Falsifying God? (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Friday, December 26, 2014, 08:12 (3403 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Dhw: It is clear from your response that certain prophecies “can neither be definitively proven nor disproven yet” (Ezekiel and Egypt, Isaiah and the Nile), and that is a pretty clever way to maintain a 100% record: it might not have happened yet, but it will. Of course that was my point in choosing Revelations.
TONY: When I said it can not be proven, perhaps I should have added the word “yet”.
Dhw: As you can see, you did add it, and this by coincidence puts you in the same position as Dawkins, who hopes and I'm sure also believes that eventually we shall understand and “embrace...within the natural” “phenomena that we don't yet understand”. (The God Delusion, p. 14) [...] You both have a similar faith in a future that will confirm your beliefs.
TONY: Unlike Dawkins, I am not saying it lightly. Historically, people have questioned the bibles legitimacy concerning historical events and it has repeated been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be true, and verified independently by third party sources no less. Even the event in dispute here is partially verified. It is only one small detail that has, of yet, been verified.-I have no sympathy with Dawkins, but science has made great strides in tracing the material causes of many phenomena that had been incomprehensible to our ancestors. I drew your attention to a long list of unfulfilled prophecies, and of the few you selected, two (Ezekiel and Egypt, Isaiah and the Nile) “can neither be definitively proven nor disproven yet”. I also referred to the prophecies concerning the 144,000 male virgins who would conquer the beast etc. I have no more faith in Dawkins' “yet” than I have in yours, but we are not talking of “one small detail”.
 
Dhw: The problem is that atheists and Jews and Christians and Muslims and Hindus all claim that their theory provides the best evidence. But belief in the Judeo-Christian God does not have to depend on the literal truth of every word in the Bible.
TONY: Literal? I've never claimed that the entire bible is literal. However, the parts where it is figurative are generally pretty clear. -I wasn't referring to those passages that are explicitly figurative. The problem lies with passages such as Eden, which you seem to think are historical whereas even many of your fellow theists regard them as fiction. 
 
TONY: ...regarding Adam and Eve, there is compelling evidence that they were real, and that their son Cain did in fact build a city named Enoch. First, that became the word for "City" so much so that there no marker in the language to distinguish it from a person of the same name, which was unusual in Hebrew. Secondly, the site of the city is still known to this day, and still bears the same name. -Is it not possible that the unknown authors of this tale deliberately set it in an identifiable location? Fiction writers have been known to use such devices. And I can't help wondering where the omniscient narrators got their information from, right down to the precise dialogue that took place between the different characters who had died thousands of years earlier. However, to get back to the subject of this thread, and putting on my theist hat, I still don't see how you can argue that a failed prophecy will falsify the concept of God, rather than falsifying the concept of the bible as the word of God.-Thank you for your very direct response to the Mormon question (was Joseph Smith a fraud, mad, or telling the truth?), which could of course be asked about any self-proclaimed prophet of any religious denomination. Without committing myself in any way (thus spake the agnostic!) I would supplement the list with “deluded”.