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You treat factual truth as some conventional fad. Whales are not fish. They may "look" like fish, but they are not fish any more than chimps are humans. My point is that whales were never fish, and chimps were never humans (nor humans chimps)! Likewise, bats were never birds; whether people knew it or not.

And yet both fish and whales are vertebrate sea creatures. And chimps and humans and monkeys and even lumurs are all primates. You're still making categorical errors.

You're also reifying "facts". Other than as an intellectual construct, there is no such entity as a "fact." There is, I believe, a world external to me and to my perceptions of it, a world that exists and will continue to exist apart from my own existence. A great deal of it is open to my experience or to my experience as mediated through various types of apparatus that compensate for the limitations of my senses and make sensible phenomena that otherwise would take place unnoticed. Because many of these "things" happen with such regularity under similar conditions to disparate people having otherwise similar sensory abilities who are able, using language and other forms of representation, to describe such experiences in similar, independent, and repeatable ways, we characterize those descriptions as "facts" regarding the matter of experience in question. The same thing can be said of mental operations. The human mind has certain characteristics more or less shared by disparate people throughout time and space to such a degree that these characteristics are accepted conventionally as representing inherent categories of mental operations or ways of perceiving and understanding that are both prior to and that transcend individual choice or individual cognition. Though that doesn't stop some from declaring that the idea that we can truly know one thing or choose to do another is simply illusion.

In spite of this, though, different people in different times and different places categorize the objects of their senses in different ways. Someone who has never seen snow may not even have a word for it. Someone whose life depends on knowing all the different physical characteristics that can be exhibited by frozen water (or sand) under different conditions will have developed a vocabulary, a conceptual framework, that is able to draw extremely fine distinctions. Some people lump similar things into more general categories. Some people focus on individual differences between those similar things to create more specific subcategories within the general category.

One group of people may have a word to describe a category (let it be called A) that contains representatives of things that another group of people may choose to describe using more than that one word based on characteristics that, to them, are sufficiently important to warrant commemorating that distinction by coining a new terms (say A1 and A2). Another group may acknowledge similarities between A1 and A2 that they say could appear unifying but that, according to their scheme of things, are actually not so important as other characteristics and so they say that, while there are some overlapping characteristics that are phenomenologically important, the other characteristics are even more fundamentally distinctive so that they split the group into A1 and B.

It is a mistake, though, to claim that because we know, based on this independently developed nomenclature, that members of A1 are not members of B, that those who described them all as A were misidentifying A1 as B when those distinctions didn't even exist at the time. It wasn't that they were too ignorant or too stupid to see the differences, it was just that, for them, those differences weren't relevant enough to justify creating separate categories, whether subordinate or mutually exclusive or something else, with names to signify those differences.

And yet both fish and whales are vertebrate sea creatures

And all are living creatures. That means we and amoebas are really one and the same.

I read your lengthy rationalizations. Anyone who reads that chapter will see that bats are included with birds. Obviously they were not insects, which are distinctly different from birds.

The author simply didn't know that bats are not birds. And that's fine with me, but it's not good enough for the Bible. The point is that if everything in the Bible is "God-breathed" then it should be true even if man's perceptions at the time the book was written were flawed.

What that means is that God would never allow the author of the book to say that the earth sits on four pillars because it is false. God would never allow the author to say that the mustard seed is the smallest seed, because it isn't. Never mind the fact that the smaller one is in Hawaii. God would know that but not the author.

The fact that such statements exist, it is evident that not everything in the Bible is the word of God, unless one is willing to say that God intentionally placed false statements in the Bible!

God stands for absolute truth and absolute truth doesn't change. If the Bible is simply the taxonomy of men, as he knew the world at that time, then it is not God's word but man's word.