Friday, February 6, 2009

The God of The Gaps

I think it's clear that the god of the Bible definitely does not describe the creation as being through evolution either metaphorically or literally. To pretend that he does describe it metaphorically is a huge stretch where one would have to interpret very clear, seemingly completely literal sentences as 'actually a metaphor' - a silly method that could just as easily be used to make any written work say anything you want it to say. It seems to me that either there's a rational point where you have to acknowledge that the written word can no longer be stretched or that no written word has any definitive meaning at all.

Either the Bible is wrong, or our observed evidence is wrong, or written works can be taken metaphorically into absurdity and there's no such thing as a written word that has any specific meaning.

The Bible defines the god that it describes, and that definition itself should be the greatest argument against a 'god of the gaps' to its own believers. It mystifies me how many of them can continue to stretch the meaning of their Bible each time new scientific understanding emerges and still call it the infallible word of god. It leads me to believe that they don't actually believe in God as complete fact, but rather they believe in solidarity with their family and culture. In many ways, I have more respect for fundamentalists that choose to believe that everyone else is simply wrong - at least then it's clear they actually believe that the word is infallible and there's not so much of this doublethink.

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