The Errors of Errancy: Part IV: The Epistemic Impossibility of Judging Whether the Bible Is Errant or Inerrant without an Inerrant Standard

The ability to judge whether the Bible is inerrant without an inerrant standard that stands outside of the Bible is an impossibility. Yet, this is exactly what both religious and nonreligious errantists alike argue. What is really being assumed here is that the moral reasoning and/or intuition of the individual or culture is the inerrant, and therefore reliable, standard by which all other truths and moralities ought to be judged. This assumption is not often noticed even by those making it. However, this human-centered standard must be assumed in order to judge the Bible as a lesser reliable standard due to its inability to find compatibility with the truth or morality of the errantist. 

The problem, of course, is that one only need compare the contradictory conclusions of individual and communal compasses of when it comes to truth and morality with one another in order to easily refute the idea that humans have such an ability to arrive at the correct truth or morality. 

Enlightenment thinkers argued one could reason to it, but men reason to different moralities. Slave-traders of the Transatlantic slave trade reasoned that their work was a good in the world that helped the progression of the modern world step closer to their utopian vision. Hitler and Stalin saw the necessity of executing those who they viewed as standing in the way of their own utopian vision and the good of mankind. Pol Pot did the same thing. All of them using both reason to do so. Feelings do not fare much better. As Ravi Zacharias has often quipped in referring to the Copleston/Russell debate, where Russel told Copleston that he distinguished between good and evil by feeling, “Mr. Russell, in some cultures they love their neighbor; in other cultures they eat them, both on the basis of feeling. Do you have a preference?”

Truths and morality go together, and they are elusive to the one guessing at them. One must know the nature of reality to conclude anything as true, that there is an objective moral mind from which something gains its inherent goodness or badness, and the clear and reliable communication to human beings from that mind what these truths and principles of morality are. Yet, individuals and communities alike, using both reason and intuition/feelings, have come to contradictory conclusions, and therefore, categorically disqualify themselves as reliable guides to either.

This means that without any reliable guide to know what is true or what is good, what is false and what is evil, it is impossible to judge any document claiming to be the reliable guide of both. Ergo, the Didactic Errantist can make no genuine objection to the claim that the Bible is inerrant. He is incapable of making any claim about any particular morality or truth in the Bible, or any claim generically about the Bible’s inerrancy. 

This is also true when it comes to the method of comparing what he thinks are two contradictory truth or moral claims he thinks the Bible is making. In point of fact, if he is incapable of distinguishing truth from error because he does not know the truth otherwise; and he is incapable of distinguishing good from evil because he does not know otherwise, then he is incapable of judging whether the truths and morality presented are contradictory or facets of the same reality or principles presented in different situations and contexts. For instance, Thom Stark claimed in his book on errancy that the Bible taught two contradictory claims concerning divine justice. On the one hand, the Bible presents that divine justice works itself out by rewarding the righteous and punishing the evil. On the other hand, the Bible presents the idea that God’s justice works itself out according to whatever God decides is in accord with His will, sometimes letting the evil be rewarded, and the righteous to be defrauded. However, in such a situation as this, since there is no way to know what is true apart from a reliable source, and human reasoning and intuition is not that reliable source, as argued above, then it must be assumed that if the Bible is that reliable source, these two ideas complement rather than contradict one another. In fact, we witness that if one does good, he often receives good, and if one does bad, he often receives bad as a general rule of life. If one robs a bank, he most often is caught and goes to prison. If one is nasty toward people, people tend to be nasty toward him. If one is kind to others, he often receives kindness in return. However, we also witness that it is also true that the kind can be met with hatred, and the bank robber can get away and live out a carefree life. The Book of Job is a piece of dispute literature in the Bible, and as a work of dispute literature presents all sides as true from certain perspectives. It presents all of these as true. However, the ultimate reality is that the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished in the long run, even though the present may or may not reflect that future reality.

In other words, if a source of truth and morality is reliable, it must be assumed that any supposed contradictions are actually complements, supplements, caveats, and a filling out of the truth and morality it presents. In point of fact, nothing in the Bible’s teaching can be absolutely proven to be contradictory. It remains, therefore, a belief of Errantists who are simply guessing that they are contradictory, but have no ability to assess whether they truly are since that would assume a full and complete knowledge of all truth and morality (i.e., a complete and full knowledge of the nature of reality) that must be gained from an alternatively reliable source that they do not possess.

The Errantist is left either to admit that the Bible cannot have didactic errors in it if reliable, and therefore, its variations must complement one another in some way, or that he must remain agnostic as to whether the Bible is inerrant because he has no way of assessing its truth and moral claims, whether in variation or not. Either way, he proves the position of didactic errancy to be a mere belief, a guess, in what the Bible apart from any of its truth and moral claims, not because of them. In other words, he cannot assess the Bible’s claims of truth and morality, and so must decide apart from what it says, and apart from what he knows, that it is not a reliable source of reality, and that the only reason for concluding such is because it has fallen out of favor with the zeitgeist obtained through the source of human reasoning and intuition that has proven time and again with examples that are legion to be an unreliable and erroneous source of truth and morality when left without any other inerrant guide to confirm its many speculations.