Falsifying God? (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Sunday, December 28, 2014, 19:42 (3618 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

dhw: Individual prophecies are not the subject of this thread, and if you say A and another scholar says B, I'm in no position to judge.-TONY: So, let me rephrase this in a slightly different way:
If I came to you with a hypothesis on cellular intelligence (which you can not "See"), and that hypothesis proved correct on every single prediction that was ever recorded, as far as our sciences could detect, and was historically without blemish as far as our sciences could detect, AND continued to prove accurate for predictions as they occurred:
Would you discard the elements of the hypothesis that you could not see, or that you could not prove, simply because they haven't been proven yet?-This is a false analogy. Cellular intelligence, as I understand it, is a hypothesis concerning the capabilities of cells to direct their own behaviour through autonomous action and interaction. In respect of the bible, we are asked to believe a collection of stories told by different authors at different times about events which in most cases they could not possibly have witnessed. Some may well have their roots in history, others in fiction. We have no way of knowing, though some certainly stretch my own credulity (see my earlier comment on the story of Adam and Eve.) You assure us that the bible's past record on prophecy is 100%, and so we should take the remainder on trust. Other scholars disagree, but you dismiss them as “fringe”, just as you dismiss certain interpretations of the blood issue and of Deuteronomy, on which I feel confident enough to pass comment.
 
TONY: Now here is a simple question for you. Christ performed miracles in front of thousands, and ascended in front of more than 500 people, most of which were later tortured to death for their beliefs in the most horrifying ways possible. Why would these people knowingly and willingly have gone to their death for something that they KNEW was a lie? If they hadn't seen it, would they have died for the lie? 
-The problem is always the same: how much credence can one give to other people's testimony, especially when events happened so long ago? You begin with the premise that the bible is God's word, and so you can believe everything it says. The torture and execution of people for their beliefs is commonplace, but that doesn't mean that every report is true or that those who die for their beliefs would only do so if their beliefs were correct. You complain that I “give more credibility to flights of fancy and random chance than you do to the Theory that has been proven more times throughout human history than any other.” I presume by that you mean the theory that God created the world, as you say the bible's theory postulates God. On this I have an open mind, and am not aware of giving credence to flights of fancy or random chance, since I don't give credence to any particular theory.-I have done my best to answer your question, though of course my answer is unsatisfactory, because unlike yourself, David, and Richard Dawkins I have great difficulty giving credence to any theory. The subject of this particular thread, however, is your claim that the concept of God is falsifiable. You did not respond to that section of my post, and so I'll repeat it here because it is extremely relevant to our disagreement over the authority of the bible and its relevance to God.-DHW: However, to get back to the subject of this thread, and putting on my theist hat, I still don't see how you can argue that a failed prophecy will falsify the concept of God, rather than falsifying the concept of the bible as the word of God.

TONY: I don't claim that, the bible does. Explicitly it states: 
Deut 18:22 21"You may say in your heart, 'How will we know the word which the LORD has not spoken?' 22"When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.(Also Jer 28:9, Eze 33:33. -dhw: I'm sorry, but this quotation is making precisely the point that I am making: if a prophecy is false, it doesn't falsify the concept of God, but the authenticity of the prophet who makes it. If a failed prophecy is recorded in the bible, it will therefore be the bible's claim to be the word of God that is falsified and not the concept of God.