The author gets in trouble with me in the very first sentence by admitting his affection for Christian apologetics.  Apologetics are, by their nature, non-objective and non-scientific.  This book itself is an apologetic.

The next sentence is so preposterous I must quote it in its entirety:

There is an abundance of evidence for the reliability of Scripture, for the authority of the Bible as the inspired Word of God, and that the Bible accurately portrays the historical events it covers, including the earthly life of Jesus Christ.

There is so much wrong with the above sentence I hardly know where to begin.  But I’ll try.

1.  The Reliability of Scripture.

The reliability of scripture?  Really?  How much time do you have for me to list the factual inaccuracies that run all the way through the Bible?  One tiny example:  There was NO census in Judea under Augustus Caesar, as the Gospels claim.  It didn’t happen. 

Also, rabbits do not chew their cud.  The Bible says they do (Leviticus 11:6).

And bats are not birds (Deuteronomy 14:11-17.

And there’s the inconvenient truth that unicorns have never existed, though God says they do in Job 39:9-12.

I could go on and on.

The Bible isn’t even internally consistent.  Over and over again it gives two totally incompatible versions of the same events.  For example, did Judas commit suicide by hanging or by throwing himself or by throwing himself headfirst down onto the ground?  He couldn’t have done both.  But the Bible tells both stories.

The inconsistency of the Bible begins in the very first chapter of its very first book.  Genesis begins with two contradictory creation stories.  The order of creation is very different from the first story to the second.  Both cannot be true.  Therefore, at least one of them is wrong.  So much for the reliability of scripture.

2.  The authority of the Bible as the inspired word of God.

How would you prove this? 

The only way you could prove that the Bible couldn’t have been written by mere human beings is if it included information in it that the human beings of the time couldn’t have known.  Is there anything in the Bible about the germ theory of disease?  Thermodynamics?  Geology?  Nope.  There isn’t a word written in the Bible that couldn’t have been written by a Bronze Age human being.  Heck, as pointed out above, the Bible can’t even get simple animal science correct. I’m pretty sure the Creator of the Universe would know what a bird is and whether or not a rabbit chewed its cud.

3.  The Bible accurately portrays the historical events it covers.

Really?  Historians disagree, Michael.  There is no historical corroboration, for example, of the enslavement of the Hebrews in Egypt, and no evidence that a large group of Hebrews wandered in the Sinai desert for forty years.  None.  Zip.  Nada. 

There evidence for the actual life of a person named Jesus is whisper-thin, and a growing number of historians consider the references in Josephus to have been inserted by apologists.

The Bible is not a history or a science book.

Coming up next:  Ray reacts to the Introduction of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist.

Michael says:

I’ve known Michael Parkman since fifth grade.  That’s . . . . . forty-two years.  Wow!

We both grew up in the college town of Bryan/College Station, Texas, in the shadow of Texas A&M University.  We went through eight years of school together. I learned to play Hearts, a game I still frequently play and enjoy, with him.  He turned me on to Styx and Elton John.  I was at both of his weddings.

Our “life journeys”, to use a gag-inducing phrase, have led us both down very different paths, and we now look at the world quite differently. 

Michael is a Christian, and I no do not have any religious beliefs.  Recently my old friend sent me a copy of a book by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be An Atheist.  He wanted me to read the book.  I told him I would read it under two conditions: 

1) That he read the copy of Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris that I was sending him and

2) He agree to discuss both books with me on my blog.

He agreed!

SO.  I will be sharing our discussion with you, Gentle Reader.    It’s a story you’ll want to read backwards.

I’m creating a new category on the blog called “Ray and Michael Debate the Universe, ” which will make it easier to check out the entries.

I hope you enjoy it!