Reliability of Scriptures and the Inerrancy of Scriptures

Let me first begin by saying that in this post I am not denying the inerrancy of Scriptures. Instead, I simply want to point out that, even if the Scriptures contain errors, they are still reliable.

Before I make my point, let me first say why I consider my point important. I have noticed (in myself and in others) the tendency to act as if an error in Scriptures would undermine our whole faith. If Genesis really isn’t a historically accurate picture of the creation of the universe, for example, then we have no hope left. I think the reasoning is that if the Scriptures are wrong on *any* point, then the Bible isn’t God’s Word, because God wouldn’t speak falsehoods. And, if the Bible isn’t God’s Word, then it isn’t reliable in matters of faith.

So, here are my thoughts on this subject:

1. Even if the Bible contains errors, it can still be reliable. Our eyes sometimes makes mistakes–we see a distant tower as round when it is square, or we might see something out of the corner of our eye when nothing was there, or a near-sighted person might see a blurred image of color in the distance, when it is really a person. But we still consider our eyes reliable. If we see fire, we walk around it. If we see the edge of a cliff, we don’t walk over it. And so on. (Someone might reply that our eyes make mistakes, but the reason they are still reliable is that we know the situations they fail and so can withhold trust in *those* circumstances. But I don’t think this is thoroughly accurate. Take our hearing as an example: sometimes our hearing fails us in ways we aren’t aware of, e.g. someone is speaking to us and we think they say one thing but they really said another thing. We might even act upon the thing we *thought* they said. The point is that, on the whole, we consider our hearing reliable even though it fails us, and it fails us sometimes when we aren’t aware that it will fail us.) So, overall, I see know reason why we can’t find the Scriptures reliable even if they makes mistakes in some cases. The Gospels might not get Jesus’ words exactly right, but they can still be a reliable source of his teachings.
2. Even if the Bible contains errors, we can still think of it as given to us as a guiding instrument by God, i.e. it can still be God-given. This will probably be even more controversial than my first point, and I’ll admit I haven’t thought about it as much as my first point. But most Christians would agree that our bodies were designed by God, and, furthermore, that our body parts were designed by God for specific reasons. For example, it is thought that our eyes were designed by God to see. But our eyes can occasionally fail us, as I gave examples of above. But, the eyes, despite occasional mistakes, are still God-given instruments for seeing. So, likewise, I see no reason that we can’t view the Bible as a God-given instrument for guidance in the faith, even if it is occasionally wrong.

In general, I think we have set the bar too high with regards to Scripture. By this I don’t mean that Scripture isn’t inerrant and infallible–I’m not denying that. I mean that we have set the bar too high as far as what the denial of inerrancy and infallibility would mean. If the Bible is errant and fallible, it can still be reliable overall, and it can still be a God-given instrument for our guidance in the faith. (For that matter, so can the Church and its leaders: they can be God-given instruments for guidance in the faith, without having to be perfect.) It can be harming to people’s faith to give them an all-or-nothing–inerrant Scriptures or our religion is false–and then send them out into the academic world, where their faith becomes extremely vulnerable.

This is similar to the history of philosophical thought on our senses. It has been tempting to set the bar so high with knowledge that it is an all-or-nothing situation with regard to our senses: either they are perfect, or they are unreliable. Of course, lowering the bar (which was probably only raised by philosophers, not by common usage…though don’t quote me on that!) means that we can have a middle ground, reliable but imperfect senses.

Anyway, I would be glad to hear any thoughts–especially criticisms–of my views here.

Blog Update

I think I’m going to rewrite some old posts for further clarity. Many posts were written hastily (my Government and Slavery posts and my David Hume posts are the ones that stand in the fore of my mind), and I’d like to clarify some of my points.

I have decided that, when I update them, I will repost them so that they show as new posts. I haven’t decided if I’m going to delete the older posts or just leave them for posterity. I’ll probably just leave them on the off chance that someone has linked to them on the website (I know that several of my posts have been linked to, but not all of them). So, be looking for old posts rewritten.

They Cut The Count Of Monte Cristo In Half–And He Didn’t Even Bleed!

I just thought to compare the number of words in the unabridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo with the abridged version that I read in high school. This book is one of my favorite novels of all time–definitely top three, maybe number one!–so you can see why I’d be appalled at what I learned.

Unabridged Version: 444,702 words

Abridged Version: 188,129 words

Difference: 256,573 words

They cut away 58% of the book!

So, if any of my readers have read both the abridged and the unabridged version, would you kindly give me your thoughts on how much worse, if any, the abridged version is.

I know need to buy the unabridged version and read it. I’d always assumed that they had only cut out, say, 10-20% of it, not 58%!

Gottlob Frege Smacks Down Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens doesn't need God because he can wash away his own sins...and smoke while doing it!

Frege striking the pose that earned him fame as a beard model

 

Christopher Hitchens says early in his book God Is Not Great:

There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

I highlighted the third point because that is what I want to address, though I provided the whole quotation simply because it is interesting. Furthermore, I’m only interested in his comment that religious faith is the “result” of “dangerous sexual repression”.

Now, let me begin by admitting I haven’t read all of Hitchens’ book. Quite honestly, I don’t want to spend the money on it when I can buy much better books. (This cuts across religious beliefs: I don’t buy a lot of Christian books because I have other books I want to buy.) Also, I don’t find his book very interesting. I did quickly read through a few chapters today, and the impression I came away with was that the book was hard-hitting only in its rhetoric, not in its logic. Once again, this impression is the result of only selectively reading; maybe I would feel different if I read the whole book. As far as arguments against religion, I think others have done a much better job, even if I don’t find their arguments wholly persuasive.

Now, back to the Hitchens’ quotation. The way I understand his point is that he is making a Freudian point. That people’s religious tendencies are the result of sexual repression. I could be mistaken in the exact details, but it seems evident that he believes it an object to religious faith that it originates in a psychological problem, i.e., sexual repression. And, furthermore, when he says “religious faith” I understand him as talking about a religion, not simply one person’s faith. 

I, as much as anyone, am glad that British men have withstood the assaults of German men at important times over the past century. But, on this occasion, I must applaud as a German man defeats a British man.

Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, philosopher, and logician in the late 19th and early 20th century. His book, The Foundations of Arithmetic, is very thought-provoking. (Of all the philosophers I have read, he stands with Bertrand Russell and William James as the clearest writers. Frege is better than these two at laying bear the structure of his arguments, and his prose doesn’t suffer in doing so.) One of the things he does in the book is to combat psychology’s encroachment upon logic and philosophy. It is from those passages that I provide the following quotations:

Never let us take a description of an origin of an idea as a definition, or an account of the mental and physical conditions on which we become conscious of a proposition for a proof of it. A proposition may be thought, and again it may be true; let us never confuse the two. We must remind ourselves, it seems, that a proposition no more ceases to be true when I cease to think of it than the sun ceases to shine when I shut my eyes.

…

We suppose, it would seem, that concepts sprout in the individual mind like leaves on a tree, and we think to discover their nature by studying their birth: we seek to define them psychologically, in terms of the nature of the mind. But this account makes everything subjective, and if we follow it through to the end, does away with truth. What is known as the history of concepts is really a history either of our knowledge of concepts or of the meanings of words.

…

[A]lways…separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective. 

 

The truth or falsity of a proposition doesn’t depend upon the psychological reasons one comes to believe it. Whether religion grew out of sexual repression doesn’t matter to whether religious beliefs are true; whether a person believes a religion solely because of sexual repression doesn’t mean that that religion is false.

This isn’t a difficult thing to grasp. But it is maddening how often a discussion of the truth or falsity of a religion turns to a discussion of the psychological reasons for a person holding religious beliefs. Christianity can still be true if every Christian in America adopted the faith because they hate homosexuals, or because they want to preserve the old culture, or because they fear death, or because they want to make their parents proud, or because they want to fit in socially–the psychological reasons for their belief shouldn’t be confused with the logical reasons for *what* they believe. 

Maybe someone doesn’t think that there are good logical reasons for Christianity and doesn’t think it’s true. Okay…fine. Attack religion through logical arguments, not though assertions about Christians’ psychological states. If you want to talk about psychological states, understand that you are only criticizing an individual’s reasons for holding a belief, not about the logical foundations of *what* they believe in. Hitchens’ four objections are directed against *what* Christians believe, and it is here that he makes his error in his third point. 

Let me end by an example: many people learn basic arithmetical truths from their parents or teachers before they have any other reason for believing these things. Our parents tell us 2+2=4, and without know why that is we simply accept it as true. If I were trying to disprove that 2+2=4, wouldn’t it be futile to say that these people only believe it because their parents tell them it’s true and they want to please their parents? Of course it would. This, I assert, is what Hitchens is (erroneously) doing by claiming that an objection to religion faith is that it is the result of sexual oppression.