(December 1, 2014 at 7:33 am)FreeTony Wrote: Haha, brilliant. I must believe Paul then, just after I finish trying out this one weird trick to increase my penis size.Or Paul and the Paulettes, since around half of his writings are believed to have been written by others. In any case, that's about as close as you will get to a blanket 'the bible is the truly-true truth.' And even that isn't crystal clear: was Paul referring to the OT, or to the whole book? Obviously it wasn't completed at the time!
I may be wrong, but I don't think it's that common for such books (collections of stories and cultural myths) to outright claim that they are true. The people who use them to control or influence a population are the ones who will claim divine influence. Even the wording in the text I quoted leaves room for people to determine if any of the stories are literal truth or allegory.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
