I’ve been thinking…I know it’s dangerous, but I can’t help it sometimes. I have arrived at the following conclusion.
Parts of the Bible are literally true. Parts of it are intended to reveal truth, without necessarily being literally true in and of themselves.
With the Fundies, belief in the truth and inerrancey of scripture is an all or nothing proposition. It’s either all literally true, or none of it is. Therefore, to believe that Genesis is not literally true would be to deny the truth of the whole Bible, including the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Christ.
I’m willing to believe that Genesis is not literally true because there were no eyewitnesses to the Creation of the Earth, which means that the guys who wrote it had to do the best they could by observation and a belief in God. The creation account in Genesis reveals that the Earth, all that lives on it including Man, was created by God, who intended that Man have a special communal relationship with Him, which the first humans screwed up by their disobedience to Him. The exact details of how He went about creating the world- ok the Universe, heck, the Multiverse if you want, are really not so important as the fact that it happened.
I’m willing to believe in the literal truth of the Virgin Birth, the miracles of Jesus, and the Resurrection (which my church is celebrating tonight) because of an abundance of eyewitness testimony.
Joseph married Mary, who was pregnant with a kid who was not his, because he believed that what an angel told him, that the Child Mary was carrying was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Heck, if that kind of testimony was good enough for someone who was in a legal position to have her put to death for what would have legally been considered adultry- they were engaged- it’s good enough for me.
There were eyewitnesses to all of the miracles.
There were eyewitnesses to Christ’s death on the cross, to the subsequent discovery that the tomb was empty, in spite of the fact that it was sealed and heavily guarded, to the fact that He dropped by to have dinner with his disciples at least twice- without using the door, no less. We all know the story of Thomas refusing to believe until he had actually put his fingers through the nail holes in Jesus’ wrists… at one time, He appeared to a gathering of five hundred of his disciples. And of course, there were eyewitnesses to His ascension.
Sorry if I’m getting a little off topic, but the point I’m trying to make is that I don’t feel that the whole Bible is meant to be taken literally. And that a story can reveal truth without being true in and of itself. But the Fundies seem to feel that the Bible was not just inspired (God-breathed) but was actually dictated by God, and that if every single word in it is not literally true, then none of it can be true.
Ok, gang, you know what’s coming next. Everybody say it along with me
The Bible is not a science book.
Now in my second month of exile in the 21 pit