[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Belacqua]

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?

from Wikipedia:

Misunderstanding the genre of the Genesis creation narrative, meaning the intention of the author(s) and the culture within which they wrote, can result in a misreading;[7] misreading the story as history rather than theology leads to Creationism and the denial of evolution.[8] As scholar of Jewish studies, Jon D. Levenson, puts it:

How much history lies behind the story of Genesis? Because the action of the primeval story is not represented as taking place on the plane of ordinary human history and has so many affinities with ancient mythology, it is very far-fetched to speak of its narratives as historical at all."[9]

and

Although tradition attributes Genesis to Moses, biblical scholars hold that it, together with the following four books (making up what Jews call the Torah and biblical scholars call the Pentateuch), is "a composite work, the product of many hands and periods."[10] A common hypothesis among biblical scholars today is that the first major comprehensive draft of the Pentateuch was composed in the late 7th or the 6th century BCE (the Jahwist source), and that this was later expanded by the addition of various narratives and laws (the Priestly source) into a work very like the one existing today.[3]

As for the historical background which led to the creation of the narrative itself, a theory which has gained considerable interest, although still controversial, is "Persian imperial authorisation". This proposes that the Persians, after their conquest of Babylon in 538 BCE, agreed to grant Jerusalem a large measure of local autonomy within the empire, but required the local authorities to produce a single law code accepted by the entire community. It further proposes that there were two powerful groups in the community – the priestly families who controlled the Temple, and the landowning families who made up the "elders" – and that these two groups were in conflict over many issues, and that each had its own "history of origins", but the Persian promise of greatly increased local autonomy for all provided a powerful incentive to cooperate in producing a single text.[11]

I am not, of course, pronouncing that Wikipedia is correct in all things. Only that what they write here is consistent with what I've read elsewhere -- theories that modern scholars take seriously. 

While the legends of creation had older roots, the recording and redaction had a specific purpose based on the political needs of the time. Probably I shouldn't have said they were made up out of "whole cloth." That was too much. Let me say instead: edited together out of older tropes, to make something they needed at the time.
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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.

Right, if the incarnation happened today we could measure how tall Jesus is. Is there an empirical scientific way to determine whether he is or is not Logos made flesh? I don't know of any. 

Here is a passage from The Hidden and the Manifest, a book of essays by David Bentley Hart, an East Orthodox Christian theologian. It describes briefly what the Christian god is and is not. 

A God who is a being among beings, who possesses the properties of his nature in a
composite way, as aspects of his nature rather than as names ultimately
convertible with one another in the simplicity of his transcendent essence, is a
myth, a mere supreme being, whose being and nature are in some sense distinct
from one another, who receives his being from being as such and so is less than
being, who (even if he is changeless and eternal) in some sense becomes the
being he is by partaking of that prior unity (existence) that allows his nature to
persist as the composite reality it is. He is a God whose being has nonexistence
as its opposite; he is not, that is to say, the infinite actus of all things, id quo
maius cogitari nequit, but only an “ontic” God. There simply is no such God.
Atheism is not the mirror inversion of this sort of theism, but both its inmost
secret and its most necessary corrective. If God is thought of in such terms—if
his true transcendence as the being of all beings is forgotten, hidden behind the
imposing spectacle of a more conformable “supreme being”—then the longing
to know the truth of God cannot help but lead to the rejection of God as truth;
the inevitable terminus of “theism,” so conceived, is nihilism.

This should be clear that Hart is also denying the existence of the kind of god that people on this forum tend to argue against.

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As an example of how we probably shouldn't imagine that ancient people thought the way we do, here is something from a new review of Dominion, by Tom Holland, in which he looks into the influences Christianity has had on European thought in general.

https://www.amazon.com/Dominion-Christia...247&sr=1-1

the bedrock of much modern social activism and
protest – discontent with the status quo and the desire for a
better world – is something we may owe to Christianity. ‘To
dream of a world transformed by a reformation, or an
enlightenment, or a revolution’, writes Holland, ‘is nothing
exclusively modern. Rather, it is to dream as medieval
visionaries dreamed: to dream in the manner of a Christian.’
The impact of Christianity on the way we live, think and
speak has been extraordinarily pervasive, and not only in the
West, Holland concludes. Whether we like it or not, we live
in a ‘society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and
assumptions’. We could not even rebel against this heritage
without resort to Christian vocabulary, Christian ethical
tools and Christian notions of rebirth and renewal. It is not
for nothing that Nietzsche came up with the notion of the
Ubermensch: to unlearn Christianity would take nothing
less than a superhuman, quasi-divine effort.

I'm not saying that he's definitely right. Just that at least one serious scholar holds that Christianity changed our assumptions about how the world can work. If he's right, pre-Christian people would have conceived of some things very differently, and it would be wrong of us to project our post-Christian views onto them.