Also, I must ask you NotReady: do you think that there is ANY CHANCE WHATSOEVER that 1500 years ago any good priest or theologian (granting he spoke Greek and Hebrew) would have thought that the intended meaning of that passage was that it was a local flood? If you could go back in time and poll them, knowing what they know about geology and science in general, is there ANY CHANCE that any of them would say "Yeah I think it might actually mean just a local flood."??

this is actually the very reason i have 8 credits of ancient greek, and an embarrassing 30ish credits of linguistics.

In other words, the Bible is a great moral handbook, but only if you are already a professor of ethics so you can tell which passages are moral and which arent.

fyp

Wow, what an interesting thread to find here on 2+2. I have quite an opinion myself.

Evolutionary Theory and the Bible are CLEARLY NOT COMPATIBLE!

The bible was not written 2000+ years ago with ingenious metaphorical intention explaining the "self-awareness" of man. Such philosophical reasonings had no place in the early stages of human development. The bible is a "collection" of carefully selected works from many authors reflecting the assumed factual accounts of many happenings. Man at this time in history was worried about disease, famine, hunger, murder, rape, flood etc...all of which the bible conveniently accounted for. The men who wrote this book did not have time to ponder the origins of the universe, they simply took the knowledge available at the time and came up with a reasonably believable story which was refined slowly to prevent disproof.

What has happened through the evolution of human knowledge is something called Law and Science. The bible was the old version of Law and Science. The ten commandments were written to try and keep some order in the absence of law! The absence of scientific explanation lent itself even further to the spread of an idea called the miracle!...an unexplainable occurrence.

The modern day schools of Law and Science have effectively eliminated the need for the bible and its tales. Why is it that some of you still feel the need to legitimize a school of thought which is 2000+ years outdated, and ignore the amazing improvements man has made for himself? Is it simply lack of satisfaction with life on earth, coupled with fear of death?

Lets all evolve mentally and see the facts of our past! I don't hate Christians, or Jews or Muslims or any religious people. I just feel that religion no longer has a place in a developed society. And I feel that the Christian church (the only one I can speak for b/c that is what i was raised in) causes people to fear eternal hell and burning if they use their powerful minds to examine history objectively like this. Free your minds!

Like I said, the Bible wasn't written in 21st century American.

The OT wasn't written in Greek. You guys are pathetic. I would tell you about interlinear texts, dictionaries and scholarly works by people some of whom aren't Christian, but why bother?

They would no doubt think it covered all the known world and they would be right.

and apparently the distinguished translators of our most common english bibles misunderstood the passage completely. of course, that probably only happened once.

he knows that. he probably assumed the NT would be more important.

according to wikipedia mount ararat is over 5,000 m. do you think god held the water back from flowing out of the region?

LOL nice dodge, and source? I'll assume you are going to define the "known world" as "the places one arbitrary flood covered" right? Do you have any idea how much of the world was "known" and do you have any evidence of a flood that covered ALL of that?

Plus, this definition of the flood seems to ENTIRELY change the "meaning" behind the story. If its a flood sent by God to kill all the sinful humans, then how can it possibly be a LOCAL flood? There were humans elsewhere, it would need to kill them, WHETHER THE AUTHORS KNEW ABOUT THEM OR NOT.

Yes, NR, this is the point. And current mistranslations of known texts is only the tip of the iceberg, considering NO known text is an original. Who knows what we lost in THOSE translations?

also,

This is a good point. Do theists believe that the most up-to-date version of the Bible is divine? If so, would that diminish the divinity of the original Bible or does the Bible become more divine over time?

Or, does the divinity of the Bible remain constant throughout the 'evolution'? Is every word, altered and original, divine? With an outstretched meaning of divinity, what basis would they have to regard the Koran as non-divine.

Or, are the "general ideas" of the Bible divine? If so, how can they distinguish the divine ideas from the hogwash? With an altered Bible, they might ask themselves "to what extent were the scriptures doctored?"

Are there definitive aspects of divinity or is it arbitrary?

Where were they?

How much have you read about the Canon, the copying procedures of the ancient Hebrews, the number and quality of NT manuscripts extant compared to other ancient documents?

Is it intellectual dishonesty to berate me for not reading Dawkins books, which I never claimed to nor did I review the books but only excepts, while posing as experts in subjects for which Ph.D.'s (or the theological equivalent) are awarded and about which many, many scholarly books have been written, some by secular experts?

Edit:

I have several times posted a link in the forum to a FREE, ONLINE, E-TEXT book by one of the leading scholars in the field of the Bible documents and textual criticisms. You don't have to buy it. You don't have to go to the library. Everybody who's read it, raise your hands.

I have several times mentioned a great reference book, Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict, which will give you sources for all kinds of questions dealing with Christianity and the Bible. Everybody who's read it, raise your hands.

Please excuse me if I don't take your whining very seriously.

Africa, where humans came from. Europe. Certainly China and Egypt. The Americas - people crossed the Bering Strait long before civilization got started. Australia.

I mean, there are indigenous peoples on every corner of the globe who have been around for tens of thousands of years, I'm sure there are whole tomes of anthropology dealing with the subject.

The human species was certianly never confined to any flood plains. People moved to the rivers because the changing climate turned the land they had lived on for millenia into desert.

A local flood in mesopotamia is utterly meaningless. The Tigris and Euphrates are notoriously unpredictable, and large floods (even very large floods) are expected occurences.

Doesn't matter. The point was philosophical. It's not how unreliable the Bible is that matters. It's that the Bible is unreliable, to some degree.

I know it's a complex field. And I certainly respect it and those who put work into it. But the very fact that so much work has been done, that so much has been written, implies that it's a very tricky subject. If we had a clear-cut, reliable source with a clean translation then nobody would be writing books on the subject.

At the time of the flood?

We don't really know that much about where humans were before about 35kya do we? I mean h omo sapiens sapiens? Modern man?

Large enough to cover the mountains?

I think in philosophy that's called question begging.


I'll try this again. How many different ways can you interpret:

"Eat the fruit and you die"?

At all times.

We have volumes of evidence, but no - we don't know for sure. A brief summary from wiki. What we do know is that none of the evidence of any kind suggests that we started in river basins. It doesn't make sense, it's a relatively hostile environment and it's not very consistent with human behavior. If God waved a magic wand and created humans right there, I guess that would work. But again, it wouldn't make any sense. Further, we'd have to be talking about a time well before the beginning of civilization - the technologies and domesticated animals of the Bible would not have existed, cities wouldn't have existed, etc etc etc. And I could go on, but I won't. The idea that humans were at one point wholly confined to a Mesopotamia that wasn't even recognizable as Mesopotamia because it was the Pleistocene, it doesn't make any sense at all.

A flood large enough to cover the mountains would have drastically altered the entire face of the globe. You can't have a flood that high unless it is global. Nor can you have that much water on top of everything without huge changes in every locale. Changes that would be perfectly consistent from one location to another and based on different types of evidence. There are certainly such consistent changes in the geology of our planet - however, they indicate clearly that there has been no such flood, that life has been around for millions upon millions of years, and that human migrations happened at least 70,000 years ago, most likely from Africa.

In order to see what we see, God would have had to create the flood and then systematically erase all evidence of it, replacing it with evidence of developing ecosystems through millions of years.

You don't accept that there's no original copy of the Bible? You're sure that every single sentence is 100% correct? If so, then I suppose you're right - I just assumed we were taking it as a given that the Bible and its translation were imperfect.

It never was that simple. And hell, how on earth are we supposed to interpret God's messages to Adam and Eve? You're the one going on about how we have to take all the rape and genocide and the horrible plagues God inflicted with a grain of salt because of culture. Whatever Adam and Eve were thinking back when they were in the Garden must have been totally unlike what we think. Right? And God was communicating with them, not us, (maybe both but definitely them), so how can we know? Did they even have a concept of death? Though it was a rather silly warning if they didn't...

This is all beside the point anyhow. How about one verse from Leviticus (the Old Covenant!) saying that "men shouldn't lay the lyings of a woman with a man," being the basis of worldwide persecution in the modern day? Either the statement is crystal clear, and because of a theological distinction didn't get voided with the inconvenient parts of the Old Covenant, or some passages are damned hard to interpret.

Particularly since there is every possibility for a verse here or a verse there to be outright incorrect.

Tell me where the "flood" was first.

I'm probably not smart enough for those books. I read Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman, which is sort of a dumbed down version for laypeople. It was made pretty clear that we dont have any original manuscripts, and that the current ones are our best guesses, but CLEARLY and ABSOLUTELY not exactly what was in the originals. And he also made it clear that some of the most accepted modern translations of certain verses are CLEARLY based on inferior texts. Is his book a bad source?

There is a subtle difference between this and your Dawkins character assassination, dont you think?

It's just the copy-of-a-copy principle in action. The information will be degraded somehow, it is unavoidable. And then with the different sects/languages/cultures it will fork also.

There exists now in circulation bibles which are very different from eachother.