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Anon (Investigator 20, 1991 September)
The poem below expresses the Christian belief that the Bible as originally written was without errors. This idea that the Bible is infallibly accurate is called "Biblical Inerrancy" and it’s a belief that is still common Belief in the
Bible's
inerrancy has always
been the usual or "orthodox" position of Christians. In the Bodleian
Library
of Oxford, for example, is the manifesto drawn up in 1865 by the
British
Association and signed by 617 scientists and which begins: We, the undersigned students of the natural sciences, desire to express our sincere regret that researches into scientific truth are perverted by some in our own times into occasion for casting doubt upon the truth and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures. Is such a belief testable? Could it be investigated in a way that both the skeptic and the Christian believer would see as fair and unbiased? Recently I browsed through several 19th-century books which defended religion and was disappointed. In LETTERS
TO A
SCEPTIC (1875), for
example, the author includes without proof numerous ideas like "Holy
Ghost",
"Immortal Soul", "Purgatory", etc. After 320 pages of making value
judgements
and describing his own attitudes and emotions the author finishes
without
giving the "sceptic" a procedure for testing "the Faith" non-commitally.
The last two
lines
quoted above from the
Manifesto and the third verse of the poem below do imply tests we can
make
to test Biblical Inerrancy. We would have
to distinguish the person who
tests a theory he already believes in from the skeptic who wants to see
if he can come up with the theory (of Biblical Inerrancy) from the
basic
data in the first place.
Last eve I paused beside a blacksmith's door, Hundreds
of articles investigating the Bible's accuracy:
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