rationalism

Inerrancy is an absurdly strong claim

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 12 JDN 246143

I’ve had a really hard time writing a post this week. Between my late father’s birthday coming up soon (April 15) and the fact that a man with full authority over a full-scale nuclear arsenal threatened to destroy an entire civilization—a literal imminent threat of genocide—and the people with the power to remove him did absolutely nothing, the world just feels like a nightmare I’ve been trying to wake up from.

And yes, it matters that he has authority over nukes. If you’re in a fistfight and the other guy says, “I’ll kill you!” that’s very different than if he draws a handgun and says the same thing. The President of the United States should essentially be treated as always brandishing a deadly weapon, and it is his responsibility to have the decorum to not make statements that can be read as imminent threats.

This means that trying to be topical about current events is just too painful and disorienting for me to write anything that feels useful to say. (I mostly feel like screaming.)

So, perhaps ironically, I’m going to write a post that’s completely un-topical, that could honestly have been written any time between roughly 300 AD and the present, and—much to my chagrin—will probably still be relevant in 3000 AD if humanity survives that long.

It concerns the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy.

Simply put, inerrancy is the belief that divine scriptures (especially the Bible or Qur’an) are without error: That is, that literally every proposition contained therein is absolutely and completely true.


This is not by any means a rare or fringe belief. 55% of Christians in the United States report that they believe in Biblical inerrancy. I was not able to obtain a similar figure for Muslims, but I can tell you that a majority of US Muslims and over 90% of African Muslims believe in the even stronger claim of Qur’anic literalism.

We can set aside the question of copyediting. I don’t care about typos or grammar mistakes. Translation errors are somewhat more serious—as they can affect real doctrines—but I’m willing to set those aside as well. We can say that we are talking about the original texts in their original languages, and idealized so that they do not contain any errors of grammar or typography.

This is already asking a lot, but I am prepared to concede it.

Even so, inerrancy is an absurdly strong claim that no rational person should ever take seriously.

The claim is that this entire text—hundreds of pages by dozens of authors over hundreds of years—is entirely true, without a single false assertion anywhere within it.

I want to be absolutely clear about this: I do not believe that about any text I have ever encountered.

I do not believe that The Origin of Species is inerrant. I do not believe that calculus textbooks are inerrant. I do not believe that Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity is inerrant.

I can’t point you to any specific errors in these books right now (especially since we haven’t even specified a calculus textbook), but if someone did point me to an error, I would not be the least bit surprised. Even if I combed through the entire text multiple times and didn’t spot any errors, I would still be doubtful that I hadn’t missed one somewhere.

Honestly, I find it improbable that any nonfiction work by human beings of significant length and complexity is completely without errors. (Okay, a 5-page book on counting for kindergartners might actually be inerrant. Maybe.)

Let me try putting it this way. What is the probability that any given proposition stated by a given source is correct? For a very reliable source, it could be 99%, or 99.9%, or even 99.99%. Perhaps you literally trust some sources so much that they must assert 10,000propositions before they get one wrong. (I’m not sure there’s anyone I trust this much—I certainly do not trust myself this much—but I’ll allow it for the sake of argument.)

There are 30,000 verses in the Bible. Many of these verses assert multiple propositions.

Even if each and every proposition is 99.99% reliable, the probability that all of 30,000 distinct propositions is correct is less than 5%. Even if you trust the Bible that much, you should still be 95% certain that it got something wrong somewhere.

In fact, it’s much worse than that, as we know for a fact that there are explicit contradictions between different parts of the Bible. The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible counts over 500 explicit contradictions, some relatively trivial (did Enoch die?) but others absolutely core to Christian theology (do Heaven and Hell exist?). If even one of those holds up—and as far as I can tell, most of them hold up, maybe even all of them (though I wouldn’t be surprised if some don’t; are you getting it yet?)—then the Bible is not inerrant. Indeed, just counting contradictions, if 500 of 30,000 propositions are contradictions, then the accuracy of each proposition can’t be more than 99%.

We don’t even need the extensive empirical evidence that refutes the creation stories in the Bible to know that those stories are wrong. The creation stories themselves contradict each other in vital ways.

We don’t need to consider the vanishingly small prior probability that a human being can rise from the dead to take issue with the resurrection story. Simon and Peter can’t both simultaneously have known in advance that Jesus would resurrect and not known that until it happened. Jesus can’t have been crucified to death both before and after Passover.

Some of these kinds of contradictions are exactly the sort of thing you would expect to slip into a historical account that was delivered by oral tradition over multiple generations. (They do not, for instance, give me reason to doubt that there was in fact a historical figure named Yeshua of Nazareth who gathered a group of apostles and was crucified to death by the Roman state. The vast majority of historians agree that this man did, in fact, exist.)

But they are exactly what you are not allowed to have in a book that is inerrant!

A book that is literally without error, without flaw, should not contain even one single contradiction, no matter how trivial—and come on, whether or not Heaven and Hell exist is not trivial!

Inerrancy is not simply saying “the Bible is basically true” or “the Bible is a reliable source” or even “Christian theology is true.”

I believe that The Origin of Species is basically true, and a reliable source, and that Darwinian evolutionary theory is true. But I absolutely do not believe that The Origin of Species is inerrant.

I believe that most calculus textbooks are basically true, and are reliable sources, and that the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is true. But I absolutely do not believe that any calculus textbook is inerrant.

Inerrancy isn’t even simply saying that “the Bible was written by God”! It’s very clear that the Bible is not simply dictated verbatim from On High; there was some kind of human process involved in its creation, and even if you believe that the Council of Nicaea was right about all their choices of the canon, you should still recognize that there is plenty of room for errors to have crept in during this long, convoluted, and controversial human process.

(For the Qur’an, we actually have mostly the original text by the original author—but even then, you should still be doubtful that any document with thousands of claims could be absolutely, 100% true.)

So, please, Christians, Muslims, and everyone else, I am literally begging you:

Please, give up on inerrancy. Admit that your book could be mistaken.

I’m not asking you to give up on your religion. You can keep your theology. You can still mostly believe in the book. But please, recognize how incredibly unreasonable you are being by asserting that it is impossible that anything in the book could ever be wrong.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that your book could be mistaken.

Administering medicine to the dead

PNRJ core principles, ethics, personal, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 28 JDN 2460339

Here are a couple of pithy quotes that go around rationalist circles from time to time:

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, […] is like administering medicine to the dead[…].”

― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”

― Jonathan Swift

You usually hear that abridged version, but Thomas Paine’s full quotation is actually rather interesting:

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”

― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

It is indeed quite ineffective to convert an atheist by scripture (though that doesn’t seem to stop them from trying). Yet this quotation seems to claim that the opposite should be equally ineffective: It should be impossible to convert a theist by reason.

Well, then, how else are we supposed to do it!?

Indeed, how did we become atheists in the first place!?

You were born an atheist? No, you were born having absolutely no opinion about God whatsoever. (You were born not realizing that objects don’t fade from existence when you stop seeing them! In a sense, we were all born believing ourselves to be God.)

Maybe you were raised by atheists, and religion never tempted you at all. Lucky you. I guess you didn’t have to be reasoned into atheism.

Well, most of us weren’t. Most of us were raised into religion, and told that it held all the most important truths of morality and the universe, and that believing anything else was horrible and evil and would result in us being punished eternally.

And yet, somehow, somewhere along the way, we realized that wasn’t true. And we were able to realize that because people made rational arguments.

Maybe we heard those arguments in person. Maybe we read them online. Maybe we read them in books that were written by people who died long before we were born. But somehow, somewhere people actually presented the evidence for atheism, and convinced us.

That is, they reasoned us out of something that we were not reasoned into.

I know it can happen. I have seen it happen. It has happened to me.

And it was one of the most important events in my entire life. More than almost anything else, it made me who I am today.

I’m scared that if you keep saying it’s impossible, people will stop trying to do it—and then it will stop happening to people like me.

So please, please stop telling people it’s impossible!

Quotes like these encourage you to simply write off entire swaths of humanity—most of humanity, in fact—judging them as worthless, insane, impossible to reach. When you should be reaching out and trying to convince people of the truth, quotes like these instead tell you to give up and consider anyone who doesn’t already agree with you as your enemy.

Indeed, it seems to me that the only logical conclusion of quotes like these is violence. If it’s impossible to reason with people who oppose us, then what choice do we have, but to fight them?

Violence is a weapon anyone can use.

Reason is the one weapon in the universe that works better when you’re right.

Reason is the sword that only the righteous can wield. Reason is the shield that only protects the truth. Reason is the only way we can ever be sure that the right people win—instead of just whoever happens to be strongest.

Yes, it’s true: reason isn’t always effective, and probably isn’t as effective as it should be. Convincing people to change their minds through rational argument is difficult and frustrating and often painful for both you and them—but it absolutely does happen, and our civilization would have long ago collapsed if it didn’t.

Even people who claim to have renounced all reason really haven’t: they still know 2+2=4 and they still look both ways when they cross the street. Whatever they’ve renounced, it isn’t reason; and maybe, with enough effort, we can help them see that—by reason, of course.

In fact, maybe even literally administering medicine to the dead isn’t such a terrible idea.

There are degrees of death, after all: Someone whose heart has stopped is in a different state than someone whose cerebral activity has ceased, and both of them clearly stand a better chance of being resuscitated than someone who has been vaporized by an explosion.

As our technology improves, more and more states that were previously considered irretrievably dead will instead be considered severe states of illness or injury from which it is possible to recover. We can now restart many stopped hearts; we are working on restarting stopped brains. (Of course we’ll probably never be able to restore someone who got vaporized—unless we figure out how to make backup copies of people?)

Most of the people who now live in the world’s hundreds of thousands of ICU beds would have been considered dead even just 100 years ago. But many of them will recover, because we didn’t give up on them.

So don’t give up on people with crazy beliefs either.

They may seem like they are too far gone, like nothing in the world could ever bring them back to the light of reason. But you don’t actually know that for sure, and the only way to find out is to try.

Of course, you won’t convince everyone of everything immediately. No matter how good your evidence is, that’s just not how this works. But you probably will convince someone of something eventually, and that is still well worthwhile.

You may not even see the effects yourself—people are often loathe to admit when they’ve been persuaded. But others will see them. And you will see the effects of other people’s persuasion.

And in the end, reason is really all we have. It’s the only way to know that what we’re trying to make people believe is the truth.

Don’t give up on reason.

And don’t give up on other people, whatever they might believe.