Poster one:

I gather from your other posts that you don't deny the supernatural; you just deny that the Bible is supernatural. Therefore, you have a bias against the Bible; you have a priori rejected the Bible as a supernatural book. Which bolsters my claim that objections to the Bible are more emotional and moral than they are intellectual.

Poster two:

I don't see how that bolsters your claim at all; a priori knowledge is not rooted in emotion or morality.

1:

Other reasons (i.e., evidentiary proofs) why I believe the Bible to be the word of God are: 1. Its preeminence among other literature. The Bible has been the all-time worlds best seller for who knows how long. Its insights into the human condition are amazing. Take the secular humanist POV. Humanity is on an upward climb; we just keep getting better and

better. Yet it amazes me the amount of evil in the world perpetrated by humanity on ourselves. I believe it takes more faith

to believe in the inherent goodness of mankind than it does to believe in the inherent depravity of mankind (i.e., the Biblical world view).

2:

I don't argue that the Bible isn't a preeminent book among christians. Similarly, the Koran is preeminent among Muslims. This is not an argument for validity so much as a recognition of christianity's popularity in large portions of the world.

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2. Its survival amidst sustained attacks. I don't think there is a book in print that has been as hated by more people that the Bible has been. Voltaire said that 100 years after his death, Christianity and the Bible would be history. However, 50 years after his death, the Geneva Bible Society bought his house and used it to print millions of Bibles. The Bible has been burned, banned, rejected, ridiculed, ignored, etc., yet it is still around. It has been translated in more languages than any other work of literature.

2:

Given that christians disagree as to what books precisely ARE in the bible, and given that errors in transcription undoubtedly DID occur, and given that scholars generally regard some passages as having been inserted long after the original writing, such as I John 5:7 and the end of Mark, it could be argued that the bible did not survive in a pure form. Since there has never been a time when the entirety of the world banned or fought against the bible, it was almost inevitable that such a prolificly-copied book would survive in SOME form in SOME region, and would reinfiltrate other regions after persecution had ceased.

1:

3. Manuscript evidence. There is more manuscript evidence for the Bible than any other work from that period. There are approximately

over 5,000 extant copies and fragments of the NT in the original Greek alone. No other ancient book comes close. Also, the time period between the original and the earliest extant copy is way smaller than any other ancient book from that period. Yet no one denies the authenticity or reliability of those other works (e.g., Homer's Illiad, Plato's Republic, etc.).

2:

This is an area in which I am ill-suited to argue the point. I do note that it is generally admitted that SOME degree of error exists in the manuscripts, and I raise the question: if god took such care to inspire infallible authorship of the bible, why didn't he take any care to infallibly preserve it?

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4. Archaeological evidence. To my knowledge, there is no archaeological find that refutes a truth claim of the Bible. Now there are still things in the Bible that archaeology hasn't verified

yet, but as far as I know the Bible is batting 1.000.

2:

One would expect that contemporaries of that time to accurately refer to places of that time; this is not remarkable. There is no archeological evidence that demonstrates any SUPERNATURAL event described in the bible, however.

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5. Predictive prophecy. Now I know that much of what he said was of the type, "That's not prophecy, that's a psalm of David."

2:

A very valid response. When a song is written that contains nothing to indicate that it is prophetic in nature, that describes an unrelated subject, and that contains no prophetic elements, it is silly to call it prophecy. However, prophecy-mongers will take isolated, far-out-of- context snippets of sentences that happen to parallel an event from the life or mythology of Jesus, and pretend that that short phrase has a "double meaning," and is in fact also a prophecy. This makes about as

much sense, as I've written before, of pretending that Psalm 69:2 prophecies the death of anyone who drowns in quicksand: "I sink in deep mire." The "dual meaning" idea simply has no support, is not credible, and completely ignores the context in which the quote appears.

1:

Yet Peter in his first letter says that the prophets marveled at who it was they were writing about. If I believe in a God that can create the universe, then I certainly believe in a God who could move a prophet

to write about someone yet to come. 6. Personal evidence. I used to be a philosophical agnostic and a practical atheist. Three years ago, I would have been a David Vestal pen pal. Yet I am more convinced of the Bible's divine authorship now than I was convinced of the opposite three years ago.

Now, I haven't gotten any smarter (in fact, I'm sure you and others would contend that I have gotten dumber), so the only thing left to me is the possibility that God did a work in my heart and mind.

2:

My personal evidence is the reverse of yours, so I question its efficacy. I was once a fine apologist; I am now better prepared to refute christianity than I ever was to defend it.

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7. Jesus said so. Finally, I believe Jesus supported the claim that

the Bible is divine in origin, and if Jesus says so, then it's good enough for me.

2:

It isn't good enough for me, just as my word wouldn't be good enough for you if I said "send me one hundred dollars, and I'll send you three thousand back within a week!"

1:

Now, I don't pretend that these seven points are scholarly or exhaustive of what could be said about them. I do know that the first five points have had much written about them throughout history. Anyone who wanted to find out more could read them until they were glutted. The point is the evidence it out there; volumes have been written about it (I also know that volumes have been written against it as well). An honest seeker could find out everything they wanted about this issue. The question to you is: Are you an honest seeker? Based on my interactions with you, I would

say that no, you're not, at least in regards to this point. Your mind is made up, and I don't think anything I or anyone else could say would change it.

2:

Do you not acknowledge the possibility that he has honestly sought? Is it your belief that anyone who disagrees with you has not honestly sought?

Another discussion (guess which poster is which):

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1. What's the "discrepancy" between 2 Chr 22ff with Ezra 1:1 - 3? Surely your not quibbling with a few variant words which change the meaning or, the message contained in Cyrus' pronouncement, not one bit, are you?

2:

Although those, in themselves, demonstrate that the bible is not literally inerrant, I'm more referring to the fact that II Chronicles ends in the middle of a sentence, giving huge support to the idea that it was pieced together using an incomplete fragment of a preexisting text.

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2. Or, that a copyist's numerical error, concerning the age of Ahaziah when he became King should negate the entirety of the Bible's message?

2:

It's one brick in the size of a structure the size of the Empire State Building, which negates the entirety of the bible's message. It seems

that christians love to point to each individual brick and say "surely

something THIS small can't be too big a problem!" Firstly, each individual brick proves the lie of "textual infallibility," and secondly, taken en masse, they do indeed prove the lie of the bible.

1:

Your argument is that the Bible ought to be rejected because some copiest got Ahaziah's age wrong.

2:

The bible ought to be rejected for the following reasons: 1) It is full of textual contradictions, two of which I presented to you, which you were unable to reconcile, and 2) It is full of atrocities and the most heinous evil, including rape,

genocide, murder, devaluation of women, etc., perpetuated by and condoned by the deity it touts, and 3) It is full of prophecies that did not come true, an example of which I gave you, which you ignored (conceding defeat), and 4) It is full of citations of prophecies that do not exist, an example of which I gave you, which you ignored (conceding defeat), and 5) Textual criticism reveals that most of its books were not written by the purported authors, but were later compiled from earlier sources, in contradiction to the bible, and 6) The bible contains much primitive "knowledge," touted as fact, which we now know to be false, and 7) It asserts things which we now know could not possibly have occurred, including the flood and many other things, and 8) It touts a deity that bears a remarkable resemblance to about every

other deity worshipped by the nations around the hebrews, a deity whose only distinguishing characteristic was his surpassing cruelty, and 9) It touts a messiah whom it claims was resurrected from the dead, despite the fact that all five accounts of this event disagree continuously in every tiny detail, scores of them, and 10) several other reasons.