First Half of Suris' and Paulogia's Take on CMI

Creation Ministries says Bible is INERRANT! We Don't Think So! (Ft. Paulogia)
Suris | 26.II.2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwycVywZNWg

Suris and Paulogia are two Atheists I like to go to refute (both already have posts marked with labels referring to them), and CMI one of my favourite resources (though more often articles appearing as posts). So, this one is a must to me. Most of my comments are from 7 months back, a few from today. This is one of the videos which I stopped more than once a minute to comment on.

Intro to this video session : I am not a fan of CMI's Protestant theology or their views on Church history after the writing of the last Bible book, but every time they restrict themselves to defending Biblical inerrancy, I am a fan. Not uncritical, I sometimes think I have better solutions myself, but a fan.

4:32 Buildings ... those are not just about truth. They are about sth functioning.

Now, a channel for truth may be one thing that needs to function also ... let's stay on the secular side for now, and take a library.

If it has books on Latin, it may be an asset if they don't do the "second Latin" certain Irish monks introduced into their grammar of the first Latin, in that intro where they enumerate how many "Latins" there are (they seem to have thought of Latin as a kind of code language, and, given that, there were obviously other ones than what they called "first Latin" and the rest of us call "Latin"). I mean if a language calls "man" "giber" it is more likely to be Hebrew than Latin ... and in fact, the Latin grammar may be a bit better off for not using those Irish monks' grammmar of the first Latin, since "vocaminor" is not exactly the correct second person plural passive of "voco". Or if it was "vocaminur" ... the correct form is supposed to be "vocamini" ...

If it has books on chemistry, it may be useful if these include the table of Mendeleiev.

If it has books on physics, it may be useful if these are divided into Newtonian, Relativistic and Quantum approaches, so you don't get a lecture in Quantum physics when you just wanted to know how to draw vectors.

Plus, the building should be able to keep the books dry, if these are made of paper.

Plus, given there are many books, the personnel should be able to tell you where a book is, and put a returned book or one left in the seats back into the correct shelf ...

4:41 straw man? ... well, the thing is, the kind of truths that the Bible and Catholic Church (that second is a subject where they are somewhat weak) are supposed to teach - like who God is, like how we go to Heaven - are also truths that need careful transmission, which are as badly decided by personal hunch as if you wanted to decide by personal hunch what atom number Oxygen has ...

Hans-Georg Lundahl

6:25 The Pentateuch has one main human author for the final (or only slightly updated) version of each book : Moses.

Exceptions would be:

• 1) Joshua writing last chapter of Deuteronomy
• 2) Moses using shorter texts that were his sources for Genesis
• 3) his brother Aaron's descendants sometimes (perhaps) updating terminology, like names of places.

As many as 38? Bad guesses by people who find Mosaic authorship too irksome when it comes to avoiding the conclusion it's also the word of God (and actually primarily so).

anAccountMustHaveAName

How do you know? The books themselves don't claim to be written by him. Or anybody for that matter.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@anAccountMustHaveAName No, but a series of "librarians", Cohanim from his brother Aaron to Caiaphas, and Christian clergy from 12 Apostles to our times, claim it for the books.

6:31 There is exactly one epistle of St Paul for which ancients have given an alternative author : Hebrews. Some have thought it was instead by St. Barnabas.

Eliminating for instance "Catholic epistles" - I and II to Timothy plus the one to Titus - is wishful thinking by Protestants (and some of them modernists too) who don't like the idea Catholic clergy was there in the time of St. Paul or Jesus Himself obsiously. Because clergy is exactly what these epistles are describing.

It's a bit how someone might imagine new age started out with Hippies in the 60's and Findhorn Foundation came later. On the contrary, Findhorn was beginning in late fifties. It's the hippies that came later.

Similarily for Christianity, the start was not unstructured groups of a purely charismatic or anarchic type of spirituality.

6:59 Has it occurred to anyone that all we have heard of Harry Potter so far since the first novel was published has been it is fiction, while the first known reception of Pentateuch and Kings was, it is history, and dito for Gospels and Acts?

7:12 St. Luke took a woman for his source to chapter 1.

A Very Important Woman. Whose words, like those of Her cousin Mrs Cohen were inspired by God.

7:23 Neither Rowling herself, nor any Church she belongs or belonged to has recognised her Harry Potter as being co-authored by God. At least so significantly as to make it inerrant.

Nor has any of these three entities claimed it is even factual history.

8:16 Good that the automatic subtitles had "in Aaron" for "inerrant".

Makes the point that the algorithm for transforming sound bites to letters are unintelligent as well as very errant, and also makes the point that inerrancy and divine authorship of a book is not just assumed by author and any and every man in his audience, it is determined "in Aaron" - by clergy, Cohanic for OT, Apostolic for NT.

8:34 "whether or not there are errors"

Let's go back to the library.

A good librarian won't accept a book that contains blatant errors. A perfect librarian, if this were humanly possible, would not accept books containing errors, without cautioning, for instance if a French language Language course for Swedish claims Swedish "U" is pronounced like French "U" ... when long Swedish "U" is like Liverpudlian "OO". Indeed, the perfect librarian of a fact conveying library would weed out all errors in any books.

We do not just count on God being main author behind human authors known as hagiographers, but also main librarian behind the librarians known as clergy.

So, "what determines" is a bit ambiguous.

It can specifically refer to either formal or efficient cause in this case, and when you say "whether it contains errors" you refer to formal cause and when we say "God is ultimate author" we refer to efficient cause.

Obviously, in order for efficient cause to actually be one for inerrancy (as authorship by an all knowing and all truthful God is), it needs to cause what you consider the formal cause of it, namely not in fact containing any error.

This means, your search for errors is a great test.

10:32 Yes, exactly, reality is a kind of arbiter on whether or not a purported claim of divine authorship and resulting inerrancy can stand or not.

8:46 Your being able to write a mathematical proof without error is a fine point in favour of human authors not of necessity blocking the divine authorship which result in an inerrant text.

Moses could be in error, but not while writing on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, like you can be in error but aren't when writing your mathematical proof.

In your case, the very limited inerrancy is due to your grasp of mathematics and that proof being within uncontroversial parts of mathematics (it can't involve 0 being a number, for instance), in his case due to his relation to God.

9:04 Genetic fallacy is not always involved in evaluating a truth claim according to source.

For instance, in history, we do want to know that the ultimate source is or at least can be a contemporary to events and so on.

In chemistry, that a lab report is by one who witnessed the experiment.

9:28 No, inerrancy is the main controversial claim of the show, but not the main point in each episode, which deals more in how the purported inerrancy stands up to such and such a claim of purported error.

10:15 No, CMI are NOT King James-onlyists.

While they prefer Masoretic timeline of Genesis 5 and 11 over LXX timeline, they are fairly different from King-James-onlyists.

11:42 The Bible nowhere says that the sacrifice of dove blood cures leprosy, it does state it is applied on a case of leprosy already cured, to ritually make the passage to an existence as a clean person again.

If all leprosy needed to be cured were dove blood, one would quickly find out it wasn't so.

When Jesus cured lepers, there was one priest who was surprised at having to make that sacrifice.

12:43 You have met plenty of Christians who have been caught between two fires, and dared oppose neither.

The existence of this anecdotic evidence does not really obfuscate their point.

13:39 But you accept things on authority all the time.

I just accepted the existence of Harriet Tubman solely on authority of history pointing to her existence and acts.

Btw, Paulogia, if someone who is slightly androgynic becomes homosexual or transgender, I'll suspect he was in too machist company, and couldn't accept himself as a man or herself as a woman based on that.

And if someone does your move, I may suspect that authority being drilled into him all the time is one possible explanation and half and half excuse.

I am still a fundie, because in my case it wasn't so drilled into me.

14:37 There is a passage which says one must obey the laws of the prince unless they are at odds with God's law.

There are plenty of passages pointing to situations where one obeying God must either ask things of himself others do not ask of themselves, or of each other or of him, or even oppose what others ask of him.

16:41 Feel free to apply the hostile witness principle when someone next time is citing an Evolutionist who is also a scientist, but a scientist hired with the tacit understanding he remain an Evolutionist, against a Creationist claim ...

17:08 While the Bible is the ultimate authority, they have a thing against circular reasoning.

Now, the fact is, I'd say Bible, Tradition, Magisterium, not Bible alone, but the guys were not in fact trying to prove the authority of the Bible in that phrase, but to prove the importance of the issue.

18:08 "is the book correct"

Note he was arguing "for Christians" where above question would already be answered in affirmative.

18:21 "if I don't assume it is correct in the first place, can I come to the conclusion it is correct?"

I will not subject myself to the psychological experiment of being a non-believer again, but I can go through logical steps that logically should convince some.

• 1) The Bible makes claims.
• 2) Certain communities make the claim the Bible or (for Jews and Protestants) parts of it are in part God's instructions on good living and in part also correct history of how the community came to know God well enough to state such a thing.
• 3) The way we decide historical claims is usually the claims of the communities concerned.

You could try to wiggle out of premiss 3 either by referring to my non-belief in Mormon claims, but the historical fact is about the same whether Joseph Smith actually had gold plates from angels or only claimed that - he alone witnessed this and he used this claim he alone witnessed to get others to believe the statements purportedly translated from gold plates in Nephites' texts in Reformed Egyptian.

Then, you could also claim, we don't usually believe Iliad, Odyssey or Aeneid - my point is, we should, on the historic, not theological side.

Again, you could try to make it out historical claims of the Bible could be true even without its theology being true. Not so if bona fide 5000 people saw a multiplication of breads and fishes. Or if women past climacterium and a virgin got pregnant.

18:56 Here CMI are in trouble by citing the heretic John McArthur as an authority ON Scripture.

As I pointed out to them here:

CMI is Bad on Church History
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2020/02/cmi-is-bad-on-church-history.html

Under II, time signature of their video 6:27.

19:55 "if you don't accept the Bible as inerrant as your presupposition, the Bible appears very illogical"

No, if you don't accept atheism and anti-miraculism as your presuppositions, it doesn't.

If I ever had the shame to apostasise, I'd feel shame on some non-Christians trying to prove "illogical traits" that aren't there in the Bible or aren't illogical.

Like the one who claimed pi disproves a passage about temple vessels, as if the two measures of the object were measuring the same geometric circle with the string ...

21:18 Basic on applied maths : apples and oranges are not counted together.

There is one example of the divine nature, and that one example is the nature of each of three persons, so there are three examples of persons having that nature.

Nature does not equal person.

But thanks for the nod to Ahmed Deedat!

22:54 Their whole ministry - much of which I enjoy - exists bc others deny that the Bible is to be understood normally (I agree at least for Biblical history).

It also exists, bc people like you pretend some of the things so understood to be disproven.

To disprove your disproofs.

Corey C

Right. But, warping , hiding, ignoring, or misrepresenting the facts isn't supporting or helping to "understand". It's a deception (intentional or not) to support their view.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Corey C It is a bit odd, that if Suris or Paulogia wanted to denounce that, they still should avoid the most obvious way to do so, for at least about the first half of the video (second remains to be watched).

This very obvious way, which has been avoided first part of the video is : take on Bible fact, confront it with a real fact, see how CMI warps, hides, ignores or misrepresents real fact to defend Bible fact.

My gut feeling is, they have perhaps taken a look at more than one examples, and concluded, they were not really able to, against CMI, hold up any real fact as opposed to a Bible fact.

24:57 Paulogia : "postmodernism [...?] is not the reason why the Bible is demonstrated incorrect"

No, but there is a certain post-modernist hint in the mentality which accepts both CHristianity as true in some loose sense while also pretending the Bible is "demonstrated" incorrect...

Take confort in one thing, Suris, I am no fan of Jordan Peterson, if these guys had had his attitude of psychological condescension, I could not have been following them on a daily basis.

Most of their episodes and written posts are on the format : "atheists typically consider the Bible as demonstrated incorrect on the matter of ... [often related to Evolution and Deep time] ... but this is why the facts of ... [the matter] ... do not demonstrate the Bible incorrect / or does demonstrate the evolution believers incorrect".

Speaking of this, so far neither the video by CMI, nor the answers by Suris and Paulogia, have been concentrating on this very typical CMI format. No factual claim of the Bible defended by CMI that Suris and Paulogia then tried to demolish. Perhaps second half?

26:27 "in every video I have done on them"

Wait, do you say you have other videos than this on CMI?

Sth where you actually get into some defined subject matter where you disagree with them on whether Bible fact matches actual fact?

Oh, yeah, one about Sarfati, two about "creationists say the darndest things" ...