The Bible is clearly not the Word of God. Here is part of a message I sent to a Christian in order to deconvert him:
Genesis 1 says that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. By stringing together the genealogies of Genesis you get an age of 6000 years for the earth. This is false: the earth is 4.5 billion years old.
Genesis 1 says that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, but this is false: the earth was not present from the beginning. In the beginning, when God created the universe 15 billion years ago (the Big Bang), there was neither earth nor sun. They coalesced from clouds of nebular gas about 4.5 billion years ago.
Genesis 1 says God created a firmament to separate between the waters above and the waters below. What is the firmament? In Hebrew raqiya', which means a layer of beaten metal. The firmament is a solid roof above our heads protecting us from the waters above it. The firmament has windows, which were opened in Noah's day to let the flood waters down. Needless to say, all this is an error: we send shuttles high above, to space, and they never crash into a solid firmament. The Bible is in error.
Genesis 1 says God created lights to rule the day and night: a greater light (the sun) to rule the day, and a lesser light (the moon) to rule the night, and the stars as an afterthought, as tiny decorative lights stuck onto the solid firmament. There are a few errors here: the sun is a light, yes, but it is not so great compared to other stars (such as Rigel or Betelgeuse); the moon is not a light at all, but reflects sunlight; and the stars are distant suns, not tiny dots of light.
And finally, Genesis 1 neglects to mention how God created living beings: the process of evolution. This is a process of descent with modification, of random mutations combined with non-random natural selection to produce novelty. Genesis 1 puts mankind at the pinnacle of creation, while in fact mankind shares common descent with all other living beings and is closely related to the ape species.
Now you see that the Bible tells us untruths about God's creation. Shall we attribute such untruths to God's authorship? By no means! It was ignorant men that wrote those things. We have come to the truth not by accepting the guesswork of ignorant men, but by investigating the universe scientifically.
We must equally be chary, then, of accepting what the Bible says about God. The men who wrote the Bible infused their own ideas about God's creation; is it not then possible that they infused their own ideas about God as well? Is it not possible that God is totally different than the one whom the Bible describes?
I believe God created the universe 15 billion years ago, setting the whole host of natural laws and material properties sufficient for subsequent evolution of stars, planets and living organisms. He created a fully-gifted creation, capable of self-organisation. I believe God is self-sufficient and requires no praise nor worship. All that is required is a life of love and kindliness towards other beings, which prepares the self for the coming life after death.
™ Version 4.2
