The Bible was inspired by God

Pro's first claim is that it is impossible for many authors to write something with the scale and precision the Bible has. I will show it is indeed possible. For my argument, Pro's claim that the Bible does not contain any contradictions is irrelevant. Breed writes: "That is, the text is transmitted (and sometimes changed) by scribes who copied the ancient scrolls over and over again. In time, editions of these books were collected and religious communities gradually narrowed down the list of books they deemed authoritative. However, different communities used different criteria. This process of including certain books as Scripture and rejecting others is called canonization." [1] In other words, the bible was put together by scribes or clergymen who picked and choose what went into the bible. Furthermore, The Bible was created from the many tales that had been passed on through generations orally and through writing, and these tales were collected into 'books,' some of which would find their way into the Bible. Finally, the Bible was put together by the Church, and both the contents of the Old and New Testament were put together over hundreds of years. [2] It would indeed be miraculous if, as Pro implies, 40+ authors had written the books separately, and the bible was created by simply putting all of these books together. But this was not the case. Even if the original authors were diverse and independent, it was the Church, not they, who was the final author of the Bible. Additionally, the church was composed of scholars and clergy members who would have spent their career studying the books that would eventually be canonized. As I will explain in the next paragraph, this is why the Bible is not necessarily a miracle. Let us suppose the bible was not divinely inspired, in which case the stories and books most likely contained contradictions and errors. Given the extensive attention the bible received, and the length of time it took before the bible was canonized, it is plausible that the scribes or clergy members edited the text to remove contradicting stories improve the text. The Church, which would have sought to maintain its authority, would have an obviously incentive to produce a solid, consistent text, and with the scholars and scribes in their ranks, they had the means to. Thus, the Bible's could have come about without divine inspiration. I move on to Pro's second claim: that the bible contains scientific knowledge ahead of its time that was impossible to ascertain without divine guidance. First, Pro claims divine inspiration was required to call the stars innumerable. However, this was often used as a more poetic way to describe the many stars in the sky. For instance, here is an excerpt from Greek mythology, "his shoulders rested the whole vault of heaven with all the innumerable stars."[g] Here's one from Dante's Paradiso, "Those sparkling, innumerable stars that I saw in the Sphere of Jupiter" (Canto 18: 115-16). These works were written before Galileo's time, one by a pagan author, and its shows that the term 'innumerable stars' was well within the realm of an author's imagination. If one looks at the sky, it does indeed appear that there are an extraordinary number of stars, perhaps more than we could number. Pro claims that a passage in the bible associating blood with life was a stroke of divine inspiration because, as evidenced by bloodletting, people considered blood unimportant at the time. This is false. Blood was considered one of the four fluids essential to life. Bloodletting arose due to the belief that all four fluids had to be in balance, and that sickness was caused by an excess of blood [3]. Lastly, Pro claims it is miraculous that the bible recommends that sick people bath in water after they have recovered, and that this is an example of the Bible being ahead of its time. However, the connection of bathing to health was nothing new. "The Romans understood that dirty conditions made people ill, and provided many facilities - such as public baths, sewers and toilets - to promote public health" [4]. "By 33 BC there were 170 baths, public and private in Rome alone" [5]. In this case, the Bible was not ahead of its time at all. Quite the opposite, the Bible was actually behind. If the Bible had explained the existence of bacteria and viruses, that would have been truly miraculous. However, none of Pro's examples come close to this. The Bible does not contain any texts that mirror the major discoveries humans would later make in medicine and science, including the discovery of penicillin, atoms, evolution, quantum theory, and so forth. This observation would make sense if one assumed that the bible was, as I suggested earlier, a compilation of stories created and edited by men untouched by divine influence. For the above reasons, it certainly is possible that the Bible was not inspired by God. [1]http://www.bibleodyssey.org... [2]http://www.gotquestions.org... [g]http://www.theoi.com... [3]http://webcache.googleusercontent.com... [4]http://www.bbc.co.uk... [5]http://www.dl.ket.org...