Contradictions in the Bible

So I was having an interesting and refreshingly civil conversation with an atheist blogger named ThoughtCounts Z in one of my recent (well, “recent” in terms of this blog) postings.  Responding in the comments section started to feel awkward, so I thought about gathering my thoughts on the matter in a full-length posting.  So be warned – this post may be quite long!

The gist of our discussion was about whether the Bible permits Christians to be friends with atheists.  I feel like there’s not necessarily a problem with it, and verses about not being “yoked with unbelievers” or tossing false teachers out of our churches (at least, that’s how I interpret 2 John) don’t seem to mean that we are never to engage or be friends with nonbelievers.  So I don’t see a “contradiction” between such verses and, say, Paul’s instructions to believers on how to behave when eating dinner at the homes of nonbelievers.  ThoughtCounts Z seemed, at least, to credit my interpretation as reasonable, but she raises a more general point about how people should deal with “contradictions” in Scripture – isn’t it more reasonable to conclude that the book isn’t divine or authoritative?

So how should Christians deal with apparent contradictions in Scripture?  Plenty of believers simply maintain a level of cognitive dissonance, or blithely dismiss one or more parts of the Bible out of wishful thinking – or, as my dad puts it, “the last verse read wins.”  It’s an easy trap to fall into, and I pray that I don’t.  I feel like the appropriate response varies from situation to situation.

Some “contradictions” require a reevaluation of how one verse or the other is interpreted (or even translated – human language is not infallible, and it’s sometimes worth checking into things).  Or how BOTH are interpreted.  If there seems to be a contradiction, perhaps one or more of the Scriptures don’t mean what you think they mean.

Others require a larger contextual understanding – God is unchanging, but the nature of God’s covenant with humanity certainly did change.  The regimen of sacrifices and dietary regulations in the Torah were intended to be taken seriously by Israel, but later prophets and apostles (not to mention the Christ) made it very plain that such regulations were never really the point.  Or an understanding that inspiration is mysterious and God did not dictate the Bible word for word – this means that if the writer of the Chronicles and the writer of Kings use different numbers to describe a battle scene, or Mark and Luke put events in Christ’s life in different order, it doesn’t remotely bother me, as such things aren’t really the point, and nowhere does God say that the Bible is comprised of the infallible and perfect words of angels, as some other holy texts claim to be.

But more importantly, I find the idea that “contradictions” can disprove the Bible to be problematic at a more fundamental level.  Modern Western culture has things backwards, I believe, when it comes to the big picture of how the world works.  We feel that “the ground truth” is logical, governed by strict laws, mathematical – even binary – in character, and that our emotions, perceptions, will, desire, consciousness, and languages are “heuristics” – that is, ways of simplifying a complex underlying reality to better get by in and understand the world.  The idea is that, if we simply had a computer quick enough and powerful enough, we could crunch all the numbers in the universe and have perfect knowledge.

But what if that has it mostly backwards?  What if the base of reality is perception, consciousness, will, desire, and language (”the word”), and our logic and reason are simply “heuristics” to help us simplify a complex, probabilistic, subjective, and personal universe to get by in it?  I think there’s good evidence that this is the case.  For example, the deeper one gets into physics, the less “sense” everything starts to make.  As a computer science student, I spent plenty of time in classes proving that there are things that computers can’t do – problems that can’t be solved in a reasonable amount of time.  True logic knows its own limits.

People sometimes point to computer models as though the mere fact that the results came from a computer means the results are reliable.  But a logical system is only as good as the data that goes into it, the assumptions built into it, and the appropriateness of the logic to the task at hand.  In computer science land, they say “Garbage in, garbage out.”  I believe this to be true of all systematic logic.

While logic is the appropriate tool for building airplanes and radars, and (to a certain extent) for describing and understanding the physical workings of the universe, it is not always the appropriate tool for understanding human language or relating to other personalities – it is seldom the appropriate tool for understanding the eternal and the divine.  After all, as God is perfectly supreme and in no way bound by our universe, on what basis can anyone “logic around” with God?  God is outside of time, cause and effect, and even the proposition that something can not be both X and not X.  Trying to reason about God as though any of these assumptions were true often results in goofy conclusions – consider the kerfuffle about predestination, or interminable arguments about the divinity/humanity of Christ, or the nature of the afterlife, or the nature of the trinity.  It doesn’t take much logic to realize that these things are beyond our comprehension, and applying systematic logic as if God was a train in a word problem won’t make the mystery any less mysterious.  We might fool ourselves, or we might get frustrated, but we won’t near the truth.

I think we intuitively understand that reason isn’t the best tool for interacting with other people.  Sure, a person can be both happy and unhappy all at the same time, but does that mean God can be perfectly loving and perfectly just at the same time?  I suppose because God is supposed to be “perfect,” some take that to mean that God is easier to stuff in a box and logic around with, rather than infinitely more difficult.  What if our longing for simplicity and pure truth, unadulterated with complexity, probability, emotion, and perception, is itself irrational and inappropriate?  It seems to me that a great deal of wisdom consists of letting go of the need to understand everything in terms that enable us to predict, manipulate, and feel certain about them.

Otherwise, you wind up chasing your tail.  You read “God is love,” and if you treat that as a mathematical certainty, you end up attaching a lot of baggage to the phrase, as though now the “perfection” or “inspiration” of Scripture is fully backing your own personal concept of divine love.  So if your own personal concept is all puppies and rainbows, and you read one of the many other revelations where God is not all about puppies and rainbows (to put it mildly), or, say, observe nature or human history for any amount of time at all, you might get frustrated and confused.  You may even doubt whether God really is love, instead of doubting whether “God is love” means what you think it means, and adjusting your understanding accordingly.

Now, does all this take big religious questions out of the realm of arguability?  Not really.  It takes them out of the realm of systematic understanding and “provability” – but, of course, they were never really there in the first place.  But it doesn’t mean that every interpretation is equally valid or likely, or that any religious faith (or lack thereof) makes as much sense as the next.  There’s still room to argue about things, and even be right or wrong to some degree.  The Bible could still make some critical claim that could be demonstrated not to be true – as Paul said,  if Jesus was not resurrected, then it’s all been in vain.  These questions are not entirely ethereal.  However, things are fuzzier and more complex than we often allow for, and require a great deal more humility than we often give them.

I do not believe that something can only be either mathematically provable or essentially unknowable.  There’s plenty of room in between.  People who believe in the (potential) infallibility of human inferences seldom turn their own level of analysis and criticism on their own beliefs – it’s easy to see other people’s beliefs as irrational and wrong, and assume your own are the reasonable status quo.  The “burden of proof” falls easily on other people.  I know I’m often guilty of it – to be constantly doubting oneself is intolerable.

Too many religious arguments that I got into when I was young devolved – after we both realized we didn’t have enough information to be really certain – into arguments about whom the burden of proof should fall on.  This is sort of like saying, whichever side I want to be true gets to be true.  It’s kind of lame.  Trouble is, that may be the best we can do sometimes.

I suspect that, while reason can help clear away some chaff and help us work our way towards a level of knowledge about the universe, there’s a good deal of truth that can only be known by revelation, and this only by analogy and often through human language.  This puts the big questions more in the realm of trust than a lot of folks are comfortable with.  Can we trust the writings of the prophets and apostles, or the sayings of Jesus?  Can we trust the community that passed these teachings down and preserved them?  The New Testament doesn’t ask its readers to accept Christ on the basis of no evidence, but on the testimony of witnesses – which we have, passed down generation to generation.  It requires trust, and that’s a hard thing to move once it’s gained or lost – someone who has been mistreated by the church (and there have been plenty, unfortunately) is going to be harder to convince of the church’s trustworthiness.  I expect that, Christianity would have an easier time of winning people over if we were better about actually living out Jesus’s teachings.  Arguments and logic play a part, but they are seldom “the clincher,” so to speak.

So all this to say, presumed “contradictions” in the Bible don’t necessarily bother me.  I’m inclined to see good faith on the part of the prophets and apostles who wrote the Bible, and where there’s ambiguity assume that the more ambiguous can be interpreted in the light of the less ambiguous.  It’s a matter of trust more than anything else, I suspect.

So, to ThoughtCounts Z, I’m sorry that it took me so long to respond, and I’m still not sure that this kind of posting is really the right way to go, as I felt uncomfortable using the second person for most of it, so it felt awkward.  I’m also going to stuff some individual responses to your last comment in parentheticals, like this:

(I didn’t intend to imply that Leviticus is a more inspired or authoritative book than the Psalms – my point is simply that if any book should be parsed like law, it would be a book from the Torah, which was intended as law, not the Psalms, which were intended as poetic expressions.  Thanks to the revelations of later prophets and apostles, we now know that while God intended the law to be followed, the law was never really the point (see Isaiah, Romans, Hebrews), so no, I don’t hold everything in Leviticus to be authoritative for modern Christians – although some of it certainly is.  I imagine books have been filled trying to sort through it all, but that’s the quick-and-dirty, I guess.)

(Again – thanks for engaging, if you’re still around.)

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