[ben_w]

Given one side is positing an entity with a mysterious personality that can create literally everything, ex nihilo, in 6 days, I wouldn’t expect it to be possible to conclusively invalidate anything, ever, under any circumstances.

No matter how much evidence there is on the side saying the Bible is just as fictional as the Olympian, Roman, Egyptian, Aztec etc. pantheons, believers can always counter it.

The argument goes something like this:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

[splistud]

What does validating or invalidating have to do with a work of allegory?

Scoring points in some long-running argument based on the common misunderstanding of both sides isn't really all that important.

Why not, instead, focus on what you yourself can accept as ineffable and universal?

[nwatson]

There's a large contingent of a minority of Evangelical Protestants who want to feel scientific exploration and discovery is done in good faith while also wanting to believe the Scripture, as currently received and understood (39 "books" of O.T., 27 "books" of N.T., written by diverse authors over more than a millenium), is what Almighty wanted us to have, and that it represents the spiritual truth as we should understand it ... how literal/symbolic/allegorical that Scripture might be is hard to determine.

So, this contingent usually is berated in religious forums ("No, the first two or three chapters in Genesis are 'historical narrative', heretic! ... BTW, here are the mental gymnastics for addressing inconsistencies in the two creation narratives [0]") or secular forums ("The Old Testament is a collection of inconsistent myths with no value in historical interpretation! There's no archaeological evidence of the Exodus! The New Testament passages weren't written till the year 300!").

But ... we (of this contingent) still want to meld the scientific and scriptural views, and we aren't too proud to be monkeys. For someone with this view, most of the New Testament makes little sense unless there was a literal Adam/Eve at some point, while evolution must also hold. There perhaps aren't many ways of reconciling these, so it's a struggle. The best I can reconcile is that "God made humankind from the dust of the earth" is the beautiful hack of evolution, and the Almighty chose, during one code review, from among candidate resulting species, his version 1.0 of the physical substrate of humankind, and "breathed the breath of life into [them]" to make them spiritually conscious. Then Garden-of-Eden, Tree-of-Life-vs-Tree-of-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil, Partaking-of-the-Forbidden-Fruit, and we get to humankind's current reality. I look forward to seeing how wrong or right I am.

[0] https://answersingenesis.org/contradictions-in-the-bible/do-...

EDIT: mention the Exodus

[ben_w]

> For someone with this view, most of the New Testament makes little sense unless there was a literal Adam/Eve at some point

I’m surprised to read this. I was raised Catholic in the UK, and everyone in my school years seemed to be fine melding scientific and scriptural views without having any problem assuming that Adam and Eve did not need to be literal.

[pyinstallwoes]

A proof requires the faith of truth, as truth can only exist as an axiom of consensus.