{"id":11019,"date":"2008-03-07T15:43:16","date_gmt":"2008-03-07T20:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/03\/07\/11019.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:12","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:12","slug":"what-is-scripture-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/03\/07\/what-is-scripture-anyway\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Scripture, anyway?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I happened to listen, briefly, to Fresh Air<\/a> this afternoon (is it just me and my increasingly inattentive and infrequent listening, or is Terry Gross becoming an actually bad<\/i> interviewer?), and heard a conversation with Francis Collins about science and faith. It was moderately interesting, a repeat of a show that had this piece as a sidebar to a Richard Dawkins interview on the same topic from a different angle.
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Mr. Collins has what I think of as the default Scientist\/Believer attitude. The universe is a wonderful thing, a Divine Gift. Our nature as humans is also a wonderful thing and a Divine gift. Using one to explore the other is an activity not unlike worship; further discoveries of the universe (or of our nature as humans) inspire awe at the Divinity of the Gift. Faith and Reason do not conflict, because they are different tools for different tasks. The way nature works<\/i> yields to the scientific method, and so that method is appropriate to the task.
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Now come we to Scripture. Mr. Collins appears to consider the Christian Bible to be Scripture, although not (of course, I am tempted to say) literal and inerrant. The creation story is a story; evolution is a fact. No conflict. The purpose of Genesis 1:1 is not to tell us how the universe was actually created, the Divine gave us our intelligence for that. And physics and so on; the Divine Gift includes the fact that our measuring, observing and recording devices can actually work. The point being that Scripture is not our only<\/i> Gift.
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I think of all of this, as I said, as a default Scientist\/Believer attitude. It isn’t surprising to find a fellow who has it, and in the brief interview, he didn’t go much further than stating it (with, admittedly, a rambling explication of how his specialty, genetic coding, is awesome in every sense) (well, almost every sense). I was left with a bunch of questions.
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What is Scripture? How does it differ from what is not Scripture? How can you tell what is and what is not Scripture? Are those questions susceptible to scientific inquiry, as for instance, textual emendation or archaeological insight?
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To the extent that a text is Scripture, do you feel that it is intended to carry a message from the Divine to individuals? To all individuals? Is the message coherent, in the sense that it is interpretable the same way by different people, or is it in some way a different message to different people (at different times)? Is that message or that process susceptible to scientific inquiry?
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I don’t mean to imply that Mr. Collins doesn’t have answers to these questions, answers that he is happy with. But I don’t know what they are. I have flipped through his book<\/a>, and I’ve looked through the index, and I haven’t seen that he addresses the questions. It’s possible that he isn’t actually very interested in Scripture, which would make the answers less interesting. I have a very Scripture-based view of religion (being, you know, Jewish), and forget sometimes that other people don’t. Maybe he’s just another Jeffersonian theist. I’m curious, though; I’d like to know.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger asks some questions of a fellow who isn’t even a Gentle Reader and will never see them. I don’t think he is, anyway. It would be pretty darned surprising, I tell you what.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18295,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11019\/revisions\/18295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}