Buzsaw writes:
yes, human works have been shown to have mistakes, but imo God would see to it that his message is generally accurate.
Um... yeah, sure, except in those cases where He has somehow not seen to it. For example, in your opinion, are the Mormons right, or are they wrong, about recent revelations from God being given to certain American citizens within the last 150 years or so? If they are wrong, why has God not smote (or otherwise squelched) them?
In any case, I don't think "accurate" is the right term for describing biblical text. Accuracy involves providing sufficient detail to forestall misinterpretation, and this attribute is demonstrably lacking in biblical text. (Update: to be more precise: the term does not apply well to the descriptions about creation and the early generations, since they leave rather a lot to the imagination. Another sense of "accuracy" -- excluding and countering misinformation -- is also problematic for portions like the flood and the Tower of Babel, since there is a wealth of firm physical and linguistic evidence that makes these accounts implausible at best, but that's a matter for other threads.)
(If the Mormons are right, we should maybe conclude that God's intervention in human affairs includes making additions to the holy text now and then; indeed there is evidence that this has happened before (adding the NT), and it's plausible that He isn't even done yet and there may be more additions later -- another indication that "accuracy", in the sense of "sufficient detail", was not one of the original "design goals" of the older books...)
The Biblical account begins with the origin of the heavens and the earth, commences to record (and prophecy) all of the major kingdoms of the earth all the way up to the end of this world and creation of new heavens and earth.
Whoa. I've seen some of the stuff you've posted at EvC about prophecy, Buz, and frankly, accuracy is really not a word that comes to mind when I think about it. If your notion of "accuracy" consists of utter vagueness in the text as to times and locations, plus (re)interpretation of nouns by free association (e.g. "bows and arrows" means "anti-aircraft missiles"), then I suppose this does bring us to something of "an impasse" in the discussion: the Bible simply says whatever you think it should say in your opinion, and contravening evidence, in whatever form or amount, simply cannot achieve any "significant falsification." Hey, I'm fine with that -- you're entitled to your opinion -- just don't try to foist it on my kids as part of a science class in public school. (Update: to be clear, I do have a strong Constitutional objection to that.)
Though the opening post in this thread was clearly not addressed to me, I think it makes a good point: perhaps the issues that are most vital to Christian faith do not need to depend crucially on accepting distortions of both science and biblical text for the sake of asserting all of Genesis as a literal record of physical history. If your personal faith depends on that, well, it means that your form of Christianity is different from other people's. So what else is new, eh?
Edited by Otto Tellick, : (moved a quotation mark)
Edited by Otto Tellick, : Added the long parenthesized "Update:..." to the 2nd paragraph.
Edited by Otto Tellick, : minor grammar fix and addition of "(Update:..)" in next-to-last paragraph
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
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