Mr. Jackson has expressed the hope that our debate will result in a renewal of the faith I once had. As a former preacher and missionary for the Churches of Christ, I can understand what motivates this hope, but I must warn him that realizing his desire will require a logical, convincing defense of his proposition. Speculative arguments and far-fetched, how-it-could-have-been scenarios so typical of Bible inerrancy spokesmen will not persuade me. Meanwhile, I will match him with a statement of my own hope, which is that Mr. Jackson will see as the debate progresses that he is devoting his life to a false belief. I hope then as much for his conversion as he does for mine.
Mr. Jackson, of course, can't understand this. He has already said that he and others in the Churches of Christ wonder why I am so "evangelistic" in promoting my agnosticism. When I was a Church-of-Christ minister, preaching essentially the same doctrines Mr. Jackson believes, he didn't wonder why I was evangelistic about my beliefs. That was something that made perfectly good sense to him. Like many other Bible fundamentalists, he seems to believe that skeptics should keep quiet so that he and his inerrancy confederates can continue to dupe an uninformed public into thinking that no substantial opposition to their belief exists. Well, I'm sorry, but I can't accommodate him. The moral and social mischief that the Bible inerrancy doctrine has left in its two-thousand-year wake is reason enough for my evangelistic opposition to it. I see no reason to apologize.
I can't think of a better way to begin my rebuttal of Mr. Jackson's first affirmative manuscript than to point out that there is nothing at all unique about his claim that the Bible is the verbally inspired word of God. Books allegedly inspired by God are almost as commonplace as religion itself. Moslems have the Koran, Zoroastrians the Avesta, Hindus the Vedas, Mormons the Book of Mormon, and so on through a seemingly endless list of world religions. The faithful in each religion that produced these sacred writings fervently believe that their book is a true, and in most cases the only, revelation from God, and no amount of logical reasoning can dissuade them from the irrational thinking that produced this faith. In this respect, Mr. Jackson finds himself in questionable company. Like the faithful of so many other major religions, he is claiming inspiration for a "sacred book" with nothing to support his claim but traditions and emotions.
Mr. Jackson said that he does not envy my task in this debate, but if anyone's task is not to be envied, it is his. He must show us why we should take his claim for the Bible any more seriously than similar claims of inspiration that are made for the many other allegedly sacred books. I looked very carefully through Mr. Jackson's first manuscript--I have read it at least ten times--for evidence that would make his proposition seem even halfway credible, but I found none. The closest he came to defending it was the discussion of his six points under the subtitle "Arguments Advanced," but if the readers will look objectively at his comments in this section, they should see that his evidence really amounts to no evidence at all.
In introducing these points, Mr. Jackson said that he would not "state that any one point is the sum whereupon the Bible is proven to be that which I claim." Apparently, then, he believes in a sort of the-whole-is-equal-to-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts approach to proving his proposition, because each point that he listed, in and of itself, proves exactly nothing. In all of the math classes I ever took, nothing added together six times equaled nothing, and I intend to show that this is exactly what Mr. Jackson's six points add up to. Nothing.
"The existence of God and his communication to man" was the basis of his first point. If God exists, he argues, then one would "expect that He would have a will or word for man and would take steps to make man aware of that word." The main problem with this argument, if it can even legitimately be considered an argument, is that it begins with a very big if. The existence of God has never been established and furthermore cannot be established in man's present state of technology, so the essential weakness of this point is that it depends on an assumption. Logic based on assumption proves nothing.
Prior to presenting this "argument," Mr. Jackson challenged me to answer a question directly related to the same point. "If God does exist," he asked, "and has a will for man, how do you think God reveals that will?" In this question, we have not just an assumption but the piling of assumption onto assumption. A slight change in the wording (without altering the meaning) will make this more apparent: "If God does exist and (if he) has a will for man, how do you think God reveals that will?" Not satisfied then just to assume that God exists, Mr. Jackson also wants to assume that this God who may exist has "a will for man." He is trying to use an if-if approach to proving his proposition, and I'm not going to let him get away with it. If he has any real evidence to present, I would like to see it. If he doesn't, I urge him to stop if-iffing around and just admit that his proposition cannot be proven. It has to be accepted by faith.
So that I won't be accused of evading his question, I will give him an answer. Even if I grant his first assumption (that God does exist), there is no reason to "expect," as Mr. Jackson so facilely assumed, that this god "would have a will or word for man." Why would that necessarily follow? Does this god who may exist have a will or word for dogs and cats or horses and pigs? If so, where is the Bible that God gave to dogs, cats, horses, and pigs? Microbiologists have established that the genetic composition of chimpanzee cells is 99+% the same as human cells. Chimpanzees, then, fall less than one percent short of being humans, and this raises an interesting question for Mr. Jackson. Does God have a "will or word" for chimpanzees? Since Mr. Jackson believes that God created chimpanzees, if he says that God has no "will or word" for chimpanzees, as I'm sure he will, he will be admitting that God could create highly intelligent creatures without having a "will or word" for them. Are we to assume, then, that just a one percent higher elevation on the creation scale somehow required God to have a "will or word" for his human creatures?
Even if I continue in my generosity and grant Mr. Jackson his second assumption, i. e., God has a will or word for man, I can't see that this would in any way prove that the Bible is the product of that will or word. Why couldn't it be that the Koran, as millions of Moslems passionately believe, is the result of God's will for man? Or why couldn't it be the Avesta or the Vedas or the Tripitaka or the Book of Mormon? Why would it have to be the Bible? I wish I could see some substance in Mr. Jackson's argument, but I honestly can't.
Obviously, then, my answer to Mr. Jackson's question is, "I don't know." If God does indeed exist and if he does indeed have a will for man, I honestly don't know how he has chosen to reveal that will. I just wish that he would do a better job of it than he has been doing, because so far his way has been a dismal failure. The hopeless confusion in the religious world is all the proof I need of God's failure to reveal his will to man in a clearly discernible way if, as Mr. Jackson claims, God does exist and has a will or word for man. It does seem that the perfect God Mr. Jackson described in his second argument could have revealed his will for man in some unequivocal way that would have averted all this confusion. He must like confusion, even though the Bible insists that he is not "a God of confusion" (1 Cor. 14:33).
The perfection of God's nature was the basis of Mr. Jackson's second point. As I understood the argument, God is perfect, so his word would therefore have to be perfect (inerrant). Well and good, but how does Mr. Jackson know that God is perfect? The Bible tells him so! And what is Mr. Jackson supposed to be proving? He is supposed to be proving that the Bible is perfect (inerrant). If then he would find himself a book on elementary logic and read what it says about begging the question, perhaps he will see what is wrong with this argument. His proposition obligates him to prove two things: (1) God verbally inspired the Bible and (2) the Bible is inerrant. He wants to assume, rather than prove, the first point (beg the question) and then use that assumption as proof of the second point. This is circular reasoning gone to seed, and it's not going to work.
Mr. Jackson sees proof of divine inspiration in the antiquity of the Bible, but he failed to explain why the age of a book would in any way indicate that God had a hand in its origin. The Epic of Gilgamesh, a sacred document of the ancient Sumerians, antedated the oldest books of the Bible by several centuries, and even parts of the Zoroastrian Avesta and the Hindu Vedas are older than some of the oldest books of the Bible. As a matter of fact, most reputable Bible scholars recognize that the source of much of the material in Genesis 1-11 was the Gilgamesh epic. I seriously doubt, though, if Mr. Jackson would accept the age of these books as evidence of divine origin. Why then does he think that antiquity would in any way prove that God inspired the Bible? If he will just explain why he thinks the Bible's antiquity proves its inspiration, I will be happy to examine his argument and write a response to it.
Mr. Jackson further declares that the Bible's consistency of theme, its fulfillment of prophecy, and its scientific foreknowledge provide additional proof of divine origin, but he did little more than state these points and cite a few unexposited scripture references in their support. I assume that he intends to develop these points with specific details as the debate progresses. At least I hope he intends to develop them; I don't relish at all the prospect of debating another inerrancy advocate who confuses quoting scripture with proving claims. So when he delineates a specific example of consistency of theme or prophetic fulfillment or scientific foreknowledge in the Bible that suggests divine intervention in its writing, I will gladly respond to the argument.
Whether he ever does this or not doesn't really matter. In defending my proposition, I intend to show that obvious disparities in the Bible text, such as textual contradictions, thematic inconsistencies, failed prophecies, scientific errors, and such like, clearly disprove the inerrancy claim. In due time, then, the readers will see that perfection in the Bible exists only in the wishful imagination of people who base their beliefs on emotions and traditions rather than facts.
To conclude my rebuttal, I urge the readers to think with their heads and not with their hearts. The Bible is no more inspired of God than the many other allegedly sacred books in the religious world. Practically every "argument" Mr. Jackson presented in the first defense of his proposition could be used to "prove" the divine inspiration of the others, so what we have here is a simple case of what proves too much proves nothing at all. This is the situation Mr. Jackson finds himself in as the debate continues.
Go to Jackson's Second Rebuttal.
