What constitutes evidence?

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But does it DISprove anything? It's not unknown that Egyptian writings tended to always present the Pharaoh in the most favorable light possible. After all, the Pharaoh was considered by his subjects to be a deity above all others. The Israelite incident was a tremendous embarrassment and so would have been left out of the books. Nobody would be surprised by that. The instructions regarding the Israelites was to displace the Canaanites as quickly as possible and use what they left behind. Even the Bible records that the Israelites did not forcibly remove all the Canaanites as they'd been instructed and indeed adopted many of their practices. Your archeological evidence merely confirms this, that's all, i.e. there wouldn't have even been overwhelming evidence of conquest anyway.

Other records such as palace records, temple records, etc., would have been destroyed with Jerusalem prior to the exile. There's all sorts of evidence understandably lost to the ravages of time. You want to believe the evidence that supposedly stands against the Bible, but simultaneously you overlook that the evidence could have been tampered with.

You assert the bible is an eyewitness account. You want to talk about court standard. Now there is a more contemporary and serious account that contradicts yours. There is material evident supporting the later. And you just want to conveniently dismiss those contradicting your favorite as lying and 'hope' for future evident? That is pathetic.

Again you proved that the bible is nothing but a bunch of nonsense gibberish that can be 'interpreted' any way you like.

I tend to disagree. Apart from some ridiculous post modernist standpoint of what is truth, it is fairly evident that much of what is in the bible is nonsense, from a historical and scientific perspective it just does not add up. Some parts of it most certainly address historical events, but the embellishments on the known events put the scriptures well into the realm of fantasy. The BIble as a work of 'man' allows scholars to compare events as portrayed in the bible with geological, archeological, historical evidence. As far as I know, on every occasion where there is other evidence for biblical stories the bible is shown to be less than accurate.

God is about faith, the Bible as far as folk tale can be tested, fails on the evidence available. If a person chooses to brush aside the evidence and continue to 'believe' the folk tale, then they are willfully ignorant.

Modern Christians conveniently ignore the fact that Jesus was an Jew who thought the 'Law" should be obeyed, they ignore the fact that all the references in the bible refer to Jewish Law, they ignore the contradictions between the beliefs and understandings of the original and contemporary Christians. WOrst of all they ignore the almost fact that much of what is in the New Testament has either wrongly attributed authorship at best or is a down right forgery.

It wouldn't just be embarrassing, it would be the most significant event in the history of Egypt. These people were believed to be more literate than the Israelites. They also carved stories in stone and private citizens filled their tomb walls with this kind of stuff. Even some believers who want the story to be true admit the numbers are impossible.

I could go into detail but you wouldn't really listen. Honestly evaluating the bible isn't in your nature. You are free to spend your life making excuses for it but I have no idea why you would do that. You can believe the bible is inspired without clinging to every single story.

Last edited by simon_says on 02 May 2014, 6:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

The ALMOST fact? If we were to assume it was a 100% full-on FACT, then where's the evidence?

But what if an honest evaluation of the Bible actually contradicts what you believe about it? Did it ever occur to anyone that perhaps the Bible might actually be correct?

Am I ONLY supposed to question the Bible? Should I not also be skeptical of the opposite claims? Or are the "material" claims against the Bible some sacred cows that don't deserve to be questioned?

The reason the Bible is such a sticky book - it works, which is something reductive materialists will never understand. It doesn't need to be historically true in the slightest to do so however.

You like to bring my posting history into current discussions, so I'll apologize in advance for the tit-for-tat; at this point I think perhaps it's only fair.

You have a history of reducing EVERYTHING to "gibberish" as though language has no meaning whatsoever. Not only that, but you're selective about it. I could just as easily do the same thing with every single thing you say. In fact, I could do the same thing with everything EVERYONE on here says who disagrees with me. The problem is that if language is meaningless, then it doesn't matter if I say it, or simon_says says it, or DentArthurDent says it, or even if you say it, then we are all EQUALLY WRONG--or as some have put it "not even wrong"--and even discussing these things is totally pointless and a complete waste of time.

I find the particular condescending style that simon_says in writing to be abrasive and somewhat annoying. I find Dent somewhat over-the-top at times. I'm sure my own style can just as frequently grate on nerves. But AT LEAST there is some underlying meaning to what they say that I can converse with them. We may not agree. We may even be committed to disagreeing. But we can at least discuss and/or argue the topic with a degree of honesty and maturity.

But calling "gibberish" on every single thing you don't like is neither honest nor mature. There is no response to that besides a like response, which serves no purpose other than derailing the discussion, and by even trying to respond I'm only wasting time. Say what you like. But understand from this point forward I will no longer read your posts nor respond to them.

But that's not how it's working out. Today, thanks to the discovery the ancient writings of the Israelite's neighbors we can see the influences. Older stories from the Canaanite and Mesopotamian civilizations that were modified and included in the bible. Modern science shows the "scientific" claims are far from right. Add in the archeological evidence and the bible is simply not accurate in any literal sense.

A believer, imo, is better off seeing the bible as symbolism, lessons, poetic language and religious polemics with some sprinkling of history. If you teach a curious kid that it's 100% accurate and he goes and finds the bible deconstructed in detail, it's going to be quite a shock.



Scientology is claimed to work too. As is Mormonism. That doesn't mean there were Jews in ancient North America or that Xenu ruled the universe trillions of years ago.

There is plenty of evidence that the authorship of large portions of the gospels is forged or at best wrongly attributed. I say "almost" because we can never actually know for sure, but the contradictions, differences in writing styles, language used I.E Greek, Aramaic or Hebrew, known educational levels of classes of the population and much more tell scholars what is likely to be genuine and what is not. This is why I posted the debate between Ehrman and Craig, more specifically I posted it for Ehrman's explanation of what constitutes historical evidence, and by this widely accepted standard, a great deal of the new testament has dubious authorship.

The question of what constitutes evidence was answered 266 years ago by David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in 1748, and reaffirmed 80 years ago by his most famous adherent - Karl Popper - in Logik der Forschung from 1934.

Why do we persist with discussions on a subject that - with the most restrictive definition - has been settled for 8 decades?

I'd guess because people do not know of these answers, or do not find them satisfactory.

If I were to be a wee bit cynical, I would say that we want a definition of evidence that best suits our present beliefs, whatever form they may take.

Work in terms of producing preternatural effect, not from the standpoint of any literal alignment with history.

On the more recent examples cited we thankfully don't have a massive book burning to cleanse history so we know who L Ron Hubbard was and that its probably something he came up with while he was watching his 'Antichrist and Babalon' (if they say so....) roommates ritual shag. Mormonism, as I've heard from Mormons intrepid enough to research it, was codification of 1840's Freemasonry into a religion as they were deeply concerned that anti-Masonic sentiment would stamp the organization out and believing in the value of their corpus they wanted it protected under the auspices of the Constitution. Whether or not a serious Masonic scholar did find deal-breaking evidence of Jewish tribes in the US and that evidence went to directly to the Kleptonian Institute who knows. We just have our evidence or lack thereof available and it's a pretty wild claim.

OT is much older but a patriotic nation-refounding work from the pens of Ezra and Cyrus the Great, from the high levels of Sumerian content and only fragments of Egyptian mystery religion, schematically fits which strongly suggests the Torah's authorship around that time. Full OT came together with Ptolemy's interest, including Ezekiel's great astrological treatise, and hence we have the Greek Septuagint. New testament seems to be a mesh of Jewish Messianic ideology, Neoplatonism (most notably in John), and Christian Gnosticism complete with Manichean pessimism in the case of the so called Apocalypse of John or Book of Revelations.


I personally would not side with either 'Bible's fully inerant and historical!' nor would I side with 'It's pure stone-age rubbish!'. It's really a litany of rather Jungian-style insights from that whole region during that time frame, largely buried under exaggerated threats of judgment to their enemies, and in that sense it's a treasure trove of beliefs and 'pagan wisdom' from that time period for those who know how to pick the locks.

As for preternatural effect - I have to defer to Eliphas Levi's 'Paradoxes of the Highest Science' - chapter 1 has it neatly in a four word title 'Religion is Magic Sanctioned'. Reza Azlan said something that made a lot of sense as well - the line of demarcation between Jesus of Nazareth and the Cosmic Christ was the stoning of Steven. In other words that was likely the point where the Jewish Messiah became a Hellenistic face of the macrocosm. Paul's vision on the road to Damascus further served to amplify that transition and the Gospel of John properly tacked it down as here to stay. It's difficult to tell for certain whether massive deity-sized miracles started occurring in Jesus name after he departure and got back-filled or if there very well may have been something to suggest that he had resurrected. Seems like James had a very different vision of his brother's mission than Paul did. Clearly James would have known the historical Jesus infinitely better, but that didn't seem to have all that heavy of an impact that the Jesus people meet today either in art or in visions, know, and love, is very much the Cosmic Christ of Paul and John.

That last part at least seems to suggest that the universe really is a mirror held up to us and even if we may not fully create our own gods and goddesses at a minimum we flesh out their characteristics in a lot of ways. The transformation of Isis as well from Egyptian to dead-ringer look alike for Mother Mary has also been an interesting one.

Genesis shows common descent of all those civilizations. The similarities could also point to a common tradition. Could it not be possible that the Israelite version is the best-preserved version?


In one sense or another, could it not be 100% accurate? Yes, the Bible is all of those things, and we don't disagree on this. Why not rather say it's 100% accurate in terms of what it IS? Can a psalm not just be a psalm? Can a proverb not just be a riddle? This one particularly fascinates me because critics point to certain proverbs as being paradoxical or contradictory, which completely ignores what proverbs are by definition. Can numbers that are plainly rounded off be rounded numbers? Can laws not just be laws? Can religious "polemics" not just be religious polemics? Can histories not be histories? If you look at it that way, the Bible IS 100% accurate.