The Historicity of women at the Tomb

Baciccico's "Women at the Tomb" (D 1709)

The women at the empty tomb who were the first to preach the Gospel strike an important blow for women in the church, yet they are written off as made up, fictional, the product of folk lore, by the major and most accomplished scholars working under the assumptions of the form critical school. Form criticism is a philosophy and methodology of Biblical criticism, "Criticism" in relation to the Bible does not mean talking about how bad the Bible is (too long and hard to understand) but refers to a means of analysis in a systematic sense. Form criticism seeks to analyze the historical development of the New Testament by understanding the forms in which the writing developed. The major scholars of that school were Rudolph Bultmann (1584-1976) and Martin Franz Dibelius (1883-1947). The form critics understood the Gospels as folk lore, their major paradigm for this view was the collection of German folk songs which were popular for intellectuals and poets in the 19th century.  

The other thing that is well worth considering is that the form critics at the beginning of the 20th century were working with probably the best models of oral tradition that were around at the time. But we now know a great deal more about oral tradition. They were reliant, mostly, on the way that folk tales were transmitted in European history. And of course, these are the kind of things that were passed down over centuries. It's a very different process, really, from the transmission of gospel traditions over a few decades in the New Testament period. Folk tales were also, by definition, fictional material, and people who passed on fictional material were often interested in creative development of it. They didn't feel bound to transmit material accurately. But we now know far more about oral tradition. We have studies of oral tradition from all societies all over the world, Africa and parts of Asia, and so forth, lots of data about how oral traditions work. And one of things we can say is… Actually, there is very little we can say about oral tradition in general.[1]

 My task here is to rehabilitate the historicity of the women of the  empty tomb,who are maligned by  critical ideology.

Form criticism assumes that there were no authors there were no historical individuals and of course don't even think about an eye witness. It's all made up out of whole cloth by the anonymous folk. This kind of criticism is still dominant and although most of it's founding assumptions have been put to bed modern liberal scholarship is loath to let go. They still make the tired old assumptions that the church fathers are not even worth reading.They assume no authors and no eye witnesses. These assumptions have been ably challenged by believing scholars  such as Mark Goodacher, N.T. Wright, and Richard Bauckham. The latter has made the greatest contribution in my view, with his great ground breaking work Jesus and the Eye Witnesses.[2] 

Before moving on I want to clearly delineate the difference in my argument about community as author [3] vs form critical assumptions. Form critics speak of community as author in the sense that there are no individual authors and the myths spread like wildfire by means of folklore. When I use the term I mean there is no one single author but I  do not exclude individuals who initiate the work yet the community is the author to the extend that it is a production of the redaction   process  and oral tradition but not to exclude either eye witnesses or a single initiating author. For example I believe that (based upon Papias) a redaction process combined Mathew's saying source with a narrative framework, to produce the Gospel of Matthew.

I have three arguments for historicity of the women:

(1) The Web of historicity.

(2) The Pre Mark Passion Narrative (PMPN)

(3) The counter productive nature of female witness.

(1) The Web of historicity: The characters of the Gospels are always assumed to be historical and many of them are tied to historical figures. There are no folkloric characters, This is the amazing challenge Bauckham has brought with his great book.[4] In seminary I had a female professor who had the reputation of always flunking men and believers, (I got an "A" out of her by disagreeing with her). One day she made the Statement that no sub apostolic writer ever claimed to have known the apostles. After class I told her  Irenaeus of Lyons talks about how Polycarp used to tell him about knowing John. She looked dumbfounded like she could barely grasp It. It made no difference in her teaching the rest of the term. These are dogmatic assumptions that have no basis in actual fact. For a rousing defense of historicity of John, and other figures in the Gospels see my debate with Bradley Bowen of Secular Outpost Blog [5]

The women could not have achieved lasting fame outside the Gospels, but the fact that they gave her a name and a geography (of Magdalah) means the character must have been based upon an actual person. Not that authors can't make up characters but why make up a female character in a patriarchal society where women  can't accomplish things why bother?,The woman at the well may have been hypothetical but MM was not. The reality is the Gospels deal in historical people not folklore. Bauckham's method see the designations of the women (all the figures from the Gospels) as code to the reader as to who was being discussed so the communities knew who the witnesses were. In so doing he's tagging specific women as witnesses to the tomb but not just any women, specific one;s to the exclusion of others,Meaning it is a historically definable reality with real flesh and blood people.

Luke, who names the women only at the end of his account of their visit to the tomb,  lists, besides the indispensable Mary Magdalene, Joanna, who is peculiar to his Gospel and already introduced at Luke 8:3, and the other Mary. His reference to Joanna surely indicates the distinctive source of his distinctive empty tomb story.1 Like Matthew he omits Mark's Salome, but he does not simply reproduce the list of women followers of Jesus he had employed earlier in chapter 8 of his Gospel. Mary Magdalene and Joanna he knew to be witnesses of the empty tomb, but Susanna, the third name in his earlier list, he evidently did not. If, as I have suggested and allowing for the evangelists' freedom as storytellers, the stories of the women are substantially as the women themselves told them, then we must regard the differences between the stories as irreducible. We cannot go behind them to a supposedly original version. Nor can we dispense with the angels and reconstruct a less mythologically laden event. These are the stories as doubtless different women told them. They are different performances of the oral traditions, and their differences are such as would have been expected and unproblematic in performances of oral tradition, no greater and no more problematic than those between the three narratives of Paul's conversion that all occur in Acts.[6]

It makes sense, consider if the story was entirely fiction we could reduce it by deconstruction to an original narrative, Being the result of several different perspectives that observed some actual event we cannot combine them to make a coherent event because it is based upon these perspectives,Now we can theorize as to the actual events but we can't get at it by reducing the eye witness accounts, they are not working  from a single unified narrative but form their experiences.They contradict each other because they have different perspectives,


(2) The Pre Mark Passion Narrative (PMPN) is the earliest writing of the Gospel and it includes the women.For an understanding of the PMPN see two  essays Iv'e written in the past [7][8].
"That Mark was Using and Relied upon a pre Markan Passion story is one that is widely accepted by most scholars today, and because it goes back so early it is probably based upon eye witness Testimony."[9] The Gospel of Peter (GPete--an apocryphal work--we don't want to use this as a guide to doctrine but it is an historical artifact). Early readings preserved in the GPete illustrate that even tough the Gospel in the form in  which we have it is late, (second century), it drew upon a very early independent source, Ray Brown showed that the Passion narrative in GPete drew upon this early source that was not dependent upon Matthew or Mark. MM is in it and I will presently give argument that she is from the earliest strata.[10]


(3) The counter productive nature of female witness. Women in both Greek and Hebrew culture were regarded as appendages to men. Not so much true in Asia Minor where Paul grew up but very much the case in Corinth and in Jerusalem. In Hebrew law women could not be considered valid witnesses in court, the testimony of one man outweighed that of two women.[11] If they are making it up anyway why use women? For that matter why allow it to even be known that women saw him? That can be answered: they were the witnesses and in that situation where they needed everyone they could get, owing to the special nature of the case,  they could not afford to be picky.

Bart Erhman tries to invent supposedly logical and creative reasons why they would invent women. He argues: first that they were not in court, Secondly, "Well, for openers, maybe women would.   We have good reasons for thinking that women were particularly well represented in the early Christian communities.  We know from the letters of Paul – from passages such as Romans 16 – that women played crucial leadership roles in the churches:  ministering as deacons, leading the services in their homes, engaging in missionary activities."[12] The court rule reflected the culture so saying they are not in court is lame, they are in the culture. The argument that women  would make them up is irrelevant because the women would not be inventing a Gospel. The community would not accept it, the women as witnesses went to Peter to get him to come and look he validated their claim, Why invent fictional women then validate their claim? He is making form critical assumptions--seeing it as folklore. Yet by acknowledging their critical role in the community he's giving us a reason to assume that real women were involved.

He Then argues: "Moreover, this claim that it was specifically women who found the empty tomb makes the best sense of the realities of history.  Preparing bodies for burial was commonly the work of women, not men.   And so why wouldn’t the stories tell of women who went to prepare the body?   Moreover, if, in the stories, they’re the ones who went to the tomb to anoint the body, naturally they would be the ones who found the tomb empty."[13] That's a better reason to think real women would have been involved because it does not outweigh the liability of female witness. All the reasons he presents are like this they all work was reasons to think women would have been involved and they do not outweigh the  liability. Ehrman himself is aware of this: "Again, I’m not saying that I think Mark invented the story.  But if we can imagine very easily a reason for Mark to have invented it, it is no leap at all to think that one or more of his predecessors may also have had reasons for doing so. "[14]He never actually gives a reason that outweighs the problem. Sure they would have a reason for introducting women but as long as they are making it up they would invent a reason to have a man there too.

There are two basic counter arguments with which I will deal:

(1) It's in Mark

(2) Paul Does not mention them.

It's in Mark: There are atheists I know who seem to imply Mark has to be the first and so being in Mark must mean the author of Mark invented it. Of course this is based upon form critical assumptions, but we can put more fiber into the argument. The argumet is based upon the gradual increase in complexity from Mark through Matt and Luke to John. For example the men in white are men in Mark but by Luke they are a bad of angels. In Mark the women are afraid and run off and and tell no one. In Luke they are given a message of hope and go off joyously. That progression of development in the narrative is true but it doesn't prove it's made up or the women didn't exist. I've seen this on message boards.

As indicated above Mary M. is in the earliest strata, She is in the pre Mark redaction. Mark could not invent her. We can see from the readings that that they are early, In the Gospel of Peter it says: "[50] Now at the dawn of the Lord's Day Mary Magdalene, a female disciple of the Lord (who, afraid because of the Jews since they were inflamed with anger, had not done at the tomb of the Lord what women were accustomed to do for the dead beloved by them), [51] having taken with her women friends, came to the tomb where he had been placed. [52] And they were afraid lest the Jews should see them and were saying, 'If indeed on that day on which he was crucified we could not weep and beat ourselves, yet now at his tomb we may do these things."[14]

Mark 16"[1] When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome brought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb." (ESV)

Matthew: 28, "Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. "(ESV)
Luke 24 "On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb.." (NIV)  "10 It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles."

John 20 "Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance.."(NIV)

First, The Peter passage feels the necessity of explaining who Mary M. was. ("Mary Magdalene, a female disciple of the Lord "). None of the others do this, why? Because they are all written 60 plus year after the events and for people who grew up hearing about it, Mary . was well known in Christian community, But if this passage in Peter was written just a few years after they might feel she needed an introduction.Secondly,  GPete takes lengths to describe preparing the body and mourning rituals (flagellation). None of the others mention the latter and only Mark and Luke mention the spices, Everyone knew 60 years latter why the women went no need to make a big thing of it,Thirdly, the mention of fear and the Jewish anger, strangely absent from the canonical other than Mark. That is something that might be mentioned when the events are recent and emotion fresh in the mind, but 60 years latter no one reading it had experienced that fear no point.

(2) Paul Does not mention them.

Paul doesn't mention the women (1 Cor 15:5-7) because women were not considered valid witnesses. He's writing to a Greek audience and it would be read by Judaizers and James church people.He does it the way a Rabbi does things. It might also be that Paul wasn't told abouit them. He got his information from people not from books, he could not google the resurrection. He must have discussed those events with James and with Peter but would either have gone to great pains to tell him of the women?

The historicity or lack thereof of the women of the tomb is neither support for nor argument against the historical nature of the narrative at large, because it derives from the narrative at large,, The assumptions we make about the women determine how we see their historicity, Yet I think there is a sense of support for the reliability of the text that derives from knowing there are good arguments for the historical nature of the women.




Sources

[1] Richard Bauckham, "A Croquette of From Criticism of The Gospels." Third Millennium Ministries, website,  no date listed.
http://thirdmill.org/answers/answer.asp/file/43180
(accessed 2/2/18)
these guys have video to down load

Answer by Dr. Richard J. Bauckham

Richard Bauckham (M.A., Ph.D. Cambridge; F.B.A.; F.R.S.E) is a widely published scholar in theology, historical theology and New Testament.

[2]____________. Jesus and The Eye Witnesses: The Gospel as Eye Witness Testimony. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wb. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Second Edition, 2017/2006. no page  indicated.

[3] Joseph Hinman, "Community as Author part 1," The Religious a priori. website no date listed.
http://religiousapriorijesus-bible.blogspot.com/2010/05/community-as-author-part-1.html
(accessed 2/2/18)

part 2

part 3


[4]Richard Bauckham, Jesus and The Eye Witnesses:... op. cit, chapter 1 "From Historical Jessu to Jesus of Testimony,: 2 "what Papias says about eye witnesses: 1-12, 13-30.

[5] Joseph Hinman,"Hinman Bowen Debate," The religious A priori, website, No date, originally published on CADRE Comment's blog, Agust 2,2016.
http://religiousapriori.blogspot.com/2016/08/photo-authorbauckhamzpstjbww5ohpng.html
(accessed 2/2/18)
http://religiousapriori.blogspot.com/2016/08/hinman-i-enjoying-its-fun-i-hope-fun.html

[6]Richard Bauckham,"The Women at the Tomb:the Credibility of their Story,"pdf, The Laing Lecture at London Bible College,no date
http://richardbauckham.co.uk/uploads/Accessible/The%20Women%20&%20the%20Resurrection.pdf
(accessed 2/2/18)

[7]Joseph Hinman, "Gospel Behind the Gospels, part 2," Religious a priori. website, no date
http://religiousapriorijesus-bible.blogspot.com/2010/05/gospel-behind-gospel-part-2.html
(accessed 2/2/18)

[8]  Joseph Hinman, "Story of Empty Tomb Dated To Mid First Century." Cadre Comments Blog, (April 2, 2017)
http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2017/04/story-of-empty-tomb-dated-to-mid-first.html
(access 1/25/18) also published in Holding's anthology Defending the Resurrection

[9]James Bishop, "Jesus in The Pre Mark Passion Narrative," James Bishop's Theologoical Rationalism:Where reason and Evidence meet faith (June 13, 2015)
https://jamesbishopblog.com/2015/06/13/jesus-in-the-pre-markan-passion-narrative/

(accessed 2/2/18)

[10] Raymond Brown, Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave, A commentary on the Passion narratives in the Four Gospels. Volume 2. New York: Dobuleday 1994 1322

[11]Bart Ehrman, "The Women AT the Tomb." The Bart Ehrman Blog. no date (first coment April 4, 2014).
https://ehrmanblog.org/women-at-the-tomb/

(accessed 2/2/18)

[12]Ibid
[13]Ibid

[14]Ibid

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982408765 God, Science, and Ideology by Joseph Hinman is a very important book. Hinman was a PhD candidate in the UT system, his field was history of ideas and he studied the history and philosophy of science. He brings this knowledge to the critique of athye8ist ideology on the internet. Hinman summarizes 20years of arguments with atheist apologist and takes down some of the major atheists figures such as Richard Dawkins,

My answer to Nadine Mesnard Alldridge

https://www.facebook.com/HollySpinak/posts/pfbid02ykWUYHT75gt5dEfw4KXgfDUqdAwvdxERPArg8nYH5nThXeNeQPc7QaLk6NsCghNil?notif_id=1664868829785102¬if_t=comment_mention&ref=notif

Oct 5, 2022.

Nadine Mesnard Alldridge claims to be a historian bt doesn't seem to know what they do. she says:

Joe Hinman -"...he problem with that analogy is that is up front a fictional work. The Bible is not fictional meaning it is taken as and was written as historical..."

NMA Says: It is NOT historical. I'm an historian. The only things in it that have ever existed are most of the places and just a few of the people. There is no physical evidence for any of it. This is mine. I wrote it about 20 years ago and no substantiation has been found to refute it since. All holy people know this as fact. It is all based on faith, and is not historical.

Me: First you need to talk about what you think needs to be proved. What historian things: Jesus running aboutworking mirecles. That's about it. What happemedto this guy whosuppossedly worked mirealces? He was cliamed to haverise formthedead, see by a whole town full of people. His words became the world's leadigrelgion and have lasted 2000 years, That's a much better histrical record than the guys who crucified him, Pilate wasonly roven to exist in thelast hundred years.

_____________ NMA: "Most authentic historians know there is no physical evidence for Jesus. There could have been a guy walking around preaching, but no evidence for him. And he certainly didn't rise from the dead."

Me: Why do we need physical evidence when we have writtigs of people who knew him? Show me physical evidece for Pliny the younger? We do actually have some physical evidence. Chruch of the Holy Seplechur is over the site of the crcifiction and resurrection. Writtimgs of people who knew him: Matthew, John 1 Pete, James, epistles of John. People who knew his best friemds: Paul. Luke,

. NMA: These are the facts:

. "We have no physical evidence that Jesus ever existed primarily because nothing was ever written down during his supposed lifetime. There are no contemporaries of Jesus that documented any of it."

Google search:

"Virtually all scholars of antiquity accept that Jesus was a historical figure, although interpretations of a number of the events mentioned in the gospels (most notably his miracles and resurrection) vary and are a subject of debate." (google search)

we have writtigs of people who knew him. Of the Gospels which chronical his life Matt and John knew him.The sight of his death and resurrection that is physical.We have writtings by his brother James, his best friend Peter.Oaul and luke met people who knew him,

NMA"Also, none of the writers of the Bible, including Paul, ever heard him speak let alone met him, not ever. The biographers wrote many decades and even centuries after Jesus supposedly died. The Gospels were all written anonymously and we do not know who they really were."

Me: This is false: I answered this above, Peter, John, John, Matthew, James and they are attested to ny studetsoftheirs such as Pokycarp whoo knew Jon, WE have three writers who knew John.

NMA According to the Catholic Church, their records say that Jesus was crucified in 33 CE. All that was written about him by sources outside of the Bible, mostly Roman, cannot be called evidence because they all were born after Jesus supposedly died. This includes:

. Josephus-born 38 CE

Tacitus-born 54 CE

Pliny the Younger-born 61 CE

Suetonius Tranquillus-born 69 CE

Lucian-born about 125 CE"

This is called history, That is what historians d they write about things from before theiriera,we cal it "the past." Sheis using criteria of Jesus myth movementnot real historiogrophy. I dobt that sheis acadmeically trained.

Me: Odd she claims to be a historian and doesnt know what historians do. All histoirans write about periods before they were born. It is not true that we have nothing from people who knew him. Matthew,John, James, Peter, Paul tesifieis to having met many who knew him such as many of the 12.

. NMA All supposedly wrote of Jesus. ALL of it was taken from ORAL history, or the writings of people who witnessed none of it.

Me: these are assertions for which she offers no evidence. Factially we know and have works by people who knew him as I show above.

The ancient Iron Age Hebrew people couldn't write. And the scribes the Hebrew hierarchy used did little more than copy the Old Testament over and over again. It was the only thing they thought worthy of being written down. Certainly nothing that was supposedly said by Jesus meant anything to them. They did not record anything happening at the time. And AT THE TIME IT HAPPENED is what constitutes evidence that it DID happen. If they had, then that would be historical, yet they did not.

Me: clearly not true. How dowe have the OT if they couldn;t wrote? The timeof Christ saw Grek inflence andRoman mnflunce they could write,The vast majoirity of scholars accpet Paul's letter as geiuime wo that dispproves her assertion,John Oakes>"By the time of Christ, the chiefinstitution among the Jews was the Synagogue. This institution encouragedthe learning of at least a rudimentary level of Hebrew literacy, at least for the more well off male Jews. I have done some research since receiving your inquiry. Let me give you what seems to me a fairly careful scholarly study. It is at http://faculty.biu.ac.il/~barilm/illitera.html" (https://evidenceforchristianity.org/were-people-literate-in-the-time-of-jesus-r/)

. NMA: "It's all nothing but folklore, ALL of it. And until or IF they ever find any evidence that he lived, at all? That is how it remains."

assertion backed by nothing,

_________________________________________________________ NMA:Most of my research I used the Vatican library, often. Even the librarians there (priests) know it has no physical evidence it can use for proof. Nothing but faith. Joe, you need to research for yourself. I've been doing it for more than 50 years and nothing has changed-nothing new. Me: do you know the differencein research and documemtation? I am actually a PhlD cndidateim history of ideas, you are not. You arenit an historian/ You are not awqare of the major issues. You thin oral tradition is disproof no it's a way to predseve knwingeim ancient worldbyou don't know your stuff. Historian!

The Point of Religion

My original statement: "religion is justified on its own terms."

Pix: If your argument is right, then the belief that Thor controls thunder "is justified on its own terms". Do you really think that is the case?

Me: Only if you have a comic book understanding of religion. You think religion is a big bully boy in the clouds and you better do what he says then know nothing about religion. My statement boils down to there is ultimate transformative experience that resolves the issue in the human problematic and gives meaning to existence. One such example of this transformative experience is the feeling of utter dependence. That feeling justifies the need to resolve the problematic.

Atheists tend to see religion as competing strong men. They are always justopossimg individual deities against each other, Like in man's post human ampliofied the most powerful people and projected them imto skay riding status and that's all religion can ever be for atheists. Meanwhile thinking religious people moved on.

What follows is a statement I wrote so long ago the name Metacrock still seemed new. The statement was part of my page on Biblical revelation so it analyzes the religious a priori in terms of the Bible and specifically questions of the  historicity of the Bible. I think it does expand the meaning of my statement about the point of religion.

All religions seek to do three things.

All religions seek to do three things:

a) to identify the human problematic,
b) to identify an ultimate transformative experience (UTE) which resolves the
problematic, and
c) to mediate between the two.

But not all religions are equal. All are relative to the truth but not all are equal. Some mediate the UTE better than others, or in a more accessible way than others. Given the foregoing, my criteria are that:

1) a religious tradition reflects a human problematic which is meaningful in terms of what we find in the world.

2) the UTE be found to really resolve the problematic

. 3) it mediates the UTE in such a way as to be effective and accessible.

4) its putative and crucial historical claims be historically probable given the ontological and epistemological assumptions that are required within the inner logic of that belief system.

5) it be consistent with itself and with the external world in a way that touches these factors.

These mean that I am not interested in piddling Biblical contradictions such as how many women went to the tomb, ect. but in terms of the major claims of the faith as they touch the human problematic and its resolution.

How Does the Bible fulfill these criteria? First, what is the Bible? Is it a rule book? Is it a manual of discipline? Is it a science textbook? A history book? No it is none of these. The Bible, the Canon, the NT in particular, is a means of bestowing Grace. What does that mean? It means first, it is not an epistemology! It is not a method of knowing how we know, nor is it a history book. It is a means of coming into contact with the UTE mentioned above. This means that the primary thing it has to do to demonstrate its veracity is not be accurate historically, although it is that in the main; but rather, its task is to connect one to the depository of truth in the teachings of Jesus such that one is made open to the ultimate transformative experience. Thus the main thing the Bible has to do to fulfill these criteria is to communicate this transformation. This can only be judged phenomenologically. It is not a matter of proving that the events are true, although there are ensconces where that becomes important.

Thus the main problem is not the existence of these piddling so-called contradictions (and my experience is 90% of them stem from not knowing how to read a text), but rather the extent to which the world and life stack up to the picture presented as a fallen world, engaged in the human problematic and transformed by the light of Christ. Now that means that the extent to which the problematic is adequately reflected, that being sin, separation from God, meaninglessness, the wages of sin, the dregs of life, and so forth, vs. the saving power of God's grace to transform life and change the direction in which one lives to face God and to hope and future. This is something that cannot be decided by the historical aspects or by any objective account. It is merely the individual's problem to understand and to experience. That is the nature of what religion does and the extent to which Christianity does it more accessibly and more efficaciously is the extent to which it should be seen as valid.

The efficacy is not an objective issue either, but the fact that only a couple of religions in the world share the concept of Grace should be a clue. No other religion (save Pure Land Buddhism) have this notion. For all the others there is a problem of one's own efforts. The Grace mediates and administrates through Scriptures is experienced in the life of the believer, and can be found also in prayer, in the sacraments and so forth.

Where the historical questions should enter into it are where the mediation of the UTE hedges upon these historical aspects. Obviously the existence of Jesus of Nazareth would be one, his death on the cross another. The Resurrection of course, doctrinally is also crucial, but since that cannot be established in an empirical sense, seeing as no historical question can be, we must use historical probability. That is not blunted by the minor discrepancies in the number of women at the tomb or who got there first. That sort of thinking is to think in terms of a video documentary. We expect the NT to have the sort of accuracy we find in a court room because we are moderns and we watch too much television. The number of women and when they got to the tomb etc. does not have a bearing on whether the tomb actually existed, was guarded and was found empty. Nor does it really change the fact that people claimed to have seen Jesus after his death alive and well and ascending into heaven. We can view the different strands of NT witness as separate sources, since they were not written as one book, but by different authors at different times and brought together later.

The historicity of the NT is a logical assumption given the nature of the works. We can expect that the Gospels will be polemical. We do not need to assume, however, that they will be fabricated from whole cloth. They are the product of the communities that redacted them. That is viewed as a fatal weakness in fundamentalist circles, tantamount to saying that they are lies. But that is silly. In reality there is no particular reason why the community cannot be a witness. The differences in the accounts are produced by either the ordering of periscopes to underscore various theological points or the use of witnesses who fanned out through the various communities and whose individual view points make up the variety of the text. This is not to be confused with contradiction simply because it reflects differences in individual's view points and distracts us from the more important points of agreement; the tomb was empty, the Lord was seen risen, there were people who put their hands in his nail prints, etc.

The overall question about Biblical contradiction goes back to the basic nature of the text. What sort of text is it? Is it a Sunday school book? A science textbook? A history book? And how does inspiration work? The question about the nature of inspiration is the most crucial. This is because the basic notion of the fundamentalists is that of verbal plenary inspiration. If we assume that this is the only sort of inspiration then we have a problem. One mistake and verbal plenary inspiration is out the window. The assumption that every verse is inspired and every word is true comes not from the Church fathers or from the Christian tradition. It actually starts with Humanists in the Renaissance and finds its final development in the 19th century with people like J. N. Drably and Warfield. (see, Avery Dulles Models of Revelation).

One of my major reasons for rejecting this model of revelation is because it is not true to the nature of transformation. Verbal plenary inspiration assumes that God uses authors like we use pencils or like businessmen use secretaries, to take dictation (that is). But why should we assume that this is the only form of inspiration? Only because we have been conditioned by American Christianity to assume that this must be the case. This comes from the Reformation's tendency to see the Bible as epistemology rather than as a means of bestowing grace (see William Abraham, Canon and Criterion). Why should be approach the text with this kind of baggage? We should approach it, not assuming that Moses et al. were fundamentalist preachers, but that they experienced God in their lives through the transformative power of the Spirit and that their writings and readings are a reflection of this experience. That is more in keeping with the nature of religion as we find it around the world. That being the case, we should have no problem with finding that mythology of Babylonian and Suzerain cultures are used in Genesis, with the view toward standing them on their heads, or that some passages are idealized history that reflect a nationalistic agenda. But the experiences of God come through in the text in spite of these problems because the text itself, when viewed in dialectical relation between reader and text (Barth/Dulles) does bestow grace and does enable transformation.

After all the Biblical texts were not written as "The Bible" but were compiled from a huge voluminous body of works which were accepted as scripture or as "holy books" for quite some time before they were collected and put in a single list and even longer before they were printed as one book: the Bible. Therefore, that this book may contradict itself on some points is of no consequence. Rather than reflecting dictation, or literal writing as though the author was merely a pencil in the hands of God, what they really reflect is the record of people's experiences of God in their lives and the way in which those experiences suggested their choice of material/redaction. In short, inspiration of scripture is a product of the transformation afore mentioned. It is the verbalization of inner-experience which mediates grace, and in turn it mediates grace itself.

The Bible is not the Perfect Revelation of God to humanity. Jesus is that perfect revelation. The Gospels are merely the record of Jesus' teachings, deposited with the communities and encoded for safe keeping in the list chosen through Apostolic backing to assure Christian identity. For that matter the Bible as a whole is a reflection of the experience of transformation and as such, since it was the product of human agents we can expect it to have human flaws. The extent to which those flaws are negligible can be judge the ability of that deposit of truth to adequately promote transformation. Christ authorizes the Apostles, the Apostles authorize the community, the community authorizes the tradition, and the tradition authorizes the canon.

Argument From the Religious a Priori

back to my roots in existentialism

Argument:

(1) Scineitifc reductionism loses phenomena by re-defining the nature of sense data and quailia.

(2)There are other ways of Knowing than scinetific induction

(3) Religious truth is apprehended phenomenoloigcally, thus religion is not a scientific issue and cannot be subjected to a materialist critque

(4) Religion is not derived from other disciplines or endeavors but is a approch to understanding in its own right

(5)Therefore, religious belief is justified on its own terms and not according to the dictates or other disciplines

In my dealings with atheists in debate and dialogue I find that they are often very committed to an empiricist view point. Over and over again I hear the refrain "you can't show one single unequivocal demonstration of scientific data that proves a God exists." This is not a criticism. It's perfectly understandable; science has become the umpire of reality. It is to scientific demonstration that we appear for a large swath of questions concerning the nature of reality. The problem is that the reliance upon empiricism has led to forgetfulness about the basis of other types of questions. We have forgotten that essentially science is metaphysics, as such it is just one of many approachs that can be derived from analytical reasoning, empiricism, rationalism, phenomonology and other approaches.

Problem with Empiricism

Is empirical evidence the best or only true form of knowledge? This is an apologetics question because it bears upon the arguments for the existence of God.

Is lack of empirical evidence, if there is a lack, a draw back for God arguments? I deny that there is a lack, but it has to be put in the proper context. That will come in future threads, for this one I will bracket that answer and just assume there no really good empirical evidence (even though I think there is).

I will ague that empiricism is not true source of knowledge by itself and logic is more important.

True empirical evidence in a philosophical sense means exact first hand observation. In science it doesn't really mean that, it implies a more truncated process. Consider this, we drop two balls of different size from a tower. Do they fall the same rate or the bigger one falls faster? They are supposed to fall at the same rate, right? To say we have empirical proof, in the litteral sense of the term we would have to observe every single time two balls are dropped for as long as the tower exists. We would have to sit for thousnds of years and observe millions of drops and then we couldn't say it was truely empirical because we might have missed one.

That's impractical for science so we cheat with inductive reasoning. We make assumptions of probability. We say we observed this 40,000 times, that's a tight correlation, so we will assume there is a regularity in the universe that causes it to work this way every time. We make a statistical correlation. Like the surgeon general saying that smoking causes cancer. The tobacco companies were really right, they read their Hume, there was no observation of cause and effect, because we never observe cause and effect. But the correlation was so tight we assume cause and effect.

The ultimate example is Hume's billiard balls. Hume says we do not see the cause of the ball being made to move, we only really see one ball stop and the other start. But this happens every time we watch, so we assume that the tight corrolation gives us causality.

The naturalistic metaphysician assumes that all of nature works this way. A tight correlation is as good as a cause. So when we observe only naturalistic causes at work we can assume there is nothing beyond naturalism. The problem is many phenomena can fall between the cracks. One might go one's whole life never seeing a miraculous event, but that doesn't mean someone else doesn't observe such things. All the atheist can say is "I have never seen this" but I can say "I have." Yet the atheist lives in a construct that is made up of his assumptions about naturslitic c/e and excluding anyting that challenges it. That is just like Kuhns paradigm shift. The challenges are absorbed into the paradigm untl there are so many the paradigm has to shit. This may never happen in naturalism.

So this constructed view of the world that is made out of assumption and probabilities misses a lot of experience that people do have that contradicts the paradigm of naturalism. The thing is, to make that construct they must use logic. After all what they are doing in making the correlation is merely inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning has to play off of deductive reasoning to even make sense.

Ultimately then, "empiricism" as construed by naturalist (inductive probabalistic assumtions building constructs to form a world view) is inadquate because it is merely a contsuct and rules out a prori much that contradicts.

The A priori

God is not given directly in sense data, God transcends the threshold of human understanding, and thus is not given amenable to empirical proof. As I have commented in previous essays (on blogs) religion is not a scientific question. There are other methodologies that must be used to understand religion, since the topic is essentially inter-subjective (and science thrives upon objective data). We can study religious behavior through empirical means and we can compare all sorts of statistical realizations through comparisons of differing religious experiences, behaviors, and options. But we cannot produce a trace of God in the universe through "objective" scientific means. Here I use the term "trace" in the Derision sense, the "track," "footprint" the thing to follow to put us on the scent. As I have stated in previous essays, what we must do is find the "co-detemrinate," the thing that is left by God like footprints in the snow. The trace of God can be found in God's affects upon the human heart, and that shows up objectively, or inter-subjectvely in changed behavior, changed attitudes, life transformations. This is the basis of the mystical argument that I use, and in a sense it also has a bearing upon my religious instinxt argument. But here I wish to present another view of the trace of God. This could be seen as a co-detmiernate perhaps, more importantly, it frees religion from the structures of having to measure up to a scientific standard of proof: the religious a prori.

Definition of the a priori.

"This notion [Religious a priori] is used by philosophers of religion to express the view that the sense of the Divine is due to a special form of awareness which exists along side the cognitive, moral, and aesthetic forms of awareness and is not explicable by reference to them. The concept of religion as concerned with the awareness of and response to the divine is accordingly a simple notion which cannot be defined by reference other than itself." --David Pailin "Religious a pariori" Westminster Dictionary of Chrisian Theology (498)

The religious a priroi deals with the speicial nature of religion as non-derivative of any other discipline, and especially it's speicial reiigious faculty of understanding which transcends ordinary means of understanding. Since the enlightenment atheist have sought to explain away religion by placing it in relative and discardable terms. The major tactic for accomplishing this strategy was use of the sociological theory of structural functionalism. By this assumption religion was chalked up to some relative and passing social function, such as promoting loyalty to the tribe, or teaching morality for the sake of social cohesion. This way religion was explained naturalistically and it was also set in relative terms because these functions in society, while still viable (since religion is still around) could always pass away. But this viewpoint assumes that religion is derivative of some other discipline; it's primitive failed science, concocted to explain what thunder is for example. Religion is an emotional solace to get people through hard times and make sense of death and destruction (it's all sin, fallen world et). But the a priori does away with all that. The a priori says religion is its own thing, it is not failed primitive science, nor is it merely a crutch for surviving or making sense of the world (although it can be that) it is also its own discipline; the major impetus for religion is the sense of the numinous, not the need for explanations of the natural world. Anthropologists are coming more and more to discord that nineteenth century approach anyway.

Thomas A Indianopolus:prof of Religion at of Miami U. of Ohio.

Cross currents Magazine

It is the experience of the transcendent, including the human response to that experience, that creates faith, or more precisely the life of faith. [Huston] Smith seems to regard human beings as having a propensity for faith, so that one speaks of their faith as "innate." In his analysis, faith and transcendence are more accurate descriptions of the lives of religious human beings than conventional uses of the word, religion. The reason for this has to do with the distinction between participant and observer. This is a fundamental distinction for Smith, separating religious people (the participants) from the detached, so-called objective students of religious people (the observers). Smith's argument is that religious persons do not ordinarily have "a religion." The word, religion, comes into usage not as the participant's word but as the observer's word, one that focuses on observable doctrines, institutions, ceremonies, and other practices. By contrast, faith is about the nonobservable, life-shaping vision of transcendence held by a participant..."

The Skeptic might argue "if religion has this unique form of consciousness that sets it apart form other forms of understanding, why does it have to be taught?" Obviously religious belief is taught through culture, and there is a good reason for that, because religion is a cultural construct. But that does not diminish the reality of God. Culture teaches religion but God is known to people in the heart. This comes through a variety of ways; through direct experience, through miraculous signs, through intuitive sense, or through a sense of the numinous. The Westminster's Dictionary of Christian Theology ..defines Numinous as "the sense of awe in attracting and repelling people to the Holy." Of course the background assumption I make is, as I have said many times, that God is apprehended by us mystically--beyond word, thought, or image--we must encode that understanding by filtering it through our cultural constrcts, which creates religious differences, and religious problems.

The Culturally constructed nature of religion does not negate the a priori. "Even though the forms by Which religion is expressed are culturally conditioned, religion itself is sui generis .. essentially irreducible to and undeceivable from the non-religious." (Paladin). Nor can the a priori be reduced to some other form of endeavor. It cannot be summed up by the use of ethics or any other field, it cannot be reduced to explanation of the world or to other fields, or physiological counter causality. To propose such scientific analysis, except in terms of measuring or documenting effects upon behavior, would yield fruitless results. Such results might be taken as proof of no validity, but this would be a mistake. No scientific control can ever be established, because any study would only be studying the culturally constructed bits (by definition since language and social sciences are cultural constructs as well) so all the social sciences will wind up doing is merely reifying the phenomena and reducing the experience. In other words, This idea can never be studied in a social sciences sense, all that the social sciences can do is redefine the phenomena until they are no longer discussing the actual experiences of the religious believer, but merely the ideology of the social scientist (see my essay on Thomas S. Kuhn.

The attempt of skeptics to apply counter causality, that is, to show that the a priori phenomena is the result of naturalistic forces and not miraculous or divine, not only misses the boat in its assumptions about the nature of the argument, but it also loses the phenomena by reduction to some other phenomena. It misses the boat because it assumes that the reason for the phenomena is the claim of miraculous origin, “I feel the presence of God because God is miraculously giving me this sense of his presence.” While some may say that, it need not be the believers argument. The real argument is simply that the co-determinates are signs of the trace of God in the universe, not because we cant understand them being produced naturalistically, but because they evoke the sense of numinous and draw us to God. The numinous implies something beyond the natural, but it need not be “a miracle.” The sense of the numinous is actually a natural thing, it is part of our apprehension of the world, but it points to the sublime, which in turn points to transcendence. In other words, the attribution of counter causality does not, in and of itself, destroy the argument, while it is the life transformation through the experience that is truly the argument, not the phenomena itself. Its the affects upon the believer of the sense of Gods presence and not the sense of Gods presence that truly indicates the trance of God.

Moreover, the attempts to reduce the causality to something less than the miraculous also lose the phenomena in reification.William James, The Verieties of Religious Experience (The Gilford Lectures):

Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.

This does not mean that the mere claim of religious experience of God consciousness is proof in and of itself, but it means that it must be taken on its own terms. It clearly answers the question about why God doesn't reveal himself to everyone; He has, or rather, He has made it clear to everyone that he exists, and He has provided everyone with a means of knowing Him. He doesn't get any more explicit because faith is a major requirement for belief. Faith is not an arbitrary requirement, but the rational and logical result of a world made up of moral choices. God reveals himself, but on his own terms. We must seek God on those terms, in the human heart and the basic sense of the numinous and in the nature of religious encounter. There are many aspects and versions of this sense, it is not standardized and can be describes in many ways:

Forms of the A priori.

Schleiermacher's "Feeling of Utter Dependence.

Frederick Schleiermacher, (1768-1834) in On Religion: Speeches to it's Cultured Disposers, and The Christian Faith, sets forth the view that religion is not reducible to knowledge or ethical systems. It is primarily a phenomenological apprehension of God consciousness through means of religious affections. Affections is a term not used much anymore, and it is easily confused with mere emotion. Sometimes Schleiermacher is understood as saying that "I become emotional when I pay and thus there must be an object of my emotional feelings." Though he does vintner close to this position in one form of the argument, this is not exactly what he's saying.

Schleiermacher is saying that there is a special intuitive sense that everyone can grasp of this whole, this unity, being bound up with a higher reality, being dependent upon a higher unity. In other words, the "feeling" can be understood as an intuitive sense of "radical contingency" (int he sense of the above ontological arugments).He goes on to say that the feeling is based upon the ontological principle as its theoretical background, but doesn't' depend on the argument because it proceeds the argument as the pre-given pre-theorectical pre-cognative realization of what Anslem sat down and thought about and turned into a rational argument: why has the fools said in his heart 'there is no God?' Why a fool? Because in the heart we know God. To deny this is to deny the most basic realization about reality.

Rudolph Otto's Sense of the Holy (1868-1937)

The sense of power in the numinous which people find when confronted by the sacred. The special sense of presence or of Holiness which is intuitive and observed in all religious experience around the world.

Paul Tillich's Object of Ultimate Concern.

We are going to die. We cannot avoid this. This is our ultimate concern and sooner or latter we have to confront it. When we do we realize a sense of transformation that gives us a special realization existentially that life is more than material.

see also My article on Toilet's notion of God as the Ground of Being.

Tillich's concept made into God argument.

As Robert R. Williams puts it:

There is a "co-determinate to the Feeling of Utter dependence.

It is the original pre-theoretical consciousness...Schleiermacher believes that theoretical cognition is founded upon pre-theoretical intersubjective cognition and its life world. The latter cannot be dismissed as non-cognative for if the life world praxis is non-cognative and invalid so is theoretical cognition..S...contends that belief in God is pre-theoretical, it is not the result of proofs and demonstration, but is conditioned soley by the modification of feeling of utter dependence. Belief in God is not acquired through intellectual acts of which the traditional proofs are examples, but rather from the thing itself, the object of religious experience..If as S...says God is given to feeling in an original way this means that the feeling of utter dependence is in some sense an apparition of divine being and reality. This is not meant as an appeal to revelation but rather as a naturalistic eidetic"] or a priori. The feeling of utter dependence is structured by a corrolation with its whence.

, Schleiermacher the Theologian, p 4. The believer is justified in assuming that his/her experinces are experiences of a reality, that is to say, that God is real.

Freedom from the Need to prove.

Schleiermacher came up with his notion of the feeling when wrestling with Kantian Dualism. Kant had said that the world is divided into two aspects of relaity the numenous and the pheneomenal. The numenous is not experienced through sense data, and sense God is not experineced through sense data, God belongs only to the numenous. The problem is that this robbs us of an object of theological discourse. We can't talk about God because we can't experience God in sense data. Schleiermacher found a way to run an 'end round' and get around the sense data. Experience of God is given directly in the "feeling" apart form sense data.

This frees us form the need to prove the existence of God to others, because we know that God exists in a deep way that cannot be estreated by mere cultural constructs or reductionist data or deified phenomena. This restores the object of theological discourse. Once having regained its object, theological discourse can proceed to make the logical deduction that there must be a CO-determinate to the feeling, and that CO-determinate is God. In that sense Schleiermacher is saying "if I have affections about God must exist as an object of my affections"--not merely because anything there must be an object of all affections, but because of the logic of the co-determinate--there is a sense of radical contengency, there must be an object upon which we are radically contingent.

Is The Bad Economy The Dem's Fault?

We are facing loss of the house and senate to the Democracy destorying Repubs in the mid terms next month. They will take away your health care, that's the least they will do A coupoleof years latter geta Repub president maybe you know who? Those of us who finnd this state of affaors unbearable mist start coampaomimgow. We all kmow REpubs we have to start trying to opem thiereyes, it's not too late just try.

One of the major points I find the Reps making is that Biden ceased or greatly reduced oil production that kicked off inflation. This is really the lynchpin of their attack.
Here is a football star running for theseate who says it:

Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for a hotly contested Georgia Senate seat, took a page from the GOP midterm playbook by accusing President Joe Biden of sabotaging the U.S. ability to produce oil, driving gasoline prices to near record highs...In a July 13 tweet attacking both his opponent, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, and Biden, Walker wrote, "Gas is more expensive because you and Senator Warnock cancelled the Keystone XL Pipeline and stopped domestic drilling, sending American jobs and energy overseas."[1]

Politifact shows this to be false, it is a lie:

• Since President Joe Biden took office, oil production has risen both on federal lands and on U.S. lands overall. Overall domestic oil production in 2021 came close to a record high.

• Biden never tried to bar all domestic drilling. He did try to pause future leasing on federal lands, but this was blocked by a court.

• No president has the authority to stop drilling on private lands. And presidents have little control over gasoline prices, which are determined by the global market. [2]

Newsweek tells us that oil production was slack before Biden took office due to the pandenic."Zibel noted that production 'fell off a cliff' in the spring of 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic but has been gradually coming back since, under both former president Donald Trump and Biden." [3] Since this is the basis of their attack on Biden disproving it means their entire reason for blaming him collapses.

Look the Reps think lower oil production caused iflation, since Biden did't reduce it he did not cause inflation.Econonists say that it was the pandemic that caused a decrease in oil production and contribted to inflation.

"Republicans Wrongly Blame Biden for Rising Gas Prices.They have pointed to the Biden administration’s policies on the Keystone XL pipeline and certain oil and gas leases, which have had little impact on prices...These claims are misleading. The primary reason for rising gas prices over the past year is the coronavirus pandemic and its disruptions to global supply and demand."[4]

"Gas prices have risen in recent weeks because a key pipeline was forced to close after a cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline. And lumber shortages — which existed during former President Donald Trump’s administration — were worsened by an unexpected housing boom."[5]

Moreover, the war in Ukrane has affected oil prices.Dario Caldara, Sarah Conlisk, Matteo Iacoviello, and Maddie Penn1

Global geopolitical risks have soared since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Investors, market participants, and policymakers expect that the war will exert a drag on the global economy while pushing up inflation, with a sharp increase in uncertainty and risks of severe adverse outcomes.2 As an example of these concerns, the April 2022 edition of the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook contains more than 200 mentions of the word "war." Some economic effects are already materializing. The economies of Russia and Ukraine are contracting sharply as a direct result of the war and the sanctions imposed on Russia. Commodity markets are in turmoil and financial markets have been highly volatile since the start of the conflict. In light of these developments, a key question is: How much will geopolitical tensions weigh on economic activity in 2022 and beyond?[6]

So we have three reasons for bad economy they have nothing to do with Biden,

(1)Covid haulted spending because everyone stayed home. How could anyone think that would not effect the economy?

(2)Market concetration

(3) War in Ukrane disrupted international trade.

Tell your republican friends, if you have any!



Notes

[1]"Did Biden stop domestic oil drilling, as Herschel Walker said? Hardly" Politifact (July 13,2022) https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jul/22/herschel-walker/did-biden-stop-domestic-oil-drilling-herschel-walk/

[2]Ibid.

[3] Alexandra Hutzler, "Have Biden Administration Policies Reduced U.S. Oil Production?,"(March 8,2022). https://www.newsweek.com/have-biden-administration-policies-reduced-us-oil-production-1686104

[4]CHRISTOPHER RUGABER and HOPE YEN Fact Check REpublicans Falsely Blame Biden for gas prices,)(May 26, 2021AP) https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-lifestyle-health-coronavirus-pandemic-prices-084a908ac2850e8690a822d6c7f56301 see also: New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/us/politics/fact-check-republicans-biden-gas.html

[5]Rugaber, op cit

[6]Dario Caldara, Sarah Conlisk, Matteo Iacoviello, and Maddie Penn,"The Effect of the War in Ukraine on Global Activity and Inflation,"FEDS notes (May 27, 2022)Journal of board of govenors federal reserve system. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/the-effect-of-the-war-in-ukraine-on-global-activity-and-inflation-20220527.html

How Do we Know Which Parts of the Bible are Inspired?

On a message board an atheist named Magus asks me:

Quote: Which parts of the bible are the "true" word of god, if any? Do you believe that the bible is only a reflection of the way that the people who wrote it or do you believe god wanted it to turn out the way it did? If you believe some parts come from god and other do not, how do you determine which is which? Of course I heard these kinds of questions all the time.

Quote: Which parts of the bible are the "true" word of god, if any?

Not a matter of Parts. You can't dissect a narrative line by line and ask "what parts of this narrative are the result of the writer's genius and what parts are just banal filler?" You can criticize different aspects of course, but you can't say 'this sentence is genius and this sentence is not a product of genius." The whole narrative works together to create a solid word. Narratives communicate in many subtle ways. you can't limit the number of insights one can deduce from a work of art.

Fundamentalists look at the Bible in a certain way and atheists look at it in reaction the fundamentalist way. The basic assumption is made by both that the text of the Bible is, from the "In the Beginning" of Genesis to the "even so come quickly Lord Jesus" of Revelation as words transmitted from God to the mind of the authors. As though Moses sits down, takes pen in hand and a light shines on him and a voice in his head says (in a booming echo like way) "write write write, this is it...."In in in The the their beginning beginning beginning...." I don't think it works that way. I am willing to understand that when the prophets say "this is what the Lord says" they may be repeating word for word the exact verbiage God gave them to say, although not necessarily. But for most of the Bible I doubt that it works that way. I think people were just using the ideas that came to them as a result of their religious experiences, and as a result they used those concepts and feelings in the different ways that it occurred to them to use such material. They put their ideas of God into the stories and those who had real experiences really captured the nature of God's grace, and those who did not genuinely experience God failed to capture such things.

The real problem is the model. The model of the fundies says that God is writing a memo. The Bible is the word form "the Big man upstairs" and just like an executive writing a memo. Moses is taking dictation. But that model assumes directly handed down verbiage, it's even called "verbal plenary" meaning "all the verbiage is inspired." That's NOT the model I use. I go by a model that views the Bible as a collection of writings which are based upon human encounters with the divine. People experience God in different ways, usually beyond words; to speak about that they must call up from the deep recesses of their spirits (minds) that intangible part that produces art and literature, and they formulate into words their experiences. That means they have to load the experience into cultural constructs.

A cultural construct is an idea that is suggested by culture, by association with other people in society and the symbols and analogies and metaphors that tacitly speak to us at a level we understand but can't necessarily articulate. In the ancient world life was cheap, people were used to thinking in terms of either wiping out the other guy or being wiped out. The ancient Hebrews magnified their culture, but a romanticized view of themselves and their struggles into narrative form and used that framework to express the wordless sense of the numinous that they experienced through contact with God. The tendency to want to wipe out other people, to destroy totally every trace of their existence and lives, is part of the cultural constructs which act as a lens to give words to the writer's deep and hidden senses of God communicated through wordless sensations on the mystical level. So they build into the narrative a bunch of stuff about wiping these guys and those guys but what we need to understand is the major point being made.

For example, in the bit about the Amalekites, I'm pretty sure the bit about the infants is added in latter. I think we see real evdience in the text that it's been tweaked. But the real point is not wipe out the Amalekites nor is it that it's ok for us to wipe our enemies, the real point is to obey God. Saul didn't obey God and the incident was a downfall for him. Now it doesn't matter that the incident is this failure to wipe out the infants it could have been anything. They wrote it like that. The real point is do whatever God tells you to do. But that God is not going to tell us to wipe out our enemies and destroy their kids is pretty obvious to most of us. We can defend that description well enough to say "God did not command this." We can even put it up to religious experience. My experiences of God tells me God doesn't want this. But why did the author of that part of the Bible (presumably Samuel) think that God did tell him that? Because he's filtering the experience through his cultural constructs.

Now you might ask "but then how can we learn moral truths? Our moral understanding is not static. Our understanding evolves over time. The ancient Hebrews could not understand this was wrong because it was common place in their day. We understand the wrong of it because culture evolves. Jesus understood it was wrong. Jesus did not say "wipe out the Amalekites" he said "turn the other cheek." He even corrected the understanding of the OT generations when he said "you have heard it said an eye a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you turn the other cheek." With the Bible we do not proof text. We don't determine what to do by one verse. We use the preponderance of the evidence, meaning everything we can understand about the Bible. We don't stop there, we study and understand what others have said about it. We use the words of the saints and the great theologians as precedents and benchmarks to help us interpret. Samuel was not speaking with authority for all time in telling that story. He was not merely telling a story he heard he was putting down on paper a tradition (probably the real author was writing from Babylon in the exile--that's the most heavily redacted part of the Bible). He was putting into the work his understanding of God from his experiences as well what he had been taught. But the end result is a narrative and like all narratives it only works to accomplish its task when we try to understand it as a narrative and not force it into molds where it doesn't fit such as memo from the boss, military communique, or auto owner's manual.

It doesn't make sense to say "this is inspired and this isn't." That would be like saying "which feet of Elliot's The Wasteland are inspired and which aren't. You can't segment things in that way. We need to understand the bible as literature. It's major function is to bestow grace upon the reader. you read it to be healed to find spiritual edification and to understand God's laws. There are those who think it should be read like an instruction Manuel for a car. They seem to think it's going to tell us ever move to make in the same way that the owner's Manual tells us how to change the oil. Since the Bible is a collection of different works written over a long period of time it doesn't make sense to try and fit the whole collection into one model and understand it all in the same way.

We don't have to underst and exactly the role of inspiration nor do we need to look for the inspired parts as opposed to the banal parts. What we need to do is understand the over all preponderance of teaching and weigh that in light of what God shows us in our own lives. When we do this grace is bestowed, we are healed, we are drawn closer to God but we do not have to relate to it as if we are reading the instructions to change the oil in the car.



https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982408765 God, Science, and Ideology by Joseph Hinman is a very important book. Hinman was a PhD candidate in the UT system, his field was history of ideas and he studied the history and philosophy of science. He brings this knowledge to the critique of athye8ist ideology on the internet. Hinman summarizes 20years of arguments with atheist apologist and takes down some of the major atheists figures such as Richard Dawkins,

Do laws imply a law giver?

In my argument from laws of nature: https://metacrock.blogspot.com/2022/09/argument-from-laws-of-nature.html I say:

Notice I said nothing about law implying a law giver. The rationale for mind is not based upon laws in the prescriptive sense. Yet there is a law like regularity in what is described as the behavior of the universe. Skeptics will argue that laws are not prescriptive but merely descriptive of how the universe works. What they describe, however, seems rather law-like. It really makes no sense to say this is merely what the universe does and yet never violates it. It just happens to be very law-like but that's a total accident, one you can run a roller coaster by. Gravity always works.

In the comments of a different post, the one on Hartshorne's modal argument

Please do not do the laws need a law giver argument. It only shows you do not understand what laws are in science. As I said before:

He doesn't read what I say. This raises a question, since avoiding the law giver idea doesn't work it doesn't matter what I say he wont read it, why otarguefraom laws to law giver?

The reason for disputing  the term "law," is because physical law are not really laws. They are not passed by any governing body. They are called laws because when Issac Newton and others came up with the idea of natural law they assumed they were established by God. Thus they are God given God is the law maker. But that would be a circular reason to argue this and the use that to prove God exists. But is there another approach?

What we call laws are not laws and according to atheist bromide (natural laws are just descriptions of the way the universe works) we can call them "tendencies." Tendencies imply a tendency maker? Well we can infer a reason that's why scientists try to explain how things work.That is why we have science, to explain how it works.

Term  tendency isn't strong enough because there is no option. Things don't just tend to fall toward the center of mass, they have to. There are no exceptions given normal conditions.Weather we go with law or find some other term is ot the issue. The issue is that efficiency and regularity that never fails implies planning and planning requires a mind,We don't have to call it law but does seem to be the product of mind.

Argument from Laws of Nature

I had such fun the last couleof weeks makimg God argumemts I just have to add another,

The folks on Secular Outpost were Always dubious of any argument from laws of nature.  The presentation that set them off and so deserved their ire was designed by Campus Crusade for Christ. [1] Yet I felt it was possible to make a valid argumemt along those lines and thus I felt like I had to try to  prove to the atheists there is a potential argument there and show my fellow Christians how to find it.

The bad argument on the Sec Outpost was purely a "god of the gaps" argument: how is it that we can identify laws of nature that never change? Why is the universe so orderly, so reliable? "The greatest scientists have been struck by how strange this is. There is no logical necessity for a universe that obeys rules, let alone one that abides by the rules of mathematics. This astonishment springs from the recognition that the universe doesn't have to behave this way. It is easy to imagine a universe in which conditions change unpredictably from instant to instant, or even a universe in which things pop in and out of existence."[2]

The only rationale upon which the argument turns is the mystery concerning how laws work. That is a god of the gaps argument by definition, textbook. My argument begins by stating a rationale that, while it may be hard to prove, is at least not a gap in knowledge, at least not only a gap. The problem with gaps is that they close up. Yet if we can demonstrate that mind is a more solid basis for the seeming law-like regularity of the universe that night make for a better explanation.[3] The argument:

1) mind is the most efficient and dependable source of ordering we know,

(2) Random ordering is usually inefficient and the odds are against its dependability.

(3) The Universe Displays a Law-like efficiency and dependability in the workings of its natural machinations.

(4) Such efficiency and dependability is indicative of mind as an ordering principle (from 1,3), therefore, it is logical to assume mind as the best explanation for the dependability of the universe..

(5) A mind that orders the universe fits the major job description for God, Thus mind is the best explanation, assuming the choices are mind vs random chance.

Notice I said nothing about law implying a law giver. The rationale for mind is not based upon laws in the prescriptive sense. Yet there is a law like regularity in what is described as the behavior of the universe. Skeptics will argue that laws are not prescriptive but merely descriptive of how the universe works. What they describe, however, seems rather law-like. It really makes no sense to say this is merely what the universe does and yet never violates it. It just happens to be very law-like but that's a total accident, one you can run a roller coaster by. Gravity always works.

This does raise the one real sticking point, premises 1-2. Can we prove that mind is the best explanation for law-like regularity? I'm going to assume that it's pretty obvious that (P3) universe displays like-like efficiency. Also I don't think it will be such a struggle to prove 4-5 linking a mind that orders the universe with God. Therefore I wont bother to argue those here. Thus I will concern myself primarily with P's 1-2.

Certain schools of philosophy hold that an inference to the best explanation is a valid argument. That is if one amid a variety of explanations has a more significant likelihood of coming true, and is more in line with prevailing theory and serves to explain more of the data then that hypothesis can be warranted as "the best explanation,"[4] Ratzsch goes on to quote Peter Lipton: "According to Inference to the Best Explanation … [g]iven our data and our background beliefs, we infer what would if true, provide the best of the competing explanations we can generate of those data (so long as the best is good enough for us to make any inference at all)."[5]

That complexity and efficacy are indicative of mind as an organizing principle might be hard or impossible to pull off but it makes sense on one level. Through complexity and fitedness one might deduce purpose or telos, and mind might be indicted in that sense.

All the richness and diversity of matter and energy we observe today has emerged since the beginning in a long and complicated sequence of self- organizing physical processes. The laws of physics not only permit a universe to originate spontaneously, but they encourage it to organize and complexify itself to the point where conscious beings emerge who can look back on the great cosmic drama and reflect on what it all means."

...The laws that characterize our actual universe, as opposed to an infinite number of alternative possible universes, seem almost contrived-fine-tuned, some commentators have claimed-so that life and consciousness may emerge. To quote Dyson again: it is almost as if "the universe knew we were coming." I cannot prove to you that this is design, but whatever it is it is certainly very clever][6]

Now the secularist skeptic might argue evolution demonstrates an organizing principle producing great complexity and in mindless fashion, While that might be the case the problem is evolution is surely the product of the law-like regularity and not it's cause. Presumably then we need laws to make evolutionary processes work and so we have not explained anything. Even so the skeptic can always fall back on the fact that we don't have a world that we know is or is not designed by a mind to which we compare our own world. Even though P1 might make sense there is no way to prove it. Not having an undesigned universe to compare may mean that we can't prove the existence of God by the argument here advanced, It does not necessarily mean the argument is not a good one. If we forget about proof and talk about warrant: it may not be proof but it is probably the best explanation and that may warrant belief.

 In arguments of this type, superior explanatory virtues of a theory are taken as constituting decisive epistemic support for theory acceptability, warranted belief of the theory, and likely truth of the theory. There are, of course, multitudes of purported explanatory, epistemic virtues, including the incomplete list a couple paragraphs back (and lists of such have evolved over time). Assessing hypotheses in terms of such virtues is frequently contentious, depending, as it does, on perceptions of ill-defined characteristics, differences in background conceptual stances, and the like. Still, in general we frequently manage rough and ready resolutions...[7]

The argument does turn on the premise of a design argument but it could be considered more than that. Hawking ascribes the origin of the universe to the laws of physics, particularly gravity He certainly seems to indicate that they are more than just descriptions of what happens. Yet he makes no attempt to explain where these laws come from. In the sense that the mind offers a more complete explanation it could be the "best."

Stephen Hawking wrote a book, The Grand Design. in which he argued that gravity accounts for the existence of everything else:

If the total energy of the universe must always remain zero, and it costs energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing? That is why there must be a law like gravity. Because gravity is attractive, gravitational energy is negative….Bodies such as stars or black holes cannot just appear out of nothing. But a whole universe can….Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner described in Chapter 6. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.[8]

Edger Anders discusses the problem with this approach: So gravity is God. Unfortunately the authors have no time to tell us who created gravity (earlier they rule out God because no one could explain who created him). Nor can they tell us why matter and gravity should pop out of nothing, except to argue that ‘nothing’ undergoes quantum fluctuations. However, this requires that (like gravity) the laws of quantum mechanics pre-existed the universe and that ‘nothing’ possesses the properties of normal space, which is part of the created order and cannot be its antecedent.[9]

Were I involved in a debate against a seasoned great thinker or some professional philosopher this is not the argument I  would use. I think it is a valid warrant for belief, the best explanation for law-like regularity.

Main supporting evidence: Laws of Physics,k beyond descriptoveprescroptovedochotomy

this is a chapter for a book I'm working on. It;s in three parts but supports thsi argument real well,

Supporter Material

Laws of physics: beyond prescriptive/descriptive Dichotomy

Sources

[1] Bradly Bowen, Adamson's Cru [de] Arguments for God part 1, Secular Outpost, (April 25, 2016) blog URL:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2016/04/25/adamsons-crude-arguments-for-god-part-1/ accessed April 28, 2016

[2] Marlyn Adamson, "Is There a God," Every Student, Published by Campus Crusade for Christ

On line resource, URL: http://www.everystudent.com/features/isthere.html She sites fn 11:Dinesh D'Souza, What's So Great about Christianity; (Regnery Publishing, Inc, 2007, chapter

[3] I recently posted on criteria by which to judge best explanation.

[4] Ratzsch, Del and Koperski, Jeffrey, "Teleological Arguments for God's Existence", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = ..

[5] Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation. 1st Edition. London: Routledge (1991, 58): quoted in Ratzsch, Ibid.

[6] ."Paul Davies, "Physics and the Mind o God; Templeton Award Address, First Things ON LINE URL

http://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/08/003-physics-and-the-mind-of-god-the-templeton-prize-address-24 accessed 1/1/16

Paul Davies is Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Adelaide in Australia and the twenty-fifth recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, which he received on May 3, 1995 at Westminster Abbey. His books include The Mind of God, God and New Physics, The Cosmic Blueprint, Superforce, and Other Worlds.

[7] Ratzsch, Ibid.

[8] Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, New York: Bantum Books, 2010. 180

[9] Edgar Andres, “Review: the Grand Design,” Challies'.com, Tim Challies, on line reouce, URL:

http://www.challies.com/book-reviews/the-grand-design acessed 10/4/15 Andres is Emeritus professor University of London. Physicist and an expert on large molecules. Born 1932

Hartshorne's Modal Argument for God' Existence

Charles Hartshorne 1897-2000

What follows is one of the most challenging subjects you will ever hear about. It is the best way to get a head ache, but I think it proves the existence of God. The problem is it requires a very specialized background to understand it. First you have to understand modal logic.

Modal Logic is so called because it turns upon the use of so called "modal operators." It's called "modal" because it is the logic of modes of being. "modes" as in what type of existence something exits in, weather it is dependent upon other things, weather it can cease or fail to exist and so forth. The modal operators are "necessity," "contingency" "impossibly," "possibility."

Necessity and contingency lie at the base of our modern understanding of cause and effect. They come from scholastic notions of logic, but the distinction between the notion our modern notions of c/e and the scholastic ones in the middle ages is not that great. The scholastic had more levels of cause, efficient cause, final cause and several others. But one could everything we have done in modern science using the scholastic ideas of c/e.

Necessity doesn't mean has to exist. It doesn't mean God is necessary to the existence of the world (except in so far as if God exists then of closure God is necessary to the world as creator--without God there would be no world).The modal argument does not begin with the assumption that God has to exist. It begins with the assumption that there is a valid distinction between necessity and contingency, which there must be.It proceeds along the lines of hypothetical consequence that obtain from different scenarios of God's existence. It concludes that is necessary. But by "necessary" it means not contingent, or not dependent upon something else for its' existence.[1]

This is often misconstrued by atheists and taken to mean the argument proceeds from God's existence as an assumed first premise. This is not the case, the first premise is either/or. Either God's existence is necessary or it is impossible. This allows for the possibility that there is no God. So the argument does not begin by "defining God into existence."

Necessity essentially not contingent, it also coneys the idea of he can;'t cease or fail to exist, stemming from his eternal nature.

Contingent means the opposite: that a thing is dependent upon a prior thing for existence, or that it could cease or fail to exist.

Impossible means logically impossible, something in the structure of the idea contradictions, such as square circles.

one of the sore spots that atheists get stuck on is the idea that God cannot be contingent. They will always leap to the conclusion that this is defining God into existence, because they don't understand the concept of God. God, by the nature of the concept, carriers certain parameters just as the existence of any human assumes humanity, or the existence of any tree assumes that the tree in question is a plant. To have to define that God is not contingent should not even come into it. The idea of God is that of eternal creator of all things. Thus God cannot cease to exits and cannot be dependent upon anything (or he wouldn't be the creator of all things). Atheists usually assume that all knowledge has to be empirical. they will argue this is defining God into existence. maybe God is contingent.

Argument:

Close to Hartshorne's version

1. God is either necessary or impossible.
2. God can be conceived without contradiction.
3. Whatever can be conceived without contradiction is not impossible.
4. God is not impossible.
5. God's existence is a necessity (from 1-4, not contingent or impossible means necessary)
6. If God is necessary, then God exists.
7. Belief in God's existence is warranted



About Hartshorne

Hartshorne Lived to be 103, at the time of his death in the Fall of 2000, he was known as "the greatest living Metaphysician." Hartshorne was one of the major forces in the "back to God" movement in Philosophy (a term coined by Christianity Today in a 1979 article. His first and greatest calim to fame is as the second most influential voice in process philosophy, along with Alfred North Whtiehead, but he is also credited as the man who brought the Ontological argument back from ignominious defeat by Kant almost two centuries earlier. Hartshorne was also a recognized authority on birdsong, and an authority on bycicles, having never driven a car a single time in his centogenerian lifespan. Hartshorne devoted the last years of life to waging a letter's to the editor campaign to advocate social issues such as medical care.

Answering the argumet that God need mot be necessary

Logic of the modal argumemt.

Fun with the Modal argumemt


Notes

[1] Most of the time philosphers define Necessity as "necessity, in logic and metaphysics, a modal property of a true proposition whereby it is not possible for the proposition to be false and of a false proposition whereby it is not possible for the proposition to be true." According to Google. There is anothersese ofnecessity menaing indepemdet existence. Hartshorne argued these senses are really one. The reason something could not cease or fail to exist is because it does dependd for existence upon anything else.

Anthropic Argument (Fine Tuning)

1 Argument from Religious experiece (codetermenate)
2 Argumemt from Transcendental signifiers(You are here)
3 The Cosmological argumemt
4 The Fine tuning argumemt (You are here)
5 Hartshorne's Modal argument


The fine tuning argument says that there are so many enstances which had things been slightly different life would not have emerged, that we must conclude that the game is fxed; there is a creative mind guiding the evolutionary development of the universe.

Our best current theories of fundamental physics are the Standard Model of elementary particle physics and the theory of general relativity. The Standard Model accounts for three of the known four fundamental forces of nature—the strong, the weak, and the electromagnetic force—while general relativity accounts for the fourth—gravity. Arguments according to which our universe is fine-tuned for life are aimed at showing that life could not have existed for the vast majority of other forms of the laws of nature, other values of the constants of nature, and other conditions in the very early universe.[1]

Examples

The following is an—incomplete—list of suggested instances of fine-tuning for life. (For popular overviews see Leslie 1989: ch. 2, Rees 2000, Davies 2006, and Lewis & Barnes 2016; for more technical ones see Hogan 2000, Uzan 2011, Barnes 2012, Adams 2019 and the contributions to Sloan et al. 2020.)[2]

The strength of gravity, when measured against the strength of electromagnetism, seems fine-tuned for life (Rees 2000: ch. 3; Uzan 2011: sect. 4; Lewis & Barnes 2016: ch. 4). If gravity had been absent or substantially weaker, galaxies, stars and planets would not have formed in the first place. Had it been only slightly weaker (and/or electromagnetism slightly stronger), main sequence stars such as the sun would have been significantly colder and would not explode in supernovae, which are the main source of many heavier elements (Carr & Rees 1979). If, in contrast, gravity had been slightly stronger, stars would have formed from smaller amounts of material, which would have meant that, inasmuch as still stable, they would have been much smaller and more short-lived (Adams 2008; Barnes 2012: sect. 4.7.1).

The strength of the strong nuclear force, when measured against that of electromagnetism, seems fine-tuned for life (Rees 2000: ch. 4; Lewis & Barnes 2016: ch. 4). Had it been stronger by more than about 50% almost all hydrogen would have been burned in the very early universe (MacDonald & Mullan 2009). Had it been weaker by a similar amount, stellar nucleosynthesis would have been much less efficient and few, if any, elements beyond hydrogen would have formed. For the production of appreciable amounts of both carbon and oxygen in stars, even much smaller deviations of the strength of the strong force from its actual value would be fatal (Hoyle et al. 1953; Barrow & Tipler 1986: 252–253; Oberhummer et al. 2000; Barnes 2012: sect. 4.7.2). The difference between the masses of the two lightest quarks—the up- and down-quark—seems fine-tuned for life (Carr & Rees 1979; Hogan 2000: sect. 4; Hogan 2007; Adams 2019: sect. 2.25). Partly, the fine-tuning of these two masses obtains relative to the strength of the weak force (Barr & Khan 2007). Changes in the difference between them have the potential to affect the stability properties of the proton and neutron, which are bound states of these quarks, or lead to a much simpler and less complex universe where bound states of quarks other than the proton and neutron dominate. Similar effects would occur if the mass of the electron, which is roughly ten times smaller than the mass difference between the down- and up-quark, would be somewhat larger in relation to that difference. There are also absolute constraints on the masses of the two lightest quarks (Adams 2019: fig. 5).

The strength of the weak force seems to be fine-tuned for life (Carr & Rees 1979). The cosmological constant characterizes the energy density of the vacuum. On theoretical grounds, outlined in Section 5 of this article, one would expect it to be larger than its actual value by an immense number of magnitudes.[3]

Many more

a source that makes the God argument based upon fine tuning, This soirce has top scientifijc credentials. (biologos--Fracis Collins):

Scientists of all worldviews agree that the physical constants of our universe and the conditions of the early universe are exquisitely fine-tuned for life. Multiple theories in physics predict that our universe may be one of very many, an idea known as the multiverse. Some Christians argue that fine-tuning is proof of God’s existence, while some atheists argue that the multiverse replaces God. Neither conclusion can be reached on the basis of science alone, because the existence of God is not a scientific question. Yet our fruitful cosmos resonates with the Christian understanding of God as the creator of a world fit for life.[4]

Answers on Multiverse The Multiverse is the idea that there is an infinite number of parallel universes. Because there is an infinite number it is not so improbable to find a life bearing universe. The more universes the greater the odds of fiding life thus this argumet is looked upon as thye defeater to the FT argument.I have 10 reasons why this is not the disproof of FT.I'll just go into a couple of them here.

I.We can never know if other universes exist or not.

One might be tempted to think that doesn't matter because the statistics indicate there must be lots of life bearing planets out there. Yet the important point is the atheists are the one's saying don't believe without empirical proof. They will challenge the believer to show "just one" fact supporting God. Yet they believe this with no empirical proof!

"yes there could be other universes out there, but they would be unobservable no matter how old our universe became...even infinitely old!! So, such universes have no meaning to science because there is no experiment we can perform to detect them." (astronomy café) [5]

Robert Koon's, philosopher Univ. Texas said,"Note how the situation has changed. Originally, atheists prided themselves on being no-nonsense empiricists, who limited their beliefs to what could be seen and measured. Now, we find ourselves in a situation in which the only alternative to belief in God is belief in an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes! You've come along way, baby!

II. Multiverse Requires Fine Tuning

Futhermore, the best mechanism for multiverses that last, actually requires fine-tuning itself. The chaotic inflationary model - which seeks to avoid fine-tuning by positing that the initial conditions vary at random over the superspace of the Higgs fields - also fine-tunes its parameters, as Earman has pointed out: "The inflationary model can succeed only by fine-tuning its parameters, and even then, relative to some natural measures on initial conditions, it may also have to fine-tune its initial conditions for inflation to work."[6]

co-author in inflationary theoryPhysicist Paul Steinhardt agrees: “The whole point of inflation was to get rid of fine-tuning – to explain features of the original big bang model that must be fine-tuned to match observations. The fact that we had to introduce one fine-tuning to remove another was worrisome. This problem has never been resolved.``[see fn for more][7] It is true they were not talking about answering the FTA for God but using FT of a sort in builig inflationary theory.  But the application it has here is that the theory of MV requires inflation, and if that theory itself requires fine tuning they can hardly balk at the concept of fine tuning. But they have no mechanism  to tune things. This puts inflationary theory in question and thus MV.

extended quote from the article:

 

Horgan: You were one of the originators of inflation theory. When and why did you start having doubts about it? Steinhardt: From the very beginning, even as I was writing my first paper on inflation in 1982, I was concerned that the inflationary picture only works if you finely tune the constants that control the inflationary period. Andy Albrecht and I (and, independently, Andrei Linde) had just discovered the way of having an extended period of inflation end in a graceful exit to a universe filled with hot matter and radiation, the paradigm for all inflationary models since. But the exit came at a cost -- fine-tuning. The whole point of inflation was to get rid of fine-tuning – to explain features of the original big bang model that must be fine-tuned to match observations. The fact that we had to introduce one fine-tuning to remove another was worrisome. This problem has never been resolved.... But my concerns really grew when I discovered that, due to quantum fluctuation effects, inflation is generically eternal and (as others soon emphasized) this would lead to a multiverse. Inflation was introduced to produce a universe that looks smooth and flat everywhere and that has features everywhere that agree with what we observe. Instead, it turns out that, due to quantum effects, inflation produces a multitude of patches (universes) that span every physically conceivable outcome (flat and curved, smooth and not smooth, isotropic and not isotropic, scale-invariant spectra and not, etc.). Our observable universe would be just one possibility out of a continuous spectrum of outcomes. So, we have not explained any feature of the universe by introducing inflation after all. We have just shifted the problem of the original big bang model (how can we explain our simple universe when there is a nearly infinite variety of possibilities that could emerge from the big bang?) to the inflationary model (how can we explain our simple universe when there is a nearly infinite variety of possibilities could emerge in a multiverse?).... I have to admit that I did not take the multiverse problem seriously at first even though I had been involved in uncovering it. I thought someone would figure out a resolution once the problem was revealed. That was 1983. I was wrong. Unfortunately, what has happened since is that all attempts to resolve the multiverse problem have failed and, in the process, it has become clear that the problem is much stickier than originally imagined. In fact, at this point, some proponents of inflation have suggested that there can be no solution. We should cease bothering to look for one. Instead, we should simply take inflation and the multiverse as fact and accept the notion that the features of the observable universe are accidental: consequences of living in this particular region of the multiverse rather than another.

To me, the accidental universe idea is scientifically meaningless because it explains nothing and predicts nothing. Also, it misses the most salient fact we have learned about large-scale structure of the universe: its extraordinary simplicity when averaged over large scales. In order to explain the one simple universe we can see, the inflationary multiverse and accidental universe hypotheses posit an infinite variety of universes with arbitrary amounts of complexity that we cannot see. Variations on the accidental universe, such as those employing the anthropic principle, do nothing to help the situation. Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, and predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.[8]

My entire argumemt on religious a priori (3 pages).



Notes


[1]Simon Friederich, "Fine-Tuning", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

[2]Ibid

[3]Ibid

[4]"What Do Fine Tuning and Multiverse say about God?" Biologos,2019 https://biologos.org/common-questions/what-do-fine-tuning-and-the-multiverse-say-about-god?gclid=Cj0KCQjw6_CYBhDjARIsABnuSzqxKBGOsLkJJ9hDYRz4aRnjFXCnilhoOu9rKwZDRa6t_LIT5CWHzh8aAqMhEALw_wcB

"BioLogos was founded by one of the top biologists in the world, Francis Collins. He led the Human Genome Project and now directs the National Institutes of Health. In 2006, he wrote the best-selling book The Language of God in which he tells his journey from atheism to Christian belief, showing that science is not in conflict with the Bible, but actually enhances faith. The outpouring of response to the book showed the need for virtual and actual meeting places to ask questions, discuss issues, and learn from the top Christian minds in the sciences and theology."

[5]Sten Odenwald, (Raytheon STX) for the NASA IMAGE/POETRY Education and Public Outreach program http://sirius-c.ncat.edu/space/Space-Weather/poetry/ask/a11215.html (accessed Jine 8.2019)

[6]John Earman. Bangs, Crunches, Wimpers, and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausalities in Relativistic Spacetimes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995., p. 156) So rather than avoid fine-tuning, the multiverse pushes it up a level.

[7]John Horgan, “Physicist slams Cosmic Theory he Helped Conceive,” Scientific American Blogs, December 1, 2014. on line, URL http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/physicist-slams-cosmic-theory-he-helped-conceive/ accessed 10/5/15. Horgan interviews Steinhardt.

[8]Ibid.

The Cosmological Argument for The Existence of God

List of God arguments to be presented: 1 Argument from Religious experience (codetermenate)
2 Argument from Transcendental signifiers
3 The Cosmological argument(You are here)
4 The Fine tuning argument
5 Hartshorne's Modal argument


The Argument

1. Something exists.
2. Whatever exists exists either necessarily or contingently.
3. It is impossible that only contingent things exist.
4. Therefore, there exists at least one necessary thing.
5. If there is a necessary thing, that thing is appropriately called 'God.'
6. Therefore God exists.[1]


There are many versions of the cosmological argument, this is the modal cosmological argument. One of the best known versions is the Kalam cosmological arument is the version made famous by William Lane Craig. Craig takes that argument from Arab philosophers in the middle ages.The Modal version differs in that Kalam rests upon the universe having a beginning The Modal argument doesn't make that assumption:

What distinguishes the modal cosmological argument from the kalam cosmological argument is that it is consistent with the idea that the universe has an infinite past. The kalam cosmological argument rests on the controversial claim that the universe has a beginning in time. The argument from contingency, in contrast, is consistent with the universe having existed from eternity.[2]

  One thing skeptocal critics have often pulled on me is to deny that contingencies require necessities. They have often challenged me to prove this. My Major means of proof is to show that major sources on philosophy affirm this idea.First let's define necessity and contingency.

Something is “necessary” if it could not possibly have failed to exist. The laws of mathematics are often thought to be necessary. It is plausible to say that mathematical truths such as two and two making four hold irrespective of the way that the world is. Even if the world were radically different, it seems, two and two would still make four. God, too, is often thought to be a necessary being, i.e. a being that logically could not have failed to exist.

  Something is “contingent” if it is not necessary, i.e. if it could have failed to exist. Most things seem to exist contingently. All of the human artefacts around us might not have existed; for each one of them, whoever made it might have decided not to do so. Their existence, therefore, is contingent. You and I, too, might not have existed; our respective parents might never have met, or might have decided not to have children, or might have decided to have children at a different time. Our existence, therefore, is contingent. Even the world around us seems to be contingent; the universe might have developed in such a way that none of the observable stars and planets existed at all.[3]

    There is a causal dimension to the relationship. Contingencies deend upo necessities for their existence.

      "A contingent being (a being such that if it exists, it could have not-existed or could cease to exist) exists. This contingent being has a cause of or explanation for its existence. ... Therefore, what causes or explains the existence of this contingent being must include a non-contingent (necessary) being."[4] This makes sense from the standpoint of cause and effect. All naturalistic things have causes.. Thus everything nature produces is caused and thus is contingent.Since   nature is contingent there must be a necessity that produces nature.

A major argument skeptics ask me is why does the cause have to be God? It could be some impersonal things. That doesn;t make sense because they are asserting another naturalistic thing which would be contingent so it doesn't solve the problem at all. The ultimate necessity must be eternal since it can't be caused (then it would be contingent). We can't get something from nothing. It must be eternal. It must be capable of producing all the contingencies. Thus God fits this description better than anything else we know.

Notes and Sources

[1]My argument is a great deal like Samuel Calrke's argumemt.

Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) was the most influential British metaphysician and theologian in the generation between Locke and Berkeley, and only Shaftesbury rivals him in ethics. In all three areas he was very critical of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Toland. Deeply influenced by Newton, Clarke was critical of Descartes’ metaphysics of space and body because of the experimental evidence for Newtonianian doctrines of space, the vacuum, atoms, and attraction and because he believed Descartes’ identifying body with extension and removing final causes from nature had furthered irreligion and had naturally developed into Spinozism.

Stanford Encyclopidia of Philosphy (Apr 5, 2003;substantive revision Wed Aug 22, 2018)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/clarke/
Clarke’s “Argument from Contingency”:

1. Every being that exists is either contingent or necessary.
2. Not every being can be contingent.
3. Therefore, there exists a necessary being on which the contingent beings depend.
4. A necessary being, on which all contingent things depend, is what we mean by “God”.
5. Therefore, God exists.

[2] Tim Holt, "Philoso[hy of Reliogion," www.philosophyofreligion.info website. URL:https://www.philosophyofreligion.uk/theistic-proofs/the-cosmological-argument/the-argument-from-contingency/

[3] Ibid.

[4]B Reichenbach, "Cosmological Argument," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,2004 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/