Moral Understanding

To the editor:

Bill Balch argued at length in his letter that “[e]thical behavior and moral understanding predates by thousands of years the writings of the earliest books of the Bible.” He could have saved himself many words by citing Genesis 1: “In the Beginning . . . God saw that it was good.” Or John 1: “In the beginning . . . in him was life, and the life was the light of men” (emphasis added). Or Job 32, or any other of dozens of passages that emphasize that “moral understanding,” like the “tree” of knowledge of good and evil, predated writing of any kind and even man himself.

But the Bible goes much further than merely saving Mr. Balch the trouble. By linking ancient traditions recorded in the Old Testament to Jesus’s radical self-sacrifice to Paul’s Greek thought, the Bible records with precision a chain of ideas showing how man progressed from primitive might-makes-right morals to Mr. Balch’s “modern” notions of empathy and equality. Thanks to the Bible, those ideas are now the norm, even among atheists.

If even unbelievers owe their morality to it, you could say the Bible is a miraculous book.