Contradictions in the Bible

ChetSinger said:

I've already given you my answer: God has assigned the copying of manuscripts to men, and He tolerates less than perfection from us.

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I must've missed your answer. So did you say that the contradictions exist because God doesn't care, or because he wants them to be there, or did you come up with a third possibility?

ChetSinger said:

Post 27 remains my answer, and the scriptural references in it explain why.

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You are not specifying if God doesn't care, or if he prefers there are contradictions, or if there is a third option. Your contribution to this thread remains to be nil.

ChetSinger said:

Let's call my response in #27 a "third option".

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Let's not. You did not prove I have put forth a false dichotomy, nor have you even attempted to do so.

Your argument is that God allows us to pollute the Bible with mistakes. This scenario is feasible whether God wants there to be errors in the Bible or if he doesn't care, so you have answered nothing and you have not posited another possibility. You also continue to refuse to answer the question.

You are not only contributing nothing to this thread, but you are now detracting from it by forcing me to explain why your answers are irrelevant.

[serious] said:

I think this one is where you are going wrong. First, to address your analogy: you have two terms: An even number is one that is a multiple of 2. An odd number is one that is not even. So we don't have an A or B situation, but an A or not A situation. The question is also binary. No even number is any more even than any other. No odd number is any less odd.

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Referring to not A as B does not make me incorrect.

That logic, however, does not extend so well to correct and incorrect. As Asimov wrote in his "relativity of wrong" "when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." (the whole text is available freely online and is worth a read)

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3 does not equal pi. 10,000,000,000 does not equal pi. You are equally incorrect if you say that either equals pi.

If you say that 10,000,000,000 is approximately pi, then you are less accurate than if you were to say that 3 is approximately pi. Similarly, if you approximate the shape of the earth as flat, you are less accurate than if you were to approximate it as a sphere. But you are incorrect in both scenarios, and it is a fact, and it is not up for debate.

Let's take a sample section and apply this to it.
Acts 18:1-2 After these things Paul departed from Athens, and came to Corinth; And found a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, lately come from Italy, with his wife Priscilla; (because that Claudius had commanded all jews to depart from Rome and came unto them.

Now, the expulsion of the Jews from rome is a known historical event, so the bolded section is historically accurate. But wait! I didn't capitalize Jews, so there is an error in it. But we could still say it's correct even though there is a grammatical error made in transcription, no? Let's go a step further. Let us assume for a moment that it was not actually Claudius who commanded it, but maybe an underling he had delegated such authority to. Then we would have a factual error, but one that was irrelevant to the point being made about the reason why this one particular guy was in Corinth. Now, of course if we keep adding errors, we eventually get to the point at which the remaining nuggets of truth are not sufficient to say that the story as a whole is generally true. What we have is not a binary choice of true or false, but rather a continuum of accuracy.

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If an account is not grammatically correct or contains some other error, then it is not correct. This is not something that historians actually evaluate when determining if a historical event actually occurred. You are convoluting historical analysis with logical deduction and your argument is nonsensical.

Likewise, intervention by God to prevent these errors also exists on a continuum. Let's look at extreme cases on either end and then one in the middle:

1. The Spellchecker: God fixes every error no matter how minor at every transcription, translation, etc. Natural factors such as a bit of punctuation getting rubbed off are likewise prevented. Around the world an endless stream of documentable miracles occur continuously.

2. Laissez Faire: God really doesn't care at all. perhaps some flawless version was delivered in the past, but he has not taken any action to prevent the natural accumulation of errors in transcription or translation. As such, it has the same error rate as any other document would transcribed with similar care. Such care is likely sufficient to deliver something very close to the first well circulated versions to the present day.

3. A middle way: God wishes to preserve the accuracy of scripture, but also wishes to avoid making a big spectacle of it. God takes care to preserve the message, but not so intrusively to require constant micromanaging of every scribe. All major translations carry the same meanings even if a minor error pops up here and there.

Now, we can verify that #1 isn't happening, so that leaves us with two reasons an omnipotent God would allow mistakes. Combined with the possibility that God is incapable as you mentioned, we have three valid possibilities.

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Firstly, your many errors in your premises are carried forward in your conclusion.

Secondly, God is capable of making anything occur without us knowing. He could make a gigantic cherry pie appear in the sky and make it so that all of us generally don't care. So he is certainly capable of preserving the Bible without making a big spectacle of it. Your argument is nonsense and you have not logically shown that I put forth a false dichotomy.

[serious] said:

I cross posted with him (had my post open in editing most of the day due to other duties), but I think I can restate what he is trying to say in a way that will answer your specific question better. It ultimately breaks down into the idea of competing interests. God does not wish there to be errors, but there are other desires to be balanced against that.

God is able to prevent errors
AND
God does not wish there to be errors
BUT
God also wishes to entrust man with the care of scripture

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Off topic as defined in the OP: this does not explain why it is a good thing that they are there.

Recall I related this to the problem of evil:

If God is omnipotent and benevolent, why does evil exist? God allows evil to exist because good things can come from evil actions. I find this to be acceptable. But now we look at contradictions in the Bible. God is able to prevent errors, AND he doesn't want them to be there, so WHY does he allow them? What good comes from them? Failure to answer this or explain WHY God is entrusting the accuracy of scripture to us means you are giving me a half-baked answer.

I have a similar approach in my post with a second desire balancing the desire to prevent errors. In this format, my last bit would be "BUT: God also does not wish to produce an endless stream of miracles that are easily documented"

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An inerrant Bible is a documented miracle?

[serious] said:

I'm afraid that if you do not recognize degrees of of right and wrong as existing, we are at a fundamental impass. If I were to take such a binary view, I must also abandon science as all theories are almost certainly wrong to some minor degree.

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Degrees of right and wrong simply do not exist in logic. This is factual and not up for debate. If that book you were citing can come up with a really short answer, I'll read it, but I might as well be arguing with a flat-earther because that is how wrong you are on this issue. It is a matter of fact that I have created a dichotomy. Your malformed answer best fits into the category of "God does not care," which is the answer I will accept.

Regardless of all of this, even if we assume that your evaluation of logic is correct then you have still fallen short of an acceptable answer. My first question was,

Therefore, he either wants there to be errors in the Bible, or he simply does not care. Which is it and why?

You reject the dichotomy, so you do not have to answer the "Which is it" part because you have provided your own (invalid) response where you say that God entrusts the preservation of the Bible to us. You have avoided the "why?" part. Do you have a good reason for this?

Also, there was my second question which you left entirely unaddressed:

In the problem of evil, God is shown to have good reasons for allowing evil to exist. But what good reason is there for allowing contradictions in the Bible? I am curious if anyone can even name one good reason.

Crandaddy said:

Those were just two rebuttals that I threw out off the top of my head.

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Those rebuttals were quite terrible. In defense of your claim that you start from secular facts, you tasked me with disproving the resurrection.

You had just been talking about how you think my “preconceived conclusion” is that “Jesus is God and savior of mankind,” and so the topic of Jesus was just something I had fresh on my mind. So no, those aren't the only two rebuttals that would persuade me to change my mind.

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The world is becoming increasingly rational and, accordingly, less faith-based, so whatever set of secular facts drives your conclusion about the existence of God or the resurrection of Christ should be in your sheath ready to be drawn, particularly here in an apologetics forum.

If you take yourself to be able to make a robust positive case for atheism (as you have indicated), then you shouldn't need for me to instruct you on how to go about attacking the rational foundations of Christianity.

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Entirely false.

I can only show that God's existence is not necessary, and also that his existence is logically absurd. This is what I mean by a positive case for atheism, whereas a negative case for atheism is simply rejecting theological arguments for being insufficient. But showing that the universe can (and must) exist apart from God's actions does not show he does not exist, and showing that his properties are logically absurd does not negate his possible existence, as can be inferred from my positive case for nihilism.

A better metaphor than your lamp in the basement would be to imagine a land where it is perpetually heavily overcast, so that no resident of this land has ever seen the sun -- and yet despite this, every morning the sun rises and every evening it sets, just as in our world. Also, just as in our world, some of its light manages to filter down through the great cloud canopy, so that the residents of this land can see that all that lies below this sea of clouds (unless it be overshadowed by some intermediate object or structure) is somehow illuminated from above. Would a resident of such a land be justified in believing that somewhere beyond all those clouds there exists a great light that shines down through them and illuminates the world below, even though she can't directly see it? I think she would.

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Firstly, it is not a metaphor. Secondly, the analogy you are presenting is not relevant to the discussion (which entirely defeats the purpose of presenting an analogy) because my analogy relates to the burden of proof, whereas yours relates to logical inference. Thirdly, my analogy is better because it is more straight to the point.

I see my own epistemic situation with respect to God as similar to this perpetually cloud-covered land. I see the world around me to be teeming with inherent and ontologically built-in intelligibility and telic goal-orientation, so even entirely apart from Christianity and the Bible, I have grounds for believing that there is a metaphysical foundation underlying those principles that is not altogether dissimilar from a rational personal agent who acts according to a plan, despite the fact that I've never directly observed it.

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If our intelligence or goal-orientation is indicative of a higher intelligence acting according to a plan, then that higher intelligence acting according to a plan is indicative of a yet higher intelligence, and so on. Nothing is solved.

Furthermore, the dominant state of the universe is maximal entropy. The stellar era is a cosmic blink, and is infinitesimal in comparison to the era of the final energy state.

And if you or any other interested readers would like to get a better general understanding of the classical theistic approach to metaphysics and philosophical theology, a good place to start would be here. Notice that its roots extend back into ancient Platonic and Peripatetic philosophy and draw considerably from their ideas.

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Metaphysics is merely mental gymnastics. Until you can refute nihilism, metaphysics is dead.

It seems to me that if there are areas where even logic doesn't hold -- by which I mean that it actually doesn't hold in those areas, not simply that we haven't figured them out yet -- then we must give up all hope of ever making coherent sense of them, because we can't dispense with reason itself and still expect to be able to reason.

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Firstly, I'm not saying that logic does not hold. I'm saying that its axioms are assertions, and on top of this have no concrete meaning. Secondly, it's not that we simply haven't figured this out yet, like you suggest - we know with certainty what the situation is because logic was invented, not discovered. Thirdly, not all is lost. I'm not suggesting we dispense with reason and then proceed to reason. I'm saying that we need to understand that we can use logic as a tool, and we can apply it conditionally, but that we must not come to believe that any axiom within it is absolutely true, nor can we even say that we are absolutely certain what truth actually means.

What I think is actually the case is that our understanding of quantum mechanics is not yet sufficiently advanced to really understand what goes on at that scale.

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The double slit experiment has been repeated and verified more than any other experiment in the history of mankind, and this is specifically because its conclusion was so shocking to us, that is, that electrons interfere with themselves, and hence are distinct from themselves, and hence the "X is not distinct from itself" logical law is shown to be an assertion that is not true in all possible realities.

So then let's define this word “definition.” It's an explanation of what something is, yes? Are you saying that all of language can be decomposed entirely into what-explanations?

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I'm saying that it has to be able to do this, since asking for a definition is a valid question in any context.

And then what happens is you ask the what-questions about words within the what-explanation, and you create an effective procedure for a never-ending sentence, and a never-ending sentence can have no truth value.

Does this also extend to propositions that purport to assert fully concretely-existent states of affairs (what actually is the case, so to speak)?

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No such proposition can exist. Did you not read my positive case for nihilism?

It seems like you are referring to something like the law of non contradiction, "Not (X and not X)." Expressed in logical terms, it is ~(X·~X). These are all primitive symbols with no concrete meaning.

If logic and mathematics are truly utterly devoid of meaning, then they can neither express nor prove anything at all whatsoever, regardless of what assumptions might be made, because they would be (at best) completely and utterly senseless gibberish... So you must excuse me if I can't any more take such a suggestion seriously than if you had claimed that 2+2=5, or that a circle can be square.

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Again you are mistaken. The very fact that mathematics is devoid of meaning is why it is so useful. How useful is it to prove that two apples plus two apples is four apples? You then have to start over if you want to prove that two oranges plus two oranges is four oranges. Numbers have no units, so when I inspect the number 2, I am not referring to apples, oranges, firetrucks, or anything. It is indeed meaningless, which means we are free to attach any meaning to it that we like. Thus you only have to prove 2+2=4 once.

The fact that mathematics is expressed in meaningless terms does not mean that you can misapply definitions. The definition of "square" decomposes into meaningless terms, as does the definition of "circle," but this does not mean they are the same thing because their definitions decompose into different strings of primitive terms. Primitive terms are not interchangeable.

Generally, in mathematics, we have the notion of a set, this notion that we can collect things together into a singular unit, and we generally regard the primitive symbol Ø as being the degenerate singular unit, that is, the singular unit with no members. This is the underlying thought process behind mathematics, although it is true (and necessary) that all primitive symbols have no actual meaning.

I won't attempt to explain how they were justified because I don't believe that they were justified.

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Could you elaborate on this? It is quite clear that God commanded them to do it.

And by the way, what makes you think that conscience is unrelated to reason?

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I'm perfectly fine with dropping that assertion for now as it is not relevant to any idea or principle I hold.

Also, your talk of being “justified” seems to indicate that you believe in some system of morality; if so, then is morality unrelated to reason as well in your view?

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Of course I have a system of morality, and of course it is unrelated to reason. However, like I said, I'm fine with dropping the assertion. If you want to show that morality is related to reason, I'm ready to see what you have to say.

I see that you asked me to elaborate on God's plan for contradictions in the Bible, and I think I gave you a reasonable answer to that question.

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Reasonable, but insufficient.

To expect me to be able to thoroughly rationalize God would be utterly ludicrous.

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To believe in something for which there is no physical evidence and incomplete rationalization is what I would call utterly ludicrous.

Besides that, I'm not sure what other question you're referring to.

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To recap:

"God either wants there to be errors in the Bible, or he simply does not care. Which is it and why?"

If I'm not mistaken, you said God wants the errors to be in there, and you have no idea why.

"What good reason is there for allowing contradictions in the Bible? I am curious if anyone can even name one good reason."

Still waiting for you to produce a good reason, or admit that it is absurd to even think there can be one.

Neither do I. What a coincidence.

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This is your response to when I said,

"Just trying to meet you in the middle. I don't actually think it's reasonable to believe in a divinely inspired book that contradicts itself for no good reason whatsoever."

So let's see what we have here...

1. You "start with facts on the ground (completely apart from religion) and try to work [your] way to discovering truth from there"

2. You concede that there are contradictions in the Bible

3. You have no idea what possible good reason there can be for contradictions in the Bible

4. You don't think it's reasonable to believe in a divinely inspired book that contradicts itself for no good reason whatsoever

5. ???

6. You believe in the Bible

Maybe they weren't, but then why they didn't just compile, alter, and edit the texts so as to omit the contradictions and omit (or at least mitigate) the atrocities to begin with? They then wouldn't have had to worry about those pesky transparency issues. If your religion is false and you're tasked with making up a sacred text for it, then why not make it as free from contradictions and other controversial matters as possible? And if anyone should ask why you omitted this or changed that, then just chalk it up to “divine inspiration” and discussion over.

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The bulk, if not entirety, of atrocities and contradictions in the Bible occur in the Old Testament. By the time Rome was sainted, the Jews, and hence the Old Testament, were scattered throughout the world. How do you propose the church was going to change it all? Are you saying they considered a course of action where they correct the errors and then just hope none of the Jewish texts ever surface?

So actually, it seems that their putting those troublesome passages into the canon and then also feeling uncomfortable enough with them to be less than transparent about them with the illiterate public (as you allege) would be more of a problem for you than it would be for me.

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Remarkable. You grant me that the Bible is contradictory and that the church is secretive about this, and then you say it is a problem for my worldview.

Even if God didn't have anything to do with those contradictions, errors, atrocities, and whatnot being in the Bible, then the people who put the Bible together certainly did, and they probably knew about a good many (if not most or all) of them. So then why did they decide to put them in there?

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To put it simply, the Old Testament was put together by racist, sexist, genocidal, slave-driving rapists, so I don't think they viewed the events in the book of Joshua as atrocities but rather as conquests.

"Off-topic," I know, but it still bears to be said that the evidence seems to indicate that those contradictions aren't nearly as heavy a blow to Christianity as you seem to think they are.

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I can concede this point if you can produce premise 5 in the pseudo-syllogism above.

It's probably simply because they don't know how to go about answering your questions. I have no problem admitting that.

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It would be more intellectually honest of them to simply admit that instead of hijacking my question, wouldn't you think?

dcalling said:

Not necessary. There is a report that that even though the % of people in general population became less, the % of scientists who believe in God didn't change much. Meaning, the lay people will sway to whatever the current trend is, but people who think rationally stay the same.


I am curious of why.

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List of grievances against your post:

1. It is hard to read or understand.
2. The existence of "a report" doesn't say much. Also you did not identify the report or explain how to find it.
3. It is tangential to the larger point of mine which you redacted, that is, that in an apologetics forum one needs to have reasonable arguments at the ready.
4. Lastly, the factual parts are incorrect. We are trending away from religion.

Aelred of Rievaulx said:

The bible didn't come into existence for "us".

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Who's it for then, the angels?

It's widely agreed that the bible came into existence as loose collections of sacred stories which were used liturgically in the early Christian communities. It increasingly became standardised in its collection after the fourth century, yet what marks "scripture" is that it was used by some Christians somewhere in informing and forming their liturgies.

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Why are you not addressing the Old Testament texts? Those are the focus of this thread.

This means that the bible is a response to God in much the same way as the liturgy itself is a human response to God, the worship and invocation of God.

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Nonsensical.

Infallibility and inerrancy are unnecessary for Christians.

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Off topic as defined in the OP. Please take the time to read it.

Aelred of Rievaulx said:

OK.


I don't think I can speak for God but I don't think God cares given that there are errors in the bible.

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Thank you for answering this part of the question, but you never address why the contradictions are good things.

God didn't write the bible, humans did. One can say that God allowed contradictions in the bible in the same sense that one can say that God allowed any other human muck-ups like believing that humans were made up of four bodily humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood each corresponding to different emotions.

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Still waiting for the explanation as to how the contradictions are good things.

You're right none of those statements gives an adequate response to the question of why there is error in the bible. The reason why there is is that there is no reason there should not be, when humans write texts there can be a guaranty that there'll be something wrong with it.

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Still not explaining why the contradictions are good things.

We Christians choose to focus on what we like about the bible especially and centrally when it functions in the liturgy.

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There's no one answer to this. Paul wrote to the Corinthians et al, Luke to Theophilus, John of Patmos wrote to seven churches. We have no idea who wrote any of the OT but we can trace its reception history into both Christian and Jewish movements, among many other heirs to the Second Temple Judaisms. I mentioned them not being written for us so as to add an air of dissimilarity to them, the texts are alien to the ways we see the world around us, they come from radically different cultures and societies which take very different sorts of things for granted. To give one example, the author of Genesis likely thought it normal to associate Genesis 1 with the Temple cult, this is very different to the ways we may be inclined at first glance to see the myth.

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So if we are not the intended audience, we have no need for the Bible. Right?

The "Old Testament" I would argue apropos Jon Levenson's 1993 paradigm shaking classic The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism, is a different collection of books to the Tanakh. Levenson went so far as to disregard the patronising term used by the more progressive Christians "Hebrew Bible" as inaccurate, since the fundamental shape of the Old Testament creates a canonical-narrative structure so different to the Tanakh he considers them simply two different texts and does therefore think that "Old Testament" is the proper designator for the Christian collection. When fourth century Christian scripture it goes without saying that I'm talking about the Old Testament as well as the New. The structure of the OT is such that it begins with the Pentateuch, the introduction to scripture, it then divides into the "(hi)storical texts" and the "poetical texts" and subsequently finishes on what is most important for Christianity from the OT: the Prophets who herald in a new age. This gives the shape of a broad canonical structure which anticipates the messianic and serves as an apt prelude to the NT gospels. This more-or-less standardised form became predominant after the fourth century for Christians. The texts that came to form the Old Testament came from the more ancient Second Temple Jewish Temple cults, they functioned alongside the calendrically structured rituals and ceremonies of the cosmically orientated temple system.

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Off topic.

Nowhere do you even attempt to explain why contradictions in the Bible are a good thing.