Sometimes I worry I will burn in hell for not following the One True Religion. This lasts about two minutes, however. That’s all the time it takes to recall how unlikely — insane even — the idea seems.

If we assume that a deity or deities exist, it seems more reasonable to assume there is no punishment (of a miserable, torturous nature anyway) for non-belief. It’s simply a question of how likely it is that a higher power would be an immoral monster or a total madman. Whichever the One True Religion is, throughout history countless millions (almost without question billions) have been born, lived, and died without ever hearing about it. Even today, as Daniel Dennett points out in Breaking the Spell, “whichever religion is yours, there are more people in the world who don’t share it than who do.” There may be two billion Christians out there, but the global population is nearly eight billion, and plenty in remote parts of the world won’t hear of Christianity, while still more won’t ever be proselytized to or decide to study it (after all, how many Christians would undertake a serious, thoughtful study of Shenism, Sikhism, Santería, or Zoroastrianism, or grow beyond the most minimal understandings of major faiths like Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism?). The vast majority of people alive today will never be Christians, and the vast majority of people who have ever lived were not Christians (nor Jews before the time of Christ). The idea that a god would bring eternal suffering to such people is mind-boggling. It would have to be evil or insane. But that’s the deity described in various religions — an honest description, not a dogmatic one about how this God is one of love, justice, and forgiveness. Yet if a supernatural being of superior intellect and power exists, it’s likely a little more reasonable than that. If there’s a wager to be made (better than that faulty Pascal’s Wager), it’s that if a god or gods exist they’d be more moral and sensible than sending people off to be tortured for something they had no control over. Perhaps instead all people reach paradise regardless of belief, or there is no afterlife for some, or no afterlife for any of us, or some go to a place that isn’t paradise but not uncomfortable, or it’s all determined by one’s deeds, not beliefs. Who knows? There are countless options far more moral!

Careful readers will notice there’s a bit of an assumption there. When I was young and devout, I used to imagine the Judeo-Christian God found a way to make sure every person across the globe heard about him — and, after the resurrection, Jesus. People would read about them, someone would speak of them, or God would appear or make himself known in some fashion, to cover those in secluded and faraway places. If a deity exists, we assume it has the power to do this, so the above assumes it’s refraining — that could be a critical error. All true. Yet that may not ease the being’s moral culpability much. Suppose you go through your life and suddenly hear of Shenism — you saw it mentioned in an article somewhere. You read the article, but didn’t study the religion. You didn’t think to, you have your own religion you’re sure is true, you’re busy and forgot, you prefer learning about other things, and so on. Missing your moment, do you deserve eternal punishment? Have you “made your choice”? Let’s go further and imagine God ensures every human being receives enough knowledge about the One True Religion to make an “informed choice.” Suppose you learn about Islam in school, or have a Muslim co-worker. You hear all about the faith — you even study it on your own, earnestly. But you’re just not convinced, the evidence and reasoning don’t seem strong enough — no, thank you. You’ll stick to Christianity or atheism or Hinduism or whatever, inadvertently rejecting the One True Religion, sealing your fate. If this is how affairs are arranged, billions aren’t persuaded and will burn. Some people will be swayed, maybe everyone who gets a flashy visit from God himself will convert, but the vast majority of humanity is toast. (And surely not all those billions recognized the One True Religion as true but ignored it for sinful, selfish reasons — I can hear that ludicrous line coming from the Christians.) So, do you deserve hell? Because what you heard or read didn’t convince you? Did you “make your choice”? One could phrase it that way, but do you really choose to believe something is true? Or do you simply believe it’s true? In any case, what kind of being would torture good people for eternity because they weren’t convinced of something? Being unpersuaded…that’s your sin! Now burn. God would again probably have to be an immoral monster or a total madman. Further, is eternal torture — trillions of years without end — a proportionate punishment for 80-90 years of unbelief? (Or sin?) Would a loving or just god do that?

So if it seems plausible that a deity is more likely to be a moral and sensible being, who wouldn’t issue everlasting damnation on people who didn’t hear about her or simply weren’t convinced by the evidence and reasoning available and presented, there isn’t too much work remaining. God is clearly a reasonable fellow, and in that light special cases can be considered. What of apostates? Perhaps you belonged to the One True Religion and left it. This is too similar to the above musings to warrant much discussion — if you can be forgiven for not being convinced, mightn’t you also be forgiven for no longer being convinced? But what of atheists and agnostics who don’t follow any faith? Same story, that’s simply not being convinced of something. If the gods are moral and sensible enough to not torture someone unconvinced by the One True Religion, why would they torture someone unconvinced by the One True Religion and all false ones? This is why my worry, as both apostate and atheist, dissipates quickly. If God exists, he’s probably good enough to not do X, and if he’s good enough to not do X he’s probably good enough to not do Y.

This could all be wrong, of course. It could be that a higher power exists and he’s simply a tyrant, completely immoral and irrational in word and deed, shipping people to hell regardless of whether they’ve heard of him, regardless of how bad the “evidence” is. (Or only tormenting atheists and apostates!) We should sincerely hope the Judeo-Christian god, for instance, doesn’t exist or is at least radically different than advertised in holy books (he has a long history of choosing less moral options and even punishing people for things they had no control over, such as the sins of the father). Or it could be the deity is mad and wicked in the opposite way. It may have been former pastor Dan Barker who wrote that a god who only lets atheists and agnostics into paradise, as a reward for thinking critically, while letting believers burn, could easily exist. Humorous, yet entirely possible (the “evidence” for each is of comparable quality). Millions of gods could be and have been theorized. But it makes some sense to suppose a higher power would be moral, because it presumably created us, and we have a moral outrage about all this, at least in modern times: most people, even many believers, are horrified at the thought of billions being tortured forever because they believed differently through no real fault of their own. We would figure out “options far more moral,” like those above, if given the power. Wouldn’t the creator be more moral, more loving and forgiving, than the created? Can mortals really surpass the gods in ethical development, in an interest in fairness and minimizing harm? Regardless, in sum, it’s simply up to us to decide if it’s most plausible that an existent deity would be good and sane — if so, damning the vast majority of humanity to hell for not knowing about, studying, or being convinced of the One True Religion seems highly implausible.

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It’s a bit odd how religious persons say things like “Science is for understanding the natural world, faith is for understanding the supernatural or spiritual world” as if these two methods of learning what is real are equally valid. They clearly are not.

“Science” basically means “testing.” You formulate a theory, devise a way to test it, and judge the results to see what’s true about the natural world. Now, it is true that some theories can’t be tested or haven’t been tested and are inappropriately presented as fact or likely to be fact. It’s also true that sometimes science is wrong — tests are flawed, good tests yield inaccurate results due to unexpected phenomena, or results are misjudged or misinterpreted. Yet over time, science grows more accurate. Tests are repeated over years, decades, and centuries, giving us further confidence in findings. New individuals administer such tests, weeding out biases. New tests are designed, looking at long-studied phenomena from different angles and in new ways. In these ways, 1) the ability to actually test ideas and 2) improved understanding over time, science helps us know what’s true.

Faith has neither of these things. First, it might be noted that when you hear the statement in the first paragraph, the speaker is typically talking about one faith, his or her own. Christian faith helps you understand the spiritual world, the true spiritual world. Hinduism, Scientology, Islam, and Buddhism won’t help you know the supernatural world, those are of course all false religions. In any case, we’ll assume a more open-minded stance, because some do believe that there is truth in all faiths, that all roads lead to Rome.

Where science is an ever-growing body of knowledge based on testing over time and into the modern age, faiths typically present more or less fixed bodies of ideas based on writings from comparatively primitive ancient cultures — desert tribes from the Middle East, for example, in the case of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Such writings describe higher powers, afterlives, the meaning of life, and so on. Ideas, supposed knowledge, of the supernatural world. Unfortunately, there is no way to test to see if any of these notions are true. The ideas could easily be man-made fictions. You may believe your Hindu or Christian or Islamic faith helps you know and understand the spiritual world, but, to put it bluntly, that spiritual world may not exist. There is no test to run to find out. (And no, Jesus being resurrected is not a “test,” nor are miracles, answered prayers, or feeling God speaking to you. The obvious problem with this poor counterargument is that these things cannot be tested for validity either. They could easily be human fictions and imaginings as well, as explained in detail elsewhere. Think about it. If someone doubts photosynthesis, you can teach him how to test to see if photosynthesis is real; there is no test you can use to show him a god or goddess is actually speaking to you, that it isn’t just in your head. “Try faith yourself, you’ll see the proof, believing is seeing” is the best a believer can say, possibly just drawing the fellow into human fictions and imaginings as well — there is no way to test to know otherwise.) This is in stark contrast to science; we can have confidence that the natural world exists, and we are able to put ideas to the test to actually see what’s true or false, or most likely to be so.

Linked with the lack of “knowledge” verification or falsifiability, of course, is simply the fact that ideas about the spiritual world cannot grow more accurate over time. Ancient scriptures aren’t typically added to. (In modern times, at least.) Texts are of course reinterpreted, gods are reimagined, ways the faithful think they should live change. For most American Christians for a long time, God was fine with the enslavement of blacks and the bible was used to justify it, without difficulty given what’s in it. Today things are quite different. Religions may change as societies do, and the faithful may feel they gain more knowledge by studying the scriptures more deeply, but no one will ever discover that we only spend 1,000 years in heaven, not eternity. Christianity won’t change when someone announces, after much research, that God has a couple wives up in heaven. Newly discovered ancient writings won’t become holy scripture. As stated, it’s all a fairly fixed set of ideas about the supernatural realm. The immutable nature of religious “knowledge” is of course celebrated by the faithful — everything we need to know about the spiritual world was written thousands of years ago, we don’t need more than what God gave us or any improved accuracy, everything’s accurate and must be preserved. (This is in contrast to scientists, who can make history, really make names for themselves, by disproving long-held scientific theories; there’s a personal incentive not to preserve doctrine but to blow it up.) But the supposed knowledge and its assumed accuracy are untestable and could easily be false, and there’s no process of gaining more knowledge or improving accuracy over time to really hammer out if these things are false or true. Imagine if science was like this — no way to know if germ theory is correct, no centuries spent gaining more information and developing better and better medicines. In its ability to test ideas and improve understanding as time goes on, science, unlike faith, is an actual method of learning what is real. (All this should not be surprising, given that “faith” is often defined, by believers and nonbelievers alike, as “belief without proof.”)

In sum, science is a useful tool for gaining objective knowledge about the natural world. Faith is simply hoped to be a tool for gaining what could easily be imagined knowledge about an imagined spiritual realm. These things are hardly the same.

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Alternatively titled: If You Get Why Government Favoring and Promoting Atheism or Another Faith is Unacceptable, You Get Why the Same is True For Christianity. Lest the following satire be misunderstood, let’s state this plainly. All people have the right to believe what they like, and promote it — unless you’re on the clock as a public employee or trying to use public institutions. Government needs to be neutral on matters of faith, not favoring or promoting one or any religion, nor atheism. To be neutral isn’t to back or advocate for disbelief, unlike events described in these fictional, hopefully thought-provoking, headlines. It’s simply to acknowledge that this is a country and government for all people, not just those of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Not all students, customers, or constituents are Christians or even people of faith. Freedom from religion is just as important as freedom of religion, which is why church and State are kept separate. If you wouldn’t want government used to push atheism, Islam, and so forth in any way, whether through its employees, institutions, laws, or creations, then you get it.

Florida Bill Requires Public Schools to Offer Elective on Atheist Classics. Why No Required Electives For Holy Books?

“God is Dead” to Appear on U.S. Currency Next Year

Christian Student Refuses to Stand For Pledge, Objecting to “One Nation, Godless” Line

Supreme Court Yet to Rule on Whether Refusing Service to Christians Based on Religious Belief is Discrimination

Why Does the Law Still Say You Can’t Be Fired For Being Gay, But Can For Being a Person of Faith?

Coach Lectures Players About How God is Fictional and Can’t Help Them Before Every Game

Little-known Last Verse of National Anthem Reads: “And Faith is a Bust” 

Believers Bewildered as to Why Students Are Studying Science and Evolution in Religion Class  

Sam Harris One of Six Selected to Lead Traditional Refutations of God’s Existence at Presidential Inauguration 

Lawmakers Want “The God Delusion” as This State’s Official Book 

Christians Fight to be Allowed to Give Invocations at the Legislature Too; Many Americans Wonder Why Invocations Are Necessary

Supreme Court Unanimously OKs Refusing Adoption to Straight Couples if Your God Says To

Bonus: Headlines From the United States of Allah

Oklahoma Legislature Votes to Install Qu’ran Monument on Capitol Grounds 

States Are Requiring or Allowing “Allahu Akbar” to be Displayed in Public Schools

Muslims Object to Removal of Big Crescent and Star From Public Park

With U.S. Supreme Court Oblivious, Alabama Ditches Rule That Death Row Inmates Can Only Have Imam With Them at the End

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Someone once told me that the bible was the greatest work of science ever written. This is mildly insane, as anyone who’s read the bible knows there is more scientific knowledge presented in any grade school or even children’s science book. (And, given thousands of extra years of research, it’s probably more accurate.) The purpose of the bible, secularists and believers can surely agree, was not to acknowledge or pass down scientific principles. Finding incredible scientific truths in the text typically requires very loose interpretations. But as religious folk sometimes point to science in the bible as proof of its divine nature, it seems necessary to critically examine these claims.

In making the case that “every claim [the bible] makes about science is not only true but crucial for filling in the blanks of our understanding about the origin of the universe, the earth, fossils, life, and human beings,” Answers in Genesis points to verses that vary in ambiguity. Meaning some are more believable than others as to whether they could present valid scientific information.

Take Job 26:7, in which it is said God “spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing.” One may wonder what it means to spread skies over empty space. Perhaps it’s referencing the expanding universe, as others think verses like Job 9:8 reference (“He alone spreads out the heavens”). But the second part matches well what we know today, that the globe isn’t sitting on the back of a turtle or something. Why this and other verses may not be as incredible as supposed is discussed below.

(It’s often asserted also that the Big Bang proves the bible right in its writing of a “beginning,” but we simply do not know for certain that no existence “existed” before the Big Bang.)

Answers in Genesis also believes the bible describes the water cycle. “All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again,” reads Ecclesiastes 1:7. It also provides Isaiah 55:10: “The rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish…” Some translations (such as NLT, ESV, and King James) are missing “without,” instead saying the rains “come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout,” which sounds more like a repudiation of the water cycle. But no matter; other verses, such as Psalm 135:7 in some translations or Job 36:27, speak of vapors ascending from the earth or God drawing up water.

From there things begin to fall apart (the Answers in Genesis list is not long).

The group presents Isaiah 40:22 and Psalm 103:12 as the bible claiming the world is spherical rather than flat (“He who sits above the circle of the earth”; “as far as the east is from the west”). But neither of these verses explicitly makes that case. A flat earth has east and west edges, and a circle is not three dimensional. “Circle,” in the original Hebrew, was חוּג (chug), a word variously used for circle, horizon, vault, circuit, and compass. A “circle of the earth,” the Christian Resource Center insists, refers simply to the horizon, which from high up on a mountain is curved. If biblical writers had wanted to explicitly call the earth spherical they could have described it like a דּוּר (ball), as in Isaiah 22:18: “He will roll you up tightly like a ball and throw you.” This is not to say for certain that the ancient Hebrews did not think the world was a sphere, it is only to say the bible does not make that claim in a clear and unambiguous manner.

The remaining “evidences” are really nothing to write home about. “For the life of the flesh is in the blood” (Leviticus 17:11) is supposed to show an understanding of blood circulation; “the paths of the seas” (Psalm 8:8) is supposed to represent knowledge of sea currents; “the fixed order of the moon and the stars” (Jeremiah 31:35) is allegedly a commentary on the predictable paths of celestial bodies in space (rather than, say, their “fixed,” unchanging positions in space, another interpretation). But none of these actually suggest any deeper understanding than what can be easily observed: if you are cut open and lose enough blood you die, bodies of water flow in specific ways, and the moon and stars aren’t blasting off into space in random directions but rather maintain consistent movement through the skies from our earthly perspective. Again, maybe there were actually deeper understandings of how these things worked, but they were not presented in the bible.

The Jehovah’s Witness website has a go at this topic as well, using most of the same verses (bizarrely, it adds two to the discussion on the water cycle, two that merely say rain comes from the heavens).

The site uses Jeremiah 33:25-26 (“If I have not made my covenant with day and night and established the laws of heaven and earth…”) and Jeremiah 38:33 (“Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth?”) to argue that the bible makes the case for the natural laws of science. Perhaps, but again, this doesn’t demonstrate any knowledge beyond what can be observed and, due to consistency, called a law by ancient peoples. So maybe it’s one of God’s laws that the sun rises each day. It’s a law that water will evaporate when the temperature gets too high. And so forth. These verses are acknowledgements that observable things function a certain way and that God made it so. There’s no verse that explains an actual scientific principle, such as force being equal to a constant mass times acceleration, or light being a product of magnetism and electricity.

True, it’s sometimes said the bible imparts the knowledge of pi (3.1415926…) and the equation for the circumference of a circle, but this is a bit misleading. There are a couple places where a circle “measuring ten cubits” is mentioned, with it requiring “a line of thirty cubits to measure around it” (1 Kings 7:23, 2 Chronicles 4:2). Pi is implicitly three here. The equation (rough or exact) and pi (rough or exact) were possibly known, as they were elsewhere in the ancient world, as they’re not too difficult to figure out after understanding basic division/multiplication and taking some measurements (once you measure a few circles, build a few round structures, you’d likely notice a circumference is always a little more than 3 times longer than the diameter), but that is not an absolute certainty based on this text. Regardless, neither the equation nor the value of pi are explicitly offered. (Why not? Because this is not a science book.) If these verses were meant, by God or man, to acknowledge or pass on scientific knowledge then they either didn’t have much figured out or were not feeling particularly helpful. “Figure out the equation and a more precise value of pi yourself.”

The Jehovah’s Witness site further believes it’s significant the ancient Hebrews had sanitary practices, like covering up feces (Deuteronomy 23:13), keeping people with leprosy isolated (Leviticus 13:1-5), and washing your clothes after handling a carcass (Leviticus 11:28). However, if you read Deuteronomy 23:14, you see that feces must be covered up so God “will not see among you anything indecent” when he visits. It wasn’t to protect community health — or at least that went unmentioned. Noticing that leprosy can spread and deciding to quarantine people who have it is not advanced science. The guidelines for cleanliness after touching dead animals start off reasonable, then go off the road. Even after washing your clothes you were for some reason still “unclean till evening,” just like any person or object that touched a woman on her period! (If this was just a spiritual uncleanliness, why were objects unclean? They don’t have souls.) The woman, of course, was unclean for seven days after her “discharge of blood.” How scientific.

Finally, this list mentions Psalm 104:6 (“You covered [earth] with the watery depths as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains”) to posit that the biblical writers knew there was an era, before earth’s plate tectonics began to collide and form mountains, when the earth was mostly water — there is actual scientific evidence for this idea. The verse may be referencing the Great Flood story; verse 9 says of the waters, “never again will they cover the earth,” which sounds a lot like what God promised after wiping out humanity: “never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth” (Genesis 9:11). But if it does in fact reference the beginning of the world, it could be a verse a believer might use to make his or her case that the bible contains scientific truths, alongside Genesis 1:1-10, which also posits the earth was covered in water in the beginning.

There are of course many more alleged scientific truths, most more vague or requiring truly desperate interpretation. For instance, the “Behemoth” in Job 40 is sometimes said to describe a dinosaur, but it in no way has to be one. Hebrews 11:3 says: “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.” That can refer to nothing other than atoms — not any nonphysical possibility like, say, love and the breath of God. Others think a sentence like “all the peoples of the earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven” (Matthew 24:30) hints at the future invention of the television! TV is apparently the only way everyone could see an event at the same time — miracles be damned. Still others suggest that when Genesis 2:1 says the heavens and earth “were finished” that this describes the First Law of Thermodynamics (constant energy, none created nor destroyed, in closed systems)! When Christ returns like a thief in the night, “the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up” (2 Peter 3:10) — that’s apparently a verse about nuclear fission. One begins to suspect people are reading too much into things.

We should conclude with four thoughts.

This can be done with any text. One can take any ancient document, read between the lines, and discover scientific truths. Take a line from the Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Babylonia: “The heroes, the wise men, like the new moon have their waxing and waning.” Clearly, the Babylonians knew the phases of the moon, how the moon waxes (enlarges) until it becomes full as it positions itself on the opposite side of the earth from the sun, allowing sunlight to envelope the side we can see. They knew how the moon then wanes (shrinks) as it positions itself between the earth and sun, falling into darkness (a new moon) because the sun only illuminates its backside, which we humans cannot see. This line must be in the text to acknowledge and impart scientific knowledge and prove the truth of the Babylonian faith, likely arranged by the moon god mentioned, Sin, or by his wife, Ningal.

This argument is no different than what we’ve seen above, and could be replicated countless times using other ancient books. Perhaps the Babylonians in fact did have a keen understanding of the moon and how it functions. But that does not mean a sentence like that in a story is meant to pass on or even indicate possession of such knowledge. Nor does it mean the gods placed it there, that the gods exist, or that the Epic is divinely inspired. Its presence in a text written between 2150 B.C. and 1400 B.C., even if surprising, simply does not make the book divine. It could be the first text in history that mentions the waxing and waning of the moon; that would not make its gods true.

(By contrast, archaeological and ethnographic research points to the Israelites as offshoots of Canaanites and other peoples around 1200-1000 B.C., with their first writings [not the Old Testament] appearing around the latter date. Though believers want to believe the Hebrews are the oldest people in human history, the evidence does not support this. I write this to stress that, like Old Testament stories taken from older cultures, the Hebrews may have learned of the water cycle and such from others.)

A society’s scientific knowledge may mix with its religion, but that does not make its religion true. Even if the Hebrews were the first group of modern humans, with the first writings, the first people to acquire and pass along scientific knowledge, that would not automatically make the supernatural elements of their writings true. As elaborated elsewhere, ancient religious texts surely have real people, places, and events mixed in with total fiction. If some science is included that’s nice, but it doesn’t prove all the gods are real. The Hebrews knowing about the water cycle or pi simply does not prove Yahweh or the rest of the bible true, any more than what’s scientifically accurate in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Koran, the Vedas, or any other ancient text proves any of its gods or stories true. That goes for the more shocking truths as well, simply because…

Coincidence is not outside the realm of the possible. As difficult as it may be to hear, it is possible that verses that reference a watery early earth or an earth suspended in space are successful guesses, nothing miraculous required. If one can look up and see the moon resting on nothing, is it so hard to imagine a human being wondering if the earth experiences the same? Could the idea that the earth was first covered in water not be a lucky postulation? Look at things through the lens of a faith that isn’t your own. Some Muslims believe the Koran speaks of XX and XY chromosome pairs (“He creates pairs, male and female, from semen emitted”), the universe ending in a Big Crunch (“We will fold the heaven, like the folder compacts the books”), wormholes (“Allah [who owns] wormholes”), pain receptors of the skin (“We will replace their skins with other new skins so that they may taste the torture”), and more. (Like nearly all faiths, it posits a beginning of the universe too.) How could they possibly know such things? Must Allah be real, the Koran divinely inspired, Islam the religion to follow? Or could these just be total coincidences, lucky guesses mixed with liberal interpretations of vague verses? Supposed references to atoms or mentions of planetary details in the bible could easily be the same. If you throw out enough ideas about the world, you’ll probably be right at times. Could the Hebrews, like Muslims, have simply made a host of guesses, some right and others wrong? After all…

There are many entirely unscientific statements in the bible. Does the ant truly have “no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest” (Proverbs 6:6-8), or were the Hebrews just not advanced enough in entomology to know about the ant queen? Are women really unclean in some way for a full week after menstruating, with every person or thing they touch unclean as well? Or was just this male hysteria over menstruation, so common throughout history? If the sun “hurries back to where it rises” (Ecclesiastes 1:5), does this suggest the Hebrews thought the sun was moving around the earth? Or was it just a figure of speech? One could likewise interpret Psalm 96:10 (“The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved”) to mean the earth does not rotate on its axis or orbit the sun. If one can interpret verses to make people seem smart, one can do the same to make them look ignorant. Do hares actually chew their cud (Leviticus 11:4), or did the Hebrews just not know about caecotrophy? Did Jesus not know a mustard seed is not “the smallest of all seeds” (Matthew 13:32)? Likewise, seeds that “die” don’t “produce many seeds” (John 12:24); seeds that are dormant will later germinate, but not dead ones. Some translations of Job 37:18 describe the sky “as hard as a mirror that’s made out of bronze” (NIRV, KJV, etc.). One could also go through the scientific evidence of today that contradicts biblical stories like the order of creation. While the findings of astronomy assert that the sun and other stars existed before the earth, Genesis 1 insists they did not come to be until Day 4, after the earth existed and had vegetation! As I wrote elsewhere, the evidence “does not support the Judeo-Christian creation story (in which birds appear on the same ‘day,’ Day 5, as creatures that live in water, before land animals, which appear on Day 6; the fossil record shows amphibians, reptiles, and mammals appearing long before birds — and modern whales, being descendants of land mammals, don’t appear until later still, until after birds, just 33 million years ago).” Or one could note that the overwhelming evidence for evolution blows up the stories of a first man from dirt and a first woman from rib (if one believes in evolution, it seems one must accept Genesis contains falsehoods, written by ordinary people or spoken by God). Christians historically counted up the generations mentioned in the bible and put the age of the planet and our species at about 6,000 years, miserably, embarrassingly inaccurate according to all the findings of science. Or look at the biblical translations that mention unicorns, dragons, and satyrs, or just argue that supernatural claims of miracles, angels, devils, and gods are unscientific in general because they can’t be proven. But the point is made: the bible takes stabs at the natural world that aren’t accurate or imply erroneous things.

In conclusion, the science in the bible is about what one would expect from Middle Eastern tribes thousands of years ago. There are some basic observations about the world that are accurate, others inaccurate. There are some statements about the universe that turned out to be true, just like in the Koran, but that doesn’t necessarily require supernatural explanations.

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On New Year’s Eve 2016, a friend introduced me to the term bereshit, Hebrew for “in the beginning.” It is the first word of the bible, and is believed by some to contain a secret message concerning the crucifixion of Christ. The bereshit argument is therefore also called the “Jesus in Genesis 1:1” theory.

The theory goes like this: Hebrew letters have special meanings, and when you examine the meanings of the six letters in bereshit (beyt-resh-aleph-shin-yud-tav) they form a sentence: “The Son of God is destroyed by his own hand on the cross.”

I told my friend I was skeptical but would research it, and later came across this graphic and this video (minutes 10:00 to 17:00). Both assert the following meanings or associations of the letters: beyt (house, tent), resh (first person, head), aleph (God), shin (consume, destroy, teeth), yud (hand, arm, works), and tav (covenant, mark, cross). Beyt and resh, when combined, make the word “son.” So the bereshit sequence can supposedly be read “son-God-destroy-hand-cross,” or “The Son of God is destroyed by his own hand on the cross.”

I reached out to some of today’s most respected and renowned Old Testament scholars to determine the merits of the bereshit theory. I also spoke to John E. Kostik, a well-traveled Christian speaker, who created the video. He informed me that proving bereshit theory was as simple as looking up the meanings of Hebrew letters, which have matching Hebrew words. “Bereshit begins with the letter beyt. The Hebrew word for ‘house’ is beyt!”

I remembered a question John Goldingay, professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, posited to me earlier that day: “Why would no one have seen it for thousands of years?” So I asked Kostik why web information on it is relatively sparse and why many pastors and believers don’t know about it. He said that because the original language of Hebrew is not widely known, and because Jewish scholars do not view Christ as the messiah and therefore do not have open eyes, the spread of this knowledge has been limited. I asked for sources on the topic, and Kostik directed me to Jeff A. Benner’s work.

Like Kostik (and myself), Benner is not a professional scholar. He works for an engineering company and lives in a log cabin, but like Kostik studying ancient Hebrew is his passion. He documents his studies on his website, which he dubbed the Ancient Hebrew Research Center. While disappointed not to find a university professor with findings published in peer-reviewed journals, that was the source I was given so I pressed on.

The first task was to see if the ancient Hebrew word for “house” indeed had the same name as the first letter in bereshit.

I looked up these words in Benner’s dictionary of ancient Hebrew words, and consulted Strong’s Concordance to ensure they were accurate, which they were.

The definitions below with ancient Hebrew lettering are both from Benner’s site, with a Strong’s Concordance number to crosscheck. Definitions without ancient Hebrew lettering are from Strong’s Concordance alone. Hebrew words are read right to left.

(ba-yit): House. (The structure or the family, as a household that resides within the house. A housing. Within.) Strong’s 1004.

 (rosh): Head. (The top of the body. A person in authority or role of leader. The top, beginning, or first of something.) Strong’s 7218.

 (a-luph): Chief. (Accorded highest rank or office; of greatest importance, significance, or influence. One who is yoked to another to lead and teach.) Strong’s 441.

(sheyn): Tooth. (Hard bony appendages on the jaws used for chewing food and forming of sounds when talking.) Strong’s 8127/8128.

 (yad): Hand. (The terminal, functional part of the forelimb. Hand with the ability to work, throw and give thanks.) Strong’s 3027.

Not pictured (tav): Frowardness (perverse thing) or mark (from tavah, Strong’s 8427). Strong’s 8420/8420a.

These then needed to be compared to the letters themselves. Here are Benner’s descriptions of the early Hebrew letters:

 (beyt, today ב): image of a house, tent

 (resh, today ר): image of a man’s head

(aleph, today א): image of an ox’s head

 (shin, today ש): image of two front teeth

 (yud, today י): image of arm and hand

 (tav, today ת): image of crossed sticks

You will notice the names of these Hebrew letters are indeed virtually the same as the Hebrew words above. We will get back to this.

Initial problems with the bereshit argument become evident fairly quickly. First, assuming these letters represent the items asserted, bereshit reads “house-head-chief-tooth-hand-mark [or perverse thing].” Benner himself does not include “God,” “consume,” “destroy,” “works,” “covenant,” or “cross” as definitions!

If we open the scope of the meanings to include Strong’s (Exhaustive Concordance), that gives us:

• House (court, door, dungeon, family, forth of, great as would contain, hangings)
• Head (band, captain, company)
• Chief (captain, duke, chief friend, governor, guide, ox; chief is actually not included under a-luph here)
• Tooth (crag, forefront, ivory, sharp)
• Hand (be able, about, armholes, at, axletree, because of, beside, border)
• Mark (very froward thing, perverse thing, desire, signature)

And still the key words are missing. “House-head-chief-tooth-hand-mark” is not all that close to the original bereshit claim. Even skipping Strong’s translations and using only Benner’s, a wide range of secret messages can be conjured. “Family-leader-yoked teacher-tooth-hand-perverse thing” is an equally valid secret message in the first word of the bible!

Key words necessary for the bereshit argument are simply assumed without basis. Aleph, while having to do with leader, has nothing to do with God, as confirmed by my scholars. Notice a noun is transformed into a verb in the conversion of “tooth” to “destroy”! It’s merely “inferring a verb,” says John J. Collins, professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School.

When I raised to John Kostik the fact that these words were missing, he sent me an image that depicted shin standing for destruction in another word, but could not provide a source. “Maybe common sense is to be employed,” he said, adding, “God doesn’t have to source everything through man. God is the source.” I pointed out common sense could also make shin stand for dental hygiene. I did not receive a reply.

You’ll notice “son” is missing here. As explained above, one must combine the first two letters to create “son.” Beyt and resh can join to form the word bar, son (Strong’s 1247). Thus, bereshit can at best be read “son-chief-tooth-hand-mark,” according to Benner’s definitions at least. Or “son-most important-tooth-hand-perverse thing” if you prefer.

Of course, opening the door to letter combinations, rather than moving bereshit closer to validation, can move it farther away. As before, many combinations and words, and thus secret messages, are possible. Beyt-resh-aleph could form bara’ (choose, Strong’s 1254). Resh-aleph could be used for the name Ra. We could combine shin-yud-tav to create shith (to put or set, Strong’s 7896). Yud-tav could form yath (whom, Strong’s 3487). Therefore, “The house of Ra is set” is an equally valid secret message in the first word of the bible, if not superior.

“I actually find this use of the Bible scary,” says Mark S. Smith, professor of Old Testament Language and Exegesis at Princeton Theological Seminary, “because it ends [up] being made into meanings that its creators want, and not what the Bible really says.” A similar sentiment was expressed to me by Michael V. Fox, professor emeritus at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, John Goldingay (“One can prove almost anything by this method”), and Walter Brueggemann, professor emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary (“Sound[s] more like nonsense to me, pressing to [see] what is not there”).

Further, we must be sure to note there are no prepositions or verb tenses with bereshit. My example at best could be “house-Ra-set.” There is no “the,” “of,” or “is.” Same with “The Son of God is destroyed by his own hand on the cross.” There’s no “the” or “of” or “is” or “by” or “his” or “own” or “on.” Where do bereshit believers get any pieces beyond “son-chief-tooth-hand-mark”? One could just as easily assert the meaning “The son isn’t chief until his tooth and hand are marked.” Even if we had “son-god-destroyed-hand-cross” there would still be room to create other narratives, for instance: “My son God destroyed when his hands formed a cross.” He crossed his arms and a city exploded. And of course, even if prepositions and verbs formed a complete “The Son of God is destroyed by his own hand on the cross” there would remain the possibility that this was first discovered by some first-century A.D. scribe who then invented a story of Jesus to “fulfill the prophecy.” But no matter. While “son-god-destroyed-hand-cross” would be intriguing indeed, “son-chief-tooth-hand-mark” is the best we have.

I reached out to ask Benner if he was a bereshit believer. He replied, “I personally do not believe that secret messages are encoded in specific words of the Bible.”

However, Benner’s website does associate letters with certain meanings. Yet the scholars I spoke to were adamant that ancient Hebrew letters should not be viewed as “standing for” something. Ron Hendel, professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies at UC-Berkeley, says of shin, “It’s just a letter of the alphabet. It doesn’t stand for anything except the sound ‘sh.'” This is because ancient Hebrew was never pictographic (where symbols represent things), it was phonetic (where symbols — letters — represent sounds).

Early Hebrew letters (Paleo-Hebrew) came from the older Phoenician alphabet (“phonetic” is not a coincidence), which had 22 letters, all consonants, just like its Hebrew offspring. The Phoenicians lived along the Syrian, Lebanese, and northern Israeli coast, and spread their alphabet across the Mediterranean regions, setting the stage for the development of Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and later English.

In the phonetic Hebrew language the crossed sticks symbol, tav, represented only the “t” sound, as in “toy.” In a similar way, the Greek letter tau makes the “t” sound. English doesn’t generally spell out its letter names, but one could say the English tee makes the “t” sound. There is no evidence that the ox head, the crossed sticks, the man’s head, nor the others were actually used by the Hebrews in a pictographic way, where if one wanted to write the word house one would draw beyt. You had to use letters to form words, like  (ba-yit) above. And no one thought the word “house” contained the secret code of “house-arm-mark”! You were simply using three letters to make a “bh” sound, “y” sound, and “t” sound to make a word.

“The letters never really ‘meant’ those things” to the Hebrews, says Molly Zahn, associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas, “because the whole point of an alphabet of only a limited number of letters (22 in the case of Hebrew) is to represent sounds, not ideas.” Pictographic languages like hieroglyphics require hundreds — thousands — of signs to be at all useful.

Other societies, such as the Egyptians and Sumerians, did use pictographic language for a time (think hieroglyphics and cuneiform), but there is no evidence the Hebrews did. The best evidence points to the first Hebrew writing system being an offshoot of the Phoenician script, which aligns neatly with the evidence that the Hebrew people themselves were an offshoot of the Canaanites, a group that included the Phoenicians.

Now, that does not mean the symbols used by the Hebrews were never used in a pictographic way — they were just never used in a pictographic way by the Hebrews. There is no evidence (“None whatsoever,” emphasized Victor H. Matthews, dean of Religious Studies at Missouri State University) that the Hebrews as an independent people used a pictographic language; they were likely already armed with a Canaanite phonetic language upon their formation. We thus arrive at this question of how it is the names of these Hebrew letters are essentially the same as the words of the everyday objects they were modeled on. This phenomenon has certainly made the bereshit argument seem plausible to some.

If we were to look back in time, before the Hebrews existed, before Phoenicia developed its groundbreaking alphabet, we would likely see the people of the region using pictograms of objects. As Zahn explains, they used the image of an ox’s head to mean an alpu (ox) and a little house drawing to represent a ba-yit. These were eventually used by the first phonetic thinkers to represent sounds, specifically these words’ first syllables, the “ah” and “b” sounds. A drawing of an ox came to represent not an ox but a sound, a letter. It was a sound and letter that would then be used to create a brand new, multi-letter word for ox. That’s the transition from pictographic to phonetic language. Alpu evolved into different forms — aleph (Phoenician, Hebrew), alpha (Greek), alif (Arabic); so did ba-yit — beth (Phoenician), beyt (Hebrew), beta (Greek, today more vita), ba (Arabic), and so on. So it should not be surprising that objects and letters modeled off those objects should have nearly the same names. This is not unique to Hebrew, either. The Arabic word for tooth (sini) looks like سن and sounds, and appears, remarkably like the letter س (sin). The Arabic word for hand (yd) looks like يد and is somewhat close to the letter ي (ya). Other examples in Arabic and other tongues are not difficult to find.

Some will of course, regardless of evidence, argue that the Hebrews, being “God’s chosen people,” invented the pictographs (and/or phonetics) themselves and disseminated them to other peoples. Or that regardless of how biblical Hebrew came about God nevertheless orchestrated events so that whoever wrote Genesis unwittingly put a secret message of Christ’s story in “in the beginning.” That even if an ox head in an ancient language doesn’t mean anything except a sound, we should take it to mean something. But given the evidence it must be concluded that the message could at best be “son-chief-tooth-hand-mark,” which itself is an entirely arbitrary arrangement, leaving out other possible symbol meanings and combinations of words to form new words, simply word choice made by Christians wishing to construct what is not there.

The final verdict on bereshit? To quote Tremper Longman III, professor of Biblical Studies at Westmont College, “It’s bull.”

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