It should be obvious to anyone reading the Bible that it just can’t be all literally true. Even the people who claim they the bible as the literal unerrant word of God don’t live their lives like they believe it.
Given a liberal enough interpretation, the bible can be made to fit whatever evidence we have about the world and natural history, which is what most believers seem to do - for whatever evidence they are aware of and can’t refute.
Of course you can argue that interpreting the bible as at least partially metaphorical is weakening its position as a moral/judicial/historical guide, but then, we’re not killing disobedient children anymore, so great.
To reiterate: everybody is cherry picking the bible, and frankly I’m beginning to get bored by the “why don’t you take it literally” argument (from both the fundamentalists and the anti-theists). The main reasons the fundamentalists are worse in this regard is that they pretend they don’t cherry pick, and that the atheist are usually demonstrating a deeper point (like that our morality can’t come from the bible directly, since we use our sense of morality to ignore parts of the moral prescripts in the bible).
Curtis, I don’t think I need to belabor the point that I don’t share your concept of the Divine. But it’s not necessary that I do to offer an answer to your question.
In order that two (or more) groups of Christians do not go into the discussion talking past one another, it’s helpful to define the terms to everyone’s satisfaction:
Is the Bible considered to be a literal historical account of events that actually took place as described? If it is to be so considered, then, yes, the acceptance of the fossil record and several other observed phenomena that are implied by theistic evolution does tend to undermine that understanding of the Bible.
But if, as Polycarp points out, the Bible is considered as a story that conveys how a culture attempts to understand itself and its environment, then questions of the literal factual accuracy of its creation story become largely irrelevant to the acceptance of what you have called “the massive evidence.”
Now, if you and your literalist brethren cannot agree to choose ONE and only ONE of the above understandings to adhere to, then I suggest that you really don’t have any basis on which to continue the conversation. There might be one thing you can say to such folks though, that could give them pause:
If I’m to choose between believing in the Bible and believing in God, I’m gonna choose believing in God every time. How ‘bout you?
I sometimes take the paths of the animal evolution ‘tree’ as a representation of our own life, starting as a single cell, and developing into our own unique person/species over our lifetime. I believe God has set these patterns in creation for us to discover them.
As for if it’s inconsistent or not, from the point of a person dedicated to the Lord, it really does not matter, just seek Him and all will be revealed by God at the proper time, so it doesn’t undermine it, as the bible, as the Word of God, is above that.
IMHO I believe creation happened pretty much in line with conventional interpretation in the respect you ask, but again that believe is not needed to come to God as I came to God first then He spoke to me on many such scriptures.
When you say “immortality” is that of the body or the soul? Because presumably an immortal Adam being eviscerated by a lion throws up a bizarre image of a man who cannot die walking around with hideous injuries that would have killed a non-immortal?
The Roman Catholics & most mainstream Protestants study the Bible but don’t take it literally. Advocates of Biblical Inerrancy will definitely have some problems with reality. (Although friends raised by these folks told me that they, too, pick which parts of The Bible they really follow.)
The influence of Texas on textbook publishers is well known. Back in 2002:
Thanks to the efforts of people like the Texas Freedom Network–source of the above quotation–the influence of these “Radical Conservatives” is waning. If their Biblical faith is built on such flimsy foundations, it’s not my problem if it collapses. I am glad that their efforts to undermine education have run into boulders.
Here’s a reportabout the more recent brouhaha about Social Studies in Texas:
My kid’s preschool show-n-tell assignment was her favorite Bible story. I tried to get her to pick a story that not even the church-sponsored school would take literally. I’m referring to the OT story about the “little children” who teased a prophet about his receding hairline. He cursed them in God’s name, and caused three “she-bears” to come out and devour the little children. I can just imagine a five-year-old reinacting the story with dolls and teddy bears. But alas, she picked David and Goliath instead.
But to believers in the Bible, is the story of the she-bears less credible than the story of the creation? Does one story undermine the other? I would think that even believers in YEC would see the she-bears story as a fiction that a prophet told to get gids to stop bugging him.
One can take the story itself as true & question the translation of “little children”- the terms can also mean teens, young adults, or even minor officials.
And that applies to any potentially life-threatening events? Like Daniel we’d be able to walk through fires, dance with wild beasts and swallow red-hot pokers without dying? :dubious:
I’m not convinced this is an irrelevant line of argument. He’s essentially asking how to reconcile one non-factual set of views with contradictory factual ones. I think “why even continue to have the non-factual views?” is a natural question to such a conundrum.
For instance - let’s say that someone believes the planets, moon, and sun move around because invisible donkies are pushing them. That person says “well, now that there’s an overwhelming bit of evidence for gravity, rotation, and orbital momentum explaining why the celestial bodies move as they do, how do I reconcile this with my knowledge that the invisible donkies are pushing the celestial bodies around?” - the natural question here is “why, in the face of clear contradictory evidence, are you so dead set on sticking to the idea of invisible space donkies?” rather than inventing ways to reconcile the views.
In a way, I sort of respect people in a very narrow way who are utterly commited to their religious ideology. They’re wrong and silly and sort of crazy, but you sort of have to admire how they just run with it. Compare to religious people who basically have whatever beliefs are comfortable and then find justification for those beliefs - those people are obviously a lot more superficially reasonable, since they don’t outright deny the factual evidence, but at some point their ideological flexibility becomes sort of silly. What’s the point of half-ass sticking to an ideology where you essentially believe the parts that you’d believe anyway (for example: murder is wrong) and then just handwaving away the rest? At that point, why even have the contradictory beliefs to reconcile?
Bringing us back to the original question he asked. Yes, the evidence contradicts the religious texts. When you accept the world as it is, as we factually know it to be, and then just add “but… god did it!” at the end of the statement, you’re just pointlessly reconciling the space donkies with the movement of planets.
A small part of me wishes religious people were all either batshit dedicated to the inerrancy and totality of their religion rather than trying some half-ass weak shit where they integrate the real world into their ideology. Playing the middle ground is so … ordinary and tiresome and unnecesary.
In some ways I think the true believers are the ones who make some sort of sense. Once you understand that some bits crumble when you to apply our modern, skeptical understanding of existance (for example that literal genesis is not factual), and you understand them to be the prescientific ramblings of a primitive people - then you understand this concept enough to use it to discard the sillier aspects of your religion. Then you have all the intellectual tools necesary to just discard the whole thing. So why stop halfway?
I can very well believe that God brought about the hominids Adam & Eve, and the rest, through evolution. Then, God bestowed on A&E the “breath of lives”- potential to become immortal children of God. Their fall crippled their ability to pass that Divine potential on to the rest of humanity, so that humans could learn God’s Law & trust Him but could not overcome sin & death.
Jesus’ parables are intended to be parables. The early sections of the Bible are, according to the Bible, the straight dope from God’s mouth.
“Jewish, Messianic, and Hebrew religious tradition ascribes authorship of the Torah to Moses through a process of divine inspiration. This view of Mosaic authorship is first found explicitly expressed in the Talmud, dating from the 1st to the 6th centuries AD, and is based on textual analysis of passages in the Torah and the subsequent books of the Hebrew Bible.”
If these books were simply stories written by humans, then the whole divinity of it all is questionable. How are you to know what’s fiction and which came from God on Mt. Sinai? How are you to know that Moses on the mountain isn’t a story too?
I don’t think creation per se has much of an impact. The Adam and Eve story however, does for Christianity. Why do we need salvation? It can’t be because God built us to be sinful, because then it is his fault, not ours. It can’t be because some random couple was sinful - people are all the time without infecting the rest of us. Our punishment only makes sense if the sinners are the parents of us all. If this couple never existed, then it doesn’t make sense.
Judaism does not have this problem, because the Adam and Eve story is a just-so story, explaining the world as it is. I was never taught I inherited their sin.
There is a big difference in impact between the Bible as myth and the Bible as truth. The Bible as myth is extremely useful in illustrating moral points developed in the culture, and an excellent teaching tool for these points. However the Bible as truth is something to be followed, and the utility of the stories is secondary to the direction that must be taken from the Bible. For instance, Adam and Eve as truth motivates the need for redemption, while Adam and Eve as myth illustrates the sometimes useful principle of obeying directions you might not totally understand. Both are beneficial, but their impacts are vastly different.
Even creation itself works this way. I’m not sure what the benefit of the creation myth is, except as literature, but a universe made for us is different from a universe made for no one which we happen to inhabit.
