Job 32-34

[wolfpurplemoon]

Just read an appropriate post at Pharyngula: The idea that the Bible should be interpreted as a metaphor is a good one — because it melts the superstition away.. I guess I need to stop trying to take every word of the bible literally, not that I know how else to take it.

Elihu was showing respect for his elders by just listening while they squabbled, but now they've reached a dead end in their discussion he's decided to let them know he thinks their arguments were flawed. He is very sure that he knows better than them.

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Explaining why history cannot report miracles gets us rapidly into epistemology and philosophy, but I'm going to try to summarize.

I'm limited. I have two or three pounds of hamburger called my brain to process what some sensory capabilities more or less adequately tell me about my environment. I can observe patterns and call repetitive patterns "rules" and use those rules to predict future events. In over fifty years of personal observation, for example, the sun has appeared to rise in the east every morning. Some mornings have been too overcast for me to see the sun, but I am sure that it was there nonetheless - my rule says it rises every morning. That rule helped me learn about our solar system, and how gravity works, and how planets move around their suns in elliptical orbits, and that our planet is travelling about a hundred thousand kilometer per hour to maintain its orbital equilibrium.

Now, I read a story that an ancient general commanded the sun to stop so that he could slaughter his enemies, and it did.

Which do you suppose is more likely, that all of the observed rules about our environment can be suspended at the command of a general, or that this story is false, that storytellers exaggerated, that the tale grew in the telling?

If the first is true, then we can know nothing. We can predict nothing. The sun might rise tomorrow, or someone might command it to stop. We might orbit the sun at 107,300 km/h, or maybe we'll put the hammer down and start orbiting at 300,000 km/h. Gravity might work, or maybe not. We have no patterns, no basis for rules, and no knowedge. The ballistics needed to launch artillery or get to the moon are false.

If miracles are part of how we know what we know, then we are ignorant savages cowering in our cold caves from the dreaded lightening god.

In Part Three: History is never the last word.

[vequenor.livejournal.com]

True, and it would be unfortunate if an essentially epistemological discussion actually got around to epistemology.

I would be very surprised if your few pounds of hamburger told you all of this by observation, and did not rely on anyone else's hamburger in the process.

Where on earth did you read that? Joshua 10:12 records a prayer to God in which it is requested in imerative form that the sun be stopped.

When dealing with likelihood, it is always best to take the broadest possible view of the odds. As such, the question would seem to be whether or not it is likely that the universe functions with or without a supernatural being of some sort that would be capable of playing with reality as it saw fit. As that it is highly, highly improbable that the universe came into existence without such a being, it seems somewhat more likely that such a being exists. As such, it seems likely that such an event would be possible. As to whether or not the book of Joshua is historically accurate is another thing altogether, and, quite frankly, beside issue of Luke entirely.

Forgive me, but we really can't know anything anyway. Everyone simply assumes that what their three pounds of hamburger interprets from supposed external stimuli is accurate. Everything anyone knows is based on an assumption that seems fairly poorly supported. Forgive me, that was epistemic. In any case, it would still be quite possible to know things even if such a being that could control human-produced laws of physics. A suspendable system is not necesarily a false one.

Odd...none of the theists I know cower in caves. Again with the fantastic and ill-supported statements!