[weknowbetter]

You can't prove a god is not real. You can though, prove that the Bible is not 100% historical fact as is claimed by a lot of mainstream religions.

So I would argue that you can prove a religion is false/incorrect by comparing the claims of it's holy book to the available historical records. If they don't match, I think we can agree that at least one set is false.

[Alupis]

That's where you run into trouble debating this stuff.

Most of religion is in the interpretation of that religion's holy literature. Interpretations can and do change, and not everything is as clear as one might think.

Famously, in Christianity, God made Earth in 6 days, and rested on the 7th. What is a day? Is it an Earth day, ie. 24 hours? What if this God wasn't from Earth and doesn't experience time the same way humans do? Perhaps this God was from Venus, and experienced 6 days of 2802 Earth hours.

World wide flooding can be explained with localized floods based on knowledge of the explored world at the time the writing was done. Same with most writing from those times.

Lastly, most modern interpretations of holy literature don't claim everything in the text is fact or historical, but rather it has a mix of historical events and stories which promote religious principles.

[joubert]

> God made Earth in 6 days, and rested on the 7th. What is a day? Is it an Earth day, ie. 24 hours? What if this God wasn't from Earth and doesn't experience time the same way humans do?

Then why is it stated that the Earth was created in 6 days? To confuse us?

[throwvid19]

If you want to see the tremendous mental gymnastics that go into it, check this out:

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/bibli...

[joubert]

Wow.

My favorite, by Michael Shermer ( https://michaelshermer.com/articles/genesis-revisited/):

In the beginning — specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon — out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang. The bang was followed by cosmological inflation. God saw that the Big Bang was very big, too big for creatures that could worship him, so He created the earth. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created out of Quarks and other subatomic goodies) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers appear to be more than 4,004 light years from Earth. In fact, some of the fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light years from Earth, so He created “tired light” — light that slows down through space — so that the 4004 B.C. creation myth might be preserved. And created He many wondrous splendors, including Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Nova and Supernova, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing (can God make a planet so big that he could not lift it?), He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired than tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continents drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants. And in the land God placed fossil fuels, natural gas, and other natural resources for humans to exploit, but not until after Day Six. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

And God saw that the land was lonely, so He created animals bearing their own kind, declaring Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the land’s strata, fossils that appeared older than 4004 B.C. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and morning were the fourth day.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land mammals he would create later that day. Since this caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt God brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, “Natura non facit saltum” — Nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and morning were the fifth day.

And God created the pongidids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve, who were anatomically fully modern humans. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, in chapter one He said he created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in chapter two He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused further confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created Bible scholars and theologians to argue the point.

And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One he chose as his special creation He named Lucy. And God realized this was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to sort it out. And just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants who lived as farmers and herders would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, population genetics, and evolutionary theory, so He created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the land that God realized this too was confusing, so he created anthropologists, folklorists, and mythologists to settle the issue.

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply (but not in those words). They took God literally and 6,000 years later there are six billion humans. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.

By now God was tired, so God said, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.

[reaperducer]

the Bible is not 100% historical fact as is claimed by a lot of mainstream religions

Which mainstream religion claims the Bible is 100% historical fact? I ask because I'm interested in your definition of "mainstream" and "100%."

[dredmorbius]

A 2011 Gallup survey reports, "Three in 10 Americans interpret the Bible literally, saying it is the actual word of God. That is similar to what Gallup has measured over the last two decades, but down from the 1970s and 1980s.... In the Reformation, Martin Luther (1483–1546 CE) separated the biblical apocrypha from the rest of the Old Testament books in his Bible, reflecting scholarly doubts that had continued for centuries,[15] and the Westminster Confession of 1646 demoted them to a status that denied their canonicity.[16] American Protestant literalists and biblical inerrantists have adopted this smaller Protestant Bible as a work not merely inspired by God but, in fact, representing the Word of God without possibility of error or contradiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism

[reaperducer]

That's a great clip from Wikipedia. But it doesn't answer the actual question posed. It avoids it.

[joubert]

Are you implying that the various Christian religions do not believe the Bible is 100% true? If so, how do they decide which parts aren’t and which parts are?

When I google, I find various resources from Catholic and Evangelical groups that say the Bible is 100% true.

[reaperducer]

I asked for someone to name a mainstream religion that believes the Bible is 100% true, and it hasn't happened yet.

You mention "Catholic," but there are lots of different types of Catholics. If you mean "Roman Catholic," you are incorrect in believing that it teaches the Bible is 100% fact.

Same with "Evangelical." There must be thousands of different evangelical religions. Please name the mainstream one that teaches that the Bible is 100% fact.

As stated previously, I think it will be interesting to find out what is meant by "mainstream."

[dredmorbius]

The following Statement affirms this inerrancy of Scripture afresh, making clear our understanding of it and warning against its denial. We are persuaded that to deny it is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit and to refuse that submission to the claims of God's own Word that marks true Christian faith. We see it as our timely duty to make this affirmation in the face of current lapses from the truth of inerrancy among our fellow Christians and misunderstanding of this doctrine in the world at large.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061115025545/http://www.spurge...

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was formulated by more than 200 evangelical leaders at a conference convened by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy[1] and held in Chicago in October 1978. The statement was designed to defend the position of biblical inerrancy against a trend toward liberal conceptions of Scripture....

[T]he December 1986 conference adopted the Chicago Statement on Biblical Application....

Signatories to the statement came from a variety of evangelical Christian denominations, and included Robert Preus, James Montgomery Boice, Kenneth Kantzer, J. I. Packer, Francis Schaeffer, R. C. Sproul and John F. MacArthur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Statement_on_Biblical_...

Notable signatories are listed at the Wikipedia article.

[catalogia]

Christians of the Strawman denomination.