How can we trust the Bible if it's not inerrant?

[otseng]

From the On the Bible being inerrant thread:

How can you trust something that's written about god that contradictory, contains errors and just plain wrong at times? Is there a logical way to do so, or do you just want it to be god's word so much that you overlook these things like happens so often through the history of christianity?

The Bible can still be God's word, inspired, authoritative, and trustworthy without the need to believe in inerrancy.

For debate:
How can the Bible be considered authoritative and inspired without the need to believe in the doctrine of inerrancy?

While debating, do not simply state verses to say the Bible is inspired or trustworthy.

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Thread Milestones

• Case study of Hezekiah
• Start discussing global flood / Flood Model summary
• Recap arguments of authority of the Bible
• Start discussing Tower of Babel / Tower of Babel summary
• Start discussing archaeology / Philosophy of science / Origin of alphabet / End of discussion on archaeology
• Start discussing cosmology / Concluding cosmology
• Start discussing Shroud of Turin / Summary top TS imaging theories / Created DefendingChristianity.com and TS subforums / Shroud of Turin summary
• Start discussing Bible and resurrection
• Start discussing the Messiahship of Jesus / Messiahship of Jesus wrap up
• Start discussing Old Testament ethics
• Summary argument of atheism and morality / God basis for objective morality
• Start discussing genocide / Genocide summary argument
• Start discussing slavery / Slavery summary argument
• Start discussing homosexuality / Homosexuality summary argument
• Old Testament ethics summary argument
• Start discussing philosophy / Summary argument on philosophy
• Start discussing creation of universe / Summary argument universe was created

[TRANSPONDER]

C14 dating has has its' ups and downs. Coal is particularly open to substance contamination, leading to misleading dates. If science throws up its' hands and says 'we can't rely on it for any dates, even broad ones' I'd have to accept that, but it isn't anywhere near there, especially with other dating methods as a check.

I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I am saying we can rely on the dating of C14. It's like the table has turned in which you stated:

Science firmly accepts the validity of Radiocarbon dating for organic material and (e.g) potassium argon dating for mineral remains. One either accepts the science or not.

I accept the dating. But, you do not accept the dating of C14 in fossil fuels. But, rather reject the dating because it conflicts with the assumption of deep time. And in order to make it fit deep time, ad hoc explanations are added.

And your effort to use 'ad hoc' explanations as to why particular coal deposits may have given wrong dates

I'm not the one using ad hoc explanations.

which only means they are hypothetical possibilities to be researched, does not in any way justify your claim that without these particular suggestion for ONE problem, you want to throw all the dating in the bin by craftily suggesting that ad hoc for one particular problem implies ad hoc for everything.

C14 in fossil fuels is not the only evidence of a young earth.

Another evidence is soft tissue remains in dinosaur fossils.

A 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil has yielded soft tissue, including blood vessels and perhaps even whole cells, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

"Tissue fragments from a Tyrannosaurus rex femur are shown at left, when it is flexible and resilient and when stretched (arrow) returns to its original shape. The middle photo shows the bone after it is air dried. The photo at right shows regions of bone showing fibrous character, not normally seen in fossil bone."
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7285683

Does it even make sense for something 70-million years old to have soft tissue remains? I have things in my kitchen that have hardened solid just after a few years.

it looked like a picture of classic period temples (250 -1200 AD,) which wouldn't help your case. Again, what ziggurat or pyramid -like structures do the (preclassic) Maya have at this 1,000 BC date of yours?

My point about ziggurats around the world is not to present a detailed chronological explanation of how it spread all around the globe (which I doubt anyone could do). But I'm simply presenting a data point where disparate cultures share a common similarity. The question is why would there be similarities? Either it was from a common source or they evolved independently.

Ok so we can (broadly, I have to add) rely on C 14 dating but how it 'turns the tables' I do not get. If C14 did (which isn't altogether the case) disagree with all the other dates of 'Deep Time' then the implication would be that, for some reason, C14 dates in coal were turning up wrong. I'll have a look at that.

You are actually using the ad hoc explanation. You are using the hypothetical explanation of the wrong dates the scientists put forward (which you call ad hoc and you have a case a they are off the cuff suggestions) as reasons to reject the fossil fuel C14 dates, Also it is the dates you use to dismiss deep time geological dates and use 'ad hoc' to dismiss the explanations. You need to think that all through again.

Oh dear. The T Rex 'soft tissue' nonsense. I understand that the soft tissue itself has been fossilised. I'll have a look but I don't think the organic tissue has been preserved as such so it won't be datable by C14. You have to bear in mind that organic material is limited not by what dates C14 can give but how likely organic material is going to survive. I'll have a look at that.

What else.. Your cheese going inedible after a month is nothing like the fossilisation process where the cheese gets buried in mud and after 500 k or a million years the cheese decays and is replaces by minerals seeping in the plaster cast it leaves and effectively you get a replica of the cheese in stone. You can't date it but you can tel it was cheese and the date of the rocks in which the fossil cheese was preserved. Which is as long as the rocks last.

Creationists persistently fail to understand either fossilisation or the C14 process.

Finally, the ziggurats, pyramids. Independent origins of temples and pyramids is more likely than a common source. My mention of Chavin de Huantar shows that even when on the coast they didn't have pottery yet (the Sumerians and Egyptians had it long before) up in the Andes the Chavin of 3,000 BC were building a stone temple complex unlike either ziggurats or Pyramids. The pre Maya on the West were building platforms as precursors of the Temples. These became more ziggurat - like as they were developed in the pre -classic period. Just as in Egypt the evidence suggests they worked it out for themselves and it was not brought from either Mesopotamia or Egypt.

[TRANSPONDER]

Ok Here's the think on T rex 'Soft tissue' Is is not chunks of meat that can be dated. It is not datable by C14. If ever dinosaur soft tissue is preserved in a tar pi for example, I'm sure we'll all hear about it.
Claim CC371.1:
Soft, flexible tissue, complete blood vessels, and apparently intact cells were found when a Tyrannosaurus bone was broken open (Schweitzer et al. 2005). Such preservation indicates that the bones are only a few thousand years old, not millions of years.
Source:
Wieland, Carl. 2005. Still soft and stretchy. http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs200 ... tissue.asp
Response:
The reports of the soft tissue, though remarkable, have been sensationalized further. The tissues were not soft and pliable originally. The tissues were rehydrated in the process of removing the surrounding mineral components of the bone (Schweitzer et al. 2005). Moreover, it is unknown whether the soft tissues are original tissues. Fossil flexible tissues and nucleated cells have been found before in which the original material was not preserved (Stokstad 2005).

The age of fossils is not determined by how well they are preserved, because preservation depends far more on factors other than age. The age of this particular bone was determined from the age of the rocks it was found in, namely, the Hell Creek Formation. This formation has been reliably dated by several independent methods (Dalrymple 2000).

DNA has never been recovered from any dinosaurs nor from anything as old as them, and researchers do not expect to find DNA from these soft tissues (though they can still hope). DNA has been recovered, however, from samples much more than 10,000 years old (Poinar et al. 1998), even more than 300,000 years old (Stokstad 2003; Willerslev et al. 2003). If dinosaur fossils were as young as creationists claim, finding soft tissues in them would not be news, and recovering DNA from them should be easy enough that it would have been done by now.

[TRANSPONDER]

Oldest dated coal brought up Quora

"Coal deposits are known to have formed more than 400 million years ago. Most anthracite and bituminous coals occur within the 299- to 359.2-million-year-old strata of the Carboniferous Period, the so-called first coal age."
They don't say how they arrived at this date but I would guess it was dating the rocks, not the coal. I have to admit that Talk Origins seems very coy in talking about dating fossil fuel (Coal or oil) as I'd expect them to say 'Most coal and oil dated by C14 gives dates of 100 million years BC.' The radiometric dating of rocks has been a different (non - organic) method and the coal and oil frankly ought to fit into that. I'll try to get further clarification of whether they can date 'fossil' coal and what the dates were. I'd agree it would be fishy if ALL the C14 dates were within the tens or even thousands of years range.

[TRANSPONDER]

The thing is that C14 is more useful for dating things in the thousands and tens of thousands than millions of years. Dating woolly mammoths gives dates up to 50 thousands years old, which is a lot older than your timescale. However there are disagreements about the dates and there is always a problem with innate or later contamination affecting the dates (though it always seems to make it less, not more).

Quora brought up
“Carbon dating” is one of a family of methods which rely on radioactive decay. Carbon-14 has a half life of less than 6,000 years, and as time progresses, less and less of it remains, so the accuracy with which fossils can be dated via radiocarbon dating reduces to a point (possibly between 50,000 to 100,000 years) at which it is less reliable than alternatives.

Those alternatives (mainly potassium/argon and uranium/thorium) are used to estimate the ages of older fossils, and may be used in conjunction with radiocarbon dating where there may be some overlap in the age ranges to which each can b…

This is part of the problem. The older the material, the more C14 radiates away leaving half of what was there in one half like (C14 is fissionable) so there will always be some left down to the last C14 atom, but with really ancient stuff it becomes more difficult to get a measurable sample. It is tough with unfossilised bone a million or so years old and must be very difficult with coal deposits tens of millions of years old. That's why dating is done more from the dates of the rocks.

[otseng]

You are using the hypothetical explanation of the wrong dates the scientists put forward (which you call ad hoc and you have a case a they are off the cuff suggestions) as reasons to reject the fossil fuel C14 dates, Also it is the dates you use to dismiss deep time geological dates and use 'ad hoc' to dismiss the explanations. You need to think that all through again.

I'm not the one that needs to think it through again.

If you just take the findings of the fossil fuel C14 dating, there is detectable C14 and it dates to 40,000 years old.

"Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), a sensitive radiometric dating technique, is in some cases finding trace amounts of radioactive carbon-14 in coal deposits, amounts that seem to indicate an age of around 40,000 years."
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/c14.html

The only way to dispute this is to add an ad hoc explanation and then claim it is older than 40,000 years old.

Oh dear. The T Rex 'soft tissue' nonsense. I understand that the soft tissue itself has been fossilised.

The point is it is soft tissue that is still pliable, not fossilized like a rock. It is "flexible and resilient and when stretched returns to its original shape". And this is to be expected for something that is 70 million years old?

The evidence of C14 in coal and soft tissue in T-Rex is pretty clear and doesn't need any more rehashing from me. There's still a lot of other areas to cover and I'll be going on to the next area of support of the reliability of the Bible, which will probably take even longer than any other area I've covered already.

[TRANSPONDER]

You're the one that needs to read and think it through. The article gives some reasons why false reading might be obtained. You simply dismiss those as 'ad hoc'. I also pointed out that the remaining C14 after millions of years would be a small relative amount making it difficult to measure and succeptible to contamination.

There are plenty of other dating methods other than coal.

You also didn't read through the article on the T. Rex soft tissue. It was fossilised soft tissue. I don't quite follow the 'rehydration' process but clearly it isn't organic material such as would give a C14 date. In any case even if it had been a chunk of preserved dinosaur meat, why would you assume it wouldn't give a C14 date of 609 million years ago?

In any case, how do these matters, even if they proved an earth ...what 40-50, 000 years old, make any case for the tower of Babel, copying of ziggurats or pyramids (pick whichever you like) in Central America, the Flood, or anything else in the Bible? Even if the Flood (non global) and Babel (a large ziggurat which perhaps collapsed) was true and the earth just a few thousand years old, and even if the Bible had recorded these events with it's own Spin, why could we trust the Bible for the significant claims it makes - the religious ones?

The Flood wouldn't be global (unless you scrap the Chinese Flood -legend) and the Babel ziggurat is hardly likely to annoy any gods because heaven is not up at top tier level. It looks like you're playing the familiar Creationist game of 'find something the scientists got wrong, pretend that it makes all the science wrong and suppose that means that makes the Bible trustworthy'.

Like I say, you need to think it through.

[TRANSPONDER]

There's an NCSE article that answers this question

Question: A sample that is more than fifty thousand years old shouldn't have any measurable C-14. Coal, oil, and natural gas are supposed to be millions of years old; yet creationists say that some of them contain measurable amounts of C-14, enough to give them C-14 ages in the tens of thousands of years. How do you explain this?

Answer: Very simply. Radiocarbon dating doesn't work well on objects much older than twenty thousand years, because such objects have so little C-14 left that their beta radiation is swamped out by the background radiation of cosmic rays and potassium-40 (K-40) decay. Younger objects can easily be dated, because they still emit plenty of beta radiation, enough to be measured after the background radiation has been subtracted out of the total beta radiation. However, in either case, the background beta radiation has to be compensated for, and, in the older objects, the amount of C-14 they have left is less than the margin of error in measuring background radiation. As Hurley points out:

Without rather special developmental work, it is not generally practicable to measure ages in excess of about twenty thousand years, because the radioactivity of the carbon becomes so slight that it is difficult to get an accurate measurement above background radiation. (p. 108)

[TRANSPONDER]

I was in two mins whether to post an extract or give a link. I don't seem to have the knack of doing both.

This link explains fully the T Rex soft tissue - what it is (fossilised remains) and what it is not (Dino meat - which would have decayed even if it was only 500 years old, if it was subject to decay at all) .

https://biologos.org/articles/soft-tiss ... really-say

[otseng]

But Archaeology has moved on and it's being recognised that the Bible is a polemical document not to say Mythical in parts and cannot be trusted, which is the topic

The next major body of evidence of the reliability of the Bible is archaeology. Out of everything presented so far in this thread, this is perhaps the strongest evidence to uphold the truthfulness of the Bible. There is so much here that there are even college degrees in this area. Needless to say, we can only briefly cover biblical archeology in this thread.

Here is a sampling of colleges that have a degree in biblical archeology:

- Newburgh Theological Seminary & College of the Bible
- Wheaton College
- Trinity Southwest University
- Veritas International University
- Lipscomb University
- Shepherds Theological Seminary
- Emmaus Bible College
- Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology

Plus there are a host of others in the field of Near East archaeology, Palestinian archaeology, and Israel archaeology.

Even with a large body of archaeological evidence, I do not claim archaeology will prove, or even support, all the claims in the Bible. But, I will claim that archaeology confirms and aligns with many claims of the Bible.

One thing interesting about the Bible is it is based on the context of history. Many sections of the Bible are set in the background of historical events, places, and people. So, it is possible to then confirm its validity through historical methods (written records and archaeology). This makes the Bible stand out among other religious scriptures since it is empirically testable. The Bible is not set in mythical lands or fictional characters or imaginary events. It is set in places you can actually go visit and dig and find things that corroborate the Biblical accounts.

[brunumb]

Radiocarbon in Dinosaur Fossils: Compatibility with an Age of Millions of Years

https://online.ucpress.edu/abt/article/ ... ility-with

The recent discovery of radiocarbon in dinosaur fossils has the potential to generate much puzzlement, because radiocarbon has a half-life too short for measurable amounts of original radiocarbon to remain in fossils that are millions of years old. Taking advantage of the popularity of dinosaurs, young-Earth creationist (YEC) authors now proclaim in an ever-increasing number of books and DVDs that radiocarbon in dinosaur fossils demonstrates that the dinosaur fossils must be only thousands, not millions, of years old (Helfinstine & Roth, 2007; Wilson et al., 2007; Lyons & Butt, 2008; Isaacs, 2010a, b; Woetzel, 2012; Thomas, 2013, 2014; Clarey, 2015; Institute for Creation Research, 2015). Many of the other dinosaur-based anti-evolution arguments from YEC authors are less worrisome, because they are plainly absurd (e.g., Senter, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2017a, 2018, 2019; Siebert, 2013; Senter & Wilkins, 2013; Senter & Klein, 2014), but the absurdity in the YEC arguments based on radiocarbon is less plain. That is because students and science educators often lack knowledge of the finer details of radiocarbon dating and the fossilization process that show how radiocarbon in dinosaur bones is consistent with an age of millions of years. Appropriate responses to such YEC arguments are therefore not always at hand. Here, I present an overview of the relevant details, to arm science educators and their students with the information they need to recognize such YEC misinterpretations as incorrect.

Also of interest:
Dinosaur soft tissues preserved as polymers
by Mary Caperton Morton
Wednesday, February 13, 2019

https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/d ... -polymers/