Answering Skeptics: Do You Take the Bible Literally, or Go With Science?

This is a continuation of an ongoing discussion with an individual who responded to an ad I placed on Facebook. We’ll start with his question in bold, followed by my response.

Now I would like to go off subject with a question or two…. It is apparent that you take the Bible literally… do you believe the earth is 6-9 thousand years old (young earth), or go with science that says billions of years old?

As I hope you’ve come to appreciate so far, I strive to give quality answers. I am not good at pithy, Twitter-worthy responses because I find such responses to serious questions patently unhelpful. Rather, I prefer to reason my way through a problem and take you along for the ride so that hopefully you can appreciate how I’ve reached my conclusion. The question you ask today is no exception—I think it requires a lot of groundwork to be laid, so I pray you’ll bear with me.

If we were having a face-to-face conversation, I would have to stop you as soon as you said that I take the Bible “literally.” The question, of course, would have to be, “What do you mean by literally?” If by “literal,” you mean that I believe, for example, that Jesus is an actual door (John 10:9), that Jesus commands us to hate our parents (Luke 14:26), or that Jesus is a sword-swallower (Revelation 19:15), then I would have to say, “Of course not.” If by “literal” you mean that when Jesus says that no one is saved except by faith in Him (John 14:6), then I would have to respond with, “Of course I do.” So how do we know when we should take the Bible literally and when we should not? This is where hermeneutics—the art and science of (biblical) interpretation—comes in.

As you are aware, the Bible is not just a book, it is 66 books of propositional truths that claim to be the inspired words of the omnipotent, eternal, infallible God (2 Timothy 3:16). These 66 books were written by some 40 different authors over the course of 1,500 years, on three different continents, and in three different languages. In these 66 books, we see at least seven different genres represented: historical narrative, poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy, gospels, epistles, and apocalypse. Watch my presentation, “Why Should Anyone Believe the Bible?” if you’d like to go into this a little deeper: .

In conservative circles, the hermeneutical principle used to rightly handle (meaning correctly interpret and apply) the Word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15) is called the “historical-grammatical approach.” This means, simply, that when we read the text, a proper understanding of it is only reached when we consider not only the grammatical context (the surrounding words, sentences, paragraphs, books, and testament), but also the historical context in which the text was written, and how the authors contemporaries would have understood it. To summarize the approach even further, some have said, “When the plain sense of the Bible makes sense, seek no other sense.” I find this to be generally helpful advice.

It’s Not About Science vs. the Bible, It’s a Battle of Presuppositions

Now, regarding the science issue, I’d like to remind you of something you already know: those who believe in an “old” (i.e. 4.6G years) earth and those who believe in a “young” (i.e. ~6k years) earth both live in the same physical world. Both behold the same rocks and the same stars, but both obviously reach drastically different conclusions about the world they live in. Why is this? Well, sometimes it is owing to a faulty hermeneutic, but more often than not, it boils down to worldview—the presuppositions we bring to the table that affect how we interpret the physical world. That word “interpret” is key.

When you pick up a rock, you don’t typically see a “created on” date emblazoned upon it. The rock is just there. It is a brute fact that has no meaning or explanation attached to it. With the technology we have, we can tell a lot about the chemical composition of the rock today—it is observable, testable, and the tests are repeatable because the rock persists through time. But as soon as we start trying to go beyond today and figure out how the rock was formed or what brought it to the place where we find it, we move from operational science into something that you are intimately familiar with—forensic science.

As you know, in forensics, you take the physical evidence you have today and attempt to infer how things got to be the way they are. But because forensics relies upon abductive reasoning, it can never tell you with absolute certainty whether your thesis is true or not—it can only increase your confidence that you have constructed the right story to explain the brute facts before you. From what I understand, getting a conviction based upon circumstantial evidence—while not impossible—is somewhat difficult. To make your case stronger, it’s helpful to have reliable eyewitness testimony…especially if you can find witnesses whose account(s) match your forensic analysis!

So what do we do with the age of the earth? As you noted, “science” tells us that the earth is 4.6B years old, but that’s an inference based upon brute facts in the context of a narrative that is shaped within the context of a worldview—predominately philosophical naturalism and its sister philosophy uniformitarianism—which rules out the possibility of the supernatural a priori and states that “the present is the key to the past.” Given this worldview—one that excludes the possibility of an eternal, immaterial, omnipotent Creator—I think it’s at least initially reasonable to infer that the earth is 4.6B years old. However, this conclusion rules out a critical piece of evidence: eyewitness testimony.

And that’s were the Bible comes in.

But alas, I’ve written another mini novel. I’d like to pause here to give you the opportunity to reflect on what I’ve said, ask clarifying questions, or correct me where I’ve gone wrong before I continue.