Message #137

[Martin]

Andrew, I was responding to this post...

The simple answer is that there are some (IMO!) nutters out there who insist that every single thing in the bible is literal truth... - on the basis that if you accept that any of it may not be absolutely true, then how do you decide what it and what is not true, and also that this means that any specific part may not be true so the veracity of the entire 'book' is brought into question.

...in which you appear to be saying that the risk, as creationists see it, is that once any part of scripture is deemed to be non-literal then the whole of it becomes suspect.  I was basically saying that they have a point in the sense that there is a cascade effect brought about by abandoning any literal meaning to the Adam and Eve story - for instance Paul's argument about the second Adam obviously takes as foundational the existence of the first Adam.  So if you accept the fact of evolution, you should, if you're honest, accept that Paul was quite wrong in his theories about there being a one to one relationships - a sinful Adam being cancelled by a non-sinful Jesus.  And then, that argument is itself foundational to Paul's idea of original sin.

ISTM that the mainstream church has generally taken up the new script about the fact of evolution and the treatment of the Genesis stories as meaningful stories - never intended to be taken as truth, but are still working to an old script that no longer makes sense when it comes the New Testament.