In God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It! I asked “why do you think God exists?” and that the answer I usually get is “cuz the Bible sez so!” Well, why do you believe the Bible? “Cuz God wrote it!” Well, why do you think there’s a God? “Cuz the Bible sez so!” This was a query to regular Writ reader and Christian charged with saving my atheist soul, Carl, and lo and behold, that’s the exact answer (albeit, five paragraphs worth) I get (see Carl’s comments). Some choice excerpts from Carl:

And what about the stars? Do they point to the existence of a creator? The force of gravity and the dynamic energy of one of them, our sun, hold the earth in place in its orbit, make plants grow, keep us warm, and make all life possible here on earth. Did all this come about by blind chance? No.

Why not? Why is blind chance harder to believe than a universal Santa Claus? We’re talking about billions of years and incremental changes from the processes of physics, biology, and evolution, as well as quantuum forces we don’t yet understand. Billions of years. Numbers that big are almost beyond comprehension. I would find it impossible to believe if someone showed me a snail that traveled from Los Angeles to New York, but if you give it a billion years to make the trip (and it was somehow immortal) it’s not only possible, but probable.

I’ve heard this argument before, too. If the earth was 1% closer to the sun, we’d fry, 1% further, we’d freeze. The earth’s distance from the sun is so perfect that it must have been God’s design. The air we breathe, water we drink, food, fauna, all point to a perfect creation, without which humans could not thrive. Because of creation, there must be a creator.

The way I look at it, the universe coalesced and elements formed. Stars came to light and planets formed and circled the stars. Maybe it’s a quintillion-to-one shot that all those things could happen just right in order for humans to exist. So, apparently, it did. The longshot came in or else we wouldn’t be around here to discuss the existence of God.

The belief in God seems to be very arrogant to me, as if we human beings are so special that an entire universe had to be made just so in order for us to exist. Why are we so much more special than quahogs, quartz, quasars, or quarks? That arrogance is further defined by most of the Bible, where we humans are given dominion over the earth. We’re not a part of nature, another animal in the kingdom, we are masters of our domain, a world of plants, animals, and minerals all created by God for us to pillage at will.

I wonder how Christians will reconcile Biblical creation if and when we discover intelligent life in space. Did God make E.T., and if so, why didn’t He tell us about it?

When you look at a simple paper clip, do you feel that it came into existence by itself? No, you are aware that somebody with a purpose made it, right?

See, paper clips are manufactured, therefore the universe must be manufactured. Brilliant! Of course paper clips don’t just spring into existence. However, a paper clip is made from metal. Metal comes from ores within the earth. The earth was a bunch of cosmic dust that coalesced due to gravity. The dust and gravity came from the big bang. Given billions of years, miraculous things happen.

Carl then goes on to name a whole bunch of natural creature abilities (birds’ wings, bats’ sonar, etc.) that inventors have learned from to make our scientific breakthroughs. I’m not sure why he brings it up; perhaps to say that God made all these fabulous inventions and we’re just copying. Well, of course we’re copying what creatures can do! We see birds flying, therefore we know it is possible to fly. If birds and insects didn’t exist, would we have even considered flight possible? (Perhaps, but it would have taken longer.) We study how birds manage to fly and emulate that. You couldn’t have given me a better defense of science if you tried.

But the fact that a bird can fly doesn’t prove the existence of God, either. Your point seems to be that God had to make a birds’ wings just so in order for it to fly. I say that birds evolved wings just so or else they wouldn’t be flying (the fossil record is littered with little dinosaurs whose arms did not evolve into wings.)

My overall point is that the existence of something does not necessarily imply an intelligent creator. If so, then who or what created God? You’ve set the standard that existence implies creation. Oh, God is infinite and did not require creation? So why couldn’t that rule apply to the universe?

Carl makes another point to defend the Bible:

A while back, you said that you accepted science. Well, although the Bible is not basically a science book, it recorded scientific truth thousands of years before science knew of them. The Mosaic Law reflected awareness of disease germs thousands of years before Pasteur…

…and continues to describe how the Bible knew about blood circulation, genetic code, and migratory fowl. I think the point is, “see, the Bible posits things that are scientifically true, therefore the Bible must be true.” This is a logical fallacy. The Odyssey may have accurately described seafaring, navigation, and the geography of the Greek isles, but that doesn’t mean that Cyclops exists.

Besides, I read Leviticus 13-14, and nowhere within did I find reference to single-celled blood-borne pathogens. There’s a whole bunch of references to unclean. Again, a great defense of science. If you’re an ancient Jew and after a few generations you notice that people with bursting scabs tend to die and the people around them tend to get the same bursting scabs, hmm, maybe you should make a law about that. If you notice that people that eat foods prepared a certain way tend to die, maybe you write some laws about how to prepare food. Observation, experimentation, theory, practice, all sounds very scientific to me.

But again, your point is “the Bible recognized the same truths that science recognizes, therefore the Bible is true.” Well, doesn’t Qu’ran have a lot of the same laws regarding the unclean? We know the Jews still hold fast to those laws. So why is the Bible perfect and inerrant but the Qu’ran and Torah are not?

Please note: What is the shape of the earth? Does the Bible agree with any of the myths of the Middle Ages, saying that the earth is flat?

Thank you for this one; slow and right over the plate just like I like ’em.

No one in the Middle Ages of any education believed the earth was flat. The Greek, Egyptian, Chinese scholars of antiquity not only believed the earth was round, but proved its circumference mathematically to within a fraction of a percent (Pythagoras figured this out around 500 BC). From www.hellenism.net:

Heraclides of Pontus proposed that the seeming westward movement of the heavenly bodies is due to the eastward rotation of the earth on its axis. He also taught that Venus and Mercury revolved around the sun, not the earth. In about the 200s BC, a man named Aristarchus of Samos suggested that all the planets, even the earth, revolve around the sun. It is said that Heraclides and Aristarchus were way ahead of their time, and their theories were not really accepted. Eratosthenes who was born in 276 BC, demonstrated the Earth’s circumference. Hipparchus, who lived around 140 BC, was a creative and talented astronomer. He divided the stars that he could see into classes of apparent brightness.He estimated the size and distance of the moon, found a way to predict eclipses, as well as calculating the length of the year to within 6 and a 1/2 minutes!

Now, the serfs and peons of the Middle Ages may have thought the earth was flat, but they also believed in dragons and wizards. Certainly, the learned class didn’t believe that, else why would the Queen of Spain sink a whole lot of money into Columbus’s adventure?

Like frosting on the cake, Carl closes with:

However, Bible facts do not change; they are true facts. ….does it include myths such as the one from an ancient tribe of India which represented the earth as resting on the backs of elephants that stood on a huge turtle that rested on a cobra?

Yeah, that Bible sure doesn’t have anything that silly in it! Elephants and turtles and cobras, oh my! No, the Bible sticks with realistic true scientifically verifiable facts like

• talking serpents (Gen 3:1)
• a boat filled with two of every creature (two mosquitos, male or female? –Bill Cosby, “Noah”) (Gen 7:8)
• woman being created from a rib (Gen 2:20-22)
• a woman turning into salt (Gen 19:26)
• sticks turning into snakes and water into blood(Ex 4:2-9)
• dividing a sea for fleeing Jews (Ex 15:8)
• unicorns (Num 23:22)
• 13 foot tall giants (Og) (Deu 3:11)
• dragons (Deu 32:33)
• 10 foot tall giants (Goliath) (1Sam 17:4)
• parting a river for Elijah (2Kin 2:8)
• a magical coin (Urim and Thummim) used to divine answers (sort of like God’s Magic 8-Ball) (numerous cites, like Neh 7:65)
• cockatrice (Isa 14:29)
• sea monsters (Isa 27:1)
• satyrs (Isa 34:13-14)
• a flat earth (Ez 7:2)
• men living in the belly of a whale (Jon 1:17)

(Massive thanks to The Skeptics Annotated Bible… and I’ve only picked a few out of 860 listed absurdities.)

And finally:

I don’t know if this applies to you, but many people deny the existence of God because of the hypocrisy they observe in people who claim to be worshipers of God.

How could one not be hypocritical when one worships a book full of inherent self-contradiction?

Others may feel that God simply doesn’t care about mankind’s plight because it seems as if he is doing nothing to help them.

Why in a war-torn, plague-filled, tsunami-ridden world would anyone think that?

If this is how you feel, you are not alone. However, the Bible has the answers to all of mankind’s troubles. Jehovah’s Witnesses in your area will be more than happy to point out just how valuable the Bible is in dealing with our problems.

Yes, it has done wonders for Jehovah’s Witness Michael Jackson.

So what of the Jews, Hindi, Muslims, Baha’i, Scientologists, Buddhists, etc. Does the Bible have answers for them, too? Everything would be just hunkey-dorey if all the world’s people would only conform to Christinsanity?

No, Carl, I do not deny the existence of God. Framing the statement in that manner presupposes a God to deny. I do deny the accuracy and worth of the Bible as an inerrant source of law for all mankind. I accept that the universe exists and have no need to consider why it was created, although I’m quite interested in how it was created.

Let me close with a question I’ve been asking since sixth grade: Why are the ancient Greek, Norse, Sumerian, Egyptian, and other creation stories and deities known as “mythology” while the modern versions are “religion”? How are followers of Christinsanity any more intellectually evolved than ancient peoples? Both have their fanciful stories and superhero-powered dieties meant to explain why we are here and how things came to exist.

(You skipped right past my description of the petulant immature God from the stories of Job and Abraham. How can you worship such a despicable being?)