful lot of hard evidence for stars, planets, what the universe is made from and how life functions. Not so much for any gods.
otseng wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 7:54 pm We can look at it from another viewpoint. Do you believe life does exist on other planets?
I am pretty confident that there are forms of life elsewhere in the universe. Not necessarily intelligent life such as human beings, but life covers an incredibly diverse range of organisms able to occupy all sorts of environments here on Earth. To me there are surely countless suitable environments for life to have evolved out there given the scale of the universe and the time frame involved.
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Re: How can we trust the Bible if it's not inerrant?

Post #1420

Post by otseng »

brunumb wrote: Wed Oct 05, 2022 1:02 am The difference is that we have an awful lot of hard evidence for stars, planets, what the universe is made from and how life functions. Not so much for any gods.
Just in the discussion on cosmology alone, the evidence to me is overwhelming for the existence of a creator/designer. And as we learn more about physics and biology, we find the conditions for life is quite rare and special. To the point now that as we've seen even scientists have to resort to extranatural explanations.
I am pretty confident that there are forms of life elsewhere in the universe.
Of course my next question is what evidence do you have to support that life exists elsewhere?

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