Originally Posted by robertlw

Using 2000 years of critical research and debate, skeptics still cannot provide even 1 demonstrable error. I would argue that this is positive evidence for inerrancy.

Originally Posted by lenrek

I think is bad simile. What Rebert said, the drivers are taking about two different gas stations. Whereas the bible is taking about a same person (Judas). If both driver are talking about the same station, then it is clearly a contradiction. Unless, there are two (or more?) Judas?

Originally Posted by Sean McHugh

Did Judas die by hanging himself or die from a fatal fall? RobertLW submitted the following:

The rope being cut would not result in Judas falling headlong, unless he hanged himself by his feet.

So now the inerrantist needs to add more complexity and unlikelihood to the scenario. Anything but simply admit that the conflicting passages are probably what they appear to be, contradictory. And one hasn’t yet considered even all the problems in the Judas story. There is the matter of one report saying he purchased a field with the money while another says he tossed the money down when the priests refused to accept it for their treasury. After that, they used it for purchasing a field – not for Judas. The Judas story is just one of the convolutions in a stream of conflicting reports that follow the alleged resurrection of Jesus.

What the inerrantist doesn’t consider, or perhaps even realise, is that in terms of probability, unlikely terms don’t add together, they multiply. By comparison, the proposal/expectation, that there would be errors in a voluminous arbitrary collection of primitive religious writings, is very mundane.

What the inerrantist won’t see is that any book, given the latitude that the biblical inerrantist affords the Bible, can be found to be ‘inerrant’. In similitude, Latter Day Saints provide whatever accommodation is necessary to find the Book of Mormon to be the most accurate book in the world!

http://www.challengemin.org/contrad.html

RobertLW claimed that, “Using 2000 years of critical research and debate, sceptics still cannot provide even 1 demonstrable error.� That is laughable. Modern science can’t get through the first few verses of this capacious document without finding glaring errors. It isn’t easy to think of a more discordant book that is claimed to be non-fiction. It would be difficult to find another supposedly non-fictional work that requires, and has received, more effort in trying to make it appear harmonious and correct.

I believe that RobertLW has fallen headlong in his comments as to why the Bible is special. He appealed strongly to its supposed inerrancy. The problem is that he has elsewhere maintained that one should assume, as the default, that any non-fictional book is inerrant until it is absolutely proved to be otherwise. How can ‘special’ represent the default? And if ‘special’ is the default, what’s so special about ‘special’?

Let’s get real here. Are we expected to believe that RobertLW really assumes beforehand, that all the religions of the world that he hasn’t examined, are inerrant? Does RobertLW provisionally believe that the plethora of ancient ‘mythological’ accounts that he can’t prove as false or hasn’t had the time to prove as false, are true? I suspect that the fundamentalist Christian would be very reluctant to make such an allowance. However, for RobertLW to be consistent, such an allowance is required. Perhaps he might argue that the accounts need to be in a documented form. Such a criterion/excuse would not wash and anyway, many of these religions have been documented as non-fiction.

Yours sincerely,


Sean McHugh