Laziness, Inc.: Part 2

So, let’s continue peeling the couch potatoes from last week, shall we?

You said explaining apologetics to a critic is like explaining nuclear physics to an infant. So that must mean you think apologetics is complicated, and the Bible even more complicated.

Wrong. It simply means the critics are extraordinarily dumb.

You compared potential inerrant originals of the Bible to the original of the Declaration of Independence. But the Founders are all dead, so they can’t make new copies. That doesn’t apply to God, who is alive.

Well, there’s another example of missing the point. It doesn’t matter if an author is alive or not; if they don’t produce any more originals – whether because they can’t, won’t, or whatever – then that original is all the more valuable and all the more subject to abuses or special protections.

We have people today who think their copies of the Bible are inerrant. Yet they don’t seem to be in any difficulty.

Wrong. Those sorts of people are full of difficulties and problems: They are precisely the sort who fall most readily for scams of the sort perpetrated by cult figures like Darwin Fish; they are also the sort who (like Fish) will refuse any contextualizing information and wield the Bible like a club in other areas (like politics). The only reason they do not cause more trouble is because we live in a modern democracy and they don’t have the guns – in contrast to Islamic societies, where the copies ARE still held in high esteem by all, including those in power. If that doesn’t let you know what kind of trouble inerrant copies can foster, then you’re too dumb to be rehabilitated. Look at Islam’s example, and at the example of relics in the medieval period – not at manifestations in a modern, democratic society where those who believe in inerrant copies are a fringe minority that the majority look at as benighted.

You say God would be a micromanager if He assured that every copy was the same. Well, isn’t that what you would be if you wanted to make sure your own books were reprinted accurately?

Yes. That’s why I wouldn’t do it. But it doesn’t matter anyway. When it comes to places like Xulon Press, it is totally the author’s job to check the galleys before printing is actually done. So I don’t need to bother anyone that way in the first place. They don’t do any editing unless I pay them to (and I don’t). Xulon does not have any “techniques” or other means to assure a faithful reproduction beyond that, unless one wants to be so absurd as to suggest that merely converting my Word file to PDF and running the software is a “technique” for ensuring accuracy in transmission. To put it simply, no one “micromanages” the copies, and unless someone wishes to make the exceptionally stupid suggestion that God ought to have imported modern printing technology into the ancient world – just to satisfy a few modern crybabies who don’t want to pursue a serious education – there’s no parallel to be drawn here.

Not that it matters. Precision copying is an obsession of modern graphocentrists; as Jocelyn Small has pointed out in Wax Tablets of the Mind:

Exact wording is rarely crucial in oral societies, but often of great importance in literate ones, though this aspect took centuries to develop…Most oral societies are not only uninterested in the detail of the words per se, but even unaware of the unit of the word…for oral cultures it is not the words but the story or the gist that counts.

To that extent, there is no reason for God to be a micromanager and assure that every word gets transmitted exactly; this is the petulant, childish demand of fundamentalist minds. Rather, as long as the ideas were accurately transmitted – and there is no reason to say, even with errant copies, that they were not – then there is no basis for objection other than childish whining.

Relatedly, one should not confuse accurate transmission of the text with clarity of ideas in the text, which are two separate issues. If the Bible as we have it had been transmitted with 100% correctness from the originals, this would have no bearing on the “clarity complaints” of critics.

Surely God could have come up with some way to do this, like maybe making it part of the natural order that copies of His Word would come out inerrant – you know, like gravity works.

How funny. When someone comes up with specific mechanisms rather than vague fantasy, they can give us a call.

But aren’t natural laws examples of God micromanaging?

No. It’s not constant interference with the process.

But those laws do restrict our free will.

No, they do not. Free will, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy among others, is the “capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives.” It doesn’t mean the ability to do whatever comes to our mind, even the impossible (what might be called freedom of action). This is a distinction that is generally beyond most theological neophytes. Gravity restricts our freedom of action (we can’t float in the air whenever we want), but not our freedom of will (it does not stop our choices to try to float in the air, or to overcome gravity in an airplane).

Part 3 and last sometime soon!

Laziness, Inc.: Part 1

Some time back I had an article titled “The Clarity Complaint” in which the follow excerpt could be offered as thematic:

John W. "the Liar" Loftus admits in his tell-all biography that while a professing Christian, he had an adulterous affair. He also has complained that the Bible is not clear on certain points. Yet when I asked him on the forum what he found "unclear" about this commandment: Thou shalt not commit adultery. ...he had no answer.

The typical whiny Skeptic who has problems with comprehension has plenty of excuses, though; let’s look at some of these over the days we do this series.

Even if you are right in pointing us to some context that interprets the Bible, the very fact that you have to do this shows that the Bible sometimes doesn't mean what it clearly says.

How moronic. The objection (“it doesn’t mean what it clearly says”) is little more than a reiteration of the original reading in which contexts were ignored, and it was imperialistically assumed the God should accommodate our unwillingness to do a little legwork. With those contexts, the Bible IS clear – to its original readers who knew the contexts.

This idea that God should have provided explanatory information to cover every possible misreading, every possible language, every possible cultural context, and every possible expression of ignorance, is simply childish refusal to accept a reasonable responsibility. God wants earnest disciples, not couch potatoes, and if the critic wants to be a couch potato – he has selected his own fate.

But why would I need such tools of context to read an inspired document?

Why is it assumed that a document being “inspired” means that it will accommodate the lazy, the stubborn, the ignorant, and the whiny? There is nothing about the semantic contexts of “inspired” – either in English or in Koine Greek – that indicates that inspiration does, or is obliged to, produce a message that is universally understandable in every language and culture, and in spite of ever effort to inform the text with one’s own agenda.
God has the power and knowledge to inspire such a text, so why didn’t He?

God also has the power and knowledge to serve you breakfast, change your TV channels, and wipe for you when you’re on the toilet. However, He has no obligation to do any of these things, and neither does He have the obligation to service the terminally dense and stubborn with their own personal Bible versions.

As I replied to John Loftus in a rebuttal to The Christian Delusion:

Loftus loftily proclaims that “communication is a two-way street,” [182] and he’s right. But what he does here is object that God failed to walk down the street 99% of the way to meet him on the last 1%. Each of the alleged “communication” deficiencies he cites are easily resolved with a few minutes of checking, as we shall see; or else they amount to people being stupid, foolish, or sinful. (We’ll see what he says about that response further on.) But Loftus would rather blame God for not saving him that walking distance, which is exactly what we might expect from someone who rationalizes away and refuses to answer for their own manifest sins. How does that work out with, Thou shalt not commit adultery? We can guess: He probably had some rationalization back then, too, of the Clintonesque “it depends what ‘is’ means” variety.
All “the Bible is not clear” amounts to is the critic saying, “I refuse to walk more than a few steps to achieve the proper understanding. God is obliged to do the rest. Why? Because I say so!”

You said that the ultimate “inerrant” copy of any message of God resides with God Himself in heaven (the Logos). How do you know this?

Gee, how do we know this? It’s sort of a logical step thing, you know? Once we assume God exists, once we assume God is omnipotent and perfect – two steps that are taken for granted at this level of the argument – it stands to reason that whatever messages God transmits are inerrant. The real question regarding inerrancy then becomes whether or to what extent any purported revelation (whether the Bible, the Quran, or Aunt Jenny’s prophecy down at the Assembly of God) reflects either God’s own statements – or the actual truth; for of course, a message need not be inspired by God to be without error. And we determine whether error exists in the same way we would decide if it exists in any other document or claim.

All these informing contexts are fine, but they are not evidence of biblical inerrancy.

Oops, missing a step there, aren’t we? The informing contexts are evidence showing that a claim of error is misguided. This in turn is evidence that particular charges raised against a claim of inerrancy are false. That in turn lends support to the doctrine of an inerrant whole, but no one has ever claimed (unless it is a backwards fundy, or a Skeptic who used to be one) that all by itself one such solution becomes “evidence of biblical inerrancy” as a whole.

Frankly, even if I were an atheist, I would be embarrassed by most of the claims made by Biblical “errantists” – and my replies to them would not change substantially.

I’ll continue this series next week sometime. In the meantime, be on the lookout for Skeptics who palm themselves off as competent critics.