4:09 AM
5 hours later…
9:39 AM
@Matthew You're not paying attention. None of it is "fictional." Not being literally true is not the same as being "fictional." Is Jesus' parable of the Sower "fictional"?
@Matthew There's a lot of charged language here, but not much substance. What are my "deliberate misrepresentations of ID"? And how do you know they are "deliberate"? Do you think that I am an evil person, lying my way through life? There's not anything here for me to respond to. Just a lot of red flags furiously waving around.
@Matthew Yes, in fact, many scientists have attempted to disprove Darwinism. The whole point is that they've failed to disprove it, because the evidence supports it. They have, however, refined it, such that today's theory of evolution is not exactly the same as Darwin's.
@Matthew And once again, creationists, to the extent that they are creationists, are not scientists, because instead of using scientific method, they are starting out with a proposition that they already believe, and searching for evidence to support it. That's just not how science works.
@OnlyTrueGod Of course, scientists are also human beings, with all of the usual human flaws. Some scientists have been unwilling to accept the evidence, and have clung to disproven theories to their dying day. But science marches on. One generation gives way to the next. Eventually bad theories are abandoned, and better theories take their place.
But to answer your question more directly, even a scientist who has an implacable belief that his theory was right must devise experiments that have the potential to show that it is wrong. Otherwise the experiment is scientifically useless. Once the scientist has devised such an experiment, he must conduct the experiment, and allow the results to speak for themselves.
Those results may or may not support his theory. If they do, his theory is strengthened. If they don't, either his theory is disproven or he will have to find some flaw in the experiment that explains why the results were faulty.
Also, even when a scientist who espouses a particular theory has conducted and experiment that supports that theory rather than disproving it, the experiment must be "repeatable," meaning that other scientists can do the same experiment. And when other scientists who aren't wedded to that theory do the same experiment, and get the same results, then other scientists will start giving more credence to that theory.
Iow, science is not a solitary endeavor, and the theory and experiments of one solitary scientist are not taken by the scientific community as conclusive. When many scientists have done the same experiment, and other experiments also that could support or disprove a particular theory, and they all come up with the same results, then the theory survives, and is strengthened.
2 hours later…
12:11 PM
@OnlyTrueGod I think the dynamics between periods of finding evidence for a theory and periods of being troubled because evidences are against that theory thus leading to a search for a new, more promising theory, is well told by that famous, frequently cited history of science book: Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
2 hours later…
2:09 PM
@LeeWoofenden Let's just say the Catholic church understands the typology of OT sacrifice differently than Swedenborg. Is this article of yours a good starting point to understand Swedenborg's typology? Side note: I really need to find time to create a competing blog 😀; yours is quite effective to disseminate Swedenborg teaching !
2:40 PM
@LeeWoofenden "Is Jesus' parable of the Sower 'fictional'?" Yes! At least, there's no reason to believe it isn't. It's also explicitly identified as a parable. Scripture is generally pretty clear when something is a metaphor, or a parable.
@LeeWoofenden, what about John 11:33, a straight-forward claim of a particular event occurring? If Luke 3 is "spiritual" rather than factual, what about John 11:33? What about Matthew 27:2, or Matthew 27:50 or Matthew 28? Maybe those are "just spiritual" as well? How do you know?
@LeeWoofenden So the message with the factually incorrect "the Intelligent Design people, aka Creationists" wasn't deliberate? Those characters just appeared in the input box via chance processes? (Well, since you believe that sort of thing can happen in biology, maybe you are claiming that...)
@LeeWoofenden Have you read any actual papers? (For that matter, have you listened to yourself?) Mainstream is very consistent in denying that anything is wrong, and making false statements like "the evidence supports [Evolution]"... because the evidence against it is systematically buried, or labeled "Creationist ranting".
1 hour later…
3:56 PM
@GratefulDisciple That article is the best I have so far on sacrifice in particular. I have in mind to write a two-part article on the meaning of sacrifice in the Old Testament and its resulting meaning in the New Testament in relation to Jesus as the sacrifice for our sins. Unfortunately, I am currently a professional scholar, a seminary professor, and a university student, which leaves little time to write new material for the blog.
@GratefulDisciple However, regarding the OT sacrifices, what I have in mind is not typology, but rather how sacrifice actually functioned in the mind and culture of the Israelites. Satisfaction theory and penal substitution have obscured and falsified that function by treating sacrifices as a payment or penalty or some other type of compensation for sin. But that's an anachronistic reading from thousands of years later.
The most basic meaning of sacrifice in the minds of the ancient Israelites is that it was a feast with their God in order to celebrate the relationship between Jehovah/Yahweh and the his people (the Israelites), or to mark a rapprochement between him and the Israelites as a healing of the separation caused by sin.
Sacrifice also commonly functioned in ancient cultures as gifts given their gods to gain their gods' favor. But the idea that they were somehow paying restitution to God in the manner of a financial transaction or legal settlement was not a significant part of the mindset of the Israelites, at least, and I don't believe it was a significant part of the mindset of the surrounding pagan cultures either.
Reading the sacrifices this way has completely vitiated the understanding of sacrifice in both the Old Testament and the New Testament in Western Christianity.
@GratefulDisciple Incidentally, Swedenborg's system of spiritual interpretation of the Bible is not really typology in the traditional Christian sense of that word. He uses the term "correspondence" instead. It is a much more robust and universal system of deriving spiritual meaning in the Bible than typology.
@GratefulDisciple And thanks for your kind words about my blog. These days I don't have the time to produce much new material for it, so I've been editing and re-posting old material, and have also begun to post papers I am writing as part of my academic studies.
Apparently the blog has struck a chord, though, because even though it has been mostly inactive for new posts over the past three years, it still averages about 800 hits per day.
@Matthew "Fictional" is the wrong word to use for Jesus' parables. "Metaphorical" is a much better word to use, in present-day terminology.
@Matthew And clearly Scripture is not very clear when something is a metaphor or a parable, because Christians have been arguing about this for the past 2,000 years.
@Matthew I have no particular reason to doubt that the things recounted in these passages took place more or less as described.
However, it should not be overlooked or brushed aside that the four Gospels do not entirely agree with one another about exactly how these events took place. If reading them in a strictly literal fashion were very important, this would be a problem. But if these stories are more about disseminating a Christian message then about being historical documents, it is not a problem that they don't entirely agree with one another.
But the overarching principle is that some parts of the Bible are meant to be taken literally, and all of it is also meant to be read spiritually.
@Matthew How we know which parts are meant to be taken both literally and spiritually, and which are meant to be read only spiritually, is not a simple question to answer. The Bible is a complex book. Every part of it must be read in the context of all the rest of it. There is no substitute for intensive study of the Bible in all its parts, and how they all relate to one another.
Yet if the reader's mind is obscured by false doctrine, no amount of Bible reading will yield the truth. The lens of false doctrine in that reader's mind will falsify everything s/he reads in the Bible.
Therefore the starting point of any fruitful study of the Bible must be in paying attention to the Bible's exact words, and noting what, exactly, it does and doesn't say. If a doctrine has been set up by one church or another as a central tenet of Christianity, but it is not stated anywhere in Scripture, then it must be discarded as essential Christian doctrine.
This is the case for most of the doctrines that are now taken as central to Christianity the major branches of Christianity, including the Trinity of Persons, original sin, the satisfaction theory of atonement, and justification by faith alone. None of these are stated anywhere in the Bible. Therefore to gain truth from the Bible, one must first clear these human doctrines from one's mind.
Once the centuries of accretion of human falsity that has built up in the traditional Christian Church has been cleared from one's mind, and the most general things that the Bible does teach have been learned, then it is possible to begin delving into the trickier questions of what we're meant to take literally and what we're meant to read only spiritually.
Since your mind is still under the influence of all those centuries of accretion of false doctrine, I can't even take the first steps with you in instructing you how to determine this.
@Matthew I am not a scientist, nor am I a historian of science, so I can't give you references on all this. But if you spend some time reading the history of science, you will find that when Darwin first came out with his theory of evolution, there were also competing theories, and there was an intense battle among scientists to determine which one, if any, was right.
It was during this time period that there was a concerted effort to prove Darwin wrong. However, among the competing theories, including a rejection of evolution altogether, Darwin's theory came out on top, because it was the only one that kept fitting the evidence that was uncovered by scientists all over the world.
4:39 PM
These days the evidence for Darwinian evolution has become so overwhelming that few scientists expend any effort attempting to disprove it. It has become a working part of how evolutionary biologists do science, just as Einstein's theory of relativity has become a working part of how astrophysicists and others in the cosmological sciences do science, because Einstein's theories have survived every attempt to disprove them.
@Matthew Ugh. There are obvious differences between the four Gospel accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection. How many times did the cock crow? Did all the disciples abandon Jesus, or did some remain with him to the end? The list of discrepancies among the Gospel accounts goes on and on. You can't just sweep them all under the rug and pretend they don't exist.
@Matthew Because it doesn't fit the evidence better. If it did, scientists would embrace it. But even I, a non-scientist, can read the ID stuff and realize that it's unscientific trash.
@Matthew This is all just creationist talking points. No serious evolutionary biologist or other scientist takes that stuff seriously, because it's such poor and shoddy "science" that it doesn't even qualify to be called science. And because it does not employ scientific method, which is the basis for all sound science.
4:44 PM
@Matthew Sure, scientists are human. But overall, the scientific method tends to overcome that, so that the scientific community as a whole gains a better and better understanding of how the world works. The main counterforce to this is government and corporate money, which is able to corrupt science for a shorter or longer time.
5:07 PM
@LeeWoofenden The fact that you are so blithely disregarding facts just goes to demonstrate your lack of neutrality. And it's ironic that your very next message is in support of my point. "Follow the money"? Okay, how much money is spent trying to prop up Evolution, and how does that compare to spending on Creation science? How do you explain that CS is keeping up despite that enormous disparity?
@LeeWoofenden Right. That's absolute garbage. "Before the rooster crows [an unspecified number of times]" does not contradict "before the rooster crows twice". (I'm hardly unaware of your claimed discrepancy. In fact, your response is exactly what I expected; a bogus claim that's been debunked for ages.)
5:16 PM
@Matthew lol. Not worried about your fears. You're so blinded by dogma that you can't even pay attention to what the Bible says. I bet you think that the creation story in Genesis 1 agrees with the creation story in Genesis 2, also.
Even though the stories are totally different, and the order in which things are created is different, such that they cannot be resolved to agree with one another. (But I suppose this has been "debunked" long ago, also. "Christians" are so blind that they can't even read the plain text of the Bible.)
You probably also think the Bible teaches that we are justified by faith alone, even though the Bible specifically denies this in the only passage that even mentions faith alone.
You probably think that the Bible teaches that Christ paid the penalty for our sins, also, even though it never says this.
And you probably think that only Christians can be saved, even though the Bible specifically denies this in Romans 2:1-16.
Sometimes, when it's obvious you're not going to convince someone, especially on matters of faith/conviction, it's better to disengage.
@LeeWoofenden I think you're overstating your case a bit here. There certainly are verses that can be interpreted in the way you're unequivocally discounting (e.g., Ephesians 2:8-9, Galatians 2:16, Romans 4:5, etc.). I'm sure you can explain those away, but realize that that's merely a different interpretation, not consistent with your claim that the Bible contains no passages about "faith alone" except for one that denies it.
2 hours later…
7:01 PM
Indeed, to read Romans 2 that way while ignoring Romans 3:28 does not make sense. The main point of Romans 2 would seem to be to knock down the ideas that Jews are somehow superior because they "possess" the Law [of Moses]. The distinction between having the law and keeping the law is a major focus. But Romans 2 also must be read within the repeated context, in Romans and everywhere, that the Law does not justify.
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The Upper Room
General discussion for Christianity.SE, pseudo-meta support, a...
