True, and it sucks as history also.
I wonder what hypothesis about the origin and development of life couldn’t be made consistent with the Bible given enough contortions by believers. Not counting those involving competing deities, of course.
I was going to comment on how good it is as a history text, and while it sucks by modern standards, it’s not that bad for it’s day.
It more or less got contemporary events right, but anything in the past was wrong, for instance Solomon’s temple and the Davidic empire. Further back than that it is totally useless. People under the impression that Moses wrote part of the Bible might misinterpret your comment.
There was a NOVA show on PBS recently that reviewed certain aspects of the history of the Bible, and their conclusion was that Solomon and David are quite possibly historic figures.
The Bible is not a science book. Christians as far back as Augustine knew that Genesis was poetry. Karl Giberson in his new book notes that Christians didn’t have a problem with Evolution until a few made it a cause during the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Why are people so insistent on trying to twist the words of the Bible in order to try and conform to modern scientific beliefs? Why not just throw out the Bible? Clearly if you’re going to have to twist and turn the text to make it make sense according to what we know today, it was never on the right track in the first place. Besides, last I checked, Genesis specifically mentions he made man and woman, not a single-celled organism that eventually evolved into humans billions of years later.
That is perhaps the crux of the entire discussion: it was written and assembled over thousands of years in a world that had no conception of what the future could be like. And yet now we treat it as a text that is literally true in a modern context that has no direct conception of what the world was like when it was written and assembled. All we have is a text that is an enigmatic bridge between then and now, where eternal human truths are interspersed with words, concepts and references that only make complete sense to the people who lived in the time it was written. The bible was not written for the nations of the world that exist on December 28, 2008. It is a post hoc record of what many, many people felt was important to preserve before it was lost. Each successive generation has had to struggle with making Scripture relevant to their own unique place in human history, and each successive generation has come to a slightly different conclusion than its ancestor. This is what makes Scripture the living word of God, rather than a direct literal truth or direct quotes from God.
At it’s best, understanding Scripture is a struggle with separating the eternal truths from the long-lost context, and then wrestling with those truths that the authors knew run counter to human desires and self-destructive tendencies. The link between Genesis and today, between the earliest written accounts of “J” and “P” and modern lit-crit are these eternal truths. God loves us unconditionally, and has continually called us back to a relationship to him through Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Jesus and other prophets. Whether or not the Bible is historically accurate, inerrant, allegorical or proves that science is wrong is irrelevant when compared to this truth that runs the length from Genesis to Revelations.
Vlad/Igor
I’m an atheist. But I can appreciate the Bible as literature. It’s quite good literature-- both the New and Old Testaments. I haven’t read the Koran, but I have read some Hindu texts. Lots of good lit there!
There are lots of ways to intepret the bible such that it’s not inconsistent with science, but none of those ways allow for the acceptance of the bible as literal fact.
In the more progressive churches, the attitude is that the Bible is meant to be taken in two different ways - one is a history of the major events in the Christian faith - the crucifixion, the resurrection, the Exodus, etc. These are considered reasonably factual and should be believed as fact. The other is a series of parables involving God, which are not to be taken literally, but which are meant to illustrate God’s plan and his commandments for his people.
Different faiths draw the line in different places - for example, some might believe that the story of Noah and the Flood is ‘canon’ and must be believed as is. Others believe there was a flood, but it was probably regional. Still others believe the entire story is a parable, meant to illustrate that man fell from grace with God and was punished, and that you must give yourself to God to be saved, yada yada.
Another intepretation is that God told the story of creation to Moses, but in terms that Moses, a man with no knowledge of science or the universe, could understand. Much like you might explain a complex issue to a child - you hope you get the main point across, but you know there’s no hope the child can understand the technical nuances.
People who believe this would say that if God spoke to us today, he might well re-tell the story of creation by explaining how the big bang happened and how the universe inflated and how the various constants were set up to allow complex matter to form. But such an explanation would be gobbledegook to someone in Moses’ time.
So it’s possible to fan-wank the Bible in ways that allow it to be consistent with modern life and science. But you can’t do while maintaining any sort of literal adherence to the ‘facts’ in the bible, because very many of them are demonstrably wrong.
I believe in a 6 phase creation, as opposed to 6 literal days. It annoys me when people take that part literally.
And it annoys me that evolution and Christianity are at odds in anyone’s mind. It’s no cause for the church to get its collective panties in a bunch.
Also, I don’t think Adam and Eve were “the first people on Earth.” I think Adam was the beginning of the bloodline which became most significant in the Bible, but I believe there were many other people on Earth at the time.
I think end times predictions are also horribly misinterpreted. The majority of things that make Christians become activists are unwarranted.
Everything in the Bible is literal, until something is found to be not true, which causes that part of the Bible to magically become allegorical. The more we find out, the more allegorical it becomes.
Why believe that Adam was a real person at all? And what does it mean to be “the beginning of the bloodline which became most significant in the Bible”?
As pointed out downthread, that argument only works for the most literal minded people who don’t “get” figurative language and would be upset to hear that the story of the Good Samaritan was not personally witnessed by Jesus himself.
I disagree, specifically because the first chapter of Genesis says that most creatures were created in one day. Until someone can grasp that this “one day” could reflect any length of time as humans measure it, they will not be able to wrap their minds around evolution.
Upthread, unless you are predicting the future.
So you are going to continue to ignore that Genesis spells out what a day is, comprising one evening and one morning: " In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day." If a “day” could be any length of time, why go out of the way to specify that it equals a period of light (Day) plus a period of darkness (Night)? In fact, why use the term “day” at all?
Who said they were the only offspring?
If 90 percent of what someone tells me is a lie, don’t expect me to build my life on the other 10 percent.
This is just silly. As Chief Pedant illustrated in post 12, it is possible to simplify without lying.
I’m going to call you on this one, because there’s no indication that the authors of Genesis intended their Creation stories to be literal. Likewise, where the Gospel of Luke presents what appears to be a reasonably accurate historical account of Jesus’ ministry and the beginning of the Christian Church (in Acts) is still filtered through an allegorical understanding of God moving in history as prophesied in Jewish Scripture. The beginning of the Gospel of John is also very allegorical in nature. I think the closest we get to any kind if literal writing is in the very earliest of the Christian Scriptures, i.e. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians and Thessalonians, and even then Paul still writes with a heavy allegorical hand when he conveys nascent Christian concepts rather than the literal words and history of Jesus.
But the point is that both concepts, both ways of viewing the world, stand apart as internally consistent perceptions of the world. Genesis doesn’t need to tell of days that we then assign as discreet periods of time in order to be true. The stories of Creation in Genesis have nothing to do with our current fetish of defining truth as something tangible, measurable or calculable. If anything, the Creation stories purposefully reflect the indescribable nature of Divine Creation that is destroyed the moment that we attempt to describe or quantify it. It is a mysterious, occult event that remains beyond human comprehension as part of preserving our emotional and spiritual reaction to the universe. This is wholly apart from our intellectual reaction to Creation, which is expressed through rational scientific inquiry and mathematical description.
Vlad/Igor
We call that “admitting that our understanding was flawed,” not “magic.” It’s a scientific term.
Seriously, do you still believe in the “literal nature” of everything that you were absolutely certain that you understood once?
A literalist interpretation would insist that they were; an allegorical interpretation would not care if they were the only offspring of Adam and Eve. A literalist interpretation of Scripture demands that Scripture is internally consistent, and this is only one of many places where that consistency breaks down. That Cain, Abel and Seth are the only offspring of Adam and Eve is irrelevant to the larger allegorical story.
Vlad/Igor
But the Bible nowhere says that Cain, Abel, and Seth were Adam and Eve’s only offspring. To insist that they were is not literalism, it is manufacturing an inconsistency where none is present (not that there aren’t plenty of inconsistencies in the Bible, just that this isn’t one of them).
I was responding to the first and second response, and referring to a response that was below that. I guess it is all a matter of perspective, isn’t it?
Patience, dear. I’m a slow writer and there were 20+ posts when I got back to this thread. Or do you believe that if I haven’t done it already, it’s not going to happen?
Before I respond to this, was 1800 a mistake or could you clarify where you are coming from?