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First, let me say that I’m an atheist. Although raised in the Christian religion, specifically Protestant, by parents who did not go to church themselves, I have never heard the voice of God, don’t need an omniscient, omnipotent, eternal sky father or invisible friend, and live in a universe that does not require an external creator. However, I have no quarrel with people who do believe in God, draw hope and meaning from their faith, and live a complete life. I just don’t have the gene that lets me receive those messages.
With all that said, I am not supportive of people who take the literal meaning of the Bible or any sacred text to be authoritative, inerrant, and final. The various texts of the Hebrew and Christian testaments were written by human authors based on the collective knowledge, the commonly accepted science, of their time. They may have been inspired by their faith—and perhaps by the whispers of an unseen presence that you might call God—but they still lived in a static universe, on a planet that they took to be at its center, with the Sun and Moon and five other planets circling around it, and with all those other “bright lights” in the night sky painted on crystal spheres that revolved beyond the furthest reaches of those five planets. They knew each animal as a separate creation, formed specifically to fulfill its niche in the world: the horse to run on the plains and eat grass; the bear to live in the forest on the mountain and eat fish, berries, and honey; the fish to swim in the sea and eat plankton, seaweed, and perhaps other, smaller fish; and every other animal created to live eternally in its predetermined place.
The authors of the Bible’s various books knew nothing of a cosmology whereby the Earth is a small planet revolving around a mediocre star in one corner of a great spiral galaxy of a hundred billion other stars, which shares the sky with between two hundred billion and two trillion other galaxies.1 They knew nothing of the DNA-RNA-protein domain that defines and unites all life on this Earth, so that the fish, the bear, and the horse all share a common ancestry going back to the tiny bacteria that the ancients never saw or knew existed. The Bible’s authors were unaware of the nature of space and time, light and radiation, gravity, and all the other elements of physics that we moderns have just learned about and perhaps have not yet gotten quite right.
I’ve heard clever people call the Bible “the Goat Herder’s Guide to the Galaxy.” That’s cruel and unfair, but it’s not far wrong.
But still, anyone who knows the science of the past four hundred years or more—since Newton, Galileo, Descartes, and all the rest following the Enlightenment—how our basis of knowledge has evolved and expanded, and what it has proven beyond a reasonable doubt, can no longer take as literal fact some of the stories and interpretations found in the Bible, or in any other ancient text.
Did God create the human beings as a separate order of life, shaped from clay in His image, and then given authority to name all the animals that came after? No, it’s pretty clear from our physical shape, down to the arrangement of our organs, the bones in our limbs, and from our genetic inheritance, that we humans are evolved from the great apes, who in turn evolved from the mammals, who were late-comers from the lizards, from the fish, and so from the first vertebrates who came out of the multi-celled explosion of the Cambrian period. But does that mean that the Biblical story is wrong in essence?
Well, one day—maybe soon, maybe later—we will meet intelligent beings from other planets around distant stars. They might have a cellular structure and physical bodies, but the chances of them having two legs, two arms, five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot, and a face with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth … well, that’s unlikely. We evolved to fit perfectly with the atmosphere, gravity, and all the other variables on this single planet—if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t be alive today, and some other creature would be writing this. The chances of arriving at this exact form and function on a planet that’s even slightly off in one or two of these variables—including recent weather and glaciation periods—are nil to nothing.
If you believe that the God you pray to created this universe of a trillion or more galaxies, and not just this little rock we call the Earth, and that He was smart enough to make use of all that real estate by populating it with other intelligent beings, and not just in the frail human form but perfectly adapted to conditions on their own planet, then you have to stop thinking that “in His image” literally means physical form and function.2 You then must grant that perhaps qualities of the awakened mind—like consciousness, perception, understanding, imagination, and empathy—are what is meant by the image of God. You would begin to suspect that what your God values is not the number of limbs, fingers, or noses, but the same intellect that He represents in your Bible story and that we all look for when we say “intelligent life.”
In the same way, every other physical detail and most of the miracles in the Bible stories fall apart. Did God make all of universe in just six days, or is that a metaphorical interpretation? Did Joshua stop the sun in the sky, or was that an eclipse, or maybe just a seemingly timeless moment in a long afternoon’s battle? Did Jesus raise the dead, or did the observers perhaps not understand the nature of catalepsy or coma? Did Jesus really turn water into wine, or was the wine already in the jars, and perhaps everyone was just a bit too tipsy to notice? I could go on—but remember, these are the imaginings of a stone-cold unbeliever.
You will have to make your own interpretations and decisions.
1. To be fair, it’s only in the last hundred years that astronomers have discovered that some of those faint, fuzzy patches in the night sky are other galaxies, each as large or larger than the Milky Way, and at vast distances. Human knowledge and discovery are still in their infancy.
2. See The God Molecule from May 2017. If I were to believe in a god, it would have to be a subtle, intelligent, far-thinking being. The DNA-RNA-protein domain that governs all life on Earth and supports evolution of species to meet changing conditions fits that requirement much better than a static creation from handfuls of clay.