Science To
The Rescue
The presence of observable and falsifiable
scientific evidence is perhaps the most compelling reason we can conclude that
the Bible is not free from error. Because this evidence clearly yields certain
conclusions that are contradicted by direct statements from biblical authors,
we can safely say that the Bible is an imperfect book containing flaws of human
origin. Due to the overwhelming amount of scientific errors the book possesses,
you should have great comfort in deciding that there was no divine inspiration
or intervention involved during its creation. Furthermore, the vast categories
of errors contained in the Bible demonstrate that the mistakes are not confined
to a single author or field of study, a realization that should question the
foundation and intent of the book as a whole. We’ll focus considerably on the
first chapter of Genesis, astronomy, and biology because each of these topics
unmistakably contributes to the faux pas
of apologetics.
“The
Beginning”
Anyone with a decent background in natural
science who undertakes an impartial but critical look at the first chapter of
Genesis should have no trouble denouncing its claims as rubbish. At best, the
author has offered a poorly constructed allegory for the creation of the
universe; at worst, and far more plausible, Genesis 1 is a total fabrication.
This section will of course demonstrate why the creation account in the opening
chapter fails miserably to be scientifically accurate.
Early in the creation, God allegedly
separated the waters into two distinct bodies so that land could appear between
them. He called the water below seas
and the water above sky, which he
presumably held aloft by the use of a firmament
(Verses 6-10). While the NIV translated this verse using expansion, the Hebrew word utilized by the author is raki’a, which the KJV more accurately
translated as a solid body.
Why is the KJV translation more in line
with the author’s intent? First, it’s the primary use of the word. Second, it
reinforces the aforementioned idea of a sky ocean because a solid protective
layer would be required to suspend the water if there truly were an ocean above
us as the Bible suggests. Third, it complements the known widespread primitive
beliefs. Take the mindset of an ancient Hebrew for a moment by ignoring any
contemporary understanding you have of the world. You can glance at the sky
above and observe that it’s the color of water, while, periodically, water
falls from above. With no further evidence to consider and no further
understanding of this phenomenon, the perfectly logical conclusion would be
that there’s a mass of water in the sky. If this is true, it certainly follows
that a solid body, a firmament, would be necessary to contain this oceanic
reservoir. Perhaps windows even open in the firmament to allow rainfall
(Genesis 8:2).
Although the pursuit of knowledge has
proven these outdated beliefs untrue, we are far richer in scientific
understanding than our Hebrew predecessors and should not scoff at the author
for his proposal. We now know that the sky is blue due to the scattering of a
particular wavelength of light passing through the atmosphere at a certain
angle, not because there’s an ocean in the sky. While we cannot fault the
author for believing this ancient hypothesis, we can conclude that his guess on the properties of the sky was
incorrect. Already, a critical analysis has demonstrated the Bible to be
scientifically inaccurate and undeniably imperfect.
God allegedly created the sun and moon on
the fourth day of the creation (14-19), but this curious statement creates a
plethora of troubles because God had already divided the day into lightness and
darkness as his first creation (3-5). How can there be night and day without
the sun, the only appreciable source of light for our planet? Again, we must
take the probable mindset of the author to understand his position. Look into
the sky away from the sun. It’s unreasonable to conclude that the earth is
bright at its distal boundaries just because the sun is shining, unless you
have solid evidence to the contrary, because the light originating from this
enormous ball of fire appears to stop very near its edges. Besides, everyone
knows that the horizon is luminous well before and well after the sun is in the
visible regions of the sky. Thus, there’s no solid reason to conclude that the
sun has anything to do with creating the illumination, only that it accompanies
the somewhat concurrent periods of lightness. In fact, the Bible explicitly
states that the sun and moon are merely symbols “to divide the day from the
night” (14). In the biblical world, however, God controlled morning and evening
by this mysterious force called light
(3-5), an entirely different entity created much earlier than the sun. We now
know that the sun is the determining factor between morning and evening, yet
the Bible clearly proclaims morning and evening existed prior to the sun’s
creation.
In addition to the sun gaffe, the
scientifically ignorant author commits the mistake of listing the moon as a
light (16). If we were to be rigidly technical about the Bible’s claim, this
verse is another scientifically erroneous notion because the moon merely
reflects illumination from the sun. Isaiah and Ezekiel also make this mistake
in their prophecy accounts (30:26 and 32:7, respectively). Again, we often take
our modern knowledge about the universe for granted, yet such a gift was
completely unforeseeable to the ancient Hebrew.
Another problem arises from the sun not
appearing until the fourth day when you consider that plants suddenly appeared
on the third day (11-13). While it’s definitely possible, even very likely, for
plants to survive without the sun for a single day, many apologists have
attempted to rectify the obvious timeline problems in Genesis by altering the
meaning of a day. Once they consummate this amendment, they’ve created a
timeline in which the plants exist without sunlight for however long these
“days” are to them. In most cases, a biblical day must necessarily be no less
than a period of millions of years in order to be congruent with scientific
data. While the general Hebrew term for day, yom, doesn’t necessarily mean a twenty-four hour day, we still
understand it to be a short time period based on every contemporaneous instance
of its use. Millennia simply do not qualify using this unbiased criterion.
Furthermore, the author provides us with the precise definition of yom in every creation instance: morning
and evening. Naturally, we’ll revisit these creationary intervals in the
upcoming Thousands Or Billions. For
now, let’s return to the problem of the plants thriving without the sun’s
existence.
Most vegetation requires sunlight to
undergo photosynthesis, the process of using light energy to convert carbon
dioxide and water into nutrients. I wouldn’t bet on plant survival much more
than a month without the sun. While it’s true that the biblical creation has
this mysterious light existing prior
to the arrival of plants, the only thing we can conclude about its existence is
the probable lack thereof. The sun, on the other hand, is fully compatible with
plant life. Once again, this obtuse blunder can be justified by the limitations
of the ancient Hebrew’s knowledge because he obviously wasn’t aware that plants
were feeding off sunlight for their survival.
As one final minor point on plants for
now, God says he has given us every plant for food (29). However, we’re now
aware of plants with qualities poisonous enough that make us avoid physical
contact with them. Such disturbingly reckless advice hardly seems to be the
kind likely given out by an omniscient deity.
The
“Heavens”
God allegedly created the stars on the
fourth day (16), but what were they, and what was their purpose? Biblical
authors believed that stars were small sources of light contained within the imaginary
firmament covering the earth. In other words, they exhibited no divine
inspiration, whatsoever, telling them that stars were actually unfathomably
enormous gaseous spheres seemingly countless miles away. In short, the authors’
celestial hypothesis was incorrect on location, number, and size. Verification
for the location part of this position is quite easy to demonstrate. After God
made the sun, moon, and stars, he “set them in
the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth” (17). So along with
the sun and moon, the stars are apparently housed in this imaginary physical
boundary separating the sky ocean from the open air above earth’s inhabitants.
The Bible also remarkably claims the
outdated belief that stars were extremely small in size. After the disclosure
of their location in the firmament, and after God tells Abraham several times
that his people would be as numerous as the stars (which is also impossible,
yet it’s claimed to have been fulfilled in Hebrews 11:12), the next clear reference
to size and position of these celestial bodies is found in the book of Isaiah.
Here, the prophet speaks of exalting a throne “above the stars of God” (
The book of Psalms states that God tells
the number of stars and calls them all by their names (147:4). That’s quite an
impressive accomplishment considering scientists estimate that there could be
as many as 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in the known universe. If God truly
told anyone how many stars surrounded our planet, the ridiculous firmament
belief should have ceased without delay.
Daniel speaks of a vision that he had
concerning a giant goat’s horn knocking the stars down to the ground where the
goat “stamped upon them” (Daniel 8:8-9). Passing comment on the vision, we can
also be decidedly certain that Daniel believed stars were tiny lights hanging
above the earth. Otherwise, how could his monstrous goat stamp upon them? More
importantly, how could someone divinely inspired write something so blatantly
preposterous? In the New Testament, Matthew and Mark both record Jesus
foretelling of an era when the stars shall “fall from heaven” (24:29 and
Revelation was the grandiose vision of
John, yet another man who God allegedly inspired, but John also thought that
stars were bright objects of insignificant size directly above the earth. In
this record of his dream-like hallucination, he claims to see Jesus holding
seven stars in his right hand (
Zoological
Pseudoscience
The ancient Hebrews apparently didn’t have
abundant knowledge of the animal kingdom, and the supposedly omniscient deity
neglected to grant them with such insight before they started working on his
timeless declaration to the world. Following Noah’s flood, the Bible says that
all terrestrial and marine life would have fear and dread toward humans
(Genesis 9:2). That’s simply not the case because there are vast numbers of
animals, ranging from pets to fearless predators, that have no fear whatsoever
toward humans. This erroneous complication was simply a matter of the fallible
author’s confined knowledge. While the animals inhabiting
Later in Genesis, Jacob successfully
alters the color patterns on lambs and goats so that he could differentiate the
stronger ones from the weaker ones. He purportedly accomplished this feat by
placing peeled tree branches in front of the mating livestock (Genesis
30:37-39). Following his absurd achievement, an angel of God visits him in a
dream and praises him for his work in genetics (Genesis 31:11-12). As someone
with a thorough background in human physiology, I hold the opinion that this is
easily the single most embarrassing error contained between the Bible’s covers.
Peeled branches have absolutely no effect on an organism’s appearance; DNA
does. As an extremely quick summary of the topic, the general rule is that half
of an offspring’s DNA comes from each parent with the more dominant type being
physically expressed. The specific genes in the DNA sequence are the
determining factor for the animals’ colors. Of course, such advanced
understanding was way beyond the
scope of the ancient Hebrew. Divine inspiration obviously doesn’t resonate from
this passage either.
The story of Moses relaying God’s commands
to the people also drops the ball when you consider which animals the almighty
deemed unclean. He says hares are not clean enough to eat because they chew
their cud (Leviticus 11:6 and Deuteronomy 14:7). I’m not sure where he gets
this impression because it’s the exact opposite of reality. The obvious
solution to this problem is that no all-knowing deity told Moses anything of
the sort.
The book of Job depicts ostriches as birds
that bury their eggs in the earth so that they can depart and leave them
unattended (Job 39:13-16). It’s sufficient to say they’re biblically painted as
careless parents. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Ostriches
are extremely meticulous about how they take care of their offspring. Even the
father helps out, which is the overwhelming exception in the animal kingdom.
This is another example of a flat-out error that often goes shunned by biblical
apologists due to the absence of a reasonable response.
A more popular story centered on
zoological blunders is that of Jonah being swallowed by a fish and living
inside its stomach for three days (Jonah 1:17). Even if we ignore how strange
the story might seem, we can still conclude that the author lacked the
knowledge of gastric juices and bile acids more than capable of digesting a
human body.
The New Testament doesn’t offer any
enlightenment on the animal kingdom either. James declares that every kind of
animal has been tamed (James 3:7). Although James asserts nearly the exact
opposite of the earlier Genesis authors, perhaps due to a widespread effort to
tame all wildlife over the preceding few centuries, he runs straight into the
same problem: limitations of an individual human perspective. Like the earlier
writers, James probably never ventured too far outside of Mesopotamia. If he
had taken the time to make this journey, he would have eventually realized that
there were other animals yet to be discovered, let alone tamed. James’
premature proclamation hardly seems consistent with what I would consider a
divinely inspired statement.
Anthropological
Pseudoscience
Once again, we return to the Pentateuch
(a.k.a. Books of Moses, Torah, or first five chapters of the Bible) to find
additional scientific errors, this time committed with regard to human beings.
Let’s begin with a consistent problem throughout the Old Testament: population
growth. The first such example takes place during the post-flood era when the
population inexplicably mushrooms from eight to a million plus, counting the
women, in only a few hundred years (Exodus 1:5, 38:26). By the time the events
of 2 Samuel are said to have been taking place, there were well over a million
men in two armies alone (2 Samuel 24:9). Not only is this exceedingly
accelerated for a believable population growth spurt, the living conditions
were not exactly primed for such a magnificent, logarithmic eruption of life.
Furthermore, there’s no reliable archaeological evidence that there was ever a
number remotely close to that many people living simultaneously in the Middle
East until just very recently. The numbers were certainly exaggerated, as are
many details of centuries-old stories handed down via oral tradition. A common
apologetic argument used in response to this problem will cite God’s supposed
tendencies to allow miraculous growth rates (Genesis 15:5, Exodus 1:7), but
what actual evidence do they provide to support this explanation? As it stands,
simple ignorance or an oversight by the error-prone author created this obvious
difficulty.
Genesis 5 and 11 contain chronologies for
the first important people in the Bible, as well as the number of years each
person lived. The average lifespan is about eight hundred years with Methuselah
taking the cake at 969. People simply do not live that long, especially
considering the treacherous conditions necessarily burdened thousands of years
ago. To answer this dilemma, biblical defenders will simply quote where the
spirit of God left man to end his longevity (Genesis 6:3). However, there’s a
realistic approach to solving this curiosity. We know from other ancient religions
that their own important figures also have extremely abnormal lifespans,
sometimes reaching into thousands of years. Due to the accompanying stories
behind this consistent practice, historians are easily able to conclude that
the founders of these religions commonly stretched the lifespans of individuals
whom they wished to exalt as having increased importance. In other words, the
incredible ages of these biblical characters are nothing more than the product
of folklore resulting from someone’s wishful thinking.
The Book of Esther accommodates the story
of a man who thinks with his heart (6:6). While this appears to be a symbolic
meaning, much like how we say people think either with their heads or with
their hearts, it’s important to realize that people originally believed thought
originated from within the heart. During Egyptian mummification, morticians
often removed the brain from the corpse, leaving the heart with the deceased
individual due to its perceived over-importance. Even the Egyptians certainly
shared the same erroneous belief as the technologically inferior Hebrews. The
Bible could have easily distinguished itself from other religious texts by
establishing some reputable authenticity with such an advanced declaration, but
it conveniently failed to do so.
Yet again, the Bible fails to improve upon
a field of science when it moves into the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, and
Luke all believed that the inabilities to speak and hear were the result of
possessions by evil spirits (9:32, 9:17, and 11:14, respectively). This is an
interesting and quiet creative hypothesis, but one we currently know is not
true. The inability to speak is usually due to a physical abnormality in the
region of the brain known as Broca’s area, while the inability to hear is
typically due to physical trauma of the inner ear. If these regions don’t
operate properly, the affected individual lacks the auditory and phonetic
capacities made possible by a normal physiology.
Matthew also believes that blindness is a
result of the devil’s inhabitance (12:22). Again, you don’t need the
unverifiable nature of this wild claim explained to you. Damage to the optic
nerve or detachment of the retina usually causes blindness. No devils or demons
have ever demonstrated their involvement in this impairment. Luke purports that
a woman’s crippled nature is also due to possession by a devil (13:11). While
there are multitudes of unfortunate factors that can cripple a person,
spiritual possession has never proven to be one of them. Luke and Matthew
commit an additional medical error when they claim that devils cause seizures
(9:39 and 17:15, respectively). Suffice to say, devils, demons, evil spirits,
or any other fiendish creatures have never been known to cause seizures. These
violent neurological events are the result of some physiological abnormality,
such as a brain tumor, or an imbalance in electrical activity. When radical
epilepsy manifestations are observed, however, it’s certainly understandable
how a person with limited knowledge of human physiology could leap to the
erroneous and fantastic conclusion that a demon might have possessed the
individual in question. The Hebrew god once again fails to distinguish himself
from the countless other ancient gods because his writers weren’t the least bit
scientifically believable.
In every instance of alleged demonic
possession I mentioned, Jesus cured the people suffering from these ailments
via exorcism, the act of casting demons out of the body. This heavily implies
that Jesus also thought evil spirits were responsible for these conditions.
Because Jesus himself even says it was through God that he casts out demons
(Matthew 12:28 and Luke 11:20), one could even insinuate that he’s obviously
relying on the ignorance of the crowd to further his stature. Otherwise, the
stories of exorcisms could very well be nothing more than fabrications.
The take-home message about these
purported exorcisms is that they could not have happened if we are to believe
the means by which they occurred unfolded exactly as recorded in the Gospels.
Even if the perceptions of the
authors served as the basis for the exorcism claims, the text is still
incorrect and, therefore, unreliable. Thus, the Bible has once again
demonstrated its own hilariously fallacious nature.
Further
Scientific Nonsense
Another embarrassing tale of biblical
nonsense is the construction of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. According to
the bogus legend, everyone on earth spoke the same language when the erection
of the tower began. Because the people of earth had a great desire to catch a
glimpse of God, they built this supposed tower intending to breach the sky. As
God didn’t like the possibility of people spotting him, he confused their
languages to prevent the architects from understanding one another. Unable to
continue construction, everyone with different languages went separate ways.
This story is unfeasible for many reasons. The first problem with the
incredulous account is the incongruency of the common language theme. We know that
many different languages existed centuries before the story’s setting around
2500-2000 BCE. Not only that, but another Pentateuch author had said Noah’s
sons separated according to their own tongues in the previous chapter (Genesis
10). At the very least, we have a major timeline discrepancy in need of an
acceptable resolution. Furthermore, the notion that nineteenth century man had
the architectural knowledge to build a tower even a mile high is ridiculous. To
fathom that a group of ignorant ancient Hebrews could make an equivalent
accomplishment is ludicrous.
Interestingly, no divine inspiration is
available as a possible excuse for the illogical story because God wasn’t
siding with his people on this occasion! If he didn’t wish for the people to
see him, he wouldn’t have provided the means for them to do so. Of course, the
most obvious blunder is God’s supposed fear of us actually reaching him in the
sky. To suggest that an omniscient god would destroy a building because he felt
he was in danger of humans catching a glimpse of him is an equally ludicrous
proposal. The aspects of this story once again go back to the ancient Hebrew
belief that God eternally resided on top of a dome covering the earth. Since an
omniscient deity would know that the people could not possibly reach him, he
would not have stopped the tower’s construction for the specific reason
provided by the Bible. The story cries of a myth.
We also have fanciful tales about giants
roaming the earth during the Pentateuch era. There’s a lot of room for
interpretation here because the exact nature of these mysterious giants is
unknown. However, we understand that the Bible has them living both before and
after the flood (Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33). Some Christians have argued
these giants are the dinosaurs, but this proposed explanation fails to be
consistent with the “flood caused the dinosaur extinction” hypothesis offered
by others in the same crowd. While the text is most likely referring to a race
of people, archaeologists have found no reliable evidence that these creatures
existed. Given the track record of the Bible thus far, it’s reasonable to
conclude that the Genesis giants are, at best, an exaggeration of an otherwise
normal species of life.
Jesus also commits another scientific
blunder when he declares the mustard seed to be the smallest seed of the earth
(Mark 4:31). There are, in fact, many seeds smaller than the mustard, such as
the South American orchid, but the Hebrews were obviously ignorant of most
everything outside of their homeland. Had God presented this bit of information
to the author of Mark, it seems unfeasible that the writer would portray Jesus
as a man so careless with his diction. This example is clearly another biblical
error on the growing accumulation that arises from the same limitation of
divinely uninspired perspective.
The
Tentative Verdict For Science Versus The Bible
The suggestion that the Bible is lacking a
scientific foundation is nothing less than a colossal understatement. The Bible
has failed fair, impartial, and universally applicable tests in multiple fields
of science. If God truly is the inspiration behind this purportedly divine
declaration to the world, he shows absolutely no interest in its
understandability or accuracy in astronomy, cosmology, zoology, botany,
anthropology, geology, ecology, geography, physiology, and several other
disciplines not covered in this chapter. In fact, the Bible handicaps those who
use their “God-given” talents of reason and logic to settle blatant biblical problems.
Nothing can be more detrimental to the authenticity of a statement than
contradictory phenomena that we readily observe and experience. With no other
evidence to consider, these natural manifestations should always override what we might hope and think to be correct
explanations for unignorable discrepancies. Such is the power of science and
reason. They are the impartial pursuit of an answer to a question, not the
search for supplements to a predetermined answer.