On 8/11/2026, I posted a meme of Willem Dafoe showing atheists just make stuff up when it comes to morality, since they have no standard outside themselves.
One guy in the comment section on X lost his mind. Accused Christians of making up stuff too.
He went on and on about the many interpretations of the Bible. Said Christians invent things, since our standard, the Bible, gets read a dozen different ways by a dozen different people, which he thinks means the Bible canโt be the ultimate, holy standard. Godโs righteous revelation.
The Bible canโt even be understood, according to him.
What you see with his argument isnโt what you get. Itโs clever and tricky, but so detached from reality that, like with most atheist accusations, it shrivels like a dead, dried-up worm as soon as you think about it for five seconds.
I already dismantled his line of thinking in The Atheist Conversion Manual, and in a long conversation with him on X, but letโs do it again.
If disagreement disqualifies a source from being true, then nothing is true.
Historians argue over evidence.
Scientists question the meaning of data.
Philosophers spent centuries fighting over what knowledge even is.
Then thereโs the nature of human memory. Ask five witnesses to describe a murder, and youโll get five different renditions of what happened. Canโt be avoided.
So, if competing interpretations erase truth, the whole exploration of reality crashes into oblivion.
But thereโs more to it than that.
In this article, weโre going to walk through why interpretation canโt defeat the Bible, canโt be a standard for defining what is true, holy, and good, and why atheism, left with only human interpretation and nothing else, gets utterly annihilated.
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Memories of Mishap and Messiah
Letโs start with a car accident analogy.
500 people witnessed a 30-car pile-up. Word spreads. Some tell the story straight. Some retell what they heard from a friend who heard it from someone else who heard it from a witness, and a little interpretive flair gets added in along the way.
Does any of that retelling change whether the crash happened?
No, because you have the original witnesses, and first responders are trained to document all details from as many as possible as soon as they arrive on scene, when memory is fresh for everyone present.
At most, ongoing interpretation means the event happened and was assessed by those who heard about it through their own perspectives, which resulted in some embellishment or distortion via false interpretations. But THAT the event happened isnโt in question.
What would put the event into question would be perfectly aligned witness statements from those who allegedly saw everything.
If the 500 witnesses gave word-for-word identical reports, the identical wording would be a red flag. Real witnesses prioritize different aspects of an event in their minds.
One remembers the colors of the cars
Another remembers the sound of screaming victims
A third remembers the driversโ bloodied faces and limbs
A fourth remembers nothing but flames and the smell of burnt rubber
A fifth remembers the chain snapping on the 18-wheeler that started the accident
Natural variations combined with rock-solid agreement on the core facts prove them valid witnesses, whereas perfect alignment between each story suggests rehearsal.
Some of you already know where Iโm going with this: The former is what we find when we examine the Bible.
Jesus was crucified.
Three days later he rose.
Over 500 people saw him alive and well again.
Record of their witness was written down early.
He appeared to individuals fully restored, to small groups who had known him for years, to skeptics whose doubt disintegrated the moment they touched him, and to family who had questioned him his whole life. The stories they shared of their encounters align in core details while diverging in interpretation and on minor aspects, signs they are telling the truth.
Then those who heard the stories first recorded them into creeds and later into the Gospels.
Hereโs where the guy on X thought he had me: If the witnesses shared the story, others heard the account, retold what they heard, filtered the retelling through their own perspective, doesnโt that mean we only inherited interpretations of interpretations and no one knows what theyโre talking about?
No.
We inherited the witness statements themselves, gathered and preserved in the gospel accounts and across the New Testament, collected as early as humanly possible in the ancient setting of the Greco-Roman period. Within living memory. When the witnesses were still alive and around to correct any errors!
The letters may not match on every detail, but they were never supposed to because theyโre real, and their central claims agree across every page.
Crucifixion under Roman authority. Burial. An empty tomb. Bodily appearances after the fact.
Small stuff shifts the way independent testimony always shifts, but the meat and bones retain their place and shape. Real testimony looks exactly like what we find in the Gospels.
Theology came after witnessโฆ
1 Story, 40 Writers, 17 Centuries, 3 Continents
Later writers further fleshed out the theology and Christology of the Messiah based on the inherited witness statements and interpretations from witnesses themselves.
Deeper reflection on who Jesus was, what his death and resurrection accomplished, how his story connects back through everything that came before.
None of their reflection, however, changes the ultimate fact that Jesus really rose from the grave.
Sin and death lost. Beat to a pulp by God Most High. Which the earliest churches determined by noticing how everything in the Old Testament pointed forward to the Savior.
Atheist treat the Bible like itโs one book, but itโs a vast collection of interrelated writings by 40-plus authors across at least 17 centuries (source material for the writings stems much earlier, some arguably as early as 3000+ years ago), on 3 different continents, and every page maintains the same coherent story from beginning to end.
God Most High made creation
We ruined creation with sin and death
Jesus, God-made-flesh, resurrected us and creation
One day heโll return as God Most High to restore the paradise of Eden
Different centuries. Different cultures. Different literary styles. Same storyline, start to finish, weaved through everyโฆsingleโฆbook.
Coherence like that doesnโt happen by accident when so many hands are involved over such an astounding length of time.
On top of that, divergence in interpretations has centered on the nature of God and the churchโs role in the eternal story of salvation, but what remained accepted since before and after the inception of Christianity is the story of salvation itself.
One day God Most High would rescue this fallen world via his Messiah, and did so through the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus. No church denies that! (Except so-called โprogressive Christians,โ who are really atheists that co-opted the Christian name in order to form a community and have a โsense of belongingโ without surrender and adherence to the Christ of the Bible.)
Disagreement takes place over the little thingsโฆ
Debating all the Little Things
Anyone who reads the whole Bible sees that overarching story of salvation. Interpretations that skip past it, dilute the message, or argue it away (mainly from atheists, not Christians) misread the text, often intentionally, so as to distort and/or distract from the meaning of Godโs Word.
Plenty of smaller issues do stay open for debate (like what should baptism look like, when should baptism happen, what is the role and directive for church leadership, what should the church even look like, can salvation be lost, what role do works play in salvation if any, etc.), but creation, fall, savior, redemption, restorationโฆthat big picture never changes.
Itโs good to be cautious because humans carry our own perspectives into every text we open, sacred or not. But because of that, multiple interpretations are an asset, not a hindrance.
Working through different readings sharpens your understanding of what God revealed. Testing one interpretation against another, alongside the inherited text itself, is how anyone deepens their understanding of any complex body of writing.
Thatโs how people read Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, the Church Fathers, Shakespeare, and so on and so forth.
Weed out readings that damage the central message. Keep the ones that clarify, enhance, brighten, and bring the picture to life.
This is how truth gets refined.
And hereโs where the atheist on X walked straight into the trap he built for meโฆ
Everyone Interprets, Even Scientists
As I point out in The Atheist Conversion Manual, without a standard above humanity, atheism is left with nothing but human consensus, and consensus isnโt truth. Claiming the majority view as truth has been a logical fallacy forever. Known as ad populum, or the โbandwagon fallacy.โ Following the crowd.
โWould you follow your friends if they walked over a cliff?โ No doubt your parents issued that question in some form when you were younger.
Because they wanted you to see that following your peers without second thought is dangerous.
Crowds have been catastrophically wrong throughout history because comfort feels better than accuracy. We tend to lead with emotion. If morality and truth is reduced to whatever the current majority prefers, nothing is ever right or wrong. Just popular. And popular views flip-flop in split seconds.
Take this argument one step further, and science gets gobbled up too.
A scientist runs an experiment, generates results, makes observations, and then has to interpret what the observations from the results mean. INTERPRETATION NEVER GOES AWAY!
โWhat best explains what we find?โ
Scientists disagree with each other constantly. Consensus forms sometimes, but even then, dissenters push back with other explanations. The history of science reads like one long parade of accepted interpretations getting overturned with better data or better analysis, yet none of that zigzagging ever meant the original observations were fake or that reality itself is unknowable.
Just like with interpreting the Bible, each and every explanation for available evidence gathered via scientific experimentation, basic observation, historical documentation, etc. has to be evaluated using logic and reason, tools which belonged first and foremost to (and still belong to) the realms of philosophy and theology.
Also, if we apply the atheistโs own standard against biblical interpretation (the idea that multiple interpretations hinder truth) consistently, the entire exploration for human knowledge becomes reduced to absurdity because humans never agree. On anything. Ever.
History? Gone.
Science? Gone.
Philosophy? Gone.
Common sense? Gone.
Reduced to rubble all because people read the same evidence or sources differently.
Unless thereโs a standard beyond humanity to determine and define truth and morality, reality itself becomes incoherent and absurd beyond recognition.
Reject Absurdity
No one can escape being a theologian. Everyone has a worldview, everyone evaluates reality through their worldview and via logic and reason, everyone develops rites and practices based on their worldview, so everyone is religious. Even atheists.
To be religious is to think thoroughly about reality, find a master, and follow that master, even if itโs yourself.
Only one Master makes sense, though. God Most High. Christ Jesus. Because a perfect Being that transcends this reality and originated it is necessary for any level of coherence.
Atheists demand you embrace the absurdity of a world without God while at the same time saying you canโt have an opinion because differing opinions amount to falsityโฆeven though that very demand is an opinion and, therefore, self-defeating (gotta love the law of non-contradiction).
They would rather destroy the whole enterprise of intellectual exploration than acknowledge the existence of the One who makes it possible. Let that sink in.
Interpretation was never the enemy of truth. Disagreement is the bedrock of truthful inquiry, the search for knowledge and meaning, and that search has revealed ultimate truth is a Person.
500 witnesses saw the Risen Savior and shared what they saw, in their own words, from their own angles, with as many people as they could, and their story revolutionized the face of this Earth for the better. Brought dead men to life.
I donโt have enough faith to be an atheist.
Neither should you.
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Funny enough, I am writing about something similar (we are always in sync). The timing is good as you have a really good quote in this article I am going to cite.