First, there is no justification for the Evangelical/fundamentalist Christian doctrine of inerrancy. The Bible contains errors and flaws. Many Christians, acknowledging this will shift to a position of "infallibility", meaning that the Bible is perfectly true with regard to its spiritual guidance and higher level claims. This move to infallibility seems to me to be shifting the goal posts. The claim of infallibility is more vague and therefore more difficult to dispute or falsify. Infallibility is a retreat to a safer and more obscure philosophical position from the position of inerrancy, which is more vulnerable to disproof. All you need is one example of an error and the claim of inerrancy is falsified.
Another move I have heard from some Christians is that the original text was inerrant, but that through transcription and translation, errors have been introduced into the text. Again, this seems like goalpost shifting. We don't have a single original manuscript, so there is no way to prove or disprove that claim. And there is just as much validity to claiming that the original texts had more errors and that the scribes and translators have actually worked to clean up the text from its original messy renderings. Actually, there is more evidence to support the idea that scribes who copied the earliest manuscripts did, in fact, make changes and corrections to passages they found to be conflicting or erroneous. The earlier dated manuscripts of some of the New Testament writings were changed as scribes copied them. In some cases, they likely thought they were correcting errors made by previous scribes, however, the earlier copies of the text preserve what seems to be a mistake, inconsistency, or cause theological problems that could be resolved with a change ...so a scribe made the change. The next scribe used that modified copy and the changes would be passed on. Bart Ehrman explains this phenomenon in his book Misquoting Jesus with specific examples where this has occurred.
Second, why would an omniscient and omnipotent deity be unable to produce an error-free text, or if he did in the original text, why wasn't he able to preserve that inerrancy as it was transmitted through the ages? Assuming a god does exist and was involved in the writing/inspiration for the texts we know as the Bible, what prevented him from ensuring errors were not included? Was he unable or unwilling to prevent the many mistakes and inconsistencies? Or did he prefer that the errors be included? If so, why? The confusion that is caused by errors and ambiguous concepts in the Bible have resulted in confusion and conflict. If that was the purpose, then it would be fair to question whether or not that god was good. As a number of atheists before me have pointed out, the Bible itself says that Yahweh is not the author of confusion. If that is the case, then it doesn't seem that he could be the author of the Bible because it has caused centuries of confusion and conflict.
My experience growing up in a fundamentalist Christian church and family caused me to closely associate my belief in the Christian god with the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility. Once the idea that the Bible was inerrant was eroded for me, holding onto my belief in a god that was active in the world was very difficult. I had never seen miracles, nor had I seen any quality compelling evidence that anyone else had experienced true miracles. I had never had any direct experience that I could attribute to a god. It is true that I used to believe that I heard the "voice of God", but that "voice" was
indistinguishable from my own thoughts. I attributed them to the god I believed in if they lined up with what I figured the god I believed in would say. Not surprisingly, he tended to communicate all of the same things I thought. Nor was there ever a single instance in which that communication from that omniscient deity ever provided me with information that I didn't already possess myself.
If a god is incapable or unwilling to communicate clearly and in a way that does not lend itself to confusion, misunderstanding, or conflict, he might be weak, he might be ignorant, he might be malicious. But to me, given the absence of other evidence that a god is involved in the workings of the world, the problems in the Bible suggest that it was authored by fallible people and there is no good reason to believe that any god like the Christian god exists.
If you disagree, feel free to comment below. Explain your answer.
Cheers,
Gavagai
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