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From: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: About Literalism
Message-ID: <516@psivax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 21-Jun-85 19:09:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: psivax.516
Posted: Fri Jun 21 19:09:04 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 24-Jun-85 04:07:03 EDT
References: <15117@watmath.UUCP> <675@ihlpg.UUCP>
Reply-To: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Pacesetter Systems Inc., Sylmar, CA
Lines: 42

In article <675@ihlpg.UUCP> jeand@ihlpg.UUCP (Diaz) writes:
>>    Personally I do not find it either necessary or desirable to take
>> every such statement as historical truth.  There is a line in one of the
>> traditional catechisms -- a Presbyterian one, I think -- which describes
>> the Bible as "the only infallible rule of faith and practice", and I
>> find that a more helpful approach than trying to take it as an infallible
>> history or science book.
>
>My question here would be, if the author of the Bible <God> is not reliable
>in the fields of history or science, why should I think that he is
>reliable in the fields of 'faith and practice'?  Either he knows everything
>and is infallible, and we should listen to him, or he is not infallible,
>and I may as well live my life without listening to anyone else.
>
	I find two problems with this reasoning. The first(minor)
one is the assumtion that God is the *author* of the Bible in the
human sense, rather than tha *inspiration* or *source* for a book
written by many human authors. Second, and more important, is the
matter of *subject* material of the book. That is the Bible is *about*
faith and religous practice *not* science and history. Thus any
science or history in it is essentially incedental to the message of
the book. To place excessive detail about incedental matters in a book
is a sure way of making the book boring and incomprehensible. Reading
the Bible for science(say for instance Biology) is like reading a
Psychology text to learn Chemistry! It is even worse, since an
absolutely scientifically correct text would be unreadable by anyone
not himself omniscient, since it would include statements of facts
not yet even imagined by our best scientists. If *we* could not
understand such a book, how could we excpect a pre-technological
citizen of Israel to do so? It simply had to be written in the
vernacular, that is in simple, non-technical terms, and I have yet
to find a non-technical text on science that did not contain
significant distortions of reality(even Scientific American has this
problem from time to time). In short, it is a mistake to read the
Bible, or any other book, for anything outside of its primary
subject.
-- 

				Sarima (Stanley Friesen)

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