What is true?

So a responder to "Reason" (below) had this to say and ask: "You ask why God didn't communicate the truth of His interactions with ancient people. If He had, how would it be any more verifiable than the accounts that we have recorded in the Bible today? In other words, how would we know that it was historically accurate?"

I responded in the comment but had intended on writing a bit more about the historical inaccuracies in the bible so I thought I'd include her question.

The question is not an uncommon argument for those who take the historicity of the bible as "gospel" :)-- after all, they have been told over and over again that the bible is true, that god may not have left evidence but nevertheless it is Truth. (Well, the whole argument is far more complex and convoluted than that, but that is essentially the point.)

In "The fiction of the bible" I point out that the creation story as written in the bible is clearly not how the earth was created. For instance we KNOW that there were humans at least 4.4 million years ago. (see full story at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ardi-hominid-human-ancestor.) This immediately contradicts the biblical account that god created man and woman in his image. The human that we see in the picture (above and also taken from Scientific American) is not at all what people should have looked like if god made people the way you might make a cake or a craft project. And most evangelical christians patently reject the notion that there is a link between humans and chimpanzees.

Yet here it is. We have the skull.

Now if you reject science (except when you're sick and want the doctor to make you well-- especially those christians who see god's miraculous hand working through technology and modern medicine for healing. Then science it great!!!) then, no problem. This means nothing. But if you do understand that we can find out a great deal about the earth and ourselves through science, then this early ancestor of ours should raise a lot of questions.

He (or she) doesn't look like Adam (or Eve) to me.

But there's lots more of those kind of things to talk about so stick around...