 If the Bible is factually incorrect on point A, what prevents it from being incorrect on point B? For example, salvation. Well, can the Bible be held as a reliable document if there are parts that are falsifiable? Or how can one say God is the author of an inconsistent scripture without calling Him a liar, which He says in the scripture He is not? Yeah, the question again presumes a certain number of things. This isn't in the question, but we're in Q&As and on the website, and even in the Faith Life group for lexum press that people are discussing on the scene realm. Typically, where this question arises is, well, the Bible has this cosmology that we know isn't scientifically correct, so okay, it's not, and Mike says, well, the reason for that is because God picked people and didn't change their thinking, and didn't make them transform them into 21st century scientists before He could use them to write scripture, and I do say that, and I mean it. But what they produce had high communicative value for their own day, but they're not making scientific statements. So how do we know if that's wrong, then what about what the Bible says about the unseen realm or something like that? First of all, we should actually spend a little time on this question because on the one hand I could say, hey, go up to the Naked Bible Podcast site, go to are you new to this or something like that, look at the videos, and there's one video there on how Mike looks at scripture, so you're going to get some of this there. But we need to go a little bit beyond that. When it comes to the cosmology thing, again, without making that the focus of this answer, because I want to get off of it and answer it in a different way. But in that regard, it's, look, these are statements made that if we believe God is the Creator and He is the author of general revelation, He is the Creator, and what is true about the thing He has created is true because this is the way He's created something. And we learn because we're part of the natural world, we learn about the natural world, we learn what makes it tick, we learn how God made it through certain tools, tools of science. That's what science is for. And we're supposed to do that. Again, we're supposed to subdue the earth. Part of that, again, is learning about it so we know what to do with it, how to steward it, so on and so forth. But that's one area. They're things like the supernatural world. We can't test with the tools of science. So it's a totally different thing. So you can't say, oh, well, if something over here in the natural world is primitive and, again, by modern scientific standards, then that dictates how we should look at some other claim in the spiritual world. On what basis? On what basis? It's not a scientific basis because the tools of science don't apply. The only basis you have is coherence, philosophical, logical coherence. And so if you're asking, can biblical claims about the supernatural world be defended without the appeal to scripture itself on philosophical coherence grounds, the answer is you betcha. It's been that way for millennia. So it's not that one thing over here looks this way and that means the other thing can't be true either. That is flawed thinking, but it's a very understandable question that I get all the time. Let's go back here to the to the actual question itself. The question assumes a few things. It assumes that, for instance, what's falsifiable? What do we mean by falsifiable? Here's an example. Is the phrase law of God falsifiable when we find many laws from the Torah showing up in whole or in part in ancient Near Eastern law codes? And then you might be thinking, well, no, why would that be falsifiable? Who cares if the Torah has a law and the code of Hammurabi has the law too? Oh, well, it's the law of God. It's the law of God. And the code of Hammurabi is older than the Torah. We know that by the Bible's own chronology. So how can it be called the law of God when this law existed before Moses or whoever wrote the Torah wrote it down? That's a lie. That's falsifiable. Again, you get into some really strained logic here because of the terms that you've chosen and because also of the way we think about those terms. I would say no. That doesn't mean it's silly to think that the existence of this law in Hammurabi falsifies a phrase, falsifies the Torah because the Torah is called the law of God. Okay, those two things, that's not clear thinking. So one of my questions is, what do we mean by falsifiable? It's a term that can get thrown around a little bit too loosely. What do we mean by an error? This is actually a really difficult question because when you ask, well, what counts as an error, you're going to get lots of different answers for some pretty specific reasons. When I look at cosmological statements in the Old Testament that we know because, again, we've been discovering God's creation for a few millennia now, and we know that this statement made two millennia ago or three or four millennia ago, whatever it is, we know that that statement does not correspond to reality in terms of the natural world. Why would we consider that an error? We would only consider it an error if the Bible was supposed to give us a statement that we are asked to believe is binding truth, that this is a statement, that all people from here on forward who read this must regard this as truth. I don't think the Bible does any of that ever when it comes to the natural world, and I think the reason is obvious. God knew the people that He picked. He knew what they knew, and He doesn't download new information so that what they write, what He has them write will make happy a person living in the 21st century. You know, I got news for you. A thousand years from now, people are going to look back on our science and giggle. They're going to say, can you believe that they believe this? Ha, ha, ha, ha. To me, it is the wisdom of God to not have Scripture be for that, to not have Scripture be to teach us about science. Why? Because what Scripture is actually here for, again, to teach us truths about the spiritual world, those things transcend science. They will always be true a thousand years from now, just like they were 3,000 years ago, because they are not linked to the natural world. The Bible is not here to give us science, you know, science-y stuff about the natural world. God uses people who say things about the natural world, and He doesn't bother to correct them. He doesn't bother to make them, give them advanced knowledge so that they would get it right 3,000 years later. That is evidence that God didn't correct them and didn't make them different than what they were. That is evidence that God didn't care and that that wasn't the purpose behind this thing that God was producing through humans, called the Bible. Again, a lot of this stuff is how you look at the whole concept, these concepts of inspiration and inerrancy, how you frame the concept and what you mean and how you frame the terminology. And here's the dirty little secret, everybody does this. There is no one definition of inspiration that has been tried and true throughout the history of the church, of the believing community. Okay, if you've been taught that, you've been taught something that is an error that is wrong, that just is not true. It does not conform to reality at all. There's no one definition of these inspiration and inerrancy, whatnot. Let me just give you an example. Now, if you went to a standard theology book, something like Ericsson or Grutum or whatever, you're going to get different theories of inspiration. Again, people have come up with different ways to look at things throughout the history of the believing community. It's just the way it is. There's no one size fits all. One of them is called the verbal theory. Now, in this view, they say that the Holy Spirit directed the writers in the choice of their words. But then they'll deny that that means dictation. You say, well, how can you, how can you have God like choosing the words and it not be dictation? Well, they want, they need to deny its dictation because there are obviously places where a dictation approach to the Bible is going to get you in trouble. The phenomena of the text will get you in trouble and you'll end up having to deny your own definition. Scholars know that, but they want to affirm Scripture to the word level, but they don't want it to be dictation. Now, a lot of this comes from 2 Timothy 3.16, God breathed. Again, there are some people who have understood that to me that God whispered every last word into the writer's head or just plopped it in there. So that the writers didn't have any independent thought as to word choice. Every word came from the mouth of God, as it were. Well, you have to ask yourself a question. Is that really what Theanu Stas means? Is that really the way we're supposed to understand it? Well, a lot of people have said, no, no. Okay, you know that it doesn't mean that it just it refers to Theanu Stas means that all of Scripture originated with God. It comes from him in some way that doesn't have to be whispering the words. So right there, you have a fundamental distinction on how people envision this thing we call inspiration. If you get away from dictation or the quote unquote verbal view, you know, you start to get into what, you know, what would be sort of more providential views that God used people. God is the ultimate origin for what we find in Scripture, but He lets people write as they as they would because they're people. And in the day and age that they live, people wrote a certain way. They use certain genres. Okay, they use certain expressions and all these things are very obviously in the Bible. The Bible does use genre. The Bible does use expressions. It uses, you know, figures of speech. It uses all this stuff. It's a very human product. And so scholars know this. And so this is why scholars very wisely want to get away from this dictation idea or the quote unquote verbal view, but it's not dictation view. You know, again, however that works. Let me give you an example. There's a quote from Erickson in his theology. Again, Erickson wants to deny dictation, but he wants to affirm, you know, the verbal view. Listen to this. The work of the Holy Spirit is so intense that each word is the exact word God once used at that point to express the message. It's on page 175. Okay, what does so intense mean? Well, it can't mean whispering in the air. It can't mean plopping the word in the head. So what does it mean? You know, frankly, it doesn't mean anything. Okay, it's just this, these are word games that theologians like to play so that they can say, Oh, I'm not in this camp. I'm over here somewhere, but they don't actually answer the question. And they still lead to difficulties in talking about inspiration. My view again, I advocate, you got to advocate a view that has that honors the human element because lo and behold, God used people and he didn't change them. He didn't make them into something they weren't. Of course, if he did that, he'd have to change his change their audience too, because they wouldn't understand the advanced knowledge coming from this human being about science. Okay, or anything else, you know, the readers expect writers to write in a certain way that is comprehensible. And you can't have someone like from a different time and place doing something and have the result be understandable. To me, these are very, very simple thoughts, very obvious thoughts. But I'll admit, in the way inspiration is taught and talked about, a lot of people just don't affirm some things that I think are pretty obvious and lots of other people think are pretty obvious. So we're, you're looking for a two sided prof process and inspiration, something that honors the humanness of the thing created and also honors the providential hand of God, where God molded the biblical writers for their tasks throughout their whole lives. He molded them, prepared them for the time and the place that they would write. And the results that they produced were good enough for God. If they're good enough for God, they should be good enough for us. Humans were chosen to produce the text. You actually get a hint of this in Jeremiah 25, 13, where God considers the words of the writers his own words. But it doesn't say he dictated them. Okay, it says, I will bring upon that land all the words that I have uttered against it, everything written in this book, which Jeremiah prophesied against all the nations. Now, you could use that in reverse. Well, God, you know, must have uttered all the words in Jeremiah's head. That's why God's saying this. But if you actually just look at the verse, you could go at it from the other direction. What Jeremiah wrote, God looked at it and said, yep, that's what I wanted you to say. That captures it well. Got it. Bingo. Good job. And that's, again, that's the view I think we need to take because of the phenomena that arise from the text. Before I, let's just, I should throw in something about inerrancy here. Believe it or not, there have been lots of different views of inerrancy. Erickson, you know, has one that's called absolute inerrancy. I'll just, again, read a little excerpt here because I'm looking at his section now on inerrancy. He says, the Bible, which includes rather detailed treatments of matters both scientific and historical, is fully true. And that's an absolute inerrant to say that. And so, if you have something that the Bible says scientifically that conflicts with science, that the known reallia of the world, well, we may not be able to explain that, but science must be wrong and the Bible must be right. So when the Bible talks about a cosmic tree that was felled, that all the animals of the earth lived on, and that's a known part of ancient Near Eastern cosmology. Oh, well, that must be true somehow. And usually what happens is, oh, well, that's metaphorical. Yeah, it is for us. It wasn't for them. Okay, they actually think that this event happened in great antiquity, or that in that somewhere there was this, you know, tree or something like that. And that, you know, you get the solid dome, you get the mountains, you get the pillars of the earth. They thought this was the way things were constructed. You go to the book of Hebrews, okay, they really thought that, you know, there were human persons inside the loins of the father of the male and he deposits that into the woman. Again, we know this is not the way babies are made because we can make them in a dish. Okay, we know this is not the case, but they didn't. So and God didn't bother to correct them and update their knowledge when they, when the writer of Hebrews wrote chapter seven. He didn't stop him from doing that. Again, that tells me that that wasn't the purpose of Hebrews chapter seven to give us science. Otherwise, God would have stopped him. And it's a very simple thought. So other than absolute inerrancy, you get something like full inerrancy. Okay, Eric, these are Eric's terms. Full inerrancy also holds that the Bible is completely true while the Bible does not primarily aim to give scientific and historical data. Such scientific and historical assertions as it makes are fully true. So that steps back a little bit from the absolutist position. The difference between absolute inerrancy in that view, it really revolves around history and science. And the, the full inerrancy view basically says, look, something can be correct without being completely precise. Now you, you know, the listeners in real life know that in real life experience, that's okay. Something can be true without being completely precise in detail statements that you make, you know, to the IRS. Okay, you know, they let, they let you round up, you know, one way or the other round up or round down whatever. Oh, well, does the IRS now are they gonna, you know, I got to fix this. I don't want to use software. I'm gonna, I'm gonna write it out be so I can put all the, all the little decimal things in there and every penny and so on and so forth. They'll think I'm lying. They'll think I'm false. They'll think I'm errant. Okay, no, no, they don't care. Okay. It's good enough for them. They still think that your return is true and correct. They don't care about the precision. Well, is the Bible allowed to do stuff like that? We, I mean, I could just go on and on with like real life things where we accept the difference between being correct and being totally, absolutely, exhaustively precise. Is the Bible allowed to be the one and not the other? I say it is. Some people don't. Some people just have to have everything nailed down. Another view, limited in errancy. The Bible is an era in its doctrinal teachings, but when it comes to science and nature and the way it does history, the Bible reflects the knowledge of its own day and circumstances. Another view is, let me just give you one more here. Inerrancy of purpose holds that the Bible faithfully accomplishes its purpose, which is to bring people to Christ. The purpose is valued over propositional truth. The purpose of the Bible is to encounter Christ. The Bible is a means to that end. These are all positions I just gave you for them. These are all positions that real believers, the high view of Scripture, have held historically within the believing community. None of these are liberal views. They are all views held by people who Christ is the only way of salvation. They're believers. This is God's word, but they're trying to articulate different perspectives of this. Again, that's just the way it is. Now, I'm something of a blend of three of these. I'm different because some of what these other views like the Inerrancy of Purpose view or the Limited Inerrancy view, some of the things those views would call errors, I don't call errors, because my belief is you can't consider an author errant when that author writes something, and that something is consistent with his purpose, even though it isn't consistent with the way we'd say it or the way we'd do something. I don't think we can call those things mistakes. They aren't mistakes. He didn't make a mistake. They are entirely faithful statements in terms of who that person was and God picked them. I'm going to honor God's choice. I'm going to honor God's choice and say if God chose that person knowing that that person had XYZ scientific thought, that wasn't really science because God knows better, and he knew that we would know better 3,000 years later. If God didn't care, I don't either. That tells me again that why would I look at the product, the Bible, and say, well, its purpose is to give us science. Even if we know it makes a statement here that isn't scientific, we have to pretend it is because that's the Bible's purpose. No, it's not. Otherwise, God would have stepped in and chosen somebody else or had the Bible written today. We're giving that person advance now. Something like that. God wouldn't have allowed it, but he did. Again, that tells me that that wasn't God's point. If I believe that, I'm not looking at these things and saying, oh, he made a boo boo. He made a mistake. Arent, aren't, aren't. I mean, some people will. I get that. I have friends that take that view. Fine, whatever. But other people will not. Again, for the reasons that we're talking about here. This is actually a really difficult subject. Again, I've spent a lot of time on this. Sorry that it's gotten a little bit long here, but it really comes down to what counts as an error. What counts as an error? Everybody gets to define and answer that question for themselves, and that's just the way it is. Is the Bible allowed to use approximations? Must it have exhausted precision? Must it always be understood literally? Is it allowed to use phenomenological language? The sun rose. Well, we know the sun doesn't rise. He's errant. That's an error. It's a mistake. We use that phrase all the time. Everybody knows what it means. Next time your neighbor says, hey, what a beautiful sunrise today. What are you going to do? Say, you're errant. You're a liar. No, you're not going to do that. That's absurd. Well, then why would you do it to the Bible? The Bible isn't trying to make a scientific statement in that place where it talks about the sun rising. Must the Bible be exhaustive? Must it say everything there is to be said about a given subject? Is the Bible allowed to use literary genres that people used? If people used them, well, then they're not out of God. How can we call this the word of God when there are human genres in there? Again, this discussion can very quickly become absurd. And frankly, if you've ever been in a discussion about this, you know that it can very quickly just become a caricature of itself. And I would say, again, I'll just throw this last on. If the Bible wasn't written with our questions in mind, with the way we would do things as the focus, with the way we would say things as the focus, then why should we judge it as though it were supposed to do that? Why must it be more than what it was and what it is? I'm in favor of just letting it be what it is under the providence of God. So back to the question, I don't think we have a situation here where we have this approach where, well, if I can find something in the Bible that isn't expressed the way we'd express it now, I've got to throw the whole thing out. That's absurd. You wouldn't do that to anything else in life. And if you say you would, you're lying. You just wouldn't do that. And so my question, again, to folks, I'm not saying the questioner is doing this. I'm just making a generalization here. But when you get into this situation, that's an honest question. It's an honest thing to bring up. You just wouldn't do this to anything else in life. You know that things have a context and a purpose, and you judge them accordingly. And it's okay. So why can't we do that with scripture? That's all I'm asking. Why not? And unfortunately, the reason why people just sort of can't do that is because they have been taught a superficial, paranormal-like view of the Bible. And then when enemies of the Bible threaten it on the basis of that understanding, people are disturbed because the reality of scripture doesn't conform to this image of it that has been transmitted. And it's been transmitted by people who don't spend time in the text and don't encounter these things. They just parrot the definitions from one person to the next, one generation to the next, one church to the next. And I'm just asking people, look, spend some time thinking about it. It's an important question, but again, I'm going to be so audacious to say it's really not that impossible to think well about this and come out with a position that is workable. Again, we're not omniscient how are we going to know which falls in what. Cat, we're not because we're not omniscient, but it's workable.