Okay that title is a bit aggressive. I hate making definitive statements like that and would certainly have preferred to say 'the Bible has some scientific and historical problems but God is probably real'. That said, you would have been far less likely to click on it if I did so here we are...
For any Christians reading this I acknowledge that you likely won't want to accept what I'm about to say. That's totally fine. I'm not interested in forcing my views on anyone and I don't think it really matters if we all agree on the interpretations of Genesis. If you're open to a new approach to Genesis I encourage you to keep reading but if not that's fine with me too.
If any of you were Christian but don't practice anymore or are 'spiritual but not religious' then I suspect you clicked on this because you have probably felt at times that parts of the Bible didn't make sense and perhaps you didn't find answers that worked for you so now you're not sure what to believe. Ultimately, this post is for you because I believe there's a way for you to reconcile that feeling that there has to be more with the fact that the science or history of the Bible doesn't conform to our current understanding of science or history.
Issues with the Bible
Now I want to talk about something very few Christians or Jews want to talk about - the parts of the Bible that don't make sense. Despite the fact that I have been attending churches for the majority of my 34 years on the Earth I have never heard anyone really address, in an intellectually compelling way, the parts of the Bible that just don't make sense. However, I think someone needs to address it because non-religious people certainly are! For a little evidence of that just take a look at this list of problematic verses in Genesis and the whole site at skepticsannotatedbible.com.
I'm not going to address all the issues listed on that site and I'd argue that a lot of what the author of that site is criticizing is perfectly reasonable and they are just trying to aggressively make their point. However, I am going to address the single biggest problem I see in the Bible and I hope that how I make sense of it will resonate with others and I believe it can be applied to many of the other problems with the Bible as well.
In the Beginning
What I see as the single biggest 'problem' in the Bible is that the first two chapters try to explain how the world came to exist and quite frankly the author gets the science wrong. I know there are lots of theories that people try to use to explain this and I will include those and my thoughts on them in an addendum at the end but let me just say that I find all the popular theories intellectually unsatisfying.
So what's wrong with Genesis 1 & 2:
Genesis 1:
- Genesis 1:3-5 tells us that God created light & dark and day & night but this was on the first day and before he creates the sun (day 4).
- Genesis 1:6-7 refers to waters above and waters below and mentions an expanse (or firmament depending on the version) that's used to separate them.
- Genesis 1:11-13 tells us that God creates plants on the 3rd day. However, Genesis 1:14 tells us that the sun isn't created until day 4.
- Genesis 1:20 is where the birds are created (day 5) and Genesis 1:24 tells us that the land animals are created on the 6th day. Modern science however believes birds came after land animals.
Genesis 2:
- Genesis 2:5-7 is inconsistent with Genesis 1 as it explains that humans are created before plants but Genesis 1 has plants being made on day 3 and humans on day 6.
- Genesis 2:18-19 has a similar problem as in this account humans are created before animals but in Genesis 1 animals are created before humans.
Let's expand on these points a little further. If there is no sun until day 4 what exactly is a day? Is it just 24 hours because God knows that's eventually how long it will take the earth to rotate? I guess you can try and justify this but it's certainly odd. Next, what exactly are the waters above and below? It's hard to escape the idea that ancient humans thought the sky was blue because there was water up there. Also, a lot of modern translations use the word 'expanse' to describe what separates these waters but the original Hebrew word for this is much closer translated to 'firmament' and it means something hard. So we can try and pretend this a fancy way of describing the sky and the idea that there's moisture in it but I'll explain later that there's a simpler explanation for this verse. With respect to plants it's again tough to understand how they came to be a day before the sun as we now know that plants require sunlight to grow. More specifically why does it take so long for the sun to appear? Our current understanding of science actually suggests it's the first thing to appear in this list and yet the Bible has it way down on day 4. Lastly, on Genesis 1 the idea that birds came before land animals is inconsistent with the fossil record and our current understanding of evolution as it's believed that birds evolved from land animals. So again the Bible and science are at odds in Genesis 1 in a number of ways.
On Genesis 2 the biggest complaint is that it just doesn't fit with Genesis 1! It feels like Genesis 1 lays out the explanation of the world and then in Genesis 2 the author rewinds the timeline and starts explaining creation again but in a different order. What's particularly troubling for people who take the Bible literally is that this inconsistency means you have to choose whether Genesis 1 or 2 is correct and it really undermines the argument that the Bible is 'inerrant'. It can't be 'inerrant' if it's not consistent so now you're stuck doing some spectacular mental gymnastics to try and make these verses consistent.
So what the heck is going on in Genesis 1 and 2? Is science just wrong and eventually the Bible will be vindicated or is the Bible wrong and therefore we shouldn't believe in the rest of it either? Well I've come to believe that the Bible is 'wrong' but that doesn't mean the rest of the messages of the Bible are irrelevant or that other parts are automatically wrong too.
Here's the Truth
Why am I so sure the Bible is wrong? The reason is pretty simple - people who lived at the time that the Bible was written believed in what's known as a 3 tier universe. In fact, even the Egyptians at the time effectively believed that the world was flat and that there was a sort of tent covering the Earth which is where the stars, sun and moon were attached and that the gods lived above the Earth and sat on a body of water (which is why the sky is blue). Here's a picture for those of you who don't want to click the links:
Now if you consider that most people living at the time of the Bible's writing believed that this is how the world worked then you start to get a better understanding of what the authors of Genesis are trying to explain:
- The waters above and the waters below are literal and factual things.
- The idea that they are separated by a 'firmament' - well duh how else do we keep the heavenly waters from falling to the Earth?
- The sun, moon and stars being created on day 4 - yeah because the firmament wasn't ready until then...
Anyway to me this is just Occam's razor. What is the simplest answer? That Genesis is some sort of puzzle that we don't understand yet or that will eventually turn out to be true or that the authors of Genesis believed that this is how the universe worked (because everyone did at the time) and they wrote the origin story according to their current understanding of the world? To me, there's little doubt that the 'puzzle' of Genesis is just that the author of it had an ancient understanding of cosmology and biology.
The Good News
Despite the fact that the authors of the Bible had an ancient understanding of science I believe the message they were trying to convey is the important part and by separating the message he was trying to convey from the way the story is delivered I think there's a way of thinking about the Bible that doesn't require you to ignore 2,000+ years of scientific development. I'll explain this more fully below.
But If the Bible is God's Word How Could it Be Wrong?
I recently completed a course on Coursera called Science & Religion 101 and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to go deeper but the short version is this - what God was trying to convey through the Bible is an important message. He was not trying to correct peoples' current understanding of science. The course instructor for Science & Religion 101 (Denis Lamoureux ) refers to this as the 'Message-Incident Principle'. Effectively, God is wrapping the important message in an incidental science or history that people at that time would understand.
At first I'll admit that this isn't very satisfying. Why couldn't God just explain how it actually happened to the writers of the Bible? When I really start thinking about it though it becomes clear how hard that would have been and how it likely wouldn't have worked. A good way of appreciating this is to try and understand String Theory (which is one of the most advanced theories in physics today). A couple years ago I tried to learn about some of these deep physics concepts and although I consider myself to be pretty clever and academic it was really, really hard. If you'd like to try it here's a video on String Theory to get you started. If we extend this line of thinking it's my guess that our understanding of the universe is going to continue to expand and grow and is likely to get more and more complicated over time. I don't have a guess as to when this will end but it's a good bet that we're not there yet. So if a modern person like myself with a decent amount of scientific training (a bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering) struggles to even understand our current physics - what would an ancient Hebrew person have been able to do with the actual and complete understanding if God had given it to them? I think it's pretty clear that they could not have understood it and they certainly couldn't have explained it to everyone else. There's also a good bet that they would have misunderstood it or even been labeled insane. So what does God do? He embeds his important message (i.e. I created you) and allows the author to use their current understandings of the world to share that message.
The last thing I'll say on this is that I also believe God wants to reveal himself to us but not so clearly that we have to believe in him. I believe the whole point is to allow us to have free will and if he reveals himself too clearly it would effectively remove our free will. So if you don't like the 'Message-Incident Principle' my question is how else could he have shared this message? Personally, I wrestled with this for a while and came to the conclusion that the most elegant approach is exactly what happened (even though it causes us current humans some trouble).
Final Thoughts
I approached this topic by talking about the first couple chapters of the Bible but there are many other instances where the Bible uses an ancient understanding of science, history or biology. What I really appreciate about the 'Message-Incident Principle' is that it can be applied to all of those instances so that we can be free to try and understand what really matters (the underlying message) and not worry so much about trying to justify science, history or biology that we simply know doesn't work anymore. To give one last example I want to talk about the Parable of the Mustard Seed. If you look at Matthew 13:32 you will find that Jesus refers to the mustard seed as the 'smallest of all seeds' but a quick look on Google finds that the smallest seeds are actually tropical orchid seeds. So is Jesus wrong? Does the Son of God really not know what the smallest seeds in the world are? Well thanks to the 'Message-Incident Principle' we can understand that Jesus was just trying to make a point and didn't want to get into semantics about which seeds are the smallest with people who had never seen a tropical orchid. He had an important and valuable message to convey and explained it to people in a way they would understand.
Lastly, I hope that this helps some people to reconcile their modern understandings of science with that deep feeling that there is something more. In a future post I might try and make the case for why I believe there is a God and why I think Christianity is the most likely religion to carry the message from that God but if this has inspired you to look at those questions I strongly recommend the book 'Mere Christianity' by C.S. Lewis as he makes the best case I have ever heard.
Addendum
What about 'x' theory?
To preempt some questions I want to address some of the most popular theories on interpreting Genesis and why I don't think they work:
The Day-Age Theory
This one is quite popular and if I had been asked earlier I would likely have clung to some version of it. Basically, it's the theory that 'days' in the Bible aren't literally days but mean thousands to billions of years or 'ages' and therefore it solves the problem of the Earth being billions of years old and not 6,000 years old. The problem with this of course is that the Bible's days aren't in the right order and it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to explain the firmament, heavens above, etc.
Gap Theory
Along the same lines as the 'Day-Age Theory' we have the 'Gap Theory' which posits that the Bible doesn't start at the exact beginning. To simplify, there was a period of billions of years before God's first day which explains the age of the Earth, dinosaurs, etc. but that after that it unfolded exactly like the Bible says. Again, the problem with this is you still have plants and days before the sun, a firmament and heavenly waters. You can try and find creative ways to explain those problems (and the apparent inconsistency with Genesis 2) but I'm not interested in this any longer as it all becomes very complicated and there's a much simpler answer.
Punctuated 24 Hour Theory
The last theory on this same train of thought is that God created for 24 hours and then waits millions of years and then creates for 24 hours and then waits for a while, then creates...you get the idea. So again this solves the problem of the age of the Earth and the fossil record but still doesn't address the order and other issues outlined above.
Genesis is Poetry
The last theory I'll mention is that some people who acknowledge the problems with Genesis decide instead to view the document as poetry or some other kind of writing and suggest it's not to be taken literally. This is a sort of extension of what's known as hermeneutics which in simple terms mean that you have to understand what the author was trying to write when they wrote it. A simple example is if I said, "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse". If you interpreted my words literally it would be foolish as I was only trying to convey that I am really hungry and of course I can't fit an entire horse in my stomach. Anyway, this is the argument applied to Genesis in that it's not meant as a historical record but is instead poetry or mythology or something else we don't understand.
I don't find this explanation particularly satisfying though as by reading Genesis you get the very strong sense that the author was trying to convey some literal truths. I don't find enough of the metaphorical in the verses to believe that the authors were trying to do anything but tell a literal story. I also find it way too convenient that the story unfolds just how an ancient person would have expected it to based on their understanding of science at the time.
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