Evidence for God and the Bible

Critics are constantly complaining that there is no evidence for God and the Bible simply isn't true. They claim the Bible simply is a bunch of stories that people made up. There is evidence for God and that the Bible is true, but the critics simply won't accept it, because they just don't want anything to do with God. This is an important point: there are lots of people who just don't want anything to do with God. I can't imagine why people want to turn down a relationship with God and turn down paradise but they do. But anyway, this essay is only a start on the evidence that I quickly tossed together when I started writing my God is Not Imaginary Essays designed to debunk Marshall Brain's God is Imaginary essays.

The first thing to recognize is that there are different kinds of proofs. First, in logic and mathematics, you start with assumptions (the givens, that everyone can agree on) and see where they lead. You take your givens and the rules of logic and try to prove something. This generally ends up in a true or false result. I say generally, because the logican, Kurt Gödel came up with the interesting proof that there are propositions that are true that can never be proven true. (This is Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.) Well, logic and mathematics are really tiny domains in which to work, mostly you can prove that something is true or false. (It is interesting to note that Gödel also managed to prove that if God could exist, He must exist. The only way God could not exist is if it was impossible for Him to exist. Some people accept the proof and some don't.)

Proofs of things in the real world are often hard because the real world is a messy situation. You've got a proposition you'd like to prove true, like, for instance, "God exists". The most you can do in a situation like this is to apply fuzzy logic. You collect evidence for and against the proposition. You weigh the evidence and then guess that the proposition is true or false. I think there is plenty of evidence that God exists and some of the evidence is found below. One of the great problems with this type of proof is that human desires get in the way. In the case of "God exists" some people WANT Him to exist and other people don't WANT Him to exist. So weighing the evidence is very subjective. If you don't want God to exist you'll find reason after reason to discount the evidence for Him. In the end, a die-hard unbeliever can always claim aliens from another planet are responsible for some miraculous event or claim that we are living in a computer simulation, like that in the movie, The Matrix.

Now, for Christians, they look at the evidence such as you'll find below and conclude that God exists. Some of the evidence is very material, like the existence of life and the existence of the universe as a 4-dimensional blockworld. But besides that, Christians simply get an intuitive belief that He does exist. In effect, they make "spiritual contact" with Him. Christians know that they know and they base their belief in His existence on this experience.

Critics love to claim that Genesis chapter 1 is totally wrong, that it came from "ignorant shepherds in the Middle East". Well, the young Earth creationists' interpretation is totally wrong but if you're going to be fair about it, you also have to consider old Earth based interpretations as well. Here is my take on Genesis 1: Genesis 1 for Atheists. It's clear that Genesis 1 was right 3000 or so years ago, long before science came along. It is cheating to only mention the young Earth creationist interpretation of Genesis 1.

Life is physical evidence of His work on Earth. Life is, in effect, a tremendous miracle. Better than moving Mt. Sinai to New Jersey (as Brain has requested). Critics of evolution are always doing math to show how unlikely it is for life and evolution to happen by chance but atheists consistently ignore these results. I've got one little essay on the subject: The DNA Code.

Criticizing the young Earth creationist interpretation of Noah's flood simply isn't fair either. There are old Earth creationist interpretations but the critics never mention them. If a critic wants to be fair about it they have to cover ALL the major interpretations of the text. There is a rational interpretation of Noah's flood: a comet hits the Indian Ocean and creates a huge tsunami that floats the ark and carries it into the MOUNTAINS of Ararat (not on top of Mount Ararat). From OzGeographics Oz Geographics there is a series of videos from around March and April, 2023 about how the comet that hit the Indian Ocean caused a tsunami and floods around the world. In particular, these two videos discuss Noah's Flood: Biblical Floods Explained: The Burckle Crater Comet Impact | A Scientific Revelation Ep 8 and The Burckle Asteroid Impact, Mega Tsunami & Global Rainstorm Behind the Biblical Flood | Ep 9 I have an essay on that too: A Rational Explanation for Noah's Flood.

The critics always say there is no evidence for the Exodus from Egypt. However, the critics base this claim on what has been the standard interpretation of dates in Egyptian history. In a new interpretation of Egyptian history proposed by British Egyptologist, David Rohl, the evidence shows up earlier in Egyptian history than was originally believed. Rohl has a book on the subject, Exodus: Myth or History? Also, Rohl lectures on the subject in the two hour and fifteen minute long video: The Biblical Exodus... Fairytale or Historical Fact? on youtube. Another source for this material can be found on the website: patternsofevidence.com. They produced a nice video called "Patterns of Evidence: Exodus" that I first ran into on Netflix. A lot of what is described in the Bible from the crossing of the Red Sea onwards is missing from the above works however I recently ran into this video that deals with it: Finding the Mountain of Moses: The Real Mount Sinai in Saudi Arabia. That's about 24 minutes or here is a new one that is 54 minutes: Forbidden footage of actual location of Red Sea Crossing & Mt. Sinai .

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah does not come up in debates very often. But it is another case of the Bible having it right before science came along. In the book, The Comets of God, the author argued that a comet hit the cities. Other people figure a meteor exploded just over Sodom, for a long article from Nature see: A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el‑Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea There are many videos on youtube about the event, see for instance: Sodom and Gomorrah: Biblical Archaeology. For just a short summary of this issue see the page, Was Sodom and Gomorrah Wiped Out by a Comet?. Now there are some archaeologists saying 3700 years ago an asteroid exploded over the area with a force of 10 megatons: Bible's Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by 10 MEGATON asteroid explosion, archaeologists say. Or this article, Swathes of Middle East OBLITERATED by SUPER-HEATED cosmic airburst - human life wiped out. Or see this Times of Israel article. where they reference a Science News article. Or see this article from sciencepost.uk.

For evidence for the Garden of Eden, see David Rohl's book: Legend: The Genesis of Civilization. I will note that the evidence for the Garden of Eden is currently very debatable but Rohl does make the search for the Garden of Eden interesting. And he may well be right.

An atheist physicist, Victor Stenger wrote a book (God: The Failed Hypothesis) arguing that there is no evidence for God and the Bible's account of history. In the book, Stenger claims there is no evidence that the empire of David and Solomon ever existed, he says:

At a recent meeting in Rome, archaeologist Niels Peter Lemche declared, "Archaeological data have now definitely confirmed that the empire of David and Solomon never existed". (page 187, the quote comes from Biblical Archaeological Review 31, no. 1 (January/February 2005): 16-170).

But a few years ago I saw a PBS NOVA program about David and Solomon. Going over to the PBS website I quickly found it: NOVA | The Bible's Buried Secrets, where we have a narrator working with archaeologists. The program is no longer available online but the transcript of the program is there. From the transcript we have the narrator summing things up at one point saying this:

Although a minority of archaeologists continue to disagree, this convergence of the Bible, Egyptian chronology and Solomon's gates is powerful evidence that a great kingdom existed at the time of David and Solomon, spanning all of Israel, north and south, with its capital in Jerusalem.

Another recent find: Biblical story Proof: Ancient palace of King David Discovered in historic find. Note they did not find a building with King David's name on it but found evidence of an advanced culture at the time of King David. They assume it belonged to David.

As to the New Testament, there is a former reporter from the Chicago Tribune, Lee Strobel, who was skeptical of the whole thing. But he investigated the New Testament texts to try and get his wife to give up her belief in Christianity. He failed. He became a believer. At the moment, Netflix has the 2017 video. Here is a new version of his book: The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Here is the 2017 video: The Case for Christ. Here is the 2007 version: The Case for Christ.

In addition to evidence for the veracity of the Bible, skeptics always claim that the miracles recorded in the Bible are impossible. They say the miracles violate the LAWS of physics. This comes from people whose understanding of the world comes from the 19th century where all you have are particles being moved around by forces. It ignores results from the 20th century. To see how easy it is to do miracles, see my little essay: Miracles are Easy.