You've said a few times what the scriptures are trying to do, and it's not science. I have agreed that it's not science, but not that it wasn't what many people believed was the literal history of the universe. Then you come back to your original claim. Why do you think that these stories were not told and believed literally by many if not most people in ancient times? That's the natural order of the progression of thought - from concrete to abstract, concrete being first. When they say to not throw out the baby with the bathwater idiomatically, it's not surprising to learn that it was once meant literally.
Good questions, of course. I have to explain more fully. A couple of points to flesh out here. Yes, absolutely we move from concrete-literal thought, to more abstract and symbolic thought developmentally. But not everyone moves from concrete-literal thought. That is an evolutionary or developmental move, which means historically the vast majority of people thought of everything in concrete literal terms. So you are correct that they would have taken the stories as a matter of fact.
As I also pointed out that it is normally for most all of us, even those of us operating at the more abstract stages, formal operational and even beyond, when it comes to things we hear told about someone generally just assume that literal point of view and see things as "just the way things are", unless otherwise given sufficient reason to be suspect of that things and critical examine it. We shortcut things this way because it is more efficient energywise for the brain to not have to analyze the crap out of everything all the time.
But taken that as one thing, along with the other point I'm trying to drive home here about the structures of consciousness themselves, or the lens or filters of reality, or frameworks of reality that we translate all experience through into forms of thoughts and ideas and concepts and actions.
Putting some more concrete skin on this abstraction, think of them as the colorized glasses that everyone at that stage of development wears. There are beige-colored glasses, red glasses, amber glasses, orange glasses, green glasses, teil glasses, indigo glasses, etc. Everyone who wears those glasses, looks through those tints all day, everyday, without any awareness of their presence.
They are one of those 'just the way things are' deals which we rarely if every any of us at all are aware even exist. We don't generally consider the eyes we are looking through in what it tells us about reality. In other words, how we see, becomes reality to us, and is reality to us
without any awareness of its presence and influence at all.
Now when it comes to the ancients versus us today, in speaking of the main center of gravity, or percentages on a bell curve, wearing mainly red and amber glasses, which are pre-modern, or mythic-literal lenses. Questions of science, the ways in which we think and try to see and understand reality are orange and later green-colored glasses. There was no orange tint in their reality. Those questions were not part of a red and amber tinted reality.
Those types of perceptions, those types of questions, those ways of thinking did not enter into their minds. They were not yet wired that developmentally, in order way to think that way. The same way that a child's mind below the age of 12 generally do not move into formal operational thinking. They don't have access to that color of glasses yet.
So yes, they would think of the "history of the universe", but NOT in the way we approach that question with orange-colored glasses and its naturalistic assumptions. Prescience, didn't not mean immature science. It means prescience in the ways a preteen is a preadolescent. Things that come online in adolescence, were simply non-present, not yet available to be developed yet. Or think of it in terms of bone growth. A 12 year old is not just a 20 year old who hasn't learned how to use his bones better!
It's more like that. They weren't trying to think like a scientist but just lacked the tools of empiricism. They lacked the capacity to think in those terms at all. Hence, the mythologies of creationism, is highly improbably they were motivated but a scientific mindset asking those kinds of questions, seeking those kinds of answers.
There are still people today that believe the biblical creation story literally, and there are people that still want it taught as history in public schools. Have you ever been a Christian? They don't tell one another that this or that is metaphor. The forbidden fruit is understood to have been plucked from a tree and eater literally.
Yes, of course this is all true. And yes, believe this or not, I was actually part of a fundamentalist Christian sect and used to believe that way. I even have a degree in theology from one of their Bible colleges. Shocking to imagine that, isn't it?
Yes, metaphors are always taken literally by those in the earlier stages of faith development. One of my most pageworn books is
Stages of Faith, where James Fowler as a developmental researcher critically researched the different levels or stages of faith development, detailing the features and mindsets of each. These stages he observed parallel the stage of development in all other lines of development that researchers have likewise mapped out, from Piaget' cognitive line, Loevinger's ego development line, Gilligan's moral development, Gebers cultural development, etc.
So what is the evidence that that is not correct? You seem to be saying, no, no, they knew it wasn't the truth.
No I'm not saying they knew it wasn't the truth. From a mythic perspective, it holds a certain cohesive functionality within that given system, or worldview, or reality-perspective, and therefore as a matter of utility, is is functionally true. Meaning it works within that system, being of a system of amber-colorized reality.
But in a system of orange-colorized reality, or modernity, or the rational structure of consciousness (all the same thing), it is not true. It is not consistent or compatible with a world that sees things in terms of naturalistic cause and effect relationships.
It is non-reality to the orange stage of development. It is reality to the amber stages. (I hear the next question coming already...
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We are told that story is fiction, but if it were in the Bible, it would be believed literally by many. This isn't an important issue. I just find it incredible that these stories weren't mostly told without qualification and weren't mostly believed to be history.
They were believed to be history, but not the way we moderns think of history. Don't assume our ways of thinking about history and nature, was the same as they way they did. We see history colorized by orange classes, so therefore it appears differently, and is a different thing to us than it was to them, colorized by red and amber realities.
I'm thinking of a recent thread here on RF in which a believer was arguing for a literal resurrection as every other Christian does. If that story meets the fate of the creation myth - science coming along that makes believing the story literally untenable. With time, some Christians would begin calling it allegory while others hung onto literalism, and the day might come in the future when in a discussion like this one, one might read that that story was never taught or believed literally, and one might ask why should that be believed?
I'm going to encourage you to read through this brief explanation of the stages of faith, and you'll see where that sort of thinking lands, and where you might see my own listed. (I see myself as stage 5 to 5/6) in this.) I think it will help to see it from another's words than just my own way of trying to explain this. (I tend to be too complex at times).
The Stages of Faith According to James W. Fowler | Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D.
Man likely evolved the way children still do, from concrete to increasingly abstract thought. They go from believing Santa literally to understanding that Santa is an abstraction with parental or societal help, without which they would be expected to believe that Santa existed literally as they do Adam andNoah.
Yes. Now we're talking.
In fact, I see our developmental stages as a micro timeline of a much longer evolutionary macro timeline. What we evolved over eons, is encapsulated in our developmental stages laid down in order that we can see today.
Do you think that they ought to add that none of these stories were believed literally? Do you think that's true?
I think if you consider what you see in Fowler's stages, you might see what I do in that while we move away from concrete-literal, or mythic-literal thinking into more formal operational, or abstract thinking or "individuative-reflective" stage of faith thinking from Fowler's research, at some point after deconstructing the crap out of our symbolic systems, we are able to see the embedded meaning in the earlier symbols that they can carry in powerful ways. Then we have to try to come to terms with those things, where we may rationally understand that they aren't literal anymore, but they are still nonetheless meaningful.
That is specifically something he touches upon in his book, that stage 2 and stage 3 faith, (mythic-literal and traditionalist), are unable to separate the meaning of the symbol from the symbol itself. For them, it is fused together, so that if you don't have the symbol, held in the way they hold the symbol, literally, factually, you don't have the meaning. That's why you'll hear this idea that atheists must be immoral people because they reject God, which symbolizes goodness. Right?
Good discussion as always.
