The Argument

Science has only vindicated the existence of god and the truth of religion.
There are many examples of things like the Big Bang theory where it took science many centuries to catch up to what religion already taught us about creation. So, not only does science validate religion, it shows how much more amazing religion is than we previously understood. Without supernatural intervention, uneducated ancients could have never discovered as much as they did. How else could you explain such ancient yet advanced knowledge?

How to debunk it

1. It takes quite a bit of imagination to connect something like the Big Bang theory to the biblical creation myth. But any sincere comparison between biblical or quranic scriptures and scientific discoveries will reveal an infinitely larger number of times where scientific discoveries have completely debunked scriptural claims. So, if you do the math on this, the argument falls on its face. Most scriptures hold that the earth is flat, and almost all of them have a geocentric approach, claiming that the sun and stars rotate around the earth. Genesis claims that the earth, along with its vegetation, was created before the sun. And so on. There are simply too many cases of science debunking religious claims for us to take such an argument seriously.
2. “How else could such uneducated ancients know such things?” doesn’t lead to, and cannot support, the conclusion that “It must have been divine revelation/intervention.” The former is a question (and not a rhetorical one). The latter is a complete non sequitur leap to an illogical conclusion.
3. There are indeed some factually correct statements about nature in ancient scriptures (that matter is made of invisible particles, about how embryos develop in the womb, etc.). But as impressive as these may be (and they are), all of them were already known at the time and didn’t require any divine intervention. Ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Persian, Indian and Greek scholars had much more advanced knowledge than many religious apologists claim. By the time the scriptures were written, many of these facts were quite well understood.
4. Many amazing discoveries were made in ancient times by ancient people without any claims of supernatural revelation. Some five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, Eratosthenes not only proved that the world was round, he discovered its circumference and its axial tilt. At around the same period, Pythagoras discovered some of the fundamentals of geometry and Democritus discovered that all matter is made of atoms. Was this a result of divine revelation from the Olympian gods, or is it more likely that intelligent minds, even very ancient ones, could discover things without supernatural intervention?

Get the Debating Religion book now and start debunking common religious arguments in real time. This is a practical hand-book comprised of short segments that introduce common religious arguments followed by bullet-point replies that debunk them—simply, quickly, straight to the point.