Scriptorium Daily
There is evidently something about the Bible that irritates a few Americans the way the sight of a stake disturbs a vampire.
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Four Reasons for Weird Anger
Problem 1. The “Science-Guy”
There is always the “science-guy” (it is almost always a guy) who thinks nobody should waste their time reading any old book since only science contains knowledge. Give them a list of great books and they will complain that the latest technical journal article in their sub-field of physics is not there. The Bible makes them the most angry, because defenders of it (some ill advised) have been the least eager to leave all knowledge to the white jacket priesthood in the laboratories.
These are the people who think Richard Dawkins has a clue about philosophy of science.
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Their souls are dead to the importance of the human things (literature and art) as they have been taught to reduce humans to computers made out meat.
This is the kind of person who thinks any reference to the soul is “magical” thinking or that the goal of an educated man is to become a great fact-grinding machine.
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Whatever the merits of philosophical naturalism (and it has merits), anybody who cannot learn from Bach, Spencer, or Shakespeare what it means to be human has confused a good thing (science) for the only good thing.
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Problem 2. Understandable Reaction to an Error By Some Christians
The second common reaction is the fault of some Christians. Since a few Christians use the Bible in conversation with non-Christians in a way that assumes non-Christians should simply fall down and repent on hearing the Bible, non-Christians are turned off by any mention of the Bible.
Use of the Bible in public discourse should not be a conversation stopper, but a wise place to begin. Who wants to stop a dialog anyway? Certainly not a traditional Christian! We love dialog.
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Problem 3. Some People Cannot Read the Bible Well
There a few sad souls that take hard passages in the Bible and allow them to so consume their understanding of this highly complex book that they can no longer get anything else out of it.
I have known people so hung up on the interesting question of how Genesis relates to Darwin that they cannot get beyond that or ever give the topic a rest to learn other things from the book.
Joseph and his brothers? They cannot stop talking about days in Genesis.
Even more absurd, given the expansiveness of the text, is the person so worried about working out the chronology of the kings of Judah that they cannot pause to hear the central message in the Book about the King of Kings.
There is another kind of chronic misreading that leads to ignorant disrespect for the Bible.
Some people believe the Bible says things it doesn’t or read it woodenly. They forget the Bible is a collection of books and has to be approached that way. They don’t check context or try to understand what the author might be doing.
My favorite example of this is the confused person who worries notices that “back to back” verses in Proverbs say to answer a fool and to not answer a fool in his folly.
Isn’t that a contradiction? The writer of Proverbs must have been really foolish not to have noticed that he contradicted himself in two parallel lines!
Of course that could be true, but isn’t it more likely that the editor of Proverbs is making a point about there being no way to safely deal with a fool? I wonder sometimes if such readers are capable of catching written irony or humor.
Problem 4. Isn't quoting any old book as an authority a bad argument?
Finally, there are a few people who don’t understand the difference between the legitimate use of authority and the logical fallacy of the “false appeal to authority.” They think any helpful quotation from any book (but especially the Bible) must be fallacious.
It is not bad to quote experts or people who put complex ideas in pithy ways!
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We trust (as we should) to authorities. Our knowledge, such as it is, is derived from them. These recognized authorities give us “operating assumptions.” When we want to challenge the authorities (as we sometimes should), they still the background where we begin to do our Socratic work.
Cultures work like people in this respect. There are certain formative ideas that are at the bottom of societies that certainly can be challenged, but usually are not. Most of us are not equipped to sensibly challenge those assumptions most of the time and have to live as if they are true.
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Authority is good and useful in normal life (though it can be dangerous). The trick is in finding good, culturally accepted, general authorities.
The “false appeal to authority” is (generally) an inappropriate reliance on an authority or an appeal to a questionable authority. The problem is determining when an authority is being relied on “inappropriately” or is “questionable.”
There is an easy example of the false appeal to authority in the tendency to think any authority outside of “science” lacks weight. Many of us wait for “science” (really certain scientists) to pronounce on an ethical topic, when science is perfectly incompetent (on all but the most extreme view of science) to show us how we SHOULD live.
Science might tell us how we DO live. Science might tell us what actions will lead to certain outcomes, but science alone can never tell us which outcomes humankind should prefer.
Unless scientism is shown to be true, a scientist cannot use his authority (as a scientist) to make pronouncements on ethics.
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Now of course I personally believe more than this about the Bible. I accept, based on reason and experience, that the Bible is the written Word of God.
If this is true, it would simply be stupid of me to ignore God’s opinion. I don’t need any other argument to take the Bible seriously. (Of course, coming to that conclusion took time and was much more difficult for me.)
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In other words, the Bible is a (generally) useful authority that can be a good place for Western people to start a discussion about how we should live. (For Christians it will frame that continuing discussion inside the Church, since we have come, through discussion, to stronger conclusions about it.)
Five Non-Religious Reasons for Thinking the Bible is a Very Great Book
First, the Bible has shaped and continues to shape foundational social assumptions in the United States.
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Second, the Bible tells a compelling story (at least in places) that rings true to human experience. Especially in the context of the life of Jesus, this story can make complex issues and propositions “three dimensional” for us.
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Third, the Bible is very likely to endure globally.
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Fourth, the Bible (whether uniquely or not) contains many wise sayings and teachings.
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Finally, the Bible is a sublimely beautiful work of art.
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Ignorance of the Bible or undue resistance to its obvious importance as (at least) a highly influential book is too often bigotry, ignorance, and anti-intellectualism tricked out as skepticism. (more)
