[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[GrandizerII]

What American hicks?

The village I'm talking about happens to be in a country that borders Israel. So close enough to Jerusalem.

And if we can't take cues from what Middle Eastern villagers believe, then who do we take cues from? We don't know either way how the stories were originally intended so we have to speculate based on what we can see.

Sorry, my mistake. Assuming it was America was wrong on my part.

Did the village have TV? Did it participate in a capitalist economy? Did it have some acquaintance with, say, heliocentrism? 

In my opinion it's better to learn about ancient people from what ancient people wrote. Just living in the same area is no guarantee. 

Is there such a thing as non-empirical evidence? I don't know, but it can certainly be empirically demonstrated to me that God does exist. There are infinite ways this could've happened. But alas, nothing. Makes you wonder.

Science works extremely well because it limits itself to certain methods, and relies on empirical evidence that is quantifiable, repeatable, etc. 

Assuming that that's all there is in the world is like going to the beach with a metal detector and declaring that, after your search, everything on the beach was metal. Because that's all you found. 

Surely you've been on this forum long enough to know that since Plato, theories of god say that god is existence itself, or purely noetic, or actualization with no potential. If god was one object among other objects, and therefore the sort of thing that science could deal with, it wouldn't be god, by definition. You're thinking of Zeus or something, but not the Christian god. 

And I know, no one here likes the logical metaphysical arguments for god either. But those explained long long ago, before the rise of modern science, why god is not an empirically-knowable object. 

What source says they invented these stories? Sounds like this bit is more conjecture than based on evidence.

Did they invented Noah as well?

As I say, it's based on historical and linguistic evidence, the political problems at the time when (scholars now claim) Genesis was edited together, and other non-supernaturally held opinions. Sure, there is always conjecture when we don't have a working time machine. But it's not pure fantasy. 

I don't know about Noah -- when flood stories got rewritten into Hebrew and adopted for the current needs of the intended audience.

What evidence suggests they invented the stories as opposed to making use of prior stories? This is the specific I'm contesting. Is there a link I can check?

And no, I'm talking about the Christian God. You know the one that underwent incarnation, came in flesh (the Son at least)? That's an example of a potentially empirical evidence right there.