Quote:
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Originally Posted by John Henry
Assumptions:
1) God is not stupid.
2) God wants us to believe and understand His word.
3) God can do whatever He wants.
4) The Bible is His word.
5) God is good.
Observations:
1) Genesis states that the world was made in 7 days.
2) The world seems to have taken a bit longer than that to form.
The observations here do not appear to fit our assumptions. We do not expect God to lie to us and if He wanted it to believe His word literally, He would not have made the universe seem so clearly to have taken longer than seven days to form.
So we are led to the conclusion that He was using a crude metaphor. Why, if it would cause misunderstanding? Surely if He had not meant 'day', when He said day, He would have added "By the way, I don't really mean 'day'" for clarity.
Keeping it simple for the primitive tribes? Then why not cut out the days altogether. "First I did this, then I did that... and, boy did it take a long time". Now I just thought of that myself and I'm pretty stupid compared to God. Couldn't he have thought of it too?
Also, if you're going to pick and choose which bits of the Bible you take literally and which you don't, you may as well chuck the whole thing out and start again. After all, who's to say He really meant "Thou shalt not"?
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The time in which the Bible was written is a significant factor here. It was written at a time in which "literal" writings were not only NOT commonplace but they were extremely unusual. The common language and method of communicating ideas at the time involved poetic stories and metaphor. This can be seen simply by the many accounts in which Jesus is shown in the Bible telling a story that is not necessarily factual and leaving it up to the apostles to discover what it means - many times they don't fully understand it until after he is dead. Taking into consideration that the Bible is not a historical book but a book meant to convey the relationship between God and humans, it is not God's place to "give" us the answers, but our place to "find" the answers through free will. Again, the Biblical stories of Jesus make this very clear - the idea is that Jesus could have easily proven that he was who people believed he was by just showing everyone very clearly and out in the open, but that denies people the ability to deny God, thus denying them free will and denying us of the inherent dignity that goes with it.