[nkkollaw]

Interesting, but I think Dawkins has a point: religion does interfere with scientific matters.

Maybe, if one doesn't take the Bible literally, but as a metaphor? But then again, for thousands of years the Church said we should interpret it literally.

[wahern]

No, not really. One of most influential early Christian theologians, Origen of Alexandria, wrote about Genesis

  And who is found so ignorant as to suppose that God, as if
  He had been a husbandman, planted trees in paradise, in Eden
  towards the east, and a tree of life in it, i.e., a visible
  and palpable tree of wood, so that any one eating of it with
  bodily teeth should obtain life, and, eating again of
  another tree, should come to the knowledge of good and evil 
  No one, I think, can doubt that the statement that God
  walked in the afternoon in paradise, and that Adam lay hid
  under a tree, is related figuratively in Scripture, that
  some mystical meaning may be indicated by it. The departure
  of Cain from the presence of the Lord will manifestly cause
  a careful reader to inquire what is the presence of God, and
  how any one can go out from it. But not to extend the task
  which we have before us beyond its due limits, it is very
  easy for any one who pleases to gather out of holy Scripture
  what is recorded indeed as having been done, but what
  nevertheless cannot be believed as having reasonably and
  appropriately occurred according to the historical account. 

(http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/origen125.html)

More generally see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegorical_interpretations_of..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_Hades, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism

And by the time of Augustine Christian teaching had become even less literal. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo#Views_and_t...

That said, as compared to the orthodox Christianity that came to dominate, there existed early Christian communities which interpreted biblical stories more literally, communities which interpreted them more allegorically, and communities which interpreted them esoterically. But these mostly died out in the first few centuries.

[sudo_rm]

>... for thousands of years the Church said we should interpret it literally.

This is completely false.

Source is the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s1...

In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.

In order to discover the sacred authors' intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. "For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression."

[nkkollaw]

Nice. When is this document from?

[Jtsummers]

The linked document is from 1992 (commissioned in 1986). However, I don't know when the ideas in this section became part of Catholic teaching. The Catechism assembled ideas rather than created them, they already existed in other sources (biblical or prior writings of the Church or scholars). Thomas Aquinas and others are cited in the footnotes so at least the core of the idea (that the Bible isn't meant to be entirely literally interpreted) within the Church dates back to their writings. However their acceptance (that is, whether the Church declared these ideas official canon or just valid non-heretical ideas), I can't say when that happened.

[dragonwriter]

> Maybe, if one doesn't take the Bible literally, but as a metaphor? But then again, for thousands of years the Church said we should interpret it literally.

No, the canon wasn't even set thousands of years ago (so there wasn't a single accepted Bible to take literally or metaphorically), and Biblical literalism as a doctrine is a minority doctrine in Christianity that is only a few hundred years old, originating within Protestantism, and mostly became a big deal with the explosion of fundamentalism in the US even more recently than that.

The Catholic Church didn't even think laypeople should read the Bible until fairly recently, one of the main concerns being the danger of naive interpretation, which simple literalism would surely qualify as.

[Digory]

While “literalism” might be close enough for rough grouping, I’ll note that few evangelicals or even (traditional Christian) fundamentalists hold to absolute literalism. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy is the widely accepted standard, and it says:

> inerrancy does not refer to a blind literal interpretation, and that "history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth."

Evangelicals do hold that the Deity means what He says, even about creation in Genesis. There’s a potential for fact/faith conflict there, but it’s not really logically necessary.

Which is to say, Dawkins isn’t a terribly reliable guide to what believers believe.