"It's just a myth. You have zero evidence there even is a God."
This arrived under an essay about the Garden of Eden. Not a response to the essay. Not an engagement with the argument inside it. Just the assumption that the whole thing is disqualified upstream, before it starts, because the Bible fails a test it was never sitting. The test being: is it physically real in the way a rock is physically real.
The Assumption Behind the Dismissal
"It's just a myth" relies on the claim that non-physical things are not real things. Money is consensus. Every pound in your bank account is a collective agreement that those numbers entitle you to things. Property rights are consensus. The piece of paper that says you own a house is meaningful because a distributed network of participants, including the state, the courts, your neighbours, and the mortgage market, all agree that it is. The corporation, the institution through which most of the modern economy runs, has no body, cannot be imprisoned, and exists entirely in law and agreement. It builds aeroplanes and performs surgery.
Law. Language. Mathematics. None of these exist the way rocks exist. You cannot point to the number seven and say "there it is, I found it, it's made of these atoms." Seven is an abstract object. So is the principle of non-contradiction. So is the subjunctive mood. These are not nothing. They are some of the most real and powerful and consequential things that exist, precisely because they are not contingent on physical instantiation. They cannot be melted down or destroyed in a fire.
The Bible is not competing with carbon dating. It is not making the same kind of claim as a physics paper. What it is doing, and what it has done for two thousand years with remarkable stability, is running a distributed consensus mechanism about what it means to be human, how to treat each other, and what we might owe to whatever is at the foundation of all this. Whether you think that consensus has correctly identified something real or beautifully constructed something useful, it is not nothing.
The question of whether God exists is a serious question that deserves a serious answer, and thoughtful people disagree about it for reasons that deserve engagement. "It's just a myth, show me the evidence" is not that engagement. It is the assumption that because God is not a physical object, God cannot be real, and because the Bible is not a scientific paper, it cannot carry genuine value or truth.
Calling it a myth because you cannot touch God is like calling Bitcoin worthless because you cannot touch the ledger.
Bitcoin, of all things, has made that a lot harder to wave away.
Does Bitcoin Exist
There is no Bitcoin warehouse. No vault. No ledger you can run your fingers along. There is a distributed network of thousands of independent nodes around the world, each holding a redundant copy of the same chain, each continuously verifying that every other copy agrees with it. The whole thing lives in electron states across silicon in data centres and basements on six continents. You cannot open a hard drive and point to a single Bitcoin. At the subatomic level, every electron carrying a piece of that ledger is genuinely uncertain in the Heisenberg sense. The physical substrate of Bitcoin is, strictly speaking, a probability distribution.
And yet Bitcoin has a market cap north of a trillion dollars. Real money. Real consequence. Real people have built businesses around it, lost houses over it, structured inheritance plans around it.
What Bitcoin is, stripped to first principles, is a consensus mechanism. It exists because a distributed network of participants, running shared rules about what counts as valid, collectively agree that it exists. The consensus is the thing. The electrons are just the medium through which the consensus propagates. Remove the consensus and you have arithmetic on a hard drive. Restore it and you have a trillion-dollar asset class built from nothing but mathematics and distributed agreement.
Nobody who understands Bitcoin finds this controversial. The entire pitch of Bitcoin is that you do not need a physical commodity, a central authority, or a state guarantee to create something real and valuable. You need consensus. Robust enough, distributed enough, verifiable enough consensus. That is the whole trick.
The Bible Is Running the Same Trick
The physical book is a substrate, the same way a hard drive is a substrate. Ink on paper is the medium through which something else is transmitted, the same way electron states in silicon are the medium through which the Bitcoin ledger is transmitted. The thing you can hold is not the thing. The thing is what two thousand years of human engagement with it has produced and what it continues to coordinate.
What has been produced is not small. Councils that formalised doctrine across centuries of dispute. Scholars who argued about meaning without ever being in the same room, across languages and cultures and political regimes that no other document survived. Communities that used the text to coordinate ethics, obligation, mutual care, and collective identity at scales no other single document has managed before or since. The Nicene Creed, formalised in 325 AD, established a foundational consensus that the vast majority of the 2.4 billion Christians alive today still operate on: the divinity and full humanity of Christ, the Trinity, salvation through the cross and resurrection. That consensus has been running continuously for 1,700 years.
History is the ledger. The printed book is just the interface. The protocol is the accumulated theological consensus of humanity trying to work out what the text means and how to live inside it.
The denominations are the forks. Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, non-denominational house churches. Real disputes about real things conducted across centuries, producing genuine divergence on governance and practice and interpretation. None of it touched the base layer. Nobody rewrote the Gospels. Nobody dropped the resurrection. The foundational consensus held, the same way Bitcoin's base layer has run unbroken since 2009 despite the entire crypto ecosystem fragmenting around it into a thousand altcoin forks, each convinced it had improved on the original.
Christianity has denominations the way crypto has altcoins. The core protocol survived both.