The actual occurrence of events in the Bible
Good afternoon,
In God Plays Dice, evolution is transformed from an attack on religion into an argument for the existence of God in a beautiful and enjoyable way. However, the question arises about the incompatibility between the creation story as written and evolution.
The accepted answer to this is that things are described allegorically, and many good people have indeed followed this path.
What bothers me is that there is no limit to this – and what if the standing at Mount Sinai is an allegory? Or the Exodus from Egypt or any other seminal event?
I will divide the question into a normative part and a methodological part. First of all – does belief in the tangible existence of these events constitute a necessary condition for belief in God in your opinion, and then, is there no flaw in the allegorical excuse in that it is infinitely expandable, as I said.
Thank you and have a nice day.
Hello.
I don’t think that belief in anything from the entire biblical corpus is a hindrance, perhaps with the exception of the Mount Sinai situation. And even there, it is about interaction with God, the nature of which is open to debate.
The question of what in the Bible is myth or allegory and what is historical description is an interpretive question, not a normative one (what is binding and what is not). On the interpretive level, descriptions of ordinary events are probably history, but events that are not taken from our daily lives are also open to other interpretations.
Yedeya HaPenini and his allegorical students took this quite far. For them, Abraham and Sarah were matter and form, not flesh and blood people. The Rashba was very angry with them and even banned philosophy students at a young age (up to 25) as a result, but this is a possible interpretation. I don’t know how to set a limit for allegorical interpretation, and I also don’t think there is a limit and that a limit is necessary. It all depends on the interpretive considerations. In light of the knowledge we have today, we definitely need to reexamine all kinds of interpretations, and even what was accepted as historical in the past can turn out to be allegory. After all, if you were to ask the early ones, they would set a limit far beyond what we are willing to do today. Therefore, even today, there is no reason to set such a limit a priori. Every time a question arises, we should examine it in its entirety, and not bind ourselves in advance. It depends on the information that is accumulated and the quality of the interpretive considerations.
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