Re: Interpretation (was: How long must we wait?)

David Lee Nidever (dln10@csufresno.edu)
Mon, 23 Dec 1996 03:23:22 -0800 (PST)

When somebody talks about accepting the Bible by faith, child-like faith,
it makes me cringe. Not that I don't think faith is important, sure it
is. But there is a lot more involved in it than that. What if we went
around and started believing a lot of things by faith, child-like faith?
Hey I believe that I'm going to get a racecar for Christmas because I
have faith. Hey I believe that there is planet at the center of our
galaxy and there are people living on it because I have faith.

If we just go around believing whatever, totally irrationally, our
beliefs will unreasonable. We will have a 50/50 change of being right.
But when we talk about our belief in the Bible it's quite different from
the above examples. Yes, we have faith, but we have a lot of good
reasons for that faith. And those reasons are what I am talking about.
Exactly that! We have reasons why we belive the Bible by faith. And
having good reasons for our beliefs is the whole point behind philosophy
and epistemology.

What I was pointing out in my previous post was that we can have just as
good reasons for believing other things are true as the Bible. Science
for example. To really compare science and the Bible we have to look at
our reasons for both. This will bring us down to sensations and
observations. Both are based on our sensations, so at that level they
match up. Then comes verification. We see that what the Bible says
matches up with historical and archaeological observations. We also see
that science matches observations. From that we conclude that science
and the Bible are very close in their trustworthyness.

So faith is important but everybody will agree that we have to have
reasons for our faith. That's where the reasons come in and we can
compare things.

That's the point I wanted to make. I hope it was clearer than last time.

David