Sorry to be so long answering this. Not only was work busy but my husband was going through withdrawal again and that is always an all consuming time sink.
On Solomonoff induction: If we take a look at one of the facts this story proposes to explain, - We live in a world of decay, where humans and other animals have death as their destiny and the universe itself tends to disorder and destruction, but that this is bad and wrong and against the harmonies of logic and lawfulness and the timelessness of truth. This story’s proposal that the original and good state of the world was without any need for death, but that at one point one fundamental change was made, perhaps tweaking a law of conservation of information just enough so that its practical consequences are an ever increasing disorder, i.e. entropy, seems as elegantly simple answer as I can think of. This one rule change is more what I was thinking of, rather than swap out of the entire rule set, basically because it’s lower complexity. Yes, I am expecting that God re-cons the plant and animal world so that you get stable biology and ecosystems under this new rule, but i already had a sufficiently intelligent and powerful agent, with an established interest in having a sustained ecosystem, who could implement the needed changes. So I don’t see any new rules there. Nor do I think it should be surprising that quite a lot of surface changes could be occasioned by even a small change of one rule that was so fundamental.
On parallels: I can think of lots of reasons to give why Satan controlling the snake in called for by a Christological interpretation and other reasons, like dualism, that could also lead to the idea this was a good interpretation, but I’m getting the internal feeling that I’m starting to treat my arguments like soldiers on this one. People are influenced by the culture around them so I can see how a culture that finds the idea of talking snakes silly would be one of the contributing factors to the general theological preference for Satan as an external control on the snake. But this is such a subtle thing with so many dependencies that it will be hard to get even someone who has this assumption to focus on questioning the one dependency you want, the inerrancy of the Bible, rather than some other dependency, especially if you are trying to avoid a feeling of personal hostility that tends to harden people positions.
Slowness not a problem. (You wouldn’t believe how long I’ve sometimes taken.) I hope your husband is OK.
You say “one fundamental change”, but I’m pretty sure there is no way to fill in the details of that story so that it actually works. Increasing entropy is a consequence of the fundamental form of the laws of physics, plus the world being in a low-entropy state at the big bang. Make a small change to that and you get not a perfect world with no death and corruption, but a world where physics doesn’t work.
I don’t think you get to call something “elegantly simple” just because you haven’t thought about the details and therefore can’t see how messy they are :-).
(Maybe God designed a lawful universe where entropy increases, and then set Eden up with a hacked version where entropy doesn’t increase because of constant divine intervention, and then just stopped doing that when Adam and Eve didn’t obey his command. That would suggest that A&E were intended to fail all along, an idea that maybe gets some support from e.g. Revelation 13:8 and which strengthens my sense that in the standard Christian interpretation of the Eden story God is the bad guy.)
Sorry to be so long answering this. Not only was work busy but my husband was going through withdrawal again and that is always an all consuming time sink.
On Solomonoff induction: If we take a look at one of the facts this story proposes to explain, - We live in a world of decay, where humans and other animals have death as their destiny and the universe itself tends to disorder and destruction, but that this is bad and wrong and against the harmonies of logic and lawfulness and the timelessness of truth. This story’s proposal that the original and good state of the world was without any need for death, but that at one point one fundamental change was made, perhaps tweaking a law of conservation of information just enough so that its practical consequences are an ever increasing disorder, i.e. entropy, seems as elegantly simple answer as I can think of. This one rule change is more what I was thinking of, rather than swap out of the entire rule set, basically because it’s lower complexity. Yes, I am expecting that God re-cons the plant and animal world so that you get stable biology and ecosystems under this new rule, but i already had a sufficiently intelligent and powerful agent, with an established interest in having a sustained ecosystem, who could implement the needed changes. So I don’t see any new rules there. Nor do I think it should be surprising that quite a lot of surface changes could be occasioned by even a small change of one rule that was so fundamental.
On parallels: I can think of lots of reasons to give why Satan controlling the snake in called for by a Christological interpretation and other reasons, like dualism, that could also lead to the idea this was a good interpretation, but I’m getting the internal feeling that I’m starting to treat my arguments like soldiers on this one. People are influenced by the culture around them so I can see how a culture that finds the idea of talking snakes silly would be one of the contributing factors to the general theological preference for Satan as an external control on the snake. But this is such a subtle thing with so many dependencies that it will be hard to get even someone who has this assumption to focus on questioning the one dependency you want, the inerrancy of the Bible, rather than some other dependency, especially if you are trying to avoid a feeling of personal hostility that tends to harden people positions.
Slowness not a problem. (You wouldn’t believe how long I’ve sometimes taken.) I hope your husband is OK.
You say “one fundamental change”, but I’m pretty sure there is no way to fill in the details of that story so that it actually works. Increasing entropy is a consequence of the fundamental form of the laws of physics, plus the world being in a low-entropy state at the big bang. Make a small change to that and you get not a perfect world with no death and corruption, but a world where physics doesn’t work.
I don’t think you get to call something “elegantly simple” just because you haven’t thought about the details and therefore can’t see how messy they are :-).
(Maybe God designed a lawful universe where entropy increases, and then set Eden up with a hacked version where entropy doesn’t increase because of constant divine intervention, and then just stopped doing that when Adam and Eve didn’t obey his command. That would suggest that A&E were intended to fail all along, an idea that maybe gets some support from e.g. Revelation 13:8 and which strengthens my sense that in the standard Christian interpretation of the Eden story God is the bad guy.)