Distinguishing biblical metaphor from reality

PDN wrote: »

Er, do you actually understand what 'metaphorical' means?

PDN wrote: »

The views of those who interpret Genesis Chapter 1 metaphorically are consistent with scientific evidence

FionnMatthew wrote: »

PDN

It's a very simple point, and you seem to be intentionally misinterpreting it.

When the Bible's credibility as a historical source, or as a work revealing cosmological truths, is brought into question because a part of it is challenged by available evidence, it is salvaged piecemeal by retracting the claim of literalism for that particular part of it, and that part only.

Now the Bible gets to still be true in its entirety, if only because the now contentious bit is considered to express something other than what it literally says. Now we are to understand that that part too is metaphor, but the subtext is, we'll take as many of the bits we want to be true as we can get.

You can point all you want to historical precedent for doing this, and yes, it's a game the RCC has been playing since, well, before there was an RCC; before the Church fathers ever knew they were going to be church fathers. But you cannot deny that this is something that is done by huge amounts of christians who find themselves in the tricky position of justifying their modern day commitment to the truth of a book some of which seems, well, silly.

The result is a pockmarked wasteland of varying degrees of literalness, and a get-out-of-jail-free card for any eventuality. It's certainly not an activity for the stupid - it's a sort of scholarship. But it looks like a salvage operation - like the activity of a group which was committed ab initio to the truth of a work without justification. The question has to be asked, if christians believed this 80 years ago, but now believe it is metaphorical, what reason do they have to believe that what they now claim is literal is not metaphorical too, will not be discovered to be so in 20 years time? Or, to take an individual example, if Johnny believed this 10 minutes ago, and now, after being presented with evidence that he cannot force himself to deny is pretty damn solid, believes it must be metaphorical, what reason does he have to believe that what he still claims is literal is not metaphorical too? And christians often have no answer to that question but 'faith.'

It all seems so pointless and bitty, and the foundational motivation of it falls so far short of a good reason to believe anything. When a modern day historian's work is thrown into question by the revelation that he seriously misrepresented entire periods of history, the credibility of the entire work of research is thrown into question. People do not, preferentially, claim that those bits were meant as metaphors, but that the rest is literally true. This would be intellectually dishonest. Clever, sure. But dishonest, because it demonstrates that the overriding commitment is holding that the work is mostly literally true until every single assertion in it it can individually be proven otherwise, each with its own little tribunal. This is precisely backwards to how any intellectually honest person should proceed.

Creationists are as thick as treacle in believing against vast mountains of evident facts that the Bible is entirely and literally true. They have to abuse their own epistemic faculties, and become entirely less than what is befitting a human in order to do this, throwing evidentiary standards and basic inference rules out the window, such that they are no longer able to reason properly anymore - no longer able to make basic logical inferences.

But, and it shouldn't really be seen as a commendation, it does seem a bit more "honest" than the idea of redacting the bits that aren't fashionable anymore with a "metaphor pen" just so that you can still have your magic book in an increasingly hostile intellectual culture.