The Good Book is not the Word of God.

Clearly, God inspired the Bible.  Whether or not God exists, this statement is true.  God inhabits our imaginations.  There, in the minds of men, God dwells.

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Some Christians are under the misconception that the Bible is the unerring Word of God.  Before I argue that Jesus did not die for our sins, I must first dispel the false notion that God is speaking to us through the Bible.  

If the Bible were the word of God, then the Bible would not contain any contradictions.  So, in order to demonstrate that the Bible is not the word of God, we will go to the beginning of the very first book of the Bible, Genesis.

Genesis opens with a story of creation.  This is immediately followed by another creation story.  The first story of creation is the seven-day account, where God worked for six days, and then rested on the seventh.  It spans all of the first chapter of Genesis, and ends in the first three verses of the second chapter.  The second shorter story of creation begins with verse 4, chapter 2.  We are only looking at the two stories of creation.  The second account of creation forms the beginning of the story of Adam and Eve and their fall from grace. We won’t get into Adam and Eve today.  We are only looking for contradictions and other illogic within the creation stories.  If the Bible is the word of God, we will not find any.

We begin with the seven days of creation. 

On day 1 God creates light and darkness, day and night.    (These five verses are pure poetry.)

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Genesis 1, 1-5, KJV.

On day 2 God creates the firmament of heaven, which is referring to the skies above, and not literal heaven.

“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Genesis 1, 6-8.

Definition. Firmament: The sky or the vault of the heavens, viewed as something solid.

The people who wrote Genesis described the world very differently than we do.  We know that the sky is not solid.  But they had no idea.

On day 3, God creates dry land and plants.

“And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

Genesis 1, 9-13

On day 4 God creates the stars, the planets, and their moons.

“And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Genesis 1, 14-19

On day 5, God creates birds and sea life.

“And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

Genesis 1, 20-23

On day 6, God creates land animals, including humans.

“And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Genesis 1, 24-31

Then, on day 7, God rests.

“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

Genesis 2, 1-3

Before we cover the second story of creation, let’s try to make sense of this first story.

On the first day of creation, God creates light and darkness, day and night.  On the second day, God creates the sky.  On the third day God creates dry land covered with living plants.  And then on the fourth day, God creates the Sun, the moon, and every other thing that glitters in the night sky.  Does any of this make sense?  

First, on day 1, did God create actual light?   How did day and night exist without the sun, which God only created on day 4?  And why did God create plants, on day 3,  before sunshine on day 4?  And back on day 2, did God actually need to create the sky?  The sky is not an actual thing.  The sky is just what we see when we look up at the celestial objects created in outer space on day 4.  (Did I say, ‘outer space’?  I meant to say, in the firmament of heaven.)

Now we will consider the second creation account. 

“These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Genesis 2, 4-9

This beautiful little story explicitly contradicts the first story.  In the first story, God created plants on day 3, and humans on day 6.  In this story, man is created before there were plants.

Contradictions are not possible.  Both stories cannot be true.  It is impossible for plants to precede humans, while at the same time, humans preceded plants.  It is one or the other.  But it can’t be both.

The contradictions and the other logical absurdities are not words from God.  These are the words of ancient Jews, written about 3500 years ago.  

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Note that we didn’t have to go far to find contradictions in the Bible.  They start to show up on the first page of the book!  And we didn’t even discuss all of the contradictions in these accounts.  We just covered enough to convince a reasonable person that the Bible is not the literal word of God.  God would not contradict God’s self in the first pages of God’s own book!