Falsifying God? (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 24, 2014, 13:26 (3622 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

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.
TONY: When I said it can not be proven, perhaps I should have added the word “yet”.-As you can see, you did add it, and this by coincidence puts you in the same position as Dawkins, who hopes and I'm sure also believes that eventually we shall understand and “embrace...within the natural” “phenomena that we don't yet understand”. (The God Delusion, p. 14) The little word “yet” clearly implies that it will happen, and it gives you both an indefinite period to prove your point. You both have a similar faith in a future that will confirm your beliefs.
 
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.
TONY: If not god in its entirety, at least the 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?-The problem is that atheists and Jews and Christians and Muslims and Hindus all claim that their theory provides the best evidence. But belief in the Judeo-Christian God does not have to depend on the literal truth of every word in the Bible. Many Jews and Christians, for instance, regard the story of Adam and Eve as just that - a symbolic piece of fiction. And if a prophecy were to fail (unlikely unless it actually specifies a date), I really can't believe all Christians would turn round and say that in that case they don't believe in God or Jesus. -TONY: The bible, as a whole, is either the divine word of God, or it isn't.-One might say of all religions and of atheism: either they are true or they are not. 
You believe that the prophecies in the bible prove that every word in it is the literal truth, and that all the authors and the people who selected their texts were directly inspired by the God in whom the authors and the selectors believed. As you point out under “Different in degree or kind”, “that is certainly your right as a human with free will.”. Perhaps we should leave it at that.-A few weeks ago, I was accosted in the street by two charming young Mormon ladies who were pleasantly surprised that I had some knowledge of Joseph Smith. They were thus able to skip the preliminaries and go straight for the jugular: either he was a fraud, a madman, or he was telling the truth. Which did I think was correct? Bearing in mind the circumstances of his “revelation”, I'd be interested to know how you would have answered.