The Errors of Errancy, Part VII: A Final Note on Detailed Errancy from Epistemic Concerns

Two things are needed in order for humans to have a correct view of reality. First, an omniscient source must exist in order to know the nature of reality, and second to this, that omniscient source must reliably communicate it to us in a way that is external to our unreliable faculties of reason and feeling/intuition alone. 

Usually one will argue that just the existence of God is needed for knowledge, but God’s mere existence is insufficient to provide a reliable source of knowledge for humans if He does not communicate a sufficient (not exhaustive) knowledge of reality to us. He need only exist to hold the exhaustive knowledge so that He knows the nature of reality. It is sufficient for us to have a sufficient knowledge of His “conclusions” gained from His exhaustive, and certainly archetypal, knowledge. Without this sufficient knowledge obtained through what would then be revelatory, therefore, knowledge is impossible, since everything is a guess and subject to change, and therefore, self-admittedly unreliable and possibly completely wrong.

This is not some arrogant endeavor where sinful men just want to know for the sake of certainty and control, but rather it is a knowledge that humans need if they are to discover anything in the world around them as being true and live in a way that is good instead of evil. 

This means that even the disciplines that are often used to undermine biblical errancy are actually reliant upon an assumption of inerrancy that most advocates of those disciplines would categorically reject. In other words, one must know that an archaeologist’s conclusions are either inerrant, or more reliable than, that of the Bible’s claims in order to reject the Bible’s claims about a certain site or event. Yet, this presupposes that one has an inerrant, completely reliable source of information or ability to access that information that humans do not have apart from externally received special revelation. Hence, the archaeologist cannot say whether his conclusions are true or false, or whether they are more reliable than the Bible’s claims, simply because he has no measuring stick by which to measure any claims, his claims or the claims of anyone else. There is an assumption of the complete reliability of reason and the methods that flow from it in obtaining knowledge that requires a reliable standard by which he can measure whether his conclusions are true. He can remain agnostic, but this means he can say nothing about any other theory, including that of the Bible. He must, therefore, first assume through sheer belief and speculation that the Bible is not that reliable source, a priori concluding that it is unreliable, and then argue that even though his conclusions are not inerrant either, and therefore, cannot function as the measuring stick, they are more reliable than the Bible. This conclusion, however, is not an academic one, but a religious belief that stems from his worldview.

If he had believed the Bible to be inerrant, then he would judge his own conclusions as incorrect or needing at least to match that inerrant source. Judging an inerrant document with an errant standard is illogical. Hence, one must first believe the document to be errant in order to come to the conclusion that it is errant, and so it is a circular argument based on the faith of one’s own subjective reasoning or moral intuition, largely influenced by whatever philosophical or cultural ideas are trending at the time. One need only ask an archaeologist if his conclusions are inerrant, or a historian if his theories or conclusions are inerrant. All will answer in the negative, and this begs the question as to why one would judge an inerrant source of truth with one that is admittedly errant. When scholars judge the Bible’s claims with the latest archaeological dig, is it not being assumed that the conclusions of those archaeologists are errant and reliable sources of information that will not be contradicted by future digs, future analyses, or even future abandonment of, perhaps, faulty methodologies? Is science settled to where scientists themselves no longer believe in the probability that future scientific discoveries and analyses will one day correct their lack of understanding of the science? Are all ancient chronologies believed by historians now set in stone, or do they shift with the advent of new information, so as to prove that these are not inerrant sources of information?

Let’s say I need to measure the size of my bookshelf with an electronic measuring tape, but that measuring tape has been proven to be inaccurate time and again. How would I ever know when it is accurate and when it is not, and therefore, how would I ever know the size of my bookshelf? In fact, how would I ever know if the measuring tape was ever right, or if it was malfunctioning and wrong every time? If I had a reliable measuring tape, I could judge the inaccuracy of the other, if it was ever right, how many times it was right in relation to how many times it was wrong, etc. However, if I use the inaccurate measuring tape to judge the accuracy of the other, I will conclude wrongly that the other measuring tape is the one malfunctioning and in error. 

It also does no good to argue that one can accumulate errant standards. This would be like multiplying the amount of inaccurate measuring tapes that I have in order to judge the accuracy of the reliable one that I have. If there is no way to judge how often the inaccurate measuring tapes are, then there is no way to say that they are ever reliable, how often they are reliable, in their readings. This means that merely accumulating the conclusions of natural science, history, archaeology, etc., which we have all agreed are not inerrant in their conclusions, since they have in the past been wrong, and may be found to be false in the future, does not increase the reliability of their conclusions and create a more reliable measuring standard any more than a single one of them alone.

Hence, it is impossible to discover whether a document claiming scientific, historical, and archaeologically related data is reliable in its claims by using errant standards without assuming a reliable source of that information that would confirm or deny the consistency of the conclusions of each with the reality the reliable standard sets forth.

This does not mean that one must believe the Bible intends to communicate specific information concerning the natural sciences, history, or archaeologically-related data, but only that the conclusions gained from the study of these subjects are incapable of refuting the reliability of the Bible in the same way that errant measuring tape is incapable of becoming a standard of the reliable one. What the Bible actually intends to communicate cannot be obtained, therefore, by comparing it with these disciplines, but rather through literary and contextual analysis of the text itself. If it should be concluded that the Bible intends to communicate, for instance, a historical idea, a contrary errant source, Josephus for instance, cannot be used to judge the reliability of the biblical claim unless one wants to argue that Jospehus’ histories are inerrant (something no Josephus scholar would ever do).

What this means is that usual external sources used by Enlightenment critics to undermine the Bible as a reliable source of what it intends to convey is a fallacious methodology that does not actually yield the result they claim that it does.

I have argued this, not because I am a Detailed Inerrantist, as I have already said such a view is not what the Bible is doing, but that one cannot even argue against Detailed Inerrancy on the basis of these external disciplines. It must be argued on the basis upon which I have already laid out. The nature of language and observing what the Bible itself is doing in terms of what it purposes to communicate.

The truth of the matter is that many disciplines have been employed by scholars who are unwitting apologists for the Enlightenment that do not conflict with the inerrancy of Scripture, and yet, are argued that they do (source criticism, evolution, ANE influences, authorship issues, dates of writing, archaeological data, etc.). It is usually the conclusions of presuppositions interwoven with the presentation of this data that argues against the inerrancy of the Bible, not the data itself.