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Theistic Models

The world's major theisms, with the exception of a few relatively small sects, derive more or less exclusively from theistic scriptures. These scriptures have a variety of ascribed authorship - in the case of some relatively modern scriptures (Islam, Mormonism) there is a high probability that the authors were, in fact, two specific historical humans named Muhammed and Joseph Smith (possibly with help in the latter case). In the case of older religions: Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism - although authorship is in some cases ascribed to particular individuals, e.g. Moses, specific apostles, there is little outside of the traditions of the theisms themselves to support this attribution historically, and hence it falls into the category of legend: stories that might be true but collectively are probably not.

For all religions older than Islam, these theistic scriptures were increased and perpetuated from their unknown origins by means of a succession of more or less widely dispersed manuscript copies. Since this work deals with information entropy it is worth noting in passing for the enlightenment of Biblical scholars that there is such a thing as information theory and information entropy. It is, in fact, possible to quantify the information entropy in all extant manuscript copies and thereby plot the diffusion of entropy into the presumed ``original'' manuscripts, although in nearly all of the older cases there was almost certainly an extended period of time where there were no original mauscripts and what are now sacred texts were then sacred sayings, perpetuated by word of mouth and hence if anything even more susceptible to the influx of information entropy. The work of Bart Ehrman summarized in Misquoting Jesus is a fine example of the kind of scholarship that is required to make this sort of thing quantitative, although unfortunately the book lacks actual graphs of a quantitative information theoretic analysis.

If we were to systematically critique even one of the scriptural theisms in its totality we'd be here forever, as scriptures tend towards the prolix, so we will try hard17 to confine our attentions to only the primary issue of consistency of e.g. the creation mythology (if any) with the theorem, plus any fairly directly associated disiderata that come to mind. This work will view with great skepticism any assertion that the mythologies are themselves a metaphor and will focus instead on whether they are plausible as ``divine revelation of truth''.



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Robert G. Brown 2014-02-06