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Permalink Reply by Karl on November 7, 2012 at 12:57pm

Forget the inconsistencies in the bible.  I've never understood how seemingly rational adults could believe in magical people living in space.  They even think these people or creatures or whatever they are want to grant them wishes when prayed to.  Really?  Compared to that, some inconsistencies in how Judas died are really trivial. 

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Permalink Reply by Mathew T. on November 7, 2012 at 1:59pm

Great point, Karl - I've actually had one of my theists friends tell me, and I quote: "I know, because I know" (what?!)

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Permalink Reply by lucas ferguson on November 11, 2012 at 11:10pm

While most christians probably just don't think things through properly, I do know one personally who is highly intelligent, well educated and believes in the bible based on (generally speaking) logical and rational reasons. The existence of one makes me think that there are many more like him scattered around.

Reasons he has given previously in response to your points raised above include:

- A reason for conflicting accounts in the gospels is that it was based on eyewitness evidence of the actual events. The exact same thing happens in court cases where multiple people are witnesses to the same event and give different accounts because they have different perspectives.

- You don't need 2 of every single type of animal in the ark. With dogs, for example, you can get multiple breeds of dog from the descendants of a single pair of dogs due to the genetic information they contain. It is possible to get horses, zebras and donkeys from a single pair of ancestors.

- The animals do not need to be full grown. There is no reason you could not have put baby elephants or baby dinosaurs on the ark instead of adult ones. Only about 25% of the space would have been needed for food/water supplies.

Other explanations include:

- Rock layers and fossils formed because of the flood

- Adam and Eve's children intermarried to create the human race

- Evolution can't be true due to irreducible complexity

While I may disagree with many of the things he says, in all honesty I can't fault a lot of the reasoning or science behind it. Not that I am particularly clever.

The thing I have found is that if you start with the assumption that the bible is true, you can reinterpret a surprising number of facts to support this. The fundamental problem with this is that you should instead look at the facts first and then decide what explanation is most likely without prior assumptions (at least as few as possible).

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Permalink Reply by Mathew T. on November 15, 2012 at 11:05am

As always, I pleasure to hear (or read) your thoughts, Lucas.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on November 12, 2012 at 1:26am

Matthew, you're wasting your time.

Let Lucretius, in his On the Nature of Things, point you in another (and perhaps profitable) direction:

Religions are sublime to the ignorant, meaningless to the philosopher, and useful to the politician.

In short, politicians and churchfolk use religion to rob the ignorant.

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Permalink Reply by Mathew T. on November 13, 2012 at 8:50pm

Hahaha yes, Lucretius had many things right, I think. I suppose it's just that I find it so difficult at times to reconcile the cognitive dissonance that I felt for so long, compared with how indifferent many of my churched friends and family remain. If I had had an atheist friend to help me along, I can't imagine how much more smoothly the transition might have gone, and yet I try to get some of these people to examine critically their doubts, and they simply shirk them off and tell me I lack the faith necessary to see the truth; in some cases, I've even been told I was never a real christian, which is why I fell into the lie I believe now. Such a shame.  

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