God’s Truth
The Bible and Science 2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
Virgin Birth
Before leaving miracles, Phibber considers the miracle of the virgin birth. It was necessary like the others, he argues, because without one human parent Jesus could not have had any human feelings. Perhaps you, like me, get confused about the powers of Yehouah. This Creator God can make the universe and everything within it, but is unable to know what it feels like to be human without coming to earth as the son of a human mother.
First, the Christian asks me to believe in an absolute god with infinite power then tries to tell me that He does not know what it is like to be a human being. All these millennia, He has been making huge demands upon the Chosen People then punishing them for not coming up to standard and all the time He had no idea what their capabilities were! Perhaps His name is not Yehouah but Squeers.
Even for a Christian this must be nonsense. If God is all powerful then He knows what it is like to be a human. He can experience the human state without having to resort to incarnations and virgin births. If He has to resort to such devices then He is not an all powerful god. But once He is seen as not being all powerful we get into a Wizard of Oz situation—where does His power end? Does He have any power? Does He exist at all?
These contradictions are inherent in the Christian farrago Phibber is trying to create. If you are a Christian it is better not to think too much—just accept the miracles and the miraculous religion because, once you start to think about it, the inconsistencies creep in and, with them, the doubts and the disbelief. This is precisely the reason why Christianity, for centuries, advocated ignorance, why it destroyed pagan knowledge built up by millennia of human experience, why it burnt books and libraries, censored buildings, books and artworks and through it created the Dark Ages. Phibber and his Fixers, the Crucifixers, doesn’t tell anyone about all this. You have to find it out for yourself
The alternative to God experiencing the human state directly was to create a new Adam without any human intervention. We know He can do it because the bible tells us He created the original Adam and therefore the whole human race. Now Adam’s descendants were all cursed with original sin but, according to the Christians, God wanted a sinless man to be sacrificed to atone for the sins of the original Adam. Why then did he have to use a human intermediary, Mary? Now Phibber tells us that without one human parent Jesus would never have known what temptation was. It was through his mother that he inherited human failings. Yet the original Adam knew what temptation was and he had no human parents. His only parent was God.
Why then couldn’t Jesus have been a new Adam? No doubt the Christian would answer, “Because there was no link with the original Adam”—again questioning the absolute power they say God possesses. He is incapable of recreating a human being which is exactly the same as the previous ones. All right, I say, then let Him take a few skin cells from another human just to get enough of the original human and make the new one out of those just as He made the original one out of mud.
All these suggestions are impertinent to Phibber. You don’t tell God what to do. The virgin birth was, he asserts, absolutely essential to the life and work of Jesus. The resurrection from the dead similarly was absolutely essential. Guess why! Because the bible (1 Cor 15:12-19) tells us it was!
Sun Standing Still
Phibber now moves on to explain that in the miracle in Joshua, when “the sun stood still”, the biblical language simply records what was observed and makes no attempt to explain how God did it. Scientific objections, for example that the earth had to stop rotating, are “fatuous” Phibber declares. We cannot understand it, but it happened—it is in the bible! When Jesus goes up to heaven at his ascension, the “up” is just biblical language. It does not imply that heaven is above. It could be anywhere—it is a figure of speech. ASgain, the bible is not literally true in these instances. Phobber is not just a fibber, he is a fool.
Interestingly Phibber now has one of his little homilies telling us not to “pooh-pooh” miracles because they sound unlikely. “Scientists are always coming unstuck” by doing that, he asserts. Thunderbolts for example were always pooh-poohed when he was a lad. Now they are accepted as ball-lightning.
Phibber the scientist doesn’t seem to understand that a “miracle”—the thunderbolt—has now been explained, at least partly, by science, and have been made by high voltage discharges in laboratories. He apparently does not see that his homily justifying miracles actually does the opposite. It goes to show that it does not matter how many letters you have after your name you are still not necessarily intelligent.
Phibber next shows how God can “know everything” by comparing Him with a strand of DNA which holds immense amounts of information compactly. Though God plainly holds far more information than the DNA, He evidently had to appear on earth as the son of a mortal woman to gather any human feelings, as we saw above. Even then He made a bad choice because of all the women in the world He could have chosen, perfectly normal women with the full gamut of human foibles, He chose the virgin Mary who was the only woman who ever lived born free of sin because she was conceived immaculately, as the church puts it.
Phibber tells us that God “knows everything”. One wonders why He does not use all this vast learning to show the human race in a more convincing way how He can save them. Indeed, since He cursed us in the first place, why doesn’t He just lift the curse. Or if that is too easy for everyone, why doesn’t He appear in person to everyone in the world and impress upon them that they must be good. Instead He has to be opaque, vague and subject to the whims and follies of a load of crooks. It is all too ridiculous, isn’t it?
If we have free will, then we are free to choose evil. Apparently God can only stop it by removing the free will from us and making us all do as He wants. In that way, we all become holy because we are all aspects of God. A simple solution but we are all robots. God gave the original Adam the choice of being human or being a robot and he chose humanity. Given the choice today most of us would still choose humanity. But why is it impossible for a supreme power simply to abolish evil and leave us with free will, to make us all holy without being robots? Is this something that even God cannot do? Then He is not omnipotent, is He?
No doubt Phibber will reply that, for free will to work, all choices must be available. By doing any of the alternatives, we have our choice restricted, and God does not want to restrict us. Why, then, does God stop blind people from having the choice of seeing, of white people from having the choice of suffering racial harassment, of poor people from having the choice of being rich? The whole Christian mythology is absurd and explains nothing.
The Flood
Phibber now wants us to consider the Flood because it is the biggest miracle in the bible. Where though are the traces of it? Phibber agrees with geologists that there appears not to have been a worldwide flood. Ah! Say I, so the bible is wrong in this respect at least. Let’s not be silly! It is once again all a question of language. Phibber himself gives us six examples of the bible making blatantly exaggerated statements.
- In Genesis 41:57, all countries came to Joseph in Egypt to buy corn
- In Deuteronomy 2:25, the nations under the whole heaven became afraid of Israel
- In 1 Kings 18:10, Ahab missed no nation or kingdom looking for Elijah
- In Daniel 2:38, Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian, ruled wheresoever the children of men dwelt
- In Ezra 1:2, Cyrus the Persian ruled all the kingdoms of the earth
- In Colossians 1:23, the gospel was preached to every creature under heaven.
Although it sounds as though Phibber has done a U-turn, he tries to persuade us that these false statements are not wrong. They are not meant to be taken literally! God and the Holy Ghost know that but millions of Christians do not. Do we have to add, that, in that case the bible is not literally true as he had insisted previously? It is God’s Truth or, as Phibber has it, Hebrew idiom which makes falsehoods true for Christians.
Well, apparently the Flood is similar so that when we read in Genesis 7:19 that all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered, it doesn’t actually mean all of them under the whole heaven. The Israelites had never heard of the Himalayas or the Rockies so it couldn’t have included them, says Phibber. Genesis 7:21 says, “all flesh died that moved upon the earth”. But Phibber tells us that it cannot have included the kangaroos for example.
So, Phibber concludes, the bible does not say the Flood was really worldwide but covered only that which was known to the Israelites namely the fertile crescent of the Middle East. What’s more it probably happened when all the men in the world lived there so they could all be comfortably drowned with a Flood stretching only from Egypt to Persia and Armenia to Arabia—there is plenty of evidence of Floods in those parts, he says.
We can partly agree. Among those countries are some in the valleys of major rivers where floods are common and occasionally are disastrous. But a flood that could land a four hundred foot long boat on top of a mountain five thousand metres high is still some flood! Unless that is all a figure of speech as well. Phibber has explained it to his own satisfaction. He had to. It is in the bible and Jesus believed it.
Creation
Phibber moves us now to consider Creation. According to Genesis it is explained as the work of God, but scientists have so far failed otherwise “to explain how the universe could have come into being on its own”. Phibber impresses us with his understanding of the concept of entropy but it does not have any bearing on the question of Creation itself, though it does suggest that there was one. Overall entropy always increases implying that there was a moment once when entropy was zero, or some minimum amount, implying in turn that there was a beginning, or an apparent one. Few people would dispute that today. But Phibber wants us to believe that this moment of creation required God to decide it.
So far as we know, at present, there is no way of deciding when a radioactive atom will decay. It is a totally random process. One atom could decay now, another in a million years. Who decides when it will happen for any particular atom? Does our scientific Dr Ernest Phibber believe it is God? We can guess he does. An excited atom will shed a photon of light and drop into a lower energy state. Who decides when it will emit its photon? Phibber will say it is God, no doubt. Truthfully there is no way of knowing when the photon will be emitted.
An old idea of God in the scientific age was “The God of the Gaps”. As science discovered how things happened, God was no longer needed to account for them—he became the “God of the Gaps”, needed to explain whatever science could not yet explain. Science cannot explain when a radioactive atom or an excited atom will decay but God supposedly can!—the “God of the Gaps”.
At some stage in the past, scientists infer, there was a totally empty void. It was so empty that it did not even contain empty space, and time had not begun. Then it happened—the Big Bang—and “Creation” had occurred. Did it need a “God of the Gaps” to push it off or was it like the excited atom?—it just went off at random.
Phibber is now faced with the problem of the Creation being so amazingly fast—only six days were needed. He is not doubting God’s power but the scientific evidence in the universe. Phibber feels obliged to concede that the earth as we see it took an awfully long time to make. Fossils, coal deposits, petroleum deposits, all of them took immense eons to form. One could say that God created them all at the time of Creation making them appear as if they were millions of years old. But Phibber does not like the implication that God deliberately tries to deceive us and so rejects this idea.
He floats the possibility that the world had already existed but God, so to speak, melted it into a formless void and then reformed it. Genesis describes the re-formation of the world not its original one. What we see in fossils, coal deposits, etc are the remnants of the previous formation. But Phibber is not satisfied by this either. Again there is no scientific evidence of it and, more important, Genesis does not seem to be describing a re-creation.
Indeed, Phibber believes the baby is being thrown out with the bath water if the originality of the Creation is rejected. The reason is that the philosophers who conceived of the Creation story in Genesis had thought carefully about the order in which things must have appeared. Their conclusion, he says, matches quite well the discoveries of modern science. This seems far too good “to be a mere coincidence”. He expects us to have forgotten that the order of creation in the two stories in Genesis are different. That is typical fundamentalist dishonesty. For Phibber, these ancient philosophers could not have been ordinary mortals musing in their studies but had to be someone inspired by God and that is why they got it right. This is not merely excessive love of his God but an insulting denigration of the abilities of primitive man. But let that be.
Phibber in the end settles for his pat answer of the use of Hebrew idiom. In the Genesis account of creation a day was not a day it was millions of Æons. For my part this is quite acceptable because I take the Genesis account to be an excellent attempt by early philosophers to reason about the nature of things. They could not have known the time scales involved but made guesses at the order of creation. There is only a problem for people like Phibber who take the bible to be the word of God and therefore infallible.
His ultimate conclusion is that the bible is indeed correct and the days of Genesis are indeed days, but a day for God is not what it is for a man—it is a divine day! Now lest you should not be impressed by all this, Phibber comes up with a finally ultimate theory. The days of the story are the days on which God revealed his handywork to his human but inspired amanuensis. This “solves a problem that science cannot touch”. Amen.
The correct explanation, we have already mentioned. The days are the days when the different stages of the creation as conceived by these early philosophers were celebrated in the ancient New Year festival, which included an extended creation ceremony lasting the six days of the week, all except the last one, which was the day of rest for people to recover from the festivities.
