Reality exists. Reality can be expressed in literal terms or symbolic terms. Reality remains real regardless of the mode of expression.
What's ambiguous?
Let's take the example of the Ram Setu (Rama's bridge). There's a bunch of rocks there in the sea. That's an observed reality.
According to geological models the bunch of rocks is a natural formation that once linked Sri Lanka to the mainland. According to Hindu activists, the bunch of rocks is the remains of the causeway that Rama built to rescue Sita.
There is a conflict here between the scientific interpretation of reality, and a literalist interpretation of the Ramayana, and the resolution of the conflict will determine whether a canal gets built in the straits between Southern India and Sri Lanka.
Now don't you thing it's very odd that this kind of thing happens so regularly with religious stories? If they're intended to be symbolic, why do people so often mistake them as literal historical accounts? I mean, nobody objects to construction work in Nuneaton on the grounds that Dorothea Brooke once built a cottage there. People understand that a novel like Middlemarch is a made-up story, however symbolically meaningful. Why don't they understand religious stories in the same way?
It couldn't be that religious communities have an interest in insisting on the literal interpretation, could it?
It's confusing to stand in front of a Chagall with a calculator, seeking 'values' in the picture one can enter on the keypad. But the confusion is not Chagall's.
Nor mine, nor Richard Dawkins. This is a strawman. (Heh, we're back on topic
). The problem comes when religion claims to be part of calculator-world, by making potentially verifiable claims about the natural world, as though Chagall were to come to us and say, 'I'm not really interested in your symbolic understanding of my painting. I want to insist that brides really can fly.'
Religion is art.
Religion is literature. It is pictures. It is architecture. And it is the ideas these things convey.
In
The God Delusion (somewhere - I'm useless at finding quotations
), Dawkins says something to the effect that if, by the word 'religious', people mean the feeling they get from looking out across a mountain landscape or listening to a sublime piece of music, then he's a religious man. Is that what you mean?
'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang