There seems a tacit assumption here that all people who read the bible believe it is to be taken literally. [...] This is NOT a premise believed by all or even most Christians.
One of the cutting-edge advances in fallacy-ology has been the weak man, a terribly-named cousin of the straw man. The straw man is a terrible argument nobody really holds, which was only invented so your side had something easy to defeat. The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat.
Note that this was also written by Yvain, and is the #2 hit on Google for “weak man fallacy”. I think it’s fair to say he popularized the concept of the Weak Man as a fallacy around here. Furthermore, he’s the only person I can think of offhand who frequently gets accused of being too charitable to his opponents. So, as far as the author’s original intent (although not necessarily everyone else’s reading of the essay, death of the author and all that), I feel like he gets the benefit of the doubt here. I, for one, will happily disclaim that a large fraction of Christians do not accept the Bible as literal.
Meanwhile, although certainly there are many Christians who would say the story of Adam and Eve and the snake and the tree is not literally true, I don’t think it’s unfair to claim that some significant fraction do believe it’s literally true—after all, almost half the country rejects evolution as the origin of human life, which is a referendum on the literal truth of another part of the same story. The fall of Adam and Eve is important to the Christian ideas of salvation and original sin, which makes some Christians understandably reluctant to reject it. From a certain perspective, denying the literal truth of the story is equivalent to rejecting a central tenet of Christian thought.
Edit: Of course, some also believe that the Fall is in some sense literally true, while the snake/tree or other fantastical elements are allegorical; there are more than just two schools of thought here.
This is, roughly, an accusation of a Weak Man fallacy:
Note that this was also written by Yvain, and is the #2 hit on Google for “weak man fallacy”. I think it’s fair to say he popularized the concept of the Weak Man as a fallacy around here. Furthermore, he’s the only person I can think of offhand who frequently gets accused of being too charitable to his opponents. So, as far as the author’s original intent (although not necessarily everyone else’s reading of the essay, death of the author and all that), I feel like he gets the benefit of the doubt here. I, for one, will happily disclaim that a large fraction of Christians do not accept the Bible as literal.
Meanwhile, although certainly there are many Christians who would say the story of Adam and Eve and the snake and the tree is not literally true, I don’t think it’s unfair to claim that some significant fraction do believe it’s literally true—after all, almost half the country rejects evolution as the origin of human life, which is a referendum on the literal truth of another part of the same story. The fall of Adam and Eve is important to the Christian ideas of salvation and original sin, which makes some Christians understandably reluctant to reject it. From a certain perspective, denying the literal truth of the story is equivalent to rejecting a central tenet of Christian thought.
Edit: Of course, some also believe that the Fall is in some sense literally true, while the snake/tree or other fantastical elements are allegorical; there are more than just two schools of thought here.