Feedback archive → Feedback 2012
Why should science make it difficult to believe the Bible?
Jonathan S. from Canada wrote in commenting on Did God create life on other planets? Gary Bates’ response interspersed.
The more I read the bible [sic] and try to rationalize what’s in there with what Science [sic] is discovering about our universe, the harder it is to believe in the book.
Of course, and you have just explained why. Secular or materialistic science is your authority. You accept its claims first as the primary axiom. Materialistic evolution has no place for a creator so no wonder it is at odds with the Bible. Both evolution and creation are belief systems about the past that you and I were not there to witness. See ‘It’s not science’.
I wish God would come back down to Earth and just clarify everything up for humanity.
He did already and He explained it to us in His book—the Bible. It seems that rejecting the Bible because of your ‘science’ is preventing you from seeing the big picture of the marvelous Gospel that the Bible is all about.
His book is so old,
That’s a good thing—a strength of it. It’s not a bad thing, because it tells us about history, our origins, what went wrong etc, and written by people of history who were actually there and closer to the events. No one saw evolution happen or a cosmic big bang, for example. It’s interesting too that the Bible has been described as the most accurate historical book ever written when it comes to archaeology; for example, see The walls of Jericho. So if one can verify such historical claims in one area to be true, then that might be a good reason to accept its historical claims in other areas too.
I picture he said things a certain way as to not blow our minds. I’m sure Jesus would have been murdered on the spot like galleleio [sic] if he started off saying "here’s some stuff you should know… the earth is a round ball circling a giant burning sphere called the sun, of which you can see thousands similar in the night sky billions of miles away in a sea of nothing."
Really, that’s not a novel idea, but if you take that approach then how could you know anything in the Bible to be true? Moreover, Jesus and the New Testament authors made some pretty specific claims about the past and particularly Genesis. So they would have to have misunderstood or be misled as well. See Jesus on the age of the earth and also The use of Genesis in the New Testament. BTW it seems that you have swallowed another false history with your comments about Galileo. This was not a matter of science vs faith, but of science vs science. Here’s a really interesting article about it.
They’d burn him before he could go on to give a bunch of moral lessons.
Interesting conjecture but one can speculate anything. It doesn’t add weight to any argument I’m afraid, particularly if you hold a wrong view about what happened to Galileo etc.
But why haven’t they come back to update the word of the Lord.
Because it doesn’t need it. If you accepted its premises it would be entirely relevant to you today, as it is for the billion or more other Christians like me and my colleagues here. We don’t see a problem, but respectfully you do, because you accept, it appears without question, the claims of secular science when it comes to trying to tell us what happened in the past. Your starting assumption is faulty in believing that the ‘science’ you accept is just about facts that can be verified. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, can science prove the world is billions of years old? Do you actually know where that idea [long ages] came from? If not, please read Did God create over billions of years?
It seems he stopped caring about humanity a while back-he probably does have a more preferred life form on another planet he’s spending all his time with.
Once again, unverified speculation. And as I said, if you took the Bible at face value you would have a better understanding of God’s plan for mankind, which hasn’t finished by the way. You say He stopped caring but there is a future restoration coming up. Have you actually read the Bible properly, I wonder?
If you are genuinely interested in who God is and why we see the things we do, I encourage you to at least start with the articles I have provided. Then there is a free short book online, Refuting Evolution, that will help you understand the limitation’s of operational science in determining history.
Readers’ comments
Comments are automatically closed 14 days after publication.