When this blog started, newspapers were still writing, “so-called Web logs, or ‘blogs’ …”
From February 21, 2007, “Let us reason together“:
So there I was, at the end of what was, undeniably, a dead end street, consulting a map that claimed otherwise. It was something of a Groucho moment: “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?” I sided with my own two eyes, thus accepting the principle that reason and experience were essential considerations for evaluating the meaning and application of the text. In a sense, I was fumbling my way toward something like Wesley’s “four-legged stool.”
No one was claiming, of course, that my county road atlas ought to be read as the inerrant, infallible and authoritative Word of God, so my fundamentalist teachers would not have disagreed with my choosing, in this case, to regard my own experience of the terrain as worthy of consideration.
Nor did they deny that I would encounter similar disparities when consulting the “map” of scripture. In that case, however, they taught that I must always side with the map. That is what it means to be a fundamentalist.
Thus, to cite one of the more infamous examples, we were taught that evolution was a lie. The map, the Bible, said that the world was only 6,000 years old, and if that’s what the map says, then this must trump any claims of “science” or any other observation about so-called reality. If reality and the map conflict, then we must reinterpret reality to conform to the map.
That’s not an ideal example, though, since it’s based on a supposed, rather than an actual, conflict between the text and reality. The supposed conflict here is based on the premise that “the Bible says” that the world is only 6,000 years old, even though it never actually says any such thing. The whole elaborate 20th-century invention of “scientific creationism” is premised upon a misreading of the map, a misreading of the text.
The same is the case with Marshall Hall, our delusional friend over at Fixedearth.com, who believes that, “The Bible teaches that the Earth is stationary and immovable at the center of a ‘small’ universe with the sun, moon and stars going around it every day.” Since this is what he believes the Bible teaches, and since he believes that this biblical teaching outweighs any other source of information, he is forced to concoct an elaborate system for reinterpreting all of reality. Hall’s whole endeavor is based on a faulty premise, that “the Bible teaches” what it does not, in fact, teach.
Such cases, in which the supposed conflict is an invention based on a misreading, are probably more common than the cases of apparently actual conflict, but they are a separate category, a different matter.
So let’s consider a case of actual conflict. …
Read the whole post here.
I am somewhat saddened to learn, revisiting this post, that Fixedearth.com, former home to “biblical geocentrist” crackpottery, is no longer a functioning link. Poor Marshall Hall never seemed to be headed toward a happy ending, but I hope the site’s disappearance is due to him finally getting the help he needed and not due to any of the likelier possibilities.
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