I just think that it is ridiculous to insist on literal interpretations that don't make sense and have no basis in reality.
How do you know they have no basis in reality?
Because physical reality is testable and it doesn't correspond to the claimed reality of YECism. Note that I say YECism, not the bible.
A little child should be able to understand the Bible not just a professional scientist.
And children are very good at understanding stories as stories.
Somewhere in Corinthians it says: "Better to trust in the Lord than to put your faith in the words of men."
I am not talking about trusting the words of men. I am talking about believing the works of God. About believing that God does not deceive in creation any more than in scripture.
Men's words get written and rewritten and rewritten and interpretations change.
Which is why we have so many interpretations of the bible, but so few interpretations of natural phenomena. Nature does not get rewritten and interpretations that have been falsified are dropped leaving only those that actually correspond to reality.
I'm sure God could have come up with a better word for billions of years then 'the first day' if he had meant it to mean a very long time.
You only need Genesis to be this explicit if you assume it is supposed to be a science text.
You can only believe that the people were too stupid to understand back then if you believe they evolved from monkeys.
People then had the same intellectual capacity as today. They did not have the same sort of accumulated scientific knowledge, nor the same level of interest in science as our generation does. Nor did they use the same style of communication common to today.
It shouldn't become possible to understand the first few chapters of Genesis only after some geologist decides in the 1700's to interpret the geological record according to a belief in uniformatarianism.
Quite right. One does not need geology to understand Genesis because it is not about geology. It is about God.
I think God knew exactly what He was saying and how men were going to twist it right from the beginning but there's always some personal reason when people decide to twist the clear words of scripture.
A non-literal approach to scripture does not require twisting the words of scripture. In fact, I see much more twisting of scripture by literalist who try to stuff modern science into the bible than I ever see from non-literalists. I find a non-literalist approach a much more straightforward way of reading scripture because it respects scripture for what it is instead of forcing modern concepts onto it.
Would you like to continue this discussion in a different thread?