(A preliminary note to the reader: Different believers use different definitions of the term “inerrancy.” When I use that term below I am referring to the hypothesis that the Bible contains no factual errors or contradictions of any kind, scientific or otherwise. If you accept that the Bible contains scientific errors, but consider these to be accommodations to the ignorance of the original author and audience, I do not consider you an inerrantist for the purposes of this post.)
***
If you have read many online debates on the topic of Biblical inerrancy, you may have noticed as I have that they typically go something like this:
Errantist: The Bible isn’t inerrant. It claims that the value of pi is 3, when we all know it’s 3.14159… etc.
Inerrantist: It does no such thing.
Errantist: Yes, it does. Look right here in 1 Kings 7:23. It says Solomon had a circular “Sea” built that was 10 cubits across and “took a line of 30 cubits to measure around it.” That means its circumference was 30 cubits, and its diameter was 10 cubits, and the ratio of the one to the other was therefore 3. But we know that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (that is, pi) is about 3.14. Hence, an error. Q.E.D.
Inerrantist: Big deal, the author could have been rounding down. Pi has an infinite number of digits, so you would have to round at some point.
Errantist: If the author had said the line was “about 31 and a half cubits,” or even 31 cubits, you’d have a point. But rounding to the tens? That’s ridiculous.
Inerrantist: Alright, even if he wasn’t rounding, don’t forget that the Sea was a handbreadth in thickness (see verse 26). So if they were measuring the interior circumference of the Sea, there’s no error.
Errantist: Why on earth would they measure the interior circumference? And even if they were reporting the interior circumference, why would they then report the exterior diameter? Face it, it’s an error; simple as that.
Inerrantist: Even if you’re right, there’s another solution. Verse 26 clearly says that the rim flared outward, like a lily. They could have measured the diameter from rim to rim, but measured the circumference lower down around the Sea.
Errantist: This is getting absurd. It’s an error.
Inerrantist: It is not.
Errantist: Is!
Inerrantist: ISN’T!
Errantist: IT IS TOO AN ERROR AND KNUCKLE DRAGGING MOUTH-BREATHERS LIKE YOU ALLOWED HITLER TO COME TO POWER!!
Inerrantist: Hah! Godwin’s Law! I win!!
What our dueling antagonists above are failing to accept, indeed, failing to see, most likely, is that they are arguing as if they were talking about certainties rather than probabilities. Each is insisting that his position is 100% certain, when in fact there is some amount of uncertainty in either position. The actual probability that the Bible affirms 3 as the value of pi lies somewhere between 0 and 1. The real question is where along that scale the probability lies. The inerrantist is correct that there are multiple ways of reading the passage in question so that the Bible is not affirming that pi = 3. The errantist is correct that none of these readings come from a plain reading of the text, and all of them require a stretching of the imagination, if not the text itself. Nevertheless, for just about any apparent error or contradiction one can find in the Bible, there is some likelihood that it is only apparent, and not genuine.
At first blush, this may seem to be a boon to the inerrantist. In fact, they seem to think so themselves, since I have seen inerrantists post harmonizations of apparent errors and contradictions in the Bible with disclaimers along the following lines: “We do not claim to have proven the Bible inerrant with our defense of these passages. However, that is not our burden. Our burden is simply to demonstrate that it is possible to read the passages in such a way that they do not contradict one another or our current scientific understanding of the cosmos.” But that dodges a big responsibility. It may be possible to read the passages that way, but how probable is it that that is the right way to read them? Is it 99% probable? 50%? 1%? Surely the answer to that question should weigh in our decision to accept or reject Biblical inerrancy. After all, there’s a chance I’ll be killed in a horrible traffic accident today, but I’m going to get in the car anyway.
Now let’s take a brief detour through some elementary probability theory. Suppose I were to show you a fair coin and ask how likely it is that when I flip the coin, it will land heads up? I’m sure you could answer without hesitation. Everyone knows that if I flip a fair coin many times, it will tend to land heads about as often as tails. In probability parlance, we say that there is a 50% probability of the coin landing heads up. Now what if I were to ask how likely it is that if I flip the coin twice, heads will come up both times? In this case, I’m asking about the likelihood of two independent events occurring. In probability parlance, this is called a joint probability. And most readers probably know that the joint probability of two events occurring is the probability of the first event occurring times the probability of the second event occurring. In the case of my fair coin, flipping heads twice in a row has a joint probability of 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25, or 25%. In general, if an event has a probability of occurring, p, the probability that it will occur n times in n trials is p to the nth power, or p^n.
Now we can see that things have gotten stickier for the inerrantist, because his position that the Bible is inerrant is actually the combination of a set of positions, namely that each and every verse in the Bible is correct. That is, his position does not stand simply because he can show that this or that passage has a high probability of not containing an error. Rather, he must be able to show that any passage that contains an apparent error is, in fact, highly likely to be accurate. And more than that, he must be able to show that the joint probability that all of the passages contain no errors is high as well. There is some probability that the Bible is inerrant, and it is necessarily the joint probability that each passage from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21 contains no errors. And there are quite a few passages that contain some apparent errors.
How many? Well, let’s ask some inerrantists. Norm Geisler and Thomas Howe have written a book entitled The Big Book of Bible Difficulties. And big it is! It’s over 600 pages long and “offers answers to over 800 questions often raised by skeptics, critics and cults.” For ease in the math, let’s forget the “over” and just call it 800. Now suppose Geisler and Howe were able to give really convincing answers to all of these questions. In fact, let’s say that in every case Geisler and Howe could convince an open-minded skeptic that there was a 95% probability that the passage in question contained no errors. How big is the likelihood that the Bible is inerrant, that not one of those passages actually contains an error? Miniscule. Remember that this is a joint probability, equal to p^n. Our open-minded skeptic says that p = 0.95, and Geisler and Howe have already told us that n = 800. A little quick math gives us 0.95^800 = 1.15 x 10^-18. In plain English, that means the odds are about 662 quadrillion to one against inerrancy.
What if Geisler and Howe go back and do some more research, and are now able to convince our skeptic that the probability of accuracy is 99% in every case? Now we have 0.99^800 = 0.00032, or about 0.03%. In this case the odds are around 3,100 to one against inerrancy. That’s a big improvement, but it’s still not very convincing. And if they do even more research, and convince the skeptic that there is a 99.9% probability of accuracy in each disputed passage? Well, now the chances of inerrancy are a little less than fifty-fifty: 44.9%, to be precise.
At the very least, then, it behooves the inerrantist to be very, very humble in his stance that the Bible contains no errors. True, if he considered the probability to be 99.99% that any given error is only apparent, and not genuine, then he could boost the joint probability of inerrancy (in his mind, at least) to a little better than 92%, which is pretty high. But let’s get serious. 99.99% confidence would mean that only 1 in 10,000 such apparent errors would be genuine. If I gave you 10,000 ancient texts apparently misreporting the value of pi, would you say only one of them is actually in error, and the others have perfectly valid explanations? Not likely.
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Note from Steve: This post was submitted by a guest blogger who goes by the snappy pseudonym “Guest Blogger”. I hope to hear more from this interesting guy. Make sure you leave some feedback!
Related posts:
- Brief question about inerrancy The question that must be asked of inerrantists is this: Is it Scripture or man’s wisdom that is the ultimate basis for Christians’ belief system?...
- Proving Christianity with inerrancy In a discussion involving my rejection of inerrancy, a frequent commenter mentioned the inerrantist objection, ”Without [our Bible] can we confidently walk up to a non-believer and ask...
- Thinking “Outside the Box” about the Bible My friend Cliff Martin has written one of the best, most concise descriptions of the nature and purpose of the Bible that I have ever...
- Mr. Sola Scriptura weighs in on inerrancy Take the great 16th century reformer Martin Luther, for instance. Most would argue that Luther — who argued for “scripture alone” — had a high...
- Chance and diminishing domains During the course of his interview with Ben Stein that I mentioned in an earlier post, R. C. Sproul recounted the story of his conversation...
View Comments on “Inerrancy: A Snowball’s Chance”
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Another great post. Inerrantists often disobey Occam’s Razor with their obtuse, convoluted solutions. So much ink spilled on protecting something that doesn’t need protecting, where instead appreciating the opposite can yield a relational, incarnational God who responds to people at their level of maturity.
Posted on December 4, 2008 at 7:24 pm.
Yeah, that is great, Steve. Especially the clincher: At the very least, then, it behooves the inerrantist to be very, very humble in his stance that the Bible contains no errors. If only every man defending his position would take that humble stance.
Damian´s last blog post..Adoption: A biblical vocation
Posted on December 4, 2008 at 9:40 pm.
Guest blogger! I was wondering how Steve suddenly became so good knowledgeable of statistics and probability.
So what percentage of Jesus’ teachings are errant? Should I start giving more serious consideration of the Jesus Seminar? What I mean is, how is a person supposed to know when to say “Oh that’s absolute Biblical truth there” and when is he supposed to know when to say “Oh that’s more hogwash in the Bible”?
Posted on December 4, 2008 at 11:20 pm.
@Josh
Well that’s basically the problem with all this right there. The whole problem in fact.. how to educate believers and in what.. what is important?
Perhaps the damage being done to the reputation of Christianity is more about politics than it is about the level of education amongst believers. After all it’s not as though you need to pass an exam or write a dissertation to become a Christian (and thank God for that), all you need to do is believe in the resurrection, accept forgiveness and follow Chist (though the truth is it’s the last part which people find the most difficult and has the most interpretations).
If more teaching was devoted to questioning, reasoning, patience, discretion and kindness to ‘enemies’ then perhaps the education element would take care of itself.
Posted on December 5, 2008 at 2:09 am.
Interpreting a book isn’t exactly comparable to flipping a coin, but you are on the right path. I once thought the Bible had a “big picture” that would become obvious if you just figured out the right theology. But I wound up losing just about all faith instead.
Why? Well, there are so many Christian ideas that can only be held together with some arcane explanation (ex: Trinity, pre-existence, all the differences between Jesus stories and quotes, Paul vs. Acts, end times theology and so on). It is not hard to justify a few of these in one’s head. However, trying to juggle dozens or hundreds of convoluted explanations is just about impossible, if one has any intellectual honesty.
Like Dan, I came to the Occam’s Razor conclusion. The only way to look at it is to understand that the books in the Bible are just a snapshot in time, the understanding of “God” by a person who lived in a different world.
Posted on December 5, 2008 at 9:21 am.
@Josh H. – Just read this this morning which I think addresses some of the questions you have:
Gospel Contradictions and Orality Studies
Even thought the Gospel texts have “contradictions” according to modern standards, they still contain reliable history.
Posted on December 5, 2008 at 11:22 am.
@Dan,
Brilliant! and it confirms one of the points I was making on another post here, looking at the bible in a historical context, not just through the eyes of science and literalism.
I’d argue that that the historical context is more important than the science aspect, since the purpose of it all is to communicate a message, and understanding the message can sometimes only be done looking at how things would be interpreted at that point in history.
Posted on December 5, 2008 at 11:48 am.
The way any incompetent boob gets stuff done: by proxy, of course!
I don’t think GB was telling us that we should imagine every verse or passage on an arbitrary scale somewhere between 0 and 1. He’s saying that each identified Bible difficulty and each proposed explanation has a chance of being wrong. You’re talking more about what happens if we accept that the Bible has unexplainable difficulties (“errors” of one sort or another), which is a valid, but separate, question.
I believe that God ordained the Bible to convey His truth for the same reason you do: by faith. The inerrantist simply believes God ordained the Bible to convey more stuff than I do. This was a major point in the last few posts of my B&H series.
The Bible never refers to itself as a canonized whole (how could it?), so we can’t appeal to it for justification for a belief in inerrancy; the closest it comes to the latter is 2 Tim 3.16-17, which limits its claim for the usefulness of “all Scripture” very clearly to “doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness” for the purpose of moral behavior. In short, it’s “authoritative in matters of faith and practice,” as many confessions affirm. If it occasionally reflects an authorial misunderstanding in peripheral matters (science, history, etc.), all that would be called into question would be the notion of God dictating the whole thing verbally or in a plenary fashion; in no way would it impugn the Bible’s usefulness in the matters for which it makes some claim to be useful — the only matters that matter anyway!
For Pete’s sake, Christians don’t even think the “all Scripture” Paul was referring to (the Tanakh) is even quite as useful for matters of faith and practice as are Paul’s own writings; in other words, even Christians recognize a variable scale of authority within Scripture.
Rule of thumb: find what message the passage teaches, whether it couches it in questionable scientific or historical terms, and believe that. God used fallible people to deliver His infallible message, who in turn delivered that infallible message by means of fallible vessels.
I agree that we need to teach Christians how to fish rather than to depend on fishmongers of wildly varying reliability. But I am also firmly against the “just me and my Bible” idea. So I fall in the middle: we need Christians to learn to think, trust, and live out the faith, but part of living out the faith is providing resources and testimonies for Christians to learn by.
I’ve come to the same conclusion, Paul. Well said. However, I would take the quotation marks off God because I think the Bible, when viewed as a gradually unfolding chronicle of revelation, does present a sufficient if incomplete view of who God is: that is why Jesus came.
@Dan – Thanks for dropping in, my friend. And thanks for that link. Although we all know that the news, weather, and traffic reports we hear in the car on the way to work are not inerrant or infallible, we can (and generally do) depend on their overall trustworthiness all the same.
Posted on December 5, 2008 at 11:49 am.
Woops – missed your comment, Damian.
And this, I think, was one of GB’s main points. I think Alex would agree: humility in our interpretation, especially if we came by it without due personal effort, is one of the things we most need to teach Christians. But now I’m sounding Emergent!
Posted on December 5, 2008 at 11:53 am.
Interesting perspective, Steve. I like your use of statistics here.
If the Bible contains errors, then as paul commented, one has to formulate an interpretation of the scripture, and interpretations will have a much higher error rate than things not subject to interpretation. The scripture is supposed to contain absolute capital “T” Truth. Is such truth only found between the 800+ errors? No. The problem is not so much “errors” but lack of clarity in the scriptures.
The errantist might say that the Bible is not God’s explicit communication with us, but rather he gave us an art piece to discuss from several different angles. One’s theology needs to ask how/why God would operate in this manner instead of being more explicit and not leaving room for interpretation. The inerrantist is obviously uncomfortable with the idea of God operating like this.
How is the inerrantist’s theology lacking and how/why is the errantist’s theology richer? Furthermore, how can you say your interpretation has a lower error rate?
Tom´s last blog post..Hulk theology
Posted on December 5, 2008 at 12:32 pm.
Steve, there are too many problems for me to conclude that if God exists he would structure his revelation to people like our “Bible.” Why in all those books is there not a single reference to his nature as believed by Christians? Why is there so much confusion about basic issues? Why did Jesus not tell people about the Trinity and the plan for salvation? He told people God would forgive them if they forgave others and other such things, but “Christians” don’t believe that at all.
Progressive revelation is totally absurd from any logical point of view. If it is true, it says bad things about “God” because he actively misled the earlier people he “spoke” to, such as Moses and Abraham.
Primitive people believed crazy things, like nations conquered other nations based on the relative strength of their backing deity. Or that a god/heavenly being (Genesis 6 and Jesus) could impregnate a human. Truly, those are nutty things that can only be believed if one takes his or her rational hat off.
Posted on December 5, 2008 at 12:38 pm.
When an Inerrantist claims that all that is necessary is to show that it is possible it is not a contradiction, I think they are totally missing the point. The point is if there are so many different confusions, contradictions, etc, why would we think it was inerrant in the first place? If “possible”, however contrived the resolution, were sufficient you could probably claim most books ever written were inerrant, including the religious texts of others. When I present the Bible to non-believers of the more critical skeptical sort, I would just as well present the obvious truthfulness of what is written within, not assume the case and then get defensive that the skeptic would point out the hundreds of problems with that assumption.
And then there is me, who, unfortunately, am also a bit of a skeptic. Actually I was a raging skeptic most of my life, just not against my own beliefs. But most of piers (who are mostly online since I keep this silent from my real life friends) can’t understand why I would began to question whether the Bible was innerant. The more the read/research/pray about all of this, the more I realize that the Bible Innerancy is itself one of the most stringent presuppositions a conservative believer has. You’re allowed a little doubt, but “mature” Christians are expected to fall quickly in line when presented with Geisler and Howe. And why not, since it is a presupposition held so firmly then just making things “possible” would do it for most who WANT to believe it so firmly.
And why do they WANT to? Because we have to have some standard of Truth. Because God DOES NOT talk to us in animals, dreams, visions, bushes, cloudy tabernacles, so we have no where else to go but the old written book. And once we start questioning that, we start asking the questions Josh H. asks above. And unfortunately, many who do start questioning that arrive at where Paul (comment 11) has appeared to arrive. How do we decide? That is a entirely valid question.
And could someone please tell me what your supposed to tell your children, age 7 and 5?
Posted on December 5, 2008 at 1:52 pm.
Hi, Tom! Fact is, I can’t claim any credit for the statistics.
Supposed by many, but not all. Capital “T” Truth is much too large for any document. You’re still claiming more for the Bible than it does for itself. You think God is logically required to provide an infallible, completely clear guide to all Truth; I do not. You apparently require God to keep people from having misconceptions; I do not.
I suppose you mean you think we should ask that question because you did and couldn’t find an answer to it, from which you concluded that the whole shebang was phony. Some of us see enough value in the religion to make sure we don’t argue from ignorance to the effect that, “I don’t know exactly how a god could have done it to my satisfaction; therefore that god does not exist.” The differences in interpretation are not substantive as matters of faith and practice, and it’s far overreaching to say that a few inaccuracies present in the text mean that the whole thing’s up for grabs. In other words, it’s the same simplistic response of “all or nothing” that the inerrantists use.
Those who insist on having all the answers right now will hardly make it through the third season of the TV show LOST, much less a lifelong belief in God. I am content to do both.
I can’t prove, if that’s what you mean, that my interpretation has an overall lower error rate (nor is doing so even necessary), although I can demonstrate that it has some advantages in certain areas – in the same areas, I daresay, that skeptics like yourself would agree upon. Knowing something crystal-clearly is a requirement for neither science nor faith.
I have come to the conclusion that belief in esoteric doctrines like the Trinity is not essential; anyone pursuing truth will encounter and have to evaluate those doctrines, but no one need ever have known those things.
I think there’s plenty in the Bible telling us about God’s nature: Jesus’ character was said to exemplify God’s (“If you have seen me, you’ve seen the Father”), and even most unbelievers of today recognize Jesus’ moral teachings to be clear and admirable.
As far as Jesus laying out the “plan for salvation”, remember that he said he was sent specifically to Israel, to whom he had already revealed the plan of salvation in the Prophets (chiefly deutero-Isaiah). Israel was to be an example of how God dealt with everyone.
You mean something different by “progressive revelation” than Christians do: it doesn’t mean that He changed up the message over time, but that He only revealed the relevant data at the time and allowed harmless misconceptions to remain. When He “spoke” to Moses, He didn’t say anything that wasn’t so, but He didn’t lay down any more cards than necessary. There’s nothing illogical or immoral about that.
Do you have any rational basis for ruling those things out as irrational a priori? Or might this be a good time to exercise some of that statistical humility?
Posted on December 5, 2008 at 1:58 pm.
Wonderful question, Pete. I’m in the same boat with an inquisitive 6-year-old. My wife and I teach the children the stories in the Bible as we do the stories from any other book; the stories have innate value as stories and as ancient literature, and the embedded/underlying doctrine will be distilled at much older ages. The important thing with our kids is to get Jesus right: if I thought the Gospels were too unreliable to teach as (broadly) historical, I probably wouldn’t be a believer at all, but as it is I don’t see any reason to throw out the teachings of Jesus or the events of his life as described in the Gospels. At the same time, I don’t expect 100% accuracy from anything or anybody in the world, and I still trust people, news media, and my own fallible senses and reason enough to function quite contently – so why should it be different with this?
We’ve got to be careful not to overreact, as well: just because the Patriarchal stories are largely saga and not historiographical doesn’t mean that none of the characters or stories have a basis in reality, and much less does it mean that they have absolutely no value for teaching as stories about men who were faithful to God and His ways. Are all the stories about David or the prophets true in fine detail? Likely not, but why should anyone then presume them all to be unhistorical characters? Historians don’t believe that any historical accounts (even much more modern ones) are 100% accurate, but they don’t throw them out, either. As adults, we’ve got to avoid the childish “all or nothing” approach. Kids see things as all or nothing, and so at the earliest stages, I’m not sure how we can do other than err on the “all” side until they get older.
It’s not easy, and I do feel for your confusion and insecurity.
Posted on December 5, 2008 at 2:39 pm.
I’m not really claiming anything. I’m just asking. But non-fundamentalists still revere it as a substantial document — something to wage wars over, swear an oath over, etc. And as Pete says, God doesn’t speak to us in dreams, through animals, and other ways. This document is really it.
Given that this document is it, I’m not saying that it has to be infallible and clear. I’m asking why it is not. What was God’s masterful purpose in making a document that was open to an infinite number of interpretations? Is it just so things are more interesting — much like if we knew the end of LOST, we would not sit it out?
Don’t presume to know my path to apostasy. Several factors weighed in on that decision that are not so simplistic and binary. That being said, yes, I did ask the question of errancy in the Bible. This pointed me to historical accounts as well. Obviously, I saw a book of errors, which I already knew existed when I had faith. If you imagine a universe without God, you can make other interpretations of the Bible — what was meant by these men writing it, what they thought about their God, how it was used in the culture. When I began reading the Bible with an atheist hat on, I found it made much more sense, and probably like you (if I shall make my own presumption), I read it as people’s culture at the time and interpretations of their God.
After years of struggling, and in a nutshell, I could not make an image of God from even scraps of my own picking and choosing from God-images in the Bible that I could believe in. I can’t make an image of any God, Biblically or not. What it boils down to for me is the choice to not live in a world containing supernatural powers.
The acceptance of a supernatural requires many hoops that simply can’t add up — Justice, the problem of evil, the bodiless spirit, etc. This is the reason the Bible contains errors, has holes, and is unclear. It’s a square peg and round hole. It’s why theologians will always argue.
Posted on December 5, 2008 at 6:35 pm.
To a large extent, this is true, but “this document” is still sufficient if all it gives is spiritual truth.
I wouldn’t say that God “made” the Bible at all – only that, much like creation itself, He ordained that it would be here for us. It’s really not all that confusing, is it? We need a savior because we fall short of God’s glory; Jesus is that savior; we confess him as Lord and live by his principles and teachings. Maybe it’s really that simple. It wouldn’t matter how clear it was, people would find a way to obfuscate it.
I apologize; I thought it was a reasonable speculation due to the recurrence of this question from you in all the blogs I’ve seen you frequent.
Would it be fair to say, then, that you got tired of asking “why” without receiving satisfactory answers? In my case, I have come to the conclusion that what is adequate need not always be wholly satisfactory, that what is unsatisfactory is not necessarily dispensable, and that incompleteness should not automatically be reckoned false.
As always, I appreciate your thoughts, Tom, in case I haven’t told you before.
Posted on December 6, 2008 at 12:11 am.
Good quote. I like that. May steal it
BTW adding your blog to my feed.
Posted on December 6, 2008 at 7:21 am.
@Steve –
Not really. While I also have incomplete answers, I have found materialism allows me something I can piece together better than a theology can. Yours and the blogs I frequent illuminate that I haven’t performed some of the possible hermeneutics, which is why I frequent those blogs. I’m curious about the discussion and want to be well-informed and rounded with my stance.
Tom´s last blog post..Hulk theology
Posted on December 6, 2008 at 11:24 pm.