The Rev. Dr. Sir John Polkinghorne, a distinguished Cambridge University particle physicist turned Anglican priest, has said that:
Scripture is not an unchallengeable set of propositions demanding unquestioning assent, but it is evidence, the record of foundational spiritual experience, the laboratory notebooks of gifted observers of God's ways with men and women.
J.C. Polkinghorne,
Faith, Science, and Understanding, Yale Nota Bene edition 2001, ch. 2, p. 37 (emphasis original).
What a marvelous metaphor! It's not perfect by any means, but it suggests some fascinating possibilities. It might help us find a way past some of the serious evidentiary difficulties of the various documents comprising the Bible (see, e.g., this posting and this one).
At the same time, just as scientists give primacy of place to real-world data, we can continue to give spiritual primacy to Scripture, in accordance with the classical Anglican view of authority -- while still recognizing that the map is not the territory and that new data may sometimes require a revisiting of old explanations.