Since we do not know what the writers of the Bible knew of the history, whether it occurred or not, we cannot say they were written as myths or allegories
We know that the Bible writers were unaware of the actual history of the universe, earth, and life. Do you really believe otherwise? They didn't know where the rain came from. They thought they lived under a dome on a flat, motionless earth.
The Old Testament says that a specific God with features the authors describe offered an assortment of threats and commandments did those things, but so what?
When they describe it as they did, it allows us to decide that no such god exists once we have learned that the words describing it are wrong..
All words require interpretation.
Yes. They begin as squiggles and sounds and must be rendered into symbolic thought (language) and then analyzed using reason and memory. Some have clear meanings, while others are ambiguous or vague. Do you have any uncertainty about what these words you just read mean? Do you not have essentially the same idea in your mind now that I did when I chose and wrote those words? Did you imagine a process also called reading comprehension, where words become ideas according to what has been learned?
You might not believe it, but you talk as if you do.
You think I talk as if I believe that there is a god and that it's the Abrahamic god? If so, you didn't interpret my words correctly. I don't believe in any gods. That seems like a simple idea unlikely to be misunderstood.
Humanism might have had an influence on Christianity, but I don't think that is the only reason that views are changing. Some Christians are just no longer willing to believe what is contradicted by science.
Science, like atheism, is a byproduct of one of humanism's twin towers of achievement, one moral, one intellectual. Humanism is the embracing of reason over received "wisdom" in matters of what is true and what is good, and the recognition that man has the potential to be noble and to do great things including improving the human condition. Christianity has been reshaped both by science, which has believers calling their myths symbolic now, and rational ethics, which improved on biblical ethics (autocratic theocracy over democracy, slavery condoned, bigotry encouraged).
I think, perhaps, the stronger argument for the existence of God is the rational soul or human intellect, which does not exist in the "star stuff" that matter is made of.
Sure it does. Arrange the star stuff appropriately and it comes alive and then awakens. It happens every day. They're epiphenomena of collected matter not seen in the parts, like the wetness of water, which is nowhere to be found in a molecule of H2O. Water molecules aren't wet, but water is.
The stuff of which we are made has no intelligence. So, whence humankind?
The stuff we are made of can become arranged into an intelligent species.
Despite the millions of years life has been evolving on the planet, there is no animal that is "almost human."
That argument works against you. The other great apes are "almost human" and we are almost gorilla. We're all anthropoid, as was Australopithecus, who was "almost human." The similarities are striking.
Many allow themselves to believe that man is radically different from the other beasts because he can reason in language, but I see that as just another innovation of evolution like life and consciousness. The Abrahamic religions depend on a different formulation of reality, one in which a soul is injected into a body and then leaves it after death, a soul that arises from a supernatural realm and comprises a supernatural substance, a world in which a great mind preceded and is distinct from and superior to material reality.
But without such notions, we'd still be making sacrifices to bears and crows. You can see the evolution of the concept of intelligence in man and the power it confers as man transforms his gods from animals to human pantheons and then later a single superman god. You also see it with the invention of the muses, who were understood to be the source of creative ideas before it was understood that we ourselves are their source.
I'd also note that science is, as a discipline, a product of faith and requires faith to be pursued.
Not religious faith, which is insufficiently justified belief.
Would we pursue knowledge of the universe if we had no faith that it could be known?
That's justified belief, a different word spelled and pronounced the same. We shouldn't conflate them lest we commit equivocation fallacies by confusing and interchanging them.
Indeed, most early scientists (they were called natural philosophers or natural historians until some time in the 19th century) were people of faith who felt their scriptures invited them to do science so as to know the physical universe God created.
They didn't get that idea from their scriptures or from the church fathers. That's the humanist tradition, which begins with Thales (and the ancient Greeks), who speculated that reality is made of water, the only substance he was aware of that could exist as a solid, liquid, and gas. This is the beginning of replacing religious type faith with human speculation and the search for patterns and unifying principles in a world that might be comprehensible. It would need to wait for the Renaissance for the addition of empiricism to pure reasoning, which is what science is - observing and testing the reality our senses present to our reasoning faculty and memory.
Lord Kelvin, who formulated the first and second laws of thermodynamics and whose title graces the scale by which we measure absolute temperatures, wrote: "Do not be afraid of being free thinkers. If you think strongly enough you will be forced by science to the belief in God, which is the foundation of all Religion. You will find science not antagonistic, but helpful to Religion." — William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
I say to the good lord here to keep thinking freely, but think harder. He might not be quite the visionary you imagine:
- "X-rays will prove to be a hoax." - Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1883.
- "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895
- "Radio has no future." - Lord Kelvin, Scottish mathematician and physicist, former president of the Royal Society, 1897
- "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now; All that remains is more and more precise measurement." - Lord Kelvin, speaking to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1900.
