This one change in wording aside, though, I believe the point of the post still standsno matter which wording is chosen. Would you agree?
The central premise? Maybe, but I would like to focus on one particular thing you said before being more concrete:
I propose that the use of the Bible and other 'historical' literature to generate knowledge about the physical world is not, as many claim, unscientific
Many people would claim that? I'm not so sure they would, under the kinds of contexts you might have in mind. It
would be unscientific to selectively dismiss evidence, however. To stick with the age of humans, if we had the Bible that say we used as evidence for "Humans have been around for at least 10,000 years", that would be fine. But to keep the that theory when we learn the book is only 4,000 years old would be bordering on unscientific, if not actually.
Those people that draw age of earth based knowledge from the Bible though, do tend to commit many of the logical errors that we now agreed on. They don't say the supported statement "Human kind is at least 10,000 years old" they tend to say "Human kind is at most 15,000 years old". This might be a fine scientific theory based solely on the evidence of the Bible. Further evidence might support it, or falsify it. Ultimately though, "Because someone said so and wrote it down", should be seen as shaky evidence the moment we discover that some people say and write falsehoods and make mistakes.
I would suggest simply any theory or factual claim based solely on the two pieces of evidence ("An author said so" and "Authors don't always speak the truth") would be seen as
much less of a scientific theory than M-Theory is today (arbitrarily picked theory which has sufficient murmurings disputing its scientific status).
It would also be unscientific to continue to stick to the theory after a sequence of ad hoc explanations as to why falsifying evidence is not falsifying have been required. It would be supernatural if those ad hoc explanations involved miracles or other divine intervention (which in the real world, is so very often is the case).
Speaking of the real world (as opposed to hypothetical world), there are people there that don't just use the Bible as evidence of ideas, they simply believe the contents of the Bible are True. I think it fair to criticize this as unscientific (especially if they attempt to pile up evidence that looks to support their presumed truth, and discard evidence that is problematic).
There are others that study the Bible as a means to gain information about the world in a scientific fashion. They try to piece together the early church structures based on the writings of their key eye witness, Paul, as well as archaeology and other contemporary authors. They try to build models of the Tabernacle, and uncover the history of the Israelite people based on the clues in the Bible - and gain a broader understanding of the general Near Eastern cultures during that time period.
So in what context are these 'many people' saying that using the Bible as a source of knowledge is unscientific?
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.