rationalskepticism.org

quas wrote:

TimONeill wrote:Because to interpret everything in the Bible literally leads to having to believe things that are demonstrably not the case. If we know for a fact that the Earth is not flat, then interpreting passages that seem to say it is literally leads the interpreter to have to deny reality.

Of course we know now that the Earth isn't flat. Why would the Church Fathers have any reason to suspect that the Earth isn't flat?

Since many of them were fairly learned guys, they had read their Aristotle and others who made the relevant arguments that showed the earth was a sphere. Once people worked out that lunar eclipses are caused by the shadow of the Earth on the Moon it doesn't take too much deduction to draw the clear inference from the fact that this shadow is curved. If they then observed a ship sailing over the horizon and saw that its hull disappears from view first and the tip of its mast last the sphericity of the Earth is pretty much there to be seen.

These guys weren't idiots.

As for why some things which are clearly absurd - like people walking on water or raising people from the dead - are interpreted figuratively when geocentric passages aren't, that seems to be because those things can be seen as single instance suspensions of normality - ie miracles.

And yes, I know that doesn't make much sense but it does make marginally more sense than outright literalism.

It still doesn't make any more sense, not even a teensy-weensy bit more.

Yes, it does make a teensy-weensy bit more. Accepting that the Earth is a sphere even if the Bible says its flat while also accepting that while men don't normally walk on water, this one did by God's magic does make more sense than accepting the latter and rejecting the sphericity of the Earth, despite what your own eyes tell you when you watch a ship sail over the horizon. Yes, I know "miracles" are still silly, but rejecting something like the Earth being a sphere as well as believing in miracles is sillier.

If we use the "single instance" cop-out, then we could say," One time, at Garden of Eden, the devil disguised himself as a serpent..." That perfectly explains why all the other snakes couldn't talk to human, because the devil didn't disguise himself as a snake anymore. Because it was one time event too, we could also say that the Jonah incident really happened, after all the Bible didn't record anyone else besides Jonah surviving for 3 days inside a whale's stomach. And the flood, that was a one time event too...

Yes, they could do that. The Jonah story, for example, often was interpreted literally. That doesn't change what I say above. You can't use the "single instance" cop out when it comes to whether the Earth is a sphere or flat.

There must be another reason that would enable Christians to differentiate between what's really literal and what's not.

Eh?