Commenting on this article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/opinion/sunday/christmas-christian-craig.html?ref=oembed
You don’t believe the Genesis account that the world was created in six days, or that Eve was made from Adam’s rib, do you? If the Hebrew Bible’s stories need not be taken literally, why not also accept that the New Testament writers took liberties?
Because the Gospels are a different type of literature than the primeval history of Genesis 1-11. The eminent Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen described Genesis 1-11 as history clothed in the figurative language of mythology, a genre he dubbed “mytho-history.” By contrast, the consensus among historians is that the Gospels belong to the genre of ancient biography, like the ‘Lives of Greeks and Romans’ written by Plutarch. As such, they aim to provide a historically reliable account.
How sad that anyone would assume that not take literally means taking liberties.
Apples and oranges.
Is someone who reads Aesop’s Fables while also assuming that animals don’t really talk in the real world thereby “taking liberties” in their reading of the fables?
Great link, Patrick. I should do a dissection of Coyne’s gaffes and logic fallacies some day. When it comes to facepalms, this was among my favorites from Coyne:
Craig does some bobbing and weaving after Kristof asks him why he takes the New Testament as gospel truth but not the Old Testament.
How do you explain Coyne’s apparent reading comprehension problem? Or is something else at work?
(I don’t agree with Dr. Craig on all of his positions but I was a bit surprised at some of Coyne’s misrepresentations, whether accidental or not.)
I remember some guy claiming that Tolkien’s Mythopoeia, specifically:
"I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends"
is an attack on theory of evolution. No sense of poetry.
I mean, it kind of is an attack on materialism, the entire poem is, but not on evolution specifically.