(August 28, 2019 at 6:59 am)Belaqua Wrote: A purely literal reading of the Bible is the compliment that poorly-educated believers pay to science. They think that the only way to get important meaning from a book is to read it like a science text, so they read it that way. In this they ignore the history of their own religion and unknowingly agree that scientific statements -- ideally unambiguous, requiring no interpretation, and either true or false -- are the only good kind of statements.
I do not read the bible as a science textbook. Rather, I read the bible as the fictional mythology it is.
When we refer to science and the bible what we mean is that our current understanding of science clashes with how the bible describes the natural world. After all, if a real divine being had chosen Messengers to write its Word, one would think that the contents of the book would align with our current understanding of science. Since it does not, it clearly means there was no divine inspiration; it means the bible is just mythology created by primitive fallible human minds.
