Science and the Bible

[Adrift]

Well if you wouldn't go that far then it seems you ought to agree with me. If the Bible can carry a special status even while erring, then why can't this special status still guarantee at least some central truths?

I say I wouldn't go that far, because I guess I'm just a hopeful person by nature. I could live with the knowledge of errancy in scripture, and hope that enough truth can be gleaned from scripture that it would still be profitable for correction, doctrine and reproof. Maybe I'd just be lying to myself though.

You still seem hung up on this matter of "who decides".

Yes, because I still think that's an important question. This is how my mind works; You can throw in all of the strange cults and Jehovah Witnesses, and whoever else you want into the ring of inerrancy, and yes, their doctrine is jacked up, but at least they know that the Bible is true through and through, and that's a starting point if nothing else. And I think that's because the doctrine of inerrancy keeps all of the relevant data on the table. Nothing can be thrown out or set aside.

What is done with what's on the table is another story, but you know... if you're an errantist who's a Universalist, you can take the verses about hell off the table. For gay marriage? Take the verses against homosexuality off the table. Find the OT verses about miraculous deeds too hard to swallow? Take them off the table. Its far far more convenient for the errantist to remove data from the pile than it is for the inerrantist. Now the inerrantist may still come to the same conclusions about hell, homosexuality, and miraculous as the errantist, but in order to do so they must make certain compromises or come to strange conclusions in their interpretation of the text. Inerrantists can't just say "well this author erred when he wrote such and such, so I'm going to dismiss it", no, they're forced to look at the text, admit that the passage was intended, and then they can come to their conclusions. So, their conclusions may still be whacked, but at least inerrancy provides some sort of check.

But Christians have always thought through what is minimally important. That is what our creeds do. And any time any of the NT authors summarise the gospel, they are implicitly making claims about what's central to the gospel.

Well can't we take that further and say that the canon we know today was also minimally important? There were plenty of other letters being passed around the early church that never made it into the canon, some that probably made better doctrinal sense at the time then the letters that were included, but the canon wasn't settled purely on doctrinal belief, but also because of surety of the authority and legitimacy of the letters. Creeds simply outline what's detailed in those minimally accepted books.

Note as well that a Christian errantist need not rule out anything uncentral as dubious a priori. They should think that anything in the Bible is potentially something proposed for our belief.

Of course, but the inerrantist is practically guaranteed not to rule out anything seemingly uncentral. Makes things less sloppy.

It might eventually be shown that some things are not what God wanted us to learn from the Bible. But we don't need to decide that from the get-go; we don't need to go through the Bible and highlight anything trivial in red as "definitely not true". I've already conceded that some of the claims of Scripture will be ambiguous as to their importance. But not all of them.

Are you saying that there might be things actually in the Bible that God may not want us to actually believe, or are you saying that there are things that one may wrongly interpret from scripture that God doesn't want us to know?

You ask how we can know that any seemingly minor errors wouldn't undermine more important doctrines. Well clearly some prima facie trivial Biblical claims indeed could be logically linked to other clearly important claims. Perhaps some YECs are right (for example) when they claim that Genesis teaches a literal 6 day creation and that you can't accept an old earth, even though the age of the earth seems trivial, because an old earth implies animal death prior to the fall and, by their view of the atonement, this renders Christ's atoning death meaningless. These sorts of entailments are possible. But must this be so for any potential error? Would denying literally anything in Scripture create such a knock-on effect? Biblical errancy isn't one uniform view; it is a class of a variety of positions. Some might have such damning conclusions, but must all of them?

If errancy is true, then I hope that most of the Bible can be trusted to be without error, but as you previously pointed out, the Bible holds a special status whose authority and reliability are derived from divine origin. If a man lies to me a few times, but is over all pretty honest, then I'm willing to overlook it. If the God of this universe were to lie to me a few times... well... I don't know, that's something else, isn't it?

Remember I'm only arguing for what God's possibly done. Perhaps it is more probable that God would create an inerrant Bible. But it isn't necessary that he must. Before getting too carried away in this line of thought stop and think about how "obvious" it might seem prima facie that it would make more sense for God to not allow natural disasters, and yet he does. A Christian errantist could even take up the task of providing "theodicies" for why God produced an errant Bible.

I think that's unfortunately true.

Anyway all I'm saying is that, whatever God's done, he's at least guaranteed the transmission of the core gospel message.

If errancy is true, we can only hope.

The distinction seems to me that most orthodox Christian scholars have proven to have a better grasp on the original author's intent, helped along by Biblical criticism, and to some degree probably church tradition. Spong and Crossan have thrown out the tradition, but they're still applying, to varying degrees, good Biblical criticism (well, sometimes they do).

So, are you claiming that the more conservative a view one has of Scripture, the more likely one is to interpret it correctly?

This feels like a setup, but, um... yeah. Why not? Do you feel that a more liberal view of scripture is more likely to be interpreted correctly? It seems to me that a liberal view would strip the Bible of quite a bit of its meat, and you'd end up with something that looks a bit like Jefferson's Bible.

Anyway, what are we talking about here? Exegesis, or something else? I mean it's possible for a liberal to correctly discern that Paul believed and considered of utmost importance the physical resurrection of Christ, but for him/her to deny that this actually happened. More than that, they could even think that, contrary to Paul, what was really significant or spiritually insightful about the events at the birth of Christianity was the profound sense of God's forgiveness that the apostles felt - that this warm glow in our hearts is what humanity really requires.

So... You don't think one's view of scripture (whether liberal or conservative) likely has any bearing on their exegesis? I mean, even generally speaking? Or am I missing what you're saying?

I think there is. But I'm not certain what that relation is and I'm trying to push you to specify more precisely what you think it is and how it looks bad for errancy.

Hmm. Well, hopefully I've clarified that in my above response.

Okay so what's the criticism of an errantist position supposed be here?

That if they accidentally (or even purposely) dismiss truth they affect the rest.

Again I'm struggling to see where exactly the issue is. You've switched from exegesis (who has correctly interpreted the Bible) to truth (who has correctly believed (or not) the claims of the Bible). Sure, the errantist is more open to be tempted to simply reject as false some passage he/she doesn't like. What that got to do with exegesis?

What does rejection of a passage have to do with exegesis? Its funny because I'm struggling to figure out why you would even need an answer to that. It doesn't seem obvious to you? First of all determining whether or not a particular passage should be thrown out is part of correct interpretation. If one is open to the idea that a passage can be dismissed as erroneous, and does dismiss a passage as erroneous, then isn't that a form of exegesis right there. By determining a passage is in error and rejecting the passage, the individual has most likely also rejected the idea that the writing was divine in origin, and that's exegesis. And then it seems to me that once the erroneous passage is identified, knowledge of this is sure to have an effect on how one interprets surrounding passages, and connecting passages in other books.

But this would just be a very poor argument. Some Christians think that trusting science is disastrous for the Christian belief. Some skeptics agree. Does that mean that Christians shouldn't trust science?

I agree, I don't think its the best argument. It is an argument though.

Moreover, not every errantist inevitably leaves Christianity. That's just a matter of fact. Of course, you might think that do so would be consistent, but then you're right back to needing an argument to demonstrate that.

Right, I agree that not every errantist inevitably leaves Christianity. In fact, some of the greatest Christians I know are errantists. Rberman often says that's because humans have the wonderful capability to rationalize potentially opposing views. I always kind of mentally smirk when he says that, though I don't think its necessarily true of errantists.

And btw, Bart doesn't claim that inerrancy was the cause for his loosing faith. In an episode of Unbelievable? where he discussed inerrancy with Mike Licona, he denied that loosing inerrancy was the cause.

Ah, interesting. Dan Wallace said that that was one of the primary reasons he denied his faith here, and it seems to me I remember hearing WLC saying the same on one of his podcasts at one point, but I suppose if anyone would know for sure it'd be Ehrman himself.

But this way I can obscure the obvious failings of my arguments with a pretense of competence. It's fun!

I'm on to you now!

Post Script: A lot of what we're discussing here may sound like I'm going in circles (though I hope that's not the case). And if so, its because a lot of this just seems obvious to me, and it seems weird to have to explain some of these views to a fellow Christian who, I'm assuming, was at one point an inerrantist himself (or may still be). Maybe its your philosophy background that forces you to ask questions that I see as obvious, or maybe I'm missing a bigger picture in all of this. I mean, I'm probably not as smart as I'd like to think I am, and I realize that some topics are over my head, and maybe this is one of those topics.