Dissecting and Assessing a Pair of Arguments for Biblical Inerrancy

In two comments in response to the previous post, Craig offers several arguments in support of a doctrine of biblical inerrancy. In this post, I want to try to develop and then evaluate the two arguments that Craig gestures towards in the following passage:

“…by insisting that the Bible contains errors you are anthropomorphizing God. The God I know (and love) would not willingly allow errors to enter His sacred text and is powerful enough to ensure that this does not occur by communicating with (breathing into the minds of) the authors.”

I think there are two related arguments here. The first is mostly undeveloped but implicit in the opening sentence of the quote. The second is a bit more developed, and is suggested by the remainder of the quote. The first argument, which I’ll call “A” (for Anthropomorphizing God), might be charitably developed in the following terms:

A1: The Bible is the revelation of God.
A2: So, if you adopt the view that the Bible contains errors, you are adopting the view that God’s revelation contains errors
A3: If God’s revelation contains errors, then God has human-like failings.
A4: So, if you adopt the view that the Bible contains errors, you are adopting the view that God has human-like failing
A5. To adopt the view that God has human-like failings is to anthropomorphize God.
A6. So, if you adopt the view that the Bible contains errors, you anthropomorphize God.
A7. It is a mistake to anthropomorphize God.
A8. So, it is a mistake to adopt the view that the Bible contains errors.

Note that this argument starts with the premise that the Bible is the revelation of God. Take that away, and I don’t see how we will get to the conclusion. But my discussion in the previous post is precisely about whether God would choose to reveal Himself primarily in a text (the Bible or some other text, such as the Koran or the Book of Mormon or the Vedas or any of the other texts that some have claimed to be the revelation of God). As such, this argument begs the question at hand—it assumes what needs to be proved.

The second argument, which I’ll call “S” (for “Sacred Text”) basically has a form similar to what we find in the argument from evil. It might be formulated as follows:

S1. The Bible is the “sacred text” of a God who is perfectly good and almighty.
S2. God, being perfectly good, would want His sacred text to be free from errors, and so would guarantee this result if He had the power to do so.
S3. God, being almighty, has the power to do so—specifically, He can inspire the authors of the Bible in such a way as to guarantee that they write without error.
S4. So, the Bible must be free from error.

Now, if we define “God’s sacred text” to mean “the text through which God has revealed Himself to the world,” we see that this argument once again begs the question at hand, assuming what needs to be proved. But perhaps Craig means something else by “God’s sacred text.” Perhaps we should take “God’s sacred text” to mean something more vague--perhaps something like “A text in which God has a special interest and which He makes use of in a unique way to guide humanity towards a state in which we all love God with our whole heart and mind and love our neighbors as ourselves.”

If we assume some sense of "sacred text" other than "a text that is the perfect and inerrant revelation of God," then premise S1 need no longer beg the question. But is the argument sound? Here, of course, much hinges on precisely what "God's sacred text" is taken to mean. But rather than run through all the possible options and evaluate the argument with each possibility in place, let me approach this in a different way.

Recall that something I pointed out when I first laid out argument "S"—namely, that the form of “S” is similar to what we find in the argument from evil. But there is a crucial difference as well. To see that difference, we need to turn to the argument from evil.

The argument from evil has been formulated in very many ways, but let me offer a formulation that makes the parallel to the above argument clear. We’ll call this argument “E”:

E1. Assume for the sake of argument that the world was made by a God who is perfectly good and almighty.
E2. God, being perfectly good, would want the world He made to be free from evil, and so would guarantee this result if He had the power to do so.
E3. God, being almighty, has the power to do so—specifically, He can make the world in such a way that there is no natural evil (disease, starvation, natural disaster) and can influence people in such a way as to guarantee that they never do evil.
E4. So, given our assumption, E1, the world must be free from evil.
E5. But, there is evil in the world.
E6. So, E1 must be false—the world was not made by a God who is perfectly good and almighty.

This argument differs from “S” in that it is formulated as a reductio ad absurdum argument—that is, it aims to show that an initial assumption leads to a false conclusion, and so must itself be rejected as false. What is revealed here is that the very same line of argument can cut in two different directions. Consider a modification of “S” along the following lines (we’ll call it argument “SR,” for “S reductio”):

SR1. Assume for the sake of argument that the Bible is the “sacred text” of a God who is perfectly good and almighty.
SR2. God, being perfectly good, would want His sacred text to be free from errors, and so would guarantee this result if He had the power to do so.
SR3. God, being almighty, has the power to do so—specifically, He can inspire the authors of the Bible in such a way as to guarantee that they write without error.
SR4. So, given our assumption, SR1, the Bible must be free from error.
SR5. But, the Bible is not free from error.
SR6. So, SR1 must be false—the Bible is not the sacred text of a God who is perfectly good and almighty.

Now there are many who argue precisely along these lines, by pointing out apparent contradictions in the Bible, or by identifying claims that sound as if they were intended by their authors to be factual assertion but which are at odds with the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence, or by highlighting moral injunctions that have every appearance of being horrifically at odds with our deepest intuitions about morality.

Since these ordinary forms of evidence contradict what is in the Bible, it is concluded that the Bible is not inerrant—and if the first part of the argument is embraced as sound, it is further concluded that the Bible is not God’s sacred text in any meaningful sense.

Now I find arguments along these lines important and worth serious reflection, but there is a difficulty with all of them. For every “error” that is identified by the measuring stick of logic or science or moral intuition, the biblical inerrantist can assert that it is logic or science or moral intuition which are in error. And this creates a kind of standoff between those who start with these ordinary forms of evidence and conclude that the Bible is not to be trusted, and those who start with a very high view of the Bible and conclude that these ordinary forms of evidence are not to be trusted.

Still, something important has been demonstrated if we come to see that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy forces its adherents to reject the evidentiary significance we would otherwise attach to logic and science and moral intuition. We are led to the conclusion that allegiance to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is not an innocuous thing. If the doctrine is wrong, the consequences of being wrong on this doctrinal issue are a rather systematic alienation from ordinary ways of knowing, and hence a greater likelihood of being wrong about many more things.

But let me set this issue aside for the time being, since it has so often led to a kind of ideological impasse. What I want to focus on is the first part of argument SR, the part which moves from the assumption that the Bible is “God’s sacred text” in some meaningful and important sense, to the conclusion that the Bible must be inerrant.

In philosophical discussions concerning the problem of evil, it is the parallel portion of argument “E” that most theists challenge. That is, they don’t deny that there is evil in the world. Rather, they argue that there are good reasons why a perfectly good and almighty God would allow the world that He created to be marred by evil. An account of such reasons is called a “theodicy.” Likewise, someone might argue that there are good reasons why a perfectly good and almighty God would allow His sacred text to be marred by error. Call it “a theodicy of biblical errors.”

Of course, the most common theodicies appeal to free will. Since my focus in this post isn’t on the problem of evil, I can’t do full justice to the problem and the various proposed solutions, but the rough gist of a free will theodicy is this: human freedom is so important that God is morally bound to allow it unimpeded expression even when it results in such horrors as the Holocaust.

Let’s consider what would follow if we took this idea seriously in the domain of the argument from evil, and then applied it to argument SR. If genuine human freedom is so deeply important to God that He would permit moral horrors of enormous proportion rather than interfere with the expression of such freedom, would there be any way that God could guarantee inerrancy in a holy book written by human authors?

If the human authors of God’s sacred texts are afforded by God the freedom to ignore divine inspiration, then God could not at the same time guarantee that they never ignored that inspiration in favor of their own cultural prejudices. Likewise, if the human beings who selected among the various writings to assemble the canon of the Bible were afforded the freedom to ignore divine inspiration (which was, say, telling them that the Book of Revelation wasn't divinely inspired at all), then God could not at the same time guarantee that they never ignored that inspiration in favor of their own fallible judgments. And so, if preserving freedom is so important that God is willing to allow millions to die in gas chambers out of respect for it, it might well be plausible to conclude that He must also regrettably allow His chosen authors to mangle and misrepresent His revelations.

Now I don’t spell out this particular “theodicy of biblical errors” because I believe that God was trying to create an inerrant text but was foiled by willful human authors whose freedom was so important to God that He had to allow them to misrepresent Him. I sketch out this theodicy of biblical errors simply to highlight the kinds of issues that need to be explored before anyone can say with confidence that God would have created an inerrant text.

My own view, as I’ve sketched it out in this blog and in my book, is that there are good reasons to conclude that God would pursue revelation in an entirely different way than through a text, and that the Bible is therefore better understood as a human testament to divine revelation rather than as the revelation itself. And I do not think that we should expect God to intrude on the freedom of human authors to prevent their testament from containing errors—not because human freedom is sacrosanct (although I do think human freedom is important), but because God’s plans are better served without the existence of a text that is inerrant in every detail.

I guess underlying all of this is an essentially Lutheran theology of grace, which holds that we cannot save ourselves—either by doing the right things or by getting all of our beliefs right. Only once we admit this will we let go of the effort to save ourselves by our own works and so let grace flood in. An inerrant text would inspire too many to think that they can get it right, if only they follow the rule book and believe everything it says. And so such a text might prove an impediment to the flow of grace.