Sometimes when I tell people that I think the Bible has no errors when read with literary sensitivity, they reply:
“That is so nineteenth century of you.” This is quite offensive to me since it is my politics and taste in fiction and architecture that are Victorian, not my theology.
Evidently, runs the argument, believing the Bible contains no errors is a weird obsession I picked up from my “modern” vision of Christianity. Since I am often accused of having a pre-modern view of Christianity, this seems an unlikely source for infection, but is the idea really so new?
It is true that one does not read many discussions about Bible errors in the early Church, but isn’t this because everyone assumed the Bible had none? After all, if God had a hand in writing a book wouldn’t you anticipate it would be error-free? Most early discussions of the Bible centered on how to read it and how not to read the Bible, but I am hard pressed to think of many that assumed the Bible was just wrong about anything.
You don’t have to get bogged down in the belief to believe it!
How many Patristic sources doubt the existence of Adam or Noah and his ark? They might not have been as interested in the actual ark as Henry Morris (more interested in turning it into a theological image of the Church), but they believed it was real.
Belief that the Bible was without error was the default position, even if the position is wrong. This is best illustrated by a story my pastor told me about a monk applying to an evangelical seminary. He had been in relative seclusion for many years and was not given to long answers. The seminary, very conservative in their views of Sacred Scripture, was trying to see his theological drift. When they asked him if the Bible contained historical errors, he was silent. Justifiably wondering if he was hiding something, the seminary prof pressed the monk harder about his view regarding the Bible and errors. Finally, the monk said something like: “I am having a hard time deciding if I want to attend a school where they ask such impious questions.’
Now I cannot testify to the truth of this story personally, but it seems capture for me the essential nature of the historic Church’s attitude toward Sacred Scripture. Human authors, but human authors under the guidance of the Holy Ghost wrote them. Scholars before the modern era tended to have a high view of any (even secular authority) and were hesitant to attribute mistakes to them, so the casual way many of my Evangelical colleagues refer to errors in the Bible would shock most Christians in most places at most times. Recently a member of my denomination applied for a job at an Evangelical college. He was asked nothing about the defining views of our church. When asked his view of Scripture, he replied that he believed it to be inerrant. The interviewer literally leapt from his chair with a “d-n” and asked if higher ups knew of this weird view of the Bible.
This attitude strikes me as one that would be unfamiliar to the Fathers.
October 26th, 2009 | 3:58 pm | #1
John Mark:
I’m going to annoy you now, since it’s your turn. :-) So, here it goes: How many books are in that inerrant Bible? I will accept “between 66 and 73″ as an answer. :-)
Blessings,
Frank
October 26th, 2009 | 5:58 pm | #2
Modern science rules out the possibility of a global flood, but does this mean the account in Genesis is in error or merely the Conservative-Evangelical interpretation?
October 26th, 2009 | 6:36 pm | #3
Modern science has as it’s goal, the elimination of God from all processes.
It means Modern Science is wrong.
By the way, it’s not true. Some, but certainly not all modern scientists don’t believe the Bible to be true.
It’s about authority. The unchanging Word or constantly changing science?
October 26th, 2009 | 7:02 pm | #4
@R. Hampton: In other words, we should begin with the presumption that modern science is infallible and judge the Bible’s fallibility by how closely it lines up to the “Inerrant Word of Science”?
Gotcha.
October 26th, 2009 | 7:03 pm | #5
We have two “works” authored by God – the Universe and the Bible. One is the result of many generations of Man collecting, editing, and translating several religious traditions into one official whole. The other has had no contribution from Man in its creation. So which one might be erroneous?
It’s important to remember that scientists did not invent atoms or gravity or geometric relationships – those things existed long before Man arrived. All that Science can does is study what God has made as honestly and obectively as humanly possible.
So when you dispute God’s Universe, you are being blasphemous. In effect you are rejecting God — it’s as if you judged his creation objectionable to your personal sensibilities. So disgusted are you by his method of construction (evolution being just one tool) that you have substituted his reality for a simpler, self-gratifying story.
I don’t know why God used evolution or friction or any other property found in this universe, nor do I presume to answer for him. But I do know that his Universe doesn’t lie. Evolution (science) is our best understanding of God’s physical reality.
October 26th, 2009 | 7:05 pm | #6
Science constantly tests its beliefs, and rewrites then when better answers become available, whereas the (literal) Bible (believers) rests on its presumptive laurels.
October 26th, 2009 | 8:23 pm | #7
Dude, if you can’t tell the difference between God-breathed Scripture and an out-of-date text book written by some guy with an atheistic agenda…you’ve got bigger issues.
I’ll take God-breathed laurels anyday.
October 26th, 2009 | 9:11 pm | #8
I’ll never forget an experience that I had in a doctoral seminar in literature. My professor, a nominal believer, said flatly that no one prior to the 20th century believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible. I blurted out “Paul did; he wrote about it in 1 Corinthians (15:12-13 “If it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised”; the same applies later in the same chapter to Adam, who is presumed to be literal in vv. 45-46). He said “Well, that’s one way to read that passage, but no one really believed any of it as, like, “truth” truth. Certainly Paul was smart enough to know that he was writing about myth, not truth.”
I grow weary of the chronological snobbery that views the ancients through modern lenses, hoping to find modernists-in-waiting behind every text. Certainly all of us are guilty of looking for forerunners who share our views, but, man!, it drives me nuts, whoever does it.
October 26th, 2009 | 10:13 pm | #9
With all due respect to Mr. Beckwith, before Rome brings up the question of canon, it might want to be a little firmer on the issue of Inspiration, given its Bishops freewheeling (to be generous) takes on the issue. Evangelicals might short change the number of books to which we give homage, but they DO at least truly homage them. Then there is the clique of Roman criticism, thankfully shunned by at least Scott Hahn and Francis Martin, but still sucked up to by the 70s tainted regime we now live with. Evangelical Bible translations come out with faithful regularoity: we are still living with that fun NAB. Ah well… Actually, I guess you likely agree: I am just venting.
October 26th, 2009 | 10:29 pm | #10
@R Hampton
You said:
“It’s important to remember that scientists did not invent atoms or gravity or geometric relationships ”
Actually….I might have to disagree with you there. If you study modern atomic theory, it’s about the biggest bunch of “made-up-ness”* and speculating you’ve ever heard. Scientists acknowledge that they can’t rightly understand everything that happens in [God's] Universe, although they think they’ve found some pretty good explanations. But “science” is not equatable with “the Universe as the revelation of God’s attributes, a la Romans 1″, because Science is nothing more than a man-made, man-inspired attempt to understand reality.
The Bible is the God-inspired, God-crafted description of Reality. Who do you think is more reliable?
———
*Forgive my liberties in making up words, but I’d contend that “made-up-ness” is not such an absurd word as “quark” (which, by the bye, is the name scientists have given a supposed sub-subatomic particle, which happens to come in different “flavors”–I’m not making this up. It’s absurd)
October 26th, 2009 | 10:46 pm | #11
Daryl Little wrote,
Exactly. And modern science started with the man-centered humanism of the 15th-16th centuries, and the unbiblical theory of heliocentrism. “Modern science” started with Copernicus and Galileo, and they were wrong. Their “scientific” theory about the structure and movements of the cosmos are incompatible with Scripture’s physical cosmology. There are over 67 passages that clearly teach that the Earth is fixed (immobile) and that the Sun, Moon and heavens move around it, and the existence of the waters surrounding the Earth above the windows of heaven.
Exactly. I’m sure you’d agree that it doesn’t matter whether that science is 150 years old (Darwin) or 400 years old (Galileo). If evolution and Copernicanism contradict the Bible, then so much the worse for those “scientific” theories. I’ll stick with what the Bible teaches about the fixed, unmoving Earth, the mobility of the Sun, the nature of the sky and the stars and the dome of heaven, and the waters surrounding the Earth above the windows of heaven.
October 26th, 2009 | 10:54 pm | #12
Travis Seitler wrote,
Precisely. And we’ve been lax in guarding against this presumption entering into the Church’s understanding of what the Bible has to say about scientific matters. But the roots of the problem go back to the battle over heliocentrism and allowing an unbiblical theory to judge what the Bible clearly says about physical cosmology. See Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina to see the how the liberal game of “the text doesn’t really mean that” is played.
October 26th, 2009 | 11:36 pm | #13
Here’s one link for Joel, Daryl, et. al.:
http://blogs4brownback.wordpress.com/2007/05/18/heliocentrism-is-an-atheist-doctrine/
Here’s another:
http://www.fixedearth.com/
Happy reading, everyone!
October 27th, 2009 | 12:02 am | #14
Joel,
Oh, I see what you did there..
October 27th, 2009 | 2:42 am | #15
R. Hampton wrote: “All that Science can does is study what God has made as honestly and obectively [sic] as humanly possible.”
It would be swell if scientists started actually studying the universe objectively and honestly. Evolution is casually asserted as a fact, but it is rather a collection of theories, many of which have come and gone because they’ve been scientifically disproven…including most of Darwin’s writings. The others are still undergoing testing. Objectively, none of them qualify as fact.
Scientific hubris has been around for a long time. In the late 1890s, for example, scientists asserted that they had the universe figured out. They hadn’t yet discovered atomic structure, let alone quantum mechanics, but they were certain they could close the books, because they knew how the universe worked.
Tread carefully before you issue dogmatic “scientific” statements about the Universe and the Bible. We cannot really know the limits of our knowledge. Much of what appears contradictory between the Bible and science is due to humans viewing the Universe from the wrong vantage point.
October 27th, 2009 | 9:22 am | #16
What’s absurd about coining a term when we discover a new particle that we don’t already have a name for? You seem to resist calling them flavors, presumably because ‘flavor’ already has another meaning. But then we need a new term that doesn’t already have a meaning. So ‘quark’ seems to fill the bill.
So by your argument against ‘flavor’, we should be using terms like ‘quark’, and by your argument against ‘quark’ we should be using terms like ‘flavor’. I guess any stick is good enough to beat scientists with, even if it contradicts the one you used in the last breath.
On the more general point, I think what’s often lacking in these discussions is the humility Cathy speaks of. At least we’re usually lacking the humility with regard to one piece of evidence.
There are at least two pieces of evidence. One is God’s revelation to us through making the universe a certain way, which provides evidence to us of how it was formed through the effects of past events, giving us indications of what’s likely to have happened in the past. This is not an infallible method of attaining knowledge, but neither is it mere speculation. It often involves genuine knowledge, but any piece of proposed knowledge is not infallible and therefore might turn out not to be knowledge after all.
The other piece of evidence is our understanding of what scripture teaches. I would insist that humility is just as important here, because even Chicago inerrancy insists that our interpretation of scripture isn’t infallible. Our views derived from reading infallible scripture are not themselves infallible, because infallibility applies to God’s inspiration of scripture, not to our deriving the correct interpretation.
The kind of hubris involved in insisting that one interpretation absolutely must be the right one without any chance of being wrong is just as bad as the kind of hubris involved in insisting that one scientific understanding of the universe is 100% certain.
That doesn’t mean we can’t be reasonably confident that a certain interpretation is right or that a certain scientific theory is correct. What’s interesting is when you reach a position when both the following seem true:
1. The most reasonable interpretation of scripture means that it teaches X.
2. The most reasonable scientific theory implies not-X.
What should we do then? We can’t put scripture first, because it’s not scripture but our interpretation of it that gives us X. Once we recognize that both are fallible methods of arriving at beliefs, all we can do is suspend judgment unless we can get some indication of which method is more reasonable than the other. I have to say that interpretations of Genesis that allow for a lot of wiggle room seem to me to be more reasonable right now than understandings of science that deny the old age of the universe. I’m willing to go at least that far. You can at least make sense of someone having less confidence on both ends when it comes to evolution.
October 27th, 2009 | 10:14 am | #17
R. Hampton,
And have you heard about the crazy drug-induced fantasy called “electric charge”? It’s bizarre. They actually think there are these things call “protons” and “electrons”–conveniently “too small” for the eye to see, even with the best microscopes.
Where do they get this stuff?
October 27th, 2009 | 11:36 am | #18
Interesting that this post came to be about something else.
My post had little or nothing to do with religion and science.
October 27th, 2009 | 11:46 am | #19
Behold, the squishiness of the Inter-tubes.
October 27th, 2009 | 1:00 pm | #20
I think I started this little rabbit-trail.
In my defense…I didn’t mean to, really.
October 27th, 2009 | 5:28 pm | #21
John Mark Reynolds: “How many Patristic sources doubt the existence of Adam or Noah and his ark?”
Or Jonah? How many Early Church Fathers doubted the historical fact-narrative in the Book of Jonah?
But the Catholic Church allows its clergy and seminary professors and laity to believe (and teach) that the Book of Jonah is simply didactic fiction.
October 27th, 2009 | 6:33 pm | #22
@Jeremy Pierce:
Forgive me if I came across proud/overconfident. I do pray that God would grant me humility in interpreting his Word, and in interpreting Reality through that lens.
And what I was saying about the quarks and flavors was just that “science” is just as made up, or more actually, than orthodox exegesis. I’m not trying to undercut atomic theory, or science as a whole–I think science is a great thing, and IS one way which God has given us to know Him better by studying His creation.
However, in response to your claim that “We can’t put scripture first, because it’s not scripture but our interpretation of it that gives us X”, I must disagree, for a very simple reason. Since the Renaissance (and perhaps even before), Science has been driven primarily by men who did not worship God, and most recently, by men who hate the idea of God. The (orthodox) interpretation of Scripture, on the other hand, has been taught and practiced by men who loved Christ, and devoted their lives to study the Scriptures so that they could know God better. I think it’s a simple choice as to whose opinion we accept, if we claim to be Christians.
There’s an even more major flaw in your argument, though. If you say that when science and the Scriptures disagree we must take a neutral stance, then we must remain undecided on the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, the Resurrection, the Ascension, Pentecost, the inspiration of the New Testament, etc. And for that matter, you have to throw out the existence of God, since last time I checked, the majority of scientists seem to agree that God can’t exist. In other words, you lose everything. And then you’re left with nothing but a convenient, man-made, you-centered religion which unfortunately can make no claims to absolute truth, or meaning, or purpose, or anything.
If you throw out the Bible’s inerrancy, you throw out Jesus.
October 27th, 2009 | 7:27 pm | #23
III,
Just be careful about what you mean by “made up”. Quarks and “flavor” are not any more more made up than protons, electrons, and “charge”.
October 27th, 2009 | 7:29 pm | #24
III said: “Since the Renaissance (and perhaps even before), Science has been driven primarily by men who did not worship God, and most recently, by men who hate the idea of God.”
That’s a demonstrably false statement. First; it’s a distinctly (Conservative) Protestant assumption that Scripture negates the findings of Science. Second; a scientist is not necessarily an atheist. For example; the Templeton Foundation, the BioLogos Foundation, and the Vatican’s own Pontifical Academy of Sciences are science-driven organizations that embrace God. Third; an atheist is not necessarily someone who hates God (in fact, they have nothing to hate), but *may* harbor hatred for the religious and/or hatred for (what they regard as) false knowledge.
Unfortunately some confuse inerrancy of Scripture to mean their interpretation of the Bible could not possibly be in error.
October 27th, 2009 | 8:31 pm | #25
@Jugulum:
Forgive me, I simply meant that the names and theories we use to describe Reality are things that we have come up with, not self-evident, self-authenticating facts. I don’t mean to discredit atomic theory in the least, I just wanted to call out the immensely speculative nature of it. Thanks for the caution, I’ll try to be more careful with my wording.
@RHampton:
I did not say any of the things you accuse me of saying. I think that I was clearly generalizing what seems to be the basic trend. I don’t think that (good) science contradicts Scripture, I’m very aware that not all scientists are atheists, and I’m equally aware that not all atheists are anti-theists (forgive me for that caricature, I admit that it was a bit extreme).
“Unfortunately some confuse inerrancy of Scripture to mean their interpretation of the Bible could not possibly be in error.”
Ah, it is, and I pray that I might be able to humbly and kindly discuss differences in interpretation with my brothers in Christ. But it is more unfortunate that some confuse man’s interpretation of nature for God’s revelation of Himself in Creation, and in doing so minimize the importance of the Bible. I pray that you will not fall into this trap.
October 27th, 2009 | 9:36 pm | #26
God reveals himself equally through the Universe and the Bible. You dismiss the importance of Scientific knowledge if you blind yourself to half the Truth.
October 28th, 2009 | 2:23 am | #27
John Mark Reynolds said,
Ah, but it has everything to do with religion and science in at least two ways.
1. Ask any evangelical who believes in inerrancy what question they’d ask someone to test whether that person had a “high” enough view of the Bible, and I’ll bet you 10 furlough days that more than half of ‘em will choose evolution or its cognates (“Do you believe we’re descended from monkeys?”). Inerrancy (at least in the popular mind) excludes certain scientific facts and theories, especially evolution.
2. Since you underlined the historical distinction premodern/modern in your post, it isn’t so difficult to examine the crucial events and ideas that effected that change. Renaissance humanism…check. The (re-)emergence of philosophy as a discipline with a subject matter distinct from theology proper…check. The Scientific Revolution…ah-ha!
My responses to the anti-”modern science” posts above were intended to push that theme closer to the alleged historical source of our errancy worries. Now I’m spoiling the game and being pedantic. Nevertheless, I think there are modern scientific views–physical cosmology chiefly among them–that are incompatible with the Bible’s cosmology. But this doesn’t set us aflutter about inerrancy because heliocentrism is now considered to be “obviously” right. Interpretive moves were enjoined, steps were taken, and now good Christian men rejoice in a moving earth and pictures from the Hubble. When new lines are drawn over the age of the universe, geology, and biology, I think that involves unprincipled selectivity of both the meaning of biblical texts and scientific evidence.
Granted arguendo that, for example, all the Fathers, heck, all pre-modern Christians, believed that the global flood of Noah was real. What has changed since the pre-modern period is the methods and means to put such a claim to the test: what physical traces did the global flood leave behind as evidence of its existence and effects? Answer: none. The only people who continue to agree with the pre-modern view of the Flood and dutifully toil away at flood geology are young-earth creationists.
And so I think the primary cause for error-anxiety is a doctrine of Scripture that states the Bible is without error when it speaks to science. This forces one to take the position that no amount of evidence is sufficient to falsify a scientific claim derived from the Bible. All the evidence in the universe may be against it, as Kurt Wise said, but it won’t make any difference: physics, evolution, geology, geochemistry, paleontology–all of it if need be–must be denied and countered with chimeric pseudoscientific conjectures. Now that kind of knavery was most certainly be rejected by at least one of the Fathers.
October 28th, 2009 | 12:02 pm | #28
…quoted these above but forgot to address them (carried away, ya know?)
Sure. But the question is whether some particular belief of pre-moderns (e.g., Noah’s Flood) is warrantedly assertible on that basis alone. My point about the absence of traces of such a Flood (and the physics of such an event) is that it no longer is. Prior to telescopes of adequate power, it was warrantedly assertible that all heavenly bodies had divine properties (perfect uniform motion, unblemished, etc.). One can continue to assume the Bible has no errors, but as long as the text constrains natural history, and what physical properties, mechanisms, etc., are permitted to exist, then the Scriptures will be put in an antagonistic position vis-a-vis the natural sciences.
This is a poor argument for a Bible without errors. Maybe not the worst, but a real contender.
First, a clarification of what it means for God to “have a hand in” something. I shall define this as God is causally active in bringing about a particular outcome or state of affairs. We may construe an Inerrancy Principle (IP) thusly:
IP: Everything that God is causally active in bringing about is without error.
And since God was causally active in producing the Scriptures it follows that the Scriptures are without error. This argument is valid.
But can IP withstand scrutiny? I don’t think so. God was causally active in producing Joe Schmoe. Does it follow that Joe Schmoe is without error? By no means. Joe Schmoe is perfect neither in body nor soul.
Since IP is false, it follows that this argument for inerrancy is unsound. God’s “having a hand in” writing a book is not a sufficient condition for the belief that the book is error-free.
October 28th, 2009 | 12:29 pm | #29
I think Mr. Hunter has misunderstood the point of my post which was not to give a positive argument for a Scripture without errors, but point to a problematic argument against that view.
He has done nothing to refute my actual argument and actually confirms it. We can all agree that the idea that the Bible is error free is not “new” and that the idea that it contains errors of fact is (relatively) new.
Why do people believe the Bible has errors? For all I know Mr. Hunter may be right about the sociology of it, but that was not the point of my post. It may also be that some people will press their interpretation of Scripture as being necessary to a Bible without errors, but that it just a mistake . . . at least as big a mistake as pressing the present consensus of science as “the obvious truth.” All of that is, however, not the point of the post.
There was, however, a weird misuse of my post in the comments.
He quotes me saying:
“After all, if God had a hand in writing a book wouldn’t you anticipate it would be error-free?”
And then says:
“This is a poor argument for a Bible without errors. Maybe not the worst, but a real contender.”
Well, if I intended to advance it is a formal argument for a Bible without errors, he might be right. Instead I view it as a plausible intuition about God and what would happen if he created a book.
From this comment in my post (not central to it), Hunter derives the IP. Of course, he formalizes an informal statement, but let us allow this. However, he broadens a statement about the creation of books to include just anything. He then uses “Joe” as a counter example.
Joe is, however, not a book and so has a feature (“free will”) that makes his creation and subsequent career markedly different from that of a book.
Since my original (informal statement about people’s default intuition) was about books and not men (who are different from books in terms of control over their own histories) this is a wrong-headed counter-example. In fact, if God created men and men had no free will we would anticipate their perfection . . . a statement that was true after all at the moment of their creation. Men, however, are not static . . . and so are able to degenerate. This is not true of the autograph of a book.
If I had been making a formal statement it might have been more like this: IP’- If there is a book x such that God authored x or God co-authored x, then it is probable that x contains no errors.”
As to the philosophy of science advanced in the series of posts, I am not impressed, but since my post was not about philosophy of science I shall refrain from comment. Interested parties can simply observe that “heliocentrism” is not in fact true: the sun (according to best science is not the center of the cosmos). It was not, therefore, adopted over geocentrism because it was true.
I am not in fact (nor should anyone be) a heliocentrist, which does not of course imply that I am a geocentrists since the two are not “opposites.”
October 28th, 2009 | 2:01 pm | #30
I don’t contest the first part of this claim, so I suppose I’m not the target of your contempt for the chronological snob. But the second part of the claim is demonstrably false: the idea that the Bible contains errors of fact is not new. It dates to at least the 2d century with Celsus and Porphyry.
This is helpful for now we reintroduce the relevance of empirical desiderata. I’ve mentioned Noah’s Flood. Do you agree that there is no evidence for such a global event a few thousand years ago? If so, then are we not required to adjust our understanding of Gen 6-9 in light of those facts? It would appear that we must choose either (a) x contains errors because x’s account of natural history is false; (b) the Galileo maneuver: make literary adjustments to the details of x’s account; or (c) the theological maneuver: claims about natural history from x’s account are a category mistake. In my experience, inerrantists either deny the evidence that falsifies Noah’s Flood, thus retaining the account in toto as one of natural history, or they acknowledge the empirical data and reinterpret the literal account (e.g., it was a local, not a true global flood) accordingly. There is a sense in which the first choice is the more intellectually principled (a la Kurt Wise), but then the untenability of the comprehensive error in the natural sciences needed to sustain it increases every year by orders of magnitude.
Cavilling. No, the sun is not the center of the entire cosmos, but it is the center of the system of observable planets, hence the solar system. Heliocentrism was adopted because geostatism and geocentrism is false. The point is that Copernicanism better saved the appearances than the physical cosmology derived from the Bible. It doesn’t matter that Copernicanism is an imperfect model. The point is that you do acknowledge empirical desiderata in your view of the Bible’s relation to science.
So you do not take the Kurt Wise approach and retain the biblical accounts of physical cosmology no matter how much evidence is adduced that contradicts them. Very well. Then what is the criterion to help us determine when the evidential tipping point is reached that requires us to reconsider the scientific pertinency of specific biblical texts?
October 28th, 2009 | 2:39 pm | #31
Since this thread was about one bad argument related to the text of Sacred Scripture being without error in Christian theology, I suppose it has served its purpose.
One can only hope Mr. Hunter reads texts better than he reads blog posts (as evidenced by this thread), because citing early Christian critics as examples against my claim of the ancient nature of a Christian presumption to inerrancy shows he has misunderstood the context of my argument. Why stop at two examples? The vast majority of the non-Christian world denied the truth, let alone the inerrancy of Scripture . . . a point that if one reads this thread in context has nothing to do with anything I have said!
Since I have made no claims at all about the method of harmonizing interpretations of Scripture with present interpretations of natural data I will not comment on the rest of this post . . . except to note that IP’ entails no particular commitment to any particular approach to harmonization. It is open to all of them. My views on the harmonization of religion and science are easily available in book and recorded form if people are interested, but I find branching threads on a blog post are not the best place to begin new discussions.
Evidently Mr. Hunter does not want to argue my claims, but ones he thinks I might be making.
October 28th, 2009 | 4:35 pm | #32
No, Mr. Hunter isn’t interested in reading your mind. He’s been trying to elicit your response to specific questions regarding the relation of science and the Bible. So far, he’s managed to obtain from you that you think interpretations of each can be harmonized. Fine, but not very informative.
If the entire thrust of your point was that pre-modern Christians assumed inerrancy, then there’s not much to discuss, since that is trivially true. The question I’ve asked is whether you think Christians today are warranted to maintain that assumption on no more grounds than you’ve offered in your post and in these comments. There are good reasons to think not if–and this is a big if–the Bible makes substantive claims about natural history, physical cosmology, and other scientific matters. Pre-modern Christians may have been warranted in their beliefs about such matters they inferred from Bible. There’s nothing irrational about their belief in a global Flood, for example, or the denial that the Antipodes were populated with human beings. We might be charitable to Luther and Calvin, both of whom condemned Copernicanism for theological reasons, since they lived and worked at the trailing edge of pre-modernity. I contend that those beliefs are no longer warrantedly assertible. If a necessary condition for inerrancy to be true is that such beliefs are warranted still, then ipso facto inerrancy is false.
But surely you think some are more plausible than others. Why so cagey about which you think are compatible with inerrancy and which are not? In my experience, an approach to harmonization which allows a 13.7-billion-year-old universe, historical geology and evolution is almost always regarded as incompatible with inerrancy. Several commenters in this thread would appear to agree. Do you?
If anyone has been following our little conversation, I’d think they’d be interested to have you condescend and briefly state how you think the natural history and physical cosmology advanced by the Bible bears upon the doctrine of inerrancy. Does your view permit that any of the following are controvertible:
a. a global flood (Gen 6-9)
b. a young universe (ca. 10^4 years old)
c. humans are not descended from non-human ancestors
d. a fixed, unmoving Earth (1 Chron 16:30, various Psalms, Isa 45:18, etc.)?
And if some, but not others, on what principle(s)?
October 28th, 2009 | 5:05 pm | #33
You say:
If the entire thrust of your point was that pre-modern Christians assumed inerrancy, then there’s not much to discuss, since that is trivially true.
I say:
Hurrah! I have talked to scads of people who think this is a big deal. When I say I believe that the Bible is without error (as I do), they say, “That is a hang up you carry over from nineteenth century Christians.” It was to those folk I was writing and it is good to get confirmation of it.
October 28th, 2009 | 7:10 pm | #34
Well then away with dilettantes, away with ‘em all!
Of course, it is possible to have one’s doctrine of inerrancy established on the particular tributaries of 19th-century thought. Alas, the data to determine whether or not these charges have merit in some cases elude us still. The dilettantes may have a point, bless ‘em.
As for me, I have talked to scads of people who think that evolution, historical geology and an old universe are a Big Deal (i.e., bad). They say, “That is a hang up you carry over from your benighted devotion to the authority of science over the Bible.” It was to those folk I was responding. The mystery of whether you share their view appears impenetrable.
October 28th, 2009 | 9:02 pm | #35
The Vatican has an excellent overview on inerrancy and how Christians understood it throughout the ages. Here’s a sample:
THE JEWISH PEOPLE AND THEIR SACRED SCRIPTURES IN THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE
4. Return to the Literal Sense
Thomas Aquinas saw clearly what underpinned allegorical exegesis: the commentator can only discover in a text what he already knows, and in order to know it, he had to find it in the literal sense of another text. From this Thomas Aquinas drew the conclusion: a valid argument cannot be constructed from the allegorical sense, it can only be done from the literal sense.
Starting from the Middle Ages, the literal sense has been restored to a place of honour and has not ceased to prove its value. The critical study of the Old Testament has progressed steadily in that direction culminating in the supremacy of the historical-critical method.
And so an inverse process was set in motion: the relation between the Old Testament and Christian realities was now restricted to a limited number of Old Testament texts. Today, there is the danger of going to the opposite extreme of denying outright, together with the excesses of the allegorical method, all Patristic exegesis and the very idea of a Christian and Christological reading of Old Testament texts. This gave rise in contemporary theology, without as yet any consensus, to different ways of re-establishing a Christian interpretation of the Old Testament that would avoid arbitrariness and respect the original meaning.
October 28th, 2009 | 11:42 pm | #36
III: You’re making it out to be a question of trusting Christians vs. trusting secularists. It’s not as simple as that. Many Christians are in science who have looked at the arguments and accepted that they are good arguments, and they do this while walking in the Spirit and praying for guidance. Many philosophers who are believers have been able to study the philosophical arguments that are relevant to this, and I’m one of them. Many Christians who are professional biblical exegetes have looked carefully at Genesis while praying for guidance and walking in the Spirit, and they’ve concluded that Genesis is compatible with evolution or at least with an old Earth. I would say the majority of evangelical commentaries in the last three decades on Genesis have taken that view.
I didn’t say that whenever science and scripture disagree we should remain agnostic. In fact, when science and scripture clearly disagree, we should be on the side of scripture. I said that when what seems like it might be the best interpretation of the world through science and what seems like it might be the best interpretation of scripture through exegesis end up disagreeing with each other, and there are some doubts about either method, then it might be worth being agnostic if there are no other indications of which way to prefer.
Your examples don’t fall under that remotely. There may be a majority of scientists who are atheists. I don’t happen to have the statistics on that, if they even exist. But scientists who are atheists have reasons for being atheists, and I don’t consider those reasons to be good science. I don’t even consider them to be science. They’re fallacious philosophical arguments. Science doesn’t tell us that a virginal conception couldn’t occur. It just tells us that there’s no natural mechanism that could do so. Science doesn’t tell us that there are no non-natural mechanisms in the universe. It just tells us things about the natural ones.
I’m also not sure why you ended with “If you throw out the Bible’s inerrancy, you throw out Jesus.” I’m not sure that’s true, but I can’t figure out why you directed it at me, since I’m among the most stalwart defenders of inerrancy in the Christian blogosphere. I have no interest in throwing out inerrancy.
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