Birds, Bats, and the Bible

It is not uncommon for Bible deniers to find excuses to justify their rebellion, but some go further and machinate alleged contradictions and absurdities. These are usually framed as "Gotcha!" statements and questions. They occasionally raise questions that some believers also want answered.

One tinhorn, geology professor Ian Plimer, wrote a (now out of print) book called Telling Lies for God: Reason vs Creationism. Aside from the clear bias, he made himself a liar and CMI set the record straight. Jimmy Li has a resource refuting hundreds of such claims. Then there are bats as birds?

Flying fruit bat, Flickr / Tambako The Jaguar (CC BY-ND 2.0)

While many of the items in the above references can be attributed to superficiality, carelessness, and lack of doing some homework, others take a bit more digging. Darwin's Flying Monkeys™ on the internet exhibit an attitude like, "Haw, haw, haw! We're supposed to believe your Bible, but it says that bats are birds! It also says ostriches can fly!" At first glance, especially when reading certain Bible translations, people may get those impressions.

Think about it. The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy (which contains the passages in question) were written about 1400 BC. That's quite a bit before creationist Carl Linnaeus developed the system of taxonomy in the 1700s AD that we still use today. It is unreasonable to expect the Bible to use today's taxonomy system. The part that takes a more work involves the original Hebrew words.

In Leviticus 11, the Lord revealed to Moses and Aaron which animals the Israelites were permitted to eat and which animals were forbidden under the Mosaic law. Certain verses in this chapter seem to contain some basic biological blunders, such as the bat being called a bird. Skeptics have seized on these types of alleged errors in their efforts to undercut the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Let’s take a closer look at this supposed problem to see why this passage is not in error.

To see why the Creator is not in error and to learn about the ostrich question, visit "Does the Bible Blunder Biology?"