In a clip from The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Stephen goes head-to-head with Ricky Gervais on religion.
Gervais: “Science is constantly proved all the time. You see, if we take something like any fiction and any holy book and any other fiction and destroyed it, in a thousand years time, that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas, if we take every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years, they’d all be back, because all the same tests would all be the same result.”
Audience: *Applause*
Colbert: “That’s good. That’s really good.”
Sorry, Stephen. That’s not good.
When you’re put on the spot, listening to someone whose job is to charm, disarm, and reel people in with clever words, it’s easy to get pulled along. Especially when the line comes packaged as a joke. That’s not meant as a harsh criticism. Ricky Gervais is a comedian. And honestly, he should take it as a compliment that this theological presentation is a joke.
So here’s my response to Mr. Gervais.
First, let’s deal with the science side of the claim. Pull a science book from a thousand years ago. Is it the same as today’s textbooks? Of course not. Scientific knowledge grows. Models change. Conclusions are revised. What was once treated as settled science has often been overturned, refined, or abandoned entirely. So the idea that modern science books would simply reappear exactly as they are today assumes something science itself does not claim: that our current conclusions are final and infallible. And it doesn’t take a thousand years to make this point. Revised science textbooks are produced every few years.
But that point is actually secondary. The real problem is that this argument commits a category error. It compares apples to oranges, so to speak. Ricky Gervais treats the Bible and science textbooks as if they belong in the same category. They do not. And he knows they do not, because he quietly shifts the Bible into the category of fiction.
Mr. Gervais is right: destroy all of the works of William Shakespeare, Stephen King, and Suzanne Collins, and Hamlet, Cujo, and The Hunger Games would never return. Gervais also claims that if you destroyed the Bible, it would never return. He concludes, therefore, that the Bible is a book of fiction. The conclusion is faulty. Do you know what else would not return if you destroyed it? History.
If you removed every history book and monument and somehow erased all historical memory, no one would rediscover the names of Rosa Parks, Stephen Hawking, Jesus, Pontius Pilate, or Adolf Hitler. Those figures would not magically reappear through experimentation. Does that mean they never existed? Of course not. It means history and science function differently.
Science investigates repeatable phenomena. History records unrepeatable events.
The Bible does not claim to be a chemistry textbook or a physics manual. It presents itself as a collection of historical accounts, eyewitness testimony, letters, poetry, and prophecy rooted in real places, real people, and real events. Comparing it to a science textbook misunderstands what it is. To give him the benefit of the doubt, because he made this category error, I have to assume Mr. Gervais has actually never read the Bible.
But let’s take it further. Even if every manuscript of the New Testament disappeared, we would not be left with nothing. Early Christian writers quoted the New Testament constantly. So much so that scholars have shown that we could reconstruct practically the entire New Testament just from their quotations and allusions alone. Add to that the countless people alive today who have memorized large portions of Scripture, sometimes entire books, and the claim that the Bible would simply vanish if you destroyed each copy does not hold up.
What we are seeing here is not a devastating argument against Christianity. It is a clever soundbite that trades clarity for applause. When listening to a comedian joke about religion, let’s remember that soundbites can be easy to cheer for, but much harder to defend.
The real question is not whether the Bible would reappear like a lab manual. The real question is whether the Bible has been reliably preserved and transmitted as a historical document that records actual history. That is a serious question, and it deserves a serious answer.
If you want to dig deeper into that, I highly recommend watching the video on our channel or reading the study by Dr. Doug Burleson, where he asks a critical question: Has the Bible been corrupted over time? You know, the typical “copy of a copy of a copy” argument. He walks through the manuscript evidence, the textual history, and the facts that often get ignored in pop-level arguments like this one.