Predict early, and predict often.
It's hard to have faith in something with so many contradictions.
https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/reasons-humanists-reject-bible/
If that's not enough, see
https://infidels.org/library/modern/donald-morgan-contradictions/
for hundreds more (list is too large to post!).
NONE of those are contradictions.
I'm too busy for this next week to write up explanations for all of these. But for anyone who spends a little time researching, those apparent contradictions become evidence that first of all, truth was being written, even when it appears contradictory. This is evidence of truthfulness, simply because if the Bible was written to deceive people, why make what appears to be such obvious errors?
Just off the top of my head, your quote states:
The contradictions start in the opening chapters of the Bible, where inconsistent creation stories are told. Genesis chapter 1 says the first man and woman were made at the same time, and after the animals. But Genesis chapter 2 gives a different order of creation: man, then the animals, and then woman.
Reading the chapters together, I have done many time, does not lead one to confusion or a contradiction. Instead, the first chapter gives a chronological account of creation whereas the second chapter gives a different style of writing. It is like a summary with further details. It does NOT state that the animals were made after Adam and Eve.
BE CAREFUL WHO YOU LISTEN TO!!! WHOEVER WROTE THIS WAS NOT HONEST. He said "Genesis chapter 2 gives a different order of creation: man, then the animals."
Judge for yourselves. Does the below passage STATE that the animals were created after humans? No. It simply says, "Now the Lord God HAD formed..." So God, at a previous time, not stated, had made the animals and birds.
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
19 Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky.
I'm not in the mood to tackle the rest, but none of these are contradictions. It does make me upset that people believe these are contradictions when with a little bit of thought, they aren't. I admit that reading them out of context, in the list, they do appear to be contradictions.
I'll bet if everything you or anybody else reading this had a transcript of everything you've ever said, there would be many "contradictions" in what you said, yet you could very well be telling the truth. Same principle with taking things out of context.
Stuff like this is better dealt with one contradiction at a time, otherwise it takes too long to deal with it. I would think a simple google search would provide logical explanations and background info so that they no longer appear to be contradictions. But studying the Bible carefully just by itself can also lead to apparent contradictions making sense, just as the first one mentioned did, with hardly any study at all.
