The Quadralemma

The conditions in the Quadralemma are not simple binary positions.Your apparent view is that God communicates reality to us by occasionally inspiring a few people to write - but providing us no objective way of working out whether a particular person was or was not inspired, or the extent to which they were inspired, or what the inspired words mean. I have to say that that does not seem to repesent much of an effort at communication and if God is unable or unwilling to do better then it is little different from being unable or unwilling to communicate at all. I cannot say that the idea that the stories must contain an element of literal truth does not seem to contribute significantly to actually solving the problem.If, as you say, nothing good can come from a story that is not literally true, why did Jesus teach in parables ? Surely any Christian must accept that a fiction can indeed carry a valuable theological message.

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We beleive the Big bang because the evidence indicates that it is real, that it actually happened. We beleive the communication of the scientists because we trust that they are able and willing to communicate reality to us about what actually happened. My objection to having a creation account be historically false is that it treats religion as something special, it treats religion with kid gloves. A religion claiming to have the True God proclaiming the story of creation presupposes that the said God actually knows something about the events that actually took place. If the said God shows no evidence of knowing what actually happened, one can reasonably doubt the veracity of that God.

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It would be hard to say that Genesis 1 is the equivalent of a scientific account of the creation of the universe. It seems to have more in common with myth - and if that were the case then it would be more like a parable - the real message would not be the literal surface meaning.I would add that Genesis 1 itself does not claim to be the True God's account of the creation. So it seems that the real problem may be that your branch of Christianity is wrong in its idea of what Genesis 1 is.

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Basically the quadralemma is raising the question of why we treat a god differently than we treat a scientist, giving God a pass for any nonsense he inspires and charging the scientist with fraud if he proclaims nonsense.

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Then the unstated assumption of the quadralemma is that Genesis 1 represents an attempt by God to speak in the same way a scientist speaks. The text certainly demands neither that it is God speaking or that God is attempting to literally describe events.And that returns to my point. If Genesis 1 is God attempting to communicate the literal history of the creation He's done a lousy job. We can't tell it's Him speaking or even be sure that the account is intended to be literally accurate. So we really are stuck with God being unable or unwilling to communicate adequately IF we accept your assumptions on the nature of Genesis 1.So the Quadralemma represents a powerful argument against the fundamentalist view of God writing the Bible since it requires him to be unable or unwilling to actually make a good job of what he's supposed to be doing. The best escape from it is to deny the assumption that Genesis 1 represents an attempt by God to speak as a scientist speaks.