If it causes it to presume that what we read in a history book is that actually happened, we are out of our minds. As that is not even remotely how it is.
More of your doomsday exaggeration: "we're out of our minds."
So what if a critical thinker provisionally grants that something historians have wrong might be correct but it wasn't? What could be less impactful? Suppose Caesar or Jesus or Socrates never actually lived. It's irrelevant if one has a false belief about either of those things.
This popular axiom that facts = truth and that everything else is just whimsy is simply wrong, and dangerously misleading
And yet more.
Here you are again playing Chicken Little by implying serious problems that just don't exist: "dangerously misleading."
Why do you think that you are qualified to suggest to people that their epistemology is dangerous? I do what you warn against, yet my epistemology works well for me.
Have you made those mistakes and encountered these dangers in your own life as a result? Do you know people that have? I'm guessing not. It seems to me that you've just got a strange idea based in nothing.
Your nihilistic epistemology doesn't seem to be doing anything for you. You make a lot of strange comments about reality which have no value to me, and I can't see where they are of value to you.
Also, that was a restatement of your usual misunderstanding of how an empiricist experiences reality: facts and nothing else. The caricature of the critical thinker as an empty vessel reasoning like a computer and doing nothing else is incorrect.
Here's one of my favorite examples of that from Deepak Chopra. Here, the atheist is like a Roomba bumping into walls making measurements but otherwise devoid of experience. Chopra also takes a dig at the religious, who he would probably call inauthentic and thus relatively lifeless, and he'd be talking about you (the smallest line says "is having your own experience"):
My inner life is rich and is much more than a collection of facts. Those facts are my understanding of how the world works and how I interact with it. I've written words like these to you:
"I like strawberries. The pleasure of eating one is not a rational experience. It doesn't involve reasoning. I simply discovered that eating strawberries is a pleasant experience, one I like to recreate from time to time. Where reason comes into it is in acquiring strawberries, and that is the value of reason (the rider) - to facilitate the passions (the horse), which are irrational. The rational mind serves the irrational mind, without which life is empty and meaningless. Without reason, unbridled passion is destructive. Life tends to be shorter and less pleasant. The two are a team. Or, if you prefer, reason is the brush and the pigments on the palette are the passions. One needs both to avoid either a blank canvass (colorless reasoning) or a messy canvass (chaotic passion)."
Here it is again written to a different poster with some of the same metaphor and imagery:
"Irrational thought is not a bad thing as long as we don't use it to modify our belief set. Irrational just means not a product or derivative of reason. All nonverbal thought is irrational. Instincts are irrational, but can be lifesaving. An infant doesn't use reason in the act of nursing. Reason is not involved in enjoying a sunset or feeling thirsty, although reason might help get to where a beautiful sunset is expected or help you slake that thirst. Passions aren't reasoned. Moral intuitions aren't reasoned. None of these are rational and none are knowledge.
"The value of reason applied to the senses and memory is to manage these irrational experiences to favor having the desirable ones while avoiding the undesirable ones as much as possible, as with that sunset and drink. Reason gets you to the beach of a tropical island sipping a pina colada, but reason isn't involved in the irrational (unreasoned) but pleasant experiences that result.
"This idea of rational thought versus irrational passions is an old one. The mind has been compared to a horse and rider, the horse representing the passions and motivations, the rider being the reason that is applied to regulate them to optimize experience. We need both. Lose your passions and the ability to experience pleasure (called anhedonia in psychiatry, a term that applies to major depression) and you become suicidal. If the rider passes out, the horses may cause the death of both horse and rider, as with foolish people who live short, impulsive lives."
All I said is that there is plenty of water in the mantle. This water could have been released for a world wide flood. The Bible actually seems to talk about something like that happening in the flood story. So your argument about the lack of water is gone.
No, that argument is not gone. You'd need to identify the water and the mechanism that brought it up from the mantle through the crust, left it there for forty days, and then returned it to the mantle. The water that comes up through springs is not coming from the mantle.
I believe the flood was a large local flood and the evidence is there for that and the Bible can be translated to agree with that. So arguing that the Bible is wrong is gone also.
You don't need evidence for that. We know that large local floods occur. We see them in the news. But they are nothing like the global flood.
Nevertheless a metaphor is a metaphor and as humans find out more about science and cosmology then that is how we recognise the metaphors.
The creation myth is not metaphor as I already explained
here:
Myth isn't metaphor or allegory. The three are specific literary forms with only the latter two using symbolism, where symbolism means one thing standing for another. She was the apple of his eye is metaphor, where the apple is a desirable and valuable object standing for "she." Allegories are longer accounts, but still substitute symbolic characters and deeds for known actual characters and deeds. In Gulliver's Travels, Walpole in the British politics of Swift's era was symbolized by the rope dancer Flimnap.
As I explained on this thread yesterday here, myths are erroneous speculations that intend to explain reality as the mythicists find it - why the world is how they find it, and in the case of biblical myths, with the assumption that a tri-omni deity (which includes omnibenevolence) rules nature and their lives
"a day" in the Bible does not always mean a literal 24 hour day.
The days of creation are literal days with mornings and evenings, including the day of rest, which the Hebrews were commanded to emulate one 24-hour day out of every seven..