Sneak preview of that coming post:
You can view other humans as noisy instruments, with many even being deliberately hostile jammers.
The engineering way to deal with noise is to statistically average many measurements.
With enough of them you can know the truth despite 99% noise.
Because of the huge number of copies and quotes from copies and arguments about quotes from copies during the first few centuries we have a high level of confidence that we have reconstructed the Biblical signal from the noise of human error and deceit.
On top of that, the Bible is massively redundant. All the important concepts of Christian doctrine are covered over and over again in many ways.
People still argue about the fine points, but that is almost always because they choose to filter out content that disagrees with their pre-desired outcome.
For example, if you have the following noisy manuscripts, full of errors, do you have any doubt about what the original said?
The quick xrown fox jumped over the slithy toves.
The quick brown fxx jumped over the slithy toves.
The quick brown fox jumped xver the slithy toves not.
The xuick brown fox juxped over the slithy toves.
xhe quick brown fox jumped over the slithy doves.
The quick brxwn fox jumped over thx slithy xoves.
One other point. Whether we like it or not, God has always interacted with mankind through other humans. We don't really have a choice.
That's thousands of false humans and 44 recognized prophets and apostles.
How do we tell the difference?
It was acceptance by their peers. They either performed miracles or made prophesies that were fulfilled.
That acceptance caused their writings to be treasured, preserved, and distributed back when it was extremely expensive to treasure, preserve, and distribute something.
To survive through time, wars, mishaps, etc. there needed to be enough copies to make up for all those that were lost along the way. So documents had to pass through the same Darwinian survival of the fittest process that the secular world loves so much today.
Finally, once the surviving documents make it down through history to us, and we compare them to extract the most probable reconstruction of the original text, it all comes down to each individual reading it and finding it credible or not.
When I read it, I find it compelling and credible. Others may not.
Yes, but it seems that we need to "trust" them and have "faith" in THEM and in what they wrote. They may talk about faith in "God" but in the end of the day it's all about having faith in humans beings, THEM, that's why I asked to remove them from the equation if we want to talk/speak about "faith in God" and not faith in humans.
In any case I will be waiting for your future post when/If you find some free time.
Sneak preview of that coming post:
You can view other humans as noisy instruments, with many even being deliberately hostile jammers.
The engineering way to deal with noise is to statistically average many measurements.
With enough of them you can know the truth despite 99% noise.
Because of the huge number of copies and quotes from copies and arguments about quotes from copies during the first few centuries we have a high level of confidence that we have reconstructed the Biblical signal from the noise of human error and deceit.
On top of that, the Bible is massively redundant. All the important concepts of Christian doctrine are covered over and over again in many ways.
People still argue about the fine points, but that is almost always because they choose to filter out content that disagrees with their pre-desired outcome.
For example, if you have the following noisy manuscripts, full of errors, do you have any doubt about what the original said?
The quick xrown fox jumped over the slithy toves.
The quick brown fxx jumped over the slithy toves.
The quick brown fox jumped xver the slithy toves not.
The xuick brown fox juxped over the slithy toves.
xhe quick brown fox jumped over the slithy doves.
The quick brxwn fox jumped over thx slithy xoves.
The truth is out there.
One other point. Whether we like it or not, God has always interacted with mankind through other humans. We don't really have a choice.
That's thousands of false humans and 44 recognized prophets and apostles.
How do we tell the difference?
It was acceptance by their peers. They either performed miracles or made prophesies that were fulfilled.
That acceptance caused their writings to be treasured, preserved, and distributed back when it was extremely expensive to treasure, preserve, and distribute something.
To survive through time, wars, mishaps, etc. there needed to be enough copies to make up for all those that were lost along the way. So documents had to pass through the same Darwinian survival of the fittest process that the secular world loves so much today.
Finally, once the surviving documents make it down through history to us, and we compare them to extract the most probable reconstruction of the original text, it all comes down to each individual reading it and finding it credible or not.
When I read it, I find it compelling and credible. Others may not.
Yes, but it seems that we need to "trust" them and have "faith" in THEM and in what they wrote. They may talk about faith in "God" but in the end of the day it's all about having faith in humans beings, THEM, that's why I asked to remove them from the equation if we want to talk/speak about "faith in God" and not faith in humans.
In any case I will be waiting for your future post when/If you find some free time.