Clouseau

http://www.arkive.org/species/ARK/ma...ovietype=rpMed

Gamera

Agreed, but I think the topic post makes the point, that these and other nonscientific categorizations and explanations, place the authors of the Hebrew Scripture outside the realm of writing a biological, historical, or geographical text.

The proponents of inerrancy claim that the Hebrew scriptures are intended to be factually true and are in fact accurate. This example shows that the authors weren't concerned with factuality as we know it and that the intent of these texts resides elsewhere (say maybe in making spiritual claims about God and man, and not about geology and biology).

If the Hebrew texts are biological texts they fail and are inaccurate. If they spiritual texts then factual issues like this don't matter. The inerrancy claims seem to posit the former and if they do, they fail.

Clouseau

It is fundamentalists (literalists) who claim scientific accuracy. There are some genuine difficulties with the texts, but this is not one of them. In this case, there is only a problem with translation. Even if there was not, it would not mean that the Israelites were unaware that they should not eat bats (though why anyone should want to I can't imagine).

pkropotkin

It's complicated, in Hebrew and Greek the words in the OT, mean "flying thing", and they both come from the root verb "to fly'.

The problem is in Old English the original word used for all birds and included other flying things was the word fowl, which in a convoluted way comes from verbs that mean "to fly". The word bird at this time, actually meant the young, primarily of feathered animals, but rarely also of other animals. Slowly there was a transition, at first where bird, was used for smaller feathered animals, and fowl used for larger feathered animals, until finally bird became the generic word for feathered animals, and fowl was rarely used and mostly for certain types of feathered animals. This left English with no good word to encompass all flying creatures.

In the King James version, the word used was fowl, not bird, which at the time meant all flying things. For example in 1648 Gage West Ind. xii. (1655) 45 "Battes, or Rear-mice and other fowle."

pkropotkin

Actually they fly and they are the only true flying mammal, their wings work fairly similarly to birds. flying squirrels glide, notice they are still called flying squirrels. yes their appendages are wings, we call airplane appendages wings as well. If you read any scientific papers on bats, they talk about flying and wingloading.

Wing in English, means any organ or appendage of flight.

spamandham

Gliding with style perhaps? If they can gain altitude by flapping, why is that not considered "flying"?

pkropotkin

I certainly think that the Bible is full of nonsense and is not innerant. But this particular quote is not factually or biologically inaccurate. Certainly, taxonomic classification is a nice human construct that has certain benefits when studying life, but it is not the only way to organize life allowed by biology, for example in some areas of comparative biology, one will organize the animals by certain functions they share and you want to explore.

In Leviticus, the book is enumerating what god considers to defile Hebrews by consumption, it's fairly clear that god considers certain functions of the animals to determine this, not their ancestral relationships, therefore organizing by phylogeny would not be a great choice.

We still do this today, we use the terms fruit, vegetables, meat(seafood, shellfish, fish, poultry, wild game, red meat), grains, legumes, nuts in nutrition science, that are often non taxonomic, because the organization of the nutritional contents of these things are more important than their taxonomy. Also in nutritional science, sometimes one will talk of good and bad fatty acid foods, high carbohydrates foods organized by glycemic index, protein sources rated by amino acid content. etc. Seeing that nutrition science and god are both concerned about aspects of food consumption, it doesn't seem strange that neither is particularly concerned with taxonomy as an organizing principle.

One of the things in this section of Leviticus that can strongly be argued biologically inaccurate, is the locust and grasshopper that walk on four legs.

Clouseau

Is this a major reason for saying that 'the Bible is full of nonsense and is not innerant'? Or are there better reasons for distrust of these books?

pkropotkin

I think that's one of the main points of nonsense for Leviticus 11, one could argue that the rabbit chewing cud is another. And finally god doesn't bother to tell the Hebrews how these animals make them unclean, which would seem to be a pretty important and helpful thing to do. Also from the majority of Christians viewpoint, since the Levitical food laws don't need to be followed, it seems that there was no reason for these rules, except a complex game of Simon Says.

As far as the whole Bible, lets not get off topic, the main point of my bringing up that I think the Bible is full of nonsense and is not inerrant, was to show that my argument was not fostered by such beliefs.

Clouseau

[QUOTE=pkropotkin;4540115]So what is the problem? That God thought that insects have four legs, or that the Israelites thought so? Is that much of a reason for rejecting an offer of eternal life?

I'm sure one could, but let's sort out problems one at a time, or we might duck something important. (Now could the Israelites have eaten ducks? )