The 2nd foundational falsehood of creationism is the belief that sacred scriptures were written by a god rather than by the actual human authors. When believers argue over any of the many things which contradict their religion, they often challenge us to decide whom we are going to believe? The alleged “word” of God? Or that of Men? As if human inquiry had no chance against the authority they imagine their doctrine to be. But when they say, “men”, they’re talking about science. And when they refer to the “word of God”, they’re talking about myths written about God by men.
If there really is an intelligent and purposeful creator, then it would have to be he who constructed the fossil record revealing evolutionary history, and he has to be the one who conceived the genetic patterns which also trace that same course, and it must have been he who added the other lines of evidence which point to the evolutionary conclusion exclusively and in brilliant detail. Why else would all these things exist? Its as if he were trying to tell us something! Men couldn’t create any of those things. But men can tell stories, whoppers in fact. And it was men who wrote all the scriptures pretending to speak for God.
Every one of the world’s supposedly “holy” doctrines of any religion describe themselves as being written by men, not gods; men who were “moved by” or inspired by their favorite gods, or perhaps taking dictation from angels, but they were written by lowly imaginative yet imperfect mortals none the less; not by angels, and certainly not by gods.
If there really was one true god, it should be a singular composite of every religion’s gods, an uber-galactic super-genius, and the ultimate entity of the entire cosmos. If a being of that magnitude ever wrote a book, then there would only be one such document; one book of God. It would be dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn’t possibly compete with it. And you wouldn’t need faith to believe it, because it would be consistent with all evidence and demonstrably true, revealing profound morality and wisdom far beyond contemporary human capacity. It would invariably inspire a unity of common belief for every reader. If God wrote it, we could expect no less. But what we see instead is the very opposite of that.
Instead of only one religion leading to one ultimate truth, we have many different religions with no common origin, all constantly sharding into ever more deeply-divided denominations, seeking conflicting truths, and each somehow claiming divine guidance despite their ongoing divergence in every direction.
The Jewish Torah, the Christian gospels, the Qur’an of Islam, the Kitab-i-Aqdas of Bahá’u’lláh, the Hindu Vedas, the Avestas of Zarathustra, the Adi-Granth of the Sikhs, the Mahabarata’s Bhagavad-Gita, the Book of Mormon, and the Urantia book are all declared to be the “absolute truth” and the “revealed word” of the “one true” god, and believers of each say the others are deceived. The only logical probability is that they all are –at least to some degree.
None of these have any particular advantage over the others. None of them have any evidentiary support, and none of them are historically verifiable.
“I’m Dr. Paul Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University. …I’m not saying that now I have proven the Bible is authorative, is accurate historically. Of course not. You still have to have faith.”
All of them require faith, and apologetics as well, because they also contain inconsistencies, absurdities, and primitive notions once held true but which have since been disproved. So they can claim no evidence of divine wisdom. Many of them promote heinous atrocities in place of morality, and many claim to be validated by prophecies now fulfilled – where each may also contain prophesies which failed to come to pass as predicted.
Leading theologians admit that all of the scriptures of any religion were written by human hands and were thus subject to the interpretations, impressions and perspectives of their primitive and often prejudiced and politically-motivated authors, and they cite this as the explanation behind many of the contradictions in those books, especially those in the Bible.
“Well I wouldn’t call them contradictions as much as commentaries, the one on the other. Again, let’s point out, we probably do have two different authors here who’s work was blended together then in editorial revisioning somewhat.”
He’s right about there being more than one author for Genesis, and it was definitely not an eyewitness account! Some experts now recognize four different sources just for the Pentateuch, the five books of “Moses”, and they don’t credit Moses as the author of any of them as he evidently never existed as described. The scholarly consensus is that Genesis was compiled, (probably by Ezra) from several unrelated oral traditions less than 2,500 years ago. Other documents filtered in at the same time, all of which attributed to human authors. The Bible is nowhere near as old as believers say it is! The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest archaeological texts known for the still unfinished basis of all of western monotheism, yet they’re each centuries younger than the origins of Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hindu, Helenist, Druidic, Chinese and Egyptian religions.
Christianity began with the Gnostic faith, and then the Docetics, and Ebionites, and their completely different perspectives of Jesus were eventually combined into a kind of compromise called Orthodoxy. Other Christian subsets like the Luciferians were overrun and discredited by further Biblical revisions.
One of these revisions relates to the king of Ugarit around 3500 years ago. As his followers were the principle competition with the emerging religion of Moses, scribes working on the New Testament chose to demonize Ba’al ZeBul, the “Lord on High”, by distorting his name to Beelzebub, the “Lord of the Flies”. So the Bible has been deliberately and deceptively altered for both religious and political reasons.
The rest of what became the New Testament was canonized in the 4th century in a series of committee decisions at a convention at Nicea. Four gospels were accepted and sixteen more were rejected, all by a show of hands, as if the facts of the matter could be evaluated or dismissed by popular vote.
“The way the canon developed was by what was being read on Sunday in the centers of Christianity. What do you read on the 2nd Sunday after Easter in the church in Jerusalem? What’s the church of Rome reading at this time? And they found that again and again, they were zeroing in on the same stories in the gospels. And so the core of the canon kind of developed from the usage of the early church”.
So the council simply accepted as gospel whatever few relevant stories the uneducated masses happened to like at that time. But they still opted to remove more than a dozen books from the Bible even though they were still referenced by other books they chose to include. Among the rejected items were the writings of both apostles and prophets. Why would God’s word refer us to other books which were some human’s word, and/or are no longer available? Who were the real editors here? The Bible often names human authors. But how could it make such an admission if God were the real author and editor of this haphazard jumble of fables, parables, and psalm lyrics?
The Bible was very definitely written by men, and not superior men either; far from it! This is why so much of it can be shown to be historically and scientifically dead wrong about damned-near everything back-to-front. We’re talking about people who believe snakes and donkeys can talk, who believe in incantations, blood sacrifice, ritual spells, enchanted artifacts, pyrotechnic potions, astrology, and the five elements of witchcraft. They thought that if you use a magic wand to sprinkle blood all over someone, it will cure them of leprosy. We’re talking about people who think that rabbits chew cud, and that bats are birds, and whales are fish, and that Pi is a round number. These folks believed that if you display striped patterns to a pregnant cow, it would bare striped calves. How could anyone say that who knows anything about genetics? Obviously the authors of this book didn’t.
If the Bible had been written by a supreme being, then it wouldn’t contain the mistakes that it does. If it was written by a truly superior being, and meant to be read as a literal history, then the Bible wouldn’t contain anything that it does.
As a moral guide, it utterly fails, because much of the original Hebrew scriptures were written by ignorant and bigoted savages who condoned and promoted animal cruelty, incest, slavery, abuse of slaves, spousal abuse, child abuse, child molestation, abortion, pillage, murder, cannibalism, genocide, and prejudice against race, nationality, religion, sex, and sexual orientation. Why? To justify their own inhumanity by claiming to do the will of God.
But creationists still continue to ignore all of that. Some of their sites even admit that wherever reality conflicts with the Bible, then reality must be ignored! And why is that? Because if creationists didn’t have their beloved books, they wouldn’t have a god either. One is the other in their world. Ironically, the faithful reject the "works" of God as "worshipping creation over the creator." But then they prop up the words of men before God, as God, and even insist that disproving their supposedly "holy" books would somehow disprove God too; not just their version of God, but everyone else's version of God as well. Creationist Christians think that if the Bible is wrong, then God lied. They cannot accept that God could exist but the Bible be wrong because they can’t distinguish doctrine from deity. So it is a form of idolatry wherein the believers worship man-made compilations as though those books were God himself -because they think it is HIS word. But God never wrote or dictated any of the scriptures of any religion. Everything men chose to reject from or include in their supposedly “inalterable word” of whatever god was conceived, composed, compiled, translated, interpreted, edited, and often deliberately altered and enhanced by mere fallible men.
