Has science made the Bible a useless document?

However, other people might argue that as scientific theories which are now widely accepted to be fact, such as evolution, contradict the Bible in many places, the rest of it cannot be trusted to be accurate and therefore as it has no historical or scientific accuracy it is a useless document. Taking my previously mentioned example of evolution, as science has proved through the discovery of fossils and Darwin’s theory of evolution, the world as we know it would have taken millions of years to be formed, not be created in 6 days as the Bible states in Genesis, saying in Chapter 2 verse 2 “by the seventh day God finished all the work he had been doing, so He rested from all his work”. People may say that science has proved this to be impossible, and therefore the Bible has no value as a scientific source, making it “useless”.

I take the non-literalist Christian view that the events in the Bible are sometimes symbolic, rather than exactly true as recorded. I believe that simply because science has come up with a theory which it believes disproves the Bible, as it is continually disproving itself it cannot unequivocally say whether or not the Bible is true. I also believe that even if the Bible has no value as a historical or scientific document, this does not make it useless, as many people hold it close to them as the direct words of their God, and take great comfort from it in times of need. Any document which gives comfort to people when they need it, and which they depend upon, can never truly be described as useless; just because it may not be of use to the whole world does not make it useless to individuals or small groups of people. Take as an example the diary of Anne Frank, which was a comfort to her in her own times of need and is now used as a real-life example of the difficult conditions families lived in during the Holocaust. This would not be considered a useless document, although at one time it was merely a young girl’s escape from the monotony of her everyday life, and neither can the Bible be considered to be useless.