Why Atheists Refuse to Use the Scientific Method When It Comes to the Bible - From the Original Moral Science Club Archives

 UPDATE: It is worthy noting that no atheist has accepted this challenge to look at the Bible using the Scientific Method. While it has generated some snarky comments here and on Twitter (@JamesDJordan), no atheist has stepped out of their comfort zone of cute memes and dismissive replies. I get a procession of unbiblical statements derived from discredited interpretations that supposedly "proof the Bible false". Or I get biblical claims taken out of context. How far would you get in planning a trip to Saturn if you ignored the existence of Mars and Jupiter? Hopefully, you'd find the error before liftoff! And I pray the atheists find their error before they leave earth, too, Enjoy the article.

First published 9-4-14
When I hear atheists dismiss the Bible as "Bronze Age nonsense" or "book of mythology", I know they haven't looked at the the Bible using the Scientific Method, preferring instead to lazily dismiss it. Could that be an anti-intellectual and unscientific response from people who pride themselves on intellect and Science? Absolutely!

The Scientific Method is used to verify or falsify claims or assumptions by testing. In order to test correctly, all frames of reference must be the same. So if I want to disprove the Bible I would have to test my contrarian claim and maintain consistent all my frames of reference so as not to compare apples to oranges. Once I was leading a Bible trivia game and threw in a trick question; when Paul writes that the Roman church's good works are being noted all over the world, was that true or false. The students said it was true, so I asked them about the Native Americans at the time - Did they know about the Roman church? Obviously they didn't - and we do not expect to find any 2,000 year old scribbling on Mayan ruins about the Romans. I explained that the frame of reference was the world Paul lived in; the Mediterranean world. The claim was true once you examine the meaning of the word "world" in the context. Unfortunately, one other teacher protested that line of reasoning and stuck with the idea that the Bible said "world" and that meant "whole world" and that was that. 

Back when I was attacking the Bible to prove it false, I was tempted to dismiss the early histories as "Bronze Age nonsense" also. But the closer I examined the stories, the depth of meaning struck me. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were as God intended them, without sin. Nothing separated them from God. There was no vile thought in them. They were naked and it didn't phase them at all, until they sinned. And sin entered the world because they wanted to be like God. Instead of reasoning everything through the lens of the perfect Creator, they wanted to be the lords of their own reasoning, which led to the sin of unbelief. They gave in to the Devil's temptation and disbelieved God's warning about the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They wanted to be like God and know what evil was like. Up went the barrier between God and men. We were unable to have knowledge of evil without enjoining it.

And God's first response is to prophesy that He is sending a Messiah who will "crush the head of the serpent" although the serpent will "bruise His heel". The Bible nails the problem with all mankind with brutal precision, then gives the solution without blinking. While I know that talking serpents aren't scientific, the use of metaphor is self-evident. And I think the serpent is the perfect animal to make us look stupid. We have the God of all creation on one side and a lowly slithering serpent on the other and who did we believe? The proud intellectual who dismisses the Bible as Bronze Age nonsense is protecting his deeply personal narrative of intellect and knowledge of science. But the brutal biblical truth is that we are dumber than dirt because we don't believe in the true God who has given us everything. We are no better than Adam and Eve.

The more I examined the Bible the less I was dismissing it. And I think that will happen with any intellectual who attacks it honestly. I was also surprised that men and women were equal (Gen 1:27) and that there was only one race as far as the Bible is concerned, the race that descended from one man and one woman, Adam and Eve. The Bible illuminates and rejects all of our human hubris equally.

Atheists who dismiss the Bible are simply not examining it. And that's one of the other points of the scientific method. What if we do not like the conclusion the evidence is pointing to? Great scientist Richard Feynman once said that it doesn't matter how great the scientist who makes the claim; if it's proved false, its false. So the Bible cannot be called mythology because there is a whole genre of archaeology that is based on biblical evidence which points archaeologists to sites on a regular basis where they find exactly what the Bible said they would. And neither can it be called Bronze Age nonsense because all of the points that it makes about our human frailties are spot on in the 21st-century. So the disgruntled atheist takes the easy way out by deliberately confusing the frames of reference saying that the Bible tells us to stone homosexuals and teenagers today. Other atheists say that it's impossible that a man can come back from the dead but of course it isn't if that man is the biblical God who exists inside the space-time continuum and apart from it. Atheists will resort to such non-science when it behooves their deeply held narrative. And that narrative is that they don't believe in God and won't even if overwhelming evidence should hit them in the face.

When you examine the Bible scientifically - we call it a "Bible study" - the clarity it gives is astounding, and the message it has for today is more relevant and urgent as ever. Hugh Ross, the astrophysicist, says that there is news in the scientific realm every few days and each revelation is a chance to talk about the God of the Bible. As truth unfolds, it tends to become more unified and clear. We live in a great time because the truth of the Bible is coming together at a faster rate than any time in history.