Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David M Tate) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: inconsistencies in the Bible (digest of postings) Message-ID: Date: 15 Dec 89 04:41:24 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Univ. of Pittsburgh, Comp & Info Services Lines: 44 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu [In article hall@vice.ico.tek.com (Hal Lillywhite) lists a range of positions related in inerrancy. --clh] I'd go rather further than this. I defy you to come up with a definition of "inerrant" that makes any sense at all. The question is not "is the Bible inerrant", but "What on earth could these people possibly mean when they say 'inerrant'". Before you leap in and say "containing no errors", stop and think: what is an error? Is an error something contrary to historical fact? What about parables, then? If there never was a Prodigal Son, does that make the Bible "errant"? What about metaphor? When Jesus says "You are the salt of the earth", is he lying, because we know we're not really salt? If Eve was actually made from Adam's zyphoid process, and not an actual 'rib', does that make the Bible untrustworthy? Think about it. -- David M. Tate | DISCLAIMER: dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu | "Hey, that's *my* dis!" _____________________________________________________________________________ Statistics is the science of inferring the obvious and the false. [Inerrancy is normally based on the original autographs, interpreted as intended by the author. The original autographs are specified because it is not claimed that tranmission of the text is without error, though usually inerrantists believe that the errors have been quite few, and they often adopt fairly conservative positions in matters of textual criticism. By interpreted as intended by the authors I mean that one has to take metaphors into account. If for a definition you require an effective procedure (in the computer science sense) for deciding when there is a metaphor, you're obviously right that one is not likely to be forthcoming. But I'm not convinced that this is a serious problem. Few issues issues turn on a question of what is and is not metaphor. This is generally pretty clear to everybody. "This is my body" is probably one of the few (maybe only?). Although there are rough edges here and there, I don't think there's any serious problem knowing what implications inerrancy has for Biblical interpretation. It doesn't solve all problems, as there are serious disagreements among those who accept it. But it certainly rules out quite a large number of possible interpretations, and narrows the range of disagreement quite significantly. --clh]