Let’s conclude our ten principles for evaluating the Bible. This list is in response to a Christian version by Jim Wallace, “Ten Principles When Considering Alleged Bible Contradictions,” critiqued here. Part 1 of my skeptical list is introduced here.

Let’s continue.

6. Missed opportunities count

God could’ve given us soap or told us that the earth is a sphere. Jesus could’ve eliminated all disease—and poverty, war, and famine while he was at it. But they didn’t.

What does that tell you? Apologists will say that the Bible isn’t a science textbook (though many will then take the Creation story literally). They’ll say that it simply wasn’t part of the plan for God to make life easy or even make the Bible message obvious so that there would be no need for the thousands of denominations of Christianity.

Even though the Bible doesn’t tell us anything that wasn’t already known to people of that time and place, that doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist. But what can we learn from the fact that the Bible is ambiguous and contradictory, that life on earth sucks for many people, and that the “God” character has no more knowledge or wisdom than the primitive people who wrote his story? This world and all the problems in it do not look like they were created by an all-loving and omnipotent deity.

7. If it looks like a book written by a primitive people, it almost certainly is

The best explanation for the Bible is that primitive people of the time wrote the story and that the Bible is just the blog of an early Iron Age desert tribe. We can’t ignore the many examples of mythology from other ancient cultures, and the Bible looks like just one more.

We need an enormous amount of evidence to conclude that Babylonian Enuma Elish or the Hindu Vedas are mythology, but the Bible, which looks so similar, is actually history.

8. Natural evidence provides poor support for a supernatural conclusion

Many Christians “just believe,” but to get there by an intellectual route takes much evidence. On one hand, we can suppose that an omniscient god who wanted to convince us that he existed would be able to reach the most skeptical atheist. For example, God could reveal himself to everyone on the same day so that we would have everyone else’s verification that our senses are reliable.

But how would you rule out very intelligent aliens? Imagine if you went back just 200 years in time with today’s modern technology—antibiotics, telephones, CGI movies and Photoshopped photos, airplanes, weapons, and so on. It would be easy to convince many people that you were a god.

Now imagine how we’d respond to someone from a technology 200 years more advanced than us. Now make it two million years. If they wanted to convince us that they were the creator of the universe, how would we know any different? (More.)

Consider from a more abstract level the problem of finding proof for the supernatural. Using natural evidence to prove the existence of the supernatural may be like Flatlanders using evidence in their 2D world to prove that there is a 3D world out there. (More.)

9. Don’t read in your own desires

Was God wrong to demand genocide or not? Did God demand human sacrifice or not? Did God approve of slavery and polygamy or not?

Christians are often quick to come to God’s rescue to find counter-verses to argue that God shares our modern sensibilities on these matters. (One wonders why God can’t make things clear himself, but never mind.) These apologists are certain that they and God are on the right side of these moral matters despite what a plain reading of the Bible indicates.

And while they’re at it, they’ll find support for their own particular views on homosexuality, abortion, and other social issues—either pro or con, it doesn’t matter because the Bible can be mined to find support for just about anything..

The honest critic lets the Bible speak for itself. If it seems to contradict itself, that may be explained by the many books of the Bible coming from many authors from different cultures and with different ideas of God.

10. Don’t presuppose God

The Christian set of 10 principles ended with this one: “Remember who’s boss.” That is, don’t forget that God is in charge and that we aren’t empowered to judge him. Whether the problem is ambiguity or contradictions in the Bible or evil in the world, we can’t even understand the situation enough to convict him.

But of course this simply starts with the conclusion. We can’t start by assuming that God exists and the Bible is his word any more than we’d start a critique of Islam, Mormonism, or Scientology with an assumption that they were correct. We’re not trying to judge God but simply decide if the Bible is anything more than what it looks like, an ancient myth.

Bonus: #11. Don’t abdicate your role as judge

There is no objective authority to lean on. As a Christian, you might rely on a pastor, televangelist, or biblical scholar. You can read the Bible, trying to resolve its various interpretations applied by its various partisans. And still the problem remains—you take their input, but the buck stops with you.

You ain’t much, but you’re all you’ve got.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/16/15.)

Image from Martin Thomas, CC license
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I recently analyzed “Ten Principles When Considering Alleged Bible Contradictions” (here) from Christian blogger Jim Wallace. I didn’t think much of them.

I’d like to offer my own version. Here are ten skeptical principles for evaluating the Bible that I think are more honest than Wallace’s.

1. Don’t confuse genres

Wallace is a murder investigator, and he tries to find parallels between the analysis done by the legal system and the study of evidence in the Bible. He finds this parallel with Bible contradictions:

It’s my job, as the investigator, to determine why the eyewitnesses appear to contradict one another, even though there is no doubt the event occurred and the witnesses were telling the truth.

A murder that you’re sure happened because you’ve read the coroner’s report and seen the body at the crime scene is quite different from a resurrection that is only a poorly evidenced story told 2000 years ago within a credulous prescientific culture.

In the case of the Bible, we don’t begin our study certain that a single word is true. It might be no more factual than the story of Gilgamesh. We have stories far removed from whatever actual events triggered them, while in a murder investigation we start with the fact of the dead body.

2. Never begin with the assumption that the Bible must be right

Making sense of the Bible isn’t easy—there are 45,000 denominations of Christianity based on different interpretations of God’s plan. The hypothesis that the Bible is wrong at a particular place needs to be one of the candidates since it sometimes makes the most sense of the evidence.

For example, consider the simplicity of the Documentary Hypothesis (that the early books of the Bible are an amalgam from four primary sources). Many facts are explained by few assumptions, the mark of a good theory.

If your religion demands that you begin with the conclusion that the Bible is right, you’re no longer following the evidence.

3. Science wins

For learning about reality, science has an excellent track record, while Christianity has taught us nothing. Science isn’t perfect, but it’s the best that we’ve got, and when the Bible says something that contradicts the science, what can we do but go with the discipline that delivers?

Apologists like William Lane Craig admit the value of science when he cites the Big Bang. He wants a beginning to the universe, and the Big Bang gives him that. It has the backing of famous scientists that he can quote (he likes quotes from famous scientists). Unfortunately, evolution steps on his theological toes, so he rejects it.

This nonscientist imagines himself the Judge of All Science, able to sift out the good stuff (Big Bang) from the nonsense (evolution), but with this ridiculous and ill-informed position, he has lost any standing as a commenter of science.

Laypeople like Craig and me have no option but to accept the scientific consensus where it exists. It’s not perfect, but we have nothing better.

Apologists often praise science where they can but fall back on handwaving when the evidence is inconvenient. Beware.

4. Be consistent: use the same standard to evaluate all truth claims.

Whenever you reject a pseudoscientific claim like astrology or a supernatural worldview like Islam, check to see if your reasoning would also reject Christianity. And whenever you accept a Christian claim (the Resurrection, a Jesus miracle, the Bible’s creation story), see if your criteria would also accept similar stories from other religions. Don’t demand tough standards for the other guy but give your cherished beliefs a pass.

Prophecy is a good example. Don’t laugh at people impressed by Nostradamus or who find clues in the Bible Code or who got caught up on Harold Camping’s hysteria about the end of the world if you apply the same poor thinking to the Bible’s claims of prophecy. We all know what a good prophecy is, but Christians seem to forget that when it’s their own claims in the spotlight.

(I’ve explored prophecy claims in Psalm 22, Isaiah 53, the virgin birth, and Daniel.)

5. Don’t judge competing interpretations based on your agenda. Let the Bible speak for itself.

What if the Bible seems to contradict itself? For example,

• The Bible says that faith alone is required for salvation (Romans 3:28) but also that works are sufficient to earn eternal life (Matthew 25:31–46).
• Jesus had a physical body after the resurrection (Luke 24:37–43). Or did he (Luke 24:31, 36)?
• The Bible’s six-day creation story conflicts with the Garden of Eden story.

The context should be the whole Bible.

Apologists pick their way through the minefield of verses, highlighting the ones that make their case and ignoring those that don’t. I suppose they depend on their readers’ ignorance (or complicity).

Don’t make the Bible into a sock puppet that says whatever you need it to. If the Bible says contradictory things, let it speak for itself. Don’t apologize for it.

Maybe (remember rule 2) the Bible is simply wrong.

To be concluded in part 2.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/12/15.)

Image credit: Olga Berrios, flickr, CC
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Let’s wrap up our critique of Jim Wallace’s article, “Ten Principles When Considering Alleged Bible Contradictions.” (Part 1 here.)

Principle #8: Description is Different Than Approval.

“Remember, just because a Biblical author writes about something, this does not mean God condones it or supports it.”

Wallace wrestles with the problem of polygamy in the Bible. Many patriarchs are shown with multiple wives, and wise king Solomon in particular had a large harem. Does this make clear that God is fine with polygamy? Apparently not, as Wallace assures us that “from the very beginning, anyone who had more than one wife was in sin and was living in opposition to God’s will.”

His evidence is the vague clue that overseers should have one wife and the demand that kings should have few wives—hardly evidence that God hates polygamy. Wallace must ignore polygamy practiced by most of the patriarchs without a peep of protest against polygamy by God. God even told David that he had blessed him with many wives and would’ve been happy to give him more (2 Samuel 12:8).

Why do you think God dislikes polygamy? Just because you do? This is an unusually blatant example of our Christian apologist playing God like a sock puppet by reading into the Bible his own views on a social issue.

Principle #9: Don’t Fret Copyist Variants.

True, there are variants in the thousands of Bible manuscripts, but none challenge anything important. And it’s not like these variants are an embarrassing secret—they’re acknowledged in the footnotes of just about every Bible.

The example this time is of conflicting accounts of a battle. In one account (2 Samuel 8:3–4), David captured 700 horsemen, while in another account of the same battle (1 Chronicles 18:3–4), he captured 7000.

Wallace notes that this isn’t especially important, and I agree. Note, though, that Wallace is again discarding biblical inerrancy. The Bible isn’t magically protected against error, so even he must accept the Bible being occasionally wrong.

But by tossing out this trivial example, Wallace may hope to camouflage an important issue. Here’s where it gets interesting. We agree that copies of Bible books can contain errors, and we agree that very, very few of the original copies from the first couple of centuries have survived. Scholars have thousands of cases of two or more variants of a single passage where we have manuscripts documenting those variants. The famous long ending of Mark is an example. Wallace will point to modern Bibles that show the most reliable version and footnote the alternative version. So where’s the problem?

Here it is: imagine a fork in the historical road, with two different manuscript traditions of a single verse, for which we have copies from only one tradition. Do we have the accurate version now? We wouldn’t even know to ask the question! Only with copies of both traditions can we distinguish verses that have been changed from those that have been copied flawlessly from the original (more here, here).

Who knows what we’d discover if we could access every single manuscript copy. Maybe our Bible would have a thousand significant changes or maybe zero—we simply don’t know.

Principle #10: Remember Who’s Boss.

“Sometimes the God of the Old Testament can seem pretty harsh. . . . But we need to read the Scriptures carefully and remember God alone is God. . . . He gets to make decisions over life and death, even when we don’t understand all the details.”

The example he gives is a tough one, God’s demand of genocide for the Amalekites (I discuss this here). Wallace’s response is a bit like what God says to Job as he justifies his might-makes-right position, which I paraphrase as: “You talking to me, bitch? Uh yeah, get back to me after you’ve created a universe.”

Wallace’s argument is a popular response to this Problem of Evil. First, we assume objective morality. Second, work God in: “Objective, transcendent standards require an objective, transcendent standard giver.” Finally, declare that the Problem of Evil assumes objective morality; otherwise, “there can be no apparent injustice.”

See how that works? Atheists bring up the Problem of Evil, but this assumes objective morality, which in turn demands God as the objective morality source, and the atheists have shot themselves in the foot!

Let’s consider the problems with each step. First, he gives no support for his claim to objective morality, and I’ve never seen any. What we see around us are shared (and sometimes deeply held) moral beliefs, but that doesn’t make them objective moral truths.

Second, evolution nicely explains human morality. Evolution selects for altruistic traits in social animals like humans and other primates. We’re all the same species, which is why your moral sense is pretty much the same as everyone else’s.

Finally, morality works just fine without being objective (grounded outside of humanity). Look it up: morality and the ideas behind it such as good and bad are defined in the dictionary with no reliance on objective grounding.

Things get a bit embarrassing as Wallace justifies God’s murderous rampages as documented in the Old Testament: “If you create a piece of art, you have the right to destroy it, even though I do not. After all, it is your creation and, therefore, it is your property.”

We’re not talking about art, we’re talking about things that feel. A rock is different from a rabbit, and you can’t treat them the same.

The property argument also doesn’t work. If you create a building or a bridge, you’re not the boss once you sell or give it away. It’s not yours anymore. The same is true for a donated kidney or unit of blood that’s now in someone else. An artist can’t destroy their art once it’s in a museum or private collection. And if God gave life to an animal, it’s no longer his life to take back (h/t commenters Kodie and Greg G.).

In our eyes, humans are immoral when they kill a living creature just for the hell of it. In the same way, God doesn’t get a pass when he kills people with no reason besides “because he can.”

And why must Wallace defend God’s “perfect plan”? Why doesn’t God come down himself and give us his perfect justification? Omniscient gods shouldn’t need apologists.

Wallace’s goal here was to give fair rules for evaluating the Bible, but his bias is apparent as he concludes:

Am I going to stand as [the Bible’s] critic, or am I going to allow the Bible stand as a critic over me? Either I am going to decide what’s true or false in the Bible, or the Bible is going to decide what is true or false in me.

No one would yield to the sovereignty of a god before thoroughly and skeptically evaluating claims for that god, which is exactly what this article was supposed to help us do. But apparently an honest evaluation of the Bible doesn’t give him the advantage that he needs, so Wallace wants to first assume God and then the Bible’s supernatural claims. This is the Hypothetical God fallacy. It’s also circular logic.

No, we don’t assume God first. Honest adults start with the null hypothesis, which is that Christian supernatural belief is no more accurate than that of any other religion. They follow the evidence where it leads, regardless of whether they like it or not.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/10/15.)

Image from Dean McCoy, CC license

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