Earlier you wrote that:
Here you seem to be asserting a truth claim: that the stories' "core message" would be contradicted by objective scientific facts. And since you have said elsewhere that the person making the assertion carries the burden of proof, I’m asking you to demonstrate that your claim is correct.
I KNOW that the global flood didn’t happen. I KNOW that the Genesis creation myth is not what happened.
I DO NOT KNOW that the “core message” of each of these stories would be contradicted if the story is not scientifically true. So I’m asking you to support your claim.
First, we’d have to establish what the “core message” of each story is. Then you’d have to show that, given this core message, it is no longer meaningful if the story containing it is fiction. You haven’t done these things yet.
I am skeptical of your claim. Writers who wish to teach moral messages have used fiction as the medium for such lessons pretty much forever. They continue to do so. If the “core message” of a story is its moral interpretation, then fiction works perfectly well. Harry Potter novels and Spiderman comics may use these techniques as well. Why not?
Scholars currently say that the Book of Genesis reached its current form sometime before the Babylonian exile, so prior to the 6th century BC. I’m curious if you can name any narrative text from that time or earlier which purports to give a straightforward account of events WITHOUT any moral or ideological message involved. I don’t know of any. When we read texts from this time, it is an informed person’s objective view to see them as carrying such messages.
Herodotus is often said to be the first writer to attempt straightforward accounts of historical events WITHOUT adding in moral messages. He was writing at least 100 years after Genesis was edited together, and he was seen as an innovator. In other words, the kind of history he was writing was not the kind of thing that the authors of Genesis wished to write. And his methods were slow to catch on.
Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico are taken to be accurate history, and of course these were written hundreds of years after Herodotus. At the time, though, it was still considered normal to write the kind of foundational myth in the same genre as the Hebrew Bible. Obviously Vergil’s Aeneid is myth written to give Rome a glamorous foundation, though everyone who read it at the time was perfectly aware that the events in the story are fictional.
One book you could read to address this whole topic is Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Rorty is an atheist and so his approach to using fiction is perfectly safe for atheists to use. He makes the case that in teaching us about our moral lives, and how we can increase our empathy and solidarity with others, fiction is often more effective than non-fiction. He does close readings of novels by Nabokov and Orwell to make this point. All of these novels are of course fiction, yet the "core message" of each is not harmed by the fact that the events recounted never happened.
So I disagree with you that the “core message” of a text is always its literal sense.
Quote:The Genesis creation myth, and the Noah flood myth, are two examples that not only contain risibly erroneous claims, but whose core message is contradicted by objective scientific facts.
Here you seem to be asserting a truth claim: that the stories' "core message" would be contradicted by objective scientific facts. And since you have said elsewhere that the person making the assertion carries the burden of proof, I’m asking you to demonstrate that your claim is correct.
I KNOW that the global flood didn’t happen. I KNOW that the Genesis creation myth is not what happened.
I DO NOT KNOW that the “core message” of each of these stories would be contradicted if the story is not scientifically true. So I’m asking you to support your claim.
First, we’d have to establish what the “core message” of each story is. Then you’d have to show that, given this core message, it is no longer meaningful if the story containing it is fiction. You haven’t done these things yet.
I am skeptical of your claim. Writers who wish to teach moral messages have used fiction as the medium for such lessons pretty much forever. They continue to do so. If the “core message” of a story is its moral interpretation, then fiction works perfectly well. Harry Potter novels and Spiderman comics may use these techniques as well. Why not?
Scholars currently say that the Book of Genesis reached its current form sometime before the Babylonian exile, so prior to the 6th century BC. I’m curious if you can name any narrative text from that time or earlier which purports to give a straightforward account of events WITHOUT any moral or ideological message involved. I don’t know of any. When we read texts from this time, it is an informed person’s objective view to see them as carrying such messages.
Herodotus is often said to be the first writer to attempt straightforward accounts of historical events WITHOUT adding in moral messages. He was writing at least 100 years after Genesis was edited together, and he was seen as an innovator. In other words, the kind of history he was writing was not the kind of thing that the authors of Genesis wished to write. And his methods were slow to catch on.
Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico are taken to be accurate history, and of course these were written hundreds of years after Herodotus. At the time, though, it was still considered normal to write the kind of foundational myth in the same genre as the Hebrew Bible. Obviously Vergil’s Aeneid is myth written to give Rome a glamorous foundation, though everyone who read it at the time was perfectly aware that the events in the story are fictional.
One book you could read to address this whole topic is Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Rorty is an atheist and so his approach to using fiction is perfectly safe for atheists to use. He makes the case that in teaching us about our moral lives, and how we can increase our empathy and solidarity with others, fiction is often more effective than non-fiction. He does close readings of novels by Nabokov and Orwell to make this point. All of these novels are of course fiction, yet the "core message" of each is not harmed by the fact that the events recounted never happened.
So I disagree with you that the “core message” of a text is always its literal sense.
