Ain\'t nature wonderful (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, September 17, 2010, 11:17 (5160 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

BALANCE_MAINTAINED: The reason I use the word non-sense about literal interpretations of the Bible is because it is clearly not a book to be interpreted literally.-For an agnostic like myself, this is easy to accept, but your statement is fraught with danger when it comes to people who believe the Bible to be the word of God. Who draws the line between the literal and the figurative? How do you as an individual even draw it for yourself? Central to Christianity are the virgin birth, the miracles and the resurrection. If you don't take them literally, where does that leave Christianity? Genesis is clearly a huge problem, and rather frustratingly the translator's notes tend to state the obvious ("swarm with swarms" is a cognate construction to emphasize fertility) but shed no light on such crucial issues as the ambiguity of "kind". If anything, I'd say the statement that God was "concerned with defining and dividing time, space and species" suggests that God did create the species individually. 46tn gives three general classifications, which again are obvious, but still doesn't resolve the ambiguity of "after their kind".
 
I must add, though, that I really appreciate the trouble you've gone to and the new dimensions you're bringing to our discussions.