So what criteria do you use to determine which things are inaccuracies or not?
Either it's all true, or you just might as well toss the whole thing out because you can never be sure what's correct or not.
For His own reasons, he chose to give us a very high degree of confidence in the Resurrection and not nearly so much in Genesis. I don't pretend to understand his reasons.
But He wouldn't have made a universe the way he did, leaving clear clues all over about its immensity and ancientness, if he intended us not to use our reason to discriminate between parts of the Bible that must be accepted as true, as is, and parts that must be accepted as true metaphor.
It makes the job a lot harder. But it doesn't relieve us of the responsibility of applying our God given reason to do the best we can.
I wanted to address this statement specifically because it is a huge stumbling block for a lot of Christians. I don't think this is correct at all. As I said in my previous post, the case for the Resurrection is overwhelming. Do we throw that out because the Jewish scholars in about 1000 BC who compiled the Pentateuch made some mistakes? Or because exaggerations crept into the oral history of the Jewish people over millenia?
Your argument is what the humanists want us to say. Then all they have to do is find one contradiction in the old testament (easy to do--have you noticed that there are two different creation stories in Genesis, that are somewhat contradictory on major points), repeat the contradiction over and over and destroy the faith of young people.
If you accept the the humanist premise that there is no basis for faith unless every word is provably true, you are setting up our young people for grim lives of athiesm and much worse after they die.
The resurrection is manifestly true. And that is all a Christian really needs.
“Either it’s all true, or you just might as well toss the whole thing out because you can never be sure what’s correct or not.”
OK, lets apply that little gem of reasoning to science: We KNOW its not all true, esp. physics. Eve stuff we have been pretty sure about for centuries gets updated/changed as new info. comes in. For example, Newton’s Second Law (F=ma) was pretty settled, but under Modified Theory - a relatively new update - it may be wrong for certain small a’s (has to do with how galaxies may hold together). So, using your reasoning, guess we’d better “toss the whole thing (science) out.”
That's why I "tossed the whole thing out". Couldn't figure out which parts of the Bible were true and which parts weren't, and since a 6000 year old universe is delusional. Well...
Courtesy ping