Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the creation of life and biological diversity, part 19.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We've been thinking about the question, are myths to be understood literally to be true?

And in our examination of anthropological data, we saw that there are three factors or

properties of myth that contribute to the view that they are not to be interpreted literalistically.

One was their metaphoricalness, another was their plasticity, and a third factor was their

flexibility. Their metaphoricalness refers to the figurative nature of the

language of myth. The plasticity of myth refers to the different versions of a myth that might

be told simultaneously in a culture that differ from one another,

though they teach the same central truth.

And the flexibility of myth is its ability to adapt and change over time

in response to new pressures and situations.

And when we began to look at the literary evidence of ancient near-eastern myths of Israel's

neighbors, Mesopotamia, that is to say Babylon and Sumer, and then also Egypt, we found

that they are characterized by this same metaphorical language

that the anthropological data suggests.

Now, not only does the metaphorical and figurative language of ancient Near Eastern myths

support a non-literal reading of such myths, but these myths also exhibit

the same sort of plasticity and flexibility that we found in the anthropological data.

In Mesopotamia, we have alternative accounts of Marduk's creation of the world which are significantly

different. Now I've already mentioned the creation narrative in the enuma eliche in which Marduk creates the world, or fashions the world, rather, out of the corpse

...