The Bible

Let me start off with a disclaimer.  If you will find discussions of religion offensive or upsetting, read no further.

This blog will not discuss the existence or non-existence of God.  There's really no point in that - God's existence can neither be proven nor disproven.  It is a personal belief, and no one can force anyone to think either way.  This is solely a discussion of a book which is the basis of a couple of major religions throughout the world.  There are thousands of individual statements in the Bible which can be debated - science vs religion - but I am just going to pick one for now.  But I am going to approach it from a perspective I've never seen or heard before - I don't know if I'm the first to question the Bible in this way, but this aspect has been on my mind for a while.

Most scientists I've read about who question the validity of the Bible deal with creation - the big bang vs "Intelligent Design."  But I've never heard scientists discuss the speed of light.  This to me is the most compelling argument against the validity of the stories in the Bible.  The Bible is pretty clear about the time frame from creation to present day.  Though the exact total is debated, most agree it is somewhere around 10,000 years.  Now the speed of light is a pretty carefully proven value - it is something we can see and measure here on earth.  I haven't heard this number questioned by creationists.  So we know how long light takes to travel in a vacuum, and therefore we know that for the universe to have only existed for 10,000 years, it would not be possible to see any stars in the sky which are further than 10,000 light years from earth.  That's just a fact - again, can't be debated.  So now the question is how far are the farthest stars we can see?  Well, given modern technology (Hubble Telescope, etc) we know that the answer to that is MUCH MUCH farther!  Like on the order of MILLIONS of light years farther.  Now having researched the way this distance is measured I know that someone could try to argue that those methods are invalid, but they are really pretty simple and logical - based on color shifts in nearby stars and applying those shifts to the farther stars.  So unless the nearby stars behave in a completely different manner than the distant stars - possible but extremely unlikely - the fact remains that the universe is much MUCH older than the Bible claims. 

Now if one element of the Bible is disproven, does that discredit the entire book?  Well if we were talking about some ordinary book, I would say not necessarily, though it would certainly cause one to question it.  However, this is not just an ordinary book.  This is a book which millions of people follow and base their entire lives around.  It is a book which was supposedly written by God himself (speaking through mortal men, of course - when that happens today we usually lock those people up).  So even if one aspect of the book is completely disproven, where does that leave the rest of it?  Well that answer is up to those to choose to follow it.  Each individual has to make up his own mind whether or not he would base his life around a book which has giant holes in it's accuracy.  My point here is simply to raise the questions.