Fundamentalist Atheist Tim Sledge thinks he has a real stumper: Abraham’s descendants nowhere near as numerous as the stars!

the­ists some­times have the same obses­sion with bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ism that Fun­da­men­tal­ists do. One such athe­ist is Tim Sledge. Mr. Sledge used to be a Bap­tist pas­tor. He now has two books out. Good­bye Jesus is his decon­ver­sion sto­ry. The fol­low-up is called Four Dis­turb­ing Ques­tions With One Sim­ple Answer, and even Dr. David Mad­son, whose Ph.D. is in bib­li­cal stud­ies, thinks it’s a slam-dunk against Chris­tian­i­ty. The book is full of dumb ques­tions like Why did­n’t Jesus tell us about germs? Even athe­ist read­ers of mine find this stuff sil­ly; I spoke with one about that ear­li­er today. But appar­ent­ly peo­ple with Ph.D.‘s in bib­li­cal stud­ies take the poor guy seri­ous­ly. So respond I must, I guess.

Here’s anoth­er of Mr. Sledge’s stumpers; this one’s on Twit­ter, where he boasts over 7,000 fol­low­ers. He writes:

God promised Abra­ham his descen­dants would be as “numer­ous as the stars” (Gen­e­sis 22:17 NIV).

There are more than 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 [100 sex­til­lion] stars.

About 100,000,000,000 peo­ple have lived on Earth.

At least 99,999,999,999,900,000,000,000 more descen­dants are need­ed.

You might think that Mr. Sledge is unfa­mil­iar with the con­cept of hyper­bole, but you’d be wrong. He con­tin­ues:

Wait, I hear the replies already: Metaphor!

The num­bers are so off that it’s a bad metaphor & the God of Abra­ham sounds like a human writer who did­n’t have a clue about stars or sand.

I don’t know; how much hyper­bole is too much? Does Mr. Sledge mean that the author of Gen­e­sis is an igno­ra­mus or just an inept user of this par­tic­u­lar fig­ure of speech? But has he nev­er heard of call­ing some­one a “dinosaur”? That’s off by about 65 mil­lion years. How about the expres­sion “old as the hills”? That’s off by a few bil­lion. I’m not sure how some­one who seems so utter­ly mys­ti­fied by the way lan­guage is used can pos­si­bly slam dunk any metaphor­i­cal bas­ket­ball. I mean, he’s not lit­er­al­ly Dr. J.

Fun­da­men­tal­ist Athe­ists are the kind of peo­ple who say that Chris­tians have only been trapped by mod­ern sci­ence into con­ced­ing that there weren’t sev­en lit­er­al, 24-hour days of cre­ation. They fail to men­tion that St. Augus­tine, liv­ing in the fourth and fifth cen­turies, did­n’t think they were lit­er­al either. And St. Augus­tine was hard­ly some exeget­i­cal neo­phyte. Com­mon usage of the word “day,” even in the Bible, includes fig­u­ra­tive mean­ings. That’s why we say things like “back in my day” or “every dog has his day” and why the Bible speaks of “the day of the Lord” (not to be con­fused with the Sab­bath).

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But let’s go through the bib­li­cal text any­way and see how Mr. Sledge’s objec­tion stacks up. Just for fun.

He cites Gen­e­sis 22, but the first account of this con­ver­sa­tion between God and Abra­ham occurs sev­en chap­ters ear­li­er, in Gen­e­sis 15. Mr. Sledge uses the NIV, so I’ll use it to. Here’s Gen­e­sis 15:5:

[God] took [Abra­ham] out­side and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars–if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your off­spring be.”

When Mr. Sledge gives us a fig­ure of 100 sex­til­lion stars, he’s refer­ring to the num­ber of stars in the uni­verse. But in Gen­e­sis 15, God calls Abra­ham’s atten­tion only to the stars that are vis­i­ble to him. Accord­ing to this arti­cle in the Atlantic, that’s a mere 5000 stars. If you want to insist on lit­er­al­ism, God would actu­al­ly be guilty of an under­state­ment here.

But the author of Gen­e­sis does not mean for us to take this lit­er­al­ly in the first place.

Mr. Sledge utter­ly over­looks the point God is get­ting at here. God’s not try­ing to give Abra­ham an exact num­ber of descen­dants. He says “count the stars if indeed you can count them.” But Abra­ham can’t count them; they are innu­mer­able. “So shall your off­spring be,” God says—that is, innu­mer­able. God is not telling Abra­ham he will have x num­ber of descen­dants; he’s telling him he will have more than he can count. And so he points Abra­ham’s atten­tion to some­thing spe­cif­ic like stars, or grains of sand, to make that point.

But let’s back up a moment to the open­ing of chap­ter 15, because there’s a larg­er con­text to God’s words. Once more, I’ll quote from the NIV:

After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.” But Abram said, “Sov­er­eign Lord, what can you give me since I remain child­less and the one who will inher­it my estate is Eliez­er of Dam­as­cus? [only a ser­vant, not even a blood rela­tion.] And Abram said, “You have giv­en me no chil­dren; so a ser­vant in my house­hold will be my heir.”

Abra­ham is afraid of hav­ing no heir, but more impor­tant­ly he is afraid that his life has been for noth­ing and that God has for­got­ten him. God shows up to reas­sure Abra­ham, and it is in this con­text that he makes his promise about Abra­ham’s chil­dren being more than may be count­ed. The pas­sage is not a les­son in astro­nom­i­cal or bio­log­i­cal sta­tis­tics; it’s about God’s love and his prov­i­dence.

And that’s much more worth talk­ing about than sil­ly lit­tle gotchas from peo­ple who appar­ent­ly have no abil­i­ty to fig­ure out what the text is say­ing in the first place. And from a for­mer pas­tor, this is a dis­ap­point­ment.