From Newsgroup: talk.origins

On 6/9/2026 1:06 PM, RonO wrote:

In the thread "The reason that the Top Six killed the ID scam on TO" I
added a post describing an article written by a Modern Orthodox Jew.-a He claimed to be raised as an Orthodox Jew, but he obviously does not take
the Bible as literally as he may have once understood it to be.

https://www.thetorah.com/article/my-encounter-with-the-firmament

I added this post because the Top Six destroyed the Reason to Believe
old earth creationists Biblical model, and they wanted to claim that the Biblical description of the firmament as a solid dome above a flat earth
was actually a description of the water cycle.-a The Orthodox author disagreed with the modern Orthodox apologetic changing the firmament
into a cloud layer.-a He put up the geocentric flat earth cosmology that
the authors of the Bible believed existed when the Bible was written. It
was a cosmology that the Hebrew likely adopted from their neighbors that
had been civilized for a longer period of time.-a There was a flat earth with a solid dome (firmament) above it.-a The firmament was created on
the second day of creation, and the sun and moon were made and placed in
the firmament on the 4th day of creation.-a There was water on the earth
and water on the other side of the firmament and God would open the firmament to let the rain fall.-a The creation was only as old as their
oral history went back to.

The Orthodox author puts up evidence that historical Rabbis believed
that the firmament existed until Copernican times when Biblical
geocentrism fell apart.-a Kepler was probably about the last creationist seriously messing with the firmament with his notion of crystal spheres.

The Orthodox author understands that the Bible is just wrong about the creation.-a Instead of letting this understanding undermine his spiritual Biblical beliefs he has decided to take solace in the fact that the
authors of the Bible wrote about what they believed to be the case. They
may have been wrong about the creation, but there isn't the same type of evidence that they were wrong about their spiritual beliefs.

I asked google about literal errors in the Bible in relation to this
belief, that the authors of the Bible were just describing what they
believed to have existed, and Google put up a claim that this became one
of the ways to reconcile errors in the Bible with reality when
Protestants had to deal with the failure of geocentrism.

QUOTE:
3. Academic Integration

Despite the initial backlash, some Protestant thinkers found ways to
embrace the new mathematics without compromising their faith. Figures
like the Lutheran scholar Georg Joachim Rheticus actively championed and helped publish Copernicus's work. By adopting the "principle of accommodation"rCothe idea that the Bible speaks in the everyday language
of human perception rather than strict scientific literalismrCoProtestant academics gradually reconciled Copernican math with scripture.
END QUOTE:

The Bible could be literally wrong because the authors were just
describing the creation in everyday language of human perception rather
than what the creation actually is. The Bible may reflect how the
authors of the Bible were able to describe the creation, but that
description does not have to be an accurate statement about the creation
that actually exists. I do not recall ever encountering the "principle
of accommodation", and the Orthodox Jewish author doesn't relate his reconciliation with it, but seems to have come to a similar belief. The Reason to Believe OEC cannot seem to use the principle to help them
explain how wrong the Bible is about the 6 day creation. Instead they
try to force reality into a literal Biblical interpretation. If you
applied the principle of accommodation to Genesis 1 you would likely end
up with "God created everything", but it could have happened anyway in
which it actually happened.

The Orthodox author notes that historical Rabbis considered the Biblical firmament to be a solid dome above the earth until the failure of
geocentrism, but he did not relate his own accommodation of the literal
error to how the Protestants dealt with the failure of geocentrism.

Ron Okimoto

The AIG claims that if one thing in the Bible is wrong that you have no reason to trust any of it, but this Orthodox take is that the authors of
the Bible believed what they were wrong about, and that they would also
have believed what no one can cross check.-a It is their belief that he
has to have faith in.-a He has faith that the authors of the Bible did
not get the spiritual claims as wrong as what can be determined to be
wrong about the creation by our own senses.

Inerrancy of the Bible has never been required by Christianity.-a The
young earth Biblical cosmology had already failed by the time Christ was born.-a Eratosthenes had used physical measurements to estimate the circumference of the earth a couple centuries before Christ was born. Likely, none of the Church Fathers were flat earth creationists even
though some of the authors of the New Testament were likely flat earth creationists.-a Origen was not a young earth creationists.-a Saint
Augustine did not believe in the 6 day creation.-a Unfortunately, all the Church Fathers were geocentric creationists.-a Augustine believed that
the authors of the Bible had gotten the 6 day creation wrong.-a It should
be telling that the alternative that Augustine put up would also have
been wrong.-a If the Bible was rewritten today the Top Six should tell
any creationists that errors could still be made.-a The authors of the
Bible were just wrong about some things that we can determine for
ourselves.

There is no reason to prevaricate about "misinterpretation" of the Bible when it is just plain wrong about somethings like the creation of the firmament on the second day.-a The author(s) were describing the creation
of a cosmos that they believed existed.-a The flat earth with a solid
dome above it with the sun and moon imbedded in the firmament was not created just a few thousand years ago in the way described in the Bible.
-aIf the ID perp's "The Story of Everything" had honestly told the story
of the Big Bang, fine tuning, and the origin of life on earth they would have made it very clear that the existing creation is not the creation described in the Bible.-a Instead the ID scam is just bait to fool the
rubes into supporting their Wedge religious-political agenda.

Ron Okimoto

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