From the study itself

The fundamentalist reading of the bible is a new phenomenon of the last couple of hundred years tops. Before that people understood that it was to be taken metaphorically.

Andy, I really wish you'd read this sh*t before you press the 'submit' button.

The heresy of literalism as such is a modern, post-scientific phenomenon. Its beginnings can be traced in seventeenth-century Protestant orthodoxy, but it bloomed with twentieth-century Fundamentalism, when the modern world fully embraced the dynamic power of natural science. Scientific method crucially altered the Western mind. After Descartes we became principled skeptics, doubting in order to find out the truth. The notion stole into the religious mind that biblical narratives make proposals that only appear to compete with testable scientific findings (to test our faith) while ultimately, if miraculously, conforming to scientific truth.

Hence the apt, related observation by another Episcopalian theologian, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, that Fundamentalism is to be regarded as "the bastard child of science and religion." Heretical literalism is the issue of an adulterous mis-match: the bastard-child product of a modern religious imagination formed or perhaps deformed by uncritical embrace of scientific method.

In the early days of the church, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Bible scholars knew that Holy Scripture was a rich, multi-layered text with many possible interpretations—some poetic, some historical, and some mythic, touching on the deepest level of the human need for meaning. Only since the materialistic bias that came in with the eighteenth-century European rationalism did the literal, limited way of reading holy texts become the heavy-handed, anti-scientific method it now is.

Late 19th century Christian fundamentalists in America began to criticize the sciences, especially evolutionary science, on the grounds they contradicted the Bible. This biblical literalism arose from America's early history and is generally not seen elsewhere in the world. Early American immigrants fleeing European religious persecution were largely from Anabaptist sects. These sects did not call on priests to explain scriptural meaning, but instead took the scriptures as literal and not to be interpreted.

"The problem," said Thoms "is literalists have no basis for…weighing meaning...If it is all taken at face value, then every word is just as important as every other word...How do you know when to stop?

"The vast majority of Christians have a much different approach to the scriptures and see no conflict," said Thoms. Many creationists, however, view evolution as an evil responsible for a litany of societal ills.

Scientific materialism is at the opposite end of the theological spectrum from biblical literalism. But they share several characteristics that lead me to discuss them together. Both believe that there are serious conflicts between contemporary science and classical religious beliefs. Both seek knowledge with a sure foundation -- that of logic and sense data, in the one case, that of infallible scripture, in the other. They both claim that science and theology make rival literal statements about the same domain, the history of nature, so that one must choose between them.

I will suggest that each represents a misuse of science. Both positions fail to observe the proper boundaries of science. The scientific materialist starts from science but ends by making broad philosophical claims. The biblical literalist moves from theology to make claims about scientific matters. In both schools of thought, the differences between the two disciplines are not adequately respected

Where does biblical literalism come from? What is the genesis, if you will, of the habit of mind that makes many Christians read the Bible with a different brain to the one they'd use with any other writing?

It is by no means an essential Christian tenet. No creed says anything about how to read the scriptures. The highest claim the Bible makes for itself is when the writer of Paul's letter to Timothy says the Hebrew scriptures were "God-breathed", which is wonderfully suggestive but hardly precise or dogmatic. I mean, Adam was God-breathed, and look what happened to him.

The Bible is the word of God, Christians believe, but why should the fact it's God's mean it has to be read with naive absolutism? Many Christians call the church "the body of Christ" without considering it anything like infallible, or refusing to see its rites as symbolic.

Part of the problem is historical. The deification of the Bible is a result of the Protestant reformation. Before then, the final authority, the ultimate arbiter and source of information in religious matters was the church, with its ancient traditions and living experts. When Luther and friends opposed the teaching of the Catholic hierarchy, they needed a superior authority to appeal to, which was provided by the Bible.

Fair enough. But in defending or reclaiming the Bible from papists and then liberals, evangelical Protestants made it the very heart of the faith. Hence the ludicrous situation where many evangelical organisations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, have statements of faith where the first point is the Bible, before any mention of, for example, God. Hence the celebrated idolatrous aphorism of William Chillingworth: "The BIBLE, I say, the BIBLE only, is the religion of Protestants!".

One practical problem of this text mania is that the Bible, unlike the church, can't answer questions, clarify earlier statements, arbitrate disagreements or deal with new developments. So those in search of religious certainty have to find it all in the text: if it says the earth was created in six days, or that gay sex is an abomination, them's the facts, end of story. And if it forbids charging interest, well there's always wriggle room.

The other practical problem is that for more moderate Christians, Christ is the heart of the faith, and the Bible offers information and ideas about him and is one of the things that point us in his direction. But if the Bible itself is the heart, then to read it is to enter the Holy of Holies, making it that much harder to accept any normal human ambiguity or inaccuracy in its words.

This effect is magnified by a more recent historical development: the charismatic movement. Even among evangelicals who don't speak in tongues or put their hands in the air when the sing Shine Jesus Shine, the movement has had profound effects, one of which is that they don't read the Bible just to be reminded and shaped by its teaching, but to hear what God has to say to them today.

If you read the Bible asking: "What was St Paul saying to the Galatians?" all kinds of critical questions arise: How would first-century Asia Minor have understood these words? Would Paul have phrased it differently to a church he was less pissed off with? Would other witnesses have recalled the events he describes differently? But if you read the Bible asking: "What is God saying to me today?" it seems less appropriate to do anything but accept it at face value.

One last factor in biblical all-or-nothingism is the part that biblical criticism plays in evangelical conversion, which is none at all.

People who convert to evangelical Christianity, including those who grow up with it, are persuaded by the experience of a religious community, and by finding that evangelical theology seems to hold water. All this is totally underpinned by the Bible – it's the foundation and guarantee. But the only test of its reliability that inquirers are invited to make is to read it and ask "Is this something that I can accept wholesale and entrust my life to?"

It's generally much later that a convert will have to consider concrete evidence that biblical writers were human beings, capable of being one-sided, of writing myth, of exaggerating, of guessing, of having opinions it's impossible to agree with.

Some of us, faced with this evidence, shape our faith in the light of it, making the Bible a far more fascinating, revealing and diverse record of human religious experience. But it's not surprising if for others the evidence comes as an attack that threatens to undermine the foundation of their faith, and has to be beaten off blindfold.

Early in the 5th century AD, St Augustine wrote a treatise called “The Literal Meaning of Genesis”... but he was arguing for a symbolic, spiritual interpretation of that work, not a literal interpretation in the modern sense. Augustine’s mother was a Christian, but in his early years he turned to another Mystery religion of the time, Manichaeism, before converting back to Christianity. So he was able to look at Christianity from an outsider’s perspective, and see that people who insisted on the word-for-word truth of the Bible were merely making themselves look stupid: “Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world... If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Christianity does not have a history of biblical literalism. Literalism has been almost entirely absent from Christianity for the vast majority of the religion's existence. It was only two hundred years ago at the advent of the modern industrial age that scriptural literalism began to appear throughout the world, in nearly every major religion. As our world has marched rapidly into an ever more modern, complex, and sometimes confusing world, more believers have begun to cling to literalism.

Literalism is a modern idea. You could even say it's a new age idea. Karen Armstrong, the most popular living historian of religion writes, "Before the modern period, Jews, Christians and Muslims all relished highly allegorical interpretations of scripture. The word of God was infinite and could not be tied down to a single interpretation. Preoccupation with literal truth is a product of the scientific revolution, when reason achieved such spectacular results that mythology was no longer regarded as a valid path to knowledge."

The earliest Christian theologians, however, knew better than to limit the work of biblical interpretation to either of these extremes. Against a literalist or purely historical approach, for example, Origen in the third century asked rhetorically regarding the creation stories in the book of Genesis: "What intelligent person would believe that the first, second and third day, and the evening and morning, existed without the sun, moon and stars..and heaven? And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, 'planted a paradise eastward in Eden'?"

This is not skepticism. It affirms rather that biblical accounts often have more than one meaning, and that the primary meaning is rarely what is referred to as the "literal" or "historical" sense.

Therefore Origen continues: "When God is said to 'walk in paradise in the cool of the day' and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual event." 1.

Nevertheless, Origen, with the whole of the patristic tradition, will see in Scripture historical facts and events as well as figures or symbolic images: facts including the birth of Jesus from a virgin, together with His miracles and His resurrection from the dead. Biblical interpreters of the early Church understood in a "literal" and "historical" way virtually every affirmation that makes up the Nicene Creed. Yet even those affirmations point beyond the literal meaning to a "higher" or more spiritual, more "mystical" sense. They can be understood not only as statements about what happened in history, but as images of what can transpire in our own life and in the life to come.

and having Caleb jump in and fling shit and offer nothing else, is deemed as a good argument, while I'm a troll.

I'll take Karen Anderson's word over yours any day. When a blog quotes Origen, it doesn't mean that Origen never said it. I've cited a number of sources. You've cited yourself, that's it. Then thrown around some derogatives like liberals. Not much of an argument you've presented here.

But of course on CKA, attacking my sources while offering none of your own, and having Caleb jump in and fling shit and offer nothing else, is deemed as a good argument, while I'm a troll.

To propose that 'analytical thinking' reduces religious belief is exactly the kind of crap I'd expect from Derby or any other nonbeliever.

I just don't get you people.

You say you don't believe in God yet you spend more effort fighting Him than most church people invest in believing in Him.

Whatever.

Let me wrap this up and say that 1) you'd NEVER post something like this about Islam and 2) posting stuff like this makes you look like an ass.

I've never said I don't believe in God.

I don't believe in Religion. I maintain, I do believe in the morality that many religions profess (but don't always practice). Note the title of the thread - "Analytic thinking can decrease religious belief". Not decrease Faith. The inherent contradictions in Religion do not lend themselves to the logical mind.

And yes, I would post the same things I've said in this and other threads like this about Islam, or the Hare Krishnas for that matter. I've met a few people that for whom faith and religion are practiced as intended, and those are the kind of people that have earned my lifelong respect.