if they're willing to ignore huge swaths of divine text what makes the existential statements special?
if someone made a list of statements, most of which were false but some of which were unverifiable why would anyone accept, as truth, the unverified claims?
if anything accept part of the Bible, cherry picking, is worse (logically) than accepting all of it.
- How can you vote for or otherwise support a politician if you don't agree 100% on everything with that politician?
- If your friend enjoys the same music that you do, but not the same food, would that necessarily make you not go to a concert with that friend?
- How can you enjoy a book written by an author if you strongly disagree with that author's personal beliefs? Do those beliefs necessarily invalidate anything and everything that this hypothetical author writes? As a real life example, take Orson Scott Card: do his personal views about homosexuality make his Ender books any worse?
if anything accept part of the Bible, cherry picking, is worse (logically) than accepting all of it.
I'm not sure I follow this... Why is this so bad. Let's say that my view of the bible is a set of self-replicating instructions that were carried through time as culture. Today I deem some ideas helpful parts of my culture, and some not to so helpful. I choose to follow the former. Is this logically inconsistent?
> if they're willing to ignore huge swaths of divine text what makes the existential statements special?
The idea that divine texts are a particularly privileged source of factual information is not universal among religions (or even among religions which have divine texts, or even among major branches of, e.g., Christianity.)
As I understood it, they were asking about religious scientists. Religious != take-given-entire-scripture-literally. It just means they believe in the existence of a higher power (if you can forgive my paraphrasing).
If they did mean scientists who take all of scripture literally, then no I don't actually know any of those.
if someone made a list of statements, most of which were false but some of which were unverifiable why would anyone accept, as truth, the unverified claims?
if anything accept part of the Bible, cherry picking, is worse (logically) than accepting all of it.