A
mature person believes in science by faith, much like a believer in a god’s law does, anytime he cannot trust his own observations/experiences and logical reasoning more than of anyone else, period
Since you are Christian, you are relying on the Bible to based your faith in your belief.
The problems here are multi-fold, that tell us, the Bible are not very reliable.
For one, much of OT books were originally composed, not contemporary to the events that those books were narrating, like from Adam in Genesis to Solomon in 1 Kings, all the events it claimed, including the lives of Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Samson and David, we have no one contemporaries writing about these people.
Fo instance, there are no books, parchments, papyri, scrolls, clay tablets, inscriptions in tomb walls, walls of houses, palaces or temple, that contemporarily narrated these stories, dated to those periods.
We only started finding evidence of writings, possibly as early as king Josiah’s reign, with the Silver Scrolls in a cave that served as tomb at Ketef Hinnom. These tiny scrolls contained a small passage from Numbers 6, the Priestly Blessing. The scrolls as well as other objects found in the tomb, have been dated somewhere between 630 BCE and 590 BCE, that’s between the reign of Josiah and just before the capture of Jerusalem in 587 BCE.
So the oldest evidence was definitely not written by eye-witness like late Bronze Age Moses.
There are no Bronze Age sources of original writing by a man and prophet who supposedly led Israelites in the exodus in the 15th century BCE.
And you don’t find start to find more evidence, until the Babylonian Exile and their returns in the 6th century BCE and later centuries. Even with the book of Daniel, we have no evidence such book existing, until the early 2nd BCE.
Much of the Old Testament books weren’t written by eyewitness authors.
And you don’t have much evidence from the Exile period, until they started translating those biblical books into Greek, and the
discovery of the scrolls from Qumran, the Dead Sea scrolls.
Even with the New Testament, especially when it come to the 4 gospels, there are no evidence that they were written contemporary to Jesus’ ministry and post-crucified, like within 10 years. The oldest gospel is supposedly the gospel of Mark, but that were composed somewhere around 65 to 75 CE, those of Matthew’s and Luke’s around the 80s, and the gospel of John from 90s.
So none of these gospels were written contemporarily to Jesus’ departure within 10 years of Jesus’ resurrection, so not eyewitnesses’ accounts.
And those gospels were originally anonymously, and those names of the 4 evangelists - Mark, Matthew, Luke and John - were only attributed to those gospels by church in the early 2nd century BCE.
Whoever were those real authors were, we will never know, because of the massive church traditions and legends surrounding the 1st century apostles and disciples, it is hard to distinguish history from fabricated fictions.
Second.
But the problems are just about finding contemporary (and original) sources to the biblical events.
Only a fraction of the Old Testament are considered “history”, and those are mostly within the 2 books of Kings, where there are independent outside sources, eg the Assyrian annals of Assyrian rulers during the early half of 1st millennium BCE, that can verify some of the Iron Age kings of Israel and Judah.
What we cannot verify in the books of Kings are those of Solomon’s reigns, his empire, his fabled wealth and the enormous numbers of wives he have, especially from foreign kingdoms, and we cannot verify any stories about the lives of prophets, like that of Elijah and Elisha in the books of Kings, especially concerning miracles.
A lot of things written about, from Adam to Solomon are mythological. Especially things about any of these stories concerning about Bronze Age Egypt and Babylonia, cannot be verified by outside sources or by archaeological evidence.
There are no Egyptian sources about Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses or Joshua being in Egypt, like the things they allegedly did.
For instance, in Exodus 1, it claimed that Moses was born during the time of building Rameses, and in Exodus 12:37, Moses led the Israelites from Rameses. And according to 1 Kings 6:1, the exodus started 480 years before Solomon began building his temple, in the 4th year of his reign.
As I said earlier, I don’t think there was any King by the name of Solomon, but based on the Kings, he ruled for 40 years, then the king was divided into two - Judah and Israel. So let’s say hypothetically he did reign between 970 and 931 BCE, then his 4th year would be 967 BCE. So based on what 1 Kings 6:1 say:
“1 Kings 6:1” said:
In the four hundred eightieth year after the Israelites came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the Lord.
That would mean the Israelites left Egypt from Rameses in 1447 BCE, during the reign of Thutmose II (1479 - 1425 BCE), and Moses was have been born in 1527 BCE, during the reign of Ahmose I (c 1549 - 1524 BCE and founder of the 18th dynasty) and his death in 1407 BCE in the reign of Amenhotep II (1525 - 1397 BCE).
Not only the Exodus never given names of Egyptian rulers (pharaohs) of the times they stayed in Egypt, we know that Rameses exist as Pi-Ramesses, but it was built during the 19th dynasty by its 2nd king, Seti I (1294 - 1279) who started its construction and completed by his son Ramesses II (1279 - 1213 BCE). Pi-Ramesses was named after Seti’s father, the dynasty’s founder Ramesses I (1295 - 1274 BCE).
Pi-Ramesses means the “House of Ramesses”, and it never existed in the 16th and 15th centuries BCE, during the 18th dynasty.
The history of Seti and Ramesses II are well-documented, including records of their building programme in Egypt, constructing cities, palaces, temples and tombs. Pi-Ramesses was meant to be their summer residence.
Pi-Ramesses was discovered at Qantir during the 1960s, and have been dated to 13th century BCE.
Pi-Ramesses wasn’t Egypt’s capital, Thebes was.
If I have to choose, which is more historical and archaeological reliable, between Exodus and Egyptian history/archaeology, then it would have to be archaeology and contemporary Egyptian records, not Exodus.
Worse still, Joshua (book) claimed that Jericho was captured, destroyed and left abandoned after Moses’ death (1407 BCE). But archaeology have been dated abandoned since 1570 BCE.
So Jericho was abandoned couple of centuries BEFORE Pi-Ramesses was constructed, HENCE contradicting both Exodus & Joshua.
And Pi-Ramesses and Jericho are not the only places that the Old Testament got wrong.
There is Genesis 10, about Egypt and the cities that Nimrod built, eg Uruk (Erech), Babylon, Nineveh and Calch (Kalhu). Genesis claimed that none of these places existed until after the flood. But Egyptian culture predated the Bronze Age dynasties, can be found in their artwork and cultures. And both Uruk and Nineveh are quite old, the oldest settlements dating respectively 5000 BCE and 6000 BCE, while Calch or the Assyrian Kalhu was constructed during the 13th century BCE, during the reign of Shalmanesser I (1263 - 1234 BCE).
So unless Nimrod have lived over 4000 years and more, Nimrod don’t exist and he didn’t built anything.
As to the gospels that we can be certain of it’s history, is the beheading of John the Baptist. Jesus may be a historical person, the details about his birth, his ministry and his resurrection, they cannot be verified.
We have two different versions about Jesus’ birth, and in details, they don’t agree with each other. The only things they have in common are, Mary is the mother, he was born in Bethlehem and he was born when Herod the Great was still alive. Other than that, the Star, the massacre, the census, the angels witnessed by the shepherds are something that either didn’t happen and in the case of the census and governor of Syria, happened in the wrong time (it occurred in 6 CE, 10 years after Herod’s death, and only after Augustus turned Judaea into Roman province and banished Archelaus).
So the Bible as a whole, isn’t very reliable at all.
So you would definitely have to take the Bible, on faith alone.