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That's enough for a curiosity but not, in my judgement, for a minor cultural icon. You need a tiny bit more meat on the legend for that.
Fair enough, but you don’t think that unique characteristic is enough to inspire the name of a character like Stephenson’s immortal wanderer Enoch Root?
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And not even among the ones that believe is sacred agree which parts are valid or not, not even mentioning the translations which it's own interpretations each.
I don’t disagree, but also don’t see in what way this is relevant to the original question or opposing my answer. If anything, two billion people care so deeply about it that they can have arguments about what’s “valid” and what the meaning is.
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Gimp eh? Well we're not going to put that in the article. We're serious people.
I would have been fine with not mentioning GIMP had they said "an open-source alternative" or something. It's the fact that they called it a "knockoff" that made me realize they have no idea what they're talking about.
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And not even among the ones that believe is sacred agree which parts are valid or not, not even mentioning the translations which it's own interpretations each.
I don’t disagree, but also don’t see in what way this is relevant to the original question or opposing my answer. If anything, two billion people care so deeply about it that they can have arguments about what’s “valid” and what the meaning is.
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The point is that science can’t comment on the “divine inspiration” claim, except to note that it’s outside its purview. Burden of proof is a whole different discussion.
> science can’t comment on the “divine inspiration” claim It certainly can. It can point out that there is no evidence that any human writing is divinely inspired, and so claims of divine inspiration are almost certainly false.
Science uses induction as a measure, meaning it presupposes that we have faith in the proposition that something will happen again because it has happened in the past. That would be akin to claiming to be immortal, because every time someone died, it wasn't you. With a little additional information, such as the recognition that you are an animal and that most animals seem to have not been immortal in the past, a good hypothesis would be that you will die, but how can you be sure that you're not the first immortal one? It might seem silly, but how can we be certain that the entirety of physics in the universe is not milliseconds from unraveling, that we're not a metaphorical barrel at the crest of a waterfall without knowing?
In epistemology, only logical truths are certain, anything else is an attempt to put a confidence rating on a proposition, be it through science or religion. Neither can reach 100%, but both can certainly be 0%. There aren't even objective measures for such confidence ratings, statistical modelling is the best we have.
The scientific method explicitly excludes unfalsifiable claims from its purview. If you have ever argued with a religious person, you will realize how easily deflected the argument is, that there is no evidence for divine inspiration. You could mention billions of recorded scientific findings that point toward a material world without supernatural events and still be rebuked by "So what? That doesn't mean it's untrue. You can't disprove that it happened that one time."
I'm not saying that science is a pointless endeavor, just that it can never be an objective measure of truth.
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The burden of proof rests on those who make fantastical claims, not on everyone else to disprove their claims.
I used to believe this after reading Dawkins as a teenager. After reading lots of philosophy I’ve come to believe that the question as posed is unfalsifiable and thus not possible to test scientifically. Asking “is the bible divinely inspired” is similar to asking “what is the meaning of life”, it cannot be tackled scientifically, thus it falls into philosophy and theology. The same thought process led me to abandon…
I guess what you're saying is technically true, but adhering to an extremely strict interpretation of "science" doesn't strike me as terribly useful here. Science can't offer a definitive conclusive question for a lot of things in life, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have anything useful to say and can certainly inform on theological and moral matters.
For example, we can conduct scientific experiments to determine whether animals have emotions, what kind of emotions they have, if they can feel pain, and things like that. This doesn't directly answer any moral questions about how animals should be treated, but such science is invaluable if you want to try and answer these moral questions.
Philosophy without science is just a bunch of people talking shit.
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This got me thinking: what exactly defines a forgery here? Ancient Jewish texts were almost certainly based on previous oral tradition and underwent all sorts of changes over the years before they came to be written down as the texts we know today, and there were probably different versions of the written texts too – the non-canonical ones just got mostly lost as they didn't get copied so much (or at all). So is a te…
Yes - there is a presumption that someone has the truth, and we can all go and check against it. When in reality it is very hard to know truth, even in the present time, even in one's own experience. So, if that is the case, why make such an outlandish claim? Well, there is value to someone if they can say 'I have the truth' and other people believe them. The initial lie, once believed, takes on a life of its own tha…
Isn't the whole bible a collection of fictional stories / articles? Who cares if some one tacks on extra "forged" chapters? What does forged even mean in this context?
>Isn't the whole bible a collection of fictional stories / articles? It isn't, according to my Catholic upbringing. It's the word of God, which he dictated through the people who originally wrote it. There are supposedly 1.345 billion Catholics. So, I think there are many people who care.
Lots of question marks: How do we know what's a forgery and what's not? Did someone take authentic originals and write additional text over them? Where do these forgeries come from? How are all of these fragments not in one place under guard? How are forgeries of this even possible? I need more context to understand.
There's a concept called "provenance" which is basically "how sure are we that it's authentic". What work like this is doing is comparing scrolls with uncertain provenance to items of very secure provenance like known fragments from the original excavations. You can find forgeries everywhere in the antiquities trade. Some of them are modern productions, but many (see all pieces of the true cross in churches around th…