christian@topaz.UUCP (04/05/87)
In a letter accompanying the return of a recent submission, our moderator (Charles Hedrick) regretted that I had gone beyond merely speaking of events and had attempted to dig beneath the surface of the posting I was responding to. The concern he expressed was that my article contained "ad hominem comments." We have recently seen a number of articles in which "contradictions" and "errors" in the Bible are given as reasons not to believe. How should one respond to these charges? It is possible, of course, to answer them one-by-one. The posting I was responding to contained more than 30 examples the author felt showed the Bible was unreliable. Since an average of one hour of research is required to ascertain the context and meaning of the passage in question (including time spent in library reference searches) and formulate a response, a comprehensive reply to such an article becomes a week's work. Even if one should decide to dedicate a week to responding to each and every objection raised, there is little likelihood that such a course would be effective. Over the past two or three centuries, many "enlightened" individuals have sneered at the Bible, oftentimes using exactly the same arguments that have recently been raised on mod.religion.christian. There is an interesting phenomenon that can be observed very frequently in the writings of those who find fault with the Bible. In military terms, they practice the art of the "tactical retreat." When a position becomes untenable, they drop back to a new position, dig a new foxhole, and continue to fight. Such a person will raise an objection to the Bible. When the objection is answered, rather than recognizing the answer as a piece of data that should be used to evaluate his own position, he simply finds another "error" in the Bible and repeats his original claims about the Bible's lack of trustworthiness. Needless to say, this is intellectual dishonesty! There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of examples that could be given of objections to Scripture that have been found to be false. But the most important thing to notice is the pattern -- over and over, what was claimed to be false is found to be true. Unfortunately, over and over, those who raised the objections simply moved on to new complaints. In rejecting my submission, Charles wrote: > I understand that the rule I am enforcing makes it impossible to say > certain things that probably need to be said. It is certainly the > case that one's intellectual judgements can be biased by what one > wants and does not want to believe. So it may indeed be the case that > attacks on the Bible are motivated by an unconscious desire not to > believe it. . . . Such a rule would have prevented Jesus from replying to the Sadducees as He did when they attempted to trap Him with the question about the woman who had seven husbands (Matthew 22:23-33). Aware of their true motivation, He refused to become bogged down in the details of their question. Instead, He went straight to the heart of the issue: Jesus replied, "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God." Matthew 22:29 [NIV] The effect of the moderator's rule is to open the doors wide to misinformation, allowing those who disbelieve to flood mod.religion.christian with sophomoric attacks on Scripture. Those of us who would reply must either sit in silence and grind our teeth at the constant repetition of discredited disinformation, or invest an inordinate amount of effort to answer each complaint, to little practical effect. Reasoned dialogue is stifled, and the field is given to the skeptic, though his arguments are specious. Steve Rice ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- new: stever@videovax.tv.Tek.com old: {decvax | hplabs | ihnp4 | uw-beaver | cae780}!tektronix!videovax!stever [I classify the argument that "you don't believe because you don't want to believe" as essentially ad hominem. It draws conclusions about the spiritual state of someone else with little evidence, and casts doubts on the sincerity of his questions. In fact we have no basis for knowing whether Vasu Murty is someone who is about to become a Christian and just needs help dealing with some doubts, is a confirmed atheist trying to stir up trouble, or something else completely. In one on one discussion, we might be able to tell, and we might adjust the way we deal with him accordingly. However I see two problems with arguments of this kind in this group 1) they are unanswerable. No one but God can know our motiviations. It's just as impossible to answer as the non-Christian attack that we are deluding ourselves and believing just because we want to. There's no way for someone else to know this, and no way to convince someone else that it isn't true. 2) they are one of a class of arguments that are known to produce more heat than light. I believe this group has a very different feel from talk.religion.misc. That feel is *not* produced by excluding non-Christian contributions. Rather, I have to formulate some reasonably clear criteria for excluding "flames". One of them is that I allow no ad hominem arguments. Furthermore, I disagree with Steve that it is a waste of time to answer the original claimed contradictions. We are not about to look at every passage in Scripture. But I think it is useful to see how various approaches deal with a few representative samples of problematical passages. Indeed I was somewhat disappointed that Vasu's sample did not include any passages that I regard as being really diffcult to deal with. I do not believe that my rule opens the gates to sophomoric attacks. Postings, whether from sophomores or otherwise, that don't contain anything of consequence, or which simply duplicate arguments that have already been seen a lot, are rejected. I believe that responses challenging the motivations of the author, even if they are correct, will themselve open us to a deluge of flames. I'm not calling for a vote, but if any of you want to respond, I will be happy to post a summary of the responses. --clh]
christian@topaz.UUCP (04/15/87)
It seems like there are several issues here. I'm going to deal with the whole motivational question separately, with reference to the Dubuc-Huybensz debacle. I have to agree with Steve Rice that we do not need to allow serial transits of the biblical inaccuracies. It's simply a question of tedium, of argument by data overload. [I would not allow repeated lists of this sort. --clh] It seems to me that those who want to bring up these inaccuracies really need to put up some sort of defense for them. After all, we've already established that various christians have quite different opinions as to how critical these "inaccuracies" are. The various "inaccuracies" vary greatly in their implications. For example, there is a passage in Samuel (not at my fingertips, unfortunately) where the hebrew text literally says that Saul was one year old when he began to reign. This is so obviously defective that nobody is particularly upset when the translators point this out(as my RSV does). If we are going to attack individual problem spots, we cannot bind them together without some theories as to what the problems mean *as a whole*. Simply bombarding the group with problem spots does not constitute a theory. If people want to discuss particular problems, then, we should permit it. If they want to discuss what it means to scripture as a whole, then arguments ought to be demanded. We are pretty much all aware that there are problem spots, after all, and we are already aware that we disagree as to their significance. C. Wingate