[QUOTE=badchad]
I’ll buy that to a point. If you want to define the bible as fiction rather than fact, then regardless of what’s in there, you can say it was meant that way.
Of course it also does not follow that someone should use a work of fiction go guide how they live their real lives. Nor should a fictional book, be considered evidence to the divinity of its author.
Now you’re putting the cart way before the horse. There is no reason to think the bible is “divinely-wrought” other than its own say so, which you have admitted is likely fictional. Second as far as works of fiction go, the bible kind of sucks. It’s long, it’s repetitive, it’s boring, the authors can’t keep their facts straight from one chapter to another and often from one verse to another. In contrast Candide, now that’s a great work of fiction.
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You neglect to notice that I am offering an argument that assumes – for the sake of the argument – that the Bible (Koran, Torah…) is ‘divinely-wrought’. My intention is to explore the consequences of holding the assumption, without considering whether or not the assumption is true.
So I ask something like “what would the assumption that the Bible is divinely inspired constrain one to conclude?” And then I answer that it would not constrain one to conclude that the bible must be factually true in every instance where it appears to make factual or historical claims.
It would constrain you to conclude that the work is perfect in the ‘ought fraught’ sense that I try to explain in my post. (I.e. that it perfectly serves the purpose for which it was written)
if we assume that there is a God and that the author of the Bible is God, then we are in no position to assume that we know why it was written or how it ought to have been written. The initial assumption – that the book is by God – disallows the other assumption – that we know how it ought to have been written, for example that it ought to all be factually or historically true. This is relevant because many people who make the first assumption ALSO make the second one.
(If you don’t make the first assumption then it doesn’t matter, and you can go on happily interpreting scriptural texts as cultural documents, lies and fabrications, good literature, bad literature, better or worse than Voltaire, or whatever.)
I’m not going to go into the rather silly claims about it as a ‘work of fiction’. Is Thucydides History a work of fact or of fiction? How about Plato’s dialogues? Descartes Meditations? If the stultifying distinction ‘fact/fiction’ is all we have to work with, we’re not going to get very far in trying to grasp what a book is about, what it is for, or why it may have been written. (Let alone by whom.)
