An Athiests Guide to the Bible: The Story of Creation

In the beginning, when God created the universe ...

Well, that's a interesting way to start. Regardless of which version of the bible you read, they all start with this idea. That God created the universe. But what is God? Not who. What. Is the Christian god a physical being, an incorporeal consciousness or an idea dreamt up by man? Obviously, if it's the third option, then the whole concept of the bible is severely put in doubt. The idea that an idea could create anything is, quite frankly ludicrous.

So if we are to believe that the bible is not simply a book written by man to explain that which they do not understand, then God must be either a physical being or an incorporeal consciousness. If God were a physical being, you would think that someone would have spotted him. We have some very smart scientists, high ranking religious clergy, philosophers, and all manner of extraordinarily intelligent people in the world. None of them have shown any physical evidence for the undoubted existence of God as a corporeal being.

That leaves us with God being an incorporeal consciousness. So how do you prove the existence of something that has no physical presence? Well, the short answer is, you can't. And that's the mistake that so many people make about atheism. Atheism in it's purest form is the rejection of the belief in any god because we see no evidence for it, mainly because much of the argument for any god is exactly the same argument for any other god, and they can't all be correct.

Anyway, for the purposes of this post (and future Guide posts) let's assume that the Christian God of the bible I hold in my hand for the purposes of writing this series is an incorporeal consciousness. Now that we've defined what God is, we must define what the universe is. So let's see what my bible says about that ...

In the beginning, when God created the universe, the earth was formless and desolate. The raging ocean that covered everything was engulphed in total darkness, and the power of God was moving over the water. Then God commanded, "Let there be light" - and light appeared. God was please with what he saw. Then he separated the light from the darkness, and he named the light "Day and the darkness "Night." Evening passed and the morning came - that was the first day.

As someone who trusts the scientific explanation for the beginning of the known universe, this biblical explanation is troublesome. The first way in which is troubling is that is doesn't say how the universe was created. Of course, the bible was written at a time when physics of any description wasn't a thing. Even science struggles with the creation of the universe, so this isn't a criticism of the writers of the bible so much as a criticism of interpreters of the bible who think that a description of the beginning of the solar system is the equivalent of the a description of the beginning of the unknown universe.

The next troubling aspect is that the earth was created before light. Science tells us that the sun formed before the earth. The Sun has been around for around 5 billion years. The earth, young thing that it is, is only about 4.5 billion years. To give some context to just how young our solour system (and our earth is), the known universe itself is just under 14 billion years old. So it's not a great start for the bible.

The last bit that troubles me is the separation of light and dark to create day and night. We know that the sun provides the light for the earth and that the spin of the earth gives us day and night. We also know that there is not a distinct separation between light and dark because as the sun sets over the horizon the amount of visible light from the sun lessens, the reverse happening at sunrise. At its extremes we see how difference night and day are but it is extraordinarily hard for ordinary human beings to pick the point where day actually turns into night because, despite there being a time for sunset, the minute (or even the second) after that time is not exactly night, there still being light from the sun visible even thought the sun itself is not.

The bible continues ...

Then God commanded, "Let there be a dome to divide the water and to keep it in two separate places" - and it was done. So God made a dome, and it separated the water under it from the water above it. He named the dome "Sky." Evening passed and morning came - that was the end of the second day.

You can, naturally, imagine the writers of the bible looking at the sky and thinking that, because the sky was blue and the water was blue, there must be water above the sky to give it the colour. Today, many Christians will tell you that the dome is actually just the edge of the atmosphere in an effort to marry their faith and science. It fails to answer what the water above actually is and where it is located.

Then God commanded, "Let the water below the sky come together in one place, so that the land will appear" - and it was done. He named the land "Earth," and the water which had come together he named "Sea." And God was pleased with what he saw.

As far as the bible goes, this part I don't really have a problem with. We have earth and water. Ok, the water isn't just called sea, but oceans and lakes and rivers and all manner of different things. This is largely by the by, and if you're picking up on this point as something to argue against the validity of the bible, I think you're probably being a bit picky and a lot petty.

Then he commanded, "Let the earth produce all kinds of plants, those that bear grain and those that bear fruit" - and it was done. So the earth produced all kind of plants, and God was pleased with what he saw. Evening passed and morning came - that was the third day.

At this point, I have to leave what the bible actually says for a moment and remark upon the utter lack of creative thought that went into the writing of the bible. It feels like it was written by a small schoolchild who has been tasked with writing a narrative for the first time. It is very dry, almost procedural. The texts that engage people the best are not manuals but those where language engages the reader on a psychological and emotional level. The bible does neither.

Then God commanded, "Let lights appear in the sky to separate day from night and to show the time when days, years, and religious festivals begin; they will shine in the sky to give light to the earth" - and it was done. So God made the two larger lights, the sun to rule over the day and the moon to rule over the night; he also made the stars. He placed the lights in the sky to shine on the earth, to rule over the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God was pleased with what he saw. Evening passed and morning came - that was the fourth day.

And this is where we go HANG ON A MINUTE! There is so much wrong with this passage. Not just in relation to the actual science of reality but simply as a consistent narrative. Let's start with the science. The moon is not a light in that it doesn't produce it's own light. It reflects the light of the sun, that's why we get eclipses. Also, the sun and moon and stars are not equidistant from Earth.

The moon is 384,400km from Earth.
The sun is 150,440,000km from Earth.
The nearest star is 4.37 light years from Earth.

The idea that all those things are attached to a dome over the earth is, given current scientific knowledge, absurd. Most Christians understand this. Most Christians have given away with a literal interpretation of the bible. They still believe that God created everything but they make the distinction between the difference in the understanding of man at the time of writing the bible and now, so far as to say that the people who wrote the bible didn't understand how God did it, so they made it up. My counterpoint is always that if they made up that bit, could they not just have made up the whole thing?

Apart from the lack of scientific reality, there is a huge disruption to the chronological progression of the narrative. On day one God created light but didn't create the sun until day four? This doesn't make any sense. Also, God separated the light and dark on day one but he's doing it again on day four? Did he forget? If he didn't forget, what was creating the light on day one and how was that different from the light the sun? This is but one of many contradictions or anomalies in the bible and we'll get to many of them in this series but let's move on ...

Then God commanded, "Let the water be filled with many kinds of living beings, and let the air be filled with birds." So God created the great sea monsters , all kinds of creatures that live in the water, and all kinds of birds. And God was pleased with what he saw. He blessed them all and told the creatures that live in the water to reproduce and to fill the sea, and he told the birds to increase in number. Evening passed and morning came - that was the fifth day.

Scientifically speaking, fish and birds were not even close to being the first living creatures. Maybe the writers of the bible just didn't think the previous creatures were important. The first creatures on earth were single celled organisms. OK, we are just repeating the argument that the writers of the bible probably didn't have any idea about science but this leads to a questioning of the concept that the bible is the direct word of God. If it's the direct word of God and the writers are simple transcribing it, then surely God would understand the science and be able to explain it in a way that the writers understood, without the huge gaps and errors, and why did God wait thousands of years between creating humans and starting his book? But I digress. Lets push on, we still have two days to go!

Then God commanded , "Let the earth produce all kinds of animal life; domestic and wild, large and small" - and it was done. So God made them all, and he was pleased with what he saw. Then God said, "And now we will make human beings; they will be like us and resemble us. They will have power over the fish , the birds and all animals, domestic and wild, large and small." So God created human beings, making them to be like himself. He created them male and female, blessed them, and said, "Have many children, so that your descendants will live all over the earth and bring it under their control. I am putting you in charge of the fish, the birds and all the wild animals. I have provided all kinds of grain and all kinds of fruit for you to eat; But for all the wild animals and for all the birds I have provided grass and leafy plants for food" - and it was done. God looked at everything he had made, and he was very pleased. Evening passed and morning came - that was the sixth day.

As a writer who got a distinction in grammar, I get very cranky when texts are not consistent in their tense or their pronouns. Here God refers to himself as we/us. There are a few explanations:

(a) There are many gods or God is talking to the angels.
(b) There's only one God but he's referring to the holy trinity
(c) There's only one God but he's using the royal "we"
(d) The writers stuffed up

If we are taking the atheistic position, this is clearly a stuff up by the writers. If we're taking the Christian position, it could be any of the other possibilities. This is not ever really reconciled. What is also not reconciled is that if God makes humans to be as himself, why are we not incorporeal consciousnesses? The fact that we have physical form could mean that this is the image the God has of himself or that God has a physical form. Going back to the opening of this post, if God had a physical form we, as a species, would have discovered a trace of it by now, one would think.

And so the whole universe was completed. By the seventh day God finished what he had been doing and stopped working. He blessed the seventh day and set it apart as a special day, because by that day he had completed his creation and stopped working. And that is how the universe was created.

Well, the solar system is not the universe, so that's a bit of a reach on behalf of the writers to claim that. It's not even all of the solar system, if we're being truthful. And there's not much of an explanation of the how, either. This is a huge problem I have with most religions, not just Christianity. God did it is not an explanation worthy of any enquiring mind, even if it was fundamentally true. If I built an amazing Lego world and someone asked you how it was made, and your answer was, "Nona did it" that would be true but not an explanation of how it was made.

But let's look at the story of Creation as a whole. It took 7 days. According to the bible, they were Earth Days as evening came at the end of each day, so seven lots of  24 and a bit hours going by current time telling techniques. But was it? Scientific studies of the bible have speculated that perhaps each day was an era, not a strict day as we know it. This is marginally closer to reality in that it allows time for evolution to take place but doesn't do anything to explain this process meaning that they thought this was unimportant, it didn't happen or the writers had no concept of it.

If you subscribe to a literal interpretation of the bible, you must deny the science that contradicts it and all the evidence which supports the science. I have talked to people both in real life and online who fall into this category. I have no problem with their belief in God but I do take issue with their rejection of evidence-based scepticism.

In the next Guide, in a few days time, we will look at the story of the Garden of Eden: its location and what it looked like. We will deal with the disobedience of man in the subsequent post.