Wednesday, December 4, 2024

All Of The Bible?

Contradictions can never be true because their falsity is necessitated by the intrinsic truth of logic.  If contradictions were true, then the idea that contradictions are impossible would still be true, since even the truth of a single contradiction would exclude no contradictions being true or possible.  Thus, the logical law of non-contradiction is true either way in itself, along with other logical axioms like the fact that if nothing was true, then this fact would be true, and so the nonexistence of truth is inherently impossible.  The same is true of one thing following by necessity from another and a thing (be it a concept, physical object, or anything else) being what it is as opposed to having any other nature.  With all such axioms, anything that contradicts them has to be false, since the axioms have to be true no matter what.  Logical axioms cannot be erroneous; anything else has to be consistent with reason to at a minimum be possible.

With other matters less immediately pertaining to axioms, though still depending on their self-necessary truth, a contradiction does not mean that all aspects of an idea or all concepts from a set of ideas are untrue.  It just cannot be possible for all of them to be true at once, whatever their proponents might think to the contrary.  For example, if the Bible had said that owning any animal is evil, and in another passage prescribed owning an ox, it is not that owning an ox cannot possibly be sinful inside or outside of Judeo-Christianity, or that God could not have (in the narrative or in reality) commanded that humans own animals.  It simply could not be the case that both of these things are simultaneously correct.  All of the Bible would not be rendered philosophically false by this.  Indeed, at least certain tenets could only be true, although these have to do with direct agreement or consistency with various logical necessities [1].

If the content of the Pauline writings is false because it contradicts logical axioms, any stemming necessary truths, or some prerequisite part of the Bible, this necessitates nothing about the gospel accounts (other than Luke's perhaps, given his connection to Paul through the book of Acts) also being false.  In turn, if the gospel accounts are false, this does not in itself require the falsity of the Old Testament prophetic writings, and if the latter is false, it does not mean that the Torah is false as well.  There are portions of the Bible espousing doctrines that absolutely can be true independent of others, and there are portions articulating ideas that cannot possibly be correct if they truly do/did contradict others.  The typical self-professing Christian I have met is simply to far removed from rationalism to ever discover such logical facts about Biblical doctrines.

Yes, there is no intrinsic veracity of the Bible (or any other religion, or a scientific or historical concept).  Reason being false still requires that reason is true for it to be false, and thus it is true in itself, independent of every other aspect of reality.  The Bible's ideologies, just like everything else, have to be consistent with such necessary truths to be possible at all.  Much of the Bible is very overtly logically possible in itself or alongside other content and it should not take a rationalist long to identify this in many instances.  Logical possibility will still lead the person making no assumptions to a host of ideas that might subjectively seem "bizarre" or that might go unspoken or undiscovered among the world's masses of non-rationalists, yet they do not contradict reason, as opposed to someone's irrational beliefs or subjective preferences or mere perceptions.

One of these is that some parts of the Bible as commonly assembled could be from God and others from delusional humans, whose ideas contradict those in the more foundational sections of the Bible they hope to build on.  They must regardless be consistent with what cannot be false (logical necessities) to be true or possible, as well as consistent with any contingent truths.  There is no exemption for Christian philosophy (or for any other religious worldview).  Since the philosophy of the New Testament is where most of the supposed abstract contradictions in Judeo-Christianity are introduced, it must be remembered that even if the New Testament does contradict the Old Testament, nothing about the Old Testament is disproven by this.  Since the New Testament hinges on the Old but not the other way around, it would only require that the New Testament or the passage/book/author in question is wrong.

Reason is inherently true, and nothing else is--or could have this intrinsic nature of reason since everything else requires that logical axioms are already true.  All other truths are only so because it is logically necessary and/or possible; all else that is knowable beyond self-evident logical axioms, which cannot be rejected or doubted without relying on them because they are true in themselves, is knowable one way or another because its truth can be demonstrated by logical necessity.  A seeming contradiction is not necessarily a genuine one, but if something does entail a contradiction, it is either false by default because it directly conflicts with reason itself or at best partially true, though this is still because logic necessitates it.  In the Bible's case, this means that if one passage does truly contradict another, depending on what is said, one or both individual concepts could still be true on their own.


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