BIBLE GOD FORBIDS SCIENCE

While the Bible insists on faith as the foundation of belief, this faith requires accepting a predetermined interpretation of its texts. Rather than encouraging questioning or exploration, it demands that its teachings be accepted as absolute truth, leaving little room for alternative understandings or scientific inquiry.  Rules about interpretation are against science which says that evidence must decide what the interpretation is and that is subject to change upon new data being discovered.

It is necessary to believe that the Bible is the word of God in order to be a Christian. It is clear that all of its writings are breathed out by God—that is, to be treated as if they are words coming from a divine mouth.

The Bible is harmful just because it opposes science. Science means checking things out and researching to make sure that we do know what we believe we know. Science is always open to changing its mind and seeks and welcomes challenge. But the Bible demands that the Bible be believed, and we are expected to continue believing even when science and archaeology conflict with the Bible. This is unjust and offensive to those good, decent scientists who are trying to enlighten the world. It means they have to spend funds on trying to counteract religion's lying propaganda when they could be using that money for research. Religion's activities and devotions are ultimately to blame for sidelining science. And because of that, we are still left with the plague of cancer and HIV.

The Bible has kept Europe and the world back from progress. It was only as unbelief and scepticism towards the Bible increased that we were able to make the discoveries that have benefited us so much today. To say God comes first is to say his word comes before all other words. Faith comes first, so faith is the enemy of science and freethought and reason. It only uses these things to suit itself, but it will not let them speak for themselves, so it is only pretending to be a friend. If faith comes first, then it will ignore or twist or deliberately forget anything that tells it that it is wrong. Many promoters of Bible-based religion are enemies of the human race, no matter how much good they do.

BIBLE VERSUS SCIENCE

The old prejudice that the Bible is not in harmony with science is right. But it takes a bit of work to defend it because it involves exposing Christian half-truths and errors.

What Christians do is that they assume the Bible is all true. Then they interpret science and even the Bible itself, where there is a contradiction, in such a way that no disagreement seems to exist. No matter how wrong or incoherent a book is, you will end up concluding that it is entirely true if you assume that it is entirely true. This happens with Muslims in relation to the Quran, Mormons with the revelations of Joseph Smith, and Catholics in relation to the pope and Church teaching. To assume something like that and then to conclude that because it all adds up and agrees it is the word of God is really making a God out of your assumption, and all the harm you do in the name of God is unforgivable—and poor God gets the blame.

In Revelation 6:13 we read that when Jesus, the Lamb, opens the sixth seal, the earth is cast into chaos and the stars of Heaven fall down on it. Though when some of the other seals were opened the author saw a symbolic vision, there is nothing symbolic in this bit. Christians cannot say that the falling stars stand for something and are not real stars. The answer that God will reduce the size of the stars so that they can fall on earth shows that religion can explain away any error if it believes in miracles. For example, the Hindu Bible, the Vedas, say that the light of the moon is its own light and that the earth is a flat triangle. Hindus could say that the earth has been turned into a sphere and the moon illuminated by the sun since that time by a miraculous transforming divine power. God might have done this for one of those inscrutable divine purposes that Christians go on about.

Revelation 9:1 has a star that fell to earth, which was given the key to the bottomless pit and is referred to as he. So this star is a symbol. But since Revelation does not tell us that the stars in the other part were symbols, they are not.

The majority held the earth to be flat in the past, so fundamentalists see a miracle in Isaiah 40:22, where God is said to sit on the circle of the earth. The original word for circle here also means sphere. But Isaiah may have subscribed to the common view that the earth was a flat circle. The circle idea was popular because the sky looked like a dome. Even the fundamentalist booklet, Verbal Inspiration of the Bible, says that the literal translation is roundness (page 23).

The magazine Free Inquiry (Fall 1998, Vol 18, No 4, page 50) informs us that since the verse argues that God sits above the circle of the earth and makes the heavens like a curtain, this is most likely to mean the roundness that appears when you look at the horizon. The word used for circle has the same root as the word for horizon in Hebrew and related languages. Eratosthenes of Alexandria, who came a few centuries after Isaiah, knew that the world was a sphere and was able to work out its circumference with surprising accuracy. It is credulity to say that Isaiah must be the word of God if it knew about the roundness when this Greek did. And especially when Isaiah would have been clearer had he intended to give a supernatural proof. Lots of ancient books have made some accurate guesses.

The Bible prophet Isaiah says that the earth has four corners (Isaiah 11:12)—flat in other words. Fundamentalists surmise that this is not meant literally and is the same as us saying that the sun rises in the morning, though we know that it does not rise but only looks like it does. But it is different for us to say that the sun rises, for everybody knows that it is just a figure of speech. The figure of speech is just a carryover from the days we thought the sun did rise. The figure of speech was not the case with Isaiah and the four corners, for he lived in an age that would have taken it literally. His book was written for people who would have done that; therefore, he did mean it literally. The fundamentalists just take the circle reference literally because it is right, instead of taking the corners one literally. That is faulty scholarship. It is reading what we know now back into the Bible. When you start doing that you can make the Bible mean anything you want. It is their subjective interpretations they honour as the word of God, not the Bible.

The verse says that a signal will be erected for the nations to gather the people of Israel back to their land, implying that the earth is flat—for you can’t see the signal from most parts of the world, for the world is a globe. Isaiah would have written simply that Israel will be collected from the earth and not the four corners of the earth if he had not meant to make a statement that the world was flat. Best to avoid symbols that may be taken up wrong.

When the Devil took Jesus up a huge mountain to show him all the kingdoms of the world, the world must be flat. He did not see them in a vision—for why would we be told that Jesus was taken up a high mountain to see them when he could see a vision anywhere?

Before, Christians would admit an error in the Bible, they would say that the world was flat until God turned it into a sphere after the Bible was finished.

The Bible is necessarily in conflict with science because it claims to be superior to science—while science says evidence and investigation and science come first. It was written before science made its big discoveries and still claims to come first; therefore, to be a Christian and a scientist is impossible. The scientist who says he is a Christian is probably watering down his Christianity. He needs to select the label Semi-Christian or Pseudo-Christian.

CONCLUSION

The Bible’s insistence on unquestioning faith directly conflicts with the principles of science, which values evidence and openness to change. By opposing scientific inquiry and promoting literal interpretations of ancient texts, the Bible has historically hindered progress and understanding. True harmony between faith and science remains difficult because the Bible claims authority over facts that science continuously revises. As a result, being fully committed to both Christianity and science is often seen as incompatible.