Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
No, petrushka, you misunderstand Erik: he would be ecstatically happy if Patrick found said posts, because they don’t exist. He never said they did exist. And the missing “actual willingness to have dialog” is Erik’s, not Patrick’s.
True, that — if and only if you are a wife beater…
Erik,
You made a claim about a supposedly historical occurrence:
You doubled down on that claim:
I’m merely trying to understand exactly what you mean when you make this claim. In order to achieve that understanding, I’ve asked three simple questions:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
There’s no conclusion assumed by these questions. They are nothing like “When did you stop beating your wife?” They are simply requests for clarification. If you’d answered them when I first asked them, we could already be discussing the much more interesting topic of how you support your claim.
For whatever reason, you clearly don’t want to clarify your claim, to the point where you’d rather behave like a coward lacking in integrity rather than do so. Please stop the transparent evasion and participate in the conversation honestly.
I have said all there is to be said about it. I said that the Biblical flood occurred. The important point is that this is not the only thing I said. The important point is what I have cited in support of this claim. In support of this claim, I said that the Bible has been found historically reliable. So, if you want a dialogue (which you don’t and never will, because you should have gotten around it long ago by now), you would look at my premise – historical reliability of the Bible – not only at my conclusion. This is how dialogue works in the normal world.
Another premise of mine is that the flood is a textual universal, found in cultures far and wide apart without direct evidence of borrowing. When I present this premise to people in real life, they immediately understand that the Bible is in a limited perspective for me – I am not defending the Bible literally and I am not claiming the flood of and from the Bible exclusively. Instead, I am talking about common heritage of humanity as revealed in several traditions of myths. This, however, is not understood by militant atheists on the internet who see fundamentalist evangelicalism whenever the Bible gets mentioned. Such is the state of this non-dialogue we are having.
No, you’re not. You may sincerely believe you are, but you’re wrong.
You’re talking about your IMAGINARY common heritage. Because in our actual reality there is NO common heritage of remnants of humanity surviving a traumatic flood.
No matter how many different populations survived local flood events which then found a place in their separate idiosyncratic folklores, there is no physical possibility that a) there has ever been an actual flood which could be rightly called “global” by a sane person, and b) the Noah folk tale is a particularly egregious falsehood, even within the genre of myths, and has nothing to do with “reliable history”.
You may not think that you’re lying about it. But all that means is that you have (unfortunately) chosen to believe whoever lied to you about it in the first place. Too bad for you.
Erik,
No, the important point is that you haven’t clarified exactly what you mean by your claim. It’s impossible to rationally discuss any support for it until your claim is understood. Please clarify exactly what you are claiming by answering these simple questions:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
Please answer these questions directly and clearly.
Perhaps you have forgotten, but we covered this ground (heh!) on October 23:
Since then, you have alluded to the presence of fossils in the Himalayas as supporting your claim. When I asked where did you get the idea that “fossils in the Himalayas support the Flood”, you replied
I don’t hold out much hope of a dialogue with someone this clueless.
I agree. You don’t understand the claim and you cannot rationally discuss it. You don’t even understand how your set of questions is inapplicable, because this would presuppose that you understood something.
TAMSZ is not representative of “the normal world”; far from it. And some of the most rabid and vacuous of the self-marginalised and sad atheists on this site are hounding you to answer their most myopic of questions.
“We don’t believe and you can’t do anything about it!” they shout, scream, kick and cry.
Ah, silly extremist ‘skeptics,’ if only you could open to another more reasonable way. 🙁 You might find hope and humanity where none now exists for you.
At least Lizzie is not as absurd as these folks she hosts even with her atheism…
Erik,
Yet another transparent attempt to cover up your cowardly failure to clarify your claim. Don’t you tire of demonstrating your lack of integrity here?
You made this statement about the biblical flood some time ago:
You further emphasized that more recently:
Two of the distinguishing, essential features of the biblical flood story are that it covered the entire planet and that only the people and animals on the ark survived.
I’m trying to understand what you are claiming actually happened. It is necessary to understand your claim before it makes sense to consider what evidence you can provide to support it. To be sure I understand your claim, I’ve asked three simple questions:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
Please answer these questions directly and clearly.
Let me see. Cowardly failures are bad, right? Lack of integrity is also bad, right? And you are basically saying I have those faults and you don’t, right? Then present me with the follow-up questions too, the complete set. Show everybody where you are heading with this. Don’t be cowardly, have integrity.
As for me, I presented a claim which was a conclusion along with some evidence how I arrived at it. You have been unwilling to address the evidence. This settled it for me tens of pages ago.
Erik,
Any follow up questions I might have will depend on the details of your (currently vacuous) claim. If you ever summon the minimal intestinal fortitude required to clarify your claim, I suspect we’ll then be able to discuss the evidence you believe supports it. Of course, if you clarify that your claim is not about anything historical in the real world, that will be less interesting to me.
Your claim lacks sufficient detail for any evidence to support it. Here it is again:
And your followup:
On the face of it, you seem to be asserting biblical literalism. I’ve been in discussions with enough creationists to learn to get clear definitions and explicit statements about their claims before investing time only to be told (after refuting their nonsense) that “That’s not what I meant.”
So, to avoid that unpleasantness, please clarify your claim by answering these simple questions:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
ZZZZZZzzzzz.
Thanks to Erik’s gymnastics, I now have a “Simple Gifts” earworm.
That’s an observation, rather than a complaint: it’s a lovely tune.
So, textual universality (equivalent to multiple testimonies in a court of law) is not evidence to you. You want to talk about some other evidence, but you are not telling what kind of evidence. This is why this dialogue never got started.
I’m not. Look up my first statement in this thread. Like keiths before, you took only half of my statement and ignored the rest. I’m not going to say it’s dishonest of you, because you are just doing what most people here do. For you it’s the standard honesty, while you hold me to a different standard. This is normal here. And, sincerely, I admire your consistency in this. I honestly value consistency.
If you are claiming that the Bible is historically reliable, then you need to talk about the kinds of evidence that are relevant to the study of history: not only documents but also archaeology, paleontology, and geology.
Philology alone can correlate events described in one text with events described in another text, but those correlations aren’t going to tell us whether the events described in those texts correspond to events in the real world.
To pursue the analogy with multiple eyewitnesses in a court of law — and ignoring the well-documented fact that eyewitness testimony is in fact not at all reliable — one would need to know, from other kinds of evidence (e.g. forensic evidence, analysis of the crime scene, etc.) whether or not the multiple eyewitnesses were telling versions of the same truth, or conspiring to lie together, or misrembering in roughly similar ways, etc.
Until you’ve established which it is, one doesn’t have the right to assert that multiple eyewitnesses are reliable. Likewise, until the textual correlations are correlated with non-textual evidence, one doesn’t have the right to assert that the texts are reliable sources of information about the actual world. And one really does need to be very careful here — just because archaeologists have discovered evidence of King David doesn’t mean that the pyramids were built by Joseph to store grain.
Conversely, if one doesn’t want to talk about evidence with regard to non-textual reality, that’s fine too — nothing wrong with philology! — but then there’s no basis for any claims about the historical reliability of any of these texts.
Great example, KN. 🙂
Lord save us from that man being taken seriously. 🙁
On the topic of religion, KN, do you actually still interact with religious Jews nowadays? Or have you lost contact completely with the religion of your ancestors, instead to tripe this sophistic linguistic relativism you peddle here? In either case, I hope somehow you feel some ‘warmth’ from the likes of ‘hotshoe’ who supports you here at TAMSZ.
Erik,
I never said that (although we might have some disagreements about it in the future). What I have been repeatedly and very clearly saying, including in the sentence you quoted, is that your claim as stated lacks sufficient detail to determine if any evidence supports it. Until you clarify your claim it is premature to discuss evidence.
This is why I am asking for clarification of your claim. Here is what you originally said:
You further emphasized that more recently:
Two of the distinguishing, essential features of the biblical flood story are that it covered the entire planet and that only the people and animals on the ark survived.
I am having trouble reconciling your statements. In order that I can understand exactly what you are claiming, please answer these simple questions:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
Direct answers rather than continued cowardly evasions would be appreciated.
What is unclear in my first statement? And you should know which first statement I mean, because if you don’t, it means you are actually not interested in my claim. You are interested in something else.
Archeology, paleontology, and geology have been brought up too. Amazingly, whatever evidence of floods there is, it somehow manages to convince people that the Biblical flood could not have happened. Just like from the book titled On the Origin of Species… they get the idea that there are no species.
Erik,
As I have made perfectly clear, multiple times, I am trying to understand exactly what you are claiming when you say:
You can easily clear up any potential misunderstandings by answering the three simple questions you have been evading:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
You have three options. First, answer the questions. We can then discuss whatever evidence you think supports your claim. Second, retract your claim. We can then end this interaction. Third, continue to demonstrate a complete lack of intellectual integrity, because you are more terrified of having your claim challenged than you are of looking like a coward.
I urge you to pick one of the non-pathetic options.
Patrick, to Erik:
Seconded.
This is not my first statement. You have made statements here which you could not have made if you had read, understood, and respected my first statement in this thread. Clearly, you are not interested in my claim, certainly not in clarifying it.
Was there ever really any doubt?
But, OK, ask him again, Patrick.
Erik,
Now you’re just behaving like a troll — attempting to get a response with minimal effort on your part.
I have made what I am asking for perfectly clear. You made this claim:
You then doubled down on it:
I would like to understand that claim. In order to do so, I have asked you three simple questions:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
I am doing you the courtesy of paying attention to your claim and demonstrating a willingness to attempt to understand it. Please (finally) demonstrate the minimal courtesy in return by either answering those questions or retracting your claim.
Erik,
I have repeatedly said and demonstrated the opposite. The rule here is that one assumes one’s interlocutors are commenting in good faith. Please follow that rule and answer my simple questions about your claim:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
The thing is, you did not comment in good faith. I pointed it out to you. Maybe I did it too gently, too inoffensively, so that you did not get it. You broke the rule and you are refusing to correct it. As long as this continues, I will treat you only slightly better than you deserve.
Narratives of floods from various myths around the world are good evidence that there was probably some sort of cataclysmic event at some point in the history of that culture. But that doesn’t mean that the event as described in the myth corresponds precisely to the event in the real world that inspired it.
For example, there is a story among the Klamath people in southern Oregon of an epic battle between the Chief of the Above World and the Chief of the Below World. The description of that battle matches quite well with a volcanic explosion that took place thousands of years ago. There is (on the face of it) good reason to think that the witnesses to that explosion understood in terms of their own frame of reference and transmitted their understanding of the eruption, in terms of a battle between spirit-chiefs, in an oral tradition.
It’s perfectly plausible that flood myths are like the Klamath story of the spirit-chiefs: based on a real-world event, but refracted through the understanding of the world that those people had at that time and place.
If that makes the Klamath legend “historically reliable,” then the bar for what counts as “historically reliable” is remarkably low.
It should also be pointed out that a plurality of flood myths, even if all caused by a single geological event, does not mean that there was a single world-wide flood. The melting of ice dams at the end of the Ice Age is not what is described in Genesis or in the flood myths found in Mesopotamian, Hindu, or Mayan texts, though it well could have caused the floods that inspired those myths.
The reason why a plurality of flood myths does not persuade us that there was a single global flood is simply that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A belief in many local floods is much more consistent with what we know about geology and paleontology than a single global flood.
Erik,
a) That is a violation of the site rules.
b) I am commenting in good faith and genuinely trying to understand exactly what you are claiming.
Please clarify what you mean when you claim this:
by answering these simple questions:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
Clear and direct answers, please.
There’s always that possibility.
🙂
You misrepresented my position by chopping off more than half of the statement with which I started my participation in this thread. I pointed it out to you, but you have refused to acknowledge and correct this. Moreover, the way I have expanded on my first statement in this thread renders your “clarifying” questions moot. Thus you are not commenting in good faith.
I don’t even believe He could save this thread.
Or in other cultures that the flood-reporting culture has come in contact with, such as the Hebrews (from a dry place) learning from the Babylonians while in captivity there.
This and your previous post make germane and acute points, KN.
Kantian Naturalist,
That too I find an extraordinary claim. We would be talking of 12,000 years of generational transmission of a story – about 60,000 generations in an unbroken chain. And no mention of, you know, ice.
I wasn’t supposing that any Mesopotamian peoples knew that the floods were caused by the melting of ice dams. However, there does seem to be some evidence that oral traditions can indeed transmit information about events from almost 8,000 years ago — the Klamath myth is an example. Australian Aborigines encode information about watering holes in myths that shamans pass on from generation to generation. It’s really quite fascinating.
Kantian Naturalist,
No, I know, but placing their ancestors in proximity to them in order to provide a body of water to add historicity seems somewhat ad hoc. There would need to be some proximity. Water doesn’t flow indefinitely southwards, nor retain its volume as it spreads beyond confines. The southern extent of the ice was north of the English Channel in this part of the world.
I find the evidence unconvincing, though.
If the information accurately reflects the location of a real live watering hole, it’s not that mythic!
Erik wrote:
and
Repeated violation of site rules.
Let me quote your first statement:
So you appear to be saying that all verses are true at the same time, under three distinct interpretations:
1) literal (which you appear to be using in the colloquial “did, in fact, happen” sense, rather than the philological “word-by-word interpretation of the text” sense that you subsequently retreated to: how else does one interpret “Jesus may have walked literally on water” ??)
2) figurative
3) esoteric
You make it clear that you view the literal interpretation as the least important, “because the literal interpretation is merely historical”. Humm.
I have not seen anyone misunderstand your point here.
The problem is that you have made claims about the historical accuracy of the Flood story
and
And you have compared the degree of archeological confirmation of the OT with that of Herodotus, and made vague allusions to ice ages, mammoths and fossils in the Himalayas as supporting your position.
You may view your “of course it occurred” claim as relatively unimportant.That’s okay. If you really don’t want to discuss it, then skip the condescension and indignation and just retract the statements. Then the conversation can move on to the figurative interpretation of the Flood story; I might skip that conversation, as my interest in the morality of the God of the OT is limited to certain specific situations.
I don’t really know why people spend over-much time looking for historical events to back up a particular story. It’s as if the capacity for invention only arose in the last couple of hundred years. Were there no palaeolithic Stephen Kings?
The story which persists is that with the most resonance, whatever its source, not that most likely rooted in a real event. Two generations on, everyone’s forgotten the facts, and a story’s ‘legs’ depend only upon its merits as a story/myth.
Erik,
If you think I’m misrepresenting your position, please answer the questions I’ve been asking to clarify exactly what your position is.
The only material I have not quoted is that where you claim to be providing evidence for your claim. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, your claim is not sufficiently detailed for evidence to be an issue yet. It is premature to talk about evidence while your claim remains vacuous.
So let’s fix that. Here’s your claim:
Here’s your emphasis of it:
To be sure I understand your claim, I’ve asked three simple questions:
1) When did the flood you claim happened occur?
2) Was the flood global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible?
3) Immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
Please answer these questions directly and clearly.
If there are eight survivors, I think it will be a miracle.
I wasn’t aware that the Hebrews came from Great Britain.
There are clueless people, persistent, willful, and then there are intentionally ignorant TAMSZ posters who seemingly *want* to not understand. Patrick takes the cake with his repeated questions. Go back and read, if you know how. Your questions have already been answered several times wahaha…
Gregory,
No, they have not. Erik has repeatedly evaded answering three simple questions intended to clarify what he means by his claim.
If you think he has answered me, link to where he did so and quote what you think are the answers. If you cannot, retract your assertion.
Which does make one wonder, what were the “merits” of the Noah tale that it was felt to be significant enough to pass through however many generations until it took written form in the OT … what were those folks thinking when they taught their children that the god they worshipped every week was a genocidal monster?
I can read. And I have read every single comment in this thread – many of them more than once – and Erik has never once told the truth in response to Patrick’s questions.
No surprise, Gregory the Great takes up arms against the non-theists on every occasion. Sure does make theism seem like a trustworthy stance. Erm, no, the other thing …
Sorry, but the questions have not been answered.
I would add, if Eric’s response happened in a court of law, Eric would would be facing charges of contempt.
Maybe assuming that I was under trial and that Patrick was the prosecutor. But maybe I am the defence lawyer and Patrick is the claimant. After all, his alleged purpose is, as expressed by him, clarification, while my point is that he has no grounds to demand it.
Well, I’d agree that Patrick has no grounds to “demand” clarification from you – nor does anyone, within internet discussion forum — but “demand’ isn’t from Patrick.
That’s yours. Indicates a bit of unseemly paranoia on your part – or if not paranoia, some other ideation of yours out of touch with reality.
And you wonder why we don’t think you’re telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 🙁
It’s not the purpose of folklore (or scripture) to describe events as a historical record. It’s their purpose to provide a narrative for a folkloric or spiritual purpose.
Yes, it’s plausible. It’s also plausible that our search in matching the story with an event is “refracted through the understanding of the world” that we have at this time and place. Which is what a scientist should be aware of and minimize.
No. The standard is what it is. Some sets of stories demonstrate a good historical reliability, some less good, for various reasons, including our difficulties of interpretation and objective inability to verify historical events empirically. Even so, the Bible has been pretty thoroughly examined in terms of historical reliability, which gives a reason to not dismiss it lightly.
The purpose of folkore (and scripture) is continuous, not momentary or transitory, so a single event for a single story is not a requirement. Droughts and floods in particular are periodic (as are ice ages) and folklore more easily describes periodic events, or very remarkable singular events. Moreover, ancient people’s perception of time was cyclical, not linear. The Bible’s rather insistent impression of linear timeline is quite exceptional in this context.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Are you sure you know what the claim is? Either way, history is largely made up of documented claims. Often enough, documented claims in and of themselves are the evidence – maybe not for you, but they are for historians. And we are talking folklore (and scripture), not just history.
The kind of evidence you are entitled to depends crucially on the genre. Misconstrue the genre and your expectations of evidence are guaranteed to be unjustified.
No one is sure what YOUR claim is, Erik.
But we do know that Noah’s tale, as recorded in the OT, cannot physically have happened unless god not only miracled up the Flood to begin with but also miracled away all the evidence afterwards (miraculously got rid of the excess water, miraculously moved all the surviving animals to their distant continents, etc.) Is this your extraordinary claim: that Noah’s Flood happened miraculously?
Why don’t you state your claim specifically and clearly in a paragraph or two.
Then we all can mutually examine it and see if it has any evidence for it.
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