People often reject the Christian worldview, saying they just can’t believe the Bible because “it’s full of contradictions.”
If you follow up asking about specific contradictions, usually no specifics are given.
Admittedly, there are many places where the Bible might appear to contradict, especially if the alleged contradictions are not looked into deeply.
In teaching a class to teenagers, we have examined about 50 supposed contradictions. With most, it only takes a few minutes to see they really aren’t contradictions at all.
The class has looked at atheist websites to try to see the strongest arguments against Christianity and we have yet to see any compelling evidence of a real contradiction.
I’ll be the first to admit we are biased; I teach those teens that the most important thing is how we approach the Bible. If we approach the Bible in unbelief, we will be quick to try to find supposed contradictions. But if we come to God’s Word in faith, we will recognize that when there appears to be a contradiction in the Bible, further study would reveal any supposed contradiction is really no contradiction at all.
To highlight that the secularist is just as biased as the Christian, let’s consider their main framework for the origins of the world. They almost universally hold to some Darwinian evolutionary understanding of how the world – and everything in it – got here.
To be clear, I am not talking about microevolution (differences in finch beaks); I am discussing the big bang and macroevolution (dinosaurs turning into finches).
The inconsistencies within the secular/evolutionary worldview are worth far more inquiry than we can look into here, but the contradictions are stark. The idea that nothing can make everything flatly contradicts observable science. Life never comes from non-life. Life always comes from life (the law of biogenesis).
Except – supposedly – in the case of the beginning of the world.
We also now know much more about the genetic code than Darwin ever did. One of the things we know – with certainty – is that there is no observable natural process through which new genetic information can be added to the genetic code (mutations decrease genetic information). Which means that it is scientifically impossible for a fish to become an amphibian, let alone for humans to come from stardust. Still, secularists dogmatically believe it by faith apart from any evidence.
These two examples (and there are many more) show that the secularist worldview is not logically consistent.
At the fundamental level, it is contrary to what we know to be true!
If even a tenth of the criticism directed toward Scripture was directed toward the evolutionary worldview, it would be rejected outright immediately. But in our day, which is biased against Scripture/God, Christians are derided as knuckle-draggers for believing the Creation account in the Bible (the only eyewitness account of our origins).
But I confess it doesn’t really bother me to be considered a flat-earther by a sect that can’t define a woman and believes men can get pregnant.
Scott Kamps writes a bi-weekly column for The Graham Star. He can be reached via email, thestableguy@frontier.com.