[OPEN]Plain/literal reading? or reading into?

[USincognito]

I was just thinking about another part of Genesis as relates to this issue and that's the Flood Narrative, or more specifically the Rainbow.

Humans have come a long way in our understanding of light, the atmosphere, etc. than we did 3000 years ago. We now know that rainbows are simple arcs of visible spectrum that are caused by the refraction of sunlight through water following rain.

That fact doesn't undermine the symbolic truths of God's promises to the faithful that the rainbow conveys nor diminishes its beauty... even to non-believers.

 

[theFijian]

Oobi I think the method you're looking for is genre analysis. Our hermeneutic should not be to take a literal interpretation then lay a metaphorical one ontop of that. If it were then we would not be taking the text on it's merits and simply forcing our own culturally-conditioned interpretive framework onto it.

It seems plain to me that YECs 'plain reading' is based on post-enlightenment modernist scientism as much as anything. To say to read the text literally is not interpreting is simply false. If there was no interpretaion involved then the text would just be a string of meaningless letters as data. To read it literally is indeed to apply an interpretation.