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Lumifer comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong
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I suggest that Genesis 3 is actually some (admittedly weak) reason to believe that. But, for the avoidance of doubt, my conjecture is not that they thought all animals talked, and I am not suggesting that they thought any non-human animals talked post-Eden.
According to this, at least some ancient-ish Hebrew commentators thought that "The snake from creation was an intelligent animal that talked, thought, and walked upright like a human". This is already long after when Genesis 3 was written, of course, but it does at minimum make it clear that this was by no means an unthinkable thought.
So that's exactly the point of people saying "ha ha, your religion has a talking snake in it", and they need not be making an error in going from "this religion's holy book has a story with a talking snake in it" to "this religion is less likely to be right than if it didn't have that story". And the fact that magic or divine intervention could obviously (if either existed) make snakes talk doesn't invalidate that.
No, actually I wondered about saying "except that it's more like incarnation than possession" but decided that was unnecessary nitpicking. So yes, rather than "of my sample of three, one basically agrees with you and two flatly disagree" it would be more accurate to say "of my sample of three, one kinda agrees with you and two flatly disagree".
The sample, by the way, consisted of the books I happen to have on my shelves that I could tell from the titles were likely to express some opinion about the question. I looked in one other but it turned out not to. So no cherry-picking here.
(But I should add that I would not expect randomly chosen Christians to be much like random samples of those three, because most Christians are theologically unsophisticated; so some version of the serpent=Satan theory might well be more popular than that sample would suggest.)
According to your own link, some commentators thought that the snake was an intelligent humanoid, some thought it was Satan in the flesh, and some thought that Genesis was... mistaken about the snake speaking.
All it shows is that the variety of interpretations is wide. "Not an unthinkable thought" is a remarkably low bar, at this level pretty much anything goes.
That's a stupid point, of the same kind as "the Pope wears a silly hat, ha-ha, he must be really dumb". It's just agitprop. I don't see any reason to pay attention to such "points", do you?
For sure. My point is that the culture Genesis 3 came out of was one that had at least some inclination to accept the idea of talking snakes, which makes it more plausible that the talking snake in Genesis 3 was intended to be understood as, well, an actual talking snake (which is how, at face value, the story describes it) rather than a puppet of the Devil, or a metaphor for human curiosity, or whatever.