In past debates on the Bible inerrancy doctrine, I have had to spend much of my rebuttal time reminding my opponents of what we were supposed to be debating. Having now read Jerry McDonald's first affirmative manuscript, I can see that this debate will be no different. His proposition obligates him to affirm that "the Bible in its original autographs was verbally and fully inspired by Jehovah God and is therefore completely inerrant," but, except for the brief section in which he stated and defined his proposition, one would never guess that Bible inerrancy was the issue we are debating. He has taken us through a maze of tangents concerning evolution, the existence of God, and my opinion of Joseph Wheless's book Is It God's Word? but he has yet to produce any evidence, either internal or external, that proves the Bible was verbally inspired of God.
Of everything that he said in his first manuscript, nothing was more ridiculous than his claim that I would have to "know that there is no God" before I could "know (absolutely) that the Bible is not the inspired and inerrant word of God" (p. 8). If I were a Mormon affirming that the Book of Mormon was verbally and fully inspired by Jehovah God, would Mr. McDonald have to prove that God does not exist before he could show that my proposition was erroneous? Of course not! If the Book of Mormon were indeed verbally inspired by Jehovah God, it would have to exhibit certain characteristics, chief of which would be inerrancy in every statement recorded in it. The Mormon, as well as Biblical, claim is that Jehovah God is both omniscient and omnipotent. If he is both of these, then any book that he verbally inspired would necessarily be inerrant in every fact and detail recorded in it. An all-knowing, all-powerful deity would not make mistakes, not even little ones, so for Mr. McDonald to disprove that the Book of Mormon was verbally inspired by Jehovah God, all he would need do is establish the existence of errors in the text of the book. He certainly wouldn't have to prove that God does not exist.
The same principle is true of his proposition. Mr. McDonald believes that the Bible was verbally inspired by an omniscient, omnipotent God. If this belief is true, then the Bible must exhibit evidence of complete inerrancy, so for me to show that McDonald's position is erroneous, all I must do is prove that contradictions, inconsistencies, and other errors exist in the Biblical text, and I intend to do just that, but first I must ask McDonald to explain something. If he is right in saying that I must first "know that there is no God" before I can "know (absolutely) that the Bible is not the inspired and inerrant word of God," why wouldn't the converse be true of his proposition? Why wouldn't he have to prove unequivocally that God does exist before he could know absolutely that the Bible is the inspired and inerrant word of God? Perhaps he can explain this to us.
Mr. McDonald took the time to tell us what he is not affirming (p. 6), so perhaps I should tell him what I will and will not be doing in this debate. I will be presenting evidence that discredits the Bible inerrancy claim, but I will not waste time discussing the existence of God or the theory of evolution. I find both subjects fascinating, but neither one relates to the propositions Mr. McDonald and I have agreed to debate. If he wishes to debate these topics, as his first affirmative manuscript seems to indicate, then I suggest that he find someone whose forensic interests lie in these areas and work out a debate agreement with him. My interest is in the Bible inerrancy doctrine. This is what I agreed to debate and what I will insist upon debating.
Mr. McDonald presented me with a list of five true or false questions, which I will answer shortly, but, before I do, I want to return the favor with five questions for him to answer:
Are there contradictions and discrepancies in the existing Bible text?
If there are contradictions and discrepancies in the existing Bible text, how do you know that these mistakes were not in the original autographs?
If you have never seen the original autographs of the books in the Bible and if you have never discussed the originals with anyone who has seen and examined them, how could you possibly know that they were inerrant?
Who wrote the book of Judges and how do you know who wrote it?
For the readers' convenience, I will restate each of Mr. McDonald's five questions. They were all presented in true or false format, with dire warnings of what conclusions he would reach if I refuse to answer. He seems to assume that I entered this debate intending to dodge and hedge rather than discuss the issues at stake. As we go along, I think he will soon find his assumption was wrong.
One: Each of us has a real (objective) moral obligation to become a believer that the Bible is not inspired by God, so that if one does not become a believer in said position, that person becomes guilty of real (objective) moral wrong.
Answer: False, because there is no such thing as objective morality. Only religious extremists preach that people have objective moral obligations to believe particular doctrines.
Two: Faith is a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence.
Answer: False. Faith is a belief, firm or otherwise, in something for which there is insufficient evidence to establish fact.
Three: It can be absolutely proven that the Bible in its original autographs cannot be absolutely proven to be the inspired and inerrant word of Jehovah God.
Answer: True. If an original document is not and has never been available for critical examination, how could anything about its origin be absolutely established?
Four: It can be absolutely proven that the Bible in its original autographs can be absolutely proven not to be the inspired and inerrant word of Jehovah God.
Answer: False. If an original document is unavailable for examination, how could anyone prove what it was not when it was written?
Five: Men should draw only such conclusions as are warranted by the evidence.
Answer: True. I sincerely hope that Mr. McDonald will practice this during the debate.
Before examining the hodgepodge of syllogisms that Mr. McDonald subjected us to in his first affirmative manuscript, I should first address a few tangent issues that he raised. In the unfinished Laws-Till Debate, I took the position that real knowledge can be acquired only through the five senses, a position that Laws was never able to refute before he threw in the towel and quit. Even though the word know doesn't appear in either proposition in this debate, Mr. McDonald, for some reason, felt compelled to try his hand where Mr. Laws had failed, so in his preliminary remarks McDonald took me to task for having said the obvious in my other debate, i. e., that knowledge can be acquired only through one or more of the five senses. "Does he really believe that this is the only way of obtaining knowledge?" McDonald asked. My answer to his question is, "Yes, I really do believe that this is the only way to acquire knowledge," and I can't understand why he doesn't believe it too.
To "refute" my position on this issue, Mr. McDonald quoted Geisler's "five corresponding logics or criteria for validating beliefs" (emphasis added) that were listed in Introduction to Philosophy: "They are faith or authoritarianism, subjectivism, rationalism, empiricism and pragmatism" (pp. 103, 104). Apparently, Mr.McDonald didn't seem to notice that he was equivocating on the very first page of his manuscript. I have no quarrel with Geisler's criteria for validating beliefs, but belief is not knowledge. As stated above in my answer to McDonald's second question, faith is "belief in things for which there is insufficient evidence to establish fact," so the nature of faith or belief makes it something entirely different from knowledge. Knowledge is that which we know as a result of sensory perceptions; faith or belief is that which we think might be true but cannot actually demonstrate to be true. I know, for example, that life in various forms exists on the planet Earth because I have seen it, heard it, smelled it, felt it, and tasted it many times. On the other hand, I can only believe that life exists on other planets in other solar systems. I have never seen or heard or smelled or tasted or felt alien life forms; therefore, I cannot know that they exist. I don't even know if other solar systems exist.
All of this is so obvious that I can't understand why Mr. McDonald can't see the truth of it. I understand even less why he would even bother to bring the matter up in a debate that does not require either of us to prove that we know anything in particular to be true. I hope that my comments on this matter will lay it to rest so that we can concentrate on relevant issues through the rest of the debate, but if Mr. McDonald should want to bring it up again, I urge him to do us all a favor and tell us one thing--just one thing--he knows that he came to know by means other than his physical senses. If he can do that, it would certainly settle the matter in his favor.
I was challenged to prove, only by the use of my senses, that "Moses never existed or that he did not write the Pentateuch" and to do this "without using the authorities or the testimony of others." First of all, I feel no need to prove that Moses never existed. What would be the point of it? If Mr. McDonald is looking for a concession, I'll give him one and freely admit that there is no way I could possibly prove that Moses did not exist just as he cannot prove that the Grecian mythological characters Agamemnon, Paris, or Helen of Troy did not exist. A more appropriate challenge would be for him to prove that Moses did exist, because the burden-of-responsibility principle of argumentation obligates the claimant of a belief or proposition to prove that it is true. The doubter of the proposition has no responsibility to prove that it is not true. If, for example, I should proclaim my belief that alien life exists on an earthlike planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri A, our nearest celestial neighbor, McDonald should feel no obligation to prove that mybelief is not true. It would be my responsibility to prove that it is true. So by the same token, I feel no obligation to prove that the Moses of the Pentateuch did not exist. If McDonald, for some reason, thinks it is vitally important to prove that this Moses was a real person, let's see him prove that he was.
To prove that Moses, if he was a real person, did not write the Pentateuch is another matter entirely. In the Pentateuch, we have a tangible document whose authorship tradition attributes to Moses, but certain internal evidences in this document clearly indicate that Moses could not have written at least some sections of it. For example, I am sure that even Mr. McDonald will admit that Moses didn't write the last chapter of Deuteronomy, which records the death of Moses. How could a person write a book that reports his own death and burial? Not even a man with the power to part the waters of the Red Sea could perform such a feat as that, could he? Furthermore, this last chapter in the Pentateuch shows signs of having been written by someone who lived long after the time of Moses, because it declared that the location of Moses' sepulchre was known by no man "unto this day" (v:6). Someone writing just a short time after the death of Moses would not have used the expression "unto this day" to emphasize the secretiveness of Moses' burial place; it is an intensifying expression that would have had meaning only to someone writing years after Moses had died.
A similar clue to the time that this section of the Pentateuch was written can be found in verse 10: "And there hath not arisen a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom Jehovah knew face to face." This was obviously intended as a special tribute to Moses, and whoever wrote it had to be someone writing from the perspective of a person who had lived long after Moses' death and had thus had the opportunity to judge succeeding prophets in terms of Moses' greatness. Otherwise, the statement becomes completely meaningless. What honor would there have been in the tribute if the only prophets to compare with Moses were his contemporaries or even those who had lived within a relatively few years of his death? For one thing, as I will soon show, there just weren't enough prophets in the Hebrew society of Moses' day and the immediate years after him to have given a contemporary of Moses a basis for making the comparison clearly intended in this statement.
Another thing to consider is the statement's comparison of Moses to the prophets "in Israel." The nation of Israel didn't even exist until after the conquest of Canaan, and prophets worthy of comparison to Moses didn't arise in Israel until long after that, a fact that can easily be verified by checking the word prophet in a reliable concordance. Judges 6:8 tells of a prophet whom Yahweh sent unto the children of Israel, but not until the book of First Samuel do we begin to read of prophets in numbers large enough to give the tribute to Moses in Deuteronomy 34:10 the special significance the comparison intended. Obviously, then, this statement had to have been written by someone who lived well after the time of Moses. If Mr. McDonald disputes this conclusion, perhaps he will be kind enough to show us what is wrong with it.
Other anachronisms in the Pentateuch discredit the tradition that it was written by Moses himself. The Song of Miriam, presumably sung immediately after the crossing of the Red Sea, told of the "chiefs of Edom" and "the mighty men of Moab" who trembled from having heard of this great feat (Exodus 15:14-15); the lyrics referred also to "the inhabitants of Canaan" who had "melted away" from the "terror and dread" that had fallen upon them after hearing of Yahweh's deliverance of his people (vv:15-16). Now common sense should tell even Mr. McDonald that in the time period of this alleged event (the crossing of the Red Sea), news of it could not have spread rapidly enough for the lyrics of this song, presumably composed and sung immediately after the miraculous crossing, to include the information in these verses. The chiefs of Edom, the mighty men of Moab, and the inhabitants of Canaan simply could not have received news of this event as quickly as the context of the story implies. Apparently, then, this was a song that was written by someone other than Moses or, more probable, a patriotic hymn that had developed over a period of years. If neither of these, at least it is a glaring discrepancy in the Bible text, and either way Mr. McDonald's proposition is in deep trouble.
Basically, the issue of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch boils down to this: proponents of it have little more than unreliable tradition to support their claim; opponents of it have tangible internal evidences like those that I have just noted. Much more could be said on this subject, but in order to respond just to Mr. McDonald's major points, I must go on to other matters.
Inerrancy proponents seem to see some kind of disgrace in simple modesty. Before Mr. Laws backed out of his debating commitment, he asked me if I could possibly be wrong in my opinion of the Bible, and I answered, as quoted by Mr. McDonald, "Yes, it is possible that I am wrong...." This was said after I had explained that from my early experiences in dogmatically believing I was right and couldn't possibly be wrong in my view of the Bible (that would have been the inerrancy doctrine, which I now reject), I had learned that it was unwise to take the position on any issue that I could not be wrong. From Laws' reaction to that answer, one would have thought that I had committed the sin against the Holy Spirit. I was "glaringly inconsistent" and "contradictory"--everything but honest and sincere. Now along comes Mr. McDonald to take up, apparently, where Laws left off. In this debate, I have agreed to affirm that "there are intertextual contradictions and inconsistencies, historical and scientific inaccuracies, failed prophecies, absurdities, moral atrocities... and other disparities recorded in the Bible that disprove its claim to be the inspired word of God," and somehow McDonald sees this proposition as a contradiction to my answer to Laws' question. So I'll have to ask McDonald to explain himself. Since when is a modest admission that one might possibly be wrong in one of his beliefs a contradiction of the belief? Whatever a person believes, there is always a possibility that he might be wrong in that belief. Only a dogmatist would claim that he just couldn't possibly be wrong.
The ellipsis [...] that McDonald used in quoting my answer to Laws' question suggests that I will need to check very carefully all quotations he uses in this debate, because he seems not to be above doctoring them to suit his purposes. My complete answer was this: "Yes, it is possible that I am wrong, but I must insist that Dr. Laws prove he is right before I admit that I am wrong" (emphasis added). The full statement plainly shows that I was not expressing any serious doubts about the soundness of my position but only acknowledging a possibility that I could be wrong. To Mr. McDonald I will issue the same challenge: he should prove he is right before thinking that "for all practical purposes the debate could end right here." What is it with these dogmatic inerrantists anyway? Hardly before the Laws-Till Debate had gotten up a good head of steam, Mr. Laws gave up and quit. Now Mr. McDonald is suggesting it's time to end this one. Maybe he should stop thinking about whether the debate should end now and concentrate on defending his proposition. Its defense will need all the concentration he can muster.
The final tangent issue Mr. McDonald led us into before at last getting down to the definition of his proposition was my opinion of Joseph Wheless's book Is It God's Word? He spent an entire page discussing (but not refuting) a discrepancy that Wheless identified in the age attributed to Methuselah in Genesis 5:26-27 and the time the flood began (Gen.7:11). So I need to have my role in this debate clarified. Am I supposed to be refuting the arguments that Mr. McDonald presents in support of his inerrancy position, or am I supposed to be defending Joseph Wheless's book? I thought it was the former.
Mr. McDonald was correct in saying that I regard Wheless's book as the most convincing anti-inerrancy book I have ever read. This doesn't mean, however, that I agree with everything in the book, so I'm not obligated to defend Wheless's Methuselah-flood argument. Before the debate is over I will probably defend my proposition with some of the same points that Wheless made in his book, but until I do, Mr. McDonald should concentrate on advancing arguments to support his own proposition. It is sorely in need of support.
When he finally got around to defending his proposition, Mr. McDonald began with the following syllogism:
Major Premise: All total situations, the constituent elements of which are factual are total situations which are true.
Minor Premise: The total situation described by my proposition is a total situation the constituent elements of which are factual.
Conclusion: Therefore, the total situation described by my proposition is a total situation which is true.
On page 6 of his manuscript, McDonald correctly identified a principle of logic that explains why this argument is unsound. For an argument to be true, the premises must be true, and the conclusion must follow from the premises. McDonald's premises do necessitate his conclusion, so in that respect his argument is valid. In logic, however, there is a difference in truth and validity. To say that an argument is valid means only that the form of the argument is correct and that the conclusion necessarily follows the premises, but if an argument is sound, the form of the argument will be correct, its premises true, and its conclusion necessitated by the premises.
The problem with McDonald's argument is that the minor premise is not true. He can say all that he wants to that the total situation described by his proposition is a total situation with constituent elements that are true, but saying is one thing; proving is another. His proposition declares that "the Bible in its original autographs was verbally and fully inspired by Jehovah God and is therefore completely inerrant," so as explained in my answers to his third and fourth questions, he is taking a position that is impossible to prove. How can anyone prove anything, especially inerrancy and verbal inspiration, about documents that no one living today has ever seen or that no one in the past, when the original autographs presumably existed, left any critical analysis of? When Mr. McDonald answers that question satisfactorily, I will be happy to analyze his argument more in detail. Until then, the truth of at least one "constituent element" in his proposition will remain enough in doubt to reject his syllogism.
The same is true of the "constituent" arguments that followed his main syllogism. As I have already explained, these concerned completely irrelevant issues (the existence of God, evolution, the origin of the human respiratory system, etc.), so I don't intend to waste my time and the readers' time analyzing them. These matters are simply not issues in this debate. We are debating the origin of the Bible, not the origin of the universe or life on earth. McDonald contends that the Bible originated through a process of divine verbal inspiration, and I say that it didn't. An objective review of his first defense will show that he said very little that relates to what he is supposed to be doing. Let's hope that his second effort will be better.
A few of McDonald's "constituent" syllogisms do relate to his proposition, so I have no qualms about responding to them. I'm ready to respond to anything he says that is relevant to his proposition. One such thing was syllogism Two-B, page 12:
Major Premise: The Bible is either of divine origin or it is of human origin.
Minor Premise: The Bible is not of human origin.
Conclusion: Therefore, the Bible is of divine origin.
A problem with the major premise of this syllogism is its imprecision. What exactly does Mr. McDonald mean by the term divine? If he intends to limit its meaning to the deity worshipped by the ancient Hebrews, then a more exact term would have been Yahwistic. So is that what he meant, the Bible is either of Yahwistic origin or it is of human origin? If so, then he needs to explain why the Bible has to be either Yahwistic or human in its origin, because, as he anticipated, I can think of another term that would be just as defensible. That would be supernatural. By substituting it, his major premise could read, "The Bible is either of supernatural origin or it is of human origin," and this change would validly allow for a possible origin of the Bible that Mr. McDonald, before I had even had a chance to respond to his syllogism, tried unsuccessfully to head off at the pass.
His anticipation of this counterargument shows just how embarrassing some of the major doctrines of their "inerrant" Bible can be to fundamentalists. In this particular case, the Bible teaches the existence of a dualistic spiritual realm in which the omniscient Yahweh with his spiritual hosts reigns supreme but allows, for reasons that only a fundamentalist mind can comprehend, Satan and his angels to wage constant warfare against him and his celestial beings. Being a fundamentalist, McDonald must accept this dualistic doctrine of the Bible, which in attributing exceptional powers to Satan (2 Thess. 2:9; Eph. 2:2; Col. 1:13) poses a real problem for McDonald's syllogism.
I explained that problem at length in the Laws-Till Debate in response to a similar argument that Mr. Laws tried to make. Here is what I said:
The Bible teaches the existence of a supernatural realm in which God is only one of many spiritual beings, for in creating "all things," God created both "things visible (material or natural) and things invisible (spiritual or supernatural)" (Col. 1:16). The invisible (supernatural) realm of the Bible consists of two major divisions: God and his angels; Satan and his angels. Satan (the devil) is a pesky little rascal; he walks about the earth as a roaring lion seeking victims to devour (1 Peter 5:8). (The first two chapters of Job present him engaged in this sort of activity.) He has power to work "signs and lying wonders" (2 Thess. 2:9). He is, in fact, "the prince of the powers of the air" (Eph 2:2), a title suggesting that the other creatures in his dominion have also been endowed with extraordinary power, and elsewhere the New Testament indicates that this is indeed so. It tells us that Satan has demons in his realm that have been sent to take possession of people in the natural world and inflict all sorts of miseries upon them from blindness and deafness to apparent insanity and epilepsy (Matt. 12:22; Luke 4:35; 8:27-36; 9:38-42). Whatever these "demons" were, they were intelligent creatures who knew who Jesus was (Mark 1:34) and had the ability to converse in human language (Luke 4:33; 8:32). In a word, the Bible depicts Satan and his angels as powerful supernatural creatures who are quite active in the affairs of man. So among many other nefarious deeds they have performed, these "powers of darkness" enabled pharaoh's magicians in the initial stages of the Egyptian plagues to match Moses and Aaron tit for tat. Furthermore, they are constantly striving to thwart the purposes of God, and Christians are warned to be on guard to withstand them (1 Peter 5:8; Eph 6:11-13), pp. 36-37.
Earlier in that debate, I had made the same point in a counterargument that Laws ignored, saying only that it was "interesting" and would be "dealt with in a future presentation of the affirmative." At that time, after reviewing what the Bible taught about the powers exercised by Satan, I made some observations that Mr. McDonald only partially quoted in his first manuscript. Here is the entire statement:
(I)f this Satan that Bible fundamentalists believe in has the power to work miracles on earth to thwart the purpose of God, how can we be sure that one of his miracles was not the "inspiration" of a book (the Bible) that was intended to deceive the world into accepting a false, albeit transcendent, image of God? Such a possibility would be entirely consistent with Bible teachings. Satan is depicted therein as a deceiver of the whole world (Rev. 12:9), who uses wily and crafty devices to achieve his purpose (Eph. 6:11; 2 Cor. 2:11), so if Satan has both the desire and the power to deceive the whole world, how do we know that he didn't do so through the book we know as the Bible? After all, if Satan wanted to deceive the world about the nature and being of God, what better way could he do it than by persuading the world to perceive God as a petty, barbaric war-deity who uses intimidation and moral atrocity as the means of imposing his will on mankind (p. 10)?
The Biblical teachings summarized in these two quotations underscore the fallacy in Mr. McDonald's argument. If a dualistic spiritual realm really exists, as the Bible says, then there aren't just two possible explanations for its origin as claimed in the major premise of McDonald's syllogism. There is yet a third one in addition to the divine (Yahwistic) and human ones. The Bible could be Satanic in its origin.
Mr. Laws never got around to dealing with this counterargument in a "future presentation of the affirmative." When the going got too tough for him, he quit. Anticipating that I might use the same counterargument again, McDonald did at least take a stab at "refuting" it, so let's take a look at what he considers "refutation." "Satan could not have written the Bible," he said, "because the Bible teaches that which is good. The Bible defines that which is good, and it claims that there is no good in Satan. How could Satan possibly have written that which would cause men to live good moral lives (Gal. 5:19-23)? Therefore, Satan could not have written the Bible" (p. 13).
If Mr. McDonald weren't so serious, what he said here would be funny. The Old Testament almost bleeds with moral atrocities perpetrated presumably in obedience to Yahweh's commands. Yahweh spoke and Saul, the first king of Israel, slaughtered the Amalekites--men and women, infants and sucklings--and their livestock (1 Samuel 15:1-9). Is this Mr. McDonald's idea of "teach(ing) that which is good"? When the Hebrew hosts returned from their slaughter and pillage of the Midianites, Moses, the meekest man on the face of the earth (Num. 12:3) "was wroth" with his officers of the host and captains of thousands for having brought back captive women and children, so he commanded them to "kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him" (Num. 31:17), but Yahweh had better plans for the "women-children that have not known man by lying with him" (v:18). These the men were to "keep alive for yourselves." Is this McDonald's idea of "teaching that which is good"? Second Samuel 21:1-9 tells the story of how David, under orders from Yahweh to appease the wrath of the Gibeonites for an atrocity committed by Saul, hanged seven of Saul's grandsons. Is executing innocent people for a crime committed by someone else Mr. McDonald's idea of "teaching that which is good"? Maybe it is. Bible fundamentalists sometimes have to believe strange things in order to protect their precious inerrancy doctrine.
Is there any need for me to continue this? I could fill the rest of this manuscript with summations of other atrocities presumably committed under direct orders from Yahweh, and I believe that Mr. McDonald will have the good sense not to challenge me on this. I could have mentioned the bitter lust for vengeance of the psalmist in Babylonian captivity whom Yahweh presumably inspired to write, "Destructive daughter of Babel, a blessing on the man who treats you as you have treated us, a blessing on him who takes and dashes your babies against the rock" (Psalm 137:8-9, JB)! I could have mentioned the trial by ordeal by which a wife suspected of adultery was "set before Jehovah (Yahweh)" and required to drink "the water of bitterness," a concoction made by mixing "holy water" with dust taken from the tabernacle floor; only if she survived the ordeal without having her body swell and her thighs rot away could she be declared innocent (Lev. [sic] 5:11-31). In the event of such, the husband, of course, was to be "free from iniquity" (v:31). I could have mentioned many such things, but these are more than enough to show the absurdity of McDonald's claim that the Bible "teaches that which is good." It does teach many things that are "good," but only someone whose allegiance to a ridiculous belief in Bible inerrancy has blinded him to the truth would deny that it also teaches many things that are not just bad but atrociously bad.
For the sake of argument, however, let's assume that McDonald is right, that the Bible does teach "that which is good." Let's even assume that it teaches only that which is good. Even if that were so, his argument would fail. As if he saw the question as irrefutable proof of his position, he asked, "How could Satan possibly have written that which would cause men to live good moral lives?" Well, I really don't know why; I'll just leave him to argue with his verbally inspired, inerrant word of God. The Apostle Paul, after warning the Corinthian Christians about false apostles and deceitful workers who were "fashioning themselves into apostles of Christ," then said, "And no marvel; for even Satan fashioneth himself into an angel of light" (2 Cor. 11:13-14). So maybe this is the answer to Mr. McDonald's question. Maybe for reasons not understood, Satan had a reason for inspiring the authorship of this book that McDonald says teaches "that which is good." After all, if God's ways are higher than man's ways (Is. 55:9), as fundamentalist preachers like to remind us, maybe Satan's ways are higher than ours too, and in the hereafter we will come to understand what his purpose was in giving us the Bible.
So that I won't be misunderstood, I want to assure the readers that I do not believe Satan inspired the Bible; I don't even believe Satan exists. What I am doing is exposing the unsoundness of McDonald's syllogism, and obviously it is unsound because its major premise didn't provide for all possible sources of the Bible's origin. To those who might think it is absurd even to think that Satan could have inspired the authorship of the Bible, I'll tell them the same thing I said to readers of the Laws-Till Debate. They should bone up on their church history, because many Gnostics, the chief sectarian rivals of Pauline Christianity that Mr. McDonald preaches, believed exactly that. Some of them--some, not all--believed the world was so evil that it couldn't have been created by God, so they postulated an evil entity whom they called the Demiurge and put the blame on him for creating a world in which evil thrived. Some of these Gnostic sects even believed that Yahweh, the deity who had given the Hebrews their Torah, was the Demiurge. In the early centuries, Gnosticism vied with Pauline Christianity for dominance but eventually lost the struggle, so if the winds of political and social chance and circumstance had blown in even slightly different directions during this time, Mr. McDonald and his colleagues might have found themselves members of a church that rejects the Old Testament because of a belief that the Demiurge Yahweh had inspired its authorship. As absurd as it may sound to modern Christian ears attuned to Pauline doctrines, this belief made sense to the Gnostics, and it would make sense to Mr. McDonald too if he had inherited it after generations and generations of wide acceptance. It would seem as sensible to him as absurd stories like the virgin birth, the transfiguration, the resurrection, and the ascension. As utterly incomprehensible as the phenomenon is to logical minds, there seems to be nothing like antiquity to give a ridiculous story plausibility.
There is also a problem in the minor premise of this syllogism. "The Bible is not of human origin," says the minor premise. So what is McDonald's proof that "the Bible is not of human origin"? Are you ready for this? He said that "bad men would not have written it because it condemns their evil-doings." Yeah, sure! The Bible sanctioned slavery, murder, injustice, lying, and you name it. So is that McDonald's idea of condemning evil-doings? For the sake of argument, especially since my word allotment is quickly running out, let's accept his claim that bad men could not have written the Bible because it condemns their evil doing. That still leaves us with the possibility that good men wrote the Bible. But good men could not have written the Bible, McDonald said, because "the Bible claims to have been inspired by God, and if good men did write the Bible, then they would have had to lie, and good men do not lie." Did he really say that? Yes, he did. I double checked it to make sure he did.
This "argument" disregarded all possibility of honest but mistaken sincerity. If a person tells a falsehood, it is not a lie if he honestly believes it to be the truth. A lie is "a false statement or piece of information deliberately presented as being true," (The American Heritage Dictionary, 1975, p. 754, emphasis added). It is entirely possible--and I believe very probable--that the Bible writers who claimed inspiration sincerely believed that they were being directed by Yahweh to write what they wrote. If so, they were merely good men who were honestly mistaken in claiming inspiration. Hence, it is very likely that the Bible was written by good, uninspired men, so there goes Mr. McDonald's syllogism. It has been shot so full of holes that it will need major repairs before he can ever expect to float it again. He can't even formulate a sound syllogism to represent the reasoning process by which agnostics reject the inerrancy doctrine. He stated it this way:
Major Premise: To err is human.
Minor Premise: The Bible was written with human agency.
Conclusion: Therefore, the Bible has error in it.
The conclusion in this syllogism is true, but it was derived from an imprecisely worded and often erroneous major premise. The premise implies that any task performed by humans will involve error, and that just isn't so. It's possible for humans to write books and do other tasks without committing errors. For his syllogism to be valid, then, the major premise would have to be more precise, perhaps something like this: All books written by human agency contain errors. The syllogism would then be valid but unsound, because its conclusion would be derived from at least one premise that is untrue. As just noted, books written by human agency don't necessarily have to contain errors.
Mr. McDonald may know skeptics and agnostics who reason in the way he described, but I certainly don't. I can only speak for myself, but I rejected Bible inerrancy through a reasoning process represented by the following syllogism:
Major Premise: Any book verbally inspired by an omniscient, omnipotent deity would necessarily be entirely free of textual discrepancies and errors.
Minor Premise: The Bible contains textual discrepancies and errors.
Conclusion: Therefore, the Bible was not verbally inspired by an omniscient, omnipotent deity.
Now this is a syllogism that is both valid and sound. McDonald will argue that the minor premise is untrue, but when it is my turn to take the affirmative role, I will present more than enough evidence to prove that the premise is indeed true. Until then, he should be patient and wait for me to formulate my own syllogisms to support my position. He obviously has more than enough to do looking for evidence to use in defense of his proposition.
At this point, I'm going to have to educate him on the fallacy of begging the question as I have had to do in every debate I have had with inerrantists. Begging the question occurs when a debater expects his audience to assume the truth of something that his proposition obligates him to prove. We have seen this throughout his efforts to bombard us with "logical" syllogisms, but it was especially evident in his inerrancy-of-the-scriptures syllogism:
Major Premise: If God wrote the Bible, and if it claims inerrancy, and if God cannot lie, then the Bible is free from error.
Minor Premise: God wrote the Bible, and it does claim inerrancy, and God cannot lie.
Conclusion: Therefore, the Bible is free from error.
What evidence did McDonald present to prove the "truth" of his minor premise? He did what all fundamentalists do when their backs are against the wall on this issue. He confused quoting scripture with proving, and this is begging the question gone to seed. His proposition obligates him to prove that the Bible is the verbally inspired, inerrant word of God, but, rather than doing that, he wants us to assume that the proposition is true and then let him go on from there to quote scriptures to settle matters that are very much in doubt. Earlier he spoke of the debate, for all practical purposes, needing to end now, and maybe he is right if all he intends to do is beg the question on issues he should be trying to prove.
He quoted four scriptures, for example, to "prove" that "God inspired men to write the Bible." Well, I certainly don't deny that the Bible claims to be inspired of God, but I do deny that the claim is true. Writers can claim anything they want to, so how do we know that these men who claimed to be inspired of God really were? He quoted John 10:35--the scriptures cannot be broken--to "prove" that "the Bible claims inerrancy." Well, again, I know that the Bible claims inerrancy, but the fact that it does claim inerrancy doesn't automatically make it true. That the Bible is inerrant is the very thing he is supposed to be proving. Once he establishes that, I will be willing to accept as proof whatever scriptures he wants to quote. But until then, he should concentrate on doing what he is supposed to be doing, i.e., presenting internal and external evidences that would prove (1) the Bible was verbally inspired by Jehovah God and (2) the Bible is completely inerrant.
God cannot lie, his minor premise said. And how did he "prove" that this is true? He quoted Titus 1:2 and Hebrews 6:18. In other words, he begged the question and in so doing completely ignored the fact that the Bible elsewhere contradicts the passages he quoted. First Kings 22:1-36 tells a quaint little fable that depicted Yahweh not only as a liar but an inept deity who, unable to think of an appropriate lie that he could use to lure king Ahab to his death, enlisted the aid of the celestial host surrounding his throne to help him find a way. Finally, a spirit came forth with a plan to become a "lying spirit" in the mouth of Ahab's prophets. The plan pleased Yahweh, and he went with it--if anyone can actually believe a yarn as far-fetched as this--and it is only one example of many absurdities in the Bible. Be that as it may, since Mr. McDonald believes in the inerrancy of the scriptures, he must accept the story and explain to us just how it can be harmonized with the passages he quoted that say God cannot lie. I will look forward to seeing him do that. Perhaps he has another syllogism he can spring on us.
Obviously, Mr. McDonald didn't do so well his first time around. Let's hope for a better effort from him next time.
Go to McDonald's Second Defense.
