mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate) (06/04/85)
In article <27500076@ISM780B.UUCP> Jim Balter writes: >>I really don't see what you mean by your response to this last point. >>For me, the Bible is the Word of God, and is therefore absolute. The >>truths presented therein are absolute truths. God can't make mistakes. >The statement that the Bible is the word of God is a hypothesis, and, it >seems to me, a pretty poor one. While God as you no doubt define him >cannot make mistakes, you certainly can. You can be mistaken in everything >you believe about him (scientists are already well aware of their >capability of being mistaken, so it is pointless to throw this one back). >To claim that you know an absolute truth when you see one is, like most >so-called faith, the height of arrogance. If you were to couch everything >you say within "I suspect ... because ...", you might get a sense of what >science and philosophy are about. In the meantime, for the sake of >everyone else, please keep out of net.philosophy any beliefs which you are >not prepared to subject to analysis. While I disagree with the article Jim Balter quotes, he is attacking it on the wrong grounds. He has skipped over the really important question completely: what does "the Word of God" mean? The passage he quotes jumps blindly into the assertion that we can equate the phrase with the statement that "The Bible was inerrantly passed down from a source inerrantly produced from some sort of dictation from an omniscient god who never lies." Now that's quite a definition. I happen to think that it's wrong, if only because the manuscripts that we have disprove it by their disagreements. But one can knock a lot of words out of that definition: "The Bible was passed down from various sources written upon the inspiration (whatever that means) of an omniscient God who never lies." You can't even begin to talk about demonstration until you've decided what you mean by the "Word of God". Deciding what the language means is most definitely the proper pursuit of philosophy, particularly that branch called theology. Charley Wingate umcp-cs!mangoe