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

[otseng]

[Replying to otseng in post #3566

I've already presented the evidence of bias regarding the Scablands explanation.

Scientists weren't interested in evidence which wasn't scientific.

I don't even think you read what I wrote about the Scablands. What did Bertz and Pardee propose and why was the former rejected and the latter accepted?

Did you ever address the evidence of fossils in geological layers?

Not in this thread.

[otseng]

[Replying to otseng in post #3566

[Exo 20:3 KJV] 3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

It doesn't say anything about demanding worship.

It doesn't use the words "demand worship", but that's what it means.

Not only does it not say God demands worship in Exodus 20, there is no other passage in the Bible that says God demands worship that I've found.

[otseng]

The Bible says God is perfect. It does not say God is omniperfect.

Again, how do you define omniperfect?

God is perfectly good:"who does no wrong", “is righteous in all his ways”, “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all”.
God is perfect in his works: "his works are perfect".
God is perfect in his speech and his words: "his way is perfect:The Lord’s word is flawless;"
God is perfect in his justice: "all his ways are just"

Again, I agree God is perfect. But how are these things differentiating between perfect and omniperfect?

God’s knowledge is perfect->omniscient. Which you agreed.
God is perfect in his benevolence->omnibenevolence. Which you agreed.

God most likely is omniscient since he knows all things. As for omnibenevolence, I'm not so sure.

God is perfect in every sense. Ergo omniperfect.

The Bible does not say this. Where does it say God is "perfect in every sense"?

[Athetotheist]

To a deity who demands it?

To an agreed upon deity of a select people who were surrounded by other people with other deities. The deity wasn't demanding it from those others. (Exodus 24:7)

But pity the poor convert to one of those other religions, even if that religion turned out to be true.....

If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Ye shall walk after the Lord your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him. And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way which the Lord thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee.
(Deuteronomy 13:1-5)


Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’

We don't even have to look at demanding worship. What about demanding love? If you're a parent, you may demand that your children obey you. You may demand that they respect your parental authority. But have you ever demanded that they love you?

[Athetotheist]

[Replying to otseng in post #3592

I don't even think you read what I wrote about the Scablands. What did Bertz and Pardee propose and why was the former rejected and the latter accepted?

Did you ever address the evidence of fossils in geological layers?

Not in this thread.

I read what you wrote about Scablands, and since it didn't address fossils in geological layering, it can hardly be considered scientifically rigorous.

[otseng]

[Replying to otseng in post #3592

I don't even think you read what I wrote about the Scablands. What did Bertz and Pardee propose and why was the former rejected and the latter accepted?

Did you ever address the evidence of fossils in geological layers?

Not in this thread.

I read what you wrote about Scablands, and since it didn't address fossils in geological layering, it can hardly be considered scientifically rigorous.

I don't follow your logic. What does fossils have anything to do with it? Bretz was not studying the sedimentary strata, but the erosion patterns.

Since 1910 he had been interested in unusual erosion features in the area after seeing a newly published topographic map of the Potholes Cataract. Bretz coined the term Channelled Scablands in 1923 to describe the area near the Grand Coulee, where massive erosion had cut through basalt deposits. The area was a desert, but Bretz's theories required cataclysmic water flows to form the landscape, for which Bretz coined the term Spokane Floods in a 1925 publication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Harlen_Bretz

[Mae von H]

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?

How? Out of perceived necessity. It's obviously not inerrant, as anyone who's read it without prior indoctrination can see; as I understand it that notion was a relatively recent invention in reaction to modernism, liberalism and progress in the sciences and literary criticism. Ancient religious folk who were literate and reasonably intelligent could obviously see various problems with the traditional Writings of their culture, but there's also a bit of a problem with believing in a God who offers no revelation or guidance whatsoever!

How can you write this? The OT is chock full of God giving revelation and detailed divine instructions to man. There’s stuff like, you want to win the battle, send in the musicians first or bring a bunch of clay pots and smash them all at once or say nothing for a few days then shout all at once. I can’t tell you how many pits I avoided by Him giving me detailed instructions.

The rationalization offered in Deuteronomy 18 is that if God spoke to the people directly they would surely die, so therefore his message had to come through human intermediaries. One of the qualifications offered is that if the message was not true it couldn't be from Yahweh, but obviously that little detail got swept under rug sometime before the canonization of (perhaps the most brazen example of obviously false prophecy in the Tanakh) Ezekiel.

Obviously the lame excuse from someone who never heard God speak,

In a different but even more problematic vein, the earliest Christians started to insist that now, finally, they were all being filled with the Holy Spirit and therefore God could and would speak to them all directly as promised regarding the 'new covenant' of Jeremiah 34. But evidently and in the end obviously, that hasn't turned out to be the case and Christians soon found that despite Paul's insistence that "we serve in the new way of the Spirit not in the old way of the written code" and "the letter kills but the Spirit gives life," they actually still did need the Writings to make sure that at least some of them were at least vaguely on the same page theologically. The Spirit just wasn't doing the job.

Pretty good analysis except the Spirit wasn’t following their easy cheap theology and they refused to meet His conditions.

And that's okay; if their religion was helping them get through their lives as decent people, and the bible was the best they had to help them out with that, more power to them. If they'd paid a little more attention to it, maybe we never would have got the Roman Catholic Church

Well, eventually the Protestants went out and changed the world but it took some centuries to find the men who’d risk their lives.

So basically the attitude would be that "God must be guiding us, and this is the best we've got - contradictions, false prophecies and all - so we've got to treat it as God's guidance and make the most of it."

He has conditions before He guides.

And at times that could directly or indirectly be a very productive attitude: The proverbial tendency within rabbinic Judaism of analyzing, reinterpreting and endlessly debating the Tanakh and Talmud has surely been one of if not the major contributors to a cultural climate which has produced an astonishingly disproportionate number of Nobel laureates. In a slightly different vein the Protestant emphasis on the bible and personal religious accountability may have been a major cause behind about half of the spread of democracy around the world: "A brief version of Woodberry’s theoretical argument goes as follows: conversionary Protestants wanted ordinary people to be i) able to read the Bible and ii) actively involved in their church. Yet in their attempts to spread their faith, conversionary Protestants were in effect facilitating the spread of mass education, mass printing, and civil society. These byproducts of religious activism in turn led to the emergence of actors and conditions favorable to democracy: civic associations, political parties, religious liberties, and mass political participation. Hence, according to Woodberry, democracy was not the autonomous triumph of modern forms of political organization and activity – like political parties, labor movements, and mass education. Rather, these modern political actors were the byproduct of a very traditional activity, namely, religious conversion and competition."

True and thank you!!

The big issue over the last couple of centuries, to my mind, is that while it may once have been a plausible competitor for the title, the bible is not the best we've got any more, not by any stretch of the imagination. It provides little factual information about our world (the challenges of geological and biological sciences to a bible-based worldview were one of if not the biggest causes for the rise of reactionary fundamentalism and inerrancy doctrines); its social models and general morality of genocides and slavery (in both the 'old' and 'new' testaments) are woefully outdated to the point of being pretty much the most evil things in human history; its existential proposals of an ultimate eternal reward versus eternal punishment are pretty much the most evil thing we can even imagine and the cause of untold psychological suffering for many. One aspect of the morality preached by Jesus - a conception of love requiring that if you can help someone you must, to the point of literally giving everything more or less down to your daily bread and the clothes on your back as long as anyone else remains unclothed or unfed - may well be unsurpassed (and was a major inspiration for the likes of Tolstoy and Gandhi), but is so lofty that virtually no-one actually follows it seriously, least of all Christians!

This is so full of error it’s hard to know where to begin, Probably easiest to look at the communist world, clearly the only atheistic societies and see if freedom and justice are markedly improved over christ based societies. Hmmmm

There's certainly some value in poring over the myths and legends of ancient cultures, their occasional intersections with history, their social theories and radically different notions of morality, and the theologies they found useful for overcoming their existential fears. But while the grounds for considering an obviously-errant collection of Writings to be 'authoritative' and 'inspired' (that "God must be guiding us, and this is the best we've got, so we've got to treat it as God's guidance and make the most of it") may have made some sense a few centuries ago and may even have produced more good in the world than bad, they quite simply and obviously don't stand up to even cursory scrutiny any more.

That isn’t the christian world view.

Maybe now is the time for Christians to have another try at asking the Spirit for guidance instead? To look more into their own hearts and minds for what is right and good, rather than to the written code?

Not bad advise. Of course atheists only can look into the moral code offered by survival of the fittest….iow, you survive no matter what you have to do to others.

[otseng]

To avoid equivocation, we need to drill down into the forms of servitude as mentioned in the Bible.

One way to break down servitude is between voluntary servitude and involuntary servitude.

Voluntary servitude includes debt servitude (bondservant), where a person under debt can not pay the debt back, so they work for someone for a fixed number of years. I think we can all agree voluntary servitude is not immoral since people freely choose to be a servant.

Involuntary servitude could be considered immoral since it is servitude against their will. Involuntary servitude includes war slaves and kidnapping.

Another way to look at servitude is the relationship between parties. In this sense, it is not immoral.

Moses and David were said to be servants of God:

Num 12:7 KJV - My servant Moses [is] not so, who [is] faithful in all mine house.

2Sa 7:5 KJV - Go and tell my servant David, Thus saith the LORD, Shalt thou build me an house for me to dwell in?

Servants in a household work for the master of the household:

Gen 24:34 KJV - And he said, I [am] Abraham’s servant.

People subject themselves to leaders:

Gen 42:13 KJV - And they said, Thy servants [are] twelve brethren, the sons of one man in the land of Canaan; and, behold, the youngest [is] this day with our father, and one [is] not.

1Sa 17:32 KJV - And David said to Saul, Let no man’s heart fail because of him; thy servant will go and fight with this Philistine.

We are to be servants of Christ:

Gal 1:10 KJV - For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.

There might be other broad ways to look at servitude in the Bible, but I think this covers the vast majority of cases. So, the only cases from above that could be immoral would be kidnapping and war slaves. I'll post separate posts to deal with these.

[Athetotheist]

[Replying to otseng in post #3596

I don't follow your logic. What does fossils have anything to do with it? Bretz was not studying the sedimentary strata, but the erosion patterns.

Fossils are there and they show an evolutionary pattern stretching over tens of millions of years, so they can't be ignored.

[Data]

But pity the poor convert to one of those other religions, even if that religion turned out to be true.....

If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Ye shall walk after the Lord your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him. And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way which the Lord thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee.
(Deuteronomy 13:1-5)

As mentioned earlier, to an agreed upon deity.

Law of God to Israel—The Law of Moses. Jehovah gave Israel the Law through Moses as mediator, in the Wilderness of Sinai, 1513 B.C.E. At the inauguration of the Law at Mount Horeb there was an awe-inspiring demonstration of Jehovah’s power. (Ex 19:16-19; 20:18-21; Heb 12:18-21, 25, 26) The covenant was validated by the blood of bulls and goats. The people presented communion offerings, and they heard the book of the covenant read to them, after which they agreed to be obedient to all that Jehovah had spoken. Many of the earlier patriarchal laws were incorporated in the Law given through Moses.—Ex 24:3-8; Heb 9:15-21; see COVENANT.
The first five books of the Bible (Genesis through Deuteronomy) are often referred to as the Law. Sometimes this term is used with reference to the entire inspired Hebrew Scriptures. Generally, however, the Jews considered the entire Hebrew Scriptures to be composed of three sections, “the law of Moses,” “the Prophets,” and “Psalms.” (Lu 24:44) Commands that came through the prophets were binding upon Israel.
Jehovah was identified in the Law as absolute Sovereign and also as King in a special way. Since Jehovah was both God and King of Israel, disobedience to the Law was both a religious offense and lèse-majesté, an offense against the Head of State, which in this case was against the King Jehovah. David, Solomon, and their successors on the throne of Judah were said to sit on “Jehovah’s throne.” (1Ch 29:23) Human kings and rulers in Israel were bound by the Law, and when they became despotic they were law violators accountable to God. (1Sa 15:22, 23) Kingship and priesthood were separate, this separation constituting a balance of power and a safeguard against tyranny. It kept the Israelites ever mindful that Jehovah was their God and real King. Each individual’s relationship to God and to his fellowman was defined by the Law, and each individual could approach God through the priestly arrangement. (Source)

The skeptical and often non-skeptical error is to assume that the Bible was written directly for us, for us to apply. This is clearly not the case as is demonstrable through an examination of law, various laws throughout scripture as given in the quoted link source. Adam's law, the angel's law, Israel's Law of Moses. Note the response below in the case of Christians. Ancient Israel, under the Law, was a bride to Jehovah. He was their agreed upon husband. In ancient Hebrew the terms that are used with reference to a husband are adhohn (lord), baal (owner; master), and rea (companion; friend). (Genesis 18:12; 20:3; Jeremiah 3:20)

Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’

We don't even have to look at demanding worship. What about demanding love? If you're a parent, you may demand that your children obey you. You may demand that they respect your parental authority. But have you ever demanded that they love you?

God is love. Israel was Jehovah's first bride, but she was unfaithful. The Christian congregation was Jehovah's second bride, although from early on (Genesis 3:15) Jehovah's bride would prove to be those faithful to him. His seed and Satan's seed are the product of one or the other. So what does it mean to love God. To obey him. What should children do? Obey their parents.