Claim CH101:

The Bible, being God's revealed word, is without error or fault in everything it teaches, including what it says about creation, historical events, and its own origin. Scientific study of the earth cannot be used to overturn scriptural accounts of creation and the flood.

Source:

Response:

1. Inerrancy cannot be trusted. Errors can only be corrected if they are first recognized and admitted. Inerrancy makes that impossible. Therefore, errors in an inerrant interpretation of the Bible can never be fixed.
   
   
2. Inerrancy is a contempt that breeds hate. Inerrantists take it as divinely certain that other people's religious views are inferior to their own. One reaps what one sows, so when inerrantists show their contempt, contempt for their own religious views is returned. History is bloodied by the consequences. Jews, Muslems, heathens, and other Christians have been subjugated, tortured, and slaughtered in the name of the "true" god. Jacob Bronowski (1973, 374), speaking of Auschwitz, wrote,

   Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by dogma. It was done by arrogance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

   The contempt also shows up as intolerance -- against women's roles, in attitudes about sex, and through a variety of other different views. Even those who do not commit atrocities, when they display such intolerance, are guilty of fomenting the atmosphere that makes the atrocities possible.
   
   
3. Inerrancy rejects much study of the Bible (not infrequently to the point of persecuting the studier). One who accepts inerrancy generally
   • ignores textual criticism. Most inerrantists accept the King James version as authoritative, but analysis of the earliest biblical manuscripts shows that the King James version includes numerous errors. For example, the story of Jesus chiding those who would stone an adulteress (John 8:1-11) does not appear until about 300 years after the Gospel of John was written.
   • ignores source criticism. Many stories in the Bible are repeated, but with different emphasis, different details, and different language. These differences show that the Bible was written by different people at different times for different purposes, and their accounts were redacted by people with still different motives (Friedman 1987).
   • ignores the reality of syncretism, the process by which rituals, concepts, etc. from one religion are adapted by another. Many biblical stories show Sumerian and Canaanite influence, for example.
   • ignores the values of the writers of the Bible, who likely did not distinguish literalism or consider it important. The Bible was not written to record accurate histories, but to convey and persuade spiritual ideas. Those ideas may not even be the same to all people.
   It is ironic that people who purport to hold the Bible in such high esteem reject serious, objective study of it.
   
   
4. Jesus himself said that religious laws are not absolute. In Matthew 5:38, he rejects the "eye for an eye" law (Exod. 21:23-25, Lev. 24:19-20, Deut. 19:21). Jesus rejected all dietary law (Mark 7:19; cf. Lev. 11). He rejected the commandment about working on the Sabbath (Mark 2:27). If Jesus considered that even the laws of Moses were not inerrant, why should we consider any part of the Bible inerrant?
   
   
5. Ultimately, there is no authority for inerrancy except oneself:
   • God cannot be the authority because God has not said anything on the subject directly. The whole point of inerrancy is to attribute God's authority to an indirect vehicle.
   • The Bible cannot be an authority to its own authoritativeness; that would be circular reasoning.
   • The church cannot be an authority for inerrancy because there is no one church. There are over 10,000 different Christian denominations, all with different ideas about the Bible. In fact, there are at least three significantly different Bibles (the Catholic, Protestant, and Ethiopian Orthodox versions).
   • For the same reason, historical tradition cannot be the authority for inerrancy. Views about the Bible have changed over history.
   
   
6. Claiming inerrancy in the Bible is pointless unless one also claims inerrancy in one's interpretation of it. Some people believe that the earth is flat and is covered by a solid dome because the Bible says so and the Bible is inerrant (Schadewald, 1987). Most people, including most biblical inerrantists, would say they are wrong. Claiming inerrancy for a particular view of creation or the flood is no different in principle. Claiming that the Flood account is a true literal account is an error if it was written as an allegory; claiming that it is a true allegory is an error if it was a literal account. To claim that a particular interpretation of any part of the Bible is inerrant is to claim that you yourself are inerrant.
   
   
7. There are several aspects of the Bible that show it is not inerrant. These include factual errors:
   
   
   • Leviticus 11:6 states that rabbits chew their cud.
   • Leviticus 11:20-23 speaks of four-legged insects, including grasshoppers.
   • 1 Chronicles 16:30 and Psalm 93:1 state that the earth is immobile; yet it not only revolves and orbits the sun but is also influenced by the gravitational pull of other bodies.
   
   and contradictions:
   
   
   • In Genesis 1, Adam is created after other animals; In Genesis 2, he appears before animals.
   • Matthew 1:16 and Luke 3:23 differ over Jesus's lineage.
   • Mark 14:72 differs from Matthew 26:74-75, Luke 22:60-61, and John 18:27 about how many times the cock crowed.
   • 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1 differ over who incited David to take a census.
   • 1 Samuel 17:23,50 and 2 Samuel 21:19 disagree about who killed Goliath.
   • 1 Samuel 31:4-5 and 2 Samuel 1:5-10 differ over Saul's death.
   • The four Gospels differ about many details of Christ's death and resurrection (Barker 1990). For example, Matthew 27:37, Mark 15:26, Luke 23:38, and John 19:19 have different inscriptions on the cross.
   • Matthew 27:5-8 differs with Acts 1:18-19 about Judas's death.
   • Genesis 9:3 and Leviticus 11:4 differ about what is proper to eat.
   • Romans 3:20-28 and James 2:24 differ over faith versus deeds.
   • Exodus 20:5, Numbers 14:18, and Deuteronomy 5:9 disagree with Ezekiel 18:4,19-20 and John 9:3 about sins being inherited.
   
   Inerrantists are familiar with these and find rationalizations for these and other errors and contradictions, but they are unconvincing. The rationalizations merely make the point that what the Bible seems to say is not what it means, which defeats the whole concept of scriptural inerrancy.

Links:

McKinsey, Dennis. 1983-1998. Biblical errancy. http://members.aol.com/ckbloomfld/index.html

References:

Further Reading:

Bringas, Ernie. 1996. Going by the Book, Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing.

Hildeman, Eric J. 2004. Creationism: The Bible Says No! Bloomington, IN: Author House.

The Straight Dope. 2002. Who wrote the Bible? (Part 5). http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbible5.html

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