Just agreeing with the Pope whe he said "The Bible isn't meant to be a manual of natural science," the pope told the estimated 5,000 visitors and pilgrims gathered for his audience. "Instead it is meant to make understandable the authentic and deep truth of all things," he said.
Well, I agree that the Bible isn’t meant to be that either, that’s not where I have any bone of contention to pick with his statements.
The problem that I have with his statement is that it isn’t intellectually consistent. First of all, the statement about it not being a science manual is simply a handwave. By making that statement, he is acknowledging that he knows the question is directed towards the attacks on the authenticity of the Bible with regards to claimed discrepancies with science, but he doesn’t actually speak of anything relevant to the controversy. So, that right there is something of an intellectual dodge.
However, just saying that the Bible isn’t a scientific document really doesn’t resolve anything as regards to the controversy. Science is simply a method of attempting to determine the truth about reality and the world around us, and people have used this method, and the supposed facts produced by it, to contradict apparently factual statements in the Bible. The Bible doesn’t need to be a scientific document to make factually authoritative statements, and it indeed makes a great many such statements. So, if there is a contradiction between the two sets of “facts”, then it can’t be resolved by saying “the Bible isn’t science”. I mean, the story of Paul Bunyan is not science either, but it doesn’t need to be in order for science to rule it implausible.
Regardless, he goes on to speak of the strictly spiritual side of the Genesis stories, with no regard to the historical and factual sides. He is a Biblical scholar, so he has no ignorance of the fact that most of the Bible contains multiple aspects to any particular passage, and so the fact that Genesis contains many spiritual implications does nothing to demonstrate for or against a historical interpretation.
In fact, some of his statements on the spiritual interpretation of Genesis are implicitly rebuking a historical interpretation, such as his statement that the Serpent represents something other than Satan. It may well be true that their is a symbolism inherent besides that of Satan, but we know from the New Testament in no uncertain terms that the Serpent is in fact primarily a representation of Satan. So, he is discussing what are in fact secondary symbolisms at best, to divert attention away from the primary meanings of the text. This is why I said he’s treating Genesis as a fairy tale, with literal meanings that can be discarded when inconvenient, in favor of the more convenient spiritual interpretations.
Yet, he then goes on to say that this document is designed to convey authentic truth. Well, that is not a consistent position, since the document represents itself to us as a historical document, as much as any of the other historical narratives in the Bible do. So, if it is an allegory that is not meant to be taken as historical, then it is fundamentally dishonest, which contradicts the idea that it is meant to convey the truth.
For example, say I find out that Muhammed never existed as a real person, and none of the events written about him in the Koran actually happened. Now, if I believed all of that was a fiction, and I knew that the Koran presented it as historical truth, then I would be intellectually inconsistent, and possibly dishonest myself, if I were to say that the Koran was meant to convey fundamental truth to people.
And, I think it's an obvious corollary that, when we use it as such we are both reducing it's value and using it incorrectly.