Models
2500 years passed between creation and Moses writing Genesis.
2500 years of history is a long time.
2500 years ago Athens and Sparta fended off Xerxes I and the Persian invasion. In the last 2500 years, Alexander the Great conquered the world, the Roman Empire rose and fell, Christianity began, and the Middle Ages gave birth to modern Europe.
If history wasn't passed down to us, we would only remember the most recent 100 years, the only part of history we know first-hand. Beyond the last 100 years, history comes second-hand, and it usually arrives in bits and pieces.
Right after the failed Persian Invasion, Herodotus wrote his Histories. Today, it’s quite a book. English translations are more than 800 pages long, but those translations come from manuscripts made in the 10th century or so, about 1500 years after the original. The oldest pieces of Histories are scraps, only a few lines of text, and those scraps are still 500 years short of the first edition. The 10th century manuscripts were probably good copies using sources we don't have anymore, but without the original, there’s no way to double-check.
What we don’t get from written records we have to find in verbal history, in what people remember. Verbal history comes in family stories, anecdotes, campfire tales, and folklore. Some stories might be true, some were probably invented, but all of them changed over time. There is no way to know the original story. Verbal history is like the party game telephone, except it isn’t whispered around a circle, but relayed across generations.
Written records and verbal stories are our main sources for history, but both suffer from the same weakness. Unless the original survives, what we receive is a copy, or a copy of a copy. Each new edition opens the door for mistakes. Written sources are better, they go through fewer editions, but there’s no way double-check the original. The copy is the best information we have.
From those copies, with their gaps and their mistakes, history is stitched and patched together. It's a mash-up full of assumptions about how words should be translated, what different idioms mean, and how to fill in missing parts. The history we have is educated guessing that tells a nice story, but there’s no way to know if that story is right. There’s no way to tell what parts are missing, or what parts aren’t true. Historians and archeologists work to make ever-better guesses, but deductive reasoning has its limits. When those limits are reached, lacking better information, we have to assume the story is right while remembering it took a leap of faith to get there.
When we forget that last leap of faith, and modern theories disagree with details in the Bible, we take modern theories as science, as fact, and belief in the Bible as anti-science faith.
But that’s not how science works.
Historians and archeologists are scientists, and scientists don’t create fact, they make models. They connect the dots on pieces of evidence and try to draw a picture that makes sense. Just as a dot-to-dot of a giraffe isn’t a photograph of a giraffe, and a photograph of a giraffe isn’t a real giraffe, a theory isn’t what actually happened, it’s only our best guess based upon how we understand the evidence.
When modern discoveries and long-held beliefs disagree, the first step shouldn’t be outright rejection of one or the other, but an investigation of assumptions. Contradictions don’t exist.
There are models for the same data that both agree and disagree with the Bible. Which model do you put faith in?