Why Literal?

Throughout these examples you've confused "faith" with "trust". One clue may have been that you use the word "trust" over and over again. "Faith" is belief in something without evidence. Trust is when I trust my TV not to blow up because I've turned it on a bazillion times without that happening, and deductive logic implies that I can probably do so again without injury. Science is based on that kind of trust - that things we see occuring over and over again probably will continue to occur. Also we can generally extend this the other way - things that occur over and over again probably also occured in the past. Much of evolutionary theory is built on these kinds of assumptions, because they're better assumptions than the alternative (there's no natural order to the universe, which is contrary to most people's experience).I have trust in things that I have evidence for, but I don't have faith. I don't trust things that there's no reason to believe exist. But bible-believing Christians commit these acts on a regular basis. (You may be interested to know that atheists comprise less than 1 percent of prison inmates - the majority are religious.) Of course, I anticipate your response: "Those people aren't TRUE christians." This is the "True Scotsman" fallacy. When members of a group you hope to defend fail to meet a high standard you can always say that they aren't "truly" members of that group. It's a pretty useless argument.The truth is, Christians aren't really any better than anybody else. At least, not any better than honest, contientious person of any other creed, even atheism. (I don't recall laziness, racism, or even drug abuse being prohibited by the ten commandments. In fact the commandments say that you SHOULD be lazy on the Sabbath, because God was.)Out of curiosity, what do you mean there would be no evolution? Do you mean no one would believe that the diversity of life is due to evolution? Or do you honestly believe that plants and animals would stop evolving simply because all humans had agreed that they couldn't? We certainly observe them evolving now. What would change?

If you can't get the details of your agruments right, how are we supposed to accept your larger conclusions?Anyway, how am I picking apart your arguments? You said "true bible-believing Christians who followed the 10 commandments wouldn't do anything bad or get cancer." I pointed out that plenty of Christians who say they do these things commit bad acts or get cancer. (BTW I'm not aware that the 10 commandments say "Thou Shall Not Get Cancer." It's also not a "B17 Deficiency", it's a genetic failure of pre-programmed cell death - instead of dying, they divide unchecked.) I also pointed out that the 10 commandments are an incomplete moral code as they do not prohibit racism or sexism, for instance. Let me put the question to you - is it reasonable to expect you to be open-minded about a theory you consider wrong? I don't really think so. so why do you demand that of us? This isn't logical. I could just as easily say "the bible goes against evolution, so there's no evidence for the bible." It's not a logical implication. You're repeating this like a mantra. Trying to convince yourself? I'll pose another question with a different built-in assumption - are new species being created by god? Because new species are arising all the time. Where are they coming from?Creationism can't explain the data (genetic similarities/lineages, the order of the fossil record, the effacacy of natural selection) as well as evolution can. All those things are evidence for evolution because evolution explains that data concisely. You can say there's no evidence, but saying doesn't make it so. It's therefore incumbent on you to explain how the weight of evidence we have for ToE has been incorrectly interpreted. Is there one bit of evidence that gives rise to the theory without any assumptions about evolution? No, that's not how science works. Evidence must be taken as a whole to develop a theory, and that's just what scientists did. You can't extrapolate a trend with only one point of data.

Have you never seen a compass? It's a flat circle with North, South, East, and West printed right one it. It's not a sphere.And those directions aren't corners. A corner is an intersection of two vertices. A sphere has no corners.But it doesn't matter. "Four corners of the Earth" is just a metaphor, which you would be able to accept if you didn't insist on total biblical literalism. But you unfortunately have to invent radical new geometries to support biblical literalism, which just gets weaker and weaker...Have you considered the possibility that a story could be false, and yet express a truth? This is what is meant by "mythically true". I can make up a story on the spot that could express a truth, but wasn't an account of actual events. Does that invalidate the lerger truth of my story? I don't think so. Why does the bible have to be literally true in every sense to contain truth? Did not Jesus teach in parables?By the way, dissecting your comments doesn't make me feel good. What would make me feel good would be for people like you to open their minds to the truth that exists all around us, even in things that are myths (yes, like your bible).

Taking documents at face value is pretty dumb. There's nothing in the bible that couldn't be there as an effort to justify all-too-human actions, garner support for one's particular cult, or simply explain the observed world in a way that makes sense at the time.A document can't be used to verify itself. That's totally illogical.Belief in God and belief in the inerrancy of the bible both require faith. But I don't think people realize that they're separate acts of faith. One can believe in God and deny the bible, since at no time has god gone on the record to say he wrote it.I mean, I could write a book and instead of signing my name, I could simply write "these are the words of David O", and in the absence of input from you, who could contest it?Belief in a literal bible is even more self-contradictory. The bible has phrasings that are contradictory on the face of them. That much is certain. I've heard the explanations, but each one relies on squeezing out meaning "between the lines" to an extent that no one who's doing so could claim to be making a literal reading! That's the paradox - if you want a literal bible you can't read every line of it literally. You know, unless we were gay. That's a pretty heterocentrist comment to make, actually. I would reconsider any further statements like this - they tend to confirm the worst stereotypes about believers.

And therefore not literally his words, now are they?

Sure, there's no real reason to doubt that. But that doesn't make every claim I make true, does it? You can assume I wrote what I did, but the reasonable thing to do would be to consider why I wrote what I did. What my authorial motivations were.I have no doubt that the bible is a real book. I have no doubt that real living people wrote it. But that simply doesn't make it true! Not so. Haven't you ever done literary interpretation? Any interpretation you make about my meaning must be supported by and argued from the text. Therefore the essence of clear writing is an effort by the author to ensure that the text supports as few meanings as possible (the meanings he/she intended). I may not be a biblical scholar, but reading texts in English is something I'm exceedingly good at. If I see a contradition in the bible, it's because it's there, or because the bible is occasionally metaphoric or even poorly worded in places. If you don't see the contradictions, it's because you're bending the words and reading between the lines to smooth them out. What I want to know is, how can such word-bending be considered a "literal" interpretation?

Do you seriously just blindly accept the illogic of using a book to verify itself? Can you not see the circularity?

In fact, booboo, maybe you'd like to start with some of the contradictions raised in this thread.(Blanket generalizations of "You just don't understand" are pretty meaningless, if that's what you were thinking about doing...)

Passages exist that say just that. If you believe that those passages say something else, it's based on your own interpretation and not a literal reading of the bible. Sci-Am is not a peer-reviewed journal, so unless the scientists had a formal paper for public viewing, most people would reject their claims. But if they had a model that explained more diseases than the Germ Theory (kind of hard because we can see germs at work with technology such as microscopes) their theory would be considered. The claims of science are always tentative because they move closer to the truth each time. Can you say the same for your bible? There's plently of fossilization. Including transitional forms aplenty. The problem with fossilization is that it's an inherently rare process. We're lucky to have any fossils at all. It is a falsifiable theory. One potential falsification would be observation of fully-formed animals springing forth from nothingness via the action of a god or gods.Observable? You can see the same fossils scientists use to make their conclusions. You can see new species arising in the lab and in the wild. You can see random mutation + natural selection give rise to function without design. What else do you need to observe?Evidence is never falsifiable. Only theories are falsifiable. That you don't seem to know the difference does not bode well for our ability to reason with you...For somebody who demands such high standards from science, you seem to be pretty credulous about the bible. Maybe you could give US "observable, repeatable evidence" that the bible is the literal words of god?

And I explained how it is, in fact, science. Did you have a specific disgreement with my evidence for its scientific basis, or are you just going to pretend like you didn't read it? To the contrary. I have the support of at least 300 scientists named "Steve", as well as the rest of the paleontology and biology communities. Do you have some evidence that the thousands of fossils uncovered as transitional elements are now no longer considered so? You would, of course, have to prove this for all of them...

Now that's what I call "hedging your bets". You've basically said "evolution is false because there aren't any transitional fossils, but even if there were, evolution would still be false." That doesn't leave much room to convince you, now does it?Wouldn't an animal with characteristics between two other groups be a transitional form? Especially if we could reasonably infer that it was related to those two groups in some way? You'll have to convince me that it wouldn't by definition be a transitional form.

There's a number of biblical contraditions awaiting your perusal in a couple of the forums. Pick anyone you like.But in order to be a biblical literalist, you must provide an reconciliation that is NOT based on either outside context, or recourse to previous translations. As a biblical literalist, you can't interpret the words. You have to take them at face value. Address any contradiction (you pick), but you have to do it with those restrictions, or else you can't be a literalist. Thus, creationism is a kind of intellectual cowardice. I couldn't have made a better point if I tried.Here's a crazy idea - maybe Hell doesn't exist? If the bible is wrong about the origin and development of life - which you appear prepared to admit, if you weren't scared of Hell - maybe it's wrong about a lot more? Maybe it's wrong about Heaven and Hell? Maybe it's wrong about God? Maybe there's not much point in defending your posts because they have no defense? Maybe that should give you a clue. Anyway, they're YOUR topics - you picked 'em - so if you can't support them, why did you post them? Not that we'd know from your efforts.

Some people may have begun with personal criticisms of you, but that's been in response to your maddening tendancy to abandon topics that you appear to be losing. That's hardly being a good sport, now is it? And here, you're proudly announcing that you're doing it again.I'm sorry people may have hurt your feelings, but it's pretty clear you're using that as an excuse to abandon your sinking ships. After all, what can we assume when the exchange goes like this:BBC: Show me proof of evolution/biblical contraditions!
Us: Here's some right here.
BBC:... (Nothing, as he abandons the thread.)If you didn't plan to respond (say, to the topic where you asked us to show you biblical contradictions, and we did), why did you ask us to devote time and effort to showing you evidence you never planned to look at? Quite frankly, you're wasting our time, and some of us are starting to not appreciate it. Isn't that a kind of false witness? My fiance had a rat, which she fed almost nothing but seeds (go to the pet store and examine the contents of rat/gerbil feed), and it died of cancer. Huge cancers. There was more cancer in the rat than there was rat. I'm pretty sure that apricot seeds were in there. How do you explain that?Anyway, ten seeds how often? Per day? Per meal? 10 seeds EVER?If you really believe that about apricot seeds, you're even more credulous than we might have guessed. These claims smack of hucksterism. Show me some medical double-blind studies, maybe there will be credence. But there's plenty that people say keeps cancer away - sleeping with your bed pointed north, acupuncture, all kinds of stuff. Do you believe that too? Citation, please?

Hrm, I'll mention that to my fiance. (She's thinking of getting another rat.) As I recall, there was a bit of that discharge.The rat (Miss Monkey, it was named) did live for many years. I understand that they do not have much of a lifespan.

When I read Gen 2, it says "...the Lord formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air..." (emphasis mine). The clear, literal reading is that this is referring to every beast and bird, not just the ones in the Garden.So the question to you is, why do so-called biblical literalists take such liberties with the reading?