There was no surprise in Mr. Jackson's rejection of my suggestion that we add three manuscripts to our original format of five exchanges on each proposition. I had hoped that he would accept the proposal so that he could select what he thinks are the best four of his six "arguments" and then devote one entire manuscript to the development of each. Although this plan would have fallen far short of providing in-depth examinations of his main points, it would have certainly been an improvement over the hit-and-run approach that he has used throughout the defense of his proposition. At least, our readers would have had the opportunity to examine extended discussions of Mr. Jackson's "best" points to see what kind of reliable evidence, if any, can be presented in their support. As it is, they will have to settle for a scrap of this said about that, a scrap of that said about this, etc., etc., etc., which ultimately led to not much being said about anything on an issue deserving much better representation than Mr. Jackson was able to give it.
His pride will probably not let him, but Mr. Jackson should apologize to the many sincere believers in Bible inerrancy who will read this debate expecting to find reliable arguments effectively presented in defense of a belief very important to them. Needless to say, they'll find nothing of the kind. They'll find instead a pathetic attempt--why not call a spade a spade?--to defend the inerrancy doctrine with flagrant conjecture, speculation, and assumption. Quite frankly, I'm embarrassed for them, so if he will not apologize, I will apologize for him. I would not want any inerrancy believer to think that I think the effort we have seen from Mr. Jackson is the best that could be presented in the Bible's defense. From past experience, I know that at least a few arguments worthy of consideration can be presented in support of the inerrancy doctrine. I had hoped to give our readers a chance to see both sides of these arguments competently represented, but obviously that isn't going to happen now.
Under the rules of debate, I cannot present in my final rebuttal any new materials that Mr. Jackson would not have an opportunity to reply to. In this case, that doesn't put me at any particular disadvantage, because, as our readers have no doubt already noticed, there was nothing in his last affirmative manuscript but more of the same--ad hominem harangues, question begging, unwarranted assumptions, and unsupported claims--so a general review of the main points Mr. Jackson has brought up during the "defense" of his proposition would probably be the best way to make my final response.
I repeatedly tried to get Mr. Jackson to see that argumentation is a two-part process: claims must be advanced and then supported by reasonable evidence. He has made a rash of claims but has presented very little evidence to support the claims. Analysis of the structure and organization of his manuscripts is enough to show that this is so. He opened the defense of his proposition by stating six unsupported points that, according to him, would collectively prove the inspiration of the Bible. In every affirmative manuscript thereafter, he repeated the points but systematically omitted evidence to support them. Such an approach to affirming his proposition can only be seen as a serious flaw in his defense strategy, because anyone who would think that six fully developed affirmative arguments on any issue, much less one as complicated as the inerrancy question, could be presented in only five double-spaced, six-page manuscripts must be either incredibly naive or deliberately demagogic or both.
Whenever I pointed this out, Mr. Jackson would accuse me of weeping and whining, but I mentioned it not to weep and whine but rather to urge him to accept the responsibilities incumbent on him as the affirmant. The affirming party in a debate is duty bound to present evidence to support his arguments. He can't just fire a volley of unsupported claims and call that debating.
Mr. Jackson wonders if I will accept "very likely" and "quite probably" statements from him when I am affirming my proposition, but I can't help wondering why he would want to use rebuttal methods that throughout the defense of his proposition he has insisted are unsound. Is this the best that we can expect from him, debating techniques that he has repeatedly condemned? In my rebuttals, I attacked his habit of making uncorroborated claims and listing unexplicated scriptures as supporting evidence; therefore, I don't intend to do either in the defense of my proposition. If they were unsound methods when he used them, they would be unsound methods for me too.
To answer his question more directly, I assure him that I absolutely will accept "very likely" and "quite probably" statements as legitimate rebuttals if he clearly and unequivocally establishes the "very likely" or "quite probably." The purpose of an argument is to arrive at an inevitable conclusion, i. e., a conclusion that is the only possible conclusion to arrive at. As I explained in my fourth rebuttal (page 19), when a debater examines the conclusion of an affirmant's argument and establishes that there are likely or probable conclusions besides the one arrived at in the argument, then the argument stands impeached until the affirmant discredits the likeliness or probability of the counterconclusions. If Jones is on trial for murder and his defense attorney, after the prosecution has rested its case, establishes that it was "very likely" or "quite probable" that the murder was committed by Smith, what jury would then return a guilty verdict? So it is with Mr. Jackson's arguments. Until he can establish the absolute inevitability of his conclusions, he has proved nothing. He argued, for example, that a reference to the "circle of the earth" (Isaiah 40:22) showed "scientific foreknowledge" of the earth's rotundity. In rebuttal, I established that it was "very likely" or "quite probable" that (1) the statement was figurative, (2) the word "circle" meant discoid, and (3) the spherical shape of the earth was already known in Isaiah's time. Any one of these likely or probable conclusions is sufficient to impeach the integrity of Mr. Jackson's argument, and he was never able to discredit the likeliness or probability of any of them. Without even attempting to establish the credibility of Matthew, he argued that Matthew 2:6 confirms the fulfillment of a prophecy stated in Micah 5:2 that the Messiah would be born in the village of Bethlehem. I established that Micah "very likely" or "quite probably" was referring to a family clan rather than a village, and in so doing I impeached the integrity of Mr. Jackson's argument. He has yet to "unimpeach" it.
Mine has been a perfectly legitimate approach to argumentation, and I will certainly welcome Mr. Jackson's application of it as he attempts to rebut my arguments. All I ask is that he establish clear likelihood or probability. He can't just claim probability; he must establish probability with logically delineated counterarguments. I suspect that he will have great difficulty doing that, because his approach so far seems to be, "If the Bible says it, that's all the proof we need." If that is all the proof we need, then I wonder why we are even debating. Does he think that I don't know that Matthew claimed that the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem fulfilled a prophecy made in Micah 5:2? Does he think that I don't know that Matthew claimed that Herod's slaughter of the children in Bethlehem fulfilled a prophecy made in Jeremiah 31:15? Of course, I know about these claims, but to rational-minded people mere claims like these are woefully insufficient to establish fact. Anyone in Matthew's time could have sat down and written a book that claimed prophetic fulfillment in contemporary events, but would the mere claim automatically make it so? Absolutely not--and that has been the major flaw in Mr. Jackson's debating strategy. He wants to conduct the debate on the assumption that if the Bible says A, B, and C, then A, B, and C are automatically true; no proof is required. That is flagrant question begging, because it asks me and the readers to assume the very thing that his proposition requires him to prove, i. e., the Bible was verbally inspired by Jehovah God and is therefore inerrant. In other words, Mr. Jackson has conducted his end of the debate on the assumption that the Bible is the inspired word of God because both it and tradition say that it is, and that ought to be enough to settle the issue. He will probably never be able to see the complete absurdity of that position.
He has applied the same fallacious thinking to every point he has tried to make in the debate. He has argued that the Bible's antiquity and its association with the nation of Israel somehow combine to "shout out a powerful argument," yet he has never explained why either or both of these facts have any particular significance in settling the issue we are debating. I have tried to point out that he would never accept the antiquity of the Avesta, the Vedas, and other allegedly sacred books as proof of divine inspiration, so why should he think that the Bible's antiquity in any way suggests divine origin for it? The fact is that the older a document is, the more likely it is to be inaccurate, because it would have had its origin in times of ignorance and superstition, when methods of copying and transmitting it were too primitive to provide reliable safeguards against the intrusion of redactions and errors.
The same applies to the Bible's association with the nation of Israel. There is absolutely nothing in that fact that would even suggest divine origin. There are volumes of pseudepigrapha that originated with the nation of Israel and date back to antiquity, yet Mr. Jackson would never accept their age and affiliation with the Israelites as proof of inspiration. Why then does he see the age of the Bible and its affiliation with Israel as proof of divine origin? If a Zoroastrian should argue that the age of the Avesta and its association with the Persian nation combine to "shout out a powerful argument," Mr. Jackson would laugh him right out of the room. Yet he tries to use the same illogical approach to proving the inspiration of the Bible.
We know of course why Mr. Jackson sees special significance in the Bible's association with the nation of Israel. The Bible depicted the Israelites as "the people of God." Rather than examining that claim to see if it was anything more than simplistic ethnocentrism, he has uncritically accepted it and leaped from that assumption to a second one: books long associated with the "people of God" must surely be Yahweh's inspired word. As I said in my first rebuttal (page 4), his approach to defending his proposition has consistently been a process of "piling assumption onto assumption."
Mr. Jackson wonders why I see "proof in what an encyclopedia states but will reject the Bible immediately." For one thing, I don't immediately reject information just because it is in the Bible. Some information recorded in the Bible is undoubtedly true and accurate, and my policy is to accept such information until I see reasons to reject it. On the other hand, I don't automatically accept something to be true just because it is written in the Bible. I subject it to critical analysis and then decide whether it is true or false. As for encyclopedic information, I have good reasons for considering it to be more reliable than biblical information. Most information recorded in encyclopedias is subjected to rigid critical analysis and scientific investigation; it is periodically updated as new discoveries are made. Neither has ever been true of the Bible. Although it was written in an unscientific, superstitious age, bibliolaters have fanatically protected it from critical analysis and revision as if absolute truth, once and for all, was known to the ancient mystics who wrote it. Perhaps Mr. Jackson can explain why, under these circumstances, he considers Bible information more reliable than encyclopedic information.
Go to Till's First Defense.
