I once believed that the Bible was historically accurate.
I now believe that it contains a lot of myths / folk stories and is therefore not a reliable history record. Most of these stories, such as the exodus, were probably not invented by a single person, but were passed down for generations with small embellishments made along the way. Other stories, like the story of Jonah, probably were invented by a single person who was trying to make a political or theological point. I'd like to list some facts that in my opinion make a solid case for the unreliability of the Bible.
Carbon dating of ancient settlements
The Biblical timeline can be pretty well established using all of the genealogies. According to this timeline, the world was created by God around 4000 BC. This timeline places the Biblical flood at around 2300 BC at which time the entire world was destroyed with a global flood that killed everyone except Noah and his family and the animals on the ark. This means that all of the nations that we have archaeological artifacts from must have existed after 2300 BC. The Akkadians, Sumerians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chinese, Aztecs, Incans, Mayans, Aboriginal Australians, etc. must have all descended from Noah's three sons. If they had existed before the flood, all of their artifacts, buildings and remains would have been destroyed by the year long global flood. This creates some real dating problems for creationists because they have to squish all of the ancient history for these nations into two millenniums. We have written records from the Sumerians that date back to 2900 BC and historians date the settlement of Sumer at around 4000 BC. The Kish tablet is said to be the oldest preserved writing we have from the Sumerians and is dated to ca. 3500 BC.
There have been human settlements discovered that date back much further than the Sumerians. For example, the buildings at Gobekli Tepe were first built around 9500 BC. One of the methods used to date these settlements is C-14 dating. Creationists believe this method is unreliable, but this has really been disproven by the numerous findings that carbon dating has been checked against. It is a lot of work, but scientists are very thorough and have calibrated this method and have been able to cross-verify its accuracy with other dating methods such as tree-ring dating.
The distribution of animal species / endemic species
According to Answers in Genesis, Noah was able to fit about 8,000 different kinds of animals on his ark. From this number of animals we are to believe that they have diverged into the millions of species we have today. Creationists routinely scoff the idea of species evolving into different species, but they surprisingly have no problem with hyper fast animal diversity occurring within a few thousand years.
The animals that left the ark would have had to survive in the barren flood lands that would have followed the great deluge. They must have all made quite a run for it after being released from their cages on the ark. They needed to escape all of the carnivores and mate quickly before one of them died. Perhaps Noah gave the herbivores a head start. With this picture of the post-flood world in your mind, let's look at what we actually see today.
Consider all of the unique species that exist on islands. Kangaroos must have left the ark and headed straight for Australia since they are found nowhere else on the planet (including fossil remains). The same goes for the Koala, the Tasmanian Devil, the Platypus and the Echidna (to name a few) that all high-tailed it for Australia. Lemurs decided to go directly to Madagascar and are found nowhere else. Armadillos on the other hand headed directly to South / Central America and are found nowhere else. There are lots of these endemic species so I won't list them all, and I won't even get into all of the different endemic insects and plants. The point is, this is not what we would expect to see if all of the animals has dispersed from a central location only 4,000 years ago. Evolution, on the other hand, predicts that we would find exotic, unique species on islands because they have been isolated for long periods of time.
Also, in the post-flood world there were animals that had to get back to their natural habitats without dying on the way there. Try to picture the penguin family making their way from the middle east back to Antarctica. What about rain forest animals? Did they have to stand around waiting for their particular ecosystem to grow back? If all of the fresh water fish somehow survived the toxic mixing of salt water oceans with fresh water, did they afterward get lucky and end up in the right pond, river or lake? To read more about the problems with the idea of a global flood, click here.
The universe is very old
When I was a Christian I never researched how astronomers have been able to determine cosmological distances. Now that I realize that it is based on observable science and I've taken the time to understand how it works it has become quite clear to me that the universe is in fact billions of years old. The fact that we are able to see light from galaxies that are billions of light-years away, means that the light from those galaxies has been traveling for billions of years. Right now the furthest known galaxy is MACS0647-JD and is 13.3 billion light years from Earth. If you would like to learn how cosmological distances are calculated, I recommend starting with this article: Determining Distances to Astronomical Objects. If you look on the Answers in Genesis website, you'll see that they agree with these methods and admit that stars exist that are millions and billions of light-years away. They try to twist out of this problem by saying things like "Maybe time used to be faster" or "Maybe light used to travel faster", but even if this were possible they are ignoring the vast difference between billions and thousands of years.
Also interesting: Helium-burning binary stars give us a new tape measure for the universe. The distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud, the second closest galaxy to the Milky Way, was calculated with new precision to 49.97 kiloparsecs from the Earth (~164,901 light years away).
Ancient human fossils
Click here for a list of fossils on Wikipedia. Biblical creationists have had to do a lot of work trying to figure out how all these fossils fit into the Biblical timeline. They usually try to classify the fossils as either being an ape or a human and they don't always agree on these. Neanderthals, I believe, are agreed on as being humans. There have been roughly 400 different Neanderthal specimens discovered, mainly in Europe. Many young-earth creationists say that the Neanderthals were part of the dispersal from Babel. I find this strange, because most Neanderthals lived in caves (some made dwellings out of animal bones) and they had primitive tools. In contrast, the people mentioned in the Bible who lived at Babel were city dwellers and were capable of building a tall tower. I don't see how a group of people from Babel would be able to go from city building to such primitive circumstances. Also, how did the Neanderthals develop such unique skull differences in such a short time? Click here for a picture of a Homo Sapiens skull next to a Neanderthal skull.
While the facts I have mentioned created some serious problems for my trust in the Bible, they are not what ultimately caused me to distrust it. It was the moral problems that really opened my eyes and helped me realize that the Bible could not be inspired or infallible. I read this lecture by Emmett Fields and by the time I reached the end of it my faith in the Bible had crumbled. I realized that it made much more sense to read the Bible strictly as the written works of men.
