(no subject)

[ceejayoz.livejournal.com]

Comments

[thomasblair.livejournal.com]

Words change. The bat described in Lev. 11 and Duet. 14 may not be the same animal as we call today's bat.

[johnraptor.livejournal.com]

That's a good point, and in my brief research on this subject, I discovered that the words translated at rabbit and hare may have referred to different animals which actually do chew their cud. I find it hard to believe however that when the bible says "bat" it's referring to something so different from what we call a bat as to be an actual bird, or when it says "grasshoppers" and "locusts" it's not referring to insects of some sort.

[thomasblair.livejournal.com]

For a person in that day and of the intellectual level I'm assuming the general populous had (they were, after all, the target audience of the Torah) and especially considering that the nomenclature and differentiating methods we use today in biology simply didn't exist then, I don't find it difficult at all to accept that they thought something that flies was a bird.

[johnraptor.livejournal.com]

That's exactly my point. The bible was written by people, and describes the natural world based on the best knowledge available at the time. The fact that we now know some of that knowledge to be incorrect proves that the bible is not infallible. This is important because the infallibility of the bible is one of the central pillars of creationism.