I think “divinely inspired” is too weak because from my perspective divine inspiration is everywhere raining down upon us in a torrent. I agree 100% about dictation – in fact, I think claims like that, much like imposing design or the creation of living things, is projection of human ways of doing things upon God. It strongly suggests to me that people are claiming to speak for God because they want to clothe themselves with His authority in the effort to control and manipulate of others. Instead, I would say God can use people, nations, and the events of history as His writing instruments – a more subtle hand in things. But in my experience, God quite often communicates things to people in spite of the person speaking or writing and thus limiting the meaning to what the speaker/writer intends is a mistake.
That is not what I said. My point is that the terms “dust” and “water” cannot exclude concepts not yet named. Whether the author is simply speaking in general terms or has some more poetic or mystical meaning is really beside the point, which is simply that there really is no call for reading any conflict with science into the text.
As a scientist and an educator, I cannot help thinking about how I could successfully communicate what I know when the language for it simply does not exist. I wonder if it might not be just as difficult as trying to communicate with Wittgenstein’s lion.
Sounds like another piece in a house of cards. Ultimately we just have boil this down to the fact that there is very little objectivity in any of this and we are just too likely to read what we want into the text one way or another. I believe it is a fact of psychology that perception cannot abstracted from our beliefs and therefore what hope do we have attaching meaning to the words of a text apart from a rather large set of assumptions.