Probably the worst "debate" I've seen about the bible
For my second entry, I'm going to keep it light and non-controversial and dive right into religion!
I recently saw this on Facebook:
This is a great example of almost every logical fallacy Christians have internalized, rolled into one very fast paced discussion. In no particular order, here are the issues I observed:
Heavy metal dude is asking bad/soft ball questions. "Do you believe the bible is real?" Of course it's real! I can go to the dollar store and buy one right now and hold it in my hand. A better question, and the question that the Christian guy actually answered, is "do you believe the bible explains the nature of existence?"
Misleading: "There has never been an archaeological discovery that has contradicted the truth of the bible." This argument relies on the fact that many of the fundamental assertions made in the bible are unfalsifiable. "God created everything." Test that premise. "God feels this way about this subject." Test that premise. That would be like me saying "There were tigers in Illinois 1000 years ago, and there have never been any archaeological findings that prove me wrong." However, there is a lack of archaeological evidence to support various documented events that are supposed to have occurred, such as the exodus from Egypt. And there certainly aren't any archaeological artifacts directly proving that Jesus was even a person, and in fact AFAIK his life and teachings only even started being documented 40-100 years after his death (according to the archaeological record). To be fair, I'm not necessarily debating his actual existence because he's likely the most well-documented figure of the ancient world, but if you're specifically referring to archaeological evidence, I'll call this point a wash.
"There is not a part of the bible that if you apply it to your life, your life doesn't improve dramatically." This can be true of any self-help book or religious text. But more specifically, I have an issue with this man speaking in absolutes. He's describing what he believes to be a canonical set of rules but is in fact a sprawling historical document spanning millennia and written by perhaps hundreds of individuals. There are some misleading things, some nuggets of wisdom, some utterly horrifying bronze age cultural practices, some fantastical stories. I really don't think this gentleman literally means "if a man rapes your daughter, you must force her to marry him" or "slavery is acceptable", so he shouldn't go around saying that the bible is full postive moral instruction from cover to cover.
"That's not mythology, that's theology." They're not mutually exclusive concepts. Theology is a subset of mythology. Or to put it another way: theology is an interpretive system built from mythological foundations. The two are not only not mutually exclusive, they're tightly interlinked.
"If Genesis 1:1 and the resurrection are true, anything in the bible is possible." This is circular reasoning. This is imploring that the listener accept this line as a fundamental axiom, and essentially this guy's entire worldview hinges on this being an axiom, which other folks may simply not accept. Later, he says "how do you know that Jesus rose from the dead?" Really, further elaboration is not necessary, as all of his arguments collapse back to a single axiom.
"Show me any other historical account where so many people brutally died, a brutal death, for a lie." This kind of touches on the "unfalsifiable premises" concept we dealt with above, but in the opposite direction. By nature of the fact that they were willing to die for the belief, means that they would not have considered it a lie. It is nonsensical that someone would be willing to die for something that they did not believe was the truth. So there's no way to actually give an example of this. Saying that many people died over Christianity is an attestation to its popularity (and how awful the ancienw world was), not that the underlying premises are true or not.
"If you were going to fake a story, you would not use female witnesses in the ancient world." Absolutely what evidence does he have of this? Also, this is akin to trying to shore up plot holes in a novel. Simply pointing this aspect of the story out and trying to build its internal consistency at most speaks to how much the authors believed what they were writing. I don't think ayone is arguing that the events of the New Testament were simply fabricated from nothing, it's rational to believe that the people who wrote these stories beleived them to be true, and none of this has any bearing over the empirical truth of the bible in explaining existence, or even providing empirical evidence that the events depicted actually happened.