This disbeliever became a disbeliever because he found it impossible to rationalize away the multitude of discrepancies and pretend that there was an overarching, unified narrative. Discovering that the Bible wasn't written nor assembled the way I thought it was helped make its contents much more sensible. Treating it like the cobbled-together writings of an ancient people who were no different than their contemporaries makes it a much more understandable book than treating it like a god-inspired testament to his own greatness, which is at once divine and fallible and given to a wide range of interpretations and misinterpretations.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
