Interesting
Some things in the bible are definitely questionable if you take them literally. Like the Noah’s Ark story. There are hundreds of millions of different species of animals and somehow he put two of each animal on the ark? Also, just imagine having to feed those animals and how many people it would take to care for the animals. It would be literally impossible. Here is a quote I found and think is interesting.
When you make a universal claim (the Bible is completely accurate and inerrant), it takes only a single counter-example to disprove it. So long as there is a single contradiction in the text, and there are many, you can’t claim that it’s a perfect work.
Moreover, the Bible itself never claims to be the literal word of God, and the concept of it being so is entirely new. If you read the Gospel of Luke, for instance, it’s prefaced with an explanation of exactly what the book is: Luke’s account of Jesus’ life according to his own investigation. If Luke were transcribing the literal word of God, there would be no need for any investigation, and I find it hard to imagine that he would lie right up front and claim that it was his own work.
As near as I can tell, the only support in the Bible for inerrancy is Paul’s writing that all scripture is God-breathed. This is problematic for several reasons, but the big one is that much of what we now call the New Testament wasn’t even authored at the time of his writing, and none of it would have been considered “scripture” to early Christians of the time. Bundling up the gospel accounts and letters of the apostles and calling them scripture didn’t happen until hundreds of years later. So the only conclusions we can reasonably draw from Paul’s assertion must focus on the Old Testament, and even then you must question what, exactly, is meant by “God-breathed.” It’s far, far away from a direct statement that all of what we consider scripture in 2012 is the perfect and inerrant word of God.
IMO, the doctrine of inerrancy has done far, far more harm than it could ever do good. Just look at this very thread, how many people are there who abandoned the church because they realized that the Bible was imperfect? There’s only so much hand-waving you can do before you have to admit “Okay, yes, those passages contradict each other,” at which point you’re left with nothing if you want to assert that the Bible is the literal word of God.
Rather than trying to make the Bible something it never claims to be, I take it exactly as it presents itself: as a human-authored history of God’s actions. Of course it’s not 100% accurate: it’s a collection of works that dates back thousands of years, recopied countless times, translated from multiple ancient languages. If you discard the flawed notion that God himself wrote the Bible as we know it today, then the linked image is actually very relevant, because it shows exceptional consistency for a series of works by so many authors.
