The Bible is the inerrant Word of God

Thank you for your thoughtful answer, leonard. I apologize for my frustration last round. I should have used my 8000 characters to spell out #3 in explicit detail. But alas, I will have to spell it out here along with a variety of other closing material that we never got to along the way. I will start a brief rebuttal to Pro’s position on issues #1 and #2. Pro has confirmed he believes that God communicates with clear and coherent inerrancy in the Bible. I believe both my assertions and even Pro’s rebuttals have shown that the case for Biblical inerrancy requires lowering the standard of “inerrancy” to “quite accurate.” Pro’s defense for both #1 and #2 was to backpedal from his position. His response to #3 may be more of same. This is the essence of the debate: do you as the voter buy Pro’s backpedal as legitimate or not. For #1, Pro cited the voluminous assortment of texts that have been found over time, and cited Bruce Metzer saying “New Testament manuscripts agree in 99.5% [1] of the text (compared to only 95% for the Iliad)." Less optimistic (but still Christian) scholars put the number around 80-85% [5]. But the point is that 85% or even 99.5%, is not 100%. Some make the case, as Pro did, that 99% is great! But the New Testament being a more reliable transcript than the Iliad is irrelevant. No one has claimed the Iliad is the Word of God. It seems within reason to expect an omnipotent God to guarantee 100% accuracy. It is not beyond the power of an omnipotent God to ensure 100% accuracy, is it? In addressing #2, Pro starts by reminding us that “Bible authors are no different than modern authors...” Wait. What?? This is the Word of God we are talking about. I think it’s reasonable to expect an omnipotent God to help his human vessels use figures of speech, metaphors and literary devices in ways that are incontrovertibly understood. Pro agreed with that contention. And yet Pro’s defense for #2 includes a variety of options. The specifics of the options are irrelevant. Some are more plausible than others, but the very fact that there are options is what is noteworthy. It means that meaning was not clearly communicated. There is no shortage of contentions regarding the many ways that the Bible has changed over the years [6],[7],[8]. The assertion of Pro is that the Bible is the Word of God. This is the same God who created the entire universe, devised quantum mechanics, made a cosmos with small-to-large scaling that defies human conception... and this God has failed to communicate the story of human origins in a way that a roomful of scholars can agree upon? Pro is effectively trying to strip the meaning of error, so that essentially nothing can be deemed wrong. It is up to you, the voters, to call him on it. I was raised as a Christian, and believed in Biblical inerrancy well into my thirties. Issue #3 was the most compelling reason for my change of mind. Broad questions like #1 and #2 could be more easily massaged away by backtracking into the vagary that Pro has employed. But #3 involves very specific accounts that are unmistakingly at odds with one another: When Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist, Mark reports that God spoke from heaven, saying “You are my beloved son, in you I am well pleased.” [9]. The next words are “Immediately the Spirit impelled him to go out into the wilderness.” Matthew is much like Mark, except in Matthew’s version God addresses the crowd, not Jesus: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” And the very next verse sends him into the wilderness, “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness.” Luke uses the same quote as Mark and also send Jesus into the wilderness immediately after baptism. John offers a different take altogether, and never mentions any audible declaration from Heaven. Even more striking is that immediately after the baptism, “The next day” Jesus sees John again and rounds up a couple disciples. Then, “the next day” he decides to leave for Galilee. John never mentions a 40 day period of temptation and leaves no room for it to have happened after the baptism. Either John or the synoptics are incorrect. I have not found any decent explanations from the apologetic sites I’ve visited. The most common effort is to say John just left out the temptation (or even that Jesus was baptised twice), but that approach is intellectually dishonest as reading the account makes very clear all of the accounts are speaking in chronological time, as they all use “immediately”, “then”, or “the next day”. I am very curious to see how Pro resolves the discrepancy. The resurrection accounts are also at odds with each other on almost every detail except that there was an empty grave. There cannot have been both 1 angel and 2 angels present. The cannot have both witnessed an earthquake and the stone rolled away like an Matthew, and arrived at a quiet empty tomb like in Mark. The point is, no Christian scholars defend actual inerrancy. They defend rough inerrancy, the idea that the important parts are true. I’m sorry, but that is not inerrancy. In Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ", a book set on establishing the Biblical narrative as authentic and believable, the case for inerrancy is closed without a fight [3]: "[Craig] Blomberg acknowledged that there are numerous points at which the gospels appear to disagree. “These range all the way from very minor variations in wording to the most famous apparent contradictions,” he said. “My own conviction is, once you allow for the elements I’ve talked about earlier—of paraphrase, of abridgment, of explanatory additions, of selection, of omission—the gospels are extremely consistent with each other by ancient standards...” Also in “The Case for Christ”, the same Bruce Metzger cited by Pro in Round 2 also dismisses actual Biblical inerrancy: ““‘Your Bible is wrong in the King James Version of 1 John 5:7–8, where it talks about ‘the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.’ They’ll say, ‘That’s not in the earliest manuscripts.’ “And that’s true enough. I think that these words are found in only about seven or eight copies, all from the fifteenth or sixteenth century. I acknowledge that is not part of what the author of 1 John was inspired to write.” [3] Then why is it in the Bible?? Dr. Lane Craig is one of Christianity most well-known apologists. Here is how defends the possibility of inerrancy [4]: “To begin with, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, as I learned it and, I think, as most of its adherents today would defend it, is not arrived at inductively, but deductively. Inerrantists freely admit that no one reading through the Bible and keeping list of difficulties encountered along the way, whether inconsistencies or mistakes, would come to the conclusion at the end of his reading that the Bible is inerrant. He would likely conclude that the Bible, like almost every other book, has some errors in it. “ These are Christian scholars admitting that the Bible is not inerrant in fact, just inerrant in principle. Or more accurately for Christians, ‘the Bible says God is real and did XYZ, and God says the Bible is inerrant.’ It is circular, self-referencing logic at its most glorious. Literally. [1]: http://www.godandscience.org... [2]: http://www.rationalchristianity.net... [3]: Strobel, Lee. 1998. “The Case for Christ” Zondervan [4]: http://www.reasonablefaith.org... [5]: http://irr.org... [6]: http://en.wikipedia.org... [7]: http://en.wikipedia.org... [8]: http://en.wikipedia.org... [9]: http://www.biblegateway.com... [10]: http://www.biblegateway.com...