1. How can you reconcile seven literal days of creation with the evidence from science of the age of the universe?

2. How can we trust the Bible when it has been through so many translations by the time it gets to English?

3. How can you reconcile God creating all creatures "in the beginning" with the conclusions of evolution, where evolution describes the development of life from non-life, a slow process of change from organisms of lower complexity to organisms of higher complexity, and the change of one species to another?

4. If the Bible is so reliable, why are there so many denominations and so many different ways of interpreting it? Isn't everything open to interpretation?

5. Is the Bible even "scientific?"

6. Hasn't truth been shown to be an obsolete concept?

7. Haven't the Dead Sea Scrolls been shown to disprove the Bible?

8. Hasn't the Bible been shown to be full of contradictions?

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How can you reconcile seven literal days of creation with the evidence from science of the age of the universe?

The short answer to this is that there are legitimate and sound ways of interpreting and understanding the Genesis accounts such that they are not in contradiction to the findings of science. One approach is to understand them as referring not to seven twenty-four hour periods, but to seven indefinite periods of time or ages. These seven ages can then be reconciled well with the scientifically measured age of the universe. Another approach is to understand that, in creating the universe, God created a "mature" universe. Much as a physician examining Adam one day after his creation would estimate Adam's age to be about thirty years old on the basis of his physical appearance, so too can scientists estimate the age of the universe at 14 billion years on the basis of its physical appearance. Neither of these approaches is a "cop-out" with respect to legitimate and sound reasoning, and neither of these approaches in any way compromises the integrity and authority of the Bible. For a much fuller discussion of this, please refer to the essay on "The Age of the Universe."

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One of the most common misunderstandings about the Bible is that it has gone through a sequence of languages before arriving at the native tongue of the reader. As is described more fully in the doctrinal statement and the historical reliability of the Bible, virtually all of the modern Bible translations are rendered directly from the ancient Hebrew language, the ancient Aramaic language, the ancient Greek language, and the smattering of ancient Latin in which the original manuscripts were written. It is true that the old King James Version uses 400-year-old English, but that too was still translated from those original ancient languages using the ancient copies that were available at that time. It is the reader's choice whether or not to read a translation using today's English or yesterday's English (or Spanish, French, German or Chinese, for that matter). It is simply not true that today's generally available Bibles are translated from one modern language to another.

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You cannot reconcile them without destroying them. There are some aspects of evolutionary theory that can be reconciled with the Bible, and likewise there are some aspects of biblical creation that can be reconciled with evolutionary theory. But as each set of ideas stands in total, they are in fundamental contradiction to each other with regard to the role of God in the appearance of life on this planet. Please refer to the age of the universe essay to examine that aspect of this debate, as well as the science and faith section for further information on the scientific method. As the evolution-versus-creation question is not the primary focus of this investigation, please refer to the Thomas Project section and the links provided in this website for more information on it.

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It is true that everything is open to interpretation, but it is not true that all interpretations are reasonable or sound. Consider the preceding sentence. It can be interpreted to mean that "all interpretations have equal validity and value," if one disregards the second half of the sentence. But just because it can be interpreted that way does not mean that it should be interpreted that way, and indeed, in this case it clearly is not a valid interpretation. Most of the interpretational problems one hears about likewise come from such mishandling of the statements recorded and related in the Bible, usually because they are taken out of context. People bring many agendas to the Bible, some noble and some less so, and will usually take away from it what they want to get out of it, whether or not it is actually there. There is a fuller discussion of this in the section on science and faith and in the section on truth.

There are some issues, however, that genuinely reflect legitimate alternatives in understanding based on context and grammar, but they do not number anywhere near the illegitimate understandings that get most of the headlines. Denominations reflect, for the most part, the outcomes of groups of individuals applying those legitimate alternatives in understanding the Bible to their practices of their faith.

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The Bible is not a "scientific" book, but it contains much that is scientifically verifiable. This is indeed what sets it apart from the literature of all the other major religions in the world. History and the Bible are inextricably linked, and this is more fully discussed in the section on the historical reliability of the Bible. (coming soon).

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No, and that's the truth (what is life without humor?). Truth is not an obsolete concept - it is an absolutely essential one without which meaningful communication is impossible. Please refer to the section on truth for a much fuller discussion of this question.

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No, they have been shown to strongly support it. It has been very easy for myths about the Dead Sea Scrolls to arise, but since they were opened up to public review in the last 10 years, a fantastic amount of information about them has come to light. None of it calls into question the integrity of either the Old Testament or the New Testament.

One remarkable aspect of the Dead Sea Scrolls is the scientific finding regarding the accuracy of the hand-copying used by the ancient writers in preparing the ancient Old Testament texts. When one thinks about the "telephone game," where a message can become hopelessly unrecognizable going through a mere twenty people, one would expect that the hand-copying techniques would be responsible for major errors in the texts. The exact opposite has been shown to be true by the Dead Sea Scrolls, however. One of those ancient scrolls records the entire Old Testament Book of Isaiah, and has been dated to around the second century B.C. When compared to the Hebrew in the oldest copies previously known to have been in existence, which date from around 800 A.D., the Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew and text were found be nearly 99% identical to the ones dated nearly one thousand years later! What differences there were consisted of very minor ones whose impacts on the text were minimal.

Now, add to this the intervening history through which that hand-copying occurred, and it becomes even more amazing. This high fidelity of reproduction was maintained through such catastrophic national events as the destruction of the Jewish nation at the hands of the Romans in late first century A.D. At this time, both Jerusalem and the Qumran community were utterly destroyed (the latter being where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found). Add to this such other world events as the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land, and the many other turbulent events of that time in that area, and the wonder of this process only grows.

In other words, across almost one thousand years of time, from one hand-copyist to another, through repeated invasions and cataclysms, the accuracy of reproduction of the Old Testament manuscripts is nothing short of phenomenal. Some might even call it "miraculous."

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No. Technically, a contradiction is saying "yes" and "no" about the same thing at the same time and in the same respect. It is contradictory to say "the sky overhead right now is cloudy and not cloudy," but it is not contradictory to say "the sky overhead right now is cloudy, but it was not cloudy this morning." It is also not contradictory to say "the sky overhead right now is cloudy with respect to storm clouds, but not cloudy with respect to smoke clouds."

There are no instances in the Bible of the writers saying "yes" and "no" about the same thing at the same time and in the same respect. There are certainly difficult passages in the Bible, and there are certainly varying accounts of the same events in the Bible, but there are no contradictions. In the vast majority of cases, the difficult passages can be found to have reasonable and rational explanations for what they report, once they have been examined more fully.

A good example of this can be found in the New Testament descriptions of the fate of Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus Christ. The Gospel of Matthew explains that Judas "went away and hanged himself,"¹ but the Book of Acts (written by Luke) reports that Judas fell headlong, and "burst open in the middle, and all his intestines gushed out." ² This would certainly appear to be a major problem in reporting the same event until one realizes that the writer of the Gospel of Matthew was a Palestinian Jew (Matthew) and the writer of Acts was a Greek physician (Luke). As it turns out, the idea of "hanging" in Classical Hebrew can mean either death by using a rope around the neck, or death by "impalement." ³ While the Gospel of Matthew is written in Koine Greek, using 'hanged' in that Greek may simply have been Matthew's particular choice in his writing for rendering the Classical Hebrew meaning of "impalement." This is especially so when one considers that Matthew's gospel is by far the most "Jewish" of the four gospels, and uses the most Jewish turns of phrase (called Hebraisms). So what appears to be contradictory is rather easily reconciled once the issues are examined more closely. If Matthew meant "impalement" as the fate of Judas, then Luke is simply re-describing that impalement with more clinical detail. And another so called "contradiction in the Bible" is resolved.

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