My thoughts on this video;
I think the biblical stories are attempting to detail a coherent interconnected (hyperlinked if you like) system for understanding the nature of symbolic phenomenological reality, which you could also define as the universally abstractable properties of the world as experienced by humans.
Examples being:
- how humans experience hierarchies of being/concepts
- how humans experience time/transformation
- how humans experience their generative energies
- how humans experience the restorative nature of food
- how humans experience order and chaos
- how humans experience suffering and it's transcendence
From what i can see, they're not a knowledge claim on materialistic reality as could be quantifiable by the scientific method, but that doesn't make the account of the perspective of reality (the world as a place of meaning and a forum for action) that these stories are giving false either.
I think atheists are right in their criticism and mockery of the fantastical absurdity of the world view of those who attempt to mix these things up and claim that attempted systematic accounts of the universally abstractable properties and categories of the phenomena of human experience and existence (one example of such an account being the bible stories) are in the same category as past, present or future events that could be recorded and quantified using the scientific method or observed in a materialistic way.
From what i can see though this fundamentalist perspective of taking an attempted account of the universally abstractable world of meaning as it presents itself to humans and claiming it to be equal to an account of a materially observable occurrence, also isn't what these stories were written to portray.
It seems to me that this perspective is a recent invention of those who are attempting to view the world of meaning through a lens of materialism and criticisms of this view are not criticisms of the religious world view as it was intended to be understood when it was written down.
So, while I think atheists are valid in their critiques of the absurdity of ideas such as men walking on water and virgin births, i don't think this is a productive or appropriate level of thinking on which to make strong arguments against the religious world view.
I would suggest that it could be of benefit to atheists to attempt to understand:
- the symbolic world view as presented by Johnathan Pageau's YouTube channel and Jordan Peterson's book 'maps of meaning'
- Heideggerian phenomenology
- how the scientific method is nested inside of the symbolic world view
- how this symbolic world view is at the base level of their own world view (examples being commonly used ideas of up and down, hot and cold, cities, order, chaos, suffering, purpose)
and then make their arguments from this level of understanding.
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