Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
First of all, thanks for writing all this out. I'm going to try to address all this as best I can, though I need to stress I'm very much not a theologian, or an apologist, or even a teacher in the church. I'm just a guy. My goal is to at least try to give you my view of these issues, so that even if you're not personally convinced (I'm not that good at rhetoric, I won't take it too hard lol) you at least will hopefully feel that what I've said is something a reasonable person can believe. I'm Catholic, so that's the perspective I'm bringing to this. Also @TheDag, @urquan and @FarNearEverywhere, please chime in if there is something I've missed or something I get wrong. I'm probably going to have more bullet points than you, as this is my third time writing this post (stupid website keeps eating it when I click on links) and I found that a lot of your points have sub-points. I don't really know how to order all that nicely within the constraints of the site, so bear with me.
First, it's important to note that the fundamentalist Protestant interpretation of Christianity is not something all denominations share. From a Catholic perspective, those people are in pretty serious error in fact. So a lot of things I noticed you said like "why does the Bible say factually untrue thing x" are just not an issue for other traditions. Specifically, the Catholics (and others tbf) believe that the Bible is divinely inspired, not that it was directly written by God. That means that the core message about God and our salvation is infallible, but plenty of other things are fallible. For example, if the Bible says "King Bigwig was succeeded by his son Mightyface" in one book, and "King Bigwig was succeeded by his son Weaksauce" in another, the Catholic take on that is "maybe one of those authors got it wrong, shit happens". We're OK with that, because the detail of which king succeeded whom isn't really central to God's message to us (and so on for other minor details of course).
Furthermore, it's important to note that the Bible is not one cohesive book. The men who wrote it down were working in various literary styles and speaking to different social contexts. There are books of history yes, but also books of poetry, and books of raw moral teaching, and books of myths. So not only is it possible that each author is fallible, you have to interpret their words through the lens of cultural context and intended style. All of which makes it pretty challenging to interpret the Bible, but means that we very much do not believe that each and every sentence of the Bible is an eternal truth directly handed to us by God. Fundamentalists believe that yes, but by no means all Christians (or even most Christians, really).
I also wanted to note that it seemed like more than one of your arguments basically boiled down to "I think you can get around this, but then that's not consistent with the Bible". I think that yes, some of the hypothetical counterarguments you mentioned aren't consistent with the fundamentalist Protestant interpretation of the Bible. But that is very much not the only interpretation (or the main interpretation) among Christians! You can't really expect people to hold to an interpretation of the Bible that they never professed to begin with, after all. So I think that significantly weakens your arguments in this area, since they are colored so much by a particular interpretation of the Bible that most Christians don't hold.
With those important overarching points out of the way, it's time for ye olde bulleted list.
Genesis (written by Moses iirc) is fundamentally a mythological book. Catholics don't generally believe it's meant to be taken literally, but that the author was using the myths of the ancient near East to try to teach those people about the origins of the world in terms they would understand (which of course doesn't remotely come close to our modern understanding of biology, geology and so on). The important takeaway from the creation story isn't "God made the world in seven days just like we understand days" (which wouldn't make sense in various ways), but "God is the supreme being who created everything, not like your gods who are either glorified mortals or forces of nature". Similarly, the story of Adam isn't generally understood as "there was a literal serpent who got Adam and Eve to eat a literal apple", but as a myth which seeks to illustrate how sin has perverted God's design for the world and placed us all in dire need of a savior.
The perception of God isn't eternal because we ourselves are not eternal. How could we have perfect knowledge of God in this life, imperfect as we are? It's like Paul says: "For now we see in a mirror, dimly...". It's not really fair to expect our understanding of God to not change over time. God himself doesn't change, of course, but human ideas of him do.
Why does God allow different interpretations of the Bible (at least some of which must be wrong)? Good question and I don't have an answer. I think you should be pretty skeptical of anyone who does. I'm content with the "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" verse on this one, but I can't fault you if you aren't. It's just not something that is an impediment to my faith because I trust God knows what he's doing.
It is true that a lot of the Old Testament comes down to divine dick measuring. But to me, this makes perfect sense in light of the "human authors are writing to the context they live in" interpretation. God revealed truths about himself to these writers, and they communicated those truths in the way they thought would make the most sense to their contemporary audience. For example, the book of Job. I think that this book is best understood as poetry, and meant in the same way good art is made today: it uses the imagery of the story to reveal something true to us. Specifically, that if we trust God then we will ultimately be rewarded (note that it may not be in this life, but we will still be rewarded). I don't know whether or not there was an actual man that Job was based on, but if there was I doubt that his life went exactly as depicted in the book. But that's OK, because the message of "trust God" is the important part.
I would not say that there is a consistent Christian view of hell. Even among Catholics there isn't unity as far as I know. That's primarily because the Bible just doesn't talk that much about hell to the best of my knowledge. As far as I'm aware Catholic doctrine on hell is that a) it exists, b) some people will end up there, c) it's an awful place to be. It's important to note here that the reason hell is awful isn't because God designed it as a punishment. It's because God is the source of everything good, and hell is separation from God. Therefore, there can be nothing good in hell (not even the sinful pleasures we can experience in this life), because the source of all goodness is not there. To the best of my knowledge, the imagery of a lake of fire where you get tormented by demons as a punishment is not something the Church teaches. Nor would I say it's something that there's broad agreement on.
I certainly don't think it's true that you have to believe in young earth creationism, or any of that other stuff, in order to avoid hell. There are a lot of ideas about hell, but I'm most convinced by CS Lewis' thoughts on this topic. The people in hell are there not because God sends them to eternal soul prison, but because they chose to be there. As Lewis said, the gates of hell are barred from the inside. I do not know if the Church has specific teaching on whether people could theoretically change their mind, so perhaps hell isn't eternal for those who wind up there. I don't know, and again I don't think there's any sort of broad Christian consensus on this topic.
I don't imagine that this will surprise you, but I don't think that God allowed the Catholics to twist the Bible for centuries. I think that is nonsense born more of hate than anything else. There's still a lot of bad blood between some Protestants and some Catholics, and it's horrible. But I think that the idea that God let the Catholic Church essentially damn people to hell for centuries through bad readings of scripture is just plain false.
So far as I'm aware, the Church does not teach that you must believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ to be saved. It simply teaches that all salvation is through him. For example, the Church teaches that all the Israelites who lived before Jesus' incarnation were saved by his sacrifice, even though it happened (from a mortal timeline's POV) after they lived. The Church also teaches that while its teachings and sacraments are a sure path to heaven, God isn't limited by such things and can save anyone he wants through any means he wants. Some believe that for those who die never having heard the message of Jesus Christ, God still gives them the grace to choose to follow the morals they were taught (and that by accepting that grace, they can still go to heaven through the power of Jesus' sacrifice even if they never knew about him in those terms). The Church very deliberately does not teach that any given person is in hell, because we simply cannot know this side of the grave. It does teach that certain people are in heaven, but that's another topic.
I know what you mean about people on the ground witnessing miracles having a leg up, but at the same time I'm not sure that's true. The Bible records that a lot of people who witnessed miracles chose to not persist in faith in God. The Old Testament is full of this (Exodus has the memorable examples where the people just watched God save them from Pharaoh's armies and then say "God has abandoned us" time and time again as they journey). The New Testament has it too. Judas personally saw Jesus, was one of his closest followers, and would have witnessed him do many miracles personally. He still chose to sell Jesus out. Not only that but he despaired at God's forgiveness even after all he saw (which is what many say was his true sin, not the selling out of Jesus). On this very forum, I've seen people say that if they saw a miracle they would think that they were having a hallucination or that there was a scientific explanation. I think that at some level, no matter what miracles you have seen or not, you have to make the choice to believe.
I don't think it's true that someone who pulls the trigger on a gun (I think you mean suicide here?) can't save themselves. I believe that God is not limited by time, and that he can even work in the past from our perspective. I think that it's possible (though we can't know until we get to heaven) that God gave people who committed suicide the chance to repent in the last instant of their life, and that some chose to accept his grace. Again, the Church doesn't say that this is necessarily true, but it is pretty consistent that the stuff the Bible says is a lifeline for our benefit, not a limitation of God. I choose to believe that he reaches even those people who us mortals think are beyond hope.
I think that addresses most of your points (hopefully all, but I might have missed something). Not necessarily in order of course, because some of your arguments are interconnected (for example I kind of touched on the "how is hell just" line of thinking while trying to address your third bullet point, even though it was part of your fourth bullet point). But again, just for emphasis: I'm not saying all of these things are arguments you will necessarily believe. My only goal is to highlight that one does not have to choose between the message of the Bible and the objective truth of the world.
It's taken me a long time to write all of this and it's late enough that I don't have time to do editing passes, but I hope that at least it gives you some food for thought. Again, thank you for the earnest and respectful discussion!
This post is good! Yes, that all makes sense. It doesn't really convince me to believe, but it's not totally at odds with reality, like how fundamentalists see it. I may have just talked to too many fundamentalists, but to be fair, that was my only perspective on the bible for pretty much all of my youth.
Catholics don't believe that scripture is infallible? Infallibility is a strong statement to make, and admitting that men wrote it is kind of conceding a lot of ground. I guess I don't know what you're supposed to base your belief on here, if men wrote it and it may not be accurate to what God actually wanted us to know. How would inspired word look any different from some random jackwagon writing whatever he wants?
To that end, is there anything solidifying your belief in day-to-day life? I asked a couple Christians if there is justice in this life, or if it's only reserved for the afterlife, and both of them seemed pretty stumped by what I thought was a simple question. To me, it seems pretty obvious that life is randomly cruel to everyone, Christian or not, a world of chaos, untamed and wild except for where men have tamed it. If someone created it, they're either not paying attention to it, as if they wound up a wind up doll and walked away from the table, or they never cared much about it in the first place, an apathetic god that lets the chips fall as they may. You probably disagree with that, and if you do, I'd like to hear it.
I have so many random theological questions (does the suffering of animals mean anything?), but maybe some other day. Or some other thread.
I am not a trained apologist either, but I think I can provide further background to your question about Scriptural Infallibility in a Catholic Context.
The Catholic Church would say that the Bible is infallible, but in a very narrow way. I don't want to quibble about words, so it makes sense to just say, the Bible isn't 100% infallible, in the way that word is commonly used today.
The Bible contains exactly what God wanted it to contain. It contains every spiritual revelation necessary for a person to be granted peace with God and know, love, and serve Him. That said, God didn't set out to give us a treatise on Natural Science.
Every Scriptural passage contains four meanings in it: literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical. The fourfold senses of Scripture—the literal, allegorical,moral (tropological), and anagogic senses—were first proposed by John Cassian (ca. 360-435). By way of example, Cassian wrote, “The one Jerusalem can be understood in four different ways, in the historical sense as the city of the Jews, in allegory as the Church of Christ, in anagoge as the heavenly city of God ‘which is the mother of us all’ (Gal 4:26), in the tropological sense as the human soul.”
The allegorical, tropological and anagogical senses are infallible. The literal is infallible only as far as it points to an allegorical, tropological or anagogical meaning.
For example, Genesis is clearly begins with myths parodying Babylonian and other Near Eastern myths. The author of Genesis takes a Babylonian myth about a flood, and then says, "there's only one God, and He made humans out of love, so how would this myth play out if the true God was involved instead of these false gods." The writing style is mythic. I don't think there was ever an intention to deceive, their original audience knew the original myths that were being parodied. That's what made the parody so powerful.
Early Christian converts from Greco-Roman paganism took Genesis as allegorical from the start. They knew given the state of natural science at the time, that the world was created in one instant and the four elements were Earth, Fire, Air, and Water, but Genesis only refers to Water and Earth. So obviously Genesis left some important things out from a natural science perspective, but the moral and anagogical truths are still infallible.
The second half of Genesis moves to Folklore. Did George Washington really chop down a cherry tree? I don't think so. Would I include that anecdote if I was writing down oral traditions for George Washington's biography? Probably. Because it portrays something important about his character with a conciseness that only a story can draw out. Did Abraham really pretend his wife was his sister twice? I don't know. The authors of Genesis thought that it conveyed something important about his character and his relationship with God though.
Meanwhile, the four Gospels are very clearly portraying themselves as Eye Witness accounts or collections of Eye Witness accounts of the strangest thing to have ever happened on Earth. Theistic and atheistic scholars recognize that the genre is Ancient Biography. Noted skeptic Bart Erhman calls them Greco-Roman biographies. The writers of the Gospels really do want their audience to believe the events described genuinely took place.
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I guess I would say my understanding is that scripture is a mixture of fallible bits and infallible bits. There are undeniable moments in the Bible where the human author is shown to be imperfect - I can't recall the exact verse, but there's a part in one of Paul's letters where he says that he forgot something or other. Clearly, God doesn't seem like he would be in the business of telling Paul "yeah say you forgot this bit". But the Catholic belief is that those things are fine because they aren't the essence of the message (which is infallible, cause that is the part God inspired).
Great question, because yeah once you open that door you now need to distinguish which parts are inspired by God, and which parts are not. Unfortunately the answer in my case is that I am just not well-versed in this stuff enough to know. I would bet that at least part of the answer is going to be rooted in what Catholics refer to as Sacred Tradition - basically, the idea is that not all of the teachings of the early church were written down as a modern audience would expect, but at least some were handed down orally. Those teachings are considered to be authoritative as well, and the Catholic justification for how we know which books of the Bible are canonical is basically "God gave men the grace to discern it and pass that down as part of Sacred Tradition". Given that the answer for which books are canonical is believed to be rooted in tradition, I imagine that so too is the answer to your question. But ultimately I don't know - sorry about that, because it is a totally fair question.
A couple of things. One thing (and basically the reason I came back to the faith after I left it in my 20s) is basically that my dad attests to having seen two genuine, cannot-mistake-it miraculous (or at least supernatural) events (I can give you more detail if you like, but I generally figure that "my dad said so" is not something which would convince anyone who doesn't know him, lol). Obviously I have a high degree of confidence that he wouldn't lie to me, and I have a high degree of confidence as well that he didn't just hallucinate the things he reports. So while that doesn't exactly prove that my faith is correct, that gives me a pretty strong nudge towards the faith my dad has (i.e. Christianity) being correct.
The second thing is the way in which I met my wife. It probably sounds trite, but it's true. I was single up until I was 30 - I couldn't even get a date, much less a girlfriend. I was pretty unhappy but couldn't really make any headway, and I would've bet you every last penny I owned that I was going to die alone. Eventually, I had a friend who had good success with online dating and I made an OKCupid profile basically just to earn the right to be bitter and mad at the world (kind of like how people will vote so they "have the right to complain about the result"). I wound up meeting my wife, who unknown to me also made a profile in more or less sheer desperation after she had been in a couple of bad relationships. Before she met me she was also going to give up on dating (for a long time if not forever), because it had just been so negative for her. To me... I just can't really believe that is coincidence. I know it's possible! But ultimately I really do think that the most likely explanation is that God brought us together at the right time when we both really needed each other. So that also solidifies my day to day belief.
I believe that sometimes we get justice in this life, but that ultimately justice is only guaranteed in the afterlife.
Yeah, I definitely feel the frustration of how messed up this world is and how it really seems like it's ripe for God to step in and correct things. Surely people deserve that from him, right? I have had the same thoughts myself more than once. Ultimately, the problem of evil is just really hard and I don't know that there's a perfect answer. But if I had to say what I think, it's probably something like this.
God is not exactly alien to us (like a Lovecraftian elder god or something), but he's not entirely comprehensible to us either. That means that having faith in God means I need to accept that sometimes, the way he chooses to handle things is going to seem really messed up in the short term but will pay off in the long term. Unfortunately, I think that sometimes "long term" here means "in the afterlife", which is really hard for us humans. But I do believe that God loves us, and that everything is ordered towards our ultimate good. I've had my own experience where I had something happen to me that I thought was catastrophic, but ultimately made me better, and I think of that whenever I think of all the horrible things God allows to happen in our world. I know that's cold comfort to those who suffer. I wish I had a better answer. But that's what I believe at least, and what I try to cling to whenever I find myself questioning "what the hell, God? Why would you allow this?"
For sure man. Feel free to ask, I'll at least do my best to answer. And I try to be honest when the answer is "I don't know", which it will probably be more often than not. ;) But I am always down to try to answer the questions.
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Maybe I misunderstand something here, but why would this be unfair? Aren't there a number of ideas that are unchanging or at least variable only in a narrow space of possibilities? Take something like the laws of logic for example, they are as far as anyone knows eternally true, and what's more they seem to be intuitively undeniable and, in a manner of speaking, to impose themselves on any rational mind and, failing that, at least the material reality of the irrational.
In other words, it does seem to be possible for God to put ideas into the minds of all humans that are relatively stable and undeniable by any serious thinker. Why did he not do that for belief in himself?
And yet, our understanding of those things has changed many times throughout history. The laws of logic and mathematics haven't changed, but over time we learn more about them. So clearly just because something is eternal and unchanging, our understanding of said thing is not precluded from changing.
The honest answer is "nobody knows for sure". Some people say that those ideas already exist. For example, some people believe that the majestic beauty of nature is proof that an intelligent creator must be behind it, and that anyone who says otherwise is a fool. Others believe that for God to do so would be limiting himself in some way. I personally would lean towards the idea (which I touched on in my earlier post) that people aren't actually as ready to accept these ideas as they think they would be. But that is just my best guess based on observing the human tendency to skepticism.
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I think you did a good job. One note:
The concept you're referring to here is Invincible Ignorance. And here's an official Church document explaining:
Thank you! I had heard the term before but totally forgot about it, so I appreciate the info.
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