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Chapter 1

Why Bother?

The next time you scratch your finger and raise a tiny drop of blood, dont just wipe it off and forget about it. Pause for a moment and reflect. That red blob the size of a pin head is one of the wonders of the world.

Floating around in it like a shoal of microscopic jellyfish are some five million red cells. Every one of them is a distinct living creature. It is born, it lives and works for about four months, and then grows old and dies.

Scattered thinly among the red cells are about ten thousand white cells. There are five different types of these, and their average life span is only a few days. Then there are another quarter of a million floating specks called platelets, and hundreds of different chemicals in solution, all mixed up in an apparently hopeless confusion-and all contained in a spot no bigger than a pins head.

Yet in the midst of this seeming chaos there is order and purpose. The blood surging ceaselessly round your body provides a better transport system than all the worlds postal services put together. Those red cells are like miniature gas cylinders. They collect oxygen from your lungs and deliver it to practically all your cells - and there are far more cells in your body than there are people on earth.

Almost every one of the vast array of chemicals in your bloodstream is on its way to one of a myriad destinations. Some of the sugar and glucose derived from your last meal is heading for your muscles, there to be consumed as fuel. If you ate too much of that chocolate cake, the excess sugar is being sent to your liver, to be stored until your muscles need it.

Other kinds of food products are needed for body-building; they are speeding in all directions to the organs that will make use of them. Iodine is destined for the thyroid, phosphorus for the teeth, calcium for the bones, amino acids for the tissues.

Carbon dioxide is travelling to the lungs to be breathed out. Urea and other waste products are making for the kidneys to be excreted. Millions of red blood cells die every minute, but although their work is finished they are not expelled from the body. They contain an element - iron - that the body does not acquire very easily. It is too precious to be thrown away. So most of these cells are consigned to one of the bodys chemical factories to be broken up. There the molecules of iron are carefully preserved, to be used again in the manufacture of new red cells.

A wide variety of hormones travels along the red river carrying messages. Created in one part of the body, they instruct some other part of the body how to behave. A youths voice breaks, for instance, and his beard begins to grow, when the hormones from his sex glands tell his throat and his face that it is time for him to sound and to look like a man.

Other components of the blood are there just to keep us from harm. It carries its own puncture repair kit. Its watery base, the plasma, contains a protein called fibrinogen. Aided by the suspended platelets this forms a leak-plugging clot whenever it comes into contact with the air. Without fibrinogen we should bleed to death from a cut finger.

The most common type of white blood cell provides a mobile defence force. When infection strikes one part of the body, millions of these white warriors converge on the scene and slaughter the invading bacteria. Other defenders, the antibodies, have a more limited role. Each antibody spells death to only one kind of deadly organism. Fortunately for us the blood contains many different kinds of antibody, so that between them they protect us from a multitude of diseases.

Facts Worth Finding Out

Just a tiny bloodstain on a handkerchief. Something so commonplace that you would not normally give it a second glance. Yet when you examine it more closely, it has a fascinating tale to tell.

The Bible is rather like that. It is so well known that everybody takes it for granted. Yet very few people really know what it is like inside. One purpose of this book is to open up the Bible, and show how interesting it is to those who look beneath its surface.

But there is an even better reason for looking into the Bible. Unlike ordinary books the Bible makes an astonishing claim. "Read me, believe me, and do what I say," says the Bible, in effect, "and the Creator of this wonderful universe will give you a priceless reward."

In these days of slick salesmen and confidence tricksters, this seems altogether too good to be true. Many people take the easy way out. They dismiss the Bibles claims out of hand, without giving them a second thought.

Others behave more thoughtfully. Perhaps they are motivated by a sense of fair play, and do not wish to condemn anything without first giving it a hearing. Perhaps they are moved by that powerful urge, the spirit of curiosity which lies behind all research and discovery. Whatever the reason, they are prepared to examine a few facts about the Bible. This book is for people like them.

Discovering facts and weighing their implications is always a worthwhile job. But it is not always an easy one. Facts can be such awkward things at times.

For example, if the postman comes one morning with an electricity bill for thirty pounds and a statement from the bank indicating that you have a credit balance of eleven pounds and fourpence, you naturally feel rather uncomfortable. Here are some unpleasant facts demanding to be faced. Whats to be done about it?

People react differently in a situation like that. Some people would push the two letters out of sight, go off to work, and forget all about it. They seem to think that if they ignore the problem it will go away.

Others might get hot under the collar about it. Whos to blame, they wonder. Did that stupid man from the Electricity Board read the meter wrongly? Have the boys secretly been keeping the electric fire in their bedroom burning all night? Or has that computer system at the bank slipped up?

You can only feel sorry for people like that. Their prejudiced outlook sticks out like a television aerial on a minicar. Thats the funny thing about prejudice. The other fellows prejudices are always so obvious, but it is often very hard indeed to see our own.

The Layout of this Book

That is why this book has been divided into two main parts. There is probably more prejudice about the Bible than about any other subject on earth. So many fantastic untruths have been told about the Bible that it is practically impossible for a newcomer to approach it with an unbiased mind. The Nazi propaganda minister, Dr. Goebbels, knew a thing or two when he declared, "The bigger the lie, the more readily people will swallow it," If enough mud is thrown, some of it is bound to stick.

Consequently, the average man starts off with the assumption that the Bible cannot possibly be true. This puts the writer of a book like this in a fix. What should he do? Start on the defensive, and show how weak are the arguments used to attack the Bible? Or plunge straight in with the positive evidence that the Bible is true?

In making my decision, I have been guided by the advice of a nineteenth-century enthusiast. "Defend the Bible?" he asked indignantly. "I'd as soon try to defend a lion! All the Bible needs is a fair chance, and it is well able to defend itself."

So I decided to make Part One of this book a statement of some remarkable facts about the Bible. To me there is only one possible explanation of these facts: that the Bible is just what it claims to be, a true

and infallible message from God to mankind. But then I am biased in favour of the Bible, and you, perhaps, are biased against it.

I am not going to ask you to read Part One with an open mind. We all start with convictions of one sort or another, so that there can be no such thing as a truly open mind. As you read Part One, you are likely to find yourself thinking, "Yes, this all sounds very plausible on its own - but what about all the damning evidence against the Bible?"

To this perfectly reasonable question there is a simple answer: that is where Part Two comes in. Part Two attempts to deal with all the most popular objections to the Bible, and you may be surprised to see how unfair and how trivial most of them are.

If you are one of those people who cant stand the suspense of reading a "whodunnit" from beginning to end, but have to have a peep at the ending before you get halfway through, you may be tempted to read Part Two first. But this is not a good idea. You would do better to read Part One keeping all your problems in reserve; then read Part Two, to see how many of those problems can be disposed of; and then go back to Part One again, to reconsider the positive evidence with an easier mind.

And what of Part Three? That is for people whose minds are half made up. If, when you have read Parts One and Two, you think there might be something in the Bible after all, Part Three will tell you how you can settle the matter once and for all.

Not Just for Eggheads

This book is written for ordinary men and women. After all, it was to such folk that Jesus Christ preached. "The common people heard Him gladly," said Mark, with evident satisfaction1. Jesus Himself took pleasure in the fact that "to the poor the gospel is preached"2.

For this reason I shall stick to simple English and try to avoid what might be called "scholarly language". The only places where language of that kind will occur will be in passages quoted from other authors.

In the parts of this book that deal with scientific matters, the kind of language used will probably make my fellow scientists weep. The fact is, you simply cannot talk accurately about science without using the correct, long, scientific terms. But then, as the foreword to an excellent non-technical book3 published by a British Government scientific laboratory says, "it is more important to be nearly right and understandable, than academically accurate and incomprehensible."

In any case, I am not writing this book from the point of view of a scientist, but as a student of the Bible. Being a scientist might help you to spot the mistakes of other scientists when they condemn the Bible.

But it would not help you to decide whether the Bible is a message from God. Studying the Bible for ourselves is the only way we can do that. And we can study the Bible without knowing any science, or even any of the more useful subjects like Hebrew and Greek and ancient history. The only essential equipment is a thoughtful, enquiring mind.

Many of the arguments in this book, especially in Parts One and Three, are based on the text of the Bible itself. Because most people are more familiar with the so-called Authorised (or King James) Version of the Bible than with any modern version, the majority of the Bible quotations are from that version. To make the quotations easier to read I have modernised the punctuation in some places. Sometimes I have slipped into the words of the English Revised Version without mentioning it, where this gives the sense of the Scriptures more clearly. Whenever any other translation has been used I have said so.

In other places I have had to base arguments on facts (and opinions) drawn from many sources. For the sake of any readers who may wish to consult the original sources of information, details of all the more important ones are given in the notes.

Where a book referred to in this way is marked with a star (*), it means that I regard it as particularly helpful-and that it is written in language a layman can understand. Some of these starred books were written a long time ago, and may be out of print now. But they are worth the trouble of tracking them down, if you can manage it.



1 Mark 12:37

2 Luke 7:22

3 Fish Handling and Processing. Published by H.M.S.O., London, 1965, for the Torry Research Station.