Brian63

How is it that the snake is representing Satan? How is Satan communicating through the snake in any way? If you think about it for a moment, you will come to realize that yes, the snake is being depicted as talking. Regardless of whether the snake is speaking on its own behalf or on behalf of Satan or on behalf of the tooth fairy, it is still a snake speaking. Changing who it is speaking for does not change the fact that it is speaking.

Brian

Steven Carr

Why would they bother discussing a work where a character talks to Satan?

sotto voce

Why not?

Vorkosigan

Sotto, quit pretending to be stupid. Basic to scholarship is the notion of methodological naturalism. Of course you know what that is; don't pretend to me you don't. If you adopt methodological naturalism as your stance for inquiring into the past, present, and future, you are a scholar/scientist. Anything else, you're just a propagandist for some ideological position.

sotto voce

Circularity comes in many forms.

Tenorikuma

The problem with the supernatural is that it is not rationally coherent, unless you define it simply as that which is not yet explainable — in which case, it is still part of the natural world.

Vorkosigan

It's only circular if you are trapped in some ideological fantasy. The beauty of adherence to useful and reliable methodologies based on the stance of methodological naturalism is that they cut through all those fantasies of the supernatural.

Of course, it isn't very pretty if you happen to have a social identity constructed out of some ideologically-driven appeal to innate teleological biases. Like religious believers, for example.

Toto

You might be surprised how many people thought that novel was reality, or hyperreality. Dan Brown himself played it both ways against the middle. For some audiences, he claimed that there was a valid historical basis for the book. When challenged by academic critics, he said it was only a novel.

And, in fact, you can find a number of brand name Biblical scholars with PhD's behind their names who felt the need to publish books on the Da Vinci Code.


E.g. - Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Bart Ehrman

The DaVinci Code Controversy (or via: amazon.co.uk)

stephan huller

No one is immune to the lure of making a buck. The one thing that strikes you when researching the historical details of an obscure period of history in an even more obscure culture is the eternal appeal of avarice.

Doug Shaver

A belief about what is possible is not a value judgment.