It is not a comment on the state of the world relative to all possible worlds so much as relative to worlds I consider likely to result should I, being not omniscient, meddle on a large scale.
I guess I could have picked something small and relevant only to my personal situation, but they did ask me "about the world", not about myself.
Actually, now that I look at it it's kind of the opposite of what I was complaining about.
Job 26:7 "He stretches out the north over empty space / And hangs the earth on nothing." as evidence that the bible revealed that the earth was a ball floating in space hundreds of years before the Greeks figured it out.
If you look at the rest of the chapter it is pretty clearly a list of metaphors sprinkled with poetic descriptions of natural phenomena meant to describe the power of God. Why this one alone should be literal (and only the second half at that) is not clear. I imagine I would get a better sense of what it's supposed to be if I more thoroughly read the entire book.
Edit: Also, I have no idea about the actual timeline of the development of the round earth idea versus the last major edit to the book of Job, so the assertion seems a bit dubious on that front too.
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Hm. Is this the best of all realizeable worlds? That seems arguably optimistic.
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I guess I could have picked something small and relevant only to my personal situation, but they did ask me "about the world", not about myself.
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Job 26:7 "He stretches out the north over empty space / And hangs the earth on nothing."
as evidence that the bible revealed that the earth was a ball floating in space hundreds of years before the Greeks figured it out.
If you look at the rest of the chapter it is pretty clearly a list of metaphors sprinkled with poetic descriptions of natural phenomena meant to describe the power of God. Why this one alone should be literal (and only the second half at that) is not clear. I imagine I would get a better sense of what it's supposed to be if I more thoroughly read the entire book.
Edit: Also, I have no idea about the actual timeline of the development of the round earth idea versus the last major edit to the book of Job, so the assertion seems a bit dubious on that front too.
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