Using Biblical Inerrancy to Prove God

Hello there. Today's bad argument is that used by Biblical Inerrantists. They argue that since the Bible has no errors, contradictions, etc. that it must be the written word of God. Hence, God must exist.

Circular Reasoning

The argument goes like this: "These books were written by dozens of people in different locations in different eras. Since it contains no errors or contradictions, it must be from God."

However, doesn't the Bible claim that God exists in the first place?

If the Bible has no errors and it claims that God exists, then it would follow that God exists. There need be no appeal to dozens of people in different locations who wrote the book. In order to claim that "The bible has no errors" one must assume that the statement that "God exists" is not in error. So, to use the fact that the bible has no errors to conclude that God exists is to use circular reasoning. One must presuppose God exists in order for the argument to get off the ground.

So, any argument that "the bible has no errors" to conclude that "God exists" is question-begging.

Lack of Contradiction is not so Spectacular

Even if it was proven that there were no contradictions in the Bible, would that really matter? Well maybe if they were randomly choosen books that were thrown together into one. However, they were not. The Council of Nicea in around A.D. 300 (something like that) decided what books would be in it. People figured out what books would be in it by vote. So, they probably had read them before and therefore, any large doctrinal disuptes could be taken care of. So, even if the Inerrantist were to prove that the Bible has no contradictions, that would be easy to account for given the fact that the books were chosen to be in the Bible. If they contradicted each other to a large degree, then they probably wouldn't have chosen them to be in the Bible in the first place.

Conclusion

Biblical Inerrancy is a belief that is difficult to uphold. There are many bad arguments that they use in defense of their position. I don't really care too much about this topic either. Even if there were some errors in the Bible, that wouldn't prove Christianity false. At most, it would just prove that God didn't write those parts.

One of the many bad abortion arguments

Here's a bad argument people who are for abortion tend to use.

"If we make abortion illegal, some people are going to do it anyways. The law will not stop them. Therefore, we should legalize abortion."

This argument has the form of: "If we make act X illegal, people will not obey the law. Therefore, we should make act X legal."

This argument makes as much sense as the following arguments:

"If we make murder illegal, some people are going to do it anyways. The law will not stop them. Therefore, we should legalize murder."

"If we make stealing illegal, some people are still going to do it anyways. The law will not stop them. Therefore, we should legalize stealing."

And so on.

So, simply because a certain law will be broken does not give us good reason to not make that law. This is seen with stealing, murdering, raping, etc. This argument does not work in these cases, therefore it does not work in the case of making a law concerning abortion.

What is relevant is not whether the people in the town will follow the law. What is relevant is whether people in the town should follow the law. This goes for rape, murder, stealing, etc. If a town made a law against rape, perhaps people would not follow it. It still remains the case, however, that we should make a law against rape.

So, one would have to argue, not that people would disobey the law in question but that they should disobey the law in question. This is a different claim however and cannot be supported by the argument at the top. A new argument would have to be brought in to support this new claim.