[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Belacqua]

Metaphor is when an entire story is not meant to be taken literally, but symbolizes an underlying message. 

No, metaphor is a trope in which one thing is said to be another thing. "Love is a rose." "Nature is a temple." 

And now we're going in circles. As branches of science--evolutionary biology, geology, history, and archaeology--have disproved scriptural claims one by one, those claims have morphed from literal truths into allegories.

People used to believe in deluge and six day creation but today it's more like a metaphor. 

We are going around in circles because you keep asserting that the stories started out as literal explanations and only changed later into allegorical or figurative meanings. "People used to believe in X but now it's a metaphor" is overly simple. Sometimes they did, and sometimes they didn't. Augustine and Origen didn't. 

Perhaps some Christians see the Bible largely as allegory, but there are some nonnegotiable beliefs that are virtually diagnostic of each religion. William Dembski, a Southern Baptist and prominent advocate of intelligent design creationism, has specified the "non-negotiables of Christianity" as these: divine creation, reflection of God’s glory in the world, the exceptionalism of humans made in the image of God, and the Resurrection of Jesus.

I'm not surprised you could find one such Christian, especially in modern America. What I've been saying all along is that earlier Christians were likely to interpret the stories non-literally, while modern dumb Americans are MORE likely to interpret them literally. So we've got Origen and Augustine (old, non-literal) and William Dumbski (new, literal), a juxtaposition which works in favor of the point I was making. 

To be clear and careful, I am making no claims about the total percentage of literalist Christians at any given time. I cannot make any claims, for example, about illiterate peasant Christians who heard about six-day creation in church. Farmers know that light comes from the sun and so it's silly to say that light was created before the sun, so they might well have taken the story non-literally, but the thing about people who can't write is that they tend not to leave memoirs. I'd be more comfortable speculating that among Christians who can read and write, a smaller percentage of them read six-day creation literally in the old days, compared to now. Because educated Christians in the old days would be more likely to know Augustine's work, whereas today they are unlikely to know Augustine, and more likely to know Dumbski. Again, this is unprovable speculation.

Then you don't know me. I never claimed some group of Christians are real and some not. 

Thank you, I'm glad of it. Next time you see someone doing that, I'd be grateful if you'd call them out.

Or they lied, made stuff up, like with all other holy books that are not your religion.

Yes, it is always possible that people were insincere. It is hard for me to know the private thoughts and motivations of people who are long dead. 

It usually goes like this

To the extent that people are insincere, or try to make up falsehoods to justify whatever they want to believe, they are doing a bad thing. 

To the extent that they are using myths as the basis for contemplation and discussion about what it is good to do, I see nothing wrong with that, and I think it's how human beings, so far, have tended to operate.