Monthly Archives: February 2019

Debunking 10 Popular Christian Principles for Reading the Bible

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Jim Wallace of the Cold Case Christianity blog has some advice for us, “Ten Principles When Considering Alleged Bible Contradictions.” I point out Bible contradictions with pleasure (like here), but let’s step back to see if we’re reading these contradictions correctly. As you can tell from the title, Wallace doesn’t think much of charges of contradictions in the Bible.

Principle #1: Begin With A Fair Attitude.

When you see a traffic sign, you obey it. Even if something seems odd about its placement or message, you first assume it’s right and only later might you question it.

You treat traffic signs that way because you know from experience that they are almost always right. But how does this map to the Bible? Supernatural claims by contrast are almost always wrong! The Roman pantheon, the Central American gods, the Egyptian gods, the Taoist gods—atheists and Christians agree that supernatural claims about these religions are wrong.

If he’s asking that we keep an open mind, I’ll do that, but a fair attitude rejects any coddling for the supernatural. We’re not going to study a question presuming the Bible is correct. It will have to stand up to scrutiny like any other source.

Principle #2: Examine the Text in Its Context.

Don’t read a single verse but read its entire chapter to understand the context. “Careful reading (with an effort to understand what the original text truly says) will resolve the lion’s share of apparent ‘contradictions’ or ‘errors’ in the Bible.”

I go even farther with this advice. I say that the context of a verse is the entire Bible (more). For example, don’t cite John 3:16 to argue that faith alone is required for salvation without also addressing Matthew’s Parable of the Sheep and the Goats and every other place where the Bible makes clear that works get you into heaven. Don’t tell me that a verse says something unless you can convince me that the rest of the Bible never contradicts it.

To illustrate this problem, we’re given the example of the mustard seed, which Jesus calls “the smallest of all seeds.” Wallace admits that it’s not, but he says that the correct translation labels it “the smallest of all seeds you plant in the ground” and “the smallest of all your seeds.” He gives no source for these translations, and Bible Hub doesn’t show them in its 21 different translations for Mark 4:31 and Matthew 13:32, the two sources of the parable.

Wallace says that Jesus was talking to farmers and was referring to the seeds with which they were familiar. I can accept that, but don’t tell me that Jesus is quoted giving the correct information when the Bible says he doesn’t. And don’t tell me to read a verse in its correct context when you won’t do that yourself.

Principle #3: Let the Bible Clarify the Bible.

Every Bible shows related verses in the margin or in a footnote. Read these other verses to clarify any difficult passages.

The puzzle given is Paul’s statement that “[the human body] is sown a natural body, [but] it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44). Paul is rejecting the imperfect physical body and sees it perfected in the spiritual equivalent. While this was popular Greek thinking at the time, it was eventually rejected by the Christian church.

But Paul out of step with Christianity isn’t an embarrassing problem, Wallace tells us. Let the Bible clarify the Bible by considering another verse in the same book: “The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments” (1 Cor. 2:15). Both verses use the same adjective pneumatikos, but the second verse refers to a wise person, not a ghost. Conclusion: Paul’s risen “spiritual body” is simply a man full of God’s wisdom.

There are a couple of problems here. First, like many words in the dictionary, pneumatikos has many meanings. These two instances might use different meanings. Wallace has simply picked the meaning that he likes and imposed it without justification.

But the far bigger problem is how he approached this problem. The first verse (15:44) is the “difficult” verse, and the second (2:15) is the “easy” one. We use the insights gained from the easy one to analyze the difficult one. But why is the first one difficult? Let’s instead assume the reverse and impose the idea of a body-less spirit from the first verse onto the second verse: “The [spirit/ghost] makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments.” Now we’re talking about a risen spirit that has discarded its material body. Of course such an enlightened being can make judgments about all things without being second-guessed by mere humans.

Or why assume that either of them is difficult and needs special attention? The only problem Wallace solves is how to hammer the Bible to fit his preconceptions. He goes into his Bible study certain that God raises bodies physically rather than spiritually, and he’s determined to wring that meaning from it. That’s not how an honest person reads the Bible. (More on the hypocrisy of imagining easy vs. difficult verses here).

Principle #4: Don’t Confuse “Imprecision” with “Error.”

The culture at the time wasn’t interested in precise numbers like we often are.

The example given is a circular basin specified in 2 Chronicles 4:2. It was 10 cubits in diameter and 30 cubits around. But, of course, if it were 10 cubits in diameter, it should be 10×π = 31.4159 cubits (rounded to 31) in circumference.

Wallace argues that the culture rounded numbers, and 31 cubits could’ve been written as 30 cubits.

I agree with this one. These measurements could also be explained if the basin were slightly oval. Even if we assume a perfectly circular basin, it could have a diameter of 9.7 cubits and a 9.7×π = 30.47-cubit circumference. These values would round to 10 and 30.

Unfortunately, there’s little else to agree about in the remaining principles for evaluating Bible verses.

Continued in part 2.

It’s easier to fool people
than to convince them that they have been fooled.
— attributed to Mark Twain

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/2/15.)

Image from Agneta Von Aisaider, CC license

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How Compelling is Christianity’s Cumulative Case?

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I recently responded to the Argument from Mathematics. Apologist William Lane Craig marvels at how mathematics explains much of the physical world.

But if that is surprising, we must ask Craig what world we should expect to see instead. He offers nothing, so then what is there to be surprised at? (See my post for the complete response.)

William Lane Craig’s bravado

At best, Christian apologists can point to some philosophical ambiguity that they hope to resolve with God, but this ignores the fact that science and math have been the only disciplines from which we’ve ever learned about reality, and the Christians’ discipline of theology has delivered no testable results despite millennia of trying.

At the end of the interview, Craig says:

Honestly, I think [God] is the only explanation on the table. I don’t see what the competing naturalistic hypotheses are.

The very existence of WLC’s proposed answer is in doubt. I don’t know whether to marvel more at his audacity to push a hypothesis with no evidence or his gall to think we’re too stupid to notice. Once again WLC sits at the children’s table. “God did it” doesn’t rise to the level of an actual useful explanation that, y’know, explains things. It’s as useful as “Fairies did it.”

If you have no standards, sure, you can label any string of words an “explanation,” but for the rest of us, an explanation needs to pass some minimum test of credibility. Does it answer more questions than it raises? Does it make new predictions? Is it testable? Falsifiable? Does it seem to be agenda-driven wishful thinking? Has this kind of explanation ever been accepted by science before?

Remember that this is the scholar called “one of Christianity’s leading defenders” and “arguably the world’s foremost defender of historic Christianity,” which say much for the standards within Christian apologetics.

If there are unanswered questions, science goes with, “We don’t know . . . yet.” Let’s stick with that.

This illustrates two problems with how apologists deal with arguments. I’d like to highlight them so you can more quickly spot them in the future.

1. These caltrop arguments mean surprisingly little to apologists

Caltrop arguments are arguments used as a rearguard action. They don’t make much of a positive argument for Christianity and are only used defensively to deflect atheist arguments.

The Argument from Mathematics isn’t a hill that any apologist will defend to the death. They won’t bother since none use it as an argument to support their own faith. They didn’t come to faith after being convinced by this argument (or the Transcendental Argument or the Ontological Argument or the Design Argument or the Moral Argument), and their faith doesn’t rest on them.

They have nothing of consequence at stake. They may enthusiastically defend the Fine Tuning Argument, say, but once science has an explanation, they’ll discard that argument like a used tissue and grope for another. “Well, how about this one?” they’ll ask with the next argument du jour. “Do I get any points this time?” Apologists would trot out the Argument from Flavors or Colors of the Rainbow if they thought this would help, but since these aren’t arguments that they use themselves to ground their own faith, why should any of us find them compelling?

Their argument is simply, “Science has unanswered questions; therefore, God.” That’s not much of an argument, especially since it bets against science, the only horse that ever wins.

Not only do these arguments form no part of Craig’s evidential foundation, not only does he have no direct evidence supporting his position, but he doesn’t care. He’s content to pretend that an internal conviction of his own correctness trumps any arguments that I could possibly present (more here and here).

2. The failure of the cumulative case

Jim Wallace of the Cold Case Christianity podcast argues that Christianity is historically accurate. He claims that this is a cumulative case, like that built by the prosecution in a murder trial.

I disagree with just about every facet of the argument for the historicity of Christianity, but let’s put that aside. I want to introduce the idea of a Christian cumulative case because that’s what William Lane Craig seems to think he’s building.

A cumulative case for a murder trial might show that the accused had motive, that he is connected to the murder weapon (through fingerprints, say), that he had opportunity (no alibi), that other suspects are poor candidates, and so on. Each successful claim strengthens a single overall case.

Contrast that with the case often made for pseudoscience. Consider how the argument for Bigfoot is often made, for example. Here is a large plaster cast that claims to be the impression of a Bigfoot footprint. Here’s the photo of pressed-down vegetation, claimed to be a sleeping area. Here’s a tuft of fur. Here’s a story from a hunter who heard something scary. They’re from different places and times, there is no connection between them, and they invite other explanations besides a Bigfoot. The Bigfoot proponent admits that any one factoid is weak but hopes that the sheer volume will be compelling.

Not really. This isn’t a collection of mutually supporting facts that fit, jigsaw-puzzle-like, into a consistent whole as a cumulative case would. It’s just a big pile of unrelated facts. This kind of argument wasn’t convincing in centuries past for alchemy or homeopathy, and it isn’t convincing today for astrology or Bigfoot.

Let’s return to the William Lane Craig throw-spaghetti-against-the-wall-to-see-if-it-sticks approach to apologetics. If you dismissed one of his arguments, he’d reach into his top hat and pull out another one. He apparently imagines a cumulative case, with a big pile of so-so arguments adding up to a great big hug with Jesus.

But this is a sign of weakness, not strength. These are the unrelated, big-pile-of-crap arguments of those who claim that Bigfoot exists or that space aliens perform experiments on people. I’m not saying that claims for God, Bigfoot, or space aliens are necessarily false; I’m just distinguishing this kind of argument from an actual cumulative case.

WLC puts his reputation on the line when he backs an apologetic argument. He gets the credit when the argument is strong, but he also takes the hit when the argument does nothing more than introduce us to a curious question (into which he’s determined to shoehorn God). We already know that science has unanswered questions. If his argument devolves into merely this observation, he gives no argument for God, he wastes our time, and his reputation must be blemished as a result. Don’t let him wriggle away from a stinker of an argument without consequences.

Some believers accuse skeptics of having nothing left
but a dull, cold, scientific world.
I am left with only art, music, literature, theatre,
the magnificence of nature, mathematics, the human spirit,
sex, the cosmos, friendship, history, science, imagination,
dreams, oceans, mountains, love, and the wonder of birth.
That’ll do for me.
— Lynne Kelly

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/25/15.)

Image from Michał Parzuchowski, CC license

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In Which North Korea’s “Brilliant Comrade” Gets a Haircut

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Kim Jong Un, the Hermit Kingdom’s Brilliant Comrade, launched a new hairstyle on an unsuspecting world four years ago. One source critiqued it this way: “The style is a variation on Kim’s signature shaved sides, but with the top now sculpted into a high, wedge-shaped pompadour that sits atop Kim’s head like a hat, or perhaps a small, dormant woodland creature.”

Some speculate that he’s trying to look more like his grandfather, the founder of North Korea, the “Great Leader” and still its Eternal President. Grandfather Kim was a revolutionary hero, and Li’l Kim may be using his new hairdo to declare that he’s maturing into that role.

Why so much excitement over a haircut? Because North Korea is a dangerous and unstable enemy, and there’s so little information that even something this trivial was parsed for clues.

Remind you of Someone?

And that’s also the Christian’s task. They have their own unpredictable Great Leader whose intentions they must infer from minimal clues. Christians become pigeons in a B.F. Skinner experiment, where intermittent reinforcement produced better results than continuous reinforcement. The dribbles of approval they infer falling from God’s table are enough to keep them eager for more.

Kim’s uncle was executed early in Kim’s reign, presumably with Kim’s approval. Similarly, God is also dangerous, and Christians unashamedly admit that he’s killed millions. But, like the North Koreans who wept genuine tears at the death of the previous leader in 2011, Christians are quick to justify God’s actions. Someone’s child dies? Their faith is strengthened. The Canaanite genocide? Those bastards had plenty of chances. The Flood? They got what they deserved. In fact, God’s actions are good by definition.

I imagine the conversation in North Korea about Kim is similar.

North Korea is officially the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” but how can a dictatorship be democratic? I suppose in the same way that Yahweh the genocidal murderer is “all loving.”

But of course we have better, more tangible things to talk about in North Korea than a haircut. Instead of the hair, we could ask about the quality of life of North Koreans. And instead of God worship, we could focus on helping his children.

Lord knows he’s not doing it.

Choose faith in spite of the facts.
— Rev. Joel Osteen

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/20/15.)

 Image credit: Vox

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The Design Argument (Fiction)

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It’s been a while since I’ve run any excerpts from my 2012 book, Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey. These are a bit longer than the usual post, but I think the fiction format is an interesting way to explore apologetics arguments.

A bit of background: Jim is a wealthy, housebound, and somewhat obnoxious atheist, and Paul is the young acolyte of Rev. Samuel Hargrove, a famous pastor. Paul is doing his best to evangelize Jim, though Paul’s faith is now wavering. It’s 1906 in Los Angeles, shortly after the San Francisco earthquake, and they’re in Jim’s house.

Paul was eager to get to business. “I’d like to talk about evidence of God’s hand in the design of the world.”

“Okay, but I’ve already told you what I think of it.” A tea kettle whistled. Jim walked into the kitchen, and returned with a tea tray and set it on the center table.

“The world has some marvelous things in it,” Paul said. “Rainbows and sunsets, laughing children, spring flowers, warm beaches, love. It’s a beautiful world.”

“True. But the world also has some terrible things in it. Earthquakes, droughts, famines, parasites. Take Guinea worm—it’s a parasite that’s common in Africa. It grows in people up to three feet long, eventually living just under the skin. When the mature worm is ready to lay eggs, it burns its way through the skin. Very painful, I hear. To extract the worm, it’s wound up on a stick, which is also a painful process. It takes days. In fact, you’ve already seen this. You know the doctor symbol, the snake twisted around a pole? That symbol came from this remedy.”

Paul grimaced and pushed himself back into his chair. “How do you get infected?”

“By drinking contaminated water. Nature has many kinds of diseases—some that kill you, and some that just make you wish you were dead. For every laughing child, I could find a child who no longer laughs, dying of dysentery or smallpox or even measles. Or an old man slowly dying of cancer. Or. . . .” Jim inhaled noisily as if he were coming up for air. “Or a young mother dying in childbirth.”

Jim cleared his throat as he stood and walked to the wall opposite the window. At the bureau, he paused before a large framed portrait of a young woman. As Jim leafed through a drawer, Paul thought of the needlepoint pillows and framed samplers. The vacancy left by a woman was now obvious. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed before.

“How old are you?” Jim asked.

“I’m twenty-five.”

Jim returned to the sofa holding a newspaper clipping. “This is a list of major natural disasters from recent history. We can date them by your life. The earthquake in the Himalayas last year was much deadlier than the one we just had in San Francisco—20,000 people died. When you were twenty-one, a volcano in Martinique killed 29,000, and when you were two, Krakatau killed even more. A cyclone in Bengal killed 150,000 people when you were sixteen, and one in Vietnam killed twice that in the year you were born. When you were six, a flood in China killed as many as 2,000,000. And years of drought in India caused a famine that killed 10,000,000 when you were about twenty.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of some of those.”

“There’s a hell of a lot of pain and suffering in the world to go along with the good things.”

“Perhaps God has a reason.”

“To teach us to be humble? To count our blessings? To not get cocky? Those are some heavy-handed lessons. Let me propose this explanation: there is no reason at all. Our earth looks just as it would if there were no purpose, no design, and no wise designer.”

This was another Jim onslaught to which Paul had no rebuttal. “Well, let’s approach this from another angle,” Paul said. “You’re familiar with the Paley pocket watch example?”

Jim dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “That argument has been around since Cicero. What’s amusing about Paley’s watch argument is that it defeats itself. Let’s imagine his original situation. He’s walking in a field and discovers the watch. It looks out of place, different from the plants and rocks. But if it looks different from nature because it looks designed, then nature must not look designed. You can’t argue on the one hand that the watch looks remarkable and stands out from the natural background, and on the other that the watch looks similar to nature, so both must be designed.”

“But nature does look designed. I’ve seen close-up photographs of insects like fleas. If God puts this amazing detail into insects, He must care far more for humans.”

“We marvel at God’s handiwork only after we know that he exists.” Jim leaned forward. “The design argument simply takes a childish view of the world. Does the world look designed by an omniscient and benevolent god? Go to the freak show at the circus—it’s a museum of nature’s poor design. Siamese twins, two-headed pigs, bearded ladies, the Lizard Man, hermaphrodites, dwarves, giants. Monsters like the Elephant Man and unfortunates with all manner of birth defects. Deformed babies floating in formaldehyde. Is this the best that God can do?”

“Maybe birth defects are meant to test us, to teach us to be better people.”

“That’s quite a barbaric test. Isn’t it ironic to imagine God teaching us to be kind with the cruelest test imaginable? Think of the parents every day who are told that their newborn has some hideous defect and will live a short, painful life. And why are there birth defects in animals? Do they need testing too? A natural explanation works best. ‘God is testing us’ is not where the evidence points.”

Jim poured tea from the pot into two delicate white china cups on saucers and pushed one toward Paul. “And there are examples of inept designs. One of the best examples is in a whale—I saw a few whale skeletons when I lived in Boston. Many species have small bones as remnants of their nonexistent rear legs, and their flippers have all the joints of a land animal’s hand but no reason for that flexibility—very different from a fish’s fin. If the whale had been designed, it would have been tailored to life in the ocean with no wasted bones.”

Paul set his Bible on his knee and opened it to a bookmark. “When Job questions God, God replies, ‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.’ Maybe it’s presumptuous of us to judge God.”

“Once again, that assumes God, the very thing we’re trying to establish. Maybe I’ll avoid judging God once I know that he exists. Let’s approach it this way: if you were God, would you design the earth with volcanoes and hurricanes, plagues and famines?”

“Maybe those are necessary features of the earth,” Paul said. “Maybe hurricanes distribute rain or heat; maybe volcanoes relieve pressure underground. We just don’t know.”

Jim reached for his tea cup. “You’re God, infinitely smarter than the smartest human, and that’s the best you can do? ‘Sorry about the volcano—I had to relieve some pressure.’ You can’t argue strong evidence for design at one moment, but plead ignorance at another when it suits you. Take your pick: does the earth look designed or not? It could indeed have been designed, but it’s not designed in a way that any human designer would have used. A loving and omniscient human designer wouldn’t have created earthquakes, plagues, legs for whales, and Guinea worm. Therefore, the design metaphor, which says the earth looks as it would if designed by a human with the ability, fails.”

“Well, maybe ‘designer’ isn’t the best metaphor,” Paul said. “Maybe God is best thought of as an artist, and we see his artistic license. This acknowledges that our human knowledge is insufficient to judge God.”

“Call him an artist then, not a designer.”

“Maybe God didn’t want a perfect design,” Paul said. “Genesis says that Creation was perfect, but it is now imperfect because of the Fall—the sin of the apple.”

“If we live in a fallen world, then don’t argue that it looks perfectly designed. You can’t argue for an imperfect fallen world and a perfectly designed world at the same time.”

Paul took stock of his position. His argument was eroding, but this didn’t feel like earlier conversations. It wasn’t really his argument, and he could view its strengths and weaknesses dispassionately. This objectivity was the new piece to the puzzle that he was trying out. “I’m trying to be open minded about this, but I still think that the earth and life on it look designed. Think of the complexity. Don’t you see that, too?”

“Many undesigned things have interesting properties. Snowflakes are complex, crystals have order, rainbows are beautiful. By contrast, many things that we know were designed don’t have these properties.”

“But a snowflake is hardly as complex as, say, a flea. When you get to a human, the complexity is overwhelming.”

“Complexity is weak evidence for design. A clumsy sock puppet or a childish clay sculpture are designed, and an intricate crystal or snowflake with trillions of precisely placed atoms is not. Which one is more complex? Mere complexity is deceiving. Atoms obey simple rules as they lock into place, one by one. From simple natural rules can come complexity.”

Jim drank from his teacup. “But the Design Argument forces you to come at this from the other direction since designers are always more complex than what they design. If a complex world must have been created by an even-more-complex God, then what created God?”

“Yes, I see that, but I think the argument makes an exception for God.”

“So ‘simple things must come from complex things . . . except for God’ is your argument.”

“Well, it’s not necessarily my argument.”

“Ah—good to see that distinction.”

And that distinction was quite plain to Paul, too. Samuel’s arguments had been a part of him like a suit of clothes, and critiquing them was like judging his appearance without a mirror. For the first time he could see this argument separate from himself, as if displayed on a mannequin. Looking at it objectively, he had lost faith that its strengths outweighed its weaknesses.

“You know of things that might look designed but aren’t,” Jim said. “The English language, for example. It’s very complex, but it wasn’t designed—it just happened. Or Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ that controls the marketplace.”

Jim set his cup on the table with a clack. “Even if I found the Design Argument compelling, this mysterious Designer is unidentified. Is it the God of Christianity? Or is it Allah or Osiris or Zeus or some other god? And it doesn’t explain anything. ‘God did it’ simply replaces a mystery with another mystery. Who is this God? Where did he come from, how did he do his designing, and what natural laws did he break? A true scientific explanation is quite different—it adds to our knowledge. No scientist, deciphering some puzzling aspect of nature, would ever say, ‘God did it, you say? Well then, nothing left for me to do here—I’ll just go home.’ ”

Paul had never been a tea drinker. Without sugar the tea was harsh, but it had a kind of intriguing charm. “I’m beginning to see your point, but science doesn’t answer everything,” he said.

“True. I don’t suppose it ever will. But adding God to the explanation doesn’t help, it just complicates. Believers tie themselves in knots trying to rationalize why God allows bad things to happen and why he doesn’t provide the relief himself. The convoluted rationalization vanishes when you simply realize that you have no need of the God hypothesis.”

“You use the word ‘rationalize’ as if it’s a bad thing.”

“Not all rationalization is bad. If you knew for a fact that God existed, then you would want to rationalize or justify any apparent contradiction with that fact—to reinterpret new clues to fit the known facts. But God’s existence is exactly what we’re trying to establish. Rationalization parries an attack, nothing more. It is very different from giving evidence to support a position.”

That made sense to Paul. “Giving evidence strengthens your position, and rationalizing avoids the weakening of your position,” Paul said. “They’re almost opposites.”

“Exactly. Rationalization starts with God’s existence: given Christianity, how can I square it with the facts? Reason starts with the facts and follows them where they lead.”

Related post: Argument from Design BUSTED!

 

9 Tactics Christians Use to Dismiss Bible Embarrassments (3 of 3)

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Let’s conclude our look at the tactics Christian apologists use to respond to embarrassments in the Bible and Christianity. How well do they work? Let’s find out. (Part 1 here.)

Tactic 7: Contradictions? That’s a Good Thing!

Some Christians respond to contradictions within the Gospels by saying that that’s actually a good thing, because if they were identical, we’d suspect collusion. A few inconsistencies are the hallmark of honest eyewitness accounts. Jim Wallace of the Cold-Case Christianity ministry was a detective and used his reputation to give this tactic credibility.

But by making two categories indistinguishable, this creates a new problem. Category one is what they’re referring to, accounts that are honest attempts at accurate reporting with inadvertent errors or different editorial choices. Category two has accounts that aren’t bound by what actually happened but are written with a religious agenda. How do we know which bin to put a contradiction into?

Here’s an example. The synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) have the Last Supper as the Passover meal, so Jesus is crucified after the Passover meal. John has the Last Supper one day earlier so that Jesus is crucified before the Passover meal. With this change, John can make a deliberate parallel between the unblemished lambs being killed for Passover concurrent with the death of the perfect Lamb of God. Maybe that’s just how things worked out . . . or maybe John, the last gospel, deliberately changed the tradition to make that theological parallel.

This tactic mixes the two categories, and agenda-drive theology hides behind the skirts of history. Honest seekers would want those to be as distinct as possible.

Tactic 8: They’re both right

I used to be impressed when Christians would come up with some rationalization for a Bible problem, but I’ve seen it so often that now I just expect it. After all, the Church has had 2000 years to hear the problems and think up answers.

This tactic attempts to directly rebut the problem. Did Jesus heal two blind men near Jericho (Matthew) or just one (Mark and Luke)? Both are correct. Did Sennacherib attack Judah in the third year of Hoshea’s reign (2 Kings 18:1) or the fourteenth year of Hezekiah’s reign (2 Kings 18:13)? Both are correct. Was Jacob buried in Shechem (Acts 7:15–16) or near Mamre (Genesis 50:13)? Pick a contradiction, and this tactic will argue that they’re both right.

I’m sure that a few of the Bible’s many contradictions can be resolved this way, but I’m skeptical that this tactic works everywhere it’s applied.

Tactic 9: Patience

This tactic tells us that some things in the Bible are confusing and that we’ll just have to wait until we get to heaven to understand them. For example, the Christian might explain away Christianity’s inability to make sense of the Trinity by calling it a divine mystery. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God.”

But if the Trinity can’t be explained so that we understand it, don’t bring it up. What sense does it make to present mysteries when the purpose of the Bible and Christianity are to educate us here, not in heaven?

(As an aside, it is extraordinary to see Christians who, in one breath, humbly admit that they don’t understand the mind of God then, in the next breath, suddenly regain their confidence and proclaim God’s very clear views on homosexuality, abortion, or some other social issue.)

Conclusion

Search Amazon for “Bible contradictions.” Half of the books will explore those contradictions from a skeptical standpoint, but the rest will pat you on the head and assure you that those contradictions don’t exist or aren’t important. Popular books defending the Bible include The Big Book of Bible Difficulties, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, and Demolishing Supposed Bible Contradictions. With titles like these, at least we’re in agreement that the Bible has many problematic passages.

While the contradictions might turn potential converts away, the contradictions can actually be a plus. They make the Bible malleable. You can emphasize some verses and ignore others to create one message and then change the mix as social conditions change. When slavery is fashionable, the Bible supports it, and when slavery becomes unpopular, the Bible supports that position as well. God is merciful or strict; God is loving or violent; God is forgiving or demanding—it’s all in there. (More.)

God becomes the Christian’s sock puppet, mouthing what the Christian wants to hear while speaking with the authority of the Bible.

I always refer to the Bible as the world’s oldest,
longest-running, most widespread,
and least deservedly respected Rorschach Test.
You can look at it and see whatever you want.
And everybody does.
— Richard S. Russell

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9 Tactics Christians Use to Dismiss Bible Embarrassments (2 of 3)

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Let’s continue our look at the ways Christian apologists respond to embarrassments in the Bible and Christianity and see how well they work. (Part 1 here.)

Tactic 3: God put them there on purpose

Let’s start with a palate cleanser and hear from “Dr.” Kent Hovind (whose “doctoral dissertation” memorably opened with the line, “Hello, my name is Kent Hovind”). Hovind admits that, yes, there are contradictions in the Bible, but don’t worry about them because God put them there on purpose. According to Hovind’s thinking, the contradictions are there to throw off those who aren’t serious. Let those people become atheists and leave the flock with stronger believers.

Or something.

Tactic 4: Things were different back then

Slavery was always wrong, y’see, but God needed to work within the social context of the Israelites 3000 years ago. And that’s also true for genocide. And human sacrifice. God knew they were wrong, of course, but he needed to ease the Israelites into this new thinking.

This creates the Janus Bible, a Bible that doesn’t tell you the unchanging, difficult moral truth whether it suits you or not but a Bible that looks forward and backward at the same time. Or maybe it’s the Quantum Bible, the superposition of moral rightness and moral evil at the same time.

If God was working within the context of those social customs, why did he impose the Ten Commandments and the hundreds of other laws in the Old Testament with no grace period? And if he could impose prohibitions against murder, lying, and stealing in an instant, why not add prohibitions against slavery, human sacrifice, and genocide?

Do the Bible’s archaic customs sound like a god easing in a new policy, or do they just sound like the Bronze Age thinking that was popular back then? And what happens to the claim of objective morality, moral truths that are unchanging through time? If “slavery is wrong” is objectively true, then the Old Testament shows God dictating a flawed morality.

No, “things were different back then” or “God’s hands were tied” don’t help when God is omnipotent. The ancient Israelites had our brains and could’ve understood modern morality as well as we do.

The Bible can’t be timeless and stuck in the past at the same time.

Tactic 5: Use context selectively

The Stand to Reason ministry has some surprising Bible advice: “Never read a Bible verse.” What they mean is, never read just a Bible verse but use the context of its paragraph or chapter to understand it correctly.

That’s a good step, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. The maxim should read: Never quote a Bible verse until you know that its point isn’t challenged anywhere else in the Bible. (More.)

The Bible is a big book, and you can find just about everything in it. God hates the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt, but he later establishes the rules for how to do it properly to other people in Israel. God knows everything, but he had to send scouts to Sodom to learn what was going on. Good comes from God, but so does evil.

The lesson here is to reject the maxim about a Bible-wide context, keep one’s outlook confined, and ignore the verses that contradict your message.

Tactic 6: “Interpret difficult passages in the light of clear ones”

By this, the Christian means that embarrassing passages like God’s support for human sacrifice or slavery should be subordinate to passages that reject human sacrifice or emphasize God’s love. So the distinction actually isn’t difficult vs. clear passages but rather embarrassing vs. pleasing. That every clash of passages always gives a result that preserves the Christian position is a clue that this isn’t an honest following of the evidence.

The Muslim rule of abrogation neatly sidesteps any contradictions in the Quran, but (like me) Christians are quick to wonder how the Prophet could get something wrong (even if it’s overruled with the correct message later) when he was basically taking dictation from an angel. With tactic 6, Christians bring the same challenge on themselves. Their job is easier—just pick the verse(s) that you like and handwave some rationalization for why you can overrule the competing verse(s)—but problems remain. They’ve opened the door for every Christian to make their own personal evaluation for which verses to keep, and, like the Muslims, they’ve admitted that the Bible is contradictory.

Here’s a clear declaration of this philosophy from the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978):

The truthfulness of Scripture is not negated by the appearance in it of . . . seeming discrepancies between one passage and another. . . . Solution of [apparent inconsistencies], where this can be convincingly achieved, will encourage our faith, and where for the present no convincing solution is at hand we shall significantly honor God by trusting His assurance that His Word is true, despite these appearances.

So it’s head’s I win; tails I don’t lose. That’s a bold and surprisingly candid statement that they don’t care about evidence. (I explore this tactic in detail here; also here and here.)

Concluded in part 3.

Everybody’s religion is different.
If there were a single consistent and demonstrable version of it,
it would be called physics.
— commenter eric

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Image from Bring Back Words, CC license
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