As an attack on those who question religion, it’s sometimes asked: “have you read the scriptures?”. The counter to that question is to point out that the quickest way to lose belief in religion is to critically read the scriptures underpinning that religion. That is true of all religions. Critically reading their scriptures is something that almost no religious person does. Instead, they simply accept what is told to them by others – who also haven’t read their scriptures critically. It should also be noted that there are many cases of people becoming atheists after critically reading various scriptures.

Consider the bible. Starting at the beginning, it doesn’t take long to encounter contradictions and mistakes that should make even the slightly-critical reader question the benefit of further reading. If such basic errors are found in the first few pages of the words of the so-called omniscient creator of the universe, then what else is in error in those scriptures?

And all of the following doesn’t even touch on the troublesome question as to where god got the materials he used to create two trillion galaxies in an observable universe that is currently 93.016 billion light years wide.

In case you haven’t read the start of the book of genesis (a page on this site), the following is a handy summary that you can use as a reference. Feel free to print and cut these out for reference in case a religious person accosts you.

This is the order in which things were created according to genesis 1:

• Day 1: the heaven and the Earth; the waters; light, day and night.
• Day 2: the sky and the firmament (with water above the firmament).
• Day 3: dry ground, seas, vegetation.
• Day 4: lights in the firmament, including the sun and the moon.
• Day 5: fish and birds; whales.
• Day 6: land creatures, cattle, creeping things, man and woman.

And here is the order in which things were created according to genesis 2 (noting genesis 2:4, “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens”):

• the Earth,
• streams,
• man (adam),
• trees, gold, resin and onyx, wild animals, birds, livestock,
• woman (eve).

Some of the problems contained in the above lists include:

• In genesis 1, day and night came three days before the sun was created. Where did the light come from for “Let there be light” (genesis 1:3)  before the sun was created?
• In genesis 1, water was created above the sky.
• In genesis 1, the animals were created before mankind, however in genesis 2 mankind was created before the animals.
• In genesis 1, man and woman were created simultaneously a day after the birds, however in genesis 2, man was created before the birds, and the birds were created before woman.
• In genesis 1, both the sun and moon are said to be light sources, but the moon is reflected light, and doesn’t create light. At certain times the moon is even completely dark, e.g. during a solar eclipse. If the moon was a light source it would never go dark.
• genesis 1 states that animals, including cattle where created before people, however cattle were selectively bred by humans – who didn’t exist yet.
• genesis 1 states that water was available before the firmament (with its stars) was created and before the sun was made. Water consists of molecules made from hydrogen and oxygen. All water in the universe originates from stars (through the combination of star-forged oxygen and primordial hydrogen), so it isn’t possible for water to exist on Earth before stars were made.

How long is a day in genesis 1? Was it 24 hours or is “day” a metaphor for eras? Is “eras” thousands of years long? If a “day” is eras, how did the vegetation (created on day 3) survive for so long before the sun was created (on day 4)? And what did the birds eat if the insects were created an agonisingly-long “day” later? If “day” is a literal day, then god must have had an easier day four because he only created the sun and the moon on that day, compared to having created two trillion galaxies on one of the previous days (noting that each galaxy has over 100 billion stars and an inconceivable number of planets and moons). So that would be about 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars on day one and just one on day four? Is it looking more likely that the men who invented the bible had no clue about science when they put “ink” to paper?

Incidentally, if you think that your book of genesis came first, think again. The Babylonian creation myth Enūma Eliš (Enuma Elish) was written long before (by over 500 years) the book of genesis and contains the following: spirits presiding over primeval chaos until light emanates from the gods, followed by the creation of the firmament (a dome), then dry land, then heavenly lights such as the sun and the moon and the stars, then men and women, and only then did the gods rest. And there were six generations of gods involved in the creation. Sound familiar? It certainly was to the men who invented the bible as they decided to take earlier myths and legends and reuse them for their own purposes. Not looking good for certain religious texts being the inerrant word of the omniscient creator of the universe, is it?

The author of genesis is unknown. Think about that. Who witnessed the events and recorded them so that they could make it into the bible? It all starts “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, but who was there to witness that event? When God said “Let there be light,” who was there to hear those words? Who recorded the events and passed them down for 3,500 years before they could be written into what is now known as the book of genesis? Where is the evidence that the events were passed down, and in what format were they passed down? Did parents repeat the story to their children, for thousands of years? Why didn’t any of those parents record the stories in a source external to the bible?

Because the origin of genesis is a problem for creationists, it is speculated that moses is the author of genesis; but it is not the “book of genesis according to moses” and nowhere does it say that god dictated the creation story to moses, or to anyone else. Attributing the beginning of the bible to moses is nothing more than an attempt to give credence to the genesis myth. The fact that an attempt was made to give credence is revealing. And by the way, there is nothing to elevate “moses” from being anything other than an invented character (which he clearly was).

When the force of that revelation hits you, you have no choice but to realize that the entire creation story is speculative fiction invented by man.

To reinforce that, the fairy tale nature of the writings must be considered. The men who wrote the bible had no scientific training or knowledge. They knew nothing about: star and planet formation or other astronomical mechanics, the scale of the universe, meteorological events, tectonics, concepts to do with abiogenesis, genetic evolution, the detailed workings of the reproduction systems of animals and plants, medical issues, DNA, or the microscopic and quantum worlds. No one can really blame them for that because the human race was effectively “awakening” from eons of prehistory (as we know it today).

But just because those authors lacked any real knowledge or understanding doesn’t mean that they weren’t curious, and of course they were at least as superstitious as many people are today. It must be remembered that they wouldn’t have considered themselves backward or uneducated; instead, they would have considered themselves to be at the cutting edge of knowledge and discovery – much the same as we think of ourselves today. Unfortunately, that is a devastating combination because it became necessary for them to try and “explain” what they saw around them, but with very limited tools to do so. In the absence of any ability to get things right, they simply invented “plausible” story after story. For example, if you experience an earthquake which shakes everything to the horizon and you have no knowledge of plate tectonics, how are you going to explain it? The most likely explanation is probably going to be that an imaginary god is angry because of the wickedness he observes in his creation, or perhaps that an unsuitable sacrifice had been made in an attempt to placate that god. With no other suitable explanation available, who would have been in a position to dispute such an explanation?

The people who wrote the stories in the bible wrote them exactly in the manner you’d expect from people who had little education and little knowledge. They took the invented stories of the past and embellished them to suit their own version of events, and of course to play to the intended audience of their writings. In some ways, that’s to be expected because many people do much the same today, except in a more subtle manner.

Where it becomes weird is that the biblical writings are supposedly based on the word of the omniscient creator of the universe. Such a being, if he did exist, didn’t have to wonder about how things were created or about how things were designed … because he created and designed them … didn’t he? Why did god allow his words to be diluted and fragmented by ignorance, translation, and time? Why would a god who “designed” the most intricate mechanisms of DNA replication have allowed his creation to remain ignorant about what caused earthquakes?

If you were god, would you not consider dictating the workings of DNA replication into the religious texts, e.g. in the (definitely missing) 1st Book of Science: “The double helix is unzipped and unwound, then each separated strand acts as a template for replicating a new partner strand. Nucleotides (bases) are matched to synthesize the new partner strands into two new double helices”? Who cares that no one of the time would have understood the language or implications of the text? No doubt the average person of the time understood little of what made it into the books of the bible, however the real implications of such an addition to the text is that people 2,500 years later (when their science had caught up) could no longer deny the presence of some sort of godly power or influence. In other words, why is every single thing in the religious texts based on the technology and understanding of the people alive at the time the text was written? You can’t appreciate that point and no longer have doubts about your religion, surely?

In terms of god’s “involvement” with the early human beings, it gets much, much worse for the old-Earth creationists. The fossil record is quite clear that anatomically-modern homo sapiens lived in Africa about 300,000 years ago, and the most recent common ancestor of humans first lived about 200,000 years ago. Those ancestors wore clothes and used tools, and there is no reason to believe that, with the same brain capacity as modern humans, they didn’t have similar emotions as we do – especially fear. They obviously cared for their young or we wouldn’t be here today. There is also evidence that they practiced rituals for their dead.

Those ancestors had little-to-no understanding of the world around them. They would have lived ruthless lives which were largely obsessed with survival. They would also have lived short lives on average during which they were mystified by things like earthquakes, fires, storms, thunder and lightning, and astronomical events, and they would have been distressed and terrified by things like tribal warfare, animal attack, disease, infant mortality, broken bones and even toothaches.

So, how do old-Earth creationists reconcile their god watching that misery and suffering and doing nothing about it for hundreds of thousands of years? There is no effective difference between an “adam” of 100,000 BCE and the “adam” of 4,000 BCE. Why did god wait until only six thousand years ago to intervene with the “start” of his plan for humanity? That’s not just a little bit cruel; it’s well over 10,000 generations of unbelievable cruelty. If you believe in old-Earth creationism, then your god is a sadomasochist.

And in case you’re a young-Earth creationist who is feeling a little smug right now, how did the bones of those human ancestors, not to mention other human-like species (e.g. Neanderthals), get into the geological record, thus allowing them to be placed accurately in the fossil record? (Much more on that elsewhere on this web site.)

Which brings us to the elephant in the room: adam and eve. For what follows, please keep in mind genesis 2:4, “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens”. That must literally mean that there were no other people on the planet before genesis’ description about how we all got here.

As everyone knows, the man in genesis 2 was adam and the woman was eve. It is a fairytale to believe that a rib taken from adam could have been used to form eve because there isn’t enough matter in one rib to form a life-size woman, and there aren’t the right sort of cells in a single rib to form all the parts of an adult female (e.g. the brain, liver, pancreas, etc.). But of course, it sounds like the sort of clever thing that an omniscient creator of the universe should be able to achieve – or what the writer(s) of genesis thought they could get away with writing.

Apparently adam and eve had three sons: cain, able and seth, but then strangely, genesis becomes quite vague: “And the days of adam after he begot seth were eight hundred years; and he begot sons and daughters” (genesis 5:4). From that it’s not even possible to say for certain whether it was adam or seth who “begot sons and daughters”, although later verses mention that seth begot enosh and that one or the other of them “begot sons and daughters”, etc. etc. etc. … all the way down to noah. Presumably all that can be assumed is that almost everyone “begot sons and daughters.” One wonders if even the writers of the day knew that the named offspring wouldn’t have been enough to populate the Earth so they tacked on “sons and daughters” to everyone?

There is even a Jewish traditional text that claims that seth had 33 sons and 23 daughters, although there is no evidence for that. The Jews even claim that adam had a previous wife named lilith, but of course, that’s nothing but speculation because it isn’t based on anything to do with biblical (or any other) sources. It’s well established that the Jews are typically smart people (20% of Nobel Prize recipients are Jews even though they represent only about 0.2% of the population) so it comes as no surprise that they had to try and invent a more plausible start to the human race than was claimed by the original writers of the bible. Why did the Jews invent the character of lilith? That’s because they inherently knew that populating the Earth via adam and eve was impossible and they had to invent a plausible story to underpin their traditions. There’s another phrase for that sort of invention: intellectual dishonesty.

If adam represents the first generation then, according to genesis, noah is the tenth generation, and all of the people alive in that period supposedly lived extremely long lives – generally over 900 years. From a scientific point of view, there has been no burial or fossil record that supports humans having lived to eight or nine hundred years of age. And of course, there is no non-biblical source that supports extreme longevity of humans.

No matter how you cut it, there’s a lot of incest going on when it comes to adam and eve and their offspring. It seems that seth and cain must have had sex with one or more of: his mother, his daughter(s), his sister(s), and/or his niece(s). Charming! The implications of that are ignored by the writers (and presumably the readers – yes, that’s you) of the bible. Modern day apologetics suggest that concepts related to incest were different in the early biblical times. To be sure, there are “rules” for incestuous relationships in the bible (leviticus 18:8-18 and 20:11-21, and also in deuteronomy), however those rules weren’t in place at the time of adam’s offspring, so exactly how is that all okay then?

The real problem with the story of adam and eve is that two people, 6,000 years ago could not have provided the genetic start to what is witnessed on Earth today. The men who wrote the bible knew nothing about the science of genetics, but we do know quite a bit now. In 2013, a team of researchers determined that the minimum size population required 60,000 years ago for humans to successfully leave Africa to eventually become the top species in the world would require at least 2,250 individuals. That’s a fair bit more than two.

Additionally, with the required incest and inbreding resulting from starting with just two people would certainly have created handicaps which would still be detectable in our genetic code (which it isn’t).

The claim that is sometimes made by Christian apologists is that because adam and eve were created “perfect” (whatever that means), incestuous relationships wouldn’t have caused the genetic inbreeding problems that are known about today. That claim is suspect based on the biblical narrative because apparently it was adam and eve’s “original sin” which led to the problems humans face today. So when did the defects kick in after adam and eve blotted their copybooks? Only after their descendants had incestuously kicked off the human race? How convenient.

And there couldn’t be a less convincing fairy tale than what is related concerning the downfall of adam and eve. Apparently god created lots of yummy things to eat in the garden of eden, but he then went further by creating two trees: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He then gave adam strict instructions not to eat from the tree of knowledge because then “thou shalt surely die” (genesis 2:17). This is a clear indication that adam and eve (in their pure form) were immortal. We know that because adam did go on to eat the fruit of the tree and most definitely did “surely die”, so god must have been talking about mortality. And exactly how adam could have had any concept of “death” when such a thing had never happened, is not explained. As an aside, why was it necessary to have a tree of life if the created beings were immortal? Could it be that god had planned the “downfall” all along? It’s also interesting to investigate the dichotomy between immortal beings and beings who can eat? Why would immortal beings need to eat, and what happens when an immortal being doesn’t eat?

But of course, god couldn’t just let things be because he decided to endow one of the snakes the ability to talk (despite snakes not having the physiology that permits speech). That darn old reptile successfully tempted eve into eating the forbidden fruit, and she promptly convinced her hubby to do likewise. Interestingly (for an omniscient being who had just completed the construction of the universe and everything in it), he had trouble finding two people in his backyard: “And the lord god called unto adam, and said unto him, where art thou?” (genesis 3:9). Well, adam decided to pass the buck to eve, and eve decided to pass the buck to the serpent, and god cursed the serpent: “and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life” (genesis 3:14). By the way, snakes do not have a digestive system that can’t handle eating only dust. He then decided to ensure further retribution on his creation: “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow” (genesis 3:16), but what sorrow was there to multiply? The garden and both adam and eve were supposed to be perfect before eve reached for an apple peeler, so what sorrow could there have been to multiply?

And to wrap things up, god “drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of eden cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life” (genesis 3:24). Funny that despite a fair amount of the world having been explored, no one has managed to find a spinning flaming sword which is guarding the entrance to the garden of eden. Seriously, why don’t you (religious person) make yourself an infinite amount of dollars by locating and documenting the “flaming sword” on a YouTube channel?

Think your garden-of-eden story is original? Think again. The Sumerian myth, the “epic of gilgamesh” (written long before genesis was invented) has many elements that should sound familiar if you know your genesis. The tale is set in a garden paradise called “dilmun” – where all is happy and peaceful. In that tale, apparently the god ninhursag curses the god enki for eating forbidden fruit. Another god (ninti) helps enki by healing his injured rib (remind me, was there something in the genesis fable to do with a rib?). By the way, eve means “life” and ninti means “lady of life”. The Sumerian tale also had a flood myth, but eventually gilgamesh discovers a fruit that will grant him eternal life – but unfortunately that fruit is eaten by a serpent before he gets a chance to give it a test run (remind me, was there something in the genesis fable to do with a serpent and eternal life?). Sorry, but you are kidding yourself if you think the writers of genesis didn’t adapt earlier stories for their own purposes. If the stories were adapted, please explain how they are the inerrant words of your creator of the universe? Did he dictate them and then re-dictate them to get them even more right?

Because the tale of adam and eve as written is ridiculous, many modern creationists state that the fable is an allegory or fanciful story that is designed to teach us more serious underlying truths. However the bible does not document at any time that the events listed are anything but the literal truth, and the events are told in a narrative style. Just because it turns out that the story is ridiculous and scientifically inaccurate, doesn’t mean that the men who wrote it didn’t believe in it wholeheartedly. They were wrong. Nothing about “In the beginning…” makes sense.

A talking snake? Really? If we one day manage to travel to another world with intelligent life and we figure out that they have a creation story involving (say) a talking bird, would we attempt to help them come to their senses with scientific information? But it’s okay when it involves the back-story of your religion, is it?