Four reasons for rejecting the Bible as a source of truth: The cultural, the rational, the factual, and the spiritual

For the wisdom of this age is foolishness with God (I Corinthians 3:19)

Jesus did not say “Go forth unto all the nations and prove to them that the Bible really is the Word of God.” The great evangelists of the past presented plain biblical teachings without a lot of preliminary apologetics, and people either believed, or did not.

We do not see such preliminary apologetics in the words of Christ or the apostles either. The truths of the Jewish Scriptures are assumed, the biblical truths were proclaimed, and people either believed, or did not.

This is not to deny the usefulness of preliminary explanations – especially in these modern, postmodern and soon to be post-postmodern times. There is a place for argument, debate, explanation. However, in what follows I am not going to try to prove that the Bible is a reliable, truthful and accurate source of eternal spiritual truths and historical facts, although I believe that it is. Rather, I want to indicate the major objections to that belief, and to demonstrate that such objections are by no means ironclad and invincible arguments founded on nothing but pure logic and irrefutable modern science.

People generally dismiss the Bible as being merely an important cultural artifact at best, and harmful delusion at worst. Of course I don’t know how many people in the USA today literally believe in the truth of the Bible. I might be wrong, but my guess would be less than 10%. And, giving verbal or intellectual assent to biblical teachings is not synonymous with actually living out said teachings, as I know too well from my own experience – so mere statement of belief in the truth of the Bible is no proof of living Christianity.

Anyway, I have identified four basic kinds of obstacles to belief in the Bible that are prevalent in our society today. They are:

[I] Cultural bias

[II] Rational objections

[III] Factual objections Actually, this is really only a subset of [II] but I separate them for the sake of simplification. The difference will be apparent when I describe them.

[IV] Spiritual or Psychological barriers

[I] Cultural bias

It is generally assumed that the Bible is irrelevant. Biblical teachings and narratives are not widely taught, many have had no real exposure to them at all, and our culture as a whole is largely disconnected from the not-so distant past when the teachings of the Bible were more relevant.

This simple point does not require further explanation, but I would like to ask: What sort of a culture have we got now anyhow? Is it really something to be proud of? Are our entertainments and our general values such as to attract the admiration or even the respect of the world? Are we not showing rather an increasingly rapid descent into lawlessness, tyranny, and social and moral chaos?

God gave America prosperity, security and liberty in the past – and what God has given, he can also take away.

[II] Rational objections

There are basic biblical teachings that are not agreeable to secular human reason. That a good God could create a world with so many evils . . . That there are divine moral rules we need to obey . . .  That there is a day of judgment followed by an eternity of heaven or hell . . . That God would come to earth in human form in Roman Palestine 2,000 years ago . . . That his sacrificial death on the cross should be the sole means of forgiveness for sin . . . That God created the physical universe out of nothing by his word alone: it is not at all surprising that these and other biblical concepts should be objectionable to modern man.

Paul teaches in I Corinthians that “the natural man receiveth (receives) not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” In this context Paul explains that God has specifically set up a situation in which he cannot be found by human wisdom unaided – “That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.

Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?

For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.

This deliberate setting up of a system that nullifies human wisdom does not by the way deny or nullify the intelligence by which we learn a foreign language, design a building, find a cure for an illness, or manage to find our way home after work. These ordinary aspects of human intelligence, including science and math, are part of God’s gifts of reason and consciousness, so that we might live in the creation that he has made.

The “wisdom of the wise” that Paul is referring to in the passage above is the wisdom that sets itself in opposition to God. It is independent human reason unaided, and its attempts to determine ethical systems, the nature of the afterlife, the origins of the cosmos, and the meaning of life independently of God. All of these efforts are foolishness and blindness, and those who rely on human intellect alone will never enter into the unseen spiritual realities that lie behind the physical world.

[III] Factual objections

By these I mean rejections of the factual content as opposed to the general ideas of the Bible. This is of course a kind of rational objection, but I separated it from point [II] for the sake of clarity.

This category of reasons for disbelief can be divided into two categories: [A] Historical objections, and [B] Scientific objections.

[A] Historical objections: Many of these are more apparent than real, and have been explained by other writers. I will give just one example of one such objection and how it might be explained.

In 1 Kings 4:26 (KJV) we read that “Solomon had forty thousand stalls of horses for his chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen.”

In 2 Chronicles 9:25 we read that “Solomon had four thousand stalls for horses and chariots, and twelve thousand horses, which he kept in the chariot cities and also with him in Jerusalem.”

The 4,000 number in 2 Chronicles could refer to specific stalls for each individual chariot and corresponding team of horses for that chariot, while the 40,000 in I Kings refers only to stalls for horses, and hence could refer to the total inventory of horses from which individual teams were drawn (since obviously there would be many more horses in addition to the specific teams for each chariot).

An alternative explanation might be that the smaller number of 4,000 referred specifically to the horses and chariots personally owned by the king, while the larger 40,000 would refer to the number available for his command in time of battle – that is, Solomon’s for use in war but not permanently owned (as we would say that Robert E. Lee had 75,000 men at the battle of Gettysburg, not that he owned them personally but that they were his to command).

As for the “twelve thousand horseman” and the “twelve thousand horses,” that is merely a difference of phrasing. It might mean that apart from all of the horses required for chariots, an additional 12,000 horses were set aside for mounted soldiers (2 Chronicles), with men to ride them included in I Kings.

Now, if that explanation should be valid, it does not prove that the Bible is the true word of God. It only shows that the Bible is historically accurate in this point – and of course a history book does not have to be divinely inspired to contain historically accurate statements.

[B] Scientific objections: These are much more significant than historical objections, and have been extremely influential in persuading people that the Bible is an outdated book, and no longer relevant to the modern age. However, things are not always what they seem, and the scientific objections are not as unassailable as many believe.

Again for the sake of simplicity, I will divide the scientific objections into three categories:

[1] The supposed impossibility of miracles

[2] Darwin’s theory of evolution        

[3] The age of the earth

[1] The supposed impossibility of miracles: We don’t need to spend a great deal of time on this one, as it is the easiest to deal with. The apostle Paul said in I Corinthians :

But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:

And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

In speaking thus, Paul was not giving way to doubt. He was dispassionately examining logical alternatives. In the same way, I can say that if God does not exist, and natural laws are the fundamental basis of all reality, then of course miracles are an impossibility. If, on the other hand, God does exist – defining God as an infinite spiritual being that designed and created the entire universe out of nothing by his power, his wisdom and his word alone – then miracles become not only possible, but perfectly possible.

This does not give any grounds for fear that all of the courses of nature will be upended, and ordinary life and science will be impossible because miracles will be happening everywhere all of the time. Miracles are sufficiently rare that they do not throw all of nature out of whack. After all, if once in the entire history of the world a man walked on water, or healed a man that had been blind from birth, that does not invalidate nautical engineering or render swimming techniques obsolete; neither does it eliminate the medical sciences of ophthalmology and optometry, which remain useful and necessary.

Also, while I do believe miracles occur today, the Bible shows only three really great outpourings of miracles in human history: (1) in the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, in their wanderings in the wilderness and in their initial conquest of the Promised Land; (2) In the life and ministry of Christ; and (3) in the establishment of the early church. And there is no reason to expect that God must consistently show miracles to the same degree at all times.

So, the real question when it comes to the possibility of miracles is, “Does God exist or not?” That is a question that is too elevated for science to approach – and if any scientist says “There is no God,” he is speaking not from the position of scientific facts and evidence, but merely from his own personal belief. Moreover, he is speaking outside of his area of expertise – and a scientist is only a layman outside of his specialized field. Thus, Albert Einstein’s opinions on the existence or non-existence of God are not more likely to be true because of his undoubted scientific genius, since God infinitely and eternally transcends human science.

[2] Darwin’s theory of evolution: I don’t want to try and make a comprehensive refutation of Darwinism here. Others have done that more effectively than I ever could. A good book in this regard is Darwin on Trial by Phillip E. Johnson. In it, Johnson does not try to prove the Bible is true, but only points out obvious flaws, logical errors, and gaps in Darwin’s theory.

Instead of trying to refute Darwinism, I only want to address the claim that it is “settled science.” In fact, it is very far from settled science, and I would like to briefly identify some specific problems with it.

First, we have the metaphysical problem. Darwinism has nothing to say about the origins of the cosmos, our solar system, and of the earth itself. This is a tremendous gap in a theory that supposedly makes God irrelevant. It is reasonable to assume that the universe and life in that universe both have the same origins.

Second, there is the ethical problem. If human life came about as Darwin claims, what does that leave us with but an ethical system based on the survival of the strong and the perishing of the weak? Many have tried to graft a different ethical system influenced by Christianity on to this inhumane Darwinian scenario, but such feeble inventions have no coherence or credibility, being merely human contrivances.

Some have asserted that we have reached a state of consciousness whereby we can transcend the evolutionary struggle that lies at the root of our being. Apart from the fact that this is merely an unproven assertion which may or may not be true, it means that extraneous ethical elements have to be borrowed and smuggled in from elsewhere, since a Darwinian scenario of origins is inadequate to explain life as we live it daily.

Thirdly, there is the epistemological problem. If our brains evolved in the context of an impersonal struggle for survival, and those innovations lasted which were most conducive to survival, how can we trust our brains in higher questions that have nothing to do with any kind of struggle for survival? Darwin himself said,

“With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”  Charles Darwin to W. Graham, July 3, 1881, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (1897; repr., Boston: Elibron, 2005), 1:285. “Darwin’s Doubt,” by Kenneth Samples, Reasons to Believe, https://reasons.org/explore/publications/nrtb-e-zine/darwin-s-doubt.

Fourthly, there is the biogenetic problem. Darwinism requires the existence of living creatures so that natural selection and variation might occur - but how did the first living creature arise? Darwinism qua Darwinism has no answer at all for this. This is a serious gap in the theory. Even the simplest microscopic living creature is of such astonishing intricacy and complexity as to make an accidental sloshing around of primordial elements inadequate as an explanatory cause. Even if the elements were present – which is by no means established – how could they have been arranged by accident in a manner such that even the most advanced human science cannot even begin to replicate it?

Fifthly, there is the problem of sexual reproduction. I am open to correction, but I have read, from what seemed to me to be a credible source, that the separation of single-celled organisms into male and female is so impossible to explain that not a single serious attempt has ever been made to explain it in a naturalistic, Darwinian context. It is an insoluble problem that is simply swept under the rug by Darwinists who falsely claim that their theory is now established and settled science.

Just consider the impossibility of it for a moment. How did the much more complex and much less efficient method of sexual reproduction arise from primitive unicellular organisms? Did one cell accidentally, by blind chance, separate into two different organisms, one of them with a fully formed and functioning male reproductive system, and the other with a fully formed and functioning female reproductive system?

Did two different organisms, both coincidentally in the same place and at the same time, give birth to one offspring with a complete and functional male system, and one with a female? That is even more improbable than the first – and both of them are logical and scientific impossibilities.

Sixth, there is the problem of the genetic mechanism. For a fish’s fin to turn into an amphibian’s leg all sorts of intricate alterations to the highly complex genetic code (which was unknown in Darwin’s day) must be made for the skin, muscles, nerves, and bones, all of them at the same time and all of them by accident (unless you accept divinely guided evolution, which few do). There is no known process by which this can be explained in terms of a random accidental process.

Seventh, there is the problem of human consciousness. What on earth does a struggle for survival of the fittest have to do with love, compassion, wisdom, justice, a sense of humor, musical talent, the search for meaning, and the love of creativity? Darwinism is completely useless here, and the Darwinists have no other alternative than to simply assert that all of those things must have evolved because Darwinism must be true.

Eighth, there is the paleontological problem. There are significant problems with the fossil record. One of those problems is (a) stasis. If natural selection has such marvelous wonder working power, how does it happen that some forms persisted unchanged or only slightly for hundreds of millions of years (according to the Darwinian scenario)? Another problem is (b) the absence of proven transitional forms and a third (c) is the Cambrian explosion. The fossil record does not convincingly prove evolution, but in fact raises questions about it.

By the way, how did some birds become brightly colored because that aided them in the struggle for survival, while other birds became drably colored for the same reason?

There is also a great difference between microevolution and macroevolution, the former being commonly observed and well-known, the other not so. Variations within finch beaks show cyclical changes within fixed limits, and do not explain the emergence of new creatures and completely different creatures.

[3] The age of the earth: As to the age of the earth, all projections or extrapolations from the known conditions of today back into completely unknown and unimaginable conditions at the first formation of the universe and our solar system are completely invalid. No one, least of all those operating from a strictly secular point of view, has the faintest idea of what sort of supra-scientific laws or meta-scientific principles might have been in operation in the first emergence of planet earth from non-being into being. There a host of unknowns which could easily render invalid all the most careful projections of people who try to reason backwards from the known into the unknown,  into mysterious original conditions that have never been observed and will never be observed in any scientific laboratory.

Moreover, that an outwardly perfect sphere covered with a thin and delicate layer of biosphere should have emerged by accident from a random explosion and find itself somehow just at the right distance from the sun to sustain life is not a matter of proven scientific fact. Statements that it was so created are the result not of undeniable evidence and indisputable science, but rather of the a priori assumption that God does not exist. Once this position is arbitrarily adopted, for highly subjective reasons, materialistic causes are adopted as a matter of necessity and passed off as science on an unsuspecting and gullible public.

Parenthetically, about the earth being a perfect sphere, it is slightly compressed at the poles, and also and bulges at the equator, due to the forces of gravity, but such alterations are invisible to the naked eye. In fact, I have read that if a billiard ball could be expanded to the size of the earth, it would have higher mountains and deeper valleys, meaning that the earth is actually smoother than a billiard ball – and what kind of random explosion could produce a billiard ball out of nothing?

About the earth’s undoubted appearance of age, I have a couple of possible creation scenarios. Neither of them is stated in the Bible, and hence binding on Christians. In fact, the first one I will present is (as far as I know) unique to myself. I have never seen it anywhere else – and that is, what if God so created the earth that all of the natural geological changes of which we now see the evidence actually occurred, in their proper chronological sequence? What if the carving out of canyons, the shifting of tectonic plates and the raising of mountain ranges, the depositing of a fossil record, and every other geological feature of earth really took place, but at incredible rates of speed so that hundreds of millions and even billions of apparent years of change were compressed into a few hours? This would be similar to the time-lapse photography films some of us have seen in biology classes where the weeks or months of growth of a plant are compressed into a few minutes.

Another scenario is that the earth was created in six distinct phases, but of indefinite length. I don’t believe that undermines the integrity of Scripture, as long as the exact order is maintained, with no regard paid whatever to the speculations of scientists. It would have been a light and simple thing for God to do, to create the heavens first, then the earth, and then the sun, moon and stars, and science has nothing to say about this. The operative power of God is not within the very limited sphere of activity of conventional science.

This earth would have been created with the appearance of age, just as Adam and the other creatures would have had the appearance of age on the first day of their creation (we can assume God would not create man and the animals as helpless newborns incapable of feeding or taking care of themselves).

Some will object that this would make God a deceiver or a trickster, but this is very far from the case. We read in the Psalms that “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth (shows) his handywork.” God could very well have deliberately shrouded the origins of the earth in mystery - not to fool any one, but so that the option of disbelief might remain open. After all, if all of the scientists could easily prove that the earth materialized out of nothing – say, five or ten thousand years ago – it would be impossible to deny the existence of God. But if God has so concealed himself as to be inaccessible to anything but faith, he has the right to do that.

[IV] Spiritual or Psychological barriers

All of the previous objections are secondary. The most fundamental and primary obstacle to recognizing the Bible’s veracity and authority is explained in the Gospel of John. There we read, “And the light shineth (shines) in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” The full passage is:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The same was in the beginning with God.

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

And the light shineth (shines) in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

We also read later in that same book, “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”

This evil is the result of sinful human nature due to the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and it can take many forms (not all of them easily recognizable). It is manifested in polite, friendly and decent people who obey the laws and pay their taxes, but have no need of God. It is manifested in those who do not want to accept any higher authority that might infringe their freedom to do whatever they please, as well as those whose guilty consciences make then want to hide from God, as Adam tried to hide himself from God. It is manifested in a false pride of intellect, and in an imaginary sense of autonomy that deceives us into thinking that we are the masters of our fate and the captains of our souls, when in fact we weak and helpless in the face of the greater vicissitudes of life.