OUTDATED "SCIENCE" IN THE BIBLE
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"And there was evening, and there was morning — the third day. And God said, 'Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night'"
Genesis 1:13-14, Bible (NIV)
Is there a problem in having mornings and evenings before the sun even existed? Of course not.
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"The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high ... You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female...You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them."
Genesis 6:15,19,21, Bible (NIV)
Noah had some mad Tetris skills as he stuffed countless thousands of animals, along with the food supply for a year-long adventure, into an ark that could accommodate only a fraction of it.
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"In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark; They, and every beast..., and all the cattle..., and every creeping thing..., and every fowl..., every bird of every sort."
Genesis 7:13-14, Bible (KJV)
This would require almost 100 couples boarding per second for 24 hours non-stop.
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"All the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered [by the flood]... on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible."
Genesis 7:19; 8:4-5, Bible (NIV)
According to biblical physics, 8000+ meter high mountains — Everest and alike — became visible only months after Noah's ark landed on 5137 meters high Ararat.
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"All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds — everything that moves on land — came out of the ark"
Genesis 8:19, Bible (NIV)
What did carnivores eat outside of the ark if all the other animals were dead? Did they wait until rabbits reproduced enough? And how did kangaroos get to Australia?
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"Now [~4000 years ago] the whole world had one language and a common speech."
Genesis 11:1, Bible (NIV)
Without a TV, God didn't know that regions other than the Middle East existed.
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"Jacob... took fresh-cut branches... and made white stripes on them... Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs... When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted."
Genesis 30:37-39, Bible (NIV)
Notes from a Biblical science page: Geneticists, close your laboratories, all you need to change genes is a striped branch.
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"In six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them"
Exodus 20:11, Bible (NIV)
But arranged it in such a way that overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrates a very different scenario.
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"These are the birds you are to regard as unclean: ... the bat."
Leviticus 11:13-19, Bible (NIV)
The omniscient God of the universe doesn't know that a bat is not a bird. Or he just didn't bother making his message for humans relevant in their world.
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"All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be regarded as unclean"
Leviticus 11:20, Bible (NIV)
Would be great to see at least one flying insect that walks on four legs.
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"If a man takes a wife... and gives her a bad name, saying, 'I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity,' then the young woman's father and mother shall bring to the town elders at the gate proof that she was a virgin... her parents shall display the cloth... If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman's virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father's house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death."
Deuteronomy 22:13-21, Bible (NIV)
God is not aware that not all women bleed at their "first time", so he comes up with this stupid brutal "bloody virginity evidence" law that led to killing plenty of women for no reason.
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"An eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings..."
Deuteronomy 32:11, Bible (KJV)
God doesn't know that eagles don't carry their young on their wings or in their claws. The myth that eagles do it when training juveniles to fly has been debunked as an adult eagle can lift only about 1/3 of its weight. By the time a juvenile is ready to fly, it weighs almost as much as an adult.
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"From the heavens the stars fought, from their courses they fought against Sisera [the commander of the army]"
Judges 5:20, Bible (NIV)
God doesn't know that stars can't fight against people. Or maybe God meant it is an astrological way after accidentally taking an astrology course instead of astronomy without ever realizing it.
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"The pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and he hath set the world upon them."
1 Samuel 2:8, Bible (KJV)
God thinks that the earth is standing on pillars.
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"When the ark of the Lord's covenant came into the camp, all Israel raised such a great shout that the ground shook."
1 Samuel 4:5, Bible (NIV)
God is unaware that it's physically impossible to shake the ground with a shout so that a person can notice it, no matter how many people you take and how hard they try. Do you say this is just a common literary technique of exaggeration? But then how can we know which other biblical statements are not exaggerations?
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"He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it."
1 Kings 7:23 = 2 Chronicles 4:2, Bible (NIV)
π knows better than God. Circumference = 2πr, which in this case is 2 x 3.14 x 5 = 31.4, not 30 as God thinks.
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"The rest of them [the Arameans] escaped to the city of Aphek, where the wall collapsed on twenty-seven thousand of them."
1 Kings 20:30, Bible (NIV)
Where did the unimportant city of Aphek get a wall big enough to collapse on 27,000 people?
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"David's fame spread throughout every land, and the Lord made all the nations fear him."
1 Chronicles 14:17, Bible (NIV)
Oh, yes, Mayan civilization was especially afraid of David, the leader of a small country in Mesopotamia on a continent they didn't even know about.
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"The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved."
1 Chronicles 16:30, Bible (NIV)
If the world was proven to be static, apologists would credit this verse for scientific knowledge beyond its time. But because the world is proven to be always moving at all scales, this biblical statement is allocated to the "metaphorical" category. So convenient.
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"I [David] have prepared for the house of the Lord a hundred thousand talents of gold, and a thousand thousand talents of silver"
1 Chronicles 22:14, Bible (KJV)
Are you ready? That is 3.4 million kg (7.5 million lbs) of gold and 34 million kg (75 million lbs) of silver. That is definitely beyond the acquiring capability of a local country of David at the boundary between the Bronze and Iron Ages.
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"King David said... 'Who is willing to consecrate themselves to the Lord today?'... They gave toward the work on the temple of God five thousand talents and ten thousand darics of gold"
1 Chronicles 29:1-7, Bible (NIV)
Darics are well-known Persian golden coins that were introduced 500 years after King David's lifetime. Bringing 10,000 of them to David seems legit. Adds credibility to the Bible.
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"Asa... was diseased in his feet... his disease was exceeding great: yet in his disease he sought not to the Lord, but to the physicians."
2 Chronicles 16:12, Bible (KJV)
The Bible encourages the rejection of doctors in favor of prayer, despite modern doctors doing a much, much better job healing people. When fundamentalists consciously deprive themselves of medical attention, that's up to them. Natural selection will take care of them. The problem comes when they do the same to their children or when they cut medical research budgets in favor of religious fantasies.
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"The Lord moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia... to put it in writing... 'The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem'"
2 Chronicles 36:22-23, Bible (NIV)
It's already very close to the time of Jesus, but God is still unaware of the multitudes of other nations living outside of the Middle East. Even at its greatest extent, Persia was a localized entity, being not even close to controlling all the kingdoms of the earth as God believed.
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"He [God] shakes the earth from its place and makes its pillars tremble."
Job 9:6, Bible (NIV)
"When the earth and all its people quake, it is I [God] who hold its pillars firm."
Psalm 75:3, Bible (NIV)
Thank you, God, for holding the earth's pillars, so it doesn't collapse when you shake it with earthquakes!
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"He [God] speaks to the sun and it does not shine"
Job 9:7, Bible (NIV)
God: "Hey, Sun, extinguish all that burning gas in you, turn off your nuclear fusion for some time and then reignite again shortly after; that's how I think eclipses work". Sun: "Gotcha"
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"Their measure is longer than the earth"
Job 11:9, Bible (NIV)
"From heaven the Lord looks down and sees all mankind; from his dwelling place he watches all who live on earth"
Psalm 33:13-14, Bible (NIV)
"The rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth."
Daniel 2:35, Bible (NIV)
All of this requires the earth to be flat. God joined The Flat Earth Society before it became mainstream.
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"I [Job] am a brother to dragons"
Job 30:29, Bible (KJV)
That's pretty cool for Job, but not too cool for the plausibility of God's text.
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"By the breath of God frost is given"
Job 37:10, Bible (NIV)
God makes sure to breathe on the earth's poles a lot, chasing them while the earth's axis is rotating in different planes.
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"Can you join him [God] in spreading out the skies, hard as a mirror of cast bronze?"
Job 37:18, Bible (NIV)
God thinks that skies are as hard as a mirror of cast bronze.
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"Have you ever... shown the dawn its place, that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it?"
Job 38:12-13, Bible (NIV)
The Bible is just soaked with science.
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"Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I [God] reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle?"
Job 38:22-23, Bible (NIV)
God stores snow and hail in special warehouses to use it on days of wars and battles. It's true.
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"The Lord spoke to Job... 'From whose womb comes the ice?'... Job replied to the Lord: 'I know that you can do all things'"
Job 38:1,29 - 42:1-2, Bible (NIV)
From God's womb comes the ice. That's what the Bible says.
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"The foundations of the earth laid bare at your rebuke, Lord, at the blast of breath from your nostrils."
Psalm 18:15, Bible (NIV)
This statement about the foundations of the earth bared by a blast from God's super powerful nostrils is so far ahead of its time. What scientific accuracy! Unbelievable.
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"In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun... It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other"
Psalm 19:4-6, Bible (NIV)
There is a tent for the sun... Thanks to scientific advancements, more and more biblical descriptions of the natural world are proven wrong, causing them to be moved to the "allegorical" category in order to cover God's failures. There is almost nothing left. And when you think about what's left, remember that even a broken clock is right twice a day.
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"May they be like a slug that melts away as it moves along"
Psalm 58:8, Bible (NIV)
God doesn't know where the slime comes from and thinks that slugs are melting as they move until they melt away.
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"Thou [God] hast set all the borders of the earth"
Psalm 74:17, Bible (KJV)
"The Creator of the ends of the earth."
Isaiah 40:28, Bible (NIV)
"He whistles for those at the ends of the earth."
Isaiah 5:26, Bible (NIV)
"From the four corners of the earth."
Isaiah 11:12, Bible (KJV)
Did you know that the earth has 4 corners with borders at its ends?
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"The Lord watches over you — the Lord is your shade at your right hand; the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night."
Psalm 121:5-6, Bible (NIV)
God believes that moonlight is harmful.
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"He [God] determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name."
Psalm 147:4, Bible (NIV)
The stars come and go; their number is not static. And even by a conservative estimate, there are ~10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, which is a lot of names for God to remember.
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"I beheld all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun: because though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it"
Ecclesiastes 8:17, Bible (KJV)
Biblical "scientific" statements demonstrate that God himself had no clue how the world works, so he assumed that people won't get it either. He didn't expect science to come and do a far better job than he could at researching and explaining the world.
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"As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God"
Ecclesiastes 11:5, Bible (NIV)
Actually, now we know very well how wind moves and how the body is formed, and we can understand the "work of God": it's fictional.
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"Out of the serpent's root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent."
Isaiah 14:29, Bible (KJV)
A biology lesson from the Bible.
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"In that day your cattle will graze in broad meadows. The oxen and donkeys that work the soil will eat fodder and mash... the sunlight will be seven times brighter"
Isaiah 30:23-26, Bible (NIV)
Uneducated God doesn't know that the sun shining 7X brighter will be so hot that it will kill all life on earth.
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"All the stars in the sky will be dissolved... all the starry host will fall like withered leaves from the vine"
Isaiah 34:4, Bible (NIV)
Stars will fall like leaves... to where?
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"You have defiled the land with your prostitution and wickedness. Therefore the showers have been withheld, and no spring rains have fallen."
Jeremiah 3:2-3, Bible (NIV)
Based on this divine statement, spiritual prostitutes must be concentrated in the desert areas of the globe, with none of them in the tropics.
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"I [God] made the sand a boundary for the sea, an everlasting barrier it cannot cross. The waves may roll, but they cannot prevail; they may roar, but they cannot cross it."
Jeremiah 5:22, Bible (NIV)
It's no surprise that a god which was made up in the Middle East was not aware of tsunamis or possible rise in the ocean level, and believed that the shoreline can't be crossed by waves.
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"When he [God] is angry, the earth trembles"
Jeremiah 10:10, Bible (NIV)
It means that God gets angry only near the edges of the tectonic plates — where earthquakes happen. And God also matches the timing of his anger with cycles of gradually raising the pressure in the earth's lithosphere.
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"For the land is full of adulterers; for because of swearing the land mourneth; the pleasant places of the wilderness are dried up"
Jeremiah 23:10, Bible (KJV)
Now you know the biblical secret of how to quickly assess the proportion of swearing adulterers in a country: by the degree of dryness. If God had a bit more data or at least a map, he would have been more careful in his statements.
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"The Lord says: 'Only if the heavens above can be measured and the foundations of the earth below be searched out will I... [blah-blah]'"
Jeremiah 31:37, Bible (NIV)
Skies above and depths below can be measured quite precisely nowadays. God didn't see that coming.
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"These are the visions I [Daniel] saw while lying in bed: I looked, and there before me stood a tree in the middle of the land. Its height was enormous. The tree grew large and strong and its top touched the sky; it was visible to the ends of the earth."
Daniel 4:10-11, Bible (NIV)
A tree, visible from other continents and even from the opposite side of the globe? Don't argue, God knows best.
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"I saw in a vision... Out of one of them [horns] came forth a little horn... and it waxed great, even to the host of heaven; and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them."
Daniel 8:2-10, Bible (KJV)
God the science guy thinks that a waxed horn can bring stars to the earth to stomp on them.
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"There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land... Because of this the land dries up, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea are swept away."
Hosea 4:1-3, Bible (NIV)
This claimed causality between no acknowledgment of God and dryness of the land goes against hard statistics of the real world. When a book contradicts reality, the right choice is to dismiss that book, but that's a too hard choice for too many.
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"I [God] will show wonders... The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood"
Joel 2:30-31 = Acts 2:19-20, Bible (NIV)
God takes advantage of peoples' ignorance and sells to the people regular eclipses as wonders.
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"'In that day,' declares the Sovereign Lord, 'I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight.'"
Amos 8:9, Bible (NIV)
God didn't realize that it will have the opposite effect for people on the other side of the earth, who'd have midnight at that moment. God: "Folks, sorry to wake you up by bringing the sun to your side, but I'm doing some magic for people on the other side. I will do the same for you later today."
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"The devil took him [Jesus] to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world"
Matthew 4:8 = Luke 4:5, Bible (NIV)
The devil also made the earth flat for just a few minutes so that Jesus could see all the kingdoms from one point.
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"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them."
Matthew 6:26, Bible (NIV)
"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father's care."
Matthew 10:29, Bible (NIV)
Jesus thinks that his heavenly dad does a good job feeding and caring for the birds. But in reality, the majority of the birds die before they reach maturity. As for sparrows in particular, under "Father's care" 75-80% of sparrows hatched do not survive to their first breeding season. Then 35%-55% of survived adults die each year.
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"They brought him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute, and Jesus healed him, so that he could both talk and see."
Matthew 12:22, Bible (NIV)
You need to be totally ignorant of the research achievements of modern medicine to agree with the Bible that people become blind, or mute, or deaf due to demonic possession, and that restoring vision, or speech, or hearing requires a demon to be cast out.
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"The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed... which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof."
Matthew 13:31-32, Bible (KJV); similar: Mark 4:31-32
Seeds of epiphytic orchids are smaller than of mustard, and mustard "trees" in reality are mid-size bushes that don't attract nesting birds. God can't remember the specifications of his creations.
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"Immediately after the distress of those days... the stars will fall from the sky"
Matthew 24:29 = Mark 13:24-25, Bible (NIV)
Whoever wrote this clearly believed that the stars are small objects hanging above the earth, ready to fall. The author also didn't know that stars "falling" for observers at one hemisphere, will be "rising" for observers at the other hemisphere, making this "falling stars" prophecy impossible even if you throw the "miracle factor" in.
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"They were childless because Elizabeth was not able to conceive"
Luke 1:7, Bible (NIV)
Have you noticed that in the Bible only women have fertility problems? God is a bit behind in knowledge of human physiology but far ahead in sexism.
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"A man in the crowd called out, 'Teacher, I beg you to look at my son... A spirit seizes him and he suddenly screams; it throws him into convulsions so that he foams at the mouth'... While the boy was coming, the demon threw him to the ground in a convulsion. But Jesus rebuked the impure spirit, healed the boy"
Luke 9:38-42, Bible (NIV)
Cutting corpus callosum, which is a band of tissue that connects and transmits messages from one side of the brain to the other, permanently stops epilepsy. The procedure has side effects but nevertheless, that means that a physical cut casts out the impure spirit from a person, or that means that uneducated God was all wrong about impure spirits having anything to do with epilepsy.
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"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going."
John 3:8, Bible (NIV)
God, we can tell where the wind comes from and where it is going. We can. You can't.
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"During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, 'Come over to Macedonia and help us'... We got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them."
Acts 16:9-10, Bible (NIV)
Dreams were considered visions from God before the true nature of dreams became known, thanks to science.
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"Since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made"
Romans 1:20, Bible (NIV)
The complexity of the world does not prove the participation of God in it, and here is why. If complexity can't exist without an external conscious designer, then that complex designer — God — would also need to be created by an even more complex god, and so on, infinitely. "Complexity, therefore, designer" argument self-destructs when you think about it 1 step further.
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"Just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy... Those who do such things deserve death."
Romans 1:28-31, Bible (NIV)
The Bible says that neglect of God makes people evildoers. The statistics of the real world say the opposite: more religious areas have higher crime and homicide rates.
* The Gallup Religiosity Index (2009)
* European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control, Affiliated with the United Nations (2010) International Statistics on Crime and Justice, p.9
* United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2013) Global Study on Homicide, p.115-120
* Paul, GregoryS. (2005). "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies". JournalofReligion&Society 7:1.
* Zuckerman, Phil. (2008) Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment. NewYork: NewYorkUniversityPress. p.2.
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"He [Jesus] also descended first into the lower parts of the earth"
Ephesians 4:9, Bible (KJV)
Some people say it means that hell is located inside the earth. Can't really prove this wrong yet, just like Russell's teapot orbiting around the sun can't be proven wrong yet. Google "burden of proof" and be honest with yourself.
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"Every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind"
James 3:7, Bible (KJV)
God is unaware of animals other than those tamed in the times of James.
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"He [Jesus] opened the sixth seal... and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree"
Revelation 6:12-13, Bible (NIV)
God has no idea about the structure of the world that he built.
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"I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth to prevent any wind from blowing on the land or on the sea or on any tree."
Revelation 7:1, Bible (NIV)
Wind science for you from the Bible.
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"The fourth angel sounded his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of them turned dark. A third of the day was without light, and also a third of the night."
Revelation 8:12, Bible (NIV)
That's exactly how it works. If you strike 1/3 of the sun and 1/3 of the moon, they will be running out of light ahead of time during the day and the night.
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THERE ARE MORE VERSES IN A SIMILAR VEIN BUT THE ONES ABOVE ARE ENOUGH TO MAKE THE POINT