Chapter One

A Self-Evident Truth

Whoever Wrote the Bible, It Wasn’t God

If there is a uniform definition of God, it is “the Creator”. Different religions have their own ideas about what else they attribute to this being but it’s fair to say that this basic definition, “First Cause of the universe”, would be one point of agreement. If we are to believe that the Creator also wrote a book (such as the Bible) shouldn’t we expect this book to contain an accurate understanding of how Creation operates?

With that question in mind, enter the world of the Bible. It is a world of high fantasy, complete with giants (Gen 6:4), dragons (Psalms 74:13) and wizards (Lev 20:27). Illness is caused by demonic possession (Luke 6:17), some people live almost a thousand years (Gen 5:27) and those of faith can drink poison without being affected (Mark 16:17-18, warning: don’t try this). The universe isn’t structured the way we understand it to be. The earth is fixed in place (Psalms 93:1) and supported by pillars (1st Sam 2:8). The sky is a dome (Gen 1:6-8) and the sun, moon and stars are lights fixed in that dome (Gen 1:16-17). These stars will eventually fall to the earth in the end times (Matt 24:29). Anything is possible. You can even get to Heaven if you build a tower tall enough (Gen 11:1-9) but it will frighten the biblical god (Gen 11:6).

Now return to the real world, the natural universe, and note the differences. There are no wizards or mythical creatures and yet it’s filled with enough breathtaking wonders to inspire the imagination for all time. Stable, immutable laws govern the real universe, indicating a Creator that is a pragmatic architect instead of the spoiled tantrum-throwing tyrant that is the Bible’s god (hereafter in this book, this mythical mockery of our Creator will be referred to by his biblical name, "Yahweh").

It is the very Creation, the natural universe, which speaks out loudly and clearly against the Bible and other vaunted books of so-called “revelation”. Since God is defined as the Creator, it follows that the natural universe, not a book written by humans, is the supreme Word of God. Our understanding of our Creator should be grounded first and foremost in our observations of Creation. Any supposed books of divine revelation that don’t conform to these observations ought to be discarded as mythology.

Yet, despite the obvious differences between the mythical world of the Bible and the real world we live in, many continue to insist that these scriptures contain the revealed “Word” of our Creator. How do they conclude this?

Did God Tell You That?

If you believe that the Bible is divine revelation, is it because God visited you personally and told you it is so? Perhaps in some extreme cases, there are those Christians who will claim to have seen or spoken with our Creator but, more often, people of faith were converted by more worldly sources. Perhaps their parents instructed them to believe the Bible or maybe a friend converted them later in life. Regardless, it was other humans, not God, who told them to believe.

If you are a Christian, stop for a moment and ask how you first came to think that the Bible is the Word of God. A parent told you? A friend? A spouse? The pastor of your church? Whatever your feelings of love or respect for these people may be, recognize that they are fellow human beings, not divine agents. What gives them the authority to determine what is the true source of revelation? How can they be so certain?

Faith vs. Critical Thinking

The answer is most often a thing called “faith”. A doubting Christian who poses such questions is often admonished to “just have faith”. Based on the usage of this word, it seems that faith is the process by which these questions are simply silenced or suppressed in the mind of the believers so that they can go on accepting what they’re told. In other words, faith is the suppression of critical thinking, at least in certain select areas.

Why would God grant us a curious mind with the power of reason (of which, critical thinking is an essential component) only to expect us to suppress this gift? It’s typically seen as a compliment to enthusiastically use a gift we are given and an insult to ungratefully destroy it. Where could the virtue of faith in God’s eyes be?

This book is written in the application of that very Gift of Reason, to seriously question whether the Bible is the “Word of God” or whether it belongs in the library of human mythology. It examines the claims of the Bible in comparison with observations of God’s Creation, the natural universe.

The Zero Defects Standard

This book uses a very strict standard on what kind of book can be considered “The Word of God”: zero defects. If the author of the Bible and the Creator of the universe are the same being, we should expect nothing less than 100% consistency between what the Bible says about the universe and what we observe in the universe. The proper respect for God demands nothing less. We owe it to both our Creator and ourselves to be ever vigilant against flimflam artists who are always eager to misrepresent the will of the Divine for personal gain.

Some will not agree. They might say that expecting zero defects is too strict a standard to apply even to the book said to be “The Word of God”. These apologists will admit the Bible isn’t inerrant but say we shouldn’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater”. By this theory, there can be “good parts” and “corrupted parts to the Bible. We simply have to know what parts are God’s Word, which we must learn from, and what parts are contaminated by human error, which we need to ignore.

So how exactly are we supposed to do that?

Since we are not divine agents ourselves, we can’t hope to be certain about the purity of any passage we read if we know that some are contaminated by human error. Once we acknowledge that some parts of this alleged “Word of God” are, in fact, bunk, how can we trust that any other part isn’t? If, for example, the creation story in the first two chapters of Genesis are admitted to be human mythmaking, having no relationship to the actual Creation, then how can we be sure that, say, the passages describing the Lake of Fire wasn’t made up by religious leaders seeking to control their flock?

If we do claim to know the mind of God so thoroughly that we can discern with certainty what passages of the Bible are divine and what parts are corrupted or added by humans, isn’t that a textbook example of arrogance? Why bother reading the Bible at all if we know God’s mind so well?

Such a cherry-picking approach to the Bible is also arbitrary. In reading the Bible this way, we can pick and choose what passages we like and which ones we don’t like so that we may make up our religion as we go along. This being the case, we may as well dispense with the hypocritical notion that somehow this religion has anything to do with God’s wishes and admit it’s really about our own.

Claiming with certainty to know God’s mind is as dangerous as it is arrogant and arbitrary, as we have seen in sectarian violence throughout history. Humanity has suffered great tragedies and horrible bloodshed when misguided individuals are fired up with the conviction that they are on a mission from God. The burning of witches, the tortures during the Inquisition, the massacres of the Crusades and the death and destruction of 9/11 were some of the consequences. “If in doubt, throw it out” is not just a scientifically sound approach; it’s essential to avoid potential tragedy and suffering.

Consequently, there are only two possibilities regarding what the Bible is:

1. The Bible is the Word of God
2. The Bible is not the Word of God

There is no third possibility. Just as you can’t be a little bit pregnant, the Bible can’t be “sort of the Word of God”. If we find any errors in the Bible, the rest of the book becomes suspect. Therefore, either the Fundamentalist is correct, that the Bible is the universal, timeless and inerrant Word of God, or else the deist is correct, that it is just human mythology, no more relevant either to our understanding of God or to our life in the modern age than Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The middle ground, which the liberal Christians search so hard for, simply doesn’t exist.

The Seven Fatal Flaws of the Bible

As we read the Bible cover-to-cover, cross-referencing it with our modern understandings of the way the universe actually works, we discover many discrepancies and problems so severe that they can’t be dismissed as metaphors or matters of interpretation. This book organizes them into seven categories, each discussed in its own chapter:

1. By definition, the Bible isn’t “revelation”.
2. Seven ways the Bible is wrong about the cosmos
3. Seven ways the Bible is wrong about life on earth.
4. The Bible features mythical beings, magic and a god that talks to people. So why don’t we see these things today?
5. The seven most glaring self-contradictions in the Bible.
6. Seven ways the Bible is morally bankrupt by the standards of modern sensibilities.
7. The Jesus story makes no sense.

If you, the reader, are a Christian, you may want to keep a Bible handy to cross-reference. Many Christians have never read the Bible, at least not beyond the pleasant parables of Jesus or the cherry-picked passages spoken by a preacher on Sunday morning. You may be shocked to find what is contained in it. You will discover that while the book you are reading is not gentle in its analysis, it does not misrepresent the Bible.

Going Beyond Evolution

Evolution, as much as it angers Christian fundamentalists, is the least of the Bible’s problems. You don’t have to have a doctorate in biology to see how God’s Creation doesn’t conform to scripture. Even the most basic remedial education in science (things that every child in our modern world should know) is enough to completely discredit the Bible.

Addressing Defenders of the Faith

Christian apologists (those who defend the faith and try to explain away the contradictions, absurdities and atrocities of the Bible) are increasingly busy these days. They have the daunting and unenviable task of trying to maintain their collapsing, archaic structure even as it is built upon the eroding foundation of ancient mysticism. The mental gymnastics they employ to this end are breathtaking but, as we shall see, ultimately fruitless, easily debunked and would be more productively spent in other pursuits. Here are some of the common excuses Christian apologists come up with for the Bible:

1. “This analysis is too literal. The Bible is a source of metaphor to be interpreted.”
2. “(This or that passage) is just a mistranslation of the original Word.”
3. “We can’t put God in a vacuum. Some parts of the Bible may be incompatible with modern sensibilities and understandings of the universe but God had to speak to people in ways they could understand at the time.”
4. “God works in strange ways.”
5. “You can only come to God through faith, not reason.”

The Metaphorical vs. Literal View

Some Christians who read this book will complain that it is “too literal” a reading of the Bible. The idea is that the Bible speaks in metaphor to be interpreted. If we can’t understand the meaning or the ancient scriptures seem to suggest an absurdity, the fault is ours for not understanding the “true meaning”.

Why would God write a book, especially a book so important that our eternal salvation depends upon our proper understanding of it, and deliberately obscure the message so it can’t be easily understood? The entire purpose of communication is to make ideas clear for the reader or listener to comprehend. Are they suggesting that God, the same being who created this universe, is such a terrible author? Are they saying that God, the very being that granted us sense and reason, can’t understand such a basic idea of communication?

This excuse for the Bible especially makes no sense if we are to believe that God loves us or wants us to come to salvation. Christians often like to use the parent-child metaphor in explaining God’s relationship to us. Doesn’t a parent try to educate the child using clear language? Or does a parent deliberately try to confuse his or her children in their education of how the world works and how to prepare them for it?

Some Christians, particularly Calvinists, have an explanation: Yahweh doesn’t necessarily love us or want us to come to salvation. They suggest that while the elect are destined for salvation, others are predestined to never hear the Word and be condemned to Hell. Indeed, there are some passages in the Bible that suggest that God has deceived some of us (detailed later in chapter 6, “The Flip Flopping Bible”). It seems odd that a Creator should go through the trouble to bring beings into existence only to destroy them as “objects of wrath”.

What would it say for the morality, maturity and emotional stability of a god who behaves in such a wantonly sadistic and deceptive manner? Could such a spoiled child be the true architect of such a universe as ours, governed as it is by natural law and not known for supernatural upheaval? This image of a god as an obnoxious ill-mannered brat doesn’t reflect the nature of our Creator but does it fit Yahweh?

Malachi 2:3 Behold, I (the Lord) will corrupt your seed and spread dung upon your faces

It would seem so.

Another problem with the metaphor excuse is in how much it is stretched to defend the Bible’s credibility. A “metaphor” is typically a poetic analogy used to understand our reality. Perhaps it is simplified or subject to interpretation but the license only extends so far before reaching the breaking point.

For example, we may muse, “How long is a day to God?” when speaking of the “six days” of Creation. Fair enough. Perhaps these passages were not intended to mean literal days. However, when Yahweh creates plants on “day three” and the sun on “day four”, the metaphor breaks down in the face of what we know about the true nature of Creation. Our sun was created long before plants (or indeed our very world) came into being and we know that plants require sunlight to survive. The absurdities, errors and contradictions of the Bible are far too severe to be excused by even the most generous of poetic license.

The Mistranslation Excuse

Some Christians will want to dismiss embarrassing passages of the Bible by speculating that they’re mistranslations. If this is so, how are we supposed to know the good parts from the contaminated ones?

If God inspired the prophets to write the Bible but didn’t watch over them to be sure they conveyed the Word correctly, then the whole Bible must be disregarded as corrupted for we have no way of knowing which parts are the true Word and which parts are liberties taken by the prophets.

If God watched over the prophets carefully to be sure they scribed the Bible correctly but didn’t watch over the editors to be sure that extra books weren’t added, then the whole Bible must be disregarded as corrupted for we have no way of knowing which parts are the true Word and which parts are the works of false prophets.

If God watched over the prophets and the editors to be sure that the original Bible was assembled correctly but didn’t watch over the translators to be sure that the Word was preserved from one language to the next, then the whole Bible must be disregarded as corrupted for we have no way of knowing which parts are the true Word and which parts are mistranslations.

If God watched over the prophets, the editors and the translators to be sure the original Bible was maintained and preserved for all time, whence cometh all the different translations of the Bible?

A Relative God?

Some will suggest that the Bible was written with all its contradictions to modern science and material that is morally offensive to modern sensibilities (such as the Bible’s endorsement of rape, genocide or slavery) because God had to speak to people in ways that they could understand at the time. Ancient civilizations, as the argument goes, could not understand the concept of evolution.

Perhaps God could not explain the Big Bang to those who lived in the Bronze Age but at the very least we should expect that the poetry of the Bible should be consistent with modern understandings of how the universe works. It’s much the same as with prophecy in mythological stories: the prophecy sometimes seems a riddle at first but by the end of the tale, it fits with the way events unfolded.

For example, a Genesis account that is poetic, written for ancient humans to understand, yet still consistent with modern science, might have described God creating the stars first and that one of these stars was our sun. Then God took a piece of our sun and cooled it, creating the earth… and so on. Had the Book of Genesis been written this way, it would lend credibility to either the metaphoric or relativistic argument. As it stands, the order of events is completely wrong.

The relativistic excuse for the Bible seems a lame cover for the scientific errors of this ancient tome. It really falls apart as a defense for the moral problems of these scriptures. God couldn’t tell people rape was wrong because they weren’t ready? God couldn’t tell people slavery was wrong because their culture hadn’t progressed enough yet? Are there any situations or cultural paradigms where genocide might be justifiable? Clearly not.

Even if this relativistic argument is, for some reason passing our ability to comprehend, true, then where is the updated edition of the Bible? If the Bible was written with the Bronze Age in mind, then where is our edition, written for modern civilization? At best, this relativistic argument suggests that the Bible is obsolete and still belongs with other human mythology.

“God Works in Strange Ways”

This rationalization is refuted with a simple denial: “No, God doesn’t work in strange ways at all.”

Look at the universe. It’s not strange. It's governed by predictable laws. Even its mysteries carry the promise to one day be understood. It indicates a Creator that is a pragmatic architect. Herein lies what is perhaps the greatest flaw of the Bible. The spoiled, tantrum-throwing, capricious, sadistic, bloodthirsty tyrant that is the Bible’s god is completely inconsistent with the Creator as indicated by the natural universe.

“You Can Only Come to God Through Faith.”

It’s time this idea was challenged.

Are we not endowed with the power of reason? Who but our Creator would have given us this great gift? Isn’t critical thinking (also known as doubt) an essential component of reason?

Are we not born with a curious mind, driving us to unlock the mystery of this universe and discover the unknown for ourselves? Who but our Creator would have given us such an impulse?

Faith is an artificial mechanism, invented by organized religion not as a path to greater spiritual awareness but as a tool of control. It works against nature and Nature’s God to fight our instinctive drive to discover. It suppresses or curtails the very Gift of Reason that God has granted us. It teaches that doubt, a healthy and natural expression of that gift, is a sin.

Those who argue for the virtues of faith seem to believe in a limited use of reason. They place their ability to think rationally in a box with certain boundaries that are not to be crossed. They often work backwards from pre-established conclusions (a logical fallacy) so that they may feel more secure in never questioning the tenets of their faith.

By contrast, there is great spiritual depth in being a freethinker. Our minds are unfettered by the preconceptions of faith-based credos and strict religious dogmas, at liberty to explore the wonder of our consciousness and the majesty of God’s Creation.

It is in reason, not faith, that we come closer to God. Since we can’t converse with God directly, the primary way to understand this Creator is to look to Creation. Science helps us to comprehend our universe better. As we come to a greater understanding of our universe, we come to a greater understanding of God. Therefore, as Thomas Paine noted in The Age of Reason, “science… is the study of the true theology”. [2]

Of greater worth to our own spiritual development is a school or library than a church.

Conclusion: Our Understanding of God

Having dispatched with the general excuses for the Bible, we now proceed with an in-depth analysis of the ancient scriptures, cover-to-cover. It quickly becomes clear that the study of the universe reveals a very different Creator than the one described in the Bible. Accordingly, Christians and deists have subtly different ways of referring to God.

Christian descriptions of their god: “Lord”, “Savior”, “Redeemer”, “King of Kings”, “Lord of Lords”, “Heavenly Father”. Sometimes their god is referred to by his scriptural names, Yahweh or Jehovah.

Deist descriptions of God: “Nature’s God”, “Creator”, “First Cause”, “Prime Mover”, “Providence” [3]

Christians also use the pronoun “he” in reference to their god. The biblical god is well established as masculine. At two points of scripture, his very loins are described. [4] This book uses the pronoun “It” when referring to God the Creator. The gender of this enigmatic being is unknown. [5]

There are some implications carried in these choices of titles that we ascribe to God. Christians, as reflected by the term “Lord”, are afraid of God (hence their fondness for the term “God-fearing”) and submit at least partly out of this fear, much in the same way that subjects might kneel before a tyrant. There is also the implication of a personal relationship with God.

Deists regard God with respect, gratitude and admiration, much the same way we might respect great inventors or architects and be grateful for what they have given us. However, there is no personal relationship implied in these examples of deistic descriptions of God. We have no evidence that God demands worship.

These differences between these two different views of God become more apparent with a greater understanding of the Bible, as we shall see.

[1] Thomas Jefferson, “Writings”, Editor: Merrill D. Peterson, (New York: 1984), p902

[2] Thomas Paine, “The Age of Reason” (with a biographical introduction), Editor: Philip S. Foner, (New York, 1974), p137

[3] Only deists who believe in the direct involvement of God in our lives (rare) tend to use this term.

[4] See Ezekiel 1:27 and 8:2-3.

[5] Pure speculation but a physical form, necessary to have a gender, must be limiting and primitive to a being of such power.