Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
- Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
What exactly do you mean by option (b)?
It seems to me that the first three of these imply a certain degree of incompetence on the part of the writers, editors, or god concerned, given how widely the story has been treated as history since its incorporation into scripture.
The fourth is fair enough, but it seems to me that (what I take to be) ChristianKI's inference "the bible contains this story, which is not true, so we should reduce our general confidence in what the bible says" is then reasonable (and indeed the decision to understand as fiction something in the bible that wasn't originally intended that way amounts to conceding that point).
Of course if the fifth option is right then all of the above may be moot.
This is somewhat muddled by the idea that the original story may have been an oral tradition for some time before being written down - that is to say, the person who put pen to paper may not have been the one to create the story in the first place, and may in fact have been removed from that person by several generations.
So it is quite possible that whoever originally created the story may have intended it as fiction with a moral, but that it may have been understood as history by the person who put stylus to papyrus. Or it may have started out as history,... (read more)