This is an excerpt from a debate Im in: Kevin Bruce, Bryson, the bible is the claim, it can not also be the evidence too. Bryson Hughes, I can give two scenarios where there will be exceptions to that point. Take an example such as a person experiencing spiritual theist events. This person has begun encountering spiritual entities. He is seeing visions that have specific themes and messages. He is being shown demonstrations of power over physical reality. He encounters a being revealed to him as Jesus Christ who comes to him in person. This person begins to describe all these things, but is utterly at a loss to understand what is happening. In his terror he seeks advise from ministers who in turn are baffled. He gets his head examined by psychiatrist but gets no answers. He consults the Bible and viola! He finds exact descriptions of each form of thing he is experiencing. some ancient guy called a prophet gives a detailed description like his encounter with Jesus. There are accounts that define the themes and message of his visions. There are exact descriptions of the various incorporeal entities he has been encountering. For this person the Bible becomes an oasis of mutuality in a dessert of human ignorance. the Bible not only describes his experiences, but defines them. So for this person the Bible is evidence of many things and has become a guide book. This started with this persons experiences and concluded with Biblical answers. It is evidence of the veracity of mystical and supernatural for this person. In the second scenario, lets imagine a skeptic of Gods existence. This person has absolutely no spiritual experiences. In fact this person enjoys debating atheist positions with fundamentalist because he thinks their lives are imprisoned by their foolish adherence to ancient obsolete cultural systems of civil control. Because of this hobby, our hero spends much more time than most studying the scriptures for its flaws. Now it happens to be that our hero has a superb mind. He not only thinks precisely with clarity through complexity, he has an uncanny ability to see patterns and just through osmosis seems to get the gist of patterns context and direction almost like pulling information from thin air. It is just something hes good at more than others. Now in the course of our hero researching the Bible, he is consciously intent on finding absurdities. But unconsciously his gifted mind is synthesizing form from the patterns and themes he is exposing himself to. They start coming together for him and emerge consciously to where he can focus his clarity on these patterns and themes. He becomes a master even in his disbelief. He gets the Bible like no fundamentalist preacher ever could. The problem for our ultra clear thinking Hero is that pattern is describing a world course of detailed information that exactly predicts what he now perceives as secular historical facts. The predictive pattern of the Bible, exactly matches the historical pattern of his awareness. Now for our hero, the patterns suggest the stated intentions of what he considers a fictional God. Yet history matches. Could then in these correlations be the evidence of the unseen hand of this supposedly fictional God, expressing himself in controlling human events in the process known as Providence? Our hero is now experiencing dissonance, but the patterns are compelling. For him the evidence of an unseen hand at work in humanity is projected in a way that would never have occurred unless the Bible had existed to become the very Evidence of the predictions it made.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 18:58:34 +0000
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