Reasons for the Bible: God is Smarter than Us
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My 3-year-old daughter has entered the “Why?” phase. That’s the period in a preschooler’s life when the causal relationship between everything in the universe must be explained.
Sometime, you should try explaining why wheels are round to a 3-year-old. She doesn’t understand much, but my infant understands less. For instance, she cries when you take her blanket away at breakfast because she doesn’t really understand that her blanket and yogurt don’t go together. That’s why children have parents.
Parents know what children do not know because they have greater intellectual capacity, physical ability, knowledge and experience. Parents who fail to exercise this advantage on their behalf to protect and instruct their children, we would all agree, aren’t really doing their jobs as parents.
One stage of parenting I have not yet reached is the teenage years. As of now, my children basically understand that I know things they don’t and that I am smarter than they are. Teenagers seem to forget that.
Consider that there is a being whose intellectual capacity, physical ability, knowledge and experience are far greater than ours. Consider a being whose knowledge and ability exceeds ours much more than mine exceeds my baby daughter’s. This is the kind of being that, simply by speaking, can create everything that exists in its great scope and complexity. It is the source of space, time, matter, ethics and morality.
Now imagine the same being is incapable of communicating. Imagine the message that being was incapable of communicating was neither accurate nor good, even though the being itself is the source of reality and morality.
If that sort of scenario makes sense to you, you might be a spiritual teenager.
Pew reports that in 2014, only about 7 percent of Americans were atheist or agnostic. The vast majority profess belief in some kind of “higher power.” It follows that a “higher power” should at least be able to do everything we do. If we can communicate in writing, so must God be able to.
That’s what the Bible claims to be: written communication from God.
2 Peter 1:21 says, “No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” 2 Timothy 3:16-17 also claims, “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.”
I am not trying to use the Bible as evidence for itself, but what the Bible claims itself to be should not be confused. Beyond that, though, I would also like to propose that the Bible is exactly what it claims to be is a rational argument. If God can do everything we can do and more, and if we can communicate accurately through a written record, then God can also communicate through a written record.
That written record is the Bible.
Where the Bible fails to conform to our own perceptions, we have a few choices. We can decide that God was mistaken. Or we can reject God’s ability to communicate at all. More rationally, we can prefer God’s revealed perspective over our own. Perhaps God, who defines right and wrong, knows good from evil better than we do.
Recently, I have been examining objections to believing the Bible. Where those objections fail, the simple fact that God can communicate does not prove that the Bible is reliable. It does, however, make trusting the Bible as the Word of God rational.
As you consider the Bible, I would invite you to consider your presuppositions about God. If you can concede the existence of any sort of “higher power,” what the Bible claims about itself is at least not ridiculous. At best, it’s true. And if the Bible is true, something about the way we each live might need to change.