The Bible is sufficient evidence for the belief in Chrisitanity

Since the debate is closing to an end I will begin to crystallize the main issues of this debate. Please note that Con expects to debate against a fundamentalist Christian. He is atempting a straw-man as I will further prove. Once this argument is dispoved all of Con's arguemnts fail. RE: Definition of Chrisians & Factual truth of the Bible In fact, based on Galup [1] and a national religion survey[2], more than 60% of americans do not take the bible literaly. These studies also show that their perception of God and religion has changed slowly over time. This shows that my Christian view is more prevalent, and thus more relevant to the debate than Con's. Fundamentalist Christians, although fun, are a straw man for this debate. The studies also show that almost 20% of americans think that the bible is ONLY about moral precepts and fables (while the others think it is inspired by the word of God). Based on this vision of Christianity, it becomes apparent that Con's factual „errors" of the Bible are not relevant to this debate. Even if they were relevant, Con has only managed to prove that we have to correct the age of the King to be (40+20)/2=30. Or, for better precision, a mean weighted by the frequency of kings of 20 and kings of 40 in that period. Either way it does not change the essence of the book. RE: Corection of the Bible and Double Standards I realize now that the main error of Con is that he makes no distinction between church and religion. The church is an institution with privileges. It must therefore be conservatory in order to keep it's privileges. However, religion and faith are social phenomena. This means that they evolve. People use the Bible's principles to find answers to new problems and use new evidence to correct their factual beliefs and, in some cases, even their moral beliefs. The Bible remains for most of them a guiding light. For example, the Bible says nothing about cloning, but a Christian could use principles from the Bible to guide his/hers decision (e.g. don't kill). On this issue science Con states that it is a self correcting process. So is religion. It is not honest to deny this quality to religion because it was baked by some fundamentalists. I would be fair to deny this opportunity to religion, especially when people are beginning to view the Bible in a different way. If we were to apply Con's standards on science, we should have given it up a long time ago. Some of the ideas scientists had were just crazy, but they corrected. Religion corrected some MAJOR errors too: the earth is in the centre of the universe. There were many people that began to believe that the Sun was in the centre of the solar system. After some time and some burning of heretics the Church (which was defined as being slower) finally accepted this too. Come to think about it the hate of some scientists towards religion is motivated by the attitude of the Church, but it is not also justified. People did not have the same attitude towards science as the Church had. RE: Satisficing NOT sufficient Con assumed that I did a typo when I said satisficing. I did not. This is a well established scientific concept that assumes that any gain in information costs time. My argument referred to people with lower education. Therefore from their perspective it is satisficing to believe in God based only on the literal interpretation of the Bible. Although this is not rational, many of our decisions are not rational. Rational is not enough. Intuition is also needed to obtain satisficing results and survive. The purpose of humans is to survive and evolve (as pointed in the above argument) not to stay in a permanent stale-mate of rational dilemma. Where rationality fails humans use intuition and satisficing results. This is not random as Con states, because random would mean random results in the lives of Christians. The belief in the Bible produced rather positive results. However, Con asks if the Bible is sufficient evidence for the belief in God. As I pointed out the standard of evidence must be appreciated taking into account the time we have to examine the evidence. If I set a standard of evidence for gravitation (e.g. 10^10^10^10 experiments – more than atoms in the universe and more than the age of the universe in seconds) that is too high, I may be rigorous but not pragmatic. I will never walk on the moon because I have to test gravitation the entire life of the Universe to prove that it is true. The same goes for the Bible, an uneducated person may use its entire life trying to correlate the Bible with other ancient documents and with scientific knowledge, but it is actually not rational to do that. The person would be better of using a small number of tests of the Bible (time, social effects, moral principles, etc.) and its intuition and go on his/her life. Paradoxically, it is rational not to be rational. RE: Intuition and Fundamentals As shown by the logical paradoxes in my initial argument (which were again overlooked by Con), rational thinking is not sufficient for surviving and taking decisions. It is ironic that the proof for 1+1=2 is based on the Peano Postulates (axioms)[4]. Axioms are statements in science we take for granted. With no axioms there would be no science. We can simplify some axioms to more basic axioms, but we can't discard them altogether . In the end all we have is the test of results of certain models. So I urge voters to judge the Bible using the same standards as they use for science even if this is an uncommon requirement from a Christian. Secondly, I urge voters to reconsider that the majority of Christians are fundamentalists. Time changes and Christians != Church. Vote Pro. [1] http://www.gallup.com... [2] http://b27.cc.trincoll.edu... [3] http://science.discovery.com... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org...