In the comment thread of my last post, some of us mentioned that it’s hard for us to understand the point of view of Christians who believe the Bible can be inspired by God, without holding to the doctrine of inerrancy. unkleE left the following comment:
How is it that in everything else in life – whether it be ethics, or politics, relationships, science, history, law, even disbelief – we are willing to make decisions based on non-inerrant evidence and reasoning, but when it is belief in God we require inerrant evidence? I reckon your first thought might be that the stakes are so much higher. But that logic applies to disbelief as well. If we applied that logic, no-one would be an atheist because they didn’t have inerrant knowledge for that conclusion. You would not have any belief either way until you gained inerrant knowledge.
He then suggested that I might want to do a post on this topic (you’re reading it!), but there were also a couple of other comments that I think are worth including here. nonsupernaturalist said this:
My answer would be that ethics, politics, relationships, science, history, and law do not involve supernatural claims. When someone makes a supernatural claim, the standard of evidence required by most educated people in the western world to believe that claim is much, much higher than a claim involving natural evidence.
Let’s look at “history”. If someone tells me that most historians believe that Caesar crossed the Rubicon or that Alexander the Great sacked the city of Tyre, I accept those claims without demanding a great deal of evidence. However, if someone claims that the Buddha caused a water buffalo to speak in a human language for over one half hour or that Mohammad rode on a winged horse to heaven, I am going to demand MASSIVE quantities of evidence to believe these claims.
I think that most Christians would agree with my thinking, here, until I make the same assertion regarding the bodily Resurrection of Jesus. Then Christians will shake their heads in disgust and accuse me of being biased and unreasonable.
No. I am not being biased and unreasonable. I am being consistent. It is the Christian who is being inconsistent: demanding more evidence to believe the supernatural claims of other religions than he or she demands of his own.
And it isn’t just supernatural claims. Most educated people in the western world would demand much more evidence for very rare natural claims than we would for non-rare natural claims.
Imagine if someone at work tells you that his sister just gave birth to twins. How much evidence would you demand to believe this claim? Probably not much. You would probably take the guy’s word for it. Now imagine if the same coworker tells you that, yesterday, in the local hospital, his sister gave birth to twelve babies! Would you take the guy’s word for it? I doubt it.
So it isn’t that we skeptics are biased against Christianity or even that we are biased against the supernatural. We are simply applying the same reason, logic, and skepticism to YOUR very extra-ordinary religious claim that we apply to ALL very rare, extra-ordinary claims, including very rare, extraordinary natural claims.
And Arkenaten said this:
I cannot fathom how you can disregard something like Noah’s Ark as nonsense and yet accept that a narrative construct called Jesus of Nazareth could come back from the dead.
Personally, I feel very much the same way that nonsupernaturalist does. The first part of unkleE’s question that I’d like to address is his statement about nonbelief:
If we applied that logic, no-one would be an atheist because they didn’t have inerrant knowledge for that conclusion.
I think this depends on what one means by “atheism.” I’m not really interested in trying to determine what the official definition of the term is; rather, I’d like to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing within the confines of this discussion. When I refer to myself as an atheist, I simply mean that I don’t believe any of the proposed god claims that I’ve encountered. I’m not necessarily saying that I think no gods exist, period. And if I were to say that, I’d give the caveat that I could easily be wrong about such a belief. This notion of atheism, the position that one hasn’t been convinced of any god claims, is often referred to as “weak atheism” or “soft atheism.” Personally, I think that should be everyone’s default position. No one should be a Muslim, a Hindu, or a Christian until he or she has been convinced that the god(s) of that particular religion exist(s). If we didn’t operate in this way, then we’d all immediately accept the proposition of every religion we encountered, until its claims could be disproven. This would make most of us Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, pagans, and atheists all at the same time. Obviously, that’s ridiculous. So on those grounds, I don’t agree with unkleE’s assertion that we would need inerrant information to not believe something.
Furthermore, when it comes to the claims of Christianity, I can accept or reject them completely independently of what I think about the existence of god(s). Many times, discussions about the evidence for and against Christianity slide into discussions about whether or not a god exists. People bring up the cosmological and teleological arguments. While those discussions can be important, I think they are really just distractions when we’re talking about a specific religion. I’m okay conceding that a god might exist, so I’d rather focus on the pros and cons of Christianity to see if it could possibly be true. After all, it could be the case that God is real, but Christianity is false.
unkleE’s comment started like this:
How is it that in everything else in life – whether it be ethics, or politics, relationships, science, history, law, even disbelief – we are willing to make decisions based on non-inerrant evidence and reasoning, but when it is belief in God we require inerrant evidence?
To piggy-back off the comments I just made, I don’t necessarily require inerrant evidence to believe in God. I think the necessity for inerrancy comes from the kind of god being argued for. The Abrahamic religions teach that there is one God who is supreme. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, completely just, etc. I know there are sometimes caveats placed on those labels. For instance, can God create a rock so large that he can’t lift it? Arguments like that illustrate that being all-powerful doesn’t mean he’s outside the laws of logic. And the same goes for all-knowing. It’s sometimes argued that he knows all that can be known… perhaps there are some things that can’t be known? The waters can get muddy pretty quickly, so I think it’s best to refer back to the religion’s source material (the Bible, in this case) to learn more about the characteristics of this god.
In the Bible, God seems to be big on proofs. When God wanted Noah to build an ark, he spoke to him directly. Noah didn’t have to decide between a handful of prophets each telling him different things — God made sure that Noah knew exactly what was required of him. The same was done for Abraham when God wanted him to move into the land of Canaan, and when God commanded him to sacrifice Isaac. When God called Moses to deliver the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, he also spoke directly to Moses. And on top of that, he even offered additional proofs by performing signs for Moses. And when Moses appeared before Pharaoh, God again used signs to show Pharaoh that Moses did indeed speak on God’s behalf. Miraculous signs were used throughout the period of time that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness. And we can fast forward to the time of Gideon and see that God used signs as evidence then as well. Throughout the Old Testament, signs were given to people to show God’s involvement and desires. There are even examples where God punished those who listened to false prophets who hadn’t shown such signs, such as the man of God who listened to the instruction of an old prophet who was actually lying to him. God sent a lion to kill the man (I Kings 13:11-32).
The New Testament is no different. Jesus and his apostles perform all kinds of miracles as evidence of Jesus’s power. When the Pharisees accused Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Satan, he pointed out how nonsensical that would be, showing that such miracles were intended as a display of God’s approval (Matt 12:24-28). And the Gospel of John also argues that these miracles were intended as evidence:
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
— John 20:30-31
Not only did Jesus and his disciples use miracles to make their case, they also appealed to Scripture. Throughout the New Testament, you find references to the Old: “as it is written,” “as spoken by the prophet,” etc. That in itself doesn’t necessarily make the case for inerrancy, but it at least shows that they expected the scriptures to be accurate.
If God cared so much during the time periods talked about in the Bible, why wouldn’t he care just as much today? How can Jesus say that “not one jot or tittle of the law will pass away” if God’s not really all that concerned about how accurate the “jots” and “tittles” are? And yes, like unkleE said in his comment, I do think the fact that the stakes are tremendously high on this question makes it that much more necessary to have good evidence. While the Bible gives us countless examples of those who received direct communication from God or one of his representatives, we find ourselves living in a time when we’re surrounded by competing claims about which god is true, and which doctrines are the right ones. I used to believe that the one tool we had to cut through all that noise was the Bible. It was the one source we could go to to find what God wanted from us. And we could trust that it was his word because of the amazing prophecy fulfillments that it contained and that despite its length and antiquity, it was completely without error. In other words, I thought it was a final miracle to last throughout the ages. And because of its existence and availability, we no longer needed individuals who went around performing miracles and spreading the gospel.
That’s how I saw the world. Of course, since then, I’ve discovered that the Bible doesn’t live up to that high standard. I have many other posts that deal with its various problems, so I won’t try to detail them now. But I simply don’t see how the God portrayed in the Bible, a god who is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, etc, would inspire individuals to write down his incredibly important message to all of mankind, yet not make sure they relay it completely accurately. It doesn’t always agree with itself, it contains historical and scientific mistakes, and sometimes it advocates things that are outright immoral. It’s understandable why a number of people would fail to be convinced by such a book; therefore, it would be impossible for an all-loving and completely just God to punish people when they’re merely trying to avoid the same fate as the man of God who trusted the old (false) prophet.
Finding Truth 
I identify with Gary’s comment on the Iliad. There’s lots of supernatural, deity stuff in there, which no one believes, even if later evidence of Troy has been found or evidence of key characters becomes uncovered in the future.
Evidence of correct places and people do not dictate that everything in a text is correct.
We all agree with, even UnkleE, i’d think.
What I have trouble gripping, is why the OT stuff is wrong, but the NT miracles related to Jesus, including resurrection, must be real because most scholars think the man Jesus was a real guy, and that some people way back then (a small minority of the population) believed Jesus was a healer.
isnt it possible for Jesus to be a real guy, but also not really the son of virgin and not the literal son of god? Isnt it possible for Jesus to have been a real guy who inspired some people, people who later began to spread legendary tales about him?
I don’t think Matthew was malicious. If it’s even the real Matthew, I bet he was confused, scared and mourning and turned to deep prayer and study of the scriptures he had. I think it’s easy to imagine how someone so devoted, who’s so confused and suffering from real grief, began seeing connections in the scriptures where none were really intended. And, as it turns out, this is quite plausible and is quite natural, requiring no supernatural events, no bigfoots, no alien space crafts, no Goddesses helping Achilles defeat to Hector, just a human, who’s misled by his heart, who made a series of mistakes despite the best of intentions.
proof? No, it’s a theory. But mine is backed up by more observable evidence of human nature and experience, while the resurrection relies on supernatural events that were spread and written during a superstitious time.
How does the presence of absurd supernatural claims and verifiable errors not make one question things like dead people coming back to life and flying off?
How does one not question the author who claims about a personal knowledge of God’s will, after we’ve seen that author make several mistakes? Even if we were to all believe in the christian god, how could we trust what any of these guys have said about him? many of the things they claim about god are unverifiable, while many of things that are verifiable have been wrong
“Oh, you wrong here, here and there, but now that you’re telling me how to go to gold road heaven, I feel like you’re absolutely correct in that area…”
I’m having a difficult time.
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An appeal to common sense and consistency?
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“How does the presence of absurd supernatural claims and verifiable errors not make one question things like dead people coming back to life and flying off?”
It is possible for some Christians to have an “Ah Ha” moment. Others never will. I think this process will just have to happen through attrition .
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Hi Nate, before I respond to anything else you have said, I’d like to clarify your position on my two propositions P1 and P2 please.
You prefer the version that addresses the christian God, so let’s go with that. And to clarify still further, let’s define “the christian God” as the God that we see in the teachings of Jesus recorded in the 4 gospels. (I’ve tried to choose words that don’t imply any belief in the veracity of the gospels, just using the words attributed to Jesus there to define God.) So my propositions are:
P1: The God described in the teachings of Jesus exists.
P2: The God described in the teachings of Jesus doesn’t exist.
So my question is, what degree of assent do you give to each of these propositions? You could express that assent in numerical probability terms, but just as good would be to use the common scale of 1. Disagree strongly, 2. Disagree, 3. Neither agree nor disagree, 4. Agree, 5. Agree strongly.
I think if you gave your assessments, that would help a lot. Thanks.
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Nate,
I think the key is where you say that “I think the necessity for inerrancy comes from the kind of god being argued for”, which I take to mean that you reject the possibility that the Christian God can be legitimately decoupled from inerrancy. Consider this: one could start by seeing the Bible as something like a resource of ideas about God – a collection of poems, essays and stories from people who were documenting their experience of God in a way that resonates with your own thoughts and experiences. That resonance would lead you to accept many (but not all) of the biblical ideas. Further, if your conception of God also included the image of a father who wants his children to wrestle with the divine and figure things out for themselves, then the flaws and humanity of the Bible would align with that conception and override any notions of inerrancy and a God who wishes to deliver a perfectly informative revelation (and its likely that when you then ask yourself about God’s role in other religious revelations, you’ll also come to adopt a universalist soteriology).
This is similar to where I found myself before my deconversion. I’m not sure how well it aligns with Eric’s perspective, but I don’t think it’s necessarily inconsistent even if it is uncommon or even heretical, depending on who you ask. That said, it obviously also isn’t a view that I was able to sustain. Upon realizing that I was reconstructing my own personal conception of God from the scraps of a dilapidated evangelical background, it occurred to me that maybe the raw materials were themselves unfounded constructions and that I didn’t really understand why the Judeo-Christian God (and the accompanying supernatural reality) was assumed in my worldview in the first place. The questioning of that underlying assumption hasn’t yet convinced me of its validity, but if I were to ever reach that point then I would almost certainly continue to reject inerrancy and I don’t think that would be a problem except in the eyes of fundamentalists.
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UnkleE:
And then UnkleE ask to what extent we give our assent to these propositions.
For me, I neither assent nor dissent. The teachings of Jesus provide a useful guide to how we should treat each other. We can follow that guide, whether or not Jesus or his God exist.
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If I’m not mistaken (and please let me know if I am), it seems your main point is that we should require evidence that an alleged Christian deity is consistent with its own teachings. Thus, I think you’re asking more for consistency within the Christian message than some sort of special evidence. The problem (and I think some responses have hinted at this) is tamping down what the original message is that we can compare. It’s hard to ask for a consistent message when there are many different perceptions of that message.
Personally, this is why I don’t think it requires extraordinary or even special evidence to evaluate supernatural claims of any stripe – religious ones included. I’ll probably end up doing a post of my own, but the short reason is that even asking for consistency is giving the claim more deference than it would otherwise receive if all things were actually equal. A good example of this is how many arguments have you gotten into with Christians as to whether your disbelief in Poseidon is justified? If we were being completely fair, every faith would need just as much vehement defense regardless of whether one adheres to it or not.
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Hi unkleE,
I agree fairly strongly with P2. I don’t know that I could give any kind of numerical value to them, but I’m reasonably confident that P2 is true.
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Travis,
I found your comment extremely helpful. I think that’s probably the best explanation I’ve seen on how/why someone might find Christianity persuasive without needing anything like inerrancy. And for those who didn’t grow up with inerrancy, I realize how strange it probably seems that it’s such a big deal to other people.
Where do you suppose people get these initial beliefs about God from? What are they comparing the claims of Christianity against that gives them the idea that it’s true? That’s what I don’t really understand. To me, the fact that people throughout time have felt very confident that completely different gods and religions were accurate shows just how unreliable our internal barometer of such things is.
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“Where do you suppose people get these initial beliefs about God from?”
Nate, I can’t say where people 2,000 years ago got their initial beliefs. Today , I believe it’s through indoctrination, from the Church, the Bible, parents, relatives and friends.As a non-believer, do you attend some public forum to constantly enforce your beliefs ? Do you need to continue to read a certain book ? Would you need parents, relatives or friends to reinforce what you believe? I think the answer would be “No”. But these are all the vehicles Christians or believers of other religions need to continue to reinforce their beliefs.
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Hey Sirius,
Thanks for the comment! Yes, I think you’ve stated it fairly. Consistency is probably the root of what I’m driving at. I think inerrancy would be an outward manifestation of that consistency. I don’t know why a perfect God who wants us to do specific things would give us an imperfect message.
Of course, maybe there’s no real consequence whether someone believes or not. The Bible tells us there is, but it could be wrong about that. Which also means that there’s no point in Christians trying to convert people.
And maybe God doesn’t want people to do anything specific at all. Again, that’s just the Bible’s claim, and it could be wrong.
At that point though, I don’t see what the point of any of it is. To me, that still makes atheism the most logical position. At least until God stops hiding.
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I think you’re right, kc. But human history shows us that those reasons are pretty unreliable (which you know, of course). That’s why I think people would need some dependable source to tell them what God actually wants. It doesn’t have to be a book — lots of religions claim that God (or gods) interacted directly with people long ago, and that’s how they knew what was expected of them. But without something like that, people are just going to stick with the religion that appeals to them subjectively. I guess in some ways that’s fine… but it’s certainly not a good method to find truth.
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For me, the “liberal” Christianity that I ended up with prior to deconversion was mostly a consequence of trying to make sense of everything without abandoning my worldview entirely. That last step is big and scary and I can understand how people would prefer to never take it. Coming from the other side, I suspect that new converts may latch on to a non-fundamentalist Christianity because they’re drawn to the lifestyle rather than the theology. I still accompany my wife to church and the “seeker friendly” venues we hit are far more focused on how to live the good life than on any sort of Bible teaching, even though they claim the Bible as an authority. People want purpose, direction and hope and you don’t need inerrancy for that. The message rings true because it offers these things and we intuitively equate comfort with truth.
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Hi Neil (“I neither assent nor dissent. “) and Nate (“I agree fairly strongly with P2.”), thanks for your replies.
P1 and P2 are of the form of A and ~A, so they are mutually exclusive (both can’t be true) and exhaustive (there are no other possibilities). So their two probabilities should logically add to 1.0 (if they don’t, then we haven’t been logical).
So I presume, Neil, that you are assigning approximately equal probability to each proposition, i.e. you really have no opinion either way on whether the christian God exists. It is equally likely, in your mind, that he does and that he doesn’t. Is that right?
It is good to understand your views but I have little more to say about them, except that I would expect to see your arguments on sites like this to reflect your ambivalence, and just as often argue for christianity as argue against christianity. Although we have “met” before, I don’t know you well enough to know if that is how your arguments are in fact, but that is what I would expect from that result.
On the other hand, Nate, you have a strong belief that the christian God doesn’t exist, so you agree with P2 fairly strongly and you disagree with P1 fairly strongly. That’s what I would have expected your views to be. But this means you are making quite a definite proposition – you’re “reasonably confident” that the christian God doesn’t exist.
Now it is a fairly well established principle of philosophy that any proposition should be supported by an argument or evidence. Antony Flew, the famous philosopher who argued for the presumption of atheism (by which he meant what we may define as the 50/50 position, similar to Neil’s view), said: “The onus of proof lies on the proposition, not on the opposition.” So just as I expect to give a reason for any proposition I put forward, so we can reasonably expect you to do the same for this proposition.
So I come back to my original question. Why are most of your beliefs (e.g. about ethics, politics, etc) supported by errant evidence, but your disbelief in the christian God (P1) requires inerrant evidence, but your belief in the proposition that the christian God doesn’t exist (P2) doesn’t require inerrant evidence? Shouldn’t you, like Neil, withhold belief from both propositions until you have inerrant evidence?
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Hi Travis, thanks for your comments. I think you are close to understanding my views. Just a few comments ….
“one could start by seeing the Bible as something like a resource of ideas about God – a collection of poems, essays and stories from people who were documenting their experience of God in a way that resonates with your own thoughts and experiences.”
Yes, that is true, one could start that way, but it isn’t where I start. I start with the historians who talk about historical evidence and historical “facts”. (I put facts in inverted commas because no history can be known without some uncertainties.) That view doesn’t require an inerrant Bible, just the New Testament as the consensus of historians assesses it.
“if your conception of God also included the image of a father who wants his children to wrestle with the divine and figure things out for themselves”
Again, I think you are at least half right. I think God wants us to “seek and find”, but I don’t think we have to figure it out unaided, but respond to whatever truth we know.
“I still accompany my wife to church”
My sincere compliments and respect. That mustn’t be easy – I find it hard enough to go to church and I believe in Jesus, just not in a lot of stuff churches do.
Thanks.
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One thing that appears to have been overlooked here, is that there is no evidence whatsoever to assume the words attributed to the character, Jesus of Nazareth were not simply interpolated by the writer of the gospel in question.
By allowing unkleE to steer the conversation towards a purely philosophical exercise the core issue of his ( and many christians) blatant hypocrisy pertaining to accepting the Pentateuch as myth yet believing and worse, proselytizing that the resurrection of the biblical characters Lazarus and Jesus of Nazareth are factual, historical events remains undressed.
While such obfuscation on his part speaks volumes about the man’s lack of integrity to honestly address these very real concerns, allowing him to do so is likely to reduce the thread to another lengthy meander where her will, once again, bow out after manipulating the post once again.
However, if he refuses to address this issue, as he seems to intent on doing, I would be fascinated to hear from one of the other former fundamentalists here how they were able to accept the mythological nature of the Old Testament and still gladly uphold the belief the resurrection accounts were historical fact.
Ark
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Hi unkleE,
Sure, I don’t mind having a burden of evidence for my position.
Not at all.
Ethics and politics are things that we all interact with. I don’t think anyone would deny their existence as concepts. The Christian god is completely different. Its existence can’t be demonstrated, and Christians claim specific things about it that have never been demonstrated to be possible (perfection, all-knowing, all-powerful, etc).
As I said earlier, I’m not sure that I would actually require any kind of inerrant evidence to make me believe such a god exists. However, if that god really is perfect and really does want to impart a message, then I would expect the message to be perfect. For instance, if someone told me that they had a message from Bernie Sanders, but the message contained all kinds of rhetoric about how low taxes for the wealthy and deregulation of financial institutions would lead to economic security, I’d highly doubt the message. It’s not that I doubt Bernie Sanders’s existence — it’s that the purported message from him looks like nothing he would say or write.
Now it just so happens that I do doubt the existence of the Christian god. But that’s not really the issue I’m focused on right now. I’m talking about the Bible, specifically. It’s a collection of books that supposedly speak about the Christian god with authority. Many of the passages claim to be relaying a message from that god. But to me, the nature of the book is completely at odds with the characteristics of the god in question. My problems with it go beyond the question of inerrancy, but I do think inerrancy would probably be one of the Bible’s characteristics, if it really had been divinely inspired. And honestly, I think that’s what most Christians assumed throughout history, until we began discovering its flaws. That’s why most people believed in a literal 6 day creation, a literal global flood, an earth at the center of the universe, etc.
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unkleE,
I’m surprised that your faith starts with what the historians say about Jesus. Secular historians don’t think he came back from the dead, and religious ones do. Doesn’t this suggest that the historians are relying on something other than history to come to their various positions? And surely you were raised with some belief in God before you were able to study the historical Jesus? I understand that the historical arguments are what you point to for the evidence for your faith, but didn’t your faith actually come from something else first? Please correct me if my assumptions are wrong here.
Thanks
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Responding to UnkleE:
No, I’m not assigning equal probability. I am not assigning any probability at all.
You are right, that I have no opinion either way. And that’s because it doesn’t actually matter to me (either way). But it does not follow that I see either as equally likely. If anything, I see both as ill defined, as unclear.
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P1: Something you have never experienced, seen or heard from exists.
P2: Something you have never experienced, seen or heard from does not exist.
It doesn’t matter if we are talking about deities, aliens or leprechauns. Trying to suggest that P2 should be given equal standing with P1 is not logical. Common sense and the rules of logic and probability dictate that we should have a default position of 100% P2 is true. Imagine a standard deck of cards that you repeatedly draw a card from – what are the odds of drawing a “13” card or any card that you have never seen or experienced before? The same could be asked about three day old dead bodies coming back to life.
Of course there could be plenty of things we have never experienced, seen or heard from that exist, but at what point should we begin assigning some probability to their existence? Not until reports of independent verification begin to arrive and only in small amounts due to the human factors of being mistaken, lying, hallucinating, poor memory, embellishments, etc.
Let’s pick the proposition that Jesus came back from the dead.
P1: A Jewish teacher named Jesus was dead for 3 nights or 2 nights (depending on who you ask) and was then reanimated back to life.
Using our common knowledge that all of the billions of 48+ hour dead bodies throughout human history have remained dead we can accept that our starting position should be 100% P1 is false. We can then slowly add small amounts of probability based on independent verification: autopsy reports, biased witnesses, unbiased witnesses, scientific measurements, etc. Let me know if anyone makes it past 1% P1 is true.
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I give a hearty “Amen” to Dave! Imagine someone using the same philosophical argument to argue for the existence of the Tooth Fairy. Everyone, including Christians, would laugh at his silliness. Yet with the straightest of faces, Christians roll out this same philosophical nonsense for THEIR supernatural claims.
All you need to determine the probability of any supernatural claim is the following: common sense.
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@Nonsupernaturalist
UnkleE is a past master at the philosophical two-step. He isn’t an apologist for Jesus of Nazareth for nothing y’know?
And when he realises his arse is ”whooped” (as the Americans say) he will make some pithy retort and extricate himself to save further oeuf on the face..
Mark my words!
😉
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The problem here is a false premise.
It is Christians themselves, and specifically the inerrantists, who claim that inerrancy is necessary. The Chicago Statement on Biblical inerrancy says, “The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded…” Fundamentalists like AIG say, “We cannot have a reliable Savior without a reliable Scripture.” The Catholic Church has said, “inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true.”
Obviously, many Christians do not believe in inerrancy, so inerrancy is not a requirement for Christian belief. But the point the inerrantists raise — if the Bible is not reliable, why should we rely upon it? — is reasonably valid.
Atheists do not require inerrant evidence. We argue against Biblical inerrancy because it is a specific claim Christians make that we believe is demonstrably false. But atheism (defined here as “lack of belief in a God”) does not rest upon Biblical error any more than lack of belief in Atlantis rests upon the fact that some historical documents contain errors. The existence of errors in the Bible are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for atheism.
Let me try to illustrate the problem with this premise.
Christian 1: If the Bible is inerrant, then Christianity is necessarily true.
Atheist: Yes, that is correct, but I don’t believe the Bible is inerrant.
Christian 2: Why do you require inerrancy to believe that Christianity is true?
Atheist: I don’t require inerrancy to believe that Christianity is true, but Christian 1 argued that Conclusion B follows from premise A, so it was relevant to point out that Premise A is false.
Now, unklee, you might reasonably argue that you did not, personally, claim inerrancy as Premise A, but surely you can understand that others have, or that the reliability of the evidence is relevant to the conclusions one reaches.
Or, if I might turn the question around on you…
How is it that in everything else in life – whether it be ethics, or politics, relationships, science, history, law, even disbelief – you evaluate the reliability of the evidence, but when it is belief in God you criticize us for considering the reliability of the evidence?
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@Dave,
While I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, I would caution against throwing out 100% probabilities without being clear that this is a proxy for 99.9999999% or whatever is appropriate. We don’t want to be immune to adjusting our credences based on any new evidence, which is what 0% and 100% does. Our epistemic position is such that we should always acknowledge that we have incomplete information.
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Hi Travis,
I guess since we have to rely on our imperfect senses and our limited brains we could adjust our default probabilities by a small degree to account for these limitations or perhaps some other irregularity or quantum fluctuation.
My kids will be happy to learn that we should apply a 0.00000000001% probability by default to anything that may exist whether it be fairies or flying reindeer 🙂 Maybe even a universe where school does not exist!
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