Evidence for God from Science

Please help me to understand more:

What items in the Bible are no longer compliant with science nowadays?

Stone wrote:Please help me to understand more:

What items in the Bible are no longer compliant with science nowadays?

No items whatsoever.

Science is perfectly compliant with the bible.

Stone wrote:What items in the Bible are no longer compliant with science nowadays?

None?

Stone wrote:Please help me to understand more:

What items in the Bible are no longer compliant with science nowadays?

None. On the other hand, certain erroneous interpretations may not be compatible with science.

The bible is inspired by God, and nature was created by God. There are no contradictions between God's written word, and God's creation.

I have found things which are irritating me. Here they are:

8. In the field of ‘Diet and Nutrition’ lets analyse, what does the Bible say. The Bible says in the book of Genesis, Ch. No.1, Verse No.29, that… ‘God has given you all the herbs bearing seeds, the trees bearing fruits - those that bear seed, as meat for you.’ New International Version says… ‘The seed bearing plants, and the trees bearing fruits bearing seeds are food for you, all of them.’ Today, even a layman knows that there are several poisonous plants like wild berries, stritchi, datura, plants containing alkaloid, polyander, bacaipoid - that which if you ingest, if you eat there are high possibilities you may die. How come the Creator of the universe and the human beings, does not know, that if you have these plants, you will die.

9. The Bible has a scientific test how to identify a true believer. It is mentioned in the Gospel of Mark, Ch. No.16, Verse No.17 and 18 - It says that… ‘There will be signs for true believers and among the signs - In my name they shall cast out devils, they shall speak foreign tongues, new tongues, they shall take up serpents - And if they drink deadly poison, they shall not be harmed - And when they place their hand over the sick, they shall be cured.’ This is a scientific test - In scientific terminology, it is known as the ‘confirmatory test’ for a true Christian believer. There has not been a single true believing Christian that has ever passed this test, because no one's willing to even try.

11. In the field of medicine, the Bible says in the book of Leveticus, Ch. No.14, Verse No.49 to 53 - it gives a novel way for disinfecting a house from plague of leprosy… disinfecting a house from plague of leprosy. It says that… ‘Take two birds, kill one bird, take wood, scale it - and the other living bird, dip it in water… and under running water - later on sprinkle the house 7 times with it. Sprinkle the house with blood to disinfect against plague of leprosy? You know blood is a good media of germs, bacteria, as well as toxins! Unscientific!

12. It is mentioned in the book of Leveticus, Ch. No.12, Verse No.1 to 5, and we know medically, that after a mother gives birth to a child, the post-partal period, it is unhygienic. To say it is ‘unclean’, Religiously - I have got no objection. But Leviticus, Ch. No.12 Verse No.1 to 5, says that… ‘After a woman gives birth to a male child, she will be unclean for 7 days, and the period of uncleanliness will continue for 33 days more. It she give birth to a female child, she will be unclean for two weeks, and the period of uncleanliness will continue for 66 days. In short, if a woman gives birth to a male child… ‘a son’, she is unclean for 40 days. If she gives birth to a female child… ‘a daughter’, she is unclean for 80 days. I would like any Christian to explain to me scientifically, how come a woman remains unclean for double the period, if she gives birth to a female child, as compared to a male child.

13. The Bible also has a very good test for adultery - How to come to know a woman has committed adultery, in the book of Numbers, Ch. no.5 Verse No..11 to 31. I’ll just say in brief. It says that… ‘The priest should take holy water in a vessel, take dust from the floor, and put it into the vessel - And that is the bitter water ‘And after cursing it, give it to the woman And if the woman has committed adultery, after she drinks it, the curse will enter her body, the stomach will swell, the thigh will rot, and she shall be cursed by the people. If the woman has not committed adultery, she will remain clean and she will bear the seed. A novel method of identifying whether a woman has committed adultery or not. How unscientific!

What's the solution to this?

8. In the field of ‘Diet and Nutrition’ lets analyse, what does the Bible say. The Bible says in the book of Genesis, Ch. No.1, Verse No.29, that… ‘God has given you all the herbs bearing seeds, the trees bearing fruits - those that bear seed, as meat for you.’ New International Version says… ‘The seed bearing plants, and the trees bearing fruits bearing seeds are food for you, all of them.’ Today, even a layman knows that there are several poisonous plants like wild berries, stritchi, datura, plants containing alkaloid, polyander, bacaipoid - that which if you ingest, if you eat there are high possibilities you may die. How come the Creator of the universe and the human beings, does not know, that if you have these plants, you will die.

Hana this one is pretty simple, for example this is a very generalized account, as the focus is not what to eat but also what not to eat. The main thing being that there was no blood shed in Eden. But by generalized you can see how we normally generalize things. For example, "Jonny eats all the ice cream he can", you can pretty much see that the statement does not actually implies that Jonny can eat all the ice cream there exists (various types, flavours and quantity is generalized here), rather that he loves to eat ice cream very much and thus he eats as much as he can. Similarly, every tree and fruit given to man does not mean that he actually eats every single one of them, but rather the point is that there be no blood shed, so man should eat from the vegetation.

9. The Bible has a scientific test how to identify a true believer. It is mentioned in the Gospel of Mark, Ch. No.16, Verse No.17 and 18 - It says that… ‘There will be signs for true believers and among the signs - In my name they shall cast out devils, they shall speak foreign tongues, new tongues, they shall take up serpents - And if they drink deadly poison, they shall not be harmed - And when they place their hand over the sick, they shall be cured.’ This is a scientific test - In scientific terminology, it is known as the ‘confirmatory test’ for a true Christian believer. There has not been a single true believing Christian that has ever passed this test, because no one's willing to even try.

This is out of context entirely. I must admit that for years I wrestled with these verses in the same manner. The signs among the believers is something that has been distorted and disfigured in a very twisted kind of teaching, which basically says, have faith and everything can come to pass. This again is a very superficial view of faith and one which is practised nowadays more too often. There is not doubt that there can be signs. But this can not lifted out of context. For once, miracles don't happen because we will them, that is the wrong way to view it and when we read verses like these with a "whatever you shall ask it shall be given to you." Attitude we end up having questions and frustrations. The devil tempted Christ with "throw yourself and angels will safeguard you" but Christ told him "Do not tempt the Lord your God." What He basically means is you can't decide what God does, and you cant make God do everything you want and God does not do sign and miracles just to pass tests of authenticity. But most of all what I extract out of this is that we should never operate without God's will. Mark says that signs will follow but the underlying statement is not so clear but is explained indirectly through out the N.T which is "God's will be done". From Christ to every single believer we must not be putting God through the test. Mark actually says that God can perform these miracles within believers, but these sign are not what validate a believer which is what your OP actually mistakes it for. The fruits of the spirit are what actually discerns whether someone is a believer or not, not signs and miracles. Neither sign and miracles prove that God is with someone, there are other factors to consider too. That is the straw men which is irritating you, its wrong to start with.

Signs come when God wills them, miracles happen when God wills them, sure we can pray about it, but its not every instance that God will do the same because in the end we are not doing magic tricks to wow people. God listens to our prayers and he may or may not approve of them. Simple as that. I believe truly that if God calls to you to drink poison and tells you that you won't be harmed, I'm sure you won't be harmed. But that is IF HE TELLS YOU TO...

11. In the field of medicine, the Bible says in the book of Leveticus, Ch. No.14, Verse No.49 to 53 - it gives a novel way for disinfecting a house from plague of leprosy… disinfecting a house from plague of leprosy. It says that… ‘Take two birds, kill one bird, take wood, scale it - and the other living bird, dip it in water… and under running water - later on sprinkle the house 7 times with it. Sprinkle the house with blood to disinfect against plague of leprosy? You know blood is a good media of germs, bacteria, as well as toxins! Unscientific!

Wow, cherry picking again, this is what it actually says

51 And he shall take the cedar wood, and the hyssop, and the scarlet, and the living bird, and dip them in the blood of the slain bird, and in the running water, and sprinkle the house seven times:

52 And he shall cleanse the house with the blood of the bird, and with the running water, and with the living bird, and with the cedar wood, and with the hyssop, and with the scarlet:

53 But he shall let go the living bird out of the city into the open fields, and make an atonement for the house: and it shall be clean.

Blood was not used to clean the house rather than it was a symbolic representation of the sacrificial atonement. And that is why it was done with running water so that the blood doesn't stay, germs etc (what do you think people washed with when there was no soap?). Leprosy had no cure the only cure was that God heals that plague. The blood represented atonement and it was washed with water so that it doesn't stay when the ceremony is over.

12. It is mentioned in the book of Leveticus, Ch. No.12, Verse No.1 to 5, and we know medically, that after a mother gives birth to a child, the post-partal period, it is unhygienic. To say it is ‘unclean’, Religiously - I have got no objection. But Leviticus, Ch. No.12 Verse No.1 to 5, says that… ‘After a woman gives birth to a male child, she will be unclean for 7 days, and the period of uncleanliness will continue for 33 days more. It she give birth to a female child, she will be unclean for two weeks, and the period of uncleanliness will continue for 66 days. In short, if a woman gives birth to a male child… ‘a son’, she is unclean for 40 days. If she gives birth to a female child… ‘a daughter’, she is unclean for 80 days. I would like any Christian to explain to me scientifically, how come a woman remains unclean for double the period, if she gives birth to a female child, as compared to a male child.

The unclean state is not of medical nature but represents the fall, and the original sin. The remembrance of which is eliminated completely when Christ offered the perfect atonement. there is no doubt that the Jewish social culture was male dominant. But this is not gender discrimination either. The O.T clearly says that the woman shall give birth and as a punishment her labour pains will be great. The male child (Jesus Christ) shall redeem the fallen state of mankind, that promise was made in Genesis 3 when the prophecy about Christ was made. Thus the male child symbolically represents redemption and the female child represents eve and the fall and the sin and the punishment. There is no punishment is being a female, lest someone gets the wrong idea. The whole point is to remember what had happened and the punishment which ensued until the saviour comes and redeem and thus finish this curse once and for all.

13. The Bible also has a very good test for adultery - How to come to know a woman has committed adultery, in the book of Numbers, Ch. no.5 Verse No..11 to 31. I’ll just say in brief. It says that… ‘The priest should take holy water in a vessel, take dust from the floor, and put it into the vessel - And that is the bitter water ‘And after cursing it, give it to the woman And if the woman has committed adultery, after she drinks it, the curse will enter her body, the stomach will swell, the thigh will rot, and she shall be cursed by the people. If the woman has not committed adultery, she will remain clean and she will bear the seed. A novel method of identifying whether a woman has committed adultery or not. How unscientific!

These are curses which are not of scientific nature at all. Specifically, the have to be viewed from a theocratic perspective, a level of supernatural added to them. They can not be looked upon otherwise. They were not scientific measures. Jewish symbolism is very rich and it is clearly represented throughout the writings of the O.T and the N.T. The ceremony itself is of little value what really matters that the oath which the woman took was in front of God, that made the whole difference. If you have sinned you shall be punished, if not, you shall be blessed. The ceremony itself is merely a tool to convey what is being said and that it is a manner of authentication for the beholders that the allegation was made and the test was passed. But as I said before, you can not mark them as scientific procedures, they were not, would you call or categorize a prayer as being "scientific" or "not scientific"? that would make no sense, right? Same is the case here.

Who ever wrote this piece of cherry picked- out of context - verses, creating straw men positions to knock down, is simply uneducated in theology and Biblical scholarship.

The question of what in science doesn't agree with the Bible is itself a category error.

The equivilent of science is not the Bible, it is Theology.

Theology and Science often disagree with one another because both have an element of interpretation that is human and interpretation is constantly open to challenge and additionall evidence. Science tends to be more open to new evidence and change than Theology, but even theology over times changes and adjusts with additional information, insights and points of view.

What is not in disagreement for those who view the Bible as inspired is the Bible and Nature. This is a theothetical agreement because any human interaction with the two adds an element of interpretation and interpretation of either is subject to error and disagreement on either side.

A lot of confusion comes in what people mistake their theology for the Bible itself and yet it's a very common error.

1over137 wrote:I have found things which are irritating me. Here they are:

8. In the field of ‘Diet and Nutrition’ lets analyse, what does the Bible say. The Bible says in the book of Genesis, Ch. No.1, Verse No.29, that… ‘God has given you all the herbs bearing seeds, the trees bearing fruits - those that bear seed, as meat for you.’ New International Version says… ‘The seed bearing plants, and the trees bearing fruits bearing seeds are food for you, all of them.’ Today, even a layman knows that there are several poisonous plants like wild berries, stritchi, datura, plants containing alkaloid, polyander, bacaipoid - that which if you ingest, if you eat there are high possibilities you may die. How come the Creator of the universe and the human beings, does not know, that if you have these plants, you will die.

9. The Bible ...

11. In the field ...

12. It ..

13. The ..

What's the solution to this?

Thanks 1over137.

I believe in God completely BUT I really don't believed what said in The Bible completely. Here are 2 links I have just found:

1. http://evaluatingchristianity.wordpress ... /arg2long/

2. http://evaluatingchristianity.wordpress ... adictions/

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* Link 1.

2. The Bible is Not Reliable Secondary Evidence

2. The Bible Is Not A Reliable Source of Secondary Evidence For God.

This post is my ongoing discussion of answers to objections to my Summary Case for Atheism, in which some Christians have contended that the Bible provides sufficient secondary evidence for belief in God.

A. Background
Some of the most popular Christian apologetic works begin from the proposition that the Bible is true, including Josh McDowell’s seminal Evidence That Demands A Verdict and Lee Strobel’s effort to follow in McDowell’s footsteps, The Case For Christ.

If you are enamored of these two books, I would strongly recommend that you begin by reading (1) The Jury Is In, a massive online refutation of McDowell organized by Jeffrey Jay Lowder, and (2) Lowder’s lengthy review of Strobel’s Christ, The Rest of the Story.

Eventually, I will go into these (and other, similar works such as Geisler & Turek’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be An Atheist in subsequent posts, and I will link those posts here.

B. The Bible Is A Collection of Manuscripts Selected By Humans, Not God
There is no single, agreed-upon, authoritative “Bible;” rather, different sects of Christianity consider a wide variety of books to be Biblical “canon.” Thus, we (and I) err when we speak of “the” Bible, singular. In reality, we are talking about various compilations assembled and debated by ordinary people.

Thanks to the works of people like Bart Ehrman, we also know that the books of whatever Bible we do have are changed — often in substantial ways — from earlier texts.

i. Mark 16 as an example
Consider a relatively famous example, Mark 16. Go ahead and click on the link, and you’ll see a funny little notation there: “The most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20.” In other words, historians now believe that everything after Mark 16:8 is a forgery.

Among those are verses 15 through 18, which read:


He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”

That highlighted bit there (verses 17 and 18 ) is where Jesus supposedly promises Christians that they can do all sorts of magic things, including handling snakes and drinking poison. Now, perhaps it’s no big deal for you that this promise from Jesus turned out to be a forgery — but there are literally hundreds of thousands of Pentecostal Holiness Christians who have believed that all of Mark (including the forged, poison-drinking, snake-handling bit) is the divinely-inspired, inerrant word of God for about a century. And, of course, all Christians thought Mark 16:17-18 was genuine until 20th Century textual critics came along.

ii. Development of the NT canon is arbitrary
What do we really know about the New Testament? The Gospels are pseudonymous (that is, Mark did not write Mark, and so forth), and even conservative Biblical literalists believe that Matthew and Luke were partially copied from the lost Q document. And thanks to some contemporary works of fiction, many Christians now realize that the New Testament canon was not assembled until more than three centuries after Jesus’s supposed death.

Think about that for a minute. When Athanasius was declaring various NT books to be “canonical,” he bore the same relationship to the events described therein as you and I do to, say, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679. If there were 200 books about that Act, would you feel qualified to decide which ones were fact and which ones were fiction? I sure wouldn’t.

What you have on your bookshelf labeled “the Bible” is the product of debate and vote over three and a half centuries — some of which continues to this very day.

C. The Bible Bears the Unmistakable Hallmarks of Legend and Myth

i. “Just So” Stories
For example, consider Genesis 3, the well-known story of the Fall of Man, in which Adam and Eve are tempted by the serpent in the Garden of Eden into eating the forbidden fruit, with predictable results.

This passage, on face, appears to be a series of “just so” stories: it is the tale of how snakes came to crawl on the ground without legs (what the Bible colorfully calls ‘eating dust’); why childbirth is painful; and how come men have to do all the hard work. Don’t these passages seem exactly the same as “How The Zebra Got Its Stripes?” and the like?

And the Bible is literally full of “just so” stories like this. Genesis 9:13 purports to explain how the rainbow came to be — are we really to believe that light did not refract prior to Noah’s flood? Similarly, Genesis 11 (the well-known Tower of Babel story) purports to tell us how come so many people speak different languages. How is any of this any different than, for example, the story of Prometheus bringing fire to mankind?

ii. Talking Animals
In general, when you see talking snakes and donkeys (Num. 22:21-30), people living for hundreds of years (Gen. 5), stars somehow falling to the earth (Matt. 24:29) (or, alternatively, fighting in battles alongside humans! (Judges 5:20)), you know you’re reading fiction. When Matthew 27:51-54 tells us that a horde of zombies went on a rampage throughout downtown Jerusalem after Jesus’s death, we should probably recognize that as a legend. We know that people don’t generally take up residence inside fish (even “great” ones!), and we’re a little bit suspicious that eight people could gather together and cram all those animals on a big wooden boat. And so on.

To be clear: my argument is not that it is impossible for there to have been zombies, big boats full of animals, people living inside fish, talking snakes, virgin mommies, or any of that stuff. Anything’s possible, I guess. My argument is only that those sorts of things, coupled with the “just so” morality tales we see in the Bible, give off the unmistakable whiff of myth.

D. The Bible Garbles Actual History
Some things in the Bible are set in actual historical places and at actual historical times. But much of whatever Bible you’re using garbles what we know of actual history, placing it squarely in the realm of what we call today “historical fiction.” Here, I think a comparison to Homer’s Illiad is helpful. The archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann actually found the remains of Homer’s Troy, validating many of the names, places, and events in the Iliad. Although this discovery changed the way we viewed the Iliad as literature, it did not stop us from viewing it as literature. In other words, the fact that the Iliad correctly records that there was a city called Troy that was attacked by Greeks, it does not follow therefrom that the Greeks actually smuggled in a big wooden horse, or that the various gods fought alongside the Greeks and Trojans, or even that the Greeks dragged Hector’s body through the streets heaping abuse upon it.

Similarly, although some of the events in both the Old and New Testaments are recorded in history, the Biblical writers make a hash of it. Historians generally believe that there was no exodus of Jewish slaves out of Egypt as described in the Bible, or in fact, any of the subsequent conquest events described in Exodus. We know that Asa could not possibly have mustered an army of 580,000 Israelites and then used that army to slaughter a million Cushites (as described in 2 Chronicles 14); Bronze Age goatherders and desert warriors could not plausibly have maintained lines of supply for armies that big. (By contrast, for example, the Athenian invasion of Sicily — occurring nearly a thousand years later — was less than 1% of the size of the fantastic numbers frequently claimed in the Bible!) For this and other reasons, it is not surprising that none of these hundred-thousand-person battles attested to in the Bible are corroborated by any other source.

Similarly, although the historian Josephus chronicles the life and reign of Herod the Great in agonizing detail, he somehow never sees fit to mention the supposed slaughter of the innocents ordered by Herod described in Matthew 2:16-18. Is it more reasonable to believe that Josephus simply forgot to describe what would have been one of the worst atrocities in history — or that the passage in Matthew is a reworking of (and allegory to) Pharoah’s slaughter of the Jewish innocents described in Exodus 1:22-2:1?

In other words: when we review a Bible, we see that the historical events described therein are best categorized today as “historical fiction” — that is, real events embellished for literary and other reasons, and fictional events that are told in a historical setting but with garbled details, persons, and so forth. This is also true of the Gospels — they mangle contemporary historical events (as partially described above), are uncorroborated by contemporary historians, and bear the marks of legendary development and creative fiction.

E. The Bible Appears to be of Human Origin

i. Physical Description of the World
Finally, the works assembled into various Bibles are unmistakably of human, rather than divine origin. The world described in the various books of various Bibles reflects the world as understood by the people who wrote it. The cosmology is all wrong; the writers repeatedly depict a fixed firmament to which stars — alternatively described as either small bits of fire or living beings (see above) — are affixed. The geology is all wrong; the Earth is described as a flat disc (Is. 40:22) that God lives “above”, and from which it is possible to see “all the kingdoms of the world” if you just climb a mountain tall enough. (Matt. 4:8 and Luke 4:5, respectively.) The reason why today we use phrases like, “I feel sorrow in my heart” as figures of speech stems from the fact that the people who wrote the Bible believed it to be literally true; they did not understand that the brain was the source of thought.

Ask yourself: how could God have conversed and inspired the authorship of the Bible, and not corrected basic misconceptions about the world — obvious things like the moon not being a “lesser light” in the sky, or the shape of the earth, or the fact that the sun does not revolve around the earth, and so on?

ii. Morality — Slavery and Genocide
Worse — and most damningly — the morality of the Bible reflects the morality of the people who wrote it, including explicit endorsements of slavery and genocide that would make all but the worst villains of history blush.

Go read Exodus 21 and Leviticus 25:39-46, in which the God of the Universe sets forth precise rules for how the Jews can buy, sell, and keep slaves. (In a similar vein, in Joshua 9, God supposedly gives the Gibeonites to the Israelites in perpetual slavery!) And lest you think this is confined only to the Jews (as if that matters?!??), Colossians 4:1 explicitly permits a master to own slaves (but encourages him to “treat them well”), while Titus 2:9-10 instructs preachers to preach compliance to slaves.

In fact, in the New Testament, God even has his own version of the Fugitive Slave Act — which, you may recall, is considered one of the greatest moral atrocities in U.S. history. (See 1 Cor. 7:17-24 and Eph. 6:5-9.) And Paul dutifully returns a runaway slave to his owner in Philemon 1:1-13.

Imagine if you were a time-traveller accidentally sent back to the 1st century AD, and you happened to interact with the characters in the New Testament. Would you be able to bite your tongue as Paul ships Onesimus back to his master for punishment? Would you be able to sit through the sermon in Titus 2, in which the church is supposed to preach servility to slaves? Wouldn’t you cry out at the injustice?

And yet we are supposed to believe that Jesus — the divine, omnipotent creator of the Universe made flesh, the most perfect man ever to exist — that he walked amongst these people and never once clearly and unambiguously said something like “owning another person is always wrong, now and forever?” I don’t buy it.

I haven’t even gotten to the genocide of the Amalekites, in which Saul is first ordered to kill every man, woman and child in Amalek, and is killed by God for the sin of showing mercy. (1 Sam. 15) Is it even remotely conceivable that an all-just, all-loving God could behave in this way?

In conclusion: we get nothing out of the Bible that Bronze Age goatherders did not put into it. Some of what they put into it is good; much of it is evil. Some of their conceptions about the universe were correct; many more were staggeringly wrong. But none of it is divine. Moreover, what we even call the Bible today reflects human debate and cherry-picking over the next 300 years after the events supposedly described, and even those cherry-picked books are subject to alteration and forgery.

F. Resorting to the Bible as Evidence Is Self-Contradictory
It is worth noting that the arguments given by apologists for belief in the Bible are contradicted by the Bible itself. Acts 9 tells the famous story of Saul of Tarsus’s conversion on the road to Damascus, in which Jesus himself is said to appear to Saul and convinces him to give up his former life persecuting Christians and take up a new life preaching the Gospel. It was only the personal vision of the risen Christ that caused “the scales to fall from Saul’s eyes” and shepherded his conversion to Christianity.

Similarly, every Christian knows the story of doubting Thomas, John 20:24-31, in which one of the disciples — acting as a good skeptic, I might add! — sensibly notes that “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” in the resurrected Jesus. And so he gets to feel around inside of Jesus. A little gross, to be sure, but effective.

But these two events (and countless others) raise far more problems than they solve. Why do Saul and Thomas get to experience the risen Christ firsthand, while billions more have nothing to go by except the flawed Bible and the bad apologetics of the likes of Lee Strobel? John 20:29 tells us, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe,” but what about those of us who have not seen and therefore cannot believe? It doesn’t make sense — and, if you think eternal salvation depends upon sincere belief in the risen Christ as a prerequsite — it’s grossly unfair.

For these reasons, I conclude that the Bible is not reliable secondary evidence for God and thus this second set of arguments is insufficient to refute the general case for atheism.

.. ......... (and comments)


* Link 2.

October 16, 2009

More on Biblical Contradictions

Posted in Answering Apologists, Atheism, The Bible tagged apologetics, Bart Ehrman, Bible, biblical contradictions, Jesus Interrupted at 10:48 am by Andrew

There’s a great discussion going on in the comments section relating to Biblical contradictions; in light of that, I thought I’d clarify the point regarding those contradictions — at least to me.

Let me be clear: there are a lot of bad atheist arguments out there regarding Biblical contradictions. When I see even folks like Sam Harris trot out the ridiculous argument that the Bible is false because is says pi is equal to three, I cringe. As atheists, we don’t want to be making these sorts of easily-refuted arguments.

To me, the point of Biblical contradictions isn’t that the Bible says that the mustard seed is the smallest seed and therefore it’s all hokum; the point is that, taken together, the Bible looks like the work of ordinary people telling stories that try to explain the mysteries of the universe given the limitations of the knowledge they had at the time. It doesn’t look like anyone with a pipeline to the almighty, all-knowing Creator of the Universe. That’s all.

Thus, the point of Biblical contradictions isn’t to poke the Christian in the eye about Jesus’s genealogies, or stars literally falling to the earth and fighting in battles, or any of that stuff. It’s to blow a gentle breeze against what seems to me to be chain of inferences that’s balanced like a house of cards.

As far as I can tell, biblical reliability arguments generally rest on a chain of inferences that go something like this:

(1) The New Testament documents should be treated like other historical documents; otherwise, you’ve got a bias against Christianity.

(2) With other historical works, when the author(s) have established a baseline of credibility, we generally accept what the historian has written as true unless there is a good reason to reject it.

(3) The New Testament documents demonstrate a baseline of credibility with respect to historical facts that we can match up against other historical sources; e.g., that Herod was King in Judea. Thus, we should accept the New Testament accounts as generally historically true.

(4) We should not a priori exclude the miraculous accounts in the New Testament absent conflicting evidence; to do otherwise is to have an anti-supernatural bias.

(5) There is no historical evidence contradicting the miraculous accounts in the Bible; therefore, we should believe that those miracles really occurred, including the Resurrection.

(6) If you believe the Resurrection, then Jesus must be God.

(7) If Jesus is God, then the Bible is true.

Now I would argue that each and every one of these inferences is false. The variance in the accounts between the Gospels goes to the propriety of inference #3, and helps establish that the Gospels don’t really read like history, or (to use the overwrought metaphor of apologists) as differing eyewitness accounts to a car accident. They read like narratives.

........(and comments)

I am going to address some errors I spotted, but not the whole thing because I'm rather busy at the moment.

This passage, on face, appears to be a series of “just so” stories: it is the tale of how snakes came to crawl on the ground without legs (what the Bible colorfully calls ‘eating dust’); why childbirth is painful; and how come men have to do all the hard work. Don’t these passages seem exactly the same as “How The Zebra Got Its Stripes?” and the like?

Ha ha - no, God does not pronounce the Curse on the serpent. Serpents have been around for millions of years before Adam and Eve. He was pronouncing the curse on Satan so he could live like a snake. The Bible also says that Eve's pain in childbirth was greatly MULTIPLIED, not to say there was no pain there.
In order for Adam to live, he would have to work after being cast out of the Garden. That's the simple and obvious result that would ensue.

And the Bible is literally full of “just so” stories like this. Genesis 9:13 purports to explain how the rainbow came to be — are we really to believe that light did not refract prior to Noah’s flood? Similarly, Genesis 11 (the well-known Tower of Babel story) purports to tell us how come so many people speak different languages. How is any of this any different than, for example, the story of Prometheus bringing fire to mankind?

Okay... where did you get the idea that there wouldn't have been rainbows prior to the Genesis Flood?
The passage merely states that God has placed his rainbow in the clouds as a sign of the covenant. Nowhere does it say he created it. Just because Jesus is accompanied by signs and symbolisms of lambs and bread and wine does not mean there were no lambs or bread or wine prior to Jesus.
Genesis 9:13 just says that the rainbow was to be a sign/symbol of the covenant.
As for the tower of Babel, it's obvious that English, Spanish, Chinese, Algonquin, Latin, Greek, and all other languages spoken today are not original proto-languages of Babel. God split the languages of Babel to separate the people from each other. All the languages seen today developed after Babel, not during it.

ii. Talking Animals
In general, when you see talking snakes and donkeys (Num. 22:21-30), people living for hundreds of years (Gen. 5), stars somehow falling to the earth (Matt. 24:29) (or, alternatively, fighting in battles alongside humans! (Judges 5:20)), you know you’re reading fiction. When Matthew 27:51-54 tells us that a horde of zombies went on a rampage throughout downtown Jerusalem after Jesus’s death, we should probably recognize that as a legend. We know that people don’t generally take up residence inside fish (even “great” ones!), and we’re a little bit suspicious that eight people could gather together and cram all those animals on a big wooden boat. And so on.

First, it wasn't "the snake" that was talking. Satan was either talking through the snake. It really is obvious. The donkey was obviously a supernatural event: "28 Then the Lord opened the donkey’s mouth, and it said to Balaam, “What have I done to you to make you beat me these three times?"
As for your 'star' problem:
"29 “Immediately after the distress of those days (end times of Revelation) the sun will be darkened (probably as a result of the 'stars' falling from the sky throwing up huge ash clouds) and the moon will not give its light (same reason - also mentions eclipses later on) the stars will fall from the sky, (interesting to note that shooting stars were classified as 'the stars of the sky'. Planets were as well) and the heavenly bodies will be shaken."
Matthew was a reference to the very cataclysmic astronomical events that would take place on Earth. Is this a possible future solar system bombardment from the Oort cloud?

As for your 'zombie' problem:
Matthew 27:51-54 says nothing of the kind:
"51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split 52 and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53 They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people. 54 When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!”

It is clearly a supernatural event. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. Doesn't say anything about a rampage, or them being half-dead as would define a zombie. As you can see, the centurion and other people could now clearly see He was the Son of God. It would take a miracle to get these people to realize this. To dismiss any miraculous event that is so obviously brought forth by divine intervention in the Bible (and the Bible is full of them) is just bad reasoning. The Bible makes it clear that these are miracles and are plainly unnatural, and should not be described as 'legend' as God did it.

"We know that people don’t generally take up residence inside fish (even “great” ones!)"

Uh, right...
To deny the event is to deny the supernatural. God prepared the fish, the Bible says.

and we’re a little bit suspicious that eight people could gather together and cram all those animals on a big wooden boat.

Perhaps you should visit the Home site of this forum. I think 90% of the people on this forum believe the Genesis Flood was local, and there's a lot of evidence to back that position up.

To be clear: my argument is not that it is impossible for there to have been zombies...

What zombies?

big boats full of animals,

Of course it's not impossible. Noah had a hundred years to build the ark. Besides, the Flood was not global in extent and Noah did not take aboard all animals, only those in his region.

people living inside fish,

Supernatural intervention. God 'prepared' the fish prior to swallowing Jonah, anyway.

talking snakes

Satan was talking through the snake. You gotta know the story before trying to make it sound ridiculous.

virgin mommies,

Wow..
Another example of something called "Divine intervention". It is so obvious it's a miracle it's not even funny.

or any of that stuff. Anything’s possible, I guess.

Even more likely when there's Divine intervention.

My argument is only that those sorts of things, coupled with the “just so” morality tales we see in the Bible, give off the unmistakable whiff of myth.

Or divine intervention, as the Bible clearly tells us.

Historians generally believe that there was no exodus of Jewish slaves out of Egypt as described in the Bible, or in fact, any of the subsequent conquest events described in Exodus.

Ever hear of the Hyksos people?
I would suggest viewing 'the Exodus Decoded'. They have it on youtube. It's obvious that history has Exodus written all over it.

We know that Asa could not possibly have mustered an army of 580,000 Israelites and then used that army to slaughter a million Cushites (as described in 2 Chronicles 14); Bronze Age goatherders and desert warriors could not plausibly have maintained lines of supply for armies that big. (By contrast, for example, the Athenian invasion of Sicily — occurring nearly a thousand years later — was less than 1% of the size of the fantastic numbers frequently claimed in the Bible!) For this and other reasons, it is not surprising that none of these hundred-thousand-person battles attested to in the Bible are corroborated by any other source.

First, you're wrong.
Asa prayed prior to the battle. Guess what:
"12 The LORD struck down the Cushites before Asa and Judah. The Cushites fled, 13 and Asa and his army pursued them as far as Gerar. Such a great number of Cushites fell that they could not recover; they were crushed before the Lord and his forces."

This is so obviously an act of Divine intervention that you must have skipped right over the passage, or not read it at all.
The Athenians nor the Sicilians did not have God on their side.

Similarly, although the historian Josephus chronicles the life and reign of Herod the Great in agonizing detail, he somehow never sees fit to mention the supposed slaughter of the innocents ordered by Herod described in Matthew 2:16-18. Is it more reasonable to believe that Josephus simply forgot to describe what would have been one of the worst atrocities in history — or that the passage in Matthew is a reworking of (and allegory to) Pharoah’s slaughter of the Jewish innocents described in Exodus 1:22-2:1?

Josephus says that Herod murdered a vast number of people, and was so cruel to those he didn't kill that the living considered the dead to be fortunate. Thus, indirectly, Josephus tells us that there were many atrocities that Herod committed that he does not mention in his histories - and it is probable that authorizing the killing of the presumably few male infants in the vicinity of Bethlehem was a minuscule blot of the blackness that was the reign of Herod.

Being that the events of the reign of Herod involved practically one atrocity after another - it is observed by one writer, with a minimum of hyperbole, that hardly a day in his 36-year reign passed when someone wasn't sentenced to death - why should any one event in particular have touched off a rebellion, when others in particular, including those recorded by Josephus, did not?

Herod probably died in March or April of 4 BC; the Slaughter would therefore have occurred during one of his last two years on earth, and it is unreasonable to say that the things he did in the previous 34 years - equally, if not more so, a time of political unrest among the Jews - was insufficient to incite rebellion, whereas killing a few male infants in a backwater suburb would be sufficient in comparison. It is doubtful that Josephus recorded EVERY atrocity performed by Herod; if he had, his works would be rather significantly larger.

(http://www.tektonics.org/qt/slaughtinn.html)

In other words: when we review a Bible, we see that the historical events described therein are best categorized today as “historical fiction” — that is, real events embellished for literary and other reasons, and fictional events that are told in a historical setting but with garbled details, persons, and so forth.

Just because we do not have evidence for a single battle, or a single war, taking place 3,000-2,000 years ago doesn't support the notion that the entire Bible is false. There already is a LOT of archaeological evidence for the Bible:
http://www.christiananswers.net/archaeology/
So we would not expect EVERY record of battles in the Bible to survive time.

The cosmology is all wrong; the writers repeatedly depict a fixed firmament to which stars — alternatively described as either small bits of fire or living beings (see above) — are affixed.

I would have to see the specific verses in order to come to a conclusion.

The geology is all wrong; the Earth is described as a flat disc (Is. 40:22) that God lives “above”

Actually, your interpretation of Scripture is wrong. The Hebrew word used for 'circle' is 'chuwg', which incidentally means BOTH "Circle" and "Sphere." The fact that is uses Chuwg at all to describe a round shape gives more scientific support for the bible.

and from which it is possible to see “all the kingdoms of the world” if you just climb a mountain tall enough. (Matt. 4:8 and Luke 4:5, respectively.)

"Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”
--Matt 4:8
In order to get the full picture of what was happening, we will have to look at Luke as well:
"The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world."
So in a single instant, all the kingdoms of the world were seen.
Supernatural entities in the Bible fit the description of extra-dimensional creations. 4 dimensional, or even 5 dimensional. One of these dimensions would be time. We know they exist outside of time, so it's reasonable to conclude that Satan was taking Jesus to a high point to better see all the nations (we don't know how this fourth dimension would work, so I don't know why he was taken to the high mountain) from an extra dimensional perspective, and during this single 'instant' he was taken outside of time to see all the nations of the world.
This is what happens when you try binding supernatural things to earthly things. You don't really get the whole picture.

The reason why today we use phrases like, “I feel sorrow in my heart” as figures of speech stems from the fact that the people who wrote the Bible believed it to be literally true; they did not understand that the brain was the source of thought.

Or perhaps that figure of speech stemmed from an earlier meaning. Basically worldwide, 'heart' is used to refer to temptation, love, and hatred. "The brain is subject to temptation" just sounds awkward compared to "The heart is subject to temptation". 'heart' refers to will or emotion.

Ask yourself: how could God have conversed and inspired the authorship of the Bible, and not corrected basic misconceptions about the world — obvious things like the moon not being a “lesser light” in the sky,

Actually, the moon is a lesser light in the sky. It's not a source of light, but it's still a light. There's no reason to think God would give away the secrets of the universe to us. That's not the point of the Bible, and God wants us to explore Nature ourselves.

or the shape of the earth,

Gives a bit more evidence for it, really.

or the fact that the sun does not revolve around the earth, and so on?

Or perhaps this was a poetic reference to the obvious way the sun related to humans. Still today, we say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

Have you even visited the Home site? Here's a link I found:
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetic ... avens.html

I found several more large errors in your post, and I'll probably address them another time - I'm slightly busy right now.

Pardon me for asking, Calum, but most of the things you call out as "errors" you explain simply by saying "clearly it was supernatural." By definition, a supernatural event falls outside science and reason and directly contradicts everything related to science. I think that's the issue being pointed out here, that no living or recently living human being has witnessed anything on the level of the supernatural found in the Bible, and thus it can't even begin to be compatible with science in that sense. The two sides cannot reconcile with each other on these issues. Through the lens of science, I can tell you that virgin births as described in the Bible and people living inside fish and people rising from the dead are impossible. Through the lens of faith, well, that's up to an individual to decide.

Also, the points about the Bible being more scientific because it describes the shape of the Earth is irrelevant. Ancient philosophers and scientists had already estimated the size and shape of the Earth (rather accurately, I might add) long before biblical times. The Bible doesn't present any new information on the issue, though early church leaders did have a habit of mis-interpreting the Bible to mean a flat Earth or the like.

Most of these issues are easily cleared up with an understanding of ancient writings and genres, really.

Ivellious wrote:Pardon me for asking, Calum, but most of the things you call out as "errors" you explain simply by saying "clearly it was supernatural." By definition, a supernatural event falls outside science and reason and directly contradicts everything related to science. I think that's the issue being pointed out here, that no living or recently living human being has witnessed anything on the level of the supernatural found in the Bible, and thus it can't even begin to be compatible with science in that sense. The two sides cannot reconcile with each other on these issues. Through the lens of science, I can tell you that virgin births as described in the Bible and people living inside fish and people rising from the dead are impossible. Through the lens of faith, well, that's up to an individual to decide.

I believe Stone had been arguing for things told within Scripture that would be impossible. However, one of the key things included within these passages is that God intervened to produce a different outcome than normally fits the parameters of 'natural'.

Science might be defined as the detailed observation of natural occurences. Yes, it is true we have not witnessed miracles to the scale of the most incredible recorded in the Bible, but we have evidence they did happen. For example, the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Exodus out of Egypt, Jericho, etc.
My point was that, as he was using Biblical stories to try to disprove their own ideas, he forgot to read the little bits before and after (and sometimes right in the middle) mentioning how God was supernaturally involved. This in no way lowers the compatibility in Scripture, which was his main point. In fact, one of the themes of the story revolves around God and his involvement with humans. He had been making a rather large error when implying it taught snakes and donkeys could talk, the earth was flat, and literal stars would fall from the sky, without quite knowing the full meaning behind the ideas presented within the passages.

Well, going at it from the angle of "God does everything in the Bible, therefore it is natural", then it makes sense. I was just going off the thread title, which is a different angle to approach. From a Christian's perspective, whether the Bible involves "natural" events is probably a yes. Scientific, not so much.