At least some Orthodox Jews do indeed hold to a real Adam & Eve, but AFAIK don’t have a set doctrine of Original Sin yet do hold that all humans are tainted by sin.
As I said AFAIK.
I have a real issue with your initial statement – but not for the reason you probaby think. Evidence is evidence. Your analysis may find it lacking in credibilty or in validity (two distinct problems), or you may find that erroneous conclusions were drawn from it.
To avoid getting into the arguments about reliability of the Biblical accounts taken as either straight reportage or agenda-driven polemic accounts, let’s take something with reasonably objective historical background available – the career of Joan of Arc. As you’re probably aware, the story goes that Joan was a young peasant girl who experienced apparitions of saints, who told her to go save France. After some initial “I can’t do that!” demurrals, she obeyed them, went, told her story (to some skepticism), was “given enough rope to hang herself,” displayed an unexpected gift for strategy and tactics, led a reinvigorated French army to victory, then was sold out to the English, who tried her as a witch and burned her at the stake. Okay, what’s historical fact is that she did show that military gift, that she did claim to have experienced those visions. On your take, I presume you’d see them as self-delusional, a ‘gimmick’ come up with by her subconscious to bolster her self-confidence in what she realized she could do if she got the moxie. Alternative takes might be that Joan was lying in claiming those visions, that they were trick holography used by Skald the Rhymer from his time machine, etc. They do not necessarily prove that there is a God who sent saints to call Joan to her duty to France (why does God want France to win, anyway?). But they are evidence of something.
This is my frustration with skeptical analysis. There’s a difference between being able to explain something away, and simply waving it away as not credible. If somebody with a known history of substance abuse reports having seen three itsy-bitsy Loch Ness Monster-ettes playing in the lake, I’m much more likely to regard it as a hallucination than a valid sighting – but it deserves to be checked out – go to the lake at one’s early convenience, validate that the rock he allegedly saw them tossing around is not where they supposedly left it, find out the recluse who lives a quarter mile down the shore was out fishing and saw nothing Nessie-ish, etc. But appropriately refuted, not merely rejected out of hand. There were disbelieved accounts of the okapi for 20-odd years before someone bothered to check out the “natives’ wild tales” – and found out there was an atavistic giraffe-relative surviving.
Now I find YEC as wildly improbable as you do – it’s the summit of a pseudo-logical house of cards built from tissue paper, invented by people desperate for certitude and finding it in a credulous acceptance of one wild-hare theory on Biblical inspiration. But to convince people of this requires subjecting their supposed ‘evidence’ to proper debunking, as erroneous, manufactured, misconstrued, or whatever is appropriate. Simply waving it away as “there is no evidence” will not convince someone raised to believe it who is now enteraining doubts – showing how much crap their ‘evidence’ really is, will.
This is actually a topic that I think about a lot and find very interesting. In short, I would say the answer is no. I believe that Science and Religion are largely orthogonal disciplines that seek to answer different types of questions. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that a lot of people see them as much more overlapping than they are and try to use Science to answer Religious questions or vice versa.
To give a simple perspective, I like to think of science as asking “how?” where religion asks “why?” That is, when people start looking to science to determine whether or not God exists or why we’re here, or when people turn to religion to ask about the workings of evolution or cosmology, they’re utterly missing the point.
Yes, to some extent there has to be overlap, but only because you need some basis within which to work. Thus, inside of that framework, the point of Genesis isn’t in explaining how God created everything, it’s pointing out THAT God created everything and why. Moreso, if we assume for a moment that evolution happened and that God created everything, how would the people of that time have even understood what that meant and wrote it down in a way that we would understand that it’s actually describing that process? And this is the same sort of logic I look at the entire Bible through. People will question whether certain people existed or not, whether certain historical lessons are accurate or not, but the answers to those questions has no bearing at all on the message of the Bible.
But these sorts of questions aren’t just limited to people who believe in God. In fact, there’s plenty of religions that don’t necessarily believe a god (notably, some sects of Buddhism), but yet they all tie together with answers to fundamental questions like why we’re here, what we should do with our lives, and how we define our morality. Inherently, even atheists have answers to these sorts of questions, they just do so without that reasoning working back to God. And none of these questions are made any simpler by any scientific explanations. That is, even if God doesn’t exist, that doesn’t mean that our lives are necessarily without meaning or that there’s no way to establish a moral basis; in fact, I don’t know any atheists who would argue that.
I also apply the same logic to science. Evolution is not only compatible with my beliefs, but it’s completely consistent. That is, I find a naturalistic explanation far more consistent with an omniscient and omnipotent God (which is my belief), since he’d necessarily be knowledgable and powerful enough to set things up once to get them to turn out as planned, than an interventionist one, which I’m unable to resolve without violating either omniscience or omnipotence. But at the same time, a naturalistic explanation is equally consistent with the non-existence of God, and so using it to support either theism or atheism seems… pointless.
Oh. Bummer. That used to be my favorite Bible story, but now it’s not nearly as much fun. But thanks for fighting my ignorance.
Underlining added: this statement is not supported by your cite. The Talmud is not the Torah (or Christian Bible ). And “divine inspiration” does not necessarily mean “must be interpreted literally”, although some people do take that extra step.
“Myth”, in the context of literary interpretation, is not contradictory to “truth”. A myth is a type of story, and can be true or false or a mixture.
Back when I was a believer, this was basically how I justified simultaneous beliefs in evolution and in creationism. Over the course of six “creative periods” (not literally days) God produced the Earth and guided evolution. Then God placed human souls (the breath of life) in a couple of hominds Adam and Eve.
No. You’re not far off, but, presuming divine inspiration for the sake of argument (because with no god or a god who didn’t inspire Scripture, the question beomes moot), we do not know His intent and purposes in inspiring those passages. All we know is what earlier human beings thought it was. For me, the Bible is, among other things, a record of the evolving conception of God and His will among the Israelites/Jews/early Christians. I don’t have to resolve the discrepancy between the exclusivism of some Torah passages with the universalism of Isaiah 40-55 and Ruth, because for me they’re showing two different phases in the growing conception of who God is, what His purposes and attitudes are, and what He expects of His followers.
There’s no reason why a story dictated by God couldn’t use metaphors. If you say it was divinely inspired instead of dictated word-for-word by God, then the humans who were inspired could have used literary devices like metaphors.
Judaism today doesn’t tend to read the Torah literally. Most of us think you also need the oral Torah, the various rabbinic commentaries on the Torah, to really understand the written Torah. Sola scriptura is a Protestant Christian approach to the Bible, not a Jewish one.
The phrase ‘Undermine the Bible’ is rather telling.
How does one undermine an anthology of stories?
If by the phrase, the OP means ‘Undermine the Inerrancy and/or God-Inspired Nature of the Bible’ then the answer is quite obviously ‘yes’ to every fundamentalist I have ever encountered either online or IRL.
It is rather simple, after all.
If your world-view REQUIRES the inerrancy of the Bible, then anything that disproves that is anathema.
That’s an interesting definition. Could you show me usage where a story is called a myth and true (as opposed to having some true components.) Calling an explanation or a story a myth is not usually considered an endorsement of its truthiness, and I suspect that your average Biblical literalist would not appreciate you calling the Bible a myth.
You need to look at the unwritten questions that the various myths and legends are seeking to react to. Some of the points being made are: It was God Himself, not the Third Assistant Underseraph for Stellar Evolution, who called everything into existence; He did it by simply “saying it is so”, not getting His hands dirty and shaping it (notice how this ties with the much later doctrine of Jesus as pre-existent Logos), and a lot of the details are intentional slaps in the face of the Babylonian myths (the Jews being or recently having been exiles in Babylonia when it was finalized). E.g., Marduk fights with and overcomes the monster of the deep; YHwH creates the monster of the deep by simply saying so. “Up yours, Marduk! Love, Y” 
And they are a collection of stories tied together by the genealogies, which were probably added (or made up) later for the purpose. How’s the Fall link with the Flood? Well, Adam had a kid, who grew up and had a kid… And his kid was Noah, who was out in his workshop going ‘Voo-bah’ when…"
I look at the Priestly writer/redactor as a lot like Great Aunt Hattie who was a storehouse of stories about the family genealogy, some of which were even true, and who loved to get all the details of formal etiquette just so. Whether the details of the Toledoth genealogies are true, embroideries on a factual underpinning, or made up of whole cloth is just plain not important – what IS important is how the Children of Israel understood their heritage, as reflected in the Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and his children stories – which were joined together into a James Michener saga by the P redactor.
OK, so A&E had normal parents and human societies existed at the time of the G of E. The briefly were bestowed with super powers (“The Fig-leafed Crusaders!”), but were stripped of their Divie potential after eating something that gave them Divine potential.
Was eating the Fruit a sin because it gave them a double-helpig of Divine potential when they were supposed to use it to plant an orchard and then distribute then Fruit to all the other people?
I don’t know any examples off the top of my head, but a quick check of myth at Wikipedia supports my usage.
In my experience, people who expect the Bible to be interpreted literally (believers or not) tend to be unaware of both literary analysis in general and Biblical scholarship in particular.
I read at one time several decades back, and I’m hoping someone can identify and locate it from my description, an absolutely wonderful tongue-in-cheek account purportedly debunking of the history of World War II from the perspective of a skeptic in 3000 AD. “So the writer has the Church on the Hill, visually likened to a British bulldog, standing firm against the ‘little hitter’ and the ‘little muscle’, backed by the “Man of Steel” in the East and the ruler of the Veldt of Roses, the Promised Land in the West. Clearly these are all symbolic names, chosen to represent allegorically the actual individuals, whose names have not been handed down, and who were probably a collage of a group of different leaders over a long period of time.” It was very well done, and clearly shows the potential for a “factually true myth.” Similarly, Geoffrey Ashe’s controversial reserches into the historicity of Arthurian legend suggest that the majority of the basic legend, as opposed to the feudalistic ‘trim’, may have been factually accurate. (I’m not saying they were mostly factually accurate, but rather that if Ashe’s theory is correct, they were.)
The answer to “If you don’t take Genesis literally how can you take the rest of the Bible literally?” is “Who said the entire bible was all literal?”
If I take a book of history and stick in a story that includes elves as main characters, this doesn’t make the rest of the history in the book false. However it does mean that merely being present in the book isn’t itself an argument for literal truth or accuracy.
There are a few ways to react to this:
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If it’s not all literal, the book is destroyed. This is the literalist position; they consider a partially errant book destroyed and so reject that it’s partially inerrant, to allow them to consider the entire book a source of literally accurate information.
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We have to sort out the fact from the fiction using other means. Typically external evidence plays a part in this - evolution is true, so the creation story must be at least partially mythical. Whereas if we presume miracles and such, most of the Jesus story can be at least mostly accurate. An added perk to this approach is that you can discard bits of doctorine you don’t like too, based largely on not wanting to follow them. Don’t want to get circumsized? No problem. Want to work on sunday? No problem. Want to murder people? No problem.
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It doesn’t matter if it’s all mythical, there are still messages to be gleaned from it. This is like position 2 without the cognitive dissonance, and probably with less efforts to justify your actions with cherry-picked bible verse. Better all around, really.
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You could think that the bible is just a collection of old myths and thus unreliable and of little or no value. But this is a bit out of scope of the discussion and included only for completeness; I know that there are no entrance requirements for Christianity but I still think it’s unlikely that there are many Christians who completely dismiss the bible.
Sure, he could have done it just to play with peoples’ minds but I think most people would agree that between God telling a great whopper without cluing anyone in, or that the work is a fiction created by humans, the latter is more likely. Ultimately, it hurts the work to accept that the stories are just stories.
I tend to think that the editor was not concerned with answering the Big Questions, but was more concerned with writing down things in a way consistent with what was no doubt a long oral tradition. If there were inconsistent versions of the stories he put them both in, no doubt saying, to quote Depp’s Ed Wood “Nobody will notice!” While we are far more concerned with these questions, the average person back then would have been more concerned with their ritual obligations for cleanliness, sacrifice, and attendance at the Temple. Much of the Bible is a religio-political document, attempting to centralize worship in Jerusalem and representing the religious right of their day. I participated in some of these rituals only peripherally, but I knew relatives from my father’s religious side of the family who did a lot more. This is the stuff we skip over as boring today, but had a lot more impact on the everyday life of people then than who was Cain’s wife and how old is the universe really.
Was this stuff invented by the Priestly writer, or was it already out there to be written down? How much of the context are we missing because no one then had to ask “what’s a cubit?”
I rather think that the use of this lost word of God to convince the people to support the religious and political faction of the Redactor was more important than the heritage of Judah. I rather expect they didn’t have the luxury to be as self-examining as we are today. They had to eat, and to survive as a small country in the middle of a bunch of big ones. Having a victorious past no doubt made them feel better (only Serbs seem to celebrate losing battles) and it might have given the king ammunition to inspire expansion. This is hardly unique to them - remember the bad reaction to the doubts about the existence of the Davidic empire among those who claimed the West Bank as a natural part of Israel.
In short, I fear you are assuming that the Redactor and his audience were a bunch of CCNY students, more involved in issues of the mind than issues of power.
For your first point, it is no doubt considered to be politically incorrect to tell cultures that you are studying that their stories are myths. The recent controversy about the use of DNA from native Americans for additional purposes came in part from the fear that this would prove their origin stories to be incorrect. The distinction between “true stores” and fables is in the eyes of the culture with the myths, not our eyes. I have no doubt that those in Judah at the time believed in the truth of much if not all of the Bible. I’m sure there were fables also, but they were probably not included from something purporting to be a historical narrative. Perhaps Balaam’s ass was a fable, who knows.
Casting history as myth is easier to do than you might think. In high school, having studied Wagner’s Ring in English and German history in History, I wrote a pastiche of all four operas, modified to include the details of the unification of Germany. I think Bismark was Siegfried, but it was a long time ago. Hitler might have been “you remember Alberich.” It fit together remarkably well, including those parts of German history that happened after Wagner’s death.
Addendum: It is is not offensive as long as it’s done to fundamentalist Christians or orthodox Jews but if its anyone else it is.