J.W org and Noah's Flood

by Phizzy 15 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  PetrW

  @nicolaou

  You are right in one sense that it is a myth. But if it is a myth, then they are not scientifically verifiable claims. Then it's problematic to have an argument with those statements.

  On the other hand, if the author(s) of Genesis were working with the idea that Creation or the Flood was God's work, that God Almighty was behind it, then they didn't have to go into the details that we would welcome today. Example: the Hebrew "yom" => "day" appears about 2500 times in the Hebrew Bible. It has a wide semantic range, so "yom" can mean a few hours out of a 24 hour day (the light part of the day), up to an indefinite period of time e.g. in eschatological statements about Yahweh's day...

  Creation in 6 days, then, could have lasted 24 hours, or thousands of years, or at the beginning of billions of years, and in the last day, maybe only 12 hours. Similarly, the flood of the world: passages from e.g. Genesis 7 speak of a planet-wide flood, but the text from Gen 2:10-14 suggests that the Euphrates River, for example, was re-identifiable after the flood, that its bed or direction of flow did not change. This raises the question of how big the flood was and what part of the planet it flooded, and what happened on the rest of the planet if it was a regional flood... to one who sees God behind the events, these details are irrelevant: the flood happened as described, and if the flood happened only as a local event, then it does not change the Bible's account. The really tricky part is the question of God's justice (why there was a flood in the first place, and why life went on)...

  But of course science cannot consider the influence of God on world events. Especially natural sciences are based on experiment and if such experiment is not possible (astrophysics), then there are theoretical models that are then tested. Scientific theories are then supposed to be open to falsification (and in human terms, verification), so science itself affirms that it is not, does not want to be, and is not meant to be dogmatic. And rightly so.

  The conflict between the Bible and science, then, is resolved by believers more or less well, by the person of God.

  Personally, I think the arguments against, or more accurately: the arguments that do not affirm Creation, are very rational, indeed most scientists, adhere to the principles of the philosophy of science, theories of truth, etc. The competing model that the Bible describes is only slightly better. The very small, slight difference, is made up precisely because God is behind it. A biblical, religious text, without God, will not stand up to science. It becomes a myth, a legend. But this, on the other hand, says that against such a myth, serious science does not have to define itself. Science does not criticize, for example, the cosmogonic ideas of Hesiod in his Theogonies...
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  PetrW

  @Big Dog

  Doubts about why God did not restore the earth after the flood, I had those too. But only as one of many arguments against Almighty God. I was looking for an answer to the death of Jesus. What parent lets their child be killed in front of their eyes when they have the power or means to prevent it...?

  The answer is the criticism of the JWs, and other Christian churches, for not having resolved the theodicy issue. Or they have only resolved it to the level that God allows evil or that evil is to educate us to value good or that Satan is here or that we just don't know. These and other answers do provide some answer for some situation or personal life, but they certainly cannot be generalized (as e.g. JWs do) because it is unethical, without respect for the victims of e.g. the Holocaust, but also natural disasters, etc.

  The unresolved role of God and evil in the world is, in my opinion, the strongest argument for atheism/agnosticism ever. If someone has reached this point, and rejects the existence of God, for these reasons, I don't blame them at all...

  However, I think that the question of the relationship between God and evil, has an answer, has a solution.
  
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  Big Dog

  @ PetrW

  Yes, the flood account was just one of many issues that I had over the years while growing up in the Borg. As I got older the theological issues multiplied until I had quite a bill of particulars. The issues with the WTBS were in my mind separate and distinct from the theological issues and those got to the point to where by the time I was 15 I had decided that the WTBS was a complete sham.

  The theology can make for interesting discussions and ponderings but in the end, I subscribe to the very simple mantra of, you either believe it or you don't for whatever reasons make sense to that individual. Trying to "proof" it like an equation is a waste of time, it's a mystery is as good an explanation as there is for most of it.

  Science has its own problems, mainly that it's wielded by humans and its "truth" is often subservient to politics, greed, economics, academic infighting, crackpots and so on. One only needs to revisit the recent pandemic to see that in action. Anyone that holds up science as the ultimate authority on everything and proclaims with absolute certainty this or that needs to check themselves as well. Science has the potential to answer far more than theology, but we aren't quite there yet either.
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  PetrW

  @Big Dog

  Agreed. You've given me a bit of a pass✌️😎
  

  One of the earliest occurrences of the word "faith" in the NT has almost nothing to do with religious content, as we would expect with the word "faith", since it was a "trust".

  In Matt. 8:5-13, the healing of the Roman centurion's servant is described.

  The centurion knows from his own experience that if Jesus does heal, he will heal just as much as if he, himself, gives an order and cannot immediately verify the fulfillment, yet he expects the order to be carried out. Jesus refers to the centurion's attitude as trust. But not a word about theological issues. Only in Paul does "trust" take on any theological content, it becomes "faith."
  

  This story actually describes the principle of trust. I then later began to look for definitions of trust in psychology or sociology, methods of testing trust, etc. Later I wrote a thesis on this (of mediocre quality! 😁) , on the topic of trust issues in psychology, sociology and pedagogy.
  

  My main point is that trust, among other things, serves to "construct" our reality, our "world, around us". Trust is* a cognitive process (based on repeated experience, which is nothing more than a short definition of "learning") whereby things or phenomena around us that we cannot perceive are nevertheless considered real, as real as if they were so (even if we cannot see them, hear them, touch them, or feel them, because they either took place in the past or will only occur in the future, or they take place in the present tense, but outside our perceptual abilities...). A radical example of trust is a will. The one who makes a will believes that reality will occur according to the text of the will, has an anticipation of the future without being able to verify it at the time of making it, and even less so when he dies...

  The life of an adult human being is then "built" on a whole series of systems, as it were "pyramids" of individual sub-trusts in this and that, where we have acquired repeated, which then allow us to solve the very complex tasks of our life. Trust has a great competitor in us and that is emotion. The verbal opposite of trust, is indeed non-trust, but the real, functional opposite is the emotion of fear. And fear, again, can come from some cognitive process and/or emotion...

  More could be written, but that's probably enough for what I want to write: So why do people believe in God or science, and often juxtapose the two?

  Just from the above, very limited description of trust, in terms of the bio-psycho-social model of humans, trust in God or trust in science, politics, medicine, economics, law, etc., etc., are no different. The difference is in the content of trust. It suggests to me that it is not necessary then to define what people know (and therefore also: what they trust). Example: if a group of scientists discover, describe and evaluate some skeletal find, some geological phenomena, some archaeometeorological phenomena, etc., etc., and someone else compares it to the accounts of the Bible, then my first reaction is "I don't know". I'm not a biologist, chemist, physicist or archaeologist. I just know that even they shape their world on repeated experience - but even they know that the existence of 10 white swans in a row does not preclude the existence that the next swan may be black.

  My defensive reaction is not based on fear or denial of the truth of science. Healthy skepticism, must be about one's own confidence first, and then everything else. As Descartes rightly said, I can deny everything, I just can't deny myself, because I am the one denying something. I think, therefore I am. This then is precisely the starting point: I can be skeptical, but my skepticism can never be greater than I am. On the other side, there is the (paranoid) attempt to control, the attempt to avoid having to trust. Which is impossible. Trust reduces the complexity of the social world, as one definition of trust says. I believe that humanity (me), oscillates between these polarities, and it is very problematic when one group (believers), denigrates the other (atheists), or vice versa. Both groups use trust to live their lives.

  *this is just a static description; trust in fact can be, and very often is, a very dynamic process, which is then harder to describe and thus also harder to verify experimentally
  
• 

  TonusOH

  PetrW: But of course science cannot consider the influence of God on world events.

  The reason for this should give us pause. It is occasionally pointed out that science cannot intrude on the realm of religion, since science is a study of the material universe and is not able to study that which cannot be observed. If this is the case, then we also have to recognize that we have no reliable way to study the supernatural. Including gods, and their possible influence in our lives.

  The scientific method is designed to minimize the effect of human biases. We cannot eliminate those, nor can we prevent scientists from doing very unscientific things. Over the long term, the scientific method gradually weeds out the bad stuff and we are left with a better understanding of how things work. There is no such process available for the supernatural. Even the first step --observation-- is highly unreliable. Not only is there no way to account for our biases, the supernatural is heavily dependent on them for 'interpretation.'

  The supernatural is essentially a study done entirely on guesswork, at every stage. This is not an effective way to learn about or understand anything.
• 

  TonusOH

  science is a study of the material universe and is not able to study that which cannot be observed.

  It's too late to edit, but "observed" should be "tested" in the above statement.