The Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy is probably false.

============= Introduction and Asides ============= I'm glad to see HisLife has decided to participate in his first debate and, even more, that he has chosen my debate to be his first. Let me address a few things before I jump right into my key points. "I would define 'error' the way the Bible does..." My opponent will have to excuse my reluctance to accept the Bible as the source of our error-judgment when it happens to be the very thing in question - a judge may not reside over his own trial. In order to avoid circuitously questionable semantics, I think definitions of error should be taken from the dictionary or it should be understood in its most colloquial sense. "It is reasonable to assume that if God wrote a book, that book would be free from error." I absolutely agree. The problem is, given the evidence, it is not reasonable to assume the former (God wrote the book) and therefore the latter conclusion is not sound. James White is write when he says that God's message is communicated through human authors who employ their distinct language and historical settings. But as I am not defending that inerrancy is impossible, only improbable, I need only avail myself with the principle evidence. "Furthermore, my opponent states that inerrancy stems from 19th Century Princeton theology, and is thus, a new idea." Not precisely, I said that the Doctrine of Inerrancy did not reach an articulated form until the 19th century. The term inerrancy was coined by B.B. Warfield and A.A. Hodge. Moreover, it was Warfield who took works of the post-reformation scholastic, Francis Turretin, and turned them into normative theological authority. It was also Hodge who formulated the inerrancy of the autographs concept. So it is verifiably anachronistic to assume an innerentist epistemology for someone like Luther, Aquinas or Wesley. Infallibility (that the Bible never fails in its purpose) would be a more appropriate understanding for the aforementioned. "If God did not create the world in six days, there is no reason to believe that He raised Christ in three." I'll use this as a springboard into my first argument. Ironically enough, as bankrupt as this reasoning is, Jesus did not rise after three days! In fact, he was in the grave for 2 nights and a day. He was crucified on Friday and rose again on Sunday morning (not 3 days and 3 nights like Matthew 12:38-40 says). But even better, there are no good reasons for believing that God created the world in 6 days either! ============= Creation Mythology ============= There is good evidence to believe that the author(s) of Genesis (and a portion of Exodus) borrowed from other ancient Mesopotamian mythologies. This can be seen clearly in the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2, the story of Noah and the birth narrative of Moses. We'll start with the Genesis creation accounts. We simply cannot in good reason accept the Genesis account as literal - to do so would require an estimation of the earth's age as remarkably young. It's been said that, "to get a value of 6,000 years for the age of the earth one would have to assume an error of 99.9998 percent for each of the major radioactive methods. Inasmuch as the different methods employ different techniques and... different assumptions, an error of such magnitude as this is quite incredible." As is most probable then, Genesis is not a historical or literal recounting of events. Genesis 1 itself is structured poetically. This interpretation insists that the point of the creation account in Genesis is not to give a literal or scientific explanation for the origins of the universe and the earth therein, but to give us more of a theology of creation. The point of the creation account was not to show us how God created, but to merely inform us THAT he created. The days listed in Genesis, therefore, are not meant to be taken as literal, chronological days, but rather has a 7 day motif - a literary or symbolic structure meant to reinforce important theological themes (e.g. The Sabbath). The REASON why Genesis 1 does not seem to represent a literal retelling is because the author used a common 7 day literary motif. Moreover, there is a stylistic parallel of the days mentioned, day 1 parallels day 4; day 2 parallels day 5; and day 3 parallels day 6 – leaving the last day to figuratively represent the Sabbath. The Genesis account shares many similarities with ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian creation myths. In fact, it seems that in many ways, the Genesis creation account is written to combat other competing mythologies. Another hurdle for the inerrantist, is the fact that there seems to be more than one creation account presented in the beginning of Genesis. Some of these differences can be reasonably, though maybe not plausibly, reconciled. The most distinguishable difference in writing is the change in divine names. The second account (staring at 2:4) uses the divine name YHWH while the first prefers the divine name Elohim. As a relevant aside, the divine name "YHWH," according to Exodus 6:2-3, was only given later to Moses. The problem is, God explicitly uses this apparently yet revealed divine name with Abraham and others far prior to the burning bush account. The genealogies that follow in 4:17-5:32 have a remarkable similarly to early Sumerian king lists that predate Genesis by thousands of years [1]. These lists carry many of the same features. While those in the genealogy in Genesis have insanely long life spans (even though no paleoanthropologists have yet discovered any ancient skeletal remains that are even remotely close to that sort of age), the Sumerian kings have impossibly long reigns. More remarkable is that the two Sumerian lists each end with the character who supposedly survived a flood (like Noah). The similarities to ancient texts that predate Genesis seems to suggest that the author of Genesis borrowed from other mythologies. ============= The Epic of Gilgamesh and Sargon the Great ============= The Epic of Gilgamesh, written far before Genesis [2], gives us a very similar flood account too. The eleventh tablet of the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh contains the following similarities: (1) a divine warning of forthcoming flood, (2) the building of a ship coated with pitch, (3) the gathering of animals and birds to be saved from the flood, (4) the ship coming to rest upon a mountain, (5) the sending out of birds to scout, and (6) after leaving the ship, an offering of a sacrifice. The similarities are undeniable and the borrowing of material is obvious. The Neo-Assyrian text from the 7th century BCE says the following about Sargon the Great, "My mother was a high priestess, my father I knew not. The brothers of my father loved the hills. My city is Azupiranu, which is situated on the banks of the Euphrates. My high priestess mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose over me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me. Akki, the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener. While I was a gardener, Ishtar granted me her love, and for four and ... years I exercised kingship." This birth narrative is exactly similar to Moses' birth narrative found in Exodus 2. It seems abundantly obvious that the Bible used a lot of existing mythological stories as a bases for some of its material. ============= Gospel Source Criticism ============= Each Gospel gives a different rendering of what the sign above Jesus' head actually said on the cross (Mt. 28:37, Mk. 15:26, Lk. 23:38, Jn 19:19). The heart of the matter is there, but not all of these renderings can be strictly correct. With there being over 16,000 manuscripts of New Testament it surprising that not any two manuscripts are without difference (save frag