A familiar phenomenon and example for a physical visual illusion is when mountains appear to be much nearer in clear weather with low humidity than they are.This is because haze is a cue for depth perception, signalling the distance of far-away objects (Aerial perspective).. Some are known or admitted hoaxes. Yes, it is a relevant claim. Few people would doubt that Plato really wrote the works ascribed to him, and yet the Bible is far more authenticated. Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. For if the Bible were not true, we couldnt know anything at all. Even an atheist might argue that his belief in atheism produces feelings of inner peace or satisfaction. That is, in the past, when they had assumed that the future would be like the past, they were right. In 1968 a debate was held between conservative thinker William F. Buckley, Jr., and liberal writer Gore Vidal. Yes, archaeology can show consistency with Scripture but is not in a position to prove the Bible in any decisive way because archaeology itself is not decisive. This text indicates that all Scripture is inspired by God (or God-breathed) and useful for teaching. Such a response is not acceptable for a person who is a follower of Christ. A cover-up may be used to deny, defend, or obfuscate a lie, errors, embarrassing actions, or lifestyle, and/or lie(s) made previously. Kids Are Falling behind Global Competition, but Brain Science Shows How to Catch Up, People in Republican Counties Have Higher Death Rates Than Those in Democratic Counties, A Single, Quick 'Mindset' Exercise Protects against Adolescent Stress. If we understand what is at work cognitively, we might be able to intervene and try to ease some of the negative effects of partisanship. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. In all the above cases, we took as an unstated premise that there are certain standards by which we judge how likely something is true. Bryant Wood, The Discovery of the Sin Cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Bible and Spade (Summer 1999), Even this begs the question to some degree. Science is based on an underlying uniformity in nature. Others have some merit but fall short of proving the truth of the Bible with certainty. Motivated reasoning, in which people work hard to justify their opinions or decisions, even in the face of conflicting evidence, has been a popular topic in political neuroscience because there is a lot of it going around. Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. Archaeology certainly confirms Scripture. They also considered participants own party identification and whether there was a relationship between ideological differences and how the subjects did the task. That idea did not last for long. If nature were not uniform, then past success would be utterly irrelevant to the future! A person doesnt really know something just by believing it. Nam and her colleagues set out to understand which brain areas govern the affective processes that underlie system justification. The Bible provides that foundation. They are born already knowing it. When that preference is particularly strong, she adds, that can lead to things like simply rationalizing or accepting long-standing inequalities or injustices. Psychologists call the cognitive process that lets us do so system justification.. Is it appropriate to use a fallible procedure to judge what claims to be the infallible Word of God? 2022 Scientific American, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc. It is the standard of standards. Conclusion. So we cannot merely use past experience as our reason for belief that in the future nature will be uniform, unless we already knew by some other way that nature is uniform. According to the biblical worldview, God has chosen to uphold the universe in a consistent way for our benefit. So, when we take the Bible as our worldview, we find that laws of logic make sense. God has hardwired knowledge of Himself into every human being, such that we all have inescapable knowledge of God. But how could we possibly know that apart from revelation from God? It turns out that the worldview delineated by the Bible is the only worldview that can make sense of all those things necessary for knowledge. If the Bible were not inspired by God, how could its mere human writers possibly have known about events in the distant future?5. However, arguing that the Bible must be true solely on the basis that it says so is not a powerful argument. This does not mean that his position is true. In other words, the other side may not dislike us quite so much as we think. The Garden of Eden has never been found, nor has the Tower of Babel or Noahs Ark (as of the writing of this article). Unfortunately, not all of those answers have been as cogent as we might hope. Moreover, all people seem to know laws like the law of non-contradiction. That is, every writing in the Bible is a revelation from God that can be trusted as factually true. Scanners try to watch the red-blue divide play out underneath the skull. How do out-of-the-ordinary positions affect later voting? Such consistency is to be expected. But if we dont accept the Bible as true, we are left without a foundation for laws of logic. We must admit that non-Christians are able to use laws of logic and the methods of science with great successdespite the fact that such procedures only make sense in light of what the Bible teaches. Discover world-changing science. Lydia Denworth is a Brooklyn, N.Y.based science writer and a contributing editor for Scientific American. For example, Knutson et al. At best, a changed life shows consistency with the Scriptures. Instead Buckley and Vidal descended rapidly into name-calling. People might experience positive feelings and changes by believing in a position that happens to be false. Yet, persons who tenaciously resist the idea that the Bible is the Word of God have offered their counterarguments to the above examples. The Bible tells us that Gods mind is the standard for all knowledge (Colossians 2:3). After all, not every claim in Scripture has been confirmed archeologically. The Bible is uniquely self-consistent and extraordinarily authentic. There can never be an exception to a law of logic because Gods mind is sovereign over all truth. These affiliations serve multiple social goals: they feed our need to belong and desire for closure and predictability, and they endorse our moral values. Just as most of us like to think we are good-hearted human beings, people generally prefer to believe that the society they live in is desirable, fair and legitimate. But what is considered scientific fact today might not be tomorrow. Brain scans are also unlikely to be used as a biomarker for specific political results because the relationships between the brain and politics is not one-to-one. Some answers make very little sense at all. Bigfoot, also commonly referred to as Sasquatch, is a purported ape-like creature said to inhabit the forests of North America.Many dubious articles have been offered in attempts to prove the existence of Bigfoot, including anecdotal claims of sightings as well as alleged video and audio recordings, photographs, and casts of large footprints. Ren Descartes major work on scientific method was the Discourse that was published in 1637 (more fully: Discourse on the Method for Rightly Directing Ones Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences).He published other works that deal with problems of method, but this remains central in any understanding of the Cartesian method of Although specific circumstances change, the basic laws of nature (such as gravity) will continue to work in the future as they have in the past. When a baby burns his hand on a candle, he does not quickly do it again because he rightly believes that if he does it again it will hurt again. For example, consider the following. helps to explain why people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth, U.S. Some answers make very little sense at all. Circular reasoning of this type (while technically valid) is not useful in a debate because it does not prove anything beyond what it merely assumes. Critics have their counterarguments to all of the above. Most people are willing to accept what a book says about itself unless they have good evidence to the contrary. Although giving a testimony is certainly acceptable, a changed life does not (by itself) demonstrate the truth of the Scriptures. So the response is essentially, We believe because we believe. While it is true that we believe, this answer is totally irrelevant to the question being asked. Since faith is a belief in something unseen, the above response is not a good argument. Yet neurobiological features could be used as a predictor of political outcomesjust not in a deterministic way, Nam says. Even if society isnt perfect, and there are things to be criticized about it, there is a preference to think that you live in a good society, Nam says. We should indeed have faith in God and His Word. Such evidence is certainly consistent with the claim that the Bible is inspired by God. It was hoped that these two members of opposing intellectual elites would show Americans living through tumultuous times that political disagreements could be civilized. The Bible also touches on matters of science in ways that seem to go beyond what was known to humankind at the time. Read unique story pieces & columns written by editors and columnists at National Post. How could we know (apart from God) that laws of logic work everywhere? Again, how can we judge what claims to be inerrant revelation by a standard that is itself uncertain and ever-changing? Using the less-certain to judge the more-certain just doesnt make sense. After all, archaeology is an uncertain science; its findings are inevitably subject to the interpretation and bias of the observer and are sometimes overturned by newer evidence. Ren Descartes: Scientific Method. Since only the Bible can make sense of the standards of knowledge, it may seem perplexing at first that people who deny the Bible are able to have knowledge. How is it that people deny the truth of the Bible and yet simultaneously rely upon the truth of the Bible? The volume of gray matter, or neural cell bodies, making up the anterior cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, tends to be larger in liberals. She wrote about the neuroscience of stuttering in our August 2021 issue. Archaeology is useful, but fallible. Another standard we use when evaluating certain kinds of claims is the standard of science. Thank you for signing up to receive email newsletters from Answers in Genesis. The tools of science allow us to describe the predictable, consistent way in which the universe normally behaves. Among other things, partisan identity clouds memory. They have suggested that the predictive prophetic passages were written after the fact, much later than the text itself would indicate. Participants may be induced to be more honest when they think that scientists have a window into their brains. That is not to say that political neuroscience can be used as a tool to read minds, but it can pick up discrepancies between stated positions and underlying cognitive processes. See that the Bible makes knowledge possible induced to be inerrant revelation a What some people argue that this past success is a proof that the Bible can sense. The biology and neuroscience of stuttering in our past experiences is pointlessbecause thats not question Able to use logic and science is a belief in atheism produces feelings of inner or! 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