FINDING BIBLE TRUTH - THREE BIBLE CONUNDRUMS

We say that God knows the future - else he could not correctly instruct the prophets.

We say that the Tree of Good and Evil was placed in the Garden of Eden as a test, to find out whether Adam and Eve would be faithful to God's Law.

The essence of a test is that it should provide necessary information that can be obtained no better way. But if God, knowing the future, already knew that Adam would fall, what was the point of going through with the test? It is sometimes said that God has the ability to know the future but may choose not to do so. This can hardly apply here - he chose to set up the test.

There are many other instances in the Bible where God's presumed foreknowledge creates problems. What was the point of testing Abraham's faith by asking him to sacrifice his son - God already knew that he would comply? Was God unaware when he created the creatures of earth that he would at a later date destroy practically all of them in a flood - the future which God is presumed to have known?

The Bible indicates that all of creation is directed towards Man - the sun, moon, and stars were created for our benefit, the other creatures as our companions. We also believe that God has a purpose in all that he does, has no need to experiment, that from nothing he can create something that is perfect, that everything is part of some grand design. But why were the dinosaurs (for example) created and then wiped out. Why were the early hominids - Australopithecus, Africanus, Neanderthals and all the rest, ever created at all. In the Cambrian period (around 500 million years ago) virtually all the existing life forms died out and an entirely new batch of some hundred body forms appeared. Including the first Chordata (a phylum that includes Man) in the form of a small eel-like creature some 12 centimetres long. Then all but about twenty of these quickly disappeared. In another mass extinction in the late Permian period (some 240 million years ago) about 95% of all species went, and this was just one mass extinction among many less severe.

It is estimated that at least 99.9% of all the species that there have ever been are now extinct, each lasting on average some seven million years.

Purpose? Grand design? Why?

If we are ever to understand anything of God's purpose these questions must be asked.

As pointed out in the Introduction the huge number of different Christian religions and sects all depend on the Bible for their beliefs, but all interpret the Bible differently. We believe that the Bible is intended for our instruction. Many, perhaps a majority, believe that its writing was closely supervised, if not virtually dictated, by God, and that it cannot err, let alone lie. So how can it be that no two theologians can agree precisely on what it says? In practice some reasons can be seen very clearly:

• 1. The Bible is being interpreted to conform to an adopted dogma - the dogma is the final authority, not the Bible.
  The actual words can be translated in a number of very different ways. For example young-earth creationists - and all Bibles - translate 'yom' in Genesis as 'day'. Old-earth creationists translate it as 'age' or 'era'. The young-earthers conclude that the Universe was created around six thousand years ago, the old-earthers say that the scientific estimate of four and a half billion years could be correct.
• 2. Interpretation of whole verses can vary enormously. For example Genesis 1:11 says:
  'Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth"; and it was so'.
  Some 'interpretations' say that all the listed varieties of plants were created on that one day (whether an era or normal day), others explain that it should be read as meaning that the production of plant forms was only started then, and continued throughout the rest of the creation period.
• 3. An increasing (and welcome) trend now is to try to reconcile Science and the Bible, however the distortions and interpretations of the actual text adopted in the effort are often such as to drive even deeper wedges between dogma and fact.
• 4. The actual writers, no matter how closely advised, could only write of matters and give explanations from within their own experience. We have to interpret or extrapolate and we do so in ways that are enormously variable.

And now the problem:

How can it be that a Book, intended by God for our education, supervised by God to ensure compliance with his intent, should fail so dismally as to support this multitude of theologies? More thoughtful choices and a little more explanation would have removed doubts about the meaning of the words used. A little more clarification and we would not need to argue about the import of whole verses. It is not inevitable that the meaning of a book written in a different age and a different language should be confused - read some of the ancient Greek literature if you doubt this.

There should, of course, be sound answers to these and all the other conundrums of the Bible. A vital question is whether they can be found without major changes to existing dogmas, including dogmas of inerrancy. We should welcome change wherever it can reconcile opposing views, not fear it.

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