The Bible is puzzling to me in many ways. For instance, God is apparently all loving, but the Bible does not portray him in this way. Take one of the most well known stories from the Bible, Noah's Ark. Children love this story and it is often re-enacted in school plays across the globe. But everybody seems to forget that the main premise of the story was that God had essentially ordered the mass genocide of all living things (except the animals that swim and fly that is, but we won't get in to that particular plot hole). That doesn't seem like an all loving God to me.
Let's go back even further, to the story (maybe fairy story would be more fitting?) of the very first humans created, Adam and Eve. I find it very puzzling that God felt the need to create a snake that would tempt Eve to eat of the apple from the forbidden tree. Why didn't he just not bother with the talking snake? More to the point what was the tree even doing there? Did God want us to mess up? Was our creation booby trapped from the start?
I could go on all day. The Bible is littered with instances that betray God's "better" nature, and when Christians are taken to task over these things the answer is always the same, "God works in mysterious ways". This answer is unacceptable. In a world full of famine, disease and natural disasters, all of which God is supposedly more than capable of fixing, "God works in mysterious ways" just does not cut it.
But the main thing that puzzles me about the Bible is not what is in it, it is what isn't in it. In Genesis, God makes the heavens and the earth. He also makes two "Lights", the greater light (the Sun) to watch over the day, and a lesser light (the Moon) to watch over the night. Hang on a minute. Two lights? Surely God knows that the light we get from the Moon is nothing more than reflected sunlight. Yet he makes no mention of this. But we'll come back to that. Let's move on.
During the whole of the story of creation God is being awfully modest. He mentions the Earth, Moon and the Sun, yet he makes no mention of the other planets of our solar system. Beyond not mentioning the other planets in our solar system, he doesn't mention the planets in any of the other solar systems of the Milky Way. There are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy. A great many of the stars have planets orbiting them. There are approximately 170 billion galaxies in the known universe, each with their own billions of stars, and planets orbiting those stars. None of this is mentioned in the bible. Why not? Creating something as magnificent as our observable universe is a monumental achievement, yet God seemed quite content to stick with his humble little story, the creation of our Earth, the Sun and the Moon.
There is one very good reason for God not mentioning the other planets in our solar system, or the other stars in our galaxy, or the other galaxies in our universe. And it's very simple. He didn't know about them. The main protagonist of any book is always limited to the knowledge of the author. Sheep herders of three and a half thousand years ago knew nothing of galaxies and planets. All they knew was there was one planet (Earth) because they were living on it. They also knew of the Sun and the Moon. This explains why God referred to the Moon as the lesser light. Ancient sheep herders weren't to know that the moonshine was nothing more than reflected sunlight. This is also why there are no dinosaurs in the bible, why god never mentions DNA, why God forgot to mention the marvellous way in which humans are connected to all other living creatures on the planet thanks to Evolution by means of natural selection. All these things (things we know a great deal about these days thanks to technological advances and scientific discovery) are missing from the Bible, simply because the authors knew nothing about them.
If God was really talking through these people he could have easily mentioned all this, but he didn't do that. And again, you have to ask yourself why?
The answer, uncomfortable as it may be to some people, is easy: The Bible isn't the word of God. It is a work of fiction, as is the character of God himself. It is a selection of historically inaccurate, scientifically impossible, mythical stories, not even original ones (the virgin birth and the resurrection being two of them. I'll be scrutinising them later.) that were written in an attempt to control the masses. And it worked. But what is mightily depressing is that in this age of scientific enlightenment, it is continuing to work.
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