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Accommodation is often trotted out as a way to account for the unscientific language of Scripture. We now know that the earth does not rise and set, but the ancient Hebrews did not know that, and so God accommodated Himself to their (low) level of scientific knowledge when He guided the writing of Scripture.
I've got multiple problems with this theory. One of the primary ones is that it assumes that the "non-scientific" language of Scripture is false. That's not the case. "The sun rises and sets every day" is a true statement. I can prove it to you - look out the window at, say, 7 AM and again at, say 7 PM, and you'll see the sun moving through the sky up and then down.
The only reason we are uneasy with this normal language is that we've been duped into thinking that scientific descriptions are somehow more basically true than other descriptions, and that scientific study has some privileged access to truth denied to other kinds of study. Both of those are false. Scientific description is one sort of description among others, and science does not gets to the "baseline" truth that other descriptions miss. Science deliberately limits its vision to certain features of the world, where our more normal discourses represent more of the fullness of reality.
No physical/chemical/biological description of love is "truer" than Solomon's "Your love is better than wine." The contrary is the case.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, September 16, 2005 at 11:16 PM
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