From: Eli Chiprout <emc@doe.carleton.ca>
Newsgroups: alt.atheism.moderated
Subject: Higher ideas in the Bible ?
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1992 13:47:19 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: Dept. of Electronics, Carleton University

Stephen Buckley <sbuckley@sfu.ca> writes:

* all gods are not created equal.  none of the greek or roman gods asserted
*their status as the one god of all creation, higher than all the others.

I have seen this kind of argument before but in many different forms.  It goes
something like this.  The Theology and/or morality of the Bible is always a
step "higher" (leaving the debate of that metaphorical term for now) than the
ideas prevalent in the culture of the time.  That is, assuming that we have
a gradient of higher and higher ideas, the Biblical writers, although clearly
carrying the excess bagage of the knowledge of their day (such as the earth
at the center of the universe) nevertheless always wrote about ideas that 
were "higher" than their peers.
So for instance, Moses (or other writers) were the first to describe a god
that claimed to the "The God".  Jesus was the first to talk about the Kingdom
of God, which was not done in his day. etc.

Further, the Bible is supposed to be the only book that contains "lower"
ideas with early writings (and this includes moral, theology, ethics, etc.)
and "higher ideas" with later writers -- never the reverse.  For instance
early writers of the Bible talk about collective sin: if the father sins
all of his wives and children fall into the pit with him.  Later writers 
introduce a "higher" concept of individual sin:  A man is not responsible 
for the behaviour of his father but only for his own.  There are many such
ideas -- too lengthy to describe here, but I can give more examples if 
people are interested. 

This property of the Bible is supposed to be absent from any other religious
work and points to something special that even an atheist is supposed to
acknowledge.

I see several problems with this reasoning.  First, is it always possible to
so clearly distinguish the writing of a Biblical author from the knowledge
common in his day?  With our scant knowledge of the development of ideas
It would be difficult to affirm.  Secondly, the dating of different writings
in the Bible is a difficult if not impossible process.  There are early 
writings that have clearly been edited (for instance Moses speaks of the
"way of the Philistines" who were not around in his day -- it is as though
your read Shakespeare and found suddenly that he wrote of an automobile).
Even with unedited writing the time of writing is difficult to ascertain
with precision.  Thirdly, the most serious challenge, is to define "higher"
which is a figure of speech into a precise testable definition.  I think
Hindus would claim that a god that claimed to be "The" God was not enunciating
a "higher" theology but was an arrogant god of the family of gods.  Fourthly,
assuming that all of the terms could be clearly defined and were testable,
all it would take would be one exception in all of the Bible to place a 
death knell on that theory.  Fifthly, if this theory is true, is it
supposed to imply, that the cause of this property of the Bible is God
as described in the Bible (...er...which book in the Bible)?  That's quite
a leap of faith.

I would appreciate comments.




--
Eli Chiprout
Dept. of Electronics, Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
emc@doe.carleton.ca