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.
Erik,
No, it does not. Your statement is completely at odds with reality.
Here is your claim about a supposedly historical event:
Here are the questions I posed 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?
You have never answered these. Do so now or retract your claim.
Can you prove it?
This is a serious philosophical question, by the way. My proof that I have answered would be to paste the answers here yet again, point by point. What is your proof that I have not answered? Or would you say that you cannot prove a negative?
It was Dmitri Tymoczko.
I met him briefly in 2006. My daughter was a member of the wonderful Contemporary Youth Orchestra in Cleveland (first violin), which solicits original works for one of its three concerts each year. I believe he premiered a work. His biography mentioned his stint with Putnam at Harvard so I sought him out after the concert.
Congratulations, Erik, on making such an unambiguous statement.
It is clear, precise, and completely and utterly false.
Erik,
Do it. If you actually had answered my questions directly already you would simply fill in the blanks again and prove me wrong. Here they are again:
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?
Copy them into your response and provide clear, direct answers that clarify exactly what you mean by your claim that
Direct answers about your claim regarding what you are saying happened in reality. You have never done so. Now would be a good time to change that.
NO, it doesn’t answer the direct questions.
Here’s what you keep claiming is answering those questions:
NOTE:
You give no date, nor series of dates for these supposed “multiple events”, nor even a broad range of dates when these supposed events might possibly have occurred.
Why not?
It the flood(s) really did happen, you must have some idea WHEN that really happened. You don’t have to be an archeology/climatology/geology expert to make some statement about WHEN you think it fits into the human timeline. Stand up and do yourself proud by answering what you actually think. No point in taking refuge in “levels” of interpretation, yet again.
Events which occur in our real world occur in some particular time or other. There’s every reason to assume they never did occur if you can’t pin them down in space and time to something more definite than “I believe it happened.”
Otherwise, you’re just presenting a fairytale,not reality at all. ONCE UPON A TIME …
NOTE:
No points for quoting “according to … exegesis” …
You haven’t been asked what the rabbinical “experts” say. You’ve been asked what YOU think.
I don’t assume from that twisted phrasing that you believe them. IF YOU do believe them, YOU could quite easily say something like:
According to my study of the evidence, I think there never have been any floods which were global/nearly global and I believe that the Genesis text is speaking metaphorically when it says the flood covered all the world. I believe it means that it covered everything important to the Hebrews, which was probably a small area of the Tigris-Euphrates plain.
Or something like that. Whichever it is that YOU personally think about the occurrence – or not – of “global” floods such as described in Noah’s tale.
It’s amazing that we have to teach you how to speak clearly, when you seem so full of words and otherwise competent at using them.
NOTE:
Again with the non-answer reference to “exegesis”. It’s very interesting, I’m fascinated, but it doesn’t answer the question placed before you:
What do YOU think? Out of all the exegesis and study and apologetics, what conclusion have YOU reached personally? Only 8, or more than 8?
So, this proves you haven’t answered any of our questions as you were asked. Of course, you don’t have to — and no one can make you — and I don’t even like Patrick being so boring with his repeated questions. But at least Patrick is telling the truth here. Patrick is a pretty good example, after all.
hotshoe_,
Thanks for providing Erik with a detailed explanation of how he has utterly failed to answer the questions posed.
Erik,
You know full well, based on your explicit refusal to answer, that these questions are about the meaning of your words and what, exactly, you are claiming happened historically. Stop with the evasions and either answer the questions or retract your claim.
So, you know that I actually have answers to paste. Therefore you were lying when you said I never answered. That’s a bad character flaw to have, in addition to your other flaws.
I also note that you didn’t answer my question – Can you prove I have not answered? This is added now to a long list of questions from me to you that you have not answered. Therefore you actually do not deserve answers from me to you. I knew it when I gave them, and you have shown being unworthy of them ever since. But I’m going to fulfil my promise anyway one more time, even though you don’t deserve it. From then on, the issue is a pearls-before-swine thing.
Earlier: I have said that the text is multi-layered. This means that it permits multiple interpretations (levels of interpretation from literal to spiritual or esoteric). It also means that the events described refer to multiple events at once, i.e. it’s about multiple historical events even on the literal level. Looking at the tradition of interpretation of the flood story, both meanings of “multi-layered” hold. Which means the date depends on which specific layer we are considering.
On the spiritual level, the question about the date is inapplicable. And I have said that the spiritual level has priority over literal. This point also bears out in the tradition of scriptural exegesis.
Shorter: The flood story in the Bible is about multiple floods in the same narrative. They all occurred, but to apply the date, we’d have to sort out which one of them you are most interested in. You have never clarified this. Instead, you have done everything to be as repulsive as possible so that I would not interact with you. Point well taken now.
Earlier: This depends on what layer we are considering. According to Jewish traditional exegesis, the flood story is about multiple events (i.e. the text contains multiple layers of narrative). The layer specifically concerning the Hebrew guy called Noah (which is the layer you are evidently most interested in, as determined from the way you have been formulating your questions), the flood was NOT global. Source: Midrash Rabbah.
Shorter: Noah’s flood was not global. There was a global flood too, but that didn’t involve a Hebrew dude named Noah.
Earlier: According to Jewish traditional exegesis, a civilization or an era ended cataclysmically, not human species. Other flood stories are similar. Chinese flood stories leave predominantly local impression, while Indian version is multi-layered and at its broadest refers to a change of planetary/cosmic cycles (not the same thing as global flood, but adequately described in the same vocabulary).
Shorter: No.
The ignore button is long overdue. If you want further interaction, first you will have to answer all the questions I asked you during these months – just to reciprocate fairly. And acknowledge my current answers and acknowledge the fact that you have been irrationally asking exclusively literalist questions from me even though for a fair-minded reader it has been clear from my very first post in this thread that I am not a literalist. You will have a hope of a response from me when your illness ends.
PS. hotshoe is already in quarantine. You evidently want to be in the same boat. Granted.
Erik,
In this thread regarding Joseph Smith’s papyri.
It showed him to be first rate fraud. No reason to believe anything else he says as far as I’m concerned.
I find it interesting that Erik’s appeals are to exegesis and not to anything that could establish whether something actually happened or when.
You mean the Book of Abraham? This documents him as a fraud. The more interesting question is: How do you determine the fraudulence of a religious leader/preacher without such documentation, purely based on what he says/writes?
Guano, baby.
Can you please tell us about this actual global flood–when it occurred, how you know it occurred, whether there were human beings on the planet at the time, etc.?
Thanks.
I would just like to say that despite Erik’s tantrum, he still hasn’t provided evidence to back his claim that the flood actually happened. apparently lots of them, including a global one.
But not dates, times or evidence.
What he seems to have provided abundant evidence for is the vacuity of his original claim.
Thanks I hadn’t heard of him. I listened to the clips of his “Beat Therapy” album that are available at Amazon. His music reminds me of some of Henry Threadgill’s stuff.
hotshoe_,
The sentence is clearly rule-breaking. I’m disinclined to guano it as it is also easily settled. Erik accuses Patrick of lying about whether Erik has answered about what Erik means when he talks about the Biblical Flood having some basis in history. Erik clearly has not done so. No satisfactory answer from Erik can be found in the thread.
Interested in exegeting some scriptures? That’s a must, if you actually want the answers. First read Midrash Rabbah, then maybe we will have a discussion.
Define evidence. Because, you see, Patrick explicitly was not interested in evidence. He also was not interested in interpreting the text, even though my position heavily presupposes it. So, he was not interested in my actual position. Therefore I necessarily appear somewhat vacuous. Sorry about it.
Erik has clearly escalated the claim that the flood actually happened.
I don’t see any evidence for anything that could be responsive to our questions (not just Patrick’s).
We already knew that floods happen. that is not the question. the question Patrick has asked is if the elements of the Noah story actually happened.
Holy shit.
Is that really what you believe?
In which case, than Patrick’s questions do apply to whichever global flood in which you do believe. We just have to reword them so there isn’t any reference to the Genesis fairytale.
1) When did this supposed “global” flood occur, in your personal opinion?
A rough estimate is fine (as long as it’s more specific than “sometime in human existence”). At least have the integrity to pin it to a range of millennia.
2) By “global” do you believe water covered all or almost all of the highest mountains (the Alps, Andes, Himalayas), or perhaps covered only the inhabited foothills (assuming that human habitation of the true alpine zone might be more recent)? That is, given a map of our existing globe, what part do you think was colored “blue” during the “global” flood? Every single square centimeter, or not?
3) Who do you think survived? One clan or many different groups (different ancestors of some of the ancient cultures you’ve mentioned such as Chinese and Indian)? What’s your personal belief about whether they survived independently and locally, or whether they represent a wide diaspora from one single group of survivors-in-common? About how many people total do you think survived this “global” flood of yours?
Ready. set … go, Erik!
Surely you can easily prove how my answers are unsatisfactory. I could patrick you to no end: Prove it or you should not participate here. This is how Patrick has behaved with me for months. Want to enjoy the same?
Proved and proved and proved and proved again.
You have piled more bullshit on top of the original pile, but have not answered the questions.
Good thing for Erik that he’s got me in “quarantine”.
Otherwise he might have to open the window and admit I already proved exactly how his “answers are unsatisfactory”. There were answers of a sort, but NO answers to the direct questions placed before Erik.
Easily proved. Done and dusted.
But what Erik doesn’t see (quarantined, ha ha, what a convenient excuse that is! ) he doesn’t have to admit, not even to himself.
Erik,
No, that was a challenge. One that you failed, as we’ll see. I’ll leave your post here rather than sending it to Guano despite your breaking of the rules. You do remember saying that following the rules is the moral thing to do, don’t you?
Now you’re just throwing mud to see what will stick. It’s very clear who has failed to answer questions in this thread. Look in a mirror, if you can stand the shame.
You made a claim, you have an obligation to support it. Do so or retract your claim.
You have never answered my questions.
I have elided your remaining non-answer. The question, as you well know since it has been emphasized repeatedly, is what you mean when you say “Anyway, of course it [the biblical flood] occurred. The Bible has been found historically reliable.” The question is not about any texts or what anyone else has said. Your words. Your meaning. You have never answered.
You are the one making the claim, you are the one with the obligation to clarify. Since your claim is about the biblical flood and you used the singular “of course it occurred”, it is up to you to explain rather than evade for months.
Below you talk about a global flood. When do you claim that occured?
More evasion elided. The only “layer” being considered is exactly what you mean by your own words when you say “Anyway, of course it [the biblical flood] occurred. The Bible has been found historically reliable.” This has been repeatedly made clear to you. You have never answered the question.
This is the first you’ve provided even this much clarity. So, when did this alleged global flood occur?
Still more evasion elided. The question is not about exegesis, it is about exactly what you mean by your own words when you say “Anyway, of course it [the biblical flood] occurred. The Bible has been found historically reliable.” This has been repeatedly made clear to you.
Finally a direct answer, albeit not all that clear.
So what you are now claiming is that a global flood did occur but that the flood described in the bible was not that flood. So we’re down to two questions:
1) When did the global flood you claim happened occur?
2) How many people survived that flood?
Without those details your claim is untestable.
You are the one making claims about reality, you have the burden to clarify and defend those claims. If you have questions about any claims I’ve made, I’ll be happy to answer them. Some answers may have to be given in Noyau.
Ignoring questions about your claims does not make them go away. You’ve still got a claim outstanding that you haven’t clarified. Start with the easy question: When did this global flood you claim occurred actually happen?
We do have some specific things that Erik believes:
1. The flood story in the Bible is about multiple floods in the same narrative. They all occurred…
2. Noah’s flood was not global. There was a global flood too, but that didn’t involve a Hebrew dude named Noah.
3. …a civilization or an era ended cataclysmically, not human species. Shorter: No.
From my point of view, Erik could have ended all this turmoil from the earliest page of the thread, by agreeing with me that Noah’s flood story could have been inspired by any of a number of actual floods. that’s really all he’s admitted, after an this dancing.
Like Erik, I am less interested in the actual history and more interested in why anyone thinks Noah’s story is educational or spiritually enlightening.
Erik,
While I was fisking your semi-responsive comment, walto and hotshoe_ summarized your lack of clarity much more succinctly than I did. walto wrote:
Which pretty well covers the open questions you’ve left outstanding.
hotshoe_ went for a bit more detail:
Go, indeed. For all that you’ve written, you’ve still failed to explain what you are claiming actually occurred historically.
Alan Fox,
Please leave Erik’s comment as is. I think the truth is clear.
Lizzie made it look like fun, so I Guano’d one of my comments too.
Sincere congratulations, Patrick! Finally you provided some clue where your questions are aiming at. You want to test Noah’s flood. Therefore you LIED when you said you were not interested in evidence. But let this pass for now.
Most participants in this thread have said this: Floods happen all the time. I say the same thing. So, how do you plan to test for a particular flood? By examining its particulars. (At least that would be the rational thing to do, so I’m not sure about you.)
Where can you gather the particulars of Noah’s flood? From the text of Genesis. So, when you say you are not interested in examining the text, you are at a self-imposed impasse.
Feel free to stay there as long as you like.
From my point of view, the turmoil should never have started, because my position has been consistently clear since my first post in this thread. Instead, keiths began pressing on the exclusively literal geobiology-textbook-like interpretation of the flood story – against my expressed position – and Patrick took it to irrational extremes. When admins bully, some dance inevitably follows.
Well, yeah, but we’re not going to get any answers to that. I’ve become convinced no theist actually sees a “spiritual” meaning in the Noah tale. How could they?
They’d have to be psychopathic to think there’s value in the story of destroying every innocent animal and plant on the whole Earth.
Ya know what’s funny – I used to love the Noah story when I was a kid: the cute pictures of the ark with two giraffes sticking their necks out the window and the rainbow in the sky and the pretty white dove bringing back a sprig of greenery in its beak …
But fortunately I’m not a psychopath and I grew up to realize that no human should worship a supposedly-divine being who indulged in global torture.
And apparently all the theists think so, too, because they never come up with a defense for it. Ignore it, sweep it under the rug …
I’ve been following this thread but rarely commenting. What I haven’t seen is any clarification from you about what reasons you have to suggest there was a global flood as described in Genesis. You want me to prove that? Wouldn’t it be easier for you to link to a comment of yours where you address the point about whether the Genesis account of global flooding, ark-building, bottlenecking of people and other living creatures makes any sense. The theory of white swans is easily refuted by producing one black swan.
Says the man who believes in the completely wackadoodle idea that there really was a global flood (although not, as it happens, the flood as described in the Noah tale, for whatever unexplained difference that might make to the ridiculousness of the idea).
Irrational extremes, hmm.
Erik,
I’ve made it clear from the beginning that I wanted to understand exactly what you are claiming in order to discuss the evidence for it.
By the way, you should look up the term “projection” before hurling any more baseless insults. You also might want to re-read what you wrote about playing by the rules.
Indeed. Since you are the one making the claim that a global flood actually occurred, it is you who must provide the particulars. Please answer walto’s and hotshoe_’s questions to do so.
Oh yes, I have given the reasons. The reasons:
– When it comes to scriptures, every level of interpretation is true. The flood story allows for literal interpretation.
– There are comparable flood stories in many separate places of the world.
Now, I have hard time believing you didn’t see it when I argued for these points at length. Rather, it’s more plausible that you don’t think these qualify as reasons. So, perhaps it would be good if you explained why these are not reasons in your opinion.
There’s yet another reason: Floods happen all the time, so stories about it should not seem too special. This is a trivial reason, so we can leave it aside.
Comment moved to guano.
Erik,
Stop trying to rewrite history. You have never made your position clear. The root cause of all of this kerfuffle is that you made a claim about a supposedly historical event and refused to answer simple questions to clarify it. The details are available here for anyone who cares to look.
You still haven’t clarified your claim, for that matter.
The details are that my first post says that literal interpretation is the least relevant. I said that the flood literally occurred only after long bullying. I did not want to say it because 1. you were already being inconsiderate and 2. you were clearly pressing me away from my position expressed in my first post. Finally I said it anyway, to give you a chance to get back on track, but you went absolutely wacko, totally ignoring my actual position henceforth. And you “stand by it” to this moment. This is the history.
LMAO
Your first bullet consists of a pair of bald assertions, both controversial even among theists.
Your second bullet needs to be introduced to Bayes.
But thank you for finally at least attempting to clarify your claim about the historical Flood; it’s been a long time coming.
Not among theists in this thread, unless you consider KN a theist.
These points were actually discussed to death with KN tens of pages ago. Whoever cared to follow, could have followed.
Your expressed position is and always has been that the Abrahamic scripture is factually correct.
This is not some new position you invented. It has a long history.
In fact, I would argue that modern geology and biology were invented as a direct result of people attempting to find physical evidence supporting the Noah flood.
The people who invented the science of geology were convinced there would be good evidence for a global flood. They were not looking for local floods or multiple floods.
I would be interested in the history of your claims. When were they made? Who made them? What physical evidence do they cite? What scriptural support do you have?
Erik,
Nonetheless, you never said “not relevant at all” and you did make a claim about a supposedly historical event. You might wish you hadn’t, but you did and you’ve refused to retract it.
Please answer walto’s and hotshoe_’s questions to clarify what you mean by your claim.
And you stand by, to this moment, your repeated claim that of course there was a global flood (for some not one-hundred-percent clear definition of “global”) plopped out without any other clarification as to who survived/how they survived/where they survived — all of which would be the important “literal level” we would have to know before we could evaluate any possible “spiritual” significance of this supposedly real-history event.
I mean, you actually are free to jump to explaining what you believe are the religious/spiritual meanings of your flood, any time you want. You haven’t yet, but you could.
On the other hand, the real-history consequences of your purported global flood are going to have everything to do with the alleged spiritual meaning of it.
Saying god carefully held every living thing from the planet in some kind of miraculous space while it sent the planet itself through the flood-y cosmic carwash would have one meaning. Saying god torture-killed every living thing from the planet (except for P number of survivors via Q refuge or ark) would have a completely different meaning.
So do tell. Spit out the details of your belief. It’s yours, be proud of it! Don’t hide your light under a bushel.
You may have noticed that not all of us are theists.
I have no interest in exegeting any scriptures. I didn’t ask you about any scriptures. I asked you when you believe a global flood occurred and why you think it occurred. Those don’t require exegesis (of the Midrash Rabbah or otherwise). They are simply request to tell me what YOU believe and why. If your belief is based on that text you can say that.
What your answer does clearly show is what I’ve said to Patrick all along that you will never stop weaseling and it’s a patent waste of time to try to have a civilized conversation with you for that reason. I won’t badger you about this as he has, but you should understand without me repeating this remark several hundred times, that it is my view of your practice and it will not change until you stop being evasive when asked simple direct questions.
Over and out.
Yes, that’s basically true.
And if there ever had been a “global” flood, they would have found the evidence of it. (Whether we call it “Noah’s flood” or not, name is not important; global/near-global is what’s important because that’s what our smart ancestors went looking for.)
Sadly for all Floodists, this is one of the cases where absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence. Unless a trickster god miracled away all the evidence after the flood.
I have no problems with their trickster god. I rather like the tricksy ones.
As much as I know about beliefs concerning Noah’s flood specifically, e.g. Noah’s ark on Ararat was long considered common knowledge without any need to verify it (because it would be verifying what everybody knew anyway). There were pieces of the (alleged) ark on display in Armenian St. James monastery on Ararat and the monastery was the destination of pious tourism until it was destroyed in an earthquake in 19th century.
Then they were looking wrong, because multiple floods has been the standard interpretation all along. It would help if you give a specific example of an evidence-seeker.
Man, you guys get to have all the fun. No fair. X>{
But manners of interpretation of scriptures are relevant only to theists. One thing that has been solidly proven in this thread is that non-theists do not acknowledge that scriptures even exist. Except as fiction, in which case they would be fiction, not scriptures.
I’m aware that there are multiple and inconsistent flood stories. What I’m asking is how you arrive from scripture that there were multiple floods, and that one of them was global, but didn’t involve Noah.