THINK ABOUT THIS: Eight Flawed Assumptions Critics Make About the Bible

Walk into any gathering in America outside of a church and mention this subject and you are all but certain to prompt heated discussion. This guaranteed “conversation starter” is the Bible.

Just announce to all within hearing that you believe the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God and see what follows. What will follow are a bunch of arguments and claims based on logical fallacies from critics who reject the idea that there is any text inspired by God and thus without error.

Here are eight of those logical fallacies, as described by Dr. Norman Geisler. Who is Geisler, you ask? While he’s not well-known in popular culture, he is tremendously respected among the vast majority of Christian apologists and theologians.

Geisler, who passed away in 2019, was a “prolific author, veteran professor, speaker, lecturer, traveler, philosopher, apologist, evangelist, and theologian,” according to the web page dedicated by family, friends and colleagues to his work and memory.

Geisler deals with 16 of these logical fallacies, but we’re going to look at these eight today and the remaining eight on another occasion:

ASSUMING A MISTAKEN CONTEXT:

Geisler, who had occasion to deal with and debate most of the world’s most prominent biblical critics and skeptics, considered this to be the most common error among them. That context shapes meaning is taken for granted elsewhere, but too many biblical critics ignore it entirely.

“As the adage goes, ‘A text out of context is a pretext.’ One can prove anything from the Bible by this mistaken procedure. The Bible says, ‘There is no God” (Psalm 14:1). Of course, the context is: ‘The fool has said in his heart, There is no God.’ One may claim that Jesus admonished us not to resist evil (see Matthew 5:39), but the antiretaliatory context in which he cast this statement must not be ignored,” Geisler tells us.

ASSUMING THE UNEXPLAINED IS UNEXPLAINABLE:

There was a time when scientists had no idea what caused tornadoes, why meteors flew through space or how bumblebees can fly. The way they discovered the answers to those and so many other questions was to keep digging and seeking to know. They didn’t just assume there was no explanation.

“Likewise, the true biblical scholar approaches the Bible with the same presumption that there are answers to the unexplained. Critics once proposed that Moses could not have written the first five books of the Bible because Moses’ culture was preliterate. Now we know that writing had existed thousands of years before Moses,” Geisler wrote.

“Also, critics once believed that Bible references to the Hittite people were totally fictional. Such a people by that name had never existed. Now the Hittites’ national library has been found in Turkey. Thus, we have reason to believe that other unexplained phenomena in Scripture will be explained later.”

ASSUMING THE BIBLE IS GUILTY OF ERROR UNLESS PROVEN INNOCENT:

When you pull up to a Stop sign while driving, you assume that means you are required to come to a full stop. If it’s a four-way stop, you also assume other drivers will be stopping and that you and they will get a turn to go forward in an orderly sequence.

If you are charged in a court of law in the U.S., you are presumed innocent and it is the government that must prove beyond a shadow of doubt that you are in fact guilty. But, as Geisler points out, that is the reverse of the attitude of many biblical critics.

“If we assumed food packages are mislabeled, we would have to open up all cans and packages before buying. Likewise, the Bible, like any other book, should be presumed to be telling us what the authors said, experienced, and heard. But, negative critics begin with just the opposite presumption. Little wonder they conclude the Bible is riddled with error,” according to Geisler.

CONFUSING OUR FALLIBLE INTERPRETATION WITH GOD’S INFALLIBLE REVELATION:

It’s all too easy for us to confuse our understanding of what a difficult passage in the Bible “really” means and what God actually said and intended. Because He is God, He is by definition incapable of being wrong. We are incapable of not being wrong on occasion.

“Sometimes a biblical teaching rests on a small historical detail (see Hebrews 7:4-10), a word or phrase (see Acts 15:13-17), or the difference between the singular and the plural (see Galatians 3:16). But, while the Bible is infallible, human interpretations are not. Even though God’s Word is perfect (see Psalm 19:7), as long as imperfect human beings exist, there will be misinterpretations of God’s Word and false views about his world,” Geisler cautioned.

“In view of this, one should not be hasty in assuming that a currently dominant assumption in science is the final word. Some of yesterday’s irrefutable laws are considered errors by today’s scientists. So, contradictions between popular opinions in science and widely accepted interpretations of the Bible can be expected. But this falls short of proving there is a real contradiction.”

INTERPRETING THE DIFFICULT BY THE CLEAR:

Just because the difficult verse is, well, difficult to sort out, that doesn’t mean another verse whose meaning seems crystal clear makes sense as the interpretive context for the tough one.

“Some passages are hard to understand or appear to contradict some other part of Scripture. James appears to be saying that salvation is by works (see James 2:14-26), whereas Paul teaches that it is by grace. Paul says Christians are ‘saved through faith; and that not of yourselves. It is a gift of God: Not of works, lest anyone should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9; Romans 4:5),” Geisler points out.

“But the contexts reveal that Paul is speaking about justification before God (by faith alone), whereas James is referring to justification before others (who only see what we do). And James and Paul both speak of the fruitfulness that always comes in the life of one who loves God.”

FORGETTING THE BIBLE’S HUMAN CHARACTERISTICS:

There were 40 or so authors writing the Old and New Testament. Their personalities varied from one to another just as would any other group of the same number selected by you at random. God used real people when He inspired the Bible.

“The Bible discloses specific human interests. Hosea has a rural interest, Luke a medical concern, and James a love of nature. Like Christ, the Bible is completely human, yet without error. Forgetting the humanity of Scripture can lead to falsely impugning its integrity by expecting a level of expression higher than that which is customary to a human document,” Geisler observes.

ASSUMING A PARTIAL REPORT IS A FALSE REPORT:

Here’s another illustration of a fallacious understanding of how to read a biblical text that is not applied when the text being read was written by another of the familiar ancient authors such as Plato or Josephus. Simply because a report fails to include all relevant facts does not mean it should be ignored.

“Critics often jump to the conclusion that a partial report is false. However, this is not so. If it were, most of what has ever been said would be false, since seldom does time or space permit an absolutely complete report.  For example, Peter’s famous confession in the Gospels:

Matthew: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (16:16).
Mark: “You are the Christ” (8:29).
Luke: “The Christ of God” (9:20).

“Even the Ten Commandments, which were ‘written by the finger of God’ (Deuteronomy 9:10), are stated with variations the second time they are recorded (see Exodus 20:8-11 with Deuteronomy 5:12-15). There are many differences between the books of Kings and Chronicles in their description of identical events, yet they harbor no contradiction in the events they narrate,” according to Geisler.

ASSUMING NEW TESTAMENT QUOTATIONS OF OLD TESTAMENT MUST BE VERBATIM:

Ever hear somebody say “long story short?” It’s often the preface to a long-drawn-out explanation of something, but on those rare occasions when the speaker does actually condense things, he or she may well leave out important details. The absence of those details does not disqualify the Bible.

“Critics often point to variations in the New Testament use of Old Testament Scriptures as a proof of error. They forget that every citation need not be an exact quotation. Sometimes we use indirect and sometimes direct quotations. It was then (and is today) perfectly acceptable literary style to give the essence of a statement without using precisely the same words. The same meaning can be conveyed without using the same verbal expressions, Geisler says.

Now, next time you happen to get into a conversation with somebody about the Bible, see how many of these eight flawed assumptions you hear. And be careful not to make the same mistakes in your own analysis!

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