the exclusive original meaning of the text has no more depth than that by all accounts.
Is that what I said?
In a domain that is strictly non-scientific
How can a text which purports to explain the origins of the Earth, the cosmos and life be strictly non-scientific?
how could any given explanation be clearly more valid than another, especially to an uninvested party?
We can send satellites to orbit and use them to observe the shape of the Earth.
Extending this, what leads you to the conclusion that the most easily accessible and comprehensible (via Google) exegeses must be the most valid?
Period illustrations of a flat Earth engraved in stone. Medieval paintings of a flat Earth. The fact that every neighboring culture at the time of writing had a flat Earth based cosmology. Everything in this article.
Somewhat tangential: Love him or hate him (or don't know who he is), Peterson gets to the core of the fundamentalism vs. science thing in this clip:
He seems like somebody who has made a livelihood out of rendering the Bible defensible through extreme mental contortions.
"Every day moderate Christians will insist all of it's metaphorical or taken out of context, but Biblical scholars and historians know better. Googling 'Biblical cosmology' demonstrates this. Ancient Christians believed in a flat Earth." implies as much, and quite strongly.
I refer to the domain of religion. One likely explanation, if you remove the somewhat arbitrary presupposition that "moderate Christians" are wrong about the bible being metaphorical (though analogical is perhaps a better term here), is that the cosmological elements of scripture are instead an analogue to things for which crafting abstract terminology would be less useful to the reader than a simple allegory with intended self-evident relation to observable reality - a self-evidence which, to be fair, was likely more accessible to Ancients than for us in 2017.
You missed what I was saying entirely; I'm referring strictly to consensus regarding the validity of the many interpretations of scripture - at least one layer of abstraction above the "bible vs. science" discussion, so not even properly comparable. Of course the earth is round.
This also doesn't really relate to what I asked you; you just push the evidence-of-cosmology line further, but I'm asking you why you would privilege any one interpretation of scripture over another when you seem to treat it all as, broadly speaking, nonsensical.
To follow you a bit though, the interpretation of pictorial symbols has as much potential for error as does that of scripture, to say nothing of "perspective" not being an established artistic concept; nor of the implication that depictions of something must somehow inherently be authoritative on the source material (think those weird Christian Sonic drawings lol). Also that link didn't work.
You'd be wrong, he's a PhD clinical psychologist and professor of psychology - formerly at Harvard, even. Accordingly, and to extend an earlier point, perhaps the contortions aren't that extreme, or even contortions at all, if what he's talking about is something other than your own understanding of the same thing.