Matters that have been debated for centuries are usually compelling, because if we’ve been talking about them for such a long time, they must be interesting and complex enquiries to begin with. One such topic worthy of deep contemplation is the nature of the Bible, and whether it appears to bear resemblance to a book given to us by a Divine, Omniscient, Omnipotent mind. Some Christians think every word of the Bible is infallibly dictated by God, but I’m not in that camp. Others, including myself (and the majority of Christians, I think) believe that the Bible is divinely choreographed, but that it is a created artefact subjected to the limitations of the people commissioned to write it.
Either way, a Facebook friend – let’s call him Mike (because that’s his name), devised a thoughtful post expressing his doubts that the Bible was influenced by a Divine, Omniscient, Omnipotent mind. He objects on grounds that the Bible sounds to him a lot more like the sort of things that primitive tribes of humans from the past would say than the sort of things that a Supreme Being would say, and that it’s what the primitive human imagines God would be like if He had ultimate power. Mike thinks a book influenced by God would contain the most illuminating and profound and insightful things that he had ever read, and is under the impression that a book inspired by God’s revelation would contain special insights that we couldn’t have thought up ourselves, and even factual impartations that would give us knowledge of things we wouldn’t otherwise discover until tens of thousand of years henceforward.
It's certainly an interesting line of enquiry – and one I thought about myself while I was still exploring the Christian propositions in my pre-Christian days. But I think, with further contemplation, Mike might reach stronger conclusions about God’s word. In the first place, on Mike’s insistence that the Bible sounds to him a lot more like the sort of things that primitive tribes of humans from the past would say – well, that’s certain to be true of whenever God sought to give revelation to humans of any particular time or culture; if it is to be transcribed in a manner conducted by humans in possession of the revelation, then it is bound to reflect the cultural and epistemological limitations of the time. And if the purpose of the Bible is to equip us we everything we need to know God and have a relationship with Him, it doesn’t need to contain advanced scientific facts that we can go on to discover by ourselves when we have the sufficient tools and resources to do so.
In the second place, on Mike’s claim that a book influenced by God would contain the most illuminating and profound and insightful thing that he had ever read – well, what makes him so sure that the Bible isn’t the most illuminating and profound and insightful book to which he has access? What are his criteria for a book’s illuminations, insights and profundities, and how does he know that the Bible falls short of his metric? Moreover, how does he know his metric is of a high enough standard to begin with, in order to apprehend what a Divinely inspired book would look like?
In the third place, how is Mike so sure the Bible, taken as a whole, doesn’t contain special insights that we couldn’t have thought up ourselves? If the Bible never existed, what makes him so sure we would have thought up the central truths of the Bible; that God loves us enough to die for us, and that He wants to offer us intimate knowledge of His character? How could we know God loves us enough to live as a man and suffer and die for us if God didn’t make Himself known through the Incarnation and folk at the time and shortly after recorded those teachings and events for generations to come? It’s not self-evident that we would even understand the Divine standard of truth, goodness, perfection and love without being told about it. Whatever the height of standards we can construct through our evolution, there is always a higher standard than the very best we can conceive, and that's one of the most astounding things we ever get to contemplate.
And then there's the matter I wrote about in this blog post, about how the Bible is the most remarkable book in the world in terms of its multi-layered connectivity and profound complexity, which is worth deep and careful consideration in itself.
It’s all very well saying we could have thought up all this ingenious stuff by ourselves, but we are saying this as people who’ve already had access to the Bible, and been enriched by its theological, moral, cultural and psychological implantations on our humanity. In other words, we are only making the claims by virtue of having these things already – it is not at all clear that we could have written it ourselves because we only know of a reality in which the people who did write it were claiming to so with God’s revelation. Perhaps we could have, but I seriously doubt it, because these things seem to me to be Divine, and humans certainly seem not to be, at least not without God’s help. We can’t prove that we couldn’t have thought it up ourselves, but we can’t prove we could have either. And given that if we scan the evidential landscape the only experience we have of these things being expressed is through people who said they got it from God, it's plausible to me that we needed God to come up with proclaimed revelations about God. It's good to remember, there is no evidence of anyone thinking up these truths without Divine inspiration, because God had already got in first. We have no idea whether we could have thought these things up without God’s revelation, because we’ve never experienced a reality in which there is no proclaimed understanding of God’s revelation.
A similar point can be observed about nature herself, and can be contemplated like this. A bunch of people claim that nature (however many universes that comprises) exists because God created it, and that without God, nothing in creation would or could exist. And a bunch of people claim that nature can exist without the need for God. The question is, is it even possible for nature to exist without God? If nature can’t exist without God creating it, then the theists are right, and the atheists are wrong. The atheists are only claiming that a nature without God can exist by virtue of living in a nature that God created. If nature can’t exist without God creating it, then we’d never get to live in the atheists’ universe because it would never exist in the first place. In other words, if the universe can only exist by virtue of God creating it, the atheists (without knowing it) are living in a universe that’s only possible because of the God they think doesn’t exist. In saying this universe can exist without the need for God, they are making an impossible claim that they don’t realise is impossible. The theists who say this universe exists because God created it are making a claim they couldn’t possibly make in the atheists’ universe if the atheists are wrong, because such a universe wouldn’t exist.
We don’t know if it’s even possible that nature could exist without God, but we know that if nature can’t exist without God, then the theists must be right. If nature can’t exist without God, then the theists can presume they are right on this fundamental question. The atheists, on the other hand, don’t even know if it possible to live in this world without God, and therefore are wholly unsure of whether their proposition of nature without God is even possible. At least the theists know for sure that their proposition is possible; atheists don’t even know if theirs is possible because we don’t know if such a reality could exist without God. This doesn’t, of course, give us much of clue at this stage about whether the theists or atheists are right – but it does at least indicate that the atheists’ position is guaranteed to be a supposition at least as highly speculative as the theists.
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