That the Bible is a factually correct account of the events recorded is intrinsically a statement of faith, not a statement of any objective knowledge anyone can have. It is not a thing anyone can know. Lets take the best possible case from an objective point of view - if all the accounts of events of the Bible were backed up by piles of independent, contemporary accounts* all you can say is that the Bible gives a consistent account along with contemporary sources. That's it.
What can we say about the Bible? If I had it my way, nothing - I'm not really into ancient mythos, even if it is culturally significant. I'd rather take my high culture via Holst. But if I'm backed into a corner - we can't say "it's reliable", this is in the same way a statement of faith, something we cannot know.
It can be said that "it is our interpretation that it is internally consistent". This is a difficult one, because internal consistency like this relies on some sort of system of interpreting what it is written. The most straight forward one is read what is written and take the words at face value. People who say that the Bible is internally consistent do not do this, they look at these apparent inconsistencies and apply different interpretations, they sometimes refer to these things as "theology". Is as good a label as any, if you like calling things "-ologies". That said, from a straight forwards reading there are a number of apparent inconsistencies and contradictions, people make lists of these things. But I don't really want to reduce to spamming links, we're all capable of googling ourselves.
We can say "we think it's reliable factual account", if we do think that, "it is a reliable factual account" is a statement of faith, as above. There is a lot of people who will argue that the Bible is verified by other historical account and archaeologists, even though the broad body of expert opinion, from where the evidence comes, is that the Bible is only somewhat reliable as a factual account. This does seem to be cherry-picking, a sort of confirmation bias - take what they produce when it agrees with them and discard it if it doesn't.
But this isn't the major issue at least for me. In this case saying "we think it's a reliable factual account" is also a statement of faith, because the Bible reports miracles, and to say "I think it's a reliable account" is saying that you think miracles happened. This is a statement of faith - miracles do not happen nowadays, if you try to look for them in any objective way; they require faith to even see them.
It goes the other way - saying "the Bible is wrong" is a statement of faith, saying "the evidence suggests the Bible is not a factual account and it has, from a straight forwards reading, many internal inconsistencies" isn't.
I think what I'm getting at here is that if we have to have a conversation about what the Bible is, and how we think about historical evidence, then it is obvious and vital to understand that some things are a statement of faith. The Bible being a highest authority is one, the Bible being a factual account of history is one, the Bible being internally consistent is one, the Bible being a fraud is one. We cannot say that the Bible is absolutely anything, from the available evidence. Even beyond the "I think therefore I am" type thing to the more sensible way of looking at it, the evidence base just isn't there for any of these absolute statements.
I'm not saying we shouldn't make statements of faith, day to day life is full of them. But it is important to know what are statements of faith and what is available as objective evidence, it can irritate and make people look needlessly silly and closed minded, especially if you're going to cajole unwilling a-religious folk into talking about it even though the subject is deathly dull. (And it really is, no-one has said anything significantly new and accessible to me about it since Darwinism rocked up).
*They're not - for example, King David, who is the subject of a good chunk of the Bible - the Books of Samuel, 1 Kings, and 1 Chronicles has 1 possibly independent account - someone dug up some stones, which had King David mentioned on them. The stones are probably considered reliable because other stones at the same place contradict accounts of the bible, which isn't something Christian forgers are considered likely to have done. There is another book which mentions him, but it's not generally considered certain. Wiki here.
0 comments:
Post a Comment