A good example is barney's previous post.  Where I said that ordering Andrea or Islamic militants to kill [in today's situations] is not consistant with biblical doctrine, somehow barney took that to mean that God would never exercise his providence over life and death in other very different circumstances.  Of course his understanding is flawed. 

He acknowledges that he isn't in a position to be able to tell what someone else knows or believes but in the next breath goes on to say he is sure about what belief I would offer for particular events.

Can we draw any valid conclusions from barney's explanations other than the ones Baldar suggests?  I think perhaps not.

Generally they offer the evidence of a changed life.  Your prejudice rejects such evidence out of hand.


Yes but absent perception can "know" anything?  Can you distinguish the difference between something I know but cannot demonstrate and something I believe but cannot demonstrate? 


Do you claim that you can tell what someone else knows?


While we cannot always tell what somebody "knows"  we can often discern truth since truth is external and universal.  Andrea claims God told her to kill her children but that is inconsistent with Biblical doctrine.  So if God did tell her to kill her children, it was not the Bible God. Likewise the God of Abraham would not command an Islamist to bomb Jews or anyone else.  barney, I don't understand your difficulty.

Those who claim personal revelation say they have been convinced and do know.  You cannot claim that nobody knows.  You can only speak for yourself.

I think this is very telling of the issue I am trying to discuss.  One who doesn't see the need to look critically at their belief system for internal consistency won't notice if it does not hang together.  Callum, you and barney have suggested on several occasions that we shouldn't have to look for a source for everything and if we didn't we would be less constrained.  By this I suppose you mean your intellect is less conflicted when you don't need to have a foundation for such things.  Materialism is the idea that material and material processes accounts for everything.  But in the case of morality you suggest that we not look to hard for a source in material or material processes.  I presume it is because your intellect would force you to admit the inconsistency if you were to confront this challenge.

Now in addition to the issue I raise above we have barney hyjacking concepts of morality from Christian theism when he suggests that morality has properties of goodness and badness.  Here is one implied example:

In the evolutionary natural selection concept of morality barney claims he subscribes to, there is no good and  bad, just advantage and disadvantage.

The fact that atheists/materialists hijack theistic concepts for morality suggests that the theistic position comports with reality and since we all run around behaving as if there is good and bad and since society would cease to function as we know it if we all suddenly switched to advantage and disadvantage.

He does protest, but he does not seem to have an argument.

First he complains that I presume there is a God.  But I have already admitted as much when I said I did not intend to prove existence of God, instead I would simply reconcile it with my belief system.

Next he fabricates a weak analogy.  In my previous post I clearly indicated the the specific words of Joshua and Moses that were posited to be true included the direct physical presence of God and direct outward verifiable and corroborated demonstration (provable at the time and indeed for at least 200 years until the Arc and other direct evidence was lost) of the authority of God.  Without this kind of direct physical evidence Joshua's claim could not be supported.

barney's weak analogy does not include corroborated evidence (provable at the time of the event).  It is just Andrea's word only.  Now I have already addressed this, but just to be clear, barney may object that scripture is just joshua's word.  But since the evidence is lost, he is presuming that scripture represents just Joshua's word when it is unknown.  My posit is that it is not Joshua heard some voice he thought was God,  it is that Joshua is correct that these physical demonstrations occurred and God spoke to Joshua physically.

This is why the business of "proof" is out of reach for Joshua's narratives.  Simply put, the evidence is lost, the case against Joshua has gone cold.

barney's complaint ultimately is that I presuppose God and therefore have not proved my case.  But I stated that I did not intend to prove God.  I only wished to show rich how I reconcile the narrative.

And at the time then or any time in the next 100 to 200 years and perhaps as late as the time of David, the proof would have been easy enough to provide in a hypothetical court of law.  At some point the evidence was lost and now no trial can occur. 

You began this post asking for reconciliation presumably to the underlying principles of the belief system, but increasingly you are suggesting that all along you had loftier goals up to and including proof that God actually commanded Moses and Joshua.


My logic posit that Joshua's words are true and it is linear as follows .  1. Posit the words of Joshua are true 2. Therefore the God of Abraham is true 3. God does have sovernty over life and death 4. God did command Joshua to destroy the enemies of Israel 5. Therefore Joshua was justified.

Again I remind you that you did not ask for facts in your opening remarks.  You asked how it can be reconciled.  Are you now asking for proof?  If so I will tell you that the evidence is lost.  Any case you think you have against Joshua is hopelessly gone cold.  In court of law the suspect is presumed innocent.  Just as I cannot "prove" Joshua was commanded by God, you cannot prove any noncombatants were killed, such is the problem of proving such events of antiquity.

 
I disagree. There is no round and round.  If the words of the Bible are true, then we are done.   


True enough.



This statement seems illogical.  Do we state that things and events that are predicated on something that is not proved therefore must be viewed as false?  Clearly this is a special pleading and the conclusions that follow are unsupported.


Again the conclusion is not supported since the corollary is false.  Furthermore the case of Joshua is not simply "belief" that he was carrying out orders, Joshua is only justified if he factually was carrying out orders.


You have once again moved the goal post.  In the case of Joshua we had already agreed in the previous post that he is only justified if he unequivocally received direct instruction from a personal physical presence of God himself.  In the case of the whabbist there is no such similar circumstance.


I don't regard my response as a counter argument (which generally requires evidence and proofs) rather it is an explanation for how I reconcile the historical accounts of the Israelites destroying the remnant of waring nations with the moral commandment not to murder.  Do you claim that without proof for the existence of God my story does not comport internally with scriptural doctrine?  if so, I would disagree.

Now if instead of a request to reconcile, this were a court of law or even a formal debate then I would argue instead for a stalemate since I do not offer proof that Joshua's words are true with regard to existence of and physical presence of God neither do you have evidence that the Israeli's did what scripture claims they did.  The reality is that this case has gone cold.

If on the other hand you claim that as a hypothetical story, it is immoral.  I counter that it is not because as a hypothetical story it must be taken in full context and the story must include the commandment from the creator of the universe.


True to your words I see that you have put your faith elsewhere and chosen not to believe.

Yes he does but his intellect won't let him describe it that way.  He prefers to call it a gap in our knowledge.

Looking beyond the problem of tying evolution back to material from a physical standpoint (you used the term abiogenesis) there is the pesky inconsistency in the atheistic/materialistic framework that has no explanation for how it is that some life makes use of morality while other life does not and certainly pre-biotic matter does not use morality at all.  Therefore morality has its beginnings somewhere in this time span but materialists don't offer any clue as to what caused morality or what is was sourced from.  Morality is not material so it is difficult to see how material could be its source.  Regardless I note that the materialist simply stops at this point leaving morality hanging in midair with no foundation.

Assumptions that one attempts to pass off as proofs are the key to self deception.  It is a formula that seems to work well for you. 

Don't forget, you judge a man by what he does and how he behaves and the principles he expouses.  Hitler's actions, policies and goals were athiesm/materialism and social Darwinism to the extreme.  He promoted a pure genetic line,  he advocated for extermination of inferior genetic lines.  His view was that only Arian people should one day dominate the entire world.

Strange.  I read your critics.  I guess we are done here then.

Sorry barney, I can't get beyond the failure to complete your now false proof.  It is laying in a heap and I see no way around it.

You hold this belief as an article of faith or you have justification for this belief in others that may not have causes?

I agree that atheists claim evolution is the basis, but I note that it has not been tied back to material beginnings.  It seems to lack a foundation.

Not true.  The scientific method is quite capable of verifying design.  Reliability engineers use the scientific method to uncover design flaws.  Forensic scientists verify design as a cause. There are hundreds of broad categories where science verifies design.  Design is not a materialistic mechanism.


Lewontin never indicates any problem he may have with the scientific method.  He is simply calling a spade a spade when he explains why he thinks scientists should maintain a prior commitment to materialism.

Schmidt is hardly a conservative Christian.  His viewpoint is far closer to yours than mine and his bias permeates his work.  I note again that he stays far away from the merits of Thiede's analysis.

As far as Dr. Peter Head, he does appear to have good qualifications to address this topic.

When one looks hard enough one can always find a variety of opinions.  No surprise.  In reviewing the analysis here (finally one that actually focuses on the merits of Thiede's analysis)  we find that in the end the the range of acceptable dates for this scrap is from 50 AD through the early 3rd century to perhaps 250 AD.  This range is consistent with the 200 AD date and Thiede's date of 70 AD.  The writer clearly favors the 200 AD date and makes good arguments for it, but the writer is unable to properly rule out Thiede's arguments and likewise ignores his stronger arguments.  This writer does a rather poor job of accurately describing Thiede's work and puts it in worse light than it deserves thus making his case for the later date seem stronger than it is.

Barney have you read Thiede's analysis?  No you have not.  Your view is one sided.

When I said "good support" I was not expecting everyone to agree with Thiede.  We now have one expert claiming 70 AD and another in disagreement.  Though he acknowledges the possibility of overlap in the dates he prefers the newer date of 200 for reasons he explains.