Evangelical Realism

(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 14.)

We’ve reached the part of the chapter where Geisler and Turek pretend to answer the objections of critics, or at least something resembling critics.

Critics may say, “Humans err, so the Bible must err.” But again it’s the critic who is in error. True, humans err, but humans don’t always err. Fallible people write books all the time that have no errors. So fallible people who are guided by the Holy Spirit can write a book without errors.

Geisler and Turek don’t know it, but this brief paragraph—almost a throwaway—brings up a very significant point that will tell against them in their subsequent argument. Maybe it was just an uneasy, guilty feeling: we just got done looking at all 17 “errors” that Dr. Geisler accuses Bible critics of making, but that list came from a different book. In this book, they only looked at four of those “errors,” and the previous section ended with Geisler and Turek accusing critics (yes, critics) of forgetting that the Bible is a human book with human characteristics.

That’s perilously close to admitting that the Bible isn’t really the divinely amazing authority that they think it should be. It’s understandable, then, that they would immediately follow that near-confession with a hurried protest that “of course that doesn’t mean a human book can’t be perfect.” They can’t quite deny that their Scripture has an unmistakably human quality, with all the weaknesses that implies, but they want to assert, regardless, that it is still infallible. So to reassure themselves, they imagine a straw “critic” making the silly argument that the Bible must be wrong because people can be wrong. Easily refuted, but it brings up that one tiny critical point…

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Well, you had to know this was coming. Catholic Charities has announced that, in order to avoid paying benefits to same-sex couples, they will deliberately deprive all employees of their standard benefits. So naturally Chuck Colson is declaring that religious freedom is under attack, though he’s predictably inaccurate about who is doing the attacking.

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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 14.)

Time to wrap up our side-trip into Dr. Norm Geisler’s book When Critics Ask. We’ll pick up today with number 13 on his list of “errors” allegedly made by critics. And 13 seems to be Dr. Geisler’s lucky number because this one is an arguably genuine error:

13. Assuming that round numbers are false.

A good example of this would be the passage about the basin in Solomon’s Temple that, according to the Bible, was ten cubits in diameter and thirty cubits in circumference. As any good geometry student knows, a circle with a 10 cubit diameter would have a circumference of 10 x pi, or roughly 31.416 cubits. Technically speaking, the Bible is “wrong” by about one and a half cubits. But frankly, that’s just being picky. Rounding off awkward numbers is a perfectly normal, acceptable, and understandable practice in ordinary speech (like I did just now with the “one and a half” reference). Besides, there are much more significant errors that disprove Biblical inerrancy much more definitively, so it’s really not worth pressing this particular issue.

The next point isn’t quite so lucky for Dr. Geisler.
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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 14.)

We’re going a little bit beyond the Geisler and Turek book right now to have a look at the 18 “errors” that Bible critics allegedly make, at least according to Dr. Geisler’s book When Critics Ask. We only made it through the first five last week, so let’s jump right in and get started, shall we?
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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 14.)

There’s an old quip that’s been reprinted on countless T-shirts, plaques, posters and such. It goes like this:

Rule 1: The boss never makes mistakes.

Rule 2: If the boss makes a mistake, see Rule #1.

Rule 3: Any mistakes not covered by Rule #2, see Rule #1.

It may not sound theological at first glance, but see if anything sounds familiar in Geisler and Turek’s discussion of Bible inerrancy:

So what happens when we think we’ve found an error in the Bible? Augustine had the answer. “If we are perplexed by any apparent contradiction in Scripture,” he wisely noted, “it is not allowable to say, ‘The author of this book is mistaken’; but either the manuscript is faulty, or the translation is wrong, or you have not understood.”

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Boy, Chuck Colson has really been on a roll lately, hasn’t he? This time he’s denying global warming.

The people most inconvenienced by the blizzards weren’t the residents of this region, or the senators-it was the proponents of man-made global warming. Scientists and activists insisted that people on this side of the Atlantic ignore the evidence in their driveways and, instead, trust their computer models.

According to Colson, you can disprove global warming just by pointing out that it’s still snowing.

10 years ago, they told us that, on account of the same global warming, “snow is starting to disappear from our lives.” We were told that, because of all that nasty CO2, British children “just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Ten years later, they most certainly do. Not only British children, but children in every state except Hawaii. All of Britain, much of the rest of Europe, and the United States have experienced snowfalls this winter. The data suggests, in fact, that “snow is coming earlier and heavier than it used to.”

Ah yes, “they” told us. Nice to have an unimpeachable source, isn’t it?

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According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, there’s been a new study done on different approaches to sex education.

The study followed 662 African American sixth and seventh graders for two years. Some were placed in the abstinence program, others in a comprehensive course that included discussion of abstinence and condom use. Another group participated in a program that dealt only with safer sex, and a final group of control subjects did a workshop on nutrition…

Of 95 students who said they were virgins at the start of the abstinence training, 33 percent reported that they had sex within the next two years.

By comparison, 41 percent of the virgins in the comprehensive course went on to have sex in the two-year window. For the control group, the figure was 47 percent.

In a sample this size, the difference between the comprehensive class and the abstinence class – 33 percent vs. 41 percent – was not statistically significant, said Jemmott, so it is accurate to say they performed comparably.

And here’s Chuck Colson reporting the same story:

A landmark study on sex education draws a surprising conclusion. Well, you and I aren’t surprised, but the media and the educational establishments are. The study found that abstinence-based sex education works better than any other form of sex ed.

He’s right. I’m not surprised at all.

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Via Good Math, Bad Math comes this delightful bit of news.

[O]ver at the Disco Institute, resident Legal Eagle Casey Luskin has started posting an eight-part series on how the Kitzmiller case (the legal case concerning the teaching of intelligent design in Dover PA) was decided wrong.

Dr. Chu-Carroll proceeds to disassemble Luskin’s rather pathetic argument (as does Dr. Wesley Elsberry), and I recommend following the links and reading their analyses. What caught my eye, however, was the way Luskin not only bungles his case, but inadvertently pulls the rug out from under one of William Dembski’s main arguments.

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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 14.)

Geisler and Turek’s gimmick throughout the book has been to pretend that they’re building an iron-clad case, piece-by-piece, each well-documented conclusion building on the proofs that came before. It’s only a pretense, though, and the nearer we get to the end the less they even try to keep pretending. They’ve never intended to do any more than preach to the choir, and it shows.

For example, here’s their “proof” of why the Bible cannot contain any errors.

1. God cannot err.

2. The Bible is the Word of God.

3. Therefore the Bible cannot err.

Notice anything missing in their logic?

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In honor of Darwin’s birthday, I thought it might be fun to present some actual photographs of the history of the universe. These are not “artist’s conception” or faked in any way. These are actual photographs of the things that were going on around the cosmos about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

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