If you’ve ever cracked open the Bible, you’ve probably noticed that it’s full of things that everyone knows don’t actually happen, like firmaments and creationism and virgin births and miracle burning bushes.
Fearful that people might use this as occasion to, you know, disbelieve in the Bible, creative Bible-believers have created the Message-Incident Principle:
That is, instead of confusing or distracting the biblical writers and their readers with modern scientific concepts, God descended to their level and employed the science-of-the-day.[...]
Therefore, passages in the Bible referring to the physical world feature both a Message of Faith and an incidental ancient science. According to this interpretive principle, biblical inerrancy rests in the Divine Theology, and not in statements referring to nature.
Of course! God didn’t want to confuse people! If everyone believes in a firmament, then God made a firmament. If everyone believes in human parthenogenesis, then that’s how God rolls!
And, being omniscient, god must have foreseen that the science-loving denizens of the 21st century would easily distinguish between the parts of the Bible that count as “Divine Theology” and the parts that count as “Cave-People Folk Science.” It’s just common sense:
In the case of Phil 2, the 3-tier ancient astronomy is “alongside” the “more important” Message of Faith that Jesus is Lord over the entire universe. Amen!
Thanks, god, for not confusing anyone!
This post has been linked for the HOT5 Daily 9/9/2009, at The Unreligious Right
The bible mentions several places in the old and new testament that God cannot tell lies. So if the bible has lies in it, therefore it cannot be the word of God, the bible disproved with of all things…. the bible!
This post has been linked for the HOT5 Daily 9/9/2009, at <a href=”http://unreligiousright.blogspot.com/” rel=”nofollow”>The Unreligious Right</a>