Most people who go to church grow up mainly hearing the Bible on Sundays, learning Bible stories in Sunday school, and hearing preaching from the pulpit. But then many of them go to schools where the education is purely secular and at least sometimes may be overtly hostile to the Bible. This leads to the impression that “religion” is subjective, emotional, and personal, while the “real world” belongs to the secularists.
One of the main battles of biblical creation is showing that this dichotomy is false—the Bible accurately speaks about the real world. Its events do not happen in Neverland but can be placed in time and space so accurately that archaeologists have been able to use it like a map of the ancient world. In fact, the Bible is inerrant—meaning that when something conflicts with the Bible, we can confidently say that it is never the Bible that is wrong.
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The Bible is, in fact, the most-studied and fact-checked book of history. And there is not one instance where the Bible has been proven wrong about a place, event, or people group it described. Of course, because the Bible is inerrant, we can be confident that it never will be shown to be wrong about anything.
While the Bible is a historically accurate book, it is more than a history book, and Christianity’s core claims about Christ’s identity as the Son of God and his resurrection from the dead are matters of faith. However, there is a solid basis for that faith; it is not subject to a personal emotional experience.
— Answers in Genesis, Christianity is Objectively True, January 27, 2023
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Ant yet almost all of the bible can be shown to be false. The Adam and Eve story makes no sense in its own right, were it even possible for all of mankind to have emerged from just one pair of individuals, which it isn’t. Moses almost certainly didn’t exist, there was no exodus, no great flood, and no biblical Jesus, even if a person on whom the myth is based actually existed. I’m pretty certain that not even the writers of these events really thought that they were recording history, and certainly not science, they were just telling stories.
Geoff–I agree that the scribes who set down what we see in the Bible were “just telling stories.” And the thing about stories is that they change as they are told and re-told, especially if the story is passed on orally before it is written. let alone translated. So, even if there was a germ of truth in the original story, it was probably distorted into the complete improbabilities that have come down to us.
My father-in-law graduated from seminary in the 60s with the original intention to become a priest. In seminary, he decided he didn’t want to become a priest but wanted his degree and finished without going through ordination. It is interesting to talk with him about what he learned about the Bible in seminary. He too has the notion that the Bible is historically accurate and factual – that a whale swallowed Jonah and Jonah lived inside it for 3 days, that the virgin birth is real, that the Exodus was real, that the Flood was real. He didn’t get the memo that the Catholic Church supports evolution and an old universe. Like AIG,he says that science and history support the claims of the Bible but some things have to be taken by faith. He was bothered when he claimed that archaeology supports all the claims of the Bible and that all the places existed, and I mentioned that London is mentioned in Harry Potter but it isn’t real so his argument is weak.
AIG is quite a nest of liars for christ.
Objectively true according to whom? I’m going to go out on a limb and say grifting conmen who want to make an easy, quick buck.