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We’ve seen, in the previous posts in this series, that Fred Pearce’s argument for a divinely inspired Bible is little more than a tissue of self-referencing claims and uninformed ideas about Bible history. Today, we arrive at a classic argument, one which virtually every atheist who has even a cursory knowledge of Biblical scholarship can refute. Yes, folks, it’s the Argument from Prophecy!
Argument 9: Unique Prophecy
Fred reckons the Bible makes claims about future events, and that these claims have come true. If that’s so, it makes a good case for the idea of a supernatural force backing the writers of these prophecies. Unsurprisingly, however, Fred is completely wrong on this.
First off, some of the clearest prophecies in the Bible never did come true. Ebon Muse has examined a couple in detail at Daylight Atheism. Whilst is can be argued (as a couple of commentators at Daylight Atheism did) that these prophecies might just not have been fulfilled yet, that still makes them useless as evidence for divine inspiration.
Addressing the specific prophecies Fred refers to, though, we run into further problems. His first contender is Jesus himself, who, in Luke 21:24, predicts the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans:
“They shall fall by the edge of the sword and shall be led away captive into all the nations; and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles . . .”
Good work, there, Jesus! Jerusalem was indeed royally shat upon by the armies of Titus Flavius in 70 CE, so this must indeed have been a real-life, old-school prophecy. Hallelujah! But hang on a moment…
The Gospel of Luke is, along with Matthew and Mark, one of the Synoptic (“seen together”) Gospels, so called because they all display a high degree of stylistic and narrative coherence. Both Matthew and Luke draw heavily on Mark as a source, as well as a lost collection of Jesus’ sayings known as Q. The reason this fucks Fred’s theory is that Mark’s composition can be dated to 70CE or just after, meaning that Luke (and hence the prophecy) was written after the Romans ran their little demolition derby through the Israelite capital. In other words, it’s very easy for Luke to have Jesus predict these events, because Luke himself already knew they had happened.
Fred’s other big-hitter in the prophecy department is Jeremiah.
“For, lo, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah . . . and I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it . . . Behold, I will bring them from the north country, and gather them from the uttermost parts of the earth . . . Hear the word of the LORD, all ye nations . . . He that scattered Israel will gather him (Jeremiah 30:3; 31:8,10)
The Christadelphians score a big win with this one, don’t they? Jeremiah, writing in the 6th century BCE, successfully predicts the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, 1,878 years after the destruction of the Temple and more than 2,500 years after he jotted this prophecy down. Not bad. Except the Fred is letting his lack of scholarship show again…
Jeremiah, it can safely be said was not (as Fred claims) anticipating the 20th century dissection of Palestine. Instead, he was writing about a much more immediate threat: the rather worrying expansionist policies of neighbouring Babylon. Under King Nebuchadnezzar II, Babylon was rather keen on occupying quite a lot of the Middle East, and they were particular intent on taking out the other big power in the region, Egypt. Get your atlas out – who was stuck smack in between the war-mongering Babylonians and their Egyptian nemeses? Why, it’s little old Judea, home to one Prophet Jeramiah…
Politically astute, Jeremiah was wise to the imminent Babylonian assault (Nebuchadnezzar had kicked the shit out of the rebellious Jews ten years previously), and, as a keen amateur performance artist, enacted various bits of street theatre (wandering about with a yoke around his neck, smashing clay pots, burying his belt) to try and convince the local authorities not to piss off their belligerent neighbours. During the siege of Jerusalem, when it was patently obvious that Nebuchadnezzar was properly ticked-off and was about to stomp all over Judah, Jeremiah changed his tune. As a morale booster, he started preaching the message that, try as the Babylonians might, they couldn’t keep a good miniscule Semitic nation down. “We’ll be back!” Jeremiah claimed, just as many other oppressed people have defiantly shouted in the past. As it turned out, he was right (sort of), the Jews did get to return to Jerusalem as vassals of the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great. But that shouldn’t encourage us to make any claims for successful prophecy. Jeremiah was a political activist, his message intended to supply hope to a beaten people. The fact that he turned out to be right is neither here nor there (although one wonders if he would have made it into the Biblical canon had his prophecies not come up trumps). In World War II, Winston Churchill confidently predicted victory for Britain when it looked as though we were going to be overrun by Nazis – do we ascribe divine backing to his speeches, just because he turned out to be right? Of course not, and neither should we assume any such inspiration for the crazy performance art of Jeremiah. In any case, we can safely say he certainly wasn’t prophesying the formation of 20th century Israel.
Argument 10: The Course of History
This is the exact same argument as number 9, using Daniel as the prophet. I’ve addressed the prophecies of Daniel before, so I’ll put this briefly: the Book of Daniel is an early example of the genre of historical fiction. Daniel, had he existed, would have lived and made his predictions in about 600 BCE. The story of his life was written in about 165 BCE. If Philippa Gregory had one of her Elizabethan characters predict the destruction of the World Trade Centre, would we immediately assume that Mary Boleyn was a prophetess (oh, and a real person, to boot)? Daniel makes accurate predictions because the author of his story had already seen them come true – it’s worth noting how vague and unfulfilled the prophecies become once you get past the mid-second century BCE. There was a good post about Daniel at A Time To Rend recently, so I’ll direct you there for further discussion.
Next time, we’ll face yet another series of subjective arguments based entirely on Fred’s personal worldview. Sorry to have to put you through that again, but I’ll try and make it as fun as I can.
An ongoing discussion on the AikiWeb Forum concerns an aikido practitioner with the following dilemma:
“A man has visited my dojo and is interested in practicing. His religion prohibits him from touching a woman who is not his wife.”
Obviously, any mixed dojo will require its students to practice with members of the opposite sex from time to time, so this prohibition is going to impose serious limits on the guy’s practice. Since the original post back in 2006, this anonymous sensei has received a veritable avalanche of replies, primarily falling into two camps. There are those who feel that compromising the functioning of the dojo for one person’s religious dogma is unacceptable, and there are those who argue that the necessary training restrictions are not sufficiently onerous to cause a problem. I fall – hard – into the first camp, but possibly not for the reasons you might suspect.
Back when I taught T’ai Chi, there would occasionally be students who wanted special dispensation. They couldn’t make it on the night of the lessons, so could they maybe arrange private classes when it was more convenient? They weren’t happy learning about the combat applications, so could we please leave those out? They were uncomfortable with the Taoist philosophy behind the form, so would I mind not discussing it? T’ai Chi seemed like the perfect compliment to yoga, so could we spend half the class time discussing the relative merits of each? Invariably, my answer was no.
One of the guiding principles of aikido, T’ai Chi and many other martial arts is that they are not about the self. Being concerned with oneself is a sure-fire route to staying at the bottom of the ladder. It’s a hoary old cliché, but when practicing these arts, the practitioner is supposed to “be like water” – water, which has no shape of its own but flows to fit the container. The shape of the container cannot be changed, yet this is what our neophyte aikidoka wishes to do. Hopefully, he will realise after a few classes that this is not how aikido works and will change his attitude, progressing in his practice as a result. If not – well, perhaps this is not the hobby for him.
When a person takes up a martial art (or, for that matter, any practice which has a venerable history and a codified procedure for learning), they don’t get to dictate how it is taught. Aikido is a great example. Over many years, various skilled practitioners have built up a system for training aikido students. The neophyte who walks in the door with a clear idea of what he wants to learn and how he wants to be taught it is on a hiding to nothing. Apart from anything else, how can someone who has only just started to study something know how it would best be taught? His teacher will, if he’s gone to a half-decent dojo, have many years’ experience in both learning and teaching aikido, so basic common sense suggests that the newbie might want to consider such a person’s opinion.
What the lady-phobic visitor mentioned at the start of this post needs to realise is that his personal and religious baggage needs to be left at the door of the dojo. Taking it in with him only means he will be weighed down and held back by it, and will never learn any skill in aikido. Obviously I think his religion is an idiocy (and not just for its silly take on women), but it’s irrelevant to aikido – if he can’t fulfil the demands of practice, then he needs to find something else to do with his spare time.
Welcome back to another installment of the Divine Origins series, in which we take a look at the arguments presented by Fred Pearce at thisisyourbible.com. He claims that these arguments prove the Bible was inspired directly by God – I, naturally, beg to differ.
Today, Fred moves away from the variations on a circular theme he’s been peddling so far, and has a go at using evidence from history.
Argument 6: The Phenomenon of Israel
The early history of Israel definitely points to divine intervention. After all, Exodus is chock-full of plagues, pillars of fire, parted seas, manifestations of God’s holy buttocks, commandments, tabernacles and what-not. God also spends most of the book in direct conversation with His main man Moses, when he isn’t busy smiting the Egyptians and/or disobedient Hebrews. The greater part of this discourse concerns the vast list of things the Hebrews can and can’t eat, enslave, screw, kill or set on fire, and Fred argues that no society in its right mind would have agreed to all these prescriptions and proscriptions without evidence that they came direct from the Big Guy In The Sky Himself. As he puts it:
“It is emphatically not a Law which any people would have chosen for themselves of their own free will… [but] if these great events actually occurred as the book of Exodus says they did, then we can better understand how it was that Israel came unanimously to accept this Law”
Now this is a pretty fundamental failure in historical understanding. The argument is postulated entirely on the idea that Bible lays out the history of Israel exactly as it happened. It does not. The Law to which Fred is referring is that of the Pentateuch, which was, as I’ve mentioned before, composed and redacted far, far later than the events it purports to record. This was first demonstrated by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, in 1651 (see Fred? I can reference old books too!), so there’s no excuse for anyone nowadays to claim that events occurred as written in Exodus, especially now that a wealth of archaeological evidence backs up the textual analysis on which Hobbes relied. The work of Prof. Israel Finkelstein pretty much puts the nail in the coffin of the Biblical histories, so the “great events” Fred refers to, which remain unsupported by any evidence outside the Book of Exodus, can be safely said to be the imaginings of later authors.
Why then, as the argument says, would Israel have submitted to such a harsh legal code? Well, in a society headed by the priestly caste, such a system of religious laws is a pretty surefire way to maintain the status quo. Bear in mind that these laws were developed relatively late in Israel’s history (around 650 BC), not whilst they were roaming around in the desert (which they probably never were). Recall also that the texts were “discovered” by Judah’s priests precisely when the nation was under severe external threat (from Egypt), and would have benefited substantially from a unifying shared mythology which established them as a “chosen people”. What sets the Israelites apart from their neighbours? Why, the special laws they follow to gain the favour of their god! It didn’t work (Egypt installed a puppet king in Judah in 608 BC, and the country’s inhabitants were back to Babylonian-sponsored polytheism within a couple of decades), but it was an inspired attempt at national unity.
Argument 7: A Disobedient People
This argument again relies wholly on the assumption that the Bible, as written, is an accurate portrayal of Israeli history. The argument here is that no nation would preserve historical records which cast it in such an unfavourable light, but given that the whole intent of the Histories was to scare people back into compliance with the Yahweh-worshipping ruling class, a tale which emphasises the horrible things which happen to apostates is pretty appropriate.
Argument 8: How did such Writings arise?
Now we reach another argument from incredulity. How could a morally reprobate people like the Israelites produce something as lovely as the Psalms or the Song of Songs. Obviously they couldn’t, so it must have been God.
This is both rather patronising to the ancient Hebrews and also vastly subjective. Fred Pearce claims that, “No other nation did this [i.e. produced “elevated moral teaching”]”, but right about the same time we see the rise of Confucianism in China, emphasising propriety and respect for one’s fellow man, Buddhism and Jainism in India, with their focus on doing no harm, Socratic philosophy in Greece, centred on forebearance and tolerance, the enlightened legal code of Hammurabi in Babylon… Lots of ancient peoples formulated profound ethical and spiritual ideas, but because Fred happens to subscribe to the Judaic code, that’s the one which seems profound to him. The Judaic system is the best, so it must be inspired by God, so it must be the best – I sense the re-emergence of our old friend Roundy McCircuitous in this.
Keep your Bible scholarship hat on, because in the next part of the series, we’ll be looking at prophecy, and why, once again, Fred’s knowledge of Bible history lets him down.
Just found this and thought it rather beautiful.
Who says there’s no poetry in science?
The following is the text of an e-mail I recently received. I’ve added my signature – if you’re a UK citizen who cares about the right to free speech, I urge you to follow the link.
Dear Friends,
I’ve had an idea – an unusual idea, but I think it might just work.
As you know, England’s chilling libel laws need to be reformed. One way to help achieve this is for 100,000 people to sign the petition for libel reform before the political parties write their manifestos for the election. We have 17,000 signatures, but we really need 100,000, and we need your help to get there.
My idea
My idea is simple: if everyone who has already signed up persuades just one more person each week to sign the petition then we will reach our goal within a month!
One person per week is all we need, but please spread the word as much as you can. In fact, if you persuade 10 people to sign up then email me (simon@simonsingh.net) and I promise to thank you by printing your name in my next book … which I will start writing as soon as I have put my own libel case behind me. I cannot say when this will be, but it is a very real promise. My only caveat is that I will limit this to the first thousand people who recruit ten supporters.
When persuading your friends remember to tell them:
(a) English libel laws have been condemned by the UN Human Rights Committee.
(b) These laws gag scientists, bloggers and journalists who want to discuss matters of genuine public interest (and public health!).
(c) Our laws give rise to libel tourism, whereby the rich and the powerful (Saudi billionaires, Russian oligarchs and overseas corporations) come to London to sue writers because English libel laws are so hostile to responsible journalism. (In fact, it is exactly because English libel laws have this global impact that we welcome signatories to the petition from around the world.)
(d) Vested interests can use their resources to bully and intimidate those who seek to question them. The cost of a libel trial in England is 100 times more expensive than the European average and typically runs to over £1 million.
(e) Three separate ongoing libel cases involve myself and two medical researchers raising concerns about three medical treatments. We face losing £1 million each. In future, why would anyone else raise similar concerns? If these health matters are not reported, then the public is put at risk.
My experience has been sobering. I’ve had to spend £100,000 to defend my writing and have put my life on hold for almost two years. However, the prospect of reforming our libel laws keeps me cheerful.
Thanks so much for your support. We’ve only got one shot at this – so I hope you can persuade 1 (or maybe 10) friends, family and colleagues to sign.
Massive thanks,
Simon Singh
One common claim for religious faith is that humanity needs to have a “spiritual” aspect. Religious belief, it is generally assumed, fills this particular niche quite nicely, and so fulfils people’s need for “spirituality”. Whether this be found via the pews at your local cathedral or the hand-waving and nonsensical chanting of a Reiki healer seems immaterial – we want to access something “higher than ourselves”, and faith is the means by which we do that.
All of this leaves us atheists (at least the more strictly empirical sort) somewhat out in the cold. Lacking belief (sorry, PhillyChief!) in an afterlife or indeed a soul, we might be expected to suffer from a distinct void in our lives, unable to access our “spiritual” (and I’m going to stop with the inverted commas around that word now) nature and thus diminished as humans as a result. This view, regularly promulgated by the Christian Right, enables believers to alternately pity and despise atheists – pity them, for their lack of true personhood, and despise them for their lack of true humanity. It’s a convenient shorthand, thanks to the semantics of the English language: atheists have no “soul” (meaning an incorporeal version of the self which survives the death of the physical body and retains certain aspects of the ego) and therefore have no “soul” (meaning a sense of connection with our fellow humans, a desire to do good, and a collection of funky moves on the dancefloor).
Can you be spiritual and an atheist? It’s a question on which I vacillate regularly, but at the moment my answer seems to be “yes”, one can be spiritual without believing in a spirit. This is possible, in my opinion, because of the broad cultural definition of spirituality – the word has taken on such a melange of meanings that it is entirely possible for an atheist to indulge in spiritual practices. I, for example, regularly practice a form of meditation that is, in every meaningful way, identical to that practiced by Zen Buddhists. If you asked me whether I believed in the Boddhisatva Manjusri and his magic lion, however, I would probably laugh in your face, so I’m certainly not a Buddhist (they tend to be far more polite!). I practice T’ai Chi, which is replete with Taoist ideas, and indeed, incorporate many of these Taoist concepts into my daily life, but I’m not a Taoist. I’m a student of Aikido, an art with substantial roots in the crazy Oomoto-kyo religion, but I certainly don’t believe that Nao Deguchi was receiving spirit messages from the gods.
The general, if nebulous, definition of spirituality seems to incorporate the idea of searching. Searching for God, searching for truth, searching for inner peace, searching for oneself – there’s a certain questing aspect to the spiritual which only adds to its appeal. Perhaps it is actually this which is at the core of the human spirit; the need to enquire, investigate and delve into the unknown. If that’s so, then atheism is as valid an approach as any; indeed, one could argue that atheists are more spiritual in this regard. Who else has probed the question of the divine more thoroughly than one who has rejected it? I know from personal experience that few of my Christian friends (andywoo may be an exception) have anything like the knowledge of the Bible that I’ve gained from trying to investigate its validity, and it often seems that I devote far more time to pondering the great questions of the Universe (42? What is the Question?) than they invest in a few hours of singing on a Sunday morning. Whilst I’ll grant that there are many of the apathetic in our ranks, the majority of atheists I’ve met tend to have considered the search for God very carefully and in great depth. If we have a spiritual quest, it’s the quest for Truth (yeah, capital “T”), but unfortunately for the religious, success in our search means that theirs is doomed to fail.
Want to talk about atheism without the Facebook-lite paraphernalia of Atheist Nexus? Well, there’s a new (and I mean brand new) atheist forum on the web, so get yourself along there and start a discussion, have a chat, arrange a coffee morning, you know the sort of thing: Atheists’ Heaven.
In the last instalment of this series, we looked at how Fred Pearce’s primary argument for a divinely-inspired Bible boiled down to the standard Christian argument from circularity. The Bible claims to be the word of God, and so it must be true, because it’s the word of God, because it claims to be the word of God etc.
In an attempt to vary the theme, we now reach:
Argument 4: Testimony to Bible Truth
This is basically a twofold argument. Firstly, Fred reference’s Urquhart’s Inspiration & Accuracy, making the point that the Early Church believed the Bible to be of divine origin, and so did the Apostles. Well, dur. Of course they fucking did; the scholars of 200 AD had no concept of textual analysis, no higher criticism, no archaeology to speak of, no inclination to abandon tradition and certainly no motive for even considering the alternative options. It would be massively more surprising if they had disputed the theory of divine inspiration, but Urquhart’s argument that the Church Fathers believed in the Bible is roughly analogous to arguing that Russian anti-Semites in 1905 believed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be true, so there must really be a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.
As a side note, there seems to be a distinct lack of modern scholarship in Christadelphian theology. So far Fred’s referenced Urquhart (1895) and Henry Rogers (1872). Later, he refers to Cadbury (1934). Interesting that there doesn’t seem to be any scholarly work worth referencing from the last 80 years which supports their case…
The second part of the “Testimony” argument makes the case (again) that the authors of the Bible claim to be writing the words of God, and since
“Men do not willingly ascribe the authority of their words, and especially of their ideas, to someone else. They are only too eager to claim the credit for what they write.”
it stands to reason that this claim must be valid. The Bible itself supplies an obvious counter to this line of reasoning, insomuch as at least four and as many as six of the Pauline Epistles can now be safely said to be pseudepigraphic. Both Timothys, Titus, Ephesians and probably Collossians and 2 Thessalonians were not authored by Paul, in spite of the fact that they make this claim in their text. In other words, not only do men regularly ascribe their work to the pens of others (see: every celebrity “autobiography” ever published), but they do so in the very tome the Christadelphians are trying to defend!
Argument 5: Human Nature
The Bible, taken as a whole, is not terribly complimentary to humanity. It paints a picture of Man as greedy, covetous, self-indulgent, prideful, arrogant, belligerent, lustful, disobedient and depraved – a right bastard, in other words. Fred agrees, and so who could deny the divinity of the Bible when it paints such a clear picture of human nature? If, as I do, you hold to a rather more positive view of humanity, then this argument becomes rather redundant, since it only works if you allow that mankind is inherently sinful. Of course, because the Christadelphians take their view of humankind from the Bible it’s only natural that they do think that, and we’re right back to our friend Roundy McCircuitous, the circular argument. If, by contrast, I subscribe wholeheartedly to the doctrine of the Noble Savage, it would be equally clear to me that Rousseau was divinely inspired in his accurate portrayal of our psyche.
The argument continues by noting that, since this view of human nature is prevalent throughout the Bible, and is generally absent from other religious texts, the Bible must have some special coherence, which can only be explained by the hand of God. Other explanations, such as the fact that many of its books were written to perpetrate the Jewish faith during times of intense persecution; that many of the books were actually written by the same (misanthropic!) author or group of authors; that keeping the faithful convinced of their inherent unworthiness and thus compliant to the demands of the priestly hierarchy was very desirable to those in power; these explanations are not considered. Nope, the Bible agrees wholeheartedly that we are sinful creatures, unworthy of God’s kindly ministrations, and since that coincidentally happens to be the exact same thing the Christadelphians believe, it must be the work of the Divine.
In the next instalment, we’ll be taking a look at why the Christadelphian view of Israeli history is unique – sorry, I mean, why the Bible is unique. Again…
Thanks to Andrew Parker’s recent book The Genesis Enigma, there are new rumblings in the creationist world claiming that actually, Genesis makes a lot of sense when you compare it to the “scientific” version of Earth’s creation. The order of events, they say, appears to be the same as in the geological record, and since the ancient goat-herders who dreamed the story up couldn’t possibly have known about cosmology and geophysics, this similarity suggests that Genesis was divinely inspired, Therefore, God exists. QED.
I hate to burst your bubble, theists, but claiming that Genesis is the same (or even close to) the actual order of events is a bit like arguing that the plot of The Hunt For Red October closely reflects the narrative of The Odyssey, because they’re both about sailors. Here is the Jewish sequence of events, as laid out in Genesis 1:
1) Day One. The Earth is formless, and all that exists is water (verse 2).
2) Light appears, cycle of day and night begins (verses 3-6).
3) Day Two. A “firmament” is created, which divided the water into two parts, above and below (verses 6-7).
4) All the water below the firmament is gathered together “in one place”, and dry land appears (verses 9-10)
5) Day Three. Plants (grasses, seed-bearing plants and fruit trees) are created (verses 11-12).
6) Day Four. God creates the sun, moon and stars (verses 14-19).
7) Day Five. God creates aquatic life (including, specifically, “great whales”) and birds (verses 20-23).
8) Day Six. God creates land animals (verses 24-25).
9) God creates Man (verses 26-27).
Leaving aside the argument that using “Day” to mean “ an epoch of several million years” is not an interpretation readily suggested by the text, here’s what’s wrong with the idea that the above represents the same sequence of events as the “scientific” explanation:
1) Earth is “without form, and void”. I’ll grant that the loose aggregation of particles which eventually created our planet could be described thus. But this idea of everything being covered in water is just odd. The only water that could have existed in the accretion on Earth would have either been frozen solid or locked in chemical combination with other elements. It certainly would not have been the “deep” described in Genesis.
2) A cycle of day and night without the Sun (which won’t be manufactured until Day Four, remember) is quite simply ridiculous. Day and night result from the rotation of the Earth combined with the light from the sun – without a directional light source (which Genesis doesn’t yet have), you can’t have day and night.
3) The nearest parallel in reality for this event would have to be the “Big Whack” or Theia Impact, the hypothesis which describes the creation of the moon by extraterrestrial collision. Such an event would have created enough energy to release water molecules into the early atmosphere, which I suppose could be argued to be “above the firmament”. However, if this is indeed the event referred to in Genesis, we face the slight problem that it also created the moon – which by the Genesis account, isn’t due for two more days.
4) Dry land has been around for a while on our early proto-planet – as we’ve already seen, the water was locked up in what we would consider “dry” matter. So, rather than creating dry land from the water, it would be more historically accurate for God to create water from dry land – which is emphatically not what He does here.
5) Plants, even the algae, mosses and lichens which formed the first examples of botanical life, would really have struggled to exist without the sun to power their photosynthesis. As you know, we’re still waiting for the sun to turn up… On top of that, Genesis specifically references “seed-bearing herbs” and “trees which bear fruit”, both of which are very late evolutionary adaptations by the plant kingdom. Fruit-bearing trees, for example, didn’t turn up until after the advent of land animals (since without animals to eat the fruit and thus increase the plant’s propagation prospects, there was no biological incentive to develop such a strategy).
6) The sun, moon and stars turn up. Hurray! Of course, this rather ignores the fact that in reality, the stars actually existed long before the Earth (in fact, as Fred Hoyle’s work showed, without the stars generating heavier elements than hydrogen and helium, there wouldn’t have been anything to make the Earth from). And as we’ve already established, leaving the creation of the sun until this late stage constitutes some very poor planning on God’s part.
7) Life arises in the oceans? Fair enough, that gels well with what we know from biology. But whales? They evolved from land-dwelling mammals that returned to the oceans, but since there aren’t any land animals yet, there’s nothing for the poor whale to evolve from. As for the birds, they too are descendants of land-dwellers – dinosaurs, in this case – and so are also rather short of any ancestors from which to inherit their characteristics. God jumps the gun again.
8) Land animals appear – now, God, you may have some birds and whales. The idea that “cattle and creeping thing[s] and beast[s] of the earth” all turned up together simultaneously is more than a little flawed, but Day Six is at least sort of in sequence.
9) And finally, Homo Sapiens – that’s pretty much in the right place.
So one day out of six seems to be in the right order. For comparison, here’s the order we would expect if Genesis followed the evidence:
1) Sun and stars (Day Four)
2) Earth, dry as a bone (Day Two, afternoon)
3) Day and night (from the Earth’s rotation, effectively contiguous with the creation of the Earth) (Day One)
4) Clouds, water and oceans (Day Two, morning)
5) Moon (Day Four)
6) Fish (or “sea creatures”, to be more exact – microscopic zooplankton and phytoplankton) (Day Five)
7) Plants – but only mosses and ferns, no flowering plants yet. (Day Three)
8) Land animals (Day Six)
9) Flowering plants (Day Three)
10) Birds (Day Five)
11) Man (Day Six)
Sorry, but as far as I can see, Genesis is no closer to reality than the Babylonian or even Shinto equivalent. If you chuck in enough creative interpretation (a la Andrew Parker) you might be able to shoehorn it into the scientific facts, but I don’t own a shoehorn that big!
Having followed a classic PZ poll crash the other day (end result: 63% of respondents believe the Bible is a book of myth, 33% that it is untrustworthy and irrelevant), I thought I’d have a look at why the Christadelphians believe the Bible is inspired and inerrant. Fred Pearce has concocted a substantial apologetic to explain this, and I thought it might be fun to examine these claims with a more sceptical eye than they’re perhaps used to.
Since it’s such a massive screed, I’m going to make a series of this, so buckle up for a ride through the mind of Biblical Inerrantists – keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times, and try not to apply too much logic…
Argument 1: The Christian Religion
This is less of an argument than an introduction to the apology as a whole, but it does contain the overarching theme of the entire piece in essence:
“The more the writings of the Bible are studied, the more convinced one becomes that there must have been a Mind behind it all, different from and greater than the mind of men.”
Esssentially: “we see divine inspiration in the Bible, so it must be divinely inspired.” The whole section is devoted to the idea that Christianity is different and unique. Other religions are founded upon the writings of men (Buddhism upon the works of Buddha, Islam on the writings of Muhammad, etc.), but because Christianity is founded on the divinely inspired Bible, it must be special. And of course, the very fact that Christianity is special proves that the Bible must have had divine inspiration. As Edward Current would say, Checkmate, atheists!
You will, of course, have recognised that this is one of those arguments which is more circular than a big old circle called Roundy McCircuitous, so let’s set it aside and move on…
Argument 2: Many Books, yet One
As any half-assed Bible scholar knows, the very word “bible” implies a collection of books, not one single volume. Fred uses this fact to bolster his position by claiming that all the disparate stories between its covers point to an overall message in the Bible, and how could that have happened without there being some sort of divine editor in chief checking all the submissions?
Well, quite. Of course, there are a few other explanations…
First and foremost: a united message in the Bible? That’s some pretty selective reading right there. Obviously there’s the fact that Jesus’ teaching in the New Testament pretty much flat-out contradicts much of what came before (even though he specifically said in Matthew 15:17-20 that it wasn’t supposed to), but even if you take the two Testaments separately you can’t help but note some pretty glaring contradictions. Helpfully, Skeptics Annotated has compiled a thorough list of these, so, should you have an idle hour or two to fill, you might want to work your way through the 450-odd problems with the “coherent message” claim.
Secondly, the Christadelphians seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that the books of the Old Testament, especially the Torah, were actually written at the same time as the events they describe. I’ve mentioned this before – all the evidence points to the books of the Torah, along with the Histories, being written around the time of King Josiah, as a retcon of Israeli history meant to securely establish the House of Judah’s right to rule. They may have been written and edited together by different scribes, but there’s no doubt that all the authors were singing from the same hymnsheet.
Finally, if the Bible does display any thematic coherence which might indicate editorial choices, that’s because it was edited. The Bible as we know it today was formulated in 382 at the Council of Rome. Pope Damascus I, at this council, set the list of books to be considered canonical in the Old and New Testaments, and in doing so, created our modern Bible. Of course, in doing so, he also discarded quite a few other books which didn’t “fit” with the approved Catholic doctrine of the time, and so the Damascine Bible naturally appears to have a theological coherence – its contents were chosen for that express purpose.
Argument 3: The Inspired Word
“There is one common affirmation, found in all the writers of the books of the Bible: it is that they were not writing their own words, but the words and thoughts of God.”
Because obviously if a writer claims to be channelling a higher power, they must be telling the truth. By this logic, the Christadelphians should be paying close attention to Molly Rowland, who speaks not her own words, but those of St Germain. Since she says it, it must be true, right?
“there has arisen the principle that the writings of the Bible are the inspired word of God, not produced by the will of man but by the will of God (2 Peter 1:21). The apostle Paul wrote that all Scripture is “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16).”
The Bible claims to be the word of God, and it must be right, because it’s the word of God, because it claims to be the word of God… Oh, hello again, Roundy McCircuitous. Didn’t see you there.
So far, the claim that the Bible is divinely inspired has only been backed up by the argument: “because it says it is.” Need a bit more evidence than that? Keep an eye out for the next instalment of this series, then.
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