Leonard Stern, writes,

Here’s the problem: The atheists don’t understand that it’s possible to reject scripture as history but still accept it as sacred narrative.

I would say the problem for Christians is that they are cowed by atheists’ ridicule. Christ spoke about Genesis like it was literal, e.g. when talking of the importance of marriage (and quoting Genesis 2) and so should we.

We can count on the new atheists to remind us yet again that the Sumerians had their own version of a flood story (the Gilgamesh epic)

What does the Bible say? There was a global Flood. Many cultures all around the world relate a flood story. Why? Because there was a global flood! It explains an awful lot about our planet that a uniformitarian worldview cannot.

Do Not Covet Thy Neighbour’s Wife, reduces women to property.

Hitchens is so ‘new man’ isn’t he? Except a wife does belong to her husband and vice versa. Successful cultures have men as the head of the family. Hitchens’ mistake is to believe (or wish) that this means women are treated as second-class citizens, which it doesn’t necessarilly.

Religion is ridiculous for Hitchens because, in his view, it means that you necessarily believe that Eve was made from Adam’s rib.

Ribs are the only bones that will grow back.

Wilson really believes, for example, that Noah crammed all those animals on a single boat. I wonder how many times Hitchens has patiently crunched the numbers for his pal, calculating the mass of the animals in order to show that Noah’s task was an engineering impossibility.

The Ark was not an ‘engineering impossibility’. Korean naval architects, using the dimensions stated in Genesis, calculated that it would be extremely stable in high seas. As for the sheer number of animals, it is not nearly as many as people imagine. Like humans adapted to suit different parts of the world, so did the animals. There weren’t hundreds of different people groups on the Ark, just eight people in total. There needed to be just one or two types of cat, dog and bear for example and as they spread and bred after the waters receded, natural selection provided the speciation.

Yet all the professional atheists want to do is take out a Bible, flip to the story of Balaam in Numbers 22:1-35, and demand to know if you believe in talking donkeys.

Why shouldn’t we believe that the Almighty can make an animal talk? He created them in the first place. He made Balaam speak his words as well. Christ ordered devils to leave a man and they entered the Gadarene swine. God can do things that we cannot. It can’t be that hard to understand.

The problem with the “atheist”, and I like to put this word in inverted commas because I don’t believe anyone is totally atheist, (Richard Dawkins has described himself as a 6.8/6.9 out of 7 atheist. That makes him an agnostic!) is that he seems to have a limited capacity for imagining what could be, and is contented to settle for what is. He finds it hard to understand that an Almighty Creator can do whatever he wants.

Christians should stop apologising for scripture and realise that atheists, or rather agnostics, have problems understanding the world around them and the spirit within them.