Proving yet again that within the breast of every dime-store atheist beats the heart of a Christian fundamentalist crank, the latest pop paladin of Truly True Scientific Atheist Thought sallies forth to combat the ravages of faithheads like Louis Pasteur who promote irrational superstitious belief in unseen realities like "God" and "germs."
And it's something I'd suggest to Maher, too. The dude needs to learn how to read books written for grownups and not just content himself and other illiterate literalists with Beavis and Butthead levels of laughter at Christianity.
Here's the thing: The Bible, while it is a single book authored by God, is also 73 books authored by men writing under inspiration. Those men were not robots zapped by a God Ray and forced to write against their will. They were perfectly free and writing exactly what they wanted to write. This means, among other things, that they were writing a lot of different kinds of literature and were by no means all writing newspaper language. Therefore, the very first step we should take as readers in understanding a biblical (or, for that matter, any) text is to determine what literary form the author is employing. Is the passage poetry? Historical narrative? Philosophical reflection? Pastoral instruction? Apocalyptic? Myth? Scripture is simply crammed with a wide variety of different kinds of writing, and the kind of writing you are reading will greatly influence the way in which it is intended to be read.
DUH!!! HELLO??? Are you getting any of this???
For Bill Maher, it is all the National Enquirer. This leaves him ill-equipped to cope with a complex adult document like the Bible, because when he is confronted with the fact that -- mark this -- every biblical text has a literal meaning, he instantly assumes a "literal meaning" is identical with a literalistic meaning...
...The first thing we have to do is wipe any sneers off our faces. Members of the Maher school of biblical criticism imagine they are being hard-headed thinkers when they reflexively reject the possibility of the miraculous. Their favorite slogan is, "Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect." The problem is that it's not true. Skepticism is, in fact, the sterility of the intellect, just as credulity is. Take either skepticism or credulity too far and you wind up thinking nonsense (as when Maher extends his skepticism to reject not just the unseen reality of God, but the unseen reality of disease-causing germs or a faith-healing devotee who chalks up every head cold to a demon). Or worse, you wind up not thinking at all, as when H. G. Wells's skepticism in his essay "Doubts of the Instrument" leads him to doubt whether he can know anything, or when the hyper-credulous person believes it when somebody says a 900-foot-tall Jesus appeared to Oral Roberts, demanding cash.
Reflexive skepticism and reflexive credulity are both enemies of the Catholic intellectual tradition, which counsels instead both reason and faith. The devil sends dogmatic skepticism and brainless credulity into the world as a pair so that, fearing one, we might flee to the other and be ensnared. Maher-esque skeptics, living in the delusional fear that millions of Christians credulously believe the Virgin appears regularly on grilled cheese sandwiches, run to the opposite extreme of refusing to acknowledge the miraculous even if it walks up and hits them in the face. Oh sure, they may talk a good game about their desire for "scientific proof," as Emile Zola did when he said he just wanted to see a cut finger dipped in Lourdes water and healed. But when confronted with a miracle (as Zola was by the miraculous healing of a tubercular woman whose half-destroyed face was healed after a bath at Lourdes), the dogmatic skeptic simply declares, as Zola did, "Were I to see all the sick at Lourdes cured, I would not believe in a miracle." This is not reason. This is unreason: a dogmatic faith that miracles cannot happen that precedes and excludes any possible testimony to the miraculous, including the testimony of one's own two eyes.
The sane approach to the question of the supernatural is therefore to embrace a reasonable openness to the possibility of the supernatural combined with a sensible willingness to use the sense God gave a goose. In short, it's the same approach we use for determining all other matters of historical fact: Are the witnesses really trying to tell us a miracle occurred in actual human history, and are they reliable? Not all biblical documents are entirely clear about these questions, but as a general rule, it's not all that hard to tell them apart.
So, for instance, Jerome -- the greatest biblical scholar of antiquity -- tells us that the Creation story is written "after the manner of a popular poet" -- or, as we say today, in mythic language. This is a shock to the Mahers of the world, who just knew from listening to other like-minded Mahers of the world that ancient Christ
