Clark speaks the truth
“Christizanity is often repudiated on the ground that is circular: the Bible is authoritative because the Bible authoritatively says so. This objection applies no more to Christianity than to any philosophic system or even to geometry. Every system of organized proposistions depends of necessity on some indemonstrable premises, and every system must make an attempt to explain how these primary premises come to be accepted.” - Dr. Gordon H Clark
October 28, 2007 at 11:16 am
Go one step farther. The Bible, used as authority, actually nowhere validates itself as said authority in its entirely. Nowhere in the Bible does it list its component documents and say that each and every one is divinely authorized and divinely authoritative. The Bible as an anthology of documents is an historical development, and it was humans who authorized it over time.
In short, the Bible as “authority” is an artificial, human construct.
October 29, 2007 at 7:13 am
Hmmm…
let’s just say “we disagree”
Maybe check out another blog post of mine sometime:
http://respondingtoskeptics.wordpress.com/2007/08/27/the-bible-just-another-book-written-by-men/
also, a few questions brought up by that one are addressed here:
http://respondingtoskeptics.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/the-resurrection-what-do-i-know/
Thanks for reading, and responding!
November 15, 2007 at 2:27 am
The difference, at least, with geometry, is that the postulates are explicitly stated and all derivations are derived from that. Mathematicians know that if you change your postulates, you get a different geometry. Changing the parallel postulate has yielded all sorts of fun and beautiful mathematics because mathematicians do see that their assumptions are just abstractions that seem to be useful in predicting truth.
If you take as one of your postulates that the Bible is true, then yes, you are going to conclude that the Bible is true, but that is a bit harder to swallow than “a point is that without breadth or width”.