In other news, gods are still fiction and these are still comic books.

Yes...Yes...Amen and Amen...God leaves you saying WTF. He gets His almighty jollies off doing that. 

If you are dumb to him come.

It really does show how desperate some religious minded folk are that they now use a man made method of testing (scientific) to justify a book full of contradiction. Were would we be without science?

Or an incompetent and egotistical god:

Only a simpleton would assume that a single author would maintain the exact same style of writing, in a wide variety of situations and contexts, over several decades of writing.

Consider the Qur'an, which we know with a very high degree of certainty was written by a single person, namely one Muhammed ibn Abdullah.  If you read the Arabic, you see that the style changes from sura to sura, and in some of the longer suras, from ayat to ayat.

I've been a software engineer for about 32 years.  The oldest software I still have in source code form -- dating back to the early '80s -- is very different from what I write today, in all the ways that would indicate someone else wrote it.  Even in code that I write today, my style "evolves" so that code from one period looks like someone else "had" to have written it.

The Documentary Hypothesis, and all research based on it, suffers from a single fatal flaw -- evolution in linguistic style cannot happen, drift in linguisitic style cannot happen, variations of linguistic style cannot happen, etc.  In short, it assumes the conclusion.  Which any serious student of logic knows is a fallacy.  Just like the Documentary Hypothesis.  See the Qur'an for a prime example.

Yup.  According to all the historians, and they are pretty fanatical about their history, every single ayat (verse) was dictated by the angle Gabriel (Jibril) to Muhammed.  He then repeated it and one of his scribes ("companions of the Prophet&quot wrote it down immediately.  To say they were extremely precise and meticulous is an understatement.  Islam has a lot of mechanisms that prevent the unpointed (vowel-free) text from being distorted, so there's a very high degree of certainty that the =unpointed= text is exactly what Muhammed told the scribes to write.

Well, the Qur'an was written by a single person.  And it doesn't contain the Torah -- it pretty much stands on its own.  Some of the suras (chapters) are very simple and plain -- Al Fatihah, the first chapter -- is basic.  Some of them are pretty disjoint and rambling.  Many of the stories about our prophets and leaders are mangled and contain entirely new content and impossible history.  But, it's all traceable back to Muhammed.

The best evidence that the Torah (and just the Torah, until the death of Moses) was written just by Moses is our history as well as the rules that govern what is or isn't a "kosher" Torah, and how we know a Torah is "correct".  We've had "error detection and correction" in the Torah for far longer than the DH folks think the Torah has existed.  Which is the first disproof of the Documentary Hypothesis.  The second disproof is that we know how much the Torah has changed, and the answer is something like six letters, none of which are significant -- Hebrew has letters which can be vowels, or can just be thrown out completely.  The greatest deviation is with the Samaritan Torah, but they were just pissed off that the Temple was built on Mt. Moriah (Mt. Zion, the Temple Mount) and not where they'd built their temple.

Well, no one claims that Moses wrote Tehillim (Psalms), Shir Ha'Shirim (Song of Songs or Song of Solomon, take your pick), the fake Greek bible, Nevi'im (prophets), or John's account of the Roman war in 135CE (Revelations).  Genesis -- Moses wrote that one.  You got one right!

Pretty good.  I forget what was going on in my life when I last stumbled in here.

Let's see -- my company is taking off nicely, I hired someone part time to help out with "stuff", my son the Atheist started college, he has a girlfriend who is also an Atheist, I'm sure someday they'll have Atheist babies and I'll annoy the f*ck out of them with Theism.  My crazy Christian neighbors bought a new house and moved, Praise G-d!  Actually, I liked them -- they at least tolerated my being a Jew because they lost every theological argument they ever started with me.  My Muslim neighbors went back to England -- I miss them lots.  It's hard to find other monotheists when surrounded by folks who believe in the Big Three plus the Big Evil Meanie and want me to join them in their multiple personality disorder religion.

The "Documentary Hypothesis" is a guess.  Which is sort of the definition of "Hypothesis".  But mostly it's a guess based on the flawed premise that the same person doesn't, or can't, or won't, ever have a different writing style.

The disproof of the "Documentary Hypothesis" is the Qur'an, for which there is massive evidence of it's origin, both in time and authorship.  With the Qur'an, you have a document, of claimed divine origin, written in a well-known period of time, by a single well-known author, with most of the ayats -- individual revealed verses -- having very well placed times, with multiple witnesses attesting to their authorship, place, time, and precise content.  There are, from fuzzy memory, six different styles of writing.

According to the "Documentary Hypothesis", this would require six different authors, and yet all of the historical evidence, of which there are simply massive amounts, points to a single author in a single well-placed time period.

QED, the "Documentary Hypothesis" is false.

There is simply, logically, no other conclusion.

I've taken so many different courses in writing, and written professionally (technical writing within various fields I've worked in) for 25+ years.  "Audience Driven Writing" is a fine art.  In my last "real job" I got dressed-down once for writing for a "first line manager" audience when the audience included executives and middle managers.  It's not an easy task.

If I were writing the Torah, I could think of at least three or four different styles I'd use.  There's the "pre-history" -- from Genesis until Moses returns to Egypt to liberate the "children of Israel".  Then there's the "current events" -- the plagues, the Exodus itself, troubles in the desert, and so on.  Then there's the core of the law -- Leviticus.  Then there's the monologue of Deuteronomy -- all of Deuteronomy was given as a speech in one go.  That's the minimum.  If I were writing the Torah, that's the absolute minimum number of styles, with audience driven writing in mind, that I could image.  And don't forget Numbers -- that's about as boring a book as they get, but there are some key events that have to be covered.

What really happened?  What happened to me?  Yes -- I was working remote and I thought the audience was the line managers and project managers who made up the bulk of the audience.  The real audience was the handful of executives that I didn't know because I was working remotely.

Occam's Razor?

Individual writers can and do change writing styles depending on time, place, context and audience.

QED, the fundamental premise of the Documentary Hypothesis is invalid.

It's just logic.  You don't have to like logic, but don't blame me when your pet hypothesis has a giant gaping hole in it.

The idiocy of the Documentary Hypothesis should be particularly obvious to a Canadian.  Even you should know that Queen Elizabeth Number 2 has two names "Queen Elizabeth #2" and "Her Majesty".  That G-d would be referred to in multiple styles is boring.

Deuteronomy, ascribed primarily to "D", has long been understood to have been given as a monologue, and as such the style is different.  Again, boring.

And lastly, the "P" source, which is concerned with laws and rituals, would have been, as are the laws of countless nations, written in a different style from an historical accounting or long-winded monologue.

In short, the things the Documentary Hypothesis claims are some kind are "proof" aren't just =explainable=, they are also =predictable=.

Thanks!

Exactly my thoughts as well. It's a double edged sword really. Theists will either try and use science to either prove the modern bible is accurate or they'll go the Ray Comfort way and suggest we take science on faith.

My jaw hit the floor when Ray said, "I can see the painting but not the painter;" baffling words. I don't claim to be intellectual at all, many folk will see this by my grammar, but I have loads of logic & common sense. I was brought up in a Pentecostal brainwashing church in Scotland called Struthers Memorial until I left at 15. In fact I asked many rational questions and was told this was the devil tempting me away from god. I'm so thankful I've thought logically & rationally about everything in life, otherwise I would have been lost in religious self loathing, homophobia, bigotry, superstition & self righteous nonsense.

I see...

Is that not just a change of content to suit a given audience than a change in writing style? Just curious. I'm not a writer but speaking from a musicians point of view.

If I was teaching a child or novice bass guitar, I would clearly bring it down to his level, but I would still use my style of playing, just more simplified. My style still comes through in the teachings and thus identifies me to the listener. Why would a single writer be any different?

Exactly.  Bach is Bach.  Be it fugue, concerto, sonata or mass.  The difference between a Bach fugue and a Handel fugue is obvious with only a little training.