I think the story was told and believed to be a literal account of the natural history of the world.
Well there's the problem right there.
Why do you believe that? I think this goes to my point about how we moderns read our own modes of thinking and ways of relating ourselves to the world onto those of the past. There's really no reason at all to assume that they approached understanding the world as we do, using a "scientific" lens to understand "natural history".
Natural history is largely a modernist perspective permeated into culture through education systems. It was not a perspective of ancient societies and cultures, especially going back to the Genesis myth, adopted from the Epic of Gilgamesh and customized for the Hebrews through the priesthood. That definitely does not fit any context of an inquiry into natural history.
What was in their minds however and the lens through which they translated and interpreted the world, was whose deity has the power and who should they worship. Their "natural history" was a magical one. The world was magical and "given" to them somehow by some power beings. So the Hebrew texts was all about the monotheistic God being worshipped over the polytheistic gods of the day. That's the aim of the text, not teaching the "how", nearly so much as the "
Who".
I like that. Genesis is not about
how, but about
Who. That's it point, and that's the lens we moderns should look at it through, not as a scientific answer of
how.
But did they take that literally, like some other tribe might believe that we came from an egg laid by a magic dragon? Well, sure, but again, it was NOT in the context of a scientific question. It was about how that God did it. It was not a question of natural history, but a question of how that god did his magic as opposed to other gods doing theirs. It may sound like a subtle distinction, but a gulf of meaning apart at its destination.
Perhaps the original tale spinner knew that it was fabricated, but before long, it was likely often considered blasphemy to suggest that it was not literally correct.
Creating a mythology is not creating a fabrication. It's creating a story of meaning. And the meaning is the truth of the story. They weren't scientists, nor thinking as scientists, nor average people who were exposed to the sciences through public education systems as people are today. They spoke the language of truth though myth, story, song, tales, etc. It's all about meaning making and a common system of symbols and language.
They weren't using scientific language or symbols. They were using mythological ones. That's how they thought. That's the lens through which reality to form and shape and meaning and connection for them. Through the
gods, not through scientific terms.
The stories are for simple people
Well, not necessarily simple. They could have been quite sophisticated, but just using a premodern, mythic system or language to translate reality through. So the texts are actually quite contentful, quite meaningful, and quite profound, if you can unpack them within that context of premodern, mythic structures of consciousness of that day. It would not be
a mythic attempt at doing science, as you presume.
That's not how I define truth. To be called correct, an idea must be demonstrably correct.
Truth in the context of meaning making, is relative truth, not absolute truth. Scientific truths, tend to be viewed in more binary terms like this, but symbolic truths can be multifaceted, and even contradictory but still true. Paradoxical truth, is truth, even if self-contradictory.
Why do you think that is relevant? I still believe that the story was intended to explain why the world exists and how it came to be this way. In the past, it was entirely faith-based speculation.
To reiterate, you are presuming that mythic accounts are premodern attempts at doing science. That is in my view, projecting a modernist mindset back into ancients, that they had the same goal in mind, just lacking the sophisticated tools we do today. That's projection.
It may help to try to think of it in terms of children and adults today. Are children just unskilled adults? Do children just lack the correct teaching to make them think like adults? Or is it a developmental thing, that their
modes of thinking themselves undergo transformation? And than just modes of thinking, or to use a more academic term, structures of consciousness, which both allow and disallow ways of being in the world itself, how reality is both seen and experienced.
If you question that they were different than moderns in this way, then what about going back another 30,000 years? Were they just uneducated scientists in their approach to reality, just lacking the "real truth" about things as we know them today? No. Reality was in fact a different reality for them, as it was for us when we were 5 versus when we were 50. Even though we were basically the same human, our realities are markedly different realities.
Same difference between modernists and the ancient Hebrews and their mythic reality. It was reality through the eyes of a child. Not uneducated people. Not simpletons. Just mythic thinkers. Different systems of reality, that's all.
And BTW, I would not call that "faith-based" at all. It is a mythic
structure of conscious. That has nothing to do with faith whatsoever, any more that a rationalist structure of conscious does.
You can read about how these are actual structure and what they are like here:
AN OVERVIEW OF THE WORK OF JEAN GEBSER
Surely Aristotle thought that he was doing the equivalent of physics when he stated that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. He was explaining the natural order of the universe, albeit incorrectly.
I want to clarify here, if the point was lost in everything I just laid out above, that indeed you can and do have individuals who are ahead of the curve historically, and currently as well. He was in fact using a structure of consciousness much more like modernists do, and our modern science builds upon that structure. But that was rare. It was not a large percentage of the population. The masses still lived in mythic structures. That was their reality, even if you had intellectuals ahead of the curve, leading the way.
Today, the larger percentage of the masses are modernist, using rational structures of consciousness, especially in 1st world countries where education helps nurture and develop that structure. But when you go back to the Genesis myth, you're talking minimally 600 BCE Hebrew culture. That is definitely not the rationalist structure as the dominant structure culturally or societally. They were not Aristotle, nor trying to be!
It's the same thing today, you have more advanced stages and earlier stages. There are those who are far ahead of our modern sciences even. That's what leads the way to the next stage of our evolution. But the ancient Hebrews were mythic-magic structures. That's what you see in the texts. That's its language. It's not ancients even thinking in terms of doing science or natural history.
That stage hasn't come online yet.
I'm referring to the first life in the universe arising naturalistically through abiogenesis rather than intelligent design.
There are certainly things which can be made to dovetail with modern science, such as you point out. A favorite of mine is "Let there be Light", and matching that with the Big Bang.
But honestly, that is at its very best a intuition, and more likely just coincidence, At worst, and what you see mostly with Creationists trying to make Genesis fit the science, a force fitting of the words into science to make it scientifically acceptable. In other words, a crap reading.
My point is, even if you see those "match" to some degree, it is an error to therefore imagine they were trying to do science with the texts. It's really not different than the Creationists imagining God was revealing science through the authors. Neither contextualize the texts with the way ancients would have thought at all. Both are reading modernity back into the texts and its authors minds.
I want to touch on a couple other points later in a different reply. As always, good discussion.
