Kraft,
Man, that is quite a bit of stuff. After reading through once, I have a recommendation. Use some original thought. Try not to get caught up in things others have postulated. Nothing wrong with reading other’s thoughts and conclusions, reviewing evidence, etc. Use what you find useful. But climb out of the box. I find it interesting that rather than debate, you simply give books or websites for information. I would rather see you put things into your own words, or site direct quotes, etc., and debate from them.
>Science- ok, that is pretty much the standard definition. You're missing the science uses methodological naturalism, that only natural explanations will be considered.<
Right. But who determines what is natural, and what is not? Why oh why cannot science prove God? Why do you automatically place God in the realm of the supernatural? What if He embodies the "natural" world.
>It is assumed that all that exists is matter, no metaphysical realm or supernatural.<
You know what happens when one assumes, right? Further, who decides what is supernatural? Many things once thought "supernatural" have been proven by science. I consider Hawking’s work to expose the supernatural. Come on, the entire universe came from a singularity, smaller than a mustard seed, and expanded into what we see today? If you believe that theory has merit, then it appears you may believe in the supernatural. The Big Bang sounds about like what I would expect from God in Genesis 1:1.
>When you say science will prove God, that is an illogical statement.<
No, I said it would prove creationism before it proves evolution. I said I don’t think we will be around to see it.
>Later you say that the evidence you agree with, but not the theory. To me this smacks of confirmation bias, you have your conclusions (the bible) and are working backwards to find support for it.<
Please do not assume what I do in order to found my beliefs. If you wish to know, simply ask. I did not start with the Bible or science. I simply observed both, the evidence on both sides, and came to my conclusions. If anything, when I began my journey, I started solely with science.
>I would venture to say the reason you don't agree with the theories is that they try to strive for a parsimonious solutions, positing another realm of which we have no knowledge (and many would argue cannot have knowledge of if it were to exist) is an added layer of complexity. Parsimony is another name for Ockham's razor, that if 2 explanations for the same phenomenon rely on a different number of assumptions, we should go with the one with the fewest assumptions. When I say conclusions I hold, they would be based off of theory or theories.<
I have no problem with anyone positing a theory. None whatsoever. I do have a problem with scientists throwing out conclusions based on facts not in evidence.
>You seem to hold some requirement for absolute proof, however, knowing the scientific method you should know that isn't something it gives.<
No. As I have said several times, I do not believe anything will ever be "proved". I do my own research, and have come to my life conclusions based on that research. Can I "prove" them correct? I can to myself. But others will have their own level of proof before they can believe.
>It confirms or disproves positive statements.<
Exactly, and as any evolution scientist will tell you, almost any "statement" made about evolution, of any significant age, has been disproved, by scientists. Then, as they should, they go back, re-postulate, and try again. That is fine. But one should not expound the whole, shout it from the rooftops, teach it in schools, when one cannot even prove even a bit of the whole.
Following are just a few quotes of scientists dedicated to the premise of evolution. If you can find anything…anything regarding evolution, that anyone can have some significant portion of confidence in, I would appreciate reading it.
I am sorry there are so many of these. But I do believe they are important, and interesting.
CHARLES DARWIN, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."
S. M. STANLEY, Johns Hopkins Univ. "Once established, an average species of animal or plant will not change enough to be regarded as a new species, even after surviving for something like a hundred thousand or a million, or even ten million generations... Something tends to prevent the wholesale restructuring of a species, once it has become well established on earth."
STEPHEN T. GOULD, HARVARD, We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in honest moments we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excellence.
CHARLES DARWIN, "There are two or three million species on earth. A sufficient field one might think for observation; but it must be said today that in spite of all the evidence of trained observers, not one change of the species to another is on record."
Yet even the staunchest supporters of "Out of Africa" (a theory which says all modern humans evolved from Africa millions of years ago) concede that the issue is still unresolved. As Ian Tattersall, an evolutionary biologist and head of the anthropology department at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, explains, "The emergence of Homo sapiens is still the really big mystery in human evolution."
STEPHEN T. GOULD, Harvard, "A mutation doesn't produce major new raw material. You don't make a new species by mutating the species. ...That's a common idea people have; that evolution is due to random mutations. A mutation is NOT the cause of evolutionary change." Lecture at Hobart and William Smith College, 14/2/1980
STEPHEN. T GOULD Harvard, "I we] I remember how the synthetic theory beguiled me with its unifying power when I was a graduate student in the mid -1960's. Since then I have been watching it slowly unravel as a universal description of evolution ... I have been reluctant to admit it - since beguiling is often forever - but if Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory is accurate, then that theory as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy." .
FRANCIS CRICK, "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."
COLIN PATTERSON, Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Nat. History, "You say I should at least show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived. l will lay it on the line-there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." "It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another. ... But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. ... I don't think we shall ever have any access to any form of tree which we can call factual."
T.H. MORGAN Prof Zoology, Columbia, Univ., "If, then, it can be established beyond dispute that similarity or even identity of the same character in different species is not always to be interpreted to mean that both have arisen from a common ancestor, the whole argument from comparative anatomy seems to tumble in ruins."
SIR GAVIN DEBEER, Prof. Embry., U. London, Director BathmateNH, "It is now clear that the pride with which it was assumed that the inheritance of homologous structures from a common ancestor explained homology was misplaced; for such inheritance cannot be ascribed to identity of genes. The attempt to find homologous genes has been given up as hopeless."
STEPHEN J. GOULD, Harvard, Lecture at Hobart & William Smith College, 14/2/1980. "Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome .... brings terrible distress. ...They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don’t change, its not evolution so you don’t talk about it."
S.J. GOULD, Harvard, "We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in honest moments we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excellence .... I regard the failure to find a clear 'vector of progress' in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record .... we have sought to impose a pattern that we hoped to find on a world that does not really display it."
DARWIN, "....innumerable transitional forms must have existed but why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? .... why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this perhaps is the greatest objection which can be urged against my theory".
DAVID M. RAUP, Univ. Chicago; Chicago Field Mus. of N.H., "The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn't look the way he predicted it would.... Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. ...ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as the result of more detailed information."
NELES ELIDRIDGE, Columbia Univ., American Museum of Nat. Hist., "He [Darwin] prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search. ... One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction was wrong."
COLIN PATTERSON, Senior Paleontologist British Museum of Natural History, "There have been an awful lot of stories, some more imaginative than others, about what the nature of the history [of life] really is. The most famous example, still on exhibit downstairs, is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps fifty years ago. That has been presented as the literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable, particularly when the people who propose those kinds of stories may themselves be aware of the speculative nature of some of that stuff."
DEREK AGER, Univ. at Swansea, Wales, "It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student ... have now been 'debunked’. Similarly, my own experience of more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineage's among the Mesozoic Brachiopoda has proved them equally elusive."
D.B. KITTS, University of Oklahoma, "Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of "seeing" evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them... The 'fact that discontinuities are almost always and systematically present at the origin of really big categories' is an item of genuinely historical knowledge."
D. S. WOODROF'F, Univ. of CA, San Diego, "But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition."
A.C. SEWARD, Cambridge, "The theoretically primitive type eludes our grasp; our faith postulates its existence but the type fails to materialize."
NILES ELDREDGE, Columbia Univ., American Museum Of Natural History, "And it has been the paleontologist my own breed who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: .... We paleontologist have said that the history of life supports that interpretation [gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing that it does not."
GOULD & ELDREDGE, "In fact, most published commentary on punctuated equilibria has been favorable. We are especially pleased that several paleontologists now state with pride and biological confidence a conclusion that had previously been simply embarrassing; 'all these years of work and I haven t found any evolution. (R.A. REYMENT Quoted) "The occurrences of long sequences within species are common in boreholes and it is possible to exploit the statistical properties of such sequences in detailed biostratigraphy. It is noteworthy that gradual, directed transitions from one species to another do not seem to exist in borehole samples of microorganisms." (H.J. MACGILLAVRY Quoted) "During my work as an oil paleontologist I had the opportunity to study sections meeting these rigid requirements. As an ardent student of evolution, moreover, I was continually on the watch for evidence of evolutionary change. ...The great majority of species do not show any appreciable evolutionary change at all. These species appear in the section (first occurrence) without obvious ancestors in underlying beds, and are stable once established."
S.M. STANLEY, Johns Hopkins U. "The record now reveals that species typically survive for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very much. We seem forced to conclude that most evolution takes place rapidly ... a punctuational model of evolution ... operated by a natural mechanism whose major effects are wrought exactly where we are least able to study them in small, localized, transitory populations. ...The point here is that if the transition was typically rapid and the population small and localized, fossil evidence of the event would never be found."
PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM? COLIN PATTERSON, British Mus. of N. H., "Well, it seems to me that they have accepted that the fossil record doesn't give them the support they would value so they searched around to find another model and found one. ...When you haven’t got the evidence, you make up a story that will fit the lack of evidence. "
Valentine (Univ. of CA) & Erwin (MI St. Univ), "We conclude that ... neither of the contending theories of evolutionary change at the species level, phyletic gradualism or punctuated equilibrium, seem applicable to the origin of new body plans. "
D.B. KITTS, University of Oklahoma, "The claim is made that paleontology provides a direct way to get at the major events of organic history and that, furthermore, it provides a means of testing evolutionary theories .... the paleontologist can provide knowledge that cannot be provided by biological principles alone. But he cannot provide us with evolution."
MARK RIDLEY, Oxford, "...a lot of people just do not know what evidence the theory of evolution stands upon. They think that the main evidence is the gradual descent of one species from another in the fossil record. ...In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation."
E.J.H. CORNOR, Cambridge "Much evidence can be adduced in favor of the Theory of Evolution from Biology, Biogeography, and Paleontology, but I still think that to the unprejudiced the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation."
>I would argue the supernatural explanations aren't explanations at all. If one is proposing that the natural laws of the reality should suspend themselves so that a phenomenon occurs, that is no solution.<
Once again, what do you consider supernatural? No current explanation? What? What if God is the most natural thing in the universe?
>It's not falsifiable and therefore not science. It could explain anything and thus explains nothing. No predictive or explanatory power. Such as what you say of God's power, paraphrasing: he wills such, thus it occurs. Saying God did it has the ring of an answer, but is utterly hollow.<
So you place your faith in that God cannot be disproved? How truly sad. This thought is truly absurd. You reject anything that, you THINK, cannot be proven or disproved by science. I have not heard WHY God cannot be proven, or disproved by science, from anyone. When the subject is on the order of how all things came about, you will be sorely limited in your beliefs, or even your thoughts, using this logic.
>Certainty-I think the problem here is that of confusing infallibility and certainty. I hold very few things 100%, as I know man is fallible. As we know man is fallible, we have ways of separating truth from falsehood, science being the most thorough test. From Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit:
"In science, we do not work with metaphysical certainties. We support theories with empirical evidence, and test them by experiments set up to DISPROVE them vigorously and often. Failure to disprove a theory leads us to accepting it, tentatively. As Karl Popper says: "All theories will eventually be replaced by better ones." "<
Concerning evolution, everything thus far has been disproved. I am not aware of any ground breaking "new" significant theories since punctuated equilibrium. Do you know of any?
>However I can have confidence in my knowledge based off the best evidence available. I'm not going to blindly and dogmatically hold them though, I am always questioning and revising my views. Contradiction isn't likely to established theories, only revision. You keep saying I must have great faith, as your religion takes faith as the highest virtue I'm not sure if that's criticism or compliment. Faith(1) which you think I need to endorse is exactly what I reject. Faith(1) is the rejection of epistemology, it has no standard of truth/falsity, simply a means to hold beliefs that can't be rationally demonstrated. You seem to take it that inductive reasoning must be topped up to 100% certainty with faith, which is blatantly false. This is an attempt to drop everyone to your level, using this kind of thinking one needs 'faith' the sun will rise. Now you start using this kind of faith barometer, "oh, they aren't too confident in X, must fill it up with 40% faith, guess my beliefs based on faith are ok then". Do you see how this position is ridiculous?<
Actually, I have no idea what you mean. Whether you wish it to be untrue or not, believing in evolution, as it stands today, requires great faith. If not faith, then there should be a great depository of information, evidence, that would back up the theory, or your beliefs in the theory. There is not to my knowledge. So, if you believe in evolution, at any level, you must have at least some faith. If you are saying you neither believe or disbelieve, then that is another matter.
>In reality, if there is evidence for the position, faith has no place at all. With evidence and reason we come to knowledge.<
Exactly. Where is the evidence?
>There is doubt when the argument and evidence are insufficient or flawed, in these cases "I/We don't know" can be appropriate. However, when this comes up, you seem to think that means a supernatural 'explanation' is justified.<
I surely do not. Please leave the realm of my beliefs to me. Just ask specifically what you wish to know, and I will tell you, if I can.
>No, the default position is that this is all there is, materialistic existence. If you wish to posit a supernatural realm the onus is on you to provide evidence and argument for it existing.<
I can surely give you my evidence for creationism. It is sufficient for myself. I do not consider it to be "supernatural". I believe it to be normal, as shown by evidence.
>When supernatural explanations go up against natural ones, naturalistic ones have always won out.<
Except in the case of evolution vs creationism. But then, I should ask how you are judging the contest. Today, there are many more believers than non-believers.
>Abiogenesis - I think you can see why I said it would just be an extension of naturalism. As we have no evidence for anything else, the formation of life would come about due to the physical laws of the universe, ie. necessity, not chance.<
But see, you have no evidence for Abiogenesis! There is ZERO evidence for it. In fact, there is complete evidence against the odds it would occur, and the LAWS of nature would have to be violated for it to happen! You say, "we have no evidence for anything else". Well friend, you have no evidence for what you believe either.
>I don't like the quote mining, but it's expected.<
What? You do not like reading what others have concluded, who have done work in the field? It would be very hard for any one individual to do all the original research needed to come to a personal decision. Almost any science performed today is based on the work of others.
>The information quotes are red herrings, provide no backing for your argument, same with the 'size of human fossils' info.<
You must be joking. It is all scientific evidence. You may reject it. We may debate it. But it is there. It seems you now wish to throw away, or ignore the evidence. Below, I quote some of the leaders in the various fields concerning evolution. Many are atheists. And you want to disregard what they have found or concluded? What kind of scientific approach is that?
>It's irrelevant how large in physical size the evidence is<
My gosh man, repeatability is one of the major foundations of science. I cannot believe you wrote that. By that logic, if you have zero evidence, but the theory sounds good, you can still put great confidence in it?
>especially talking of evolution where the strongest case is genetic and biochemical.<
That is great. Genetics is my old field man. So you can provide me with specific evidence supporting the theory of evolution using genetics and biochemistry? I cannot wait.
The following is pretty funny:
Writer George V. Caylor interviewed Sam, a molecular biologist. George asked Sam about his work. Sam said he and his team were scientific "detectives," working with DNA and tracking down the cause of disease. Here is their published conversation.
G: "Sounds like pretty complicated work."
S: "You can’t imagine how complicated!"
G: "Try me."
S: "I’m a bit like an editor, trying to find a spelling mistake inside a document larger than four complete sets of Encyclopedia Britannica. Seventy volumes, thousands and thousands of pages of small print words."
G: "With the computer power, you can just use ‘spell check’!"
S: "There is no ‘spell check’ because we don’t know yet how the words are supposed to be spelled. We don’t even know for sure which language. And it’s not just the ‘spelling error’ we’re looking for. If any of the punctuation is out of place, or a space out of place, or a grammatical error, we have a mutation that will cause a disease."
G: "So how do you do it?"
S: "We are learning as we go. We have already ‘read’ over two articles in that encyclopedia, and located some ‘typo’s’. It should get easier as time goes by."
G: "How did all that information happen to get there?"
S: "Do you mean, did it just happen? Did it evolve?"
G: "Bingo. Do you believe that the information evolved?"
S: "George, nobody I know in my profession truly believes it evolved. It was engineered by ‘genius beyond genius’, and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book. Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise. A bit like Neil Armstrong believing the moon is made of green cheese. He's been there!"
G: "Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?"
S: "No. It all just evolved."
G: "What? You just told me ---?"
S: "Just stop right there. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold on to two insanities at all times. One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself. Two, it would be insane to say you don’t believe in evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures—everything would stop. I’d be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn’t earn a decent living."
G: "I hate to say it, Sam, but that sounds intellectually dishonest."
S: "The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind’s worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the ‘elephant in the living room’."
G: "What elephant?"
S: "Design. It’s like the elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up an enormous amount of space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn’t there!"
Or perhaps you would like to discuss the newer mDNA research? I find that fascinating.
>I don’t want to see this degenerate into a pure evolution discussion, and I’m not going to play the game where I have to come up with an answer for any biological question you can come up with. "Science must answer all, or I am justified in my magical thinking" isn’t a reasonable position, as explained above.<
I do not expect that at all. I would appreciate any smidgen of information you might have that points to the truth of evolution, or that has not been disproved yet. Actually, any answers whatsoever would be refreshing.
>Why haven’t we found fossils of first life and why doesn’t it seem to still be around?
Well, they were obviously soft bodied and very small so I’d think fossilization would be unlikely.<
Not true at all. In fact, I would say that there is easily more fossil information on soft bodied species than anything else to date. As you can see from the quotes above, most paleontologists work in the lower orders.
>As for still being around, being out competed by descendants, possible incorporation and modification in other organisms, possible hypotheses. Some guesses, not really my area.<
I have no idea what this means. The fossil record is fairly well complete.
>I would suggest looking over the site, they address many misconceptions. Precisely how it came about isn’t a huge concern to me, we have a sample of 1, and it was long ago, so really we may never know just how it happened.<
And yet you have faith that it did happen in the manner you believe.
I do not wish to debate another source through you. But the very simple, and obvious question would be, ‘then where is the evidence’. I read briefly over the site. They write of the slow formation of some things from others, evolution into a cell. But there should easily be evidence of this in the record. It has been looked for. It is not there, or has not been found yet. If you know of any, please report. They further write of things that could not have happened, without some ‘miraculous’ turns of physics. It is great to try and prove or disprove something. But you must have evidence in order to do it. The evidence, or lack thereof, so far tends to completely disprove spontaneous generation.
>Part of the reason what you’re saying bothers me is the consequence of such thinking. You say it’s evo + abio or divine creation and call them all theory. We have theory of abiogenesis and evolution, but as stated earlier, supernatural claims aren’t in the realm of science. Please don’t misrepresent it as theory.<
Still, you seem to have a hard time defining supernatural, or wish to define it in some personally held belief. You appear to be hung up on this. You are defining a Being as supernatural, that I personally believe to be natural. Always there, always been there. What you seem to be saying is that; just your METHOD of believing in anything precludes the possible existence of God. What rubbish. Science as developed over the years does not preclude ANY explanation. There are simply things that have not been answered yet. Do not attempt to co-op science into your own belief system, and change what it is. You are deigning completely-without -possibility anything occurring that you cannot fathom. I might also point out, that many scientists ascribe things they cannot explain into the realm of :God".
>This way of looking at things makes it that any unknown is due to the supernatural, until a naturalistic explanation is given.<
Not at all. Some things can be simply unknown. It is not a crime. It does not have to be one or the other or something in between.
>I can see it in the places you stick God, once god was everywhere, now he’s receded to the unknowns of the origin of this universe and life.<
I have no idea what you mean.
>My point in showing the separation between abio and evo was that citing ‘problems’ with abiogenesis isn’t a problem with evolution.<
Then, you must have some other kicking off point for evolution. Obviously, science does NOT support a theory that cannot explain even the foundation of the theory. That is like defining the Laws of Thermodynamics without defining mass. You are your own critic in this matter. The first life was just ‘there’, by magic, or what? Was it "supernatural"? Whether you like it or not, they are joined at the hip.
>What it seems you are working against is naturalism, which I find surprising as I gather you have 20 years experience in evolution from your posts. Or was that meant to say you’ve been following evolutionary theory for 20 years and happen to be a scientist?<
What kind of logic is that? If you work with, or research evolution, you must believe in a certain methodology?
After getting my BS, I worked in reproductive physiology and genetics. Later in other fields. I have followed information in many fields related to evolution over the years.
>Mosaic law (the commandments), did a bit of searching and it looks like it was pre-empted by other moral codes. One being the Egyptian book of the dead and the things needed to get into the afterlife, Chapter 125. Which bear resemblance to the exodus 20 proclamations. The other would be the Code of Hammurabi, which was formed ~700 years before the Mosaic law in Babylon. See what you think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi<
I looked at your link. What evidence is there that Mosaic law was "pre-empted by other moral codes"? The link you gave had no evidence of this. Or do you think that because something was written in stone, it must have come first? And you claim to believe in science? Rubbish.
The first writing came about the time of Abraham. Nobody knows exactly when the first WRITTEN record of the Torah was made. Until then, in prehistoric time, everything was passed by word.
From your link:
"It was initially forbidden to write and publish the Oral Law: written material would be incomplete and subject to misinterpretation (and abuse). After great debate, however, this restriction was lifted. It became apparent that the Palestine community and its learning were threatened, and that publication was the only way to ensure that the law could be preserved."
The time of Abraham has been determined to be about 2300 BC. The exodus occurred much earlier. Therefore, a very good case can be made that Mosaic law predates any other by many thousands of years. I believe almost every scholar I have read, believes this to be true.
>In terms of my daily life, I try to use a basic empathetic approach as a basic rule. You’ll probably say that is Christian, the "golden rule" of do onto others as you would have them unto you, but it has appeared throughout history before Jesus allegedly said it. Or the Leviticus 19:18 use of it. How I act isn’t "due to the Bible", just some teachings of the bible happen to align with how I act.<
OK, yeah right. You were taught in schools, by your parents, and I believe in Sunday school? You do not think the Bible worked into the things you were taught? You are dreaming. If you have any other sources of these laws predating the Bible, I would be glad to look at them.
>I meant by the passed down comment, that what you call "the Bible" is simply a compilation of scrolls chosen by vote by a bunch of Romans. It’s a compilation and many were rejected, so you have an incomplete story.<
Obviously, since we have the other scrolls, it is not an incomplete story. I can judge for myself their worth. Further, one does not have to rely on translations. You can go back to the original Hebrew. There is the possibility of error in passing the oral record, in prehistoric time. But I will judge on what I can read.
>As you say you have researched the NT, I would like to hear about dates and the original authors. To the best of my knowledge the gospels are anonymous and post date Jesus by decades, while the letter have author, but there are questions of forgery I’ve heard some raise. As for changes, even my bible says that Mark 16:9-20 aren’t in early manuscripts and are suspect.<
Do you mean the guys did not drop their cups at the last supper, go to their rooms, and jot down everything? I suppose not. But then, I truly love the differences in the Gospels. It makes it greatly more believable to me. The Gospels do post date Jesus by decades, as best as can be determined. I see no reason why that should make them any less reliable, considering the importance of the topic, I would imagine accuracy would be important.
I would be interested in any evidence of "forgery" you might find.
Bigger
Somehow I skipped that part of the sentence, and the second one should really have been "Even if the places...". Sorry about that.