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Comment by elwell | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that despite so many years of scrutiny these biblical stories have yet to be conclusively invalidated. It seems there's some balance between each critique and each discovery, always leaving room for faith, never 'proving' but never snuffing out.

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Given one side is positing an entity with a mysterious personality that can create literally everything, ex nihilo, in 6 days, I wouldn’t expect it to be possible to conclusively invalidate anything, ever, under any circumstances.

No matter how much evidence there is on the side saying the Bible is just as fictional as the Olympian, Roman, Egyptian, Aztec etc. pantheons, believers can always counter it.

The argument goes something like this:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

What does validating or invalidating have to do with a work of allegory?

Scoring points in some long-running argument based on the common misunderstanding of both sides isn't really all that important.

Why not, instead, focus on what you yourself can accept as ineffable and universal?

There's a large contingent of a minority of Evangelical Protestants who want to feel scientific exploration and discovery is done in good faith while also wanting to believe the Scripture, as currently received and understood (39 "books" of O.T., 27 "books" of N.T., written by diverse authors over more than a millenium), is what Almighty wanted us to have, and that it represents the spiritual truth as we should understand it ... how literal/symbolic/allegorical that Scripture might be is hard to determine.

So, this contingent usually is berated in religious forums ("No, the first two or three chapters in Genesis are 'historical narrative', heretic! ... BTW, here are the mental gymnastics for addressing inconsistencies in the two creation narratives [0]") or secular forums ("The Old Testament is a collection of inconsistent myths with no value in historical interpretation! There's no archaeological evidence of the Exodus! The New Testament passages weren't written till the year 300!").

But ... we (of this contingent) still want to meld the scientific and scriptural views, and we aren't too proud to be monkeys. For someone with this view, most of the New Testament makes little sense unless there was a literal Adam/Eve at some point, while evolution must also hold. There perhaps aren't many ways of reconciling these, so it's a struggle. The best I can reconcile is that "God made humankind from the dust of the earth" is the beautiful hack of evolution, and the Almighty chose, during one code review, from among candidate resulting species, his version 1.0 of the physical substrate of humankind, and "breathed the breath of life into [them]" to make them spiritually conscious. Then Garden-of-Eden, Tree-of-Life-vs-Tree-of-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil, Partaking-of-the-Forbidden-Fruit, and we get to humankind's current reality. I look forward to seeing how wrong or right I am.

[0] https://answersingenesis.org/contradictions-in-the-bible/do-...

EDIT: mention the Exodus

> For someone with this view, most of the New Testament makes little sense unless there was a literal Adam/Eve at some point

I’m surprised to read this. I was raised Catholic in the UK, and everyone in my school years seemed to be fine melding scientific and scriptural views without having any problem assuming that Adam and Eve did not need to be literal.

A proof requires the faith of truth, as truth can only exist as an axiom of consensus.

Here's just one of many anachronisms from the bible.

"Last week, archaeologists Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University released a new study that dates the arrival of the domesticated camel in the eastern Mediterranean region to the 10th century B.C. at the earliest, based on radioactive-carbon techniques. Abraham and the patriarchs, however, lived at least six centuries before then."

https://time.com/6662/the-mystery-of-the-bibles-phantom-came...

"The 'Mystery' of the Bible's Phantom Camels"

There's one really obvious solution to that mystery.

If you're going to tell us that the Bible is not composed of historically accurate accounts by contemporary writers, that's really nothing new.

I wonder about the camel thing, though. Did the authors/editors of the texts consider camels ubiquitous? Did they know that camels were very special and wanted to mention it? Was it a mistranslation?

Art and literature of all kinds has a long, long history of portraying people from the past in historically inaccurate ways that the people doing the portrayal take for granted.

One obvious religious example would be the many paintings of Christ showing him as a blonde European wearing contemporary (for the time of the painting) European clothing.

Camels were ubiquitous. And feral. The taming (camels remain undomesticated to this day - "trust in God and tie down your camel.") and exploitation of camels is what's anachronistic, not the camels themselves.

According to everything I can google, camels are definitely domesticated, and the vast majority of them are today. According to wikipedia, there’s technically only 1400 “wild” camels or so, from the wild Bactrian group

Some other neat facts I just learned:

1. Apparently domestication can be defined as simply “12 generations of selective breeding”. What exactly is being selected is left open.

2. Feral is defined as first domesticated, then released. The only truly wild population of camels is apparently the wild Bactrian camels, in the gobi desert

3. Apparently camels started in the NA, traveled to Asia, got wiped out in NA (presumably by humans), got tamed in Asia, and then brought back to NA.

4. Apparently this also true of horses.

I remember seeing a late medieval painting of a saint and he's wearing spectacles.

And that solution comes in many, many shades of gray. Picking the right shade is less obvious.

This is a really bad example of an anachronism, stop using it. They carbon dated a camel remain found in a particular settlement and are using it as the upper bound for domestication when it should be the lower bound. That's silly. Earlier this week on HN we saw evidence that camel statues in Saudia Arabia date to 5k BC or so. Clearly people have been interacting with camels in the region for quite a while.

I don't understand why you being downvoted, what is wrong with bible treasure hunting or validating one of the oldest books. if the bible was some part wrong it doesn't mean anything in it is false

Some part of it being wrong literally means that a thing in it is false, so I think you should rephrase the point you’re trying to make.

It's because many religions and mythologies based the stories they tell on actual events (or handed down stories of events). People naturally incorporate those into their own system of beliefs. Often the most prominent tales are shared amongst various religions and cultures and that certainly doesn't "prove" any one of their belief systems in particular. The prevalence does, however, help to validate the science behind the discovery.

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