That can narrow down the likely range of possibilities of what the writer was trying to convey, but in many cases, there will not be enough cross-references to narrow the options as much as you seem to assume. There will still be a range of possible meanings, and significant subjective factors.

Independent to a useful degree is all that we need to reduce the effect of individual bias. Obviously we cannot eliminate all such effects, but when someone else appears to have repeated the observation or experiment and got a significantly different result, it suggests further investigation is required. That is not mob rule or majority vote. Until further experiment and observation of some phenomena can resolve why some such discrepancy exists, the question is kept open. There may well be a consensus as to which of any proposed theories is more likely to be correct, but that is not treated as a way of deciding the issue, unless the majority is truly overwhelming. 

Scientific observation is continually open to any indication of change over time in any phenomena or apparent 'law' of nature. So the argument about the 'unjustified assumption that the future will be always like the past' is pure straw-man, and in any case applies to all attempts to understand reality. The 'Big-Bang' theory of the Universe is a clear example where Science eventually revealed changes over time that had not been anticipated, and many scientists such as Sir Fred Hoyle could not accept.

The enormous effectiveness of Science in providing the foundation of modern technology, which clearly 'works', is evidence that we have successively identified adequately persistent principles in nature. The core assumption is related to Occam's Razor, don't introduce any more entities or concepts than necessary to provide an adequate explanation, and that would include worrying about possible changes which we have no reason to expect from all observations to date. This is demonstrably all that is required for very useful knowledge. And WTF is 'demarcation' science?

Bible interpretation, insofar as it can lead to knowledge, like any study of ancient writings, can only really be about determining what the writers had in mind, what they were trying to convey. So you are trying to form an opinion about what some other person's opinion or belief was or what they actually saw, or whether they have accurately conveyed a report from another party about what that other person claimed to have seen.

When it comes to drawing a conclusion about the objective reality of what those people were claiming, such as that some event or experience was a manifestation of a God, then we are inevitably worse off than when dealing with contemporary 'evidence' for such things. It is this broader level of interpretation of the significance of the accounts and claims in the Bible that I was really referring to.

Atheism is the disbelief or denial of any god or gods. Atheists aren't necessarily proponents of evolution nor fans of Dawkins. I've personally met atheists who didn't support evolution and atheists who didn't like Dawkins. Personally, I respect Dawkins as a biologist, but his philosophy is rather questionable. Our current knowledge of the theory of evolution is also drastically greater than what Darwin knew in the 19th century.

So, calling them prophets is just blatant misinformation. The words of prophets are accepted without question. 

Ha! Nice equivocation.

You can be a non-naturalist without believing in God. You can be an atheist without being a naturalist.

We can play definition games too.

Def. Atheism is by definition the true fact that God does not exist.

1. If Atheism is true, then God does not exist (by definition of Atheism)

2. Atheism is true (by definition of Atheism)

Therefore God does not exist

QED.

 Excellent rebuttal of the TAG Argument:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gMiFl5nMfo

To FS, your OP is arrogance in the extreme, and all your subsequent posts are nothing but total obfuscation to make yourself sound intellectual, and as AtheistExtremist said you do nothing but spout invented doctrine and shit.

(1) Organic brains are dependent on space and time for their existence.

(2) The laws of logic exist even if space and time does not.

(3) The laws of logic do not depend on organic brains.

(4) The laws of logic do not exist unless they are thought.

(5) Thinking is an activity of the mind.

:. Some mind exists without an organic brain.

The law of identity is a concept.  Concepts exist in minds.  What you are trying to argue is that the laws of logic refer to physical behaviors, which is absurd.  The fact that I am who I am is not a manner of how I behave, since that would presuppose that there is a possibility that I could be what I am not and that I am simply acted the contrary way.  This is not how logic works.

The law of identity is a concept - what it describes is not. Everything that exists has to exist as something.

Your God is exempted from this as he is a concept that needed the mind of man to think him up. Unfortunately, they didn't think him up well enough as they could only describe him by what he isn't, thus denying your God an ontology.

The law of identity is not a description of anything.  We did not formulate the law after observing physical behaviors of things which happened to exist as things.  This reduces it to an a posteriori principle which is made true by how things in the world happen to operate.  A posteriori reasoning works under the presumption that we know of two or more possibilities and we must observe which one is the case.  If you are going to reduce the law of identity to this sort of reasoning, then you need to explain how it is possible for something to be what it is not. 

It is not necessary to know the exact nature of something in order to know that it exists.  For example, nobody truly knows what gravity is.  We simply infer the existence of a phenomenon from what we know in our experience, i.e. attractions between objects, objects falling, etc.  Likewise with dark matter, space, time, etc.  Aside from special revelation, we can make inferences from what we do know.  And what we do know is that we live in a universe full of contingent beings and that what we know from our experience is not accounted for by the contents of our experience, such as the laws of logic, being itself, morality, etc.  God is the necessary being which accounts for these things which transcend our experience, which is an inference we make from the things themselves and not from a prior assumption of God. 

Umm, no.  The first premise is that the laws of logic are necessary, not God.  The second premise is that the laws of logic are ontologically dependent on a mind.  Where in that do I presume that God is necessary?

I'm not asking you to.  I'm saying that simply because we cannot know exactly what something is does not mean that the being in question does not exist.  Knowledge of existing things is not predicated upon our ability to know everything about them.  We know that gravity exists even though our knowledge of exactly what it is remains incomplete at this time. 

There is no such thing as a negative ontology.  God has an ontology that we are only able to describe in a certain way based on our own lack of knowledge.  We only experience perfection in limited instances and as such, we are unable to imagine what omni-qualities or eternity is like.  This does not mean that God possesses negative properties, as that would be like saying that "not Cat" is a property of a dog.  It just means that we cannot quite articulate the what-it's-likeness of being God. 

However, the contents of our experience gives us some clues.  Namely, that the existence of principles which apply eternally necessitates that there be an intelligent being who is eternal.  Otherwise, you are saying that eternal principles such as the laws of logic are thought up by intelligent beings who are not eternal, which is illogical.

We know that God is eternal, irreducibly whole, pure actuality, self-existent, immaterial, supernatural, intelligent.  And with the aid of special revelation, we know that God is personal, sentient, holy, righteous, creative, and triune. 

I'm positing that an absolute transcendent mind must exist because the laws of logic cannot be accounted for in any other way.  I've already outlined the structure of the argument and there is no presupposition that God is anything. 

Then how do you know that it could possibly not exist?

Okay.  We can know nothing of the posited being known as God.  We can only know that God could possibly, in the non-modal sense, not exist.

Wait a minute....

That your model is stupid?

That "possible" as used in modal logic is actually rigorously defining what colloquially "possibility" really means and that the dichotomy you are trying to create really does not exist?

That if it is true that we can know nothing about God, then you cannot even make the aforementioned statements that you just made?

You are demonstrating the semantic tangles that the language of 'possible worlds' and 'necessary beings' is prone to.

Actual rigorous, not merely 'colloquial', definition of the concept of 'possible' is inclusive, ie necessary things must also be possible.

Modal logic uses the word in a special sense, to discuss the logical relationships between propositions which are deductively 'true' in the sense of the theorems of propositional logic, and the class of propositions which are not known to be strictly true in that sense, but do not contradict logic, ie are still possible in the standard sense.

I will be using the word 'possible' in the standard sense unless specifically mentioned, since it can still express the same arguments in a clearer manner.

You are assuming that there could possibly be some entity which is 'necessary' in the same sense that deductive truths are necessary, ie could not be otherwise.

I think that is a not really a coherent concept, in that the eternal truths of logic are in a very different existential category from that of a 'being', an entity.

The problem is not in modal logic, it is in the conflation of two very different categories:

(a) Deductive truths, such as the implications of fundamental assumptions or axioms such as LOI and LNC, which lead to the framework of Logic;

and

{b) The existence or otherwise of a specific entity or entities.

The FACT is that we do not know if there actually is, or even possibly could be, in reality, such a thing as a 'necessary being'. Not just 'conceivable' and not contradicting other core axioms, but required or implied by the nature of reality. 

We do not have enough certain knowledge of the actual constraints on possible existence to know whether any given conceivable eternal thing actually exists, let alone if it is 'necessary'.

You are conflating the lack of knowledge of whether any posited necessary being is actually logically possible, with the impossibility of a specific necessary being not existing. 

I realise that is a bit tricky to express, the essence of it is whether the set of proposed attributes would be compatible with each other and would logically require that the entity possessing those attributes must exist.

There are almost certainly some attributes of reality which are eternally and necessarily true, such as some truly fundamental version of the 'Laws of Physics' which are prerequisites for anything to 'exist' in any comprehensible fashion. But we do not 'know' just what they are. There are many different, logically conceivable, things which may be eternally true things. Such different possibilities would be a fundamental basis for their being a variety of 'possible worlds'. If there are eternal things of any sort, then the 'possible realities' in which such things exist must also at least exist eternally themselves, even if most things within those worlds, and most attributes of those 'worlds' are not eternal themselves, in the sense of unchangeable.

It is certainly logically conceivable that there could be entities which are eternal in time, having no start or end, but nevertheless can change over time.

You seem to be again conflating the implicit impossibility of change over time in a specific eternal entity, with the possible existence of other eternal entities with different attributes.

If 'God' were 'eternal' in the sense you assume, it would not be an intelligent agent, since any thought or action implies a change in state of some kind, which is logically a change in an attribute of some sort.

But it is not logically necessary that an entity without beginning or end be incapable of some form of change.

Being capable of change does not logically imply being capable of 'ceasing to exist'.

Conditional, contingent, possibility of existence in a world with a set of fixed, eternal attributes is not the same as, and does not necessarily imply, having the possibility of ceasing to exist, so is not incompatible with being 'eternal', even in your stronger sense. This is because it does not imply being capable of change, if what determines the possibility of it being in such a world is contingent on its unchanging eternal attribute.

Your errors seemed to based on not realising or acknowledging a number additional logically conceivable possibilities of existence, or sets of attributes, that I have just described. You are also misinterpreting and mis-applying modal logic, by applying it in the one argument to disjoint categories.