Arguing the Affirmative: JOHN THE ATHEIST
Arguing the Negative: RANDAL THE CHRISTIAN
John’s Opening Statement
According to astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson,
I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religious document. Indeed, I can make an even stronger statement. Whenever people have used religious documents to make detailed predictions about the physical world they have been famously wrong. By a prediction I mean a precise statement about the untested behavior of objects or phenomena in the natural world that gets logged before the event takes place.[58]
So let’s rehearse the things we do not find in the Bible but which should have been revealed by a good and omniscient God if he knew about them. My claim is that there is nothing in the Bible that reveals an all-knowing God, and that an all-loving one didn’t reveal some things that would be helpful and compassionate toward the people he claims to love. What we find is indistinguishable from him not revealing anything at all. Everything we find in it is more credibly explained as the production of a prescientific people.
The first and most glaring problem is that God didn’t know about the age and size of the universe. Genesis 1 is contrary to modern science in so many ways, as Ed Babinski points out. He decisively shows that the Israelites, like their Mesopotamian neighbors, all believed:
The god(s) were perched on a celestial balcony, so to speak, gazing at the drama below, handing out blessings and curses to individuals and nations alike; at least that’s what the people believed who built the temples, founded the priesthoods, invented holy rituals, and performed burnt offerings (so the smoke would ascend to heaven as a “soothing aroma”—see Gen. 8:21; Exod. 29:18, 25; Lev. 3:16; 6:21; and Num. 15:3, 10).[59]
I’ve already suggested a different way for God to have begun the first few sentences in Genesis, which would not have led to the Galileo debacle and the ensuing loss of faith for so many people since that time.
In the beginning God created an immeasurable universe of billions of stars, some of which are billions and billions of miles away, through a process that took billions of years out of which he finally created the sun, moon, and a spherical earth that revolves around the sun. On it he created water, land, the beasts of the sea, and eventually every living thing on it through stages as one species evolved into the next one. Finally he created human beings to rule over everything he created.[60]
Beyond this, God didn’t know about the scientific method, which has brought about so many good things in life and for its creatures that it’s amazing he didn’t say one thing about it.[61] This means God didn’t know that today’s scientifically literate people could not bring themselves to accept tales of a virgin birth, transfiguration, resurrection, and ascension into the sky.
There are other things God didn’t know. He didn’t know about vaccines. If he had revealed how to discover them, it would have been very useful to us during the most devastating outbreak of the bubonic plague known as the Black Death, which killed a third of the population of Europe in the fourteenth century. This knowledge would also have been useful to us during the nearly worldwide pandemic of Spanish Influenza (1918–20), when between 50 and 100 million people died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. Nor did God know about penicillin. Revealing this knowledge to us could have saved millions of lives from an early death. He didn’t know about anesthesia so surgeries could be done painlessly, or the dangers of bloodletting. He didn’t know that drinking polluted water or that lead poisoning could kill us. He didn’t know enough to warn us about eating certain poisonous plants, or to identify the various poisonous species out there whose bite or sting could kill us.
God didn’t even know that if we built cities on the fault lines of the earth it would devastate the lives of millions of people down through the centuries. In fact, he should have known because he supposedly created them. Like honey to bees, these fault lines attract us because from them we derive our water and minerals as the earth opens up and gives us access to them.
The only excuse for God is that he does not exist.
Randal’s Opening Statement
The real question here is whether we can credibly believe that God revealed himself through a book that reflects a scientific view of the world that we no longer accept. And to be sure, we don’t accept the ancient Hebrew three-storied view of the universe. The biblical writers held to an obsolete science, and the attempts of some conservative Christians to read biblical texts in a way congruent with contemporary science is naïve and harmful. The question is whether that obsolete science discredits the text’s revelatory status.
This question brings us to another: If God should not have used ancient Israelite science when revealing himself to the ancient Israelites, then which science should he have used? I’m guessing that John thinks God should have used our science, making Genesis 1 read:
In the beginning 13.7 billion years ago there was a cosmic singularity. After a period the energy cooled sufficiently and God formed subatomic particles. . . .
Yes, that’s how God should have done it, with Genesis 1 and 2 introducing Big Bang cosmology, Einsteinian relativity, quantum physics, plate tectonics, and evolutionary biology. Give those ancient Israelites a real science education.
Alas, there are two glaring problems with this suggestion. The first is that such an account of the world wouldn’t have made any sense to the ancient Israelites. Can you imagine people who considered a chariot cutting-edge technology trying to get their minds around E=mc2? If God had revealed himself to the ancient Israelites in the science of the twenty-first century, he would have ensured their inability to understand the text.
John may reply that at least we would understand it. Perhaps, but this immediately leads us into the second problem. If the history of scientific progress to this point is any guide at all, scientific theories will continue to be revised year by year—sometimes to the point where they are replaced altogether. For example, it is only in the last ten years that scientists have stumbled upon dark energy—a mysterious substance that likely composes the bulk of what constitutes the universe. Even more bizarrely, some scientists are now arguing that all matter is really a holographic projection. This claim is linked somehow to the strange fact that black holes appear to record information about the things they consume on their surface like a magnetic strip. I don’t pretend to understand this, but I do glean this lesson: while our view of the universe has things less wrong than the ancient Israelites, that hardly means we have things right. And this leads us back to the same problem. If God revealed himself in our science, then in a century people will reject the text for the same reason John rejects it today!
Forget the naïve assumption that God should have revealed himself in the science of our day. Let’s refashion the atheist’s objection to say that he should simply have revealed the way things are, period. For example, as we speak, scientists are searching for the grand unifying theory (or GUT) that can reconcile the four fundamental forces (the weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism) in a single, simple explanation. Let’s say that this is the GUT equation: X=qr. So now we ask why God didn’t place X=qr at the beginning of Genesis 1.
Unfortunately, that suggestion encounters multiple problems. To begin with, what if we do not discover X=qr for centuries or millennia to come? In that case we are suggesting that God should have privileged people in the distant future while leaving the rest of us in incomprehension. To compound the problem, what if human beings never discover X=qr? What if the calculus behind it is simply too difficult for the human brain to grasp? In that case our demands on the revelatory text would have fated it to permanent irrelevance.
Finally, even if some day far in the future a few scientists come to understand the truth of X=qr, does it follow that they would then accept the Bible as revelation? Hardly. No doubt many would dismiss the fact that X=qr appears in the biblical text as a fluke. Indeed, since the ancient Israelites didn’t know what X=qr even meant, the atheist would probably claim that reading the GUT equation into the biblical text is as naïve as we consider reading contemporary cosmology into the biblical text.
Rather than fashion his revelation to meet the demands of the twenty-first-century skeptic, God entered into history by accommodating to the limited horizons of the ancient Near East while bringing a message of salvation history that would remain relevant for all people and all times.
John’s Rebuttal
Surely there are some things that modern science knows that the ancients did not know but which will be known by all future science. Those are the kinds of things I suggested God didn’t reveal but should have. So the two problems Randal sees with my suggestions are utterly irrelevant to my point. Sorry. For instance, Einsteinian science did not discredit or undermine Newtonian science. It just added time as a fourth dimension. Newtonian science still works given that stipulation.
Not only would my suggestions make sense to the ancient Israelites, but they could confirm them with their own experiments. Then in turn it would confirm there is a God to modern scientists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and any future scientists. Revealing this scientific knowledge to humans would keep modern, scientifically literate people from discounting God’s supposed revelation in the Bible. And it would show his care and concern for his creatures too.
There is simply no way God should not have known and revealed these things, especially since not doing so discredits him in today’s world. As I said, what we find in the Bible is indistinguishable from God not revealing anything at all.
Randal’s Rebuttal
John appears to have two objections to the ancient worldview that undergirds the Bible: (1) “there is nothing in the Bible that reveals an all-knowing God,” and (2) “an all-loving one didn’t reveal some things that would be helpful and compassionate toward the people he claims to love.” Let’s consider these points in turn.
I already dealt with the first point in my opening statement where I argued that in fact accommodation to the science of the day is precisely what we would expect if God were revealing himself to a particular people at a particular time in history. In addition, John’s assumption that a revelation should include some special, scientific information fails for the reasons already noted.
What about the second point? Why didn’t the Bible include some scientific information that might have made life easier? The question reveals a misunderstanding of the Bible’s purpose. God’s revelation in the Bible was to deal not merely with our physical condition but with our spiritual one, and it is perfectly suited to that task.
John’s Closing Statement
Randal’s rebuttal fails to understand the kinds of things God could have revealed but didn’t. God could have predicted what we would discover in each new generation, like the light bulb, the automobile, flight, space travel, and the internet. Randal also argues for an unhealthy dichotomy between spiritual salvation and a healthy existence.
Randal’s Closing Statement
John claims God should have revealed some kind of scientific fact—perhaps the sphericity of the earth—in the Bible even though it would have made no sense to an ancient Israelite. In other words, he wishes that the Bible had been written with him, rather than the Israelites, in mind. But as I pointed out, scientific factoids of this type would likely have been explained away regardless, thereby rendering their inclusion a moot point.