Falsifying God? (Agnosticism)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Monday, December 22, 2014, 17:36 (3624 days ago) @ dhw

A case of mistaken identity here. As a non-scientist I would never have told you not to search fringe sites for real scientific research, and frankly I don't know which sites are fringe and which are mainstream. Nor would I know what criteria one might adopt in order to distinguish the “fringe”, especially when it comes to subjects as controversial as religion. -(It was something you and David both told me when I first joined this site.) You would use the same as you would use for any other research: cited sources, references, related research. Religious researchers still use best practices for citing sources. Its the mark of a good academic. -
>DHW:It is clear from your response that certain prophecies “can neither be definitively proven nor disproven yet” (Ezekiel and Egypt, Isaiah and the Nile), and that is a pretty clever way to maintain a 100% record: it might not have happened yet, but it will. Of course that was my point in choosing Revelations.
> -There is a difference between "can not at this moment" and "never can be". For a long time people thought that the names and places that Luke wrote about did not exist because there was no evidence for them. Later, archaeologist discovered evidence of virtually every single one of his references with exact matches for date and location. That same has been true for numerous instances of things that were disbelieved about the bible. -Archaeology, as a science is relatively young. When I said it can not be proven, perhaps I should have added the word "yet".--> dhw: Secondly, as we keep saying, the bible is a collection of books written by different authors. If a prophecy proves to be false, it will not falsify the concept of God. It will only falsify the claim of the particular author that God is speaking through him, and the claims of those who believe that the bible is the Word of God. So the concept of God can't be falsified in this way.-If not god in its entirety, at least the biblical Judeo-Christian hypothesis of God could be. The same could be applied to any religion. There are multiple hypothesis regarding the nature of the universe, just as there are regarding god. Can't we simply treat all theories with the same methods and follow the ones that provide the best evidence?-->DHW: You seem to think the Bible exists independently of the people who wrote it. Who claims that the Bible is the word of God? The individual authors may claim it, and the various assemblies of self-appointed editors with their own agendas may have claimed it. And maybe they were all as human and fallible as the rest of us. But your point was that God's existence could be falsified if inaccuracies were found in the Bible, and I am actually defending the theist viewpoint here! I am arguing that inaccuracies would not make a blind bit of difference to the case for God's existence. They would only falsify the claim that the Bible was the Word of God.
> -The bible, as a whole, is either the divine inspired word of God, or it isn't. It cross-references itself repeatedly, forward and backwards via prophecy, across more than a millenia and so can not be divided into multiple books. It is A book. That is why all scholars treat it as A book instead of the books. Yes, we recognize that individual people pinned it, but the bible is actually explicitly clear when the author was adding his or her own opinion to it. Which was excruciatingly rare.-
>DHW: I do think it's far fetched, but I'm consoled by the fact that as my resident biblical expert, you have assured me there is no such place as hell. In that case, if your interpretation is correct, I shall be condemned to everlasting peace. That's not so terrible.
> -Not as far fetched and not as far off as you might like to believe. No man knows the day nor hour, but there were a large number of prophecies that provided a sort of virtual timeline that could be followed. 
 ->DHW: We have spent many hours discussing the various scientific theories that relate to a future or a past that none of us can ever see. Your prophecies do indeed work in much the same way. We might literally have to wait an eternity before we can say, as you do, that God's existence can be falsified through the prophecies.-Fortunately, prophecy is much more reliable than that, in most regards. For example, there were numerable prophecies which pointed to specific dates in recorded history that were perfectly accurate in their time lines. Including prophecies that ran right into the 20th Century....down to the very year WWI broke out.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.