At 03:15 PM 4/28/2010, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
As to the "hours would be as days" reasoning which allows "7 days" to be
a synonym for "billions of years", that exact sort of reasoning is used
to dodge all questions of errors in the Bible. It's what makes
creationism untestable, and therefore invalid as a theory.
Different people make those arguments. The literalist fundamentalists
claim that 7 days is 7 24-hour solar days, or whatever that might
mean before the sun exists! But those who look at the story as an
ancient teaching story with a religious foundation point out that the
words have many different possible meanings. And the general advice
from those who know this stuff is that you know, though your own
innate truth-detector, I'd call it your "heart," what's the truth.
Heart? Does he mean that muscle in the chest? What, do I check my
heart rate when reading? What DOES he mean?
If you don't know, don't bother asking....
A consequence of understanding this flexibility of interpretation is
that it becomes a lousy science text-book, but, then again, it
doesn't appear to have been written with that purpose, does it?
I've seen the same stuff with the Qur'an. There are those who claim
that the Qur'an is really accurate scientifically. I will say that
I've found it remarkably "consistent" with science, for a book of the
time when it was revealed, but it has, very much, this flexibility of
interpretation. Again, it's not a science textbook. If it inspires
someone to look for something, great, but you can't prove the
existence of a thing because of mention in the Qur'an, for it quite
literally tells stories, and the purpose of the story isn't to be, as
I mentioned before, a history textbook or a science text. It's about
that heart thing.
