Can We Trust the Bible? - Is It Reasonable? Part 1 (From the Bible Study series: Fear Not! You Can Do This. Easing in the Bible One Toe at a Time) via www.JeanWilund.com

A talking donkey, a global flood, and a virgin birth. These sound like the stuff of fables, not facts. But the Bible includes them as historical events.

How can we know the Bible is inspired, trustworthy, and infallible when we read about phenomenon such as these?

Sure, we can believe it by faith. But we don’t have to. We have evidentiary proof.

Before we look at some of the evidence we can hold in our hands, let’s consider the Bible’s trustworthiness using good old-fashioned detective work—abductive reasoning.

This means we’ll consider the observable facts and then look for the simplest and most reasonable explanation.

Can We Trust the Bible? - Is It Reasonable? Part 1 (From the Bible Study series: Fear Not! You Can Do This. Easing in the Bible One Toe at a Time) via www.JeanWilund.com

Considering the Inconceivable

In order to answer the inconceivable oddity of a talking donkey or a world-wide flood, it’s helpful to first reason together whether we believe that the God of the Bible even exists.

Is it reasonable to believe God exists?

Consider our world, our bodies, and the cosmos.

Complex DNA strands.

Crazy creatures at the bottom of the sea with lighted fishing poles for noses. Crazy stuff like that. I still marvel at electricity.

Consider the precise alignment of the planets and stars that enable life on earth to neither burn up nor freeze solid.

The Bible says God created the heavens and the earth, including all living beings within them. It seems reasonable that something this complex would have a highly intelligent designer.

But what if we don’t believe?

What If We Don’t Believe?

If we look at the complex universe around us but don’t believe it’s reasonable that God exists, we must produce an alternate explanation for how everything came into being.

Thus far, scientists who don’t believe in God have offered only theories, like the Big Bang Theory – the “something came from nothing” theory. (Not the TV show.)

Let’s imagine if the Big Bang Theory were true. We’d now need to explain why other things haven’t “started from nothing” ever since that initial bang.

Is it reasonable to believe that the creation of the world was the sole incident of spontaneous creation in history?

The Big Problem with the Big Bang

Can We Trust the Bible? - Is It Reasonable? Part 1 (From the Bible Study series: Fear Not! You Can Do This. Easing in the Bible One Toe at a Time) via www.JeanWilund.com

In support of the Big Bang Theory, atheist and biologist Richard Dawkins presented in his book, The God Delusion (published in 2006), his “Ultimate Boeing 747” argument.

This argument asserts a Being that could create the world would have to be more complex than a 747. And something would have to create the Being.

Ironically, rather than presenting evidence to prove God doesn’t exist, Dawkins’ 747 argument supports the Bible’s view that God is more complex than His creation and anything His creation could build.

But Dawkins ignores the possibility that God, being supremely complex, was never created. He’s always existed with no beginning and no end.

Interestingly, an article on his website from 2016 discusses a new theory that involves the universe having no end and no beginning.

The author of the article explains the need for their new theory, which is: the Big Bang theory simply doesn’t work.

Here a clip from the article:


Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity.

“The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there,” Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org.

Ali and coauthor Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, have shown in a paper published in Physics Letters B that the Big Bang singularity can be resolved by their new model in which the universe has no beginning and no end.

— No Big Bang? Quantum Equation Predicts Universe Has No Beginning


What Does Your Reasoning Tell You?

Using our abductive reasoning, we now ask ourselves, which is more reasonable to believe?

Is it more reasonable to believe that the universe has simply existed without beginning or end and that one day that abyss of nothingness collided and created our intricately complex universe as we now know it?

OR

Is it more reasonable to believe that God is the intelligent designer who has always existed and created the universe?

If neither seems reasonable, what’s the alternative origin of the universe? The one that Richard Dawkins and others who don’t believe in God have yet to discover?

I believe the God of the Bible is the Creator, and He’s always existed.

Which leads me back to the talking donkey.

A Powerful and Creative Creator

If God can create the universe and give mankind – and parrots, and a few dogs on YouTube – the ability to speak, can we then also believe He’s able to make a donkey speak?

Can we also believe He can cover this globe we live on with water? And do everything else we read about in the Bible that seems impossible?

“Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh; is anything too difficult for Me?” (Jeremiah 32:27 ESV). 

“But Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible’” (Matthew 19:26 ESV).

If God can create the world, it’s reasonable to believe He can and will perform miraculous works, whether on a small, talking-donkey scale or on a massive worldwide flood scale.

To be continued in Part 2 . . .


it's All About Him Transformational Bible Study Method by Jean Wilund

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