2 ms·

This is precisely my point. Why would you take this part metaphorically, but insist that God have literally created the world in 7 days? EDIT: I think you misu

• humanrebar 9y ago
  > Why would you take this part metaphorically, but insist that God have literally created the world in 7 days? There are a few schools of thought about this, but three popular ones are: 1. The creation story is a different genre. It's a poem, not a historical account, so you can think the Bible is absolutely true while allowing for poetic license in these chapters. The genre shifts back to history later in Genesis (with various opinions on where that is, some saying one creation passage of Genesis is poetic, the other historical). 2. The word "day" is mistranslated. It's better translated as "era". As in "back in the day". So Genesis is describing seven prehistoric eras. 3. Since the passage also refers to sunsets and sunrises, it's literally a rotation of the Earth. But God is omnipotent, so it's fine. ...and there are a few other competing thoughts. Do you have a scientific problem with any of the ones I listed? Other objections are fine, too, but I'm mostly trying to show how science and biblical literalism are fine together. The usual objections to #3 involve carbon dating, fossil records, etc., but none of them really refute the creation story as much as describe the world that already exists. Why couldn't God have created pre-decayed isotopes and a fossil record? That's a metaphysical and/or theological question, not a scientific one. So we don't really have a scientific conflict here. In my mind, God could have easily tweaked input parameters (to, say, make sure Earth has oceans and continents) and "JIT recompiled" the universe like so much source code. Why didn't Genesis describe the creation process more specifically? That's, again, a theological question, not a scientific one. But, practically, how would you describe, say, writing software, to a literate ancient Egyptian Jew (i.e, Moses)?
  • dragonwriter 9y ago
    #1 is not literalism, it is a reason for rejecting a literal reading of certain passages. “The Bible is sometimes literally true, but sometimes not” is the view that literalism is defined in opposition to.
    • humanrebar 9y ago
      People don't think God is literally a shepherd or he literally makes people lie down beside still waters. It doesn't mean they don't think psalm 23 isn't true. They just read it as a poem. Part of the problem is that people used to call something "fundamentalism" but then the word "fundamentalist" started being a negative word and people had to find some other ways to describe themselves. When people say they are "biblical literalist" (yeah, words drift), they basically mean that they trust the Bible to be absolutely trustworthy. It doesn't mean they don't practice critical analysis such as accounting for genre. It does mean they don't, say, commit adultery because "the Bible isn't literal".
      • dragonwriter 9y ago
        > Part of the problem is that people used to call something "fundamentalism" but then the word "fundamentalist" started being a negative word and people had to find some other ways to describe themselves. Literalism was not coined as a term in response to fundamentalism becoming negative with other groups; fundamentalists still call themselves fundamentalists. Literalism has always been a term for a doctrine within they fundamentalist and Evangelical traditional, which is distinct from the simple inerrantism that is a more common Christian doctrine (simple inerrantism is basically the doctrine that the Bible, understood as intended, is correct in what it teaches; there are slightly different forms of this doctrine in the Protestant and Catholic communities, but they are generally similar and similar in how they differ from literalism.) > When people say they are "biblical literalist" (yeah, words drift), they basically mean that they trust the Bible to be absolutely trustworthy. No, that’s just inerrantism. Literalism at least purports to be a stronger position. (In practice, I agree that it's actually not and that “literalism” is an empty conceit.)
  • beojan 9y ago
    So you don't even disagree with me. I didn't mean science is contradictory to believing the bible at all, that's why I singled out biblical literalism (i.e. believing the bible to be literally word for word true) as being a straw man. > Why didn't Genesis describe the creation process more specifically? Because it was written down by people who hadn't yet (or were only just) developing place value. They clearly wouldn't understand an even slightly accurate explanation.
    • humanrebar 9y ago
      > ... biblical literalism as being a straw man. There are some definitional problems here (1). "Biblical inerrancy" is a more accurate term, but it's used interchangeably with "biblical literalism" for reasons I'm not clear on. Nobody reads every word of the Bible literally. Portions of it are obviously poems. There perhaps wasn't really a Good Samaritan. That was a parable. But people who believe the Bible is inerrant do not think, "Hey, this part seems dumb to me. Let's just get rid of that part," which is a different reaction to reading the Genesis creation story. But there are people who think the world was created in seven days 100k years ago (or even more recently). I was trying to describe a few different approaches, one of which involves interpreting a passage of Genesis as a poem. Other two approaches take that passage more literally. All of the above fit under the umbrella of "biblical inerrancy" rather easily. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism#Background