From: Debbie Mann (deborahjmann@insightbb.com)
Date: Wed May 21 2003 - 20:52:21 EDT
You do realize that your syllogism in no way discredited God? It only points
to God not having directly provided the extant versions of the Hebrew
writings in their entirety.
You want clear proof. No absolute proof exists. However, that does nothing
to disprove much of anything.
My husband frequently says, "How does anyone have enough faith to be an
atheist? It requires an infinite amount of faith to believe in nothing."
-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
Behalf Of Jim Eisele
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 6:53 PM
To: PASAlist@aol.com
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: The Tower of Babel - Less Confusing
Paul writes
>Culture is not ultimate. I can show you people from all over the world,
from every different culture who have met Jesus. They testify to the same
thing I do: the new personal relationship with God transcends their cultural
religious experience.
Paul, we're not talking about final conclusive proof here.
We're talking evidence. Many cultures have had many
religions with all sorts of "real" religious experience.
Every one thought they were right and the others wrong.
That is strong evidence that Christianity is "just another religious
experience."
For me, when I substituted "understand and dominate" for "God"
my "religious feelings" were exactly the same. It didn't
take a holy spirit to recreate them.
>> Major premise: The Bible/church says God doesn't lie, God is truth, etc.
>> Minor premise: Genesis misrepresents reality to humans (a lie if God were
>> real).
>> Conclusion: Therefore, Genesis is merely human work.
>You have the rough materials here for a logical syllagism. But, this
>reasoning is still not logically sound. You have a term in the conclusion,
"merely
>human work," that you do not have in either of the premises. Consequently,
the
>conclusion is logically invalid, illogical, irrational. Try again.
Well, let's try this:
A work credited to an omnipotent being of truth doesn't misrepresent
reality.
Early Hebrew writing (Genesis) misrepresents reality.
Therefore, early Hebrew writing (Genesis) is not credited to
an omnipotent being of truth.
Also, you ignored my silliness/primitive comment on the fall.
You are a very bright and experienced man, Paul. That will
only take you as far as the evidence does.
Jim
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