Excluding miraculous events that occur in the
Bible, which are never claimed to be amenable to scientific examination, the
following holds:
P1: If Christianity is true, then every verse of the Bible is true when interpreted correctly.
P2: Science is the only reliable tool we have for
understanding facts about the physical world.
P3: Some Christians interpret the Bible in a way
that their interpretation contradicts known scientific facts.
C: Biblical interpretations that contradict known
scientific facts are incorrect interpretations.
Young earth creationists (YECs) of course distort this and get into a muddle, but how does their muddle materialise? They accept Premise 1 (although be careful, some YECs don’t even acknowledge that scripture needs interpreting). They accept Premise 2, because they depend on the scientific understanding of the world like everyone else. It’s Premise 3 where they stumble, because they assume that if scientific facts contradict their interpretation of scripture, then it must be the scientific facts that are wrong, not their interpretation of scripture.
There has probably never been a more conceited, deluded infestation in the whole of modern Christianity than the group that maintains that the prodigious hard work and achievements of the tens of thousands of scientists all over the world, in hundreds of diverse but mutually interconnected fields, across several centuries, are the ones that are wrong and can’t be trusted, and not themselves, with their empirical denialism and univariate focus on poorly executed Biblical exegesis.
