Re: Top three reasons for optimism about the ID scam

On Wed, 4 Dec 2024 21:24:48 +0000, Ernest Major
<{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 04/12/2024 19:05, Vincent Maycock wrote:

They should never have been on it in the first place as there was
nothing heretical about them

Except that the Bible says the earth does not move.

>
The Bible also says that the earth is flat.
>
The Catholic Church recognised that the Bible includes idiom, metaphor,
poetry and allegory, inter alia. Augustine, an early Church Father,
recognised that empirical data trumped Biblical interpretation, and
advised Christians not to bring the faith into disrepute by adopting
positions (such as flat earth) that were obvious nonsense.

Right.   I suppose Holy Scripture would have to be "interpreted"
before one could conclude that anything was contrary to it or not.

When I looked into the subject I found that the Catholic Church was
rather more literalist than I had expected. There is a presumption of
literalism in the absence of contrary data. I have read that Galileo had
a theological dispute with the Church - he argued that the Church should
not give hostages to fortune by unnecessarily nailing its mast to
interpretations that might be overturned by later discoveries.