Believers call their scripture the perfect word of God. But skeptics point at mustard seeds described as 'the smallest of all seeds', a flat earth with corners, or a hare that 'chews the cud'. Does one factual mistake collapse the claim of divine perfection — or is that an unfair test? Pick a side.
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Add your commentIf it's the word of an all-knowing God, it doesn't get to be 'mostly right'. A perfect author doesn't make a single biology error. One mistake and the 'every word is divine' claim is dead — you can still keep the wisdom, just not the perfection.
You're reading a 3,000-year-old text like it's a science journal. It was written for shepherds, in their categories, in their language. 'Smallest seed they planted' is not a peer-reviewed botany claim. The error is in your expectations, not the text.
Define 'error'. Translators chose 'cud' for a word that just meant the chewing motion rabbits make. Half of these 'errors' are 17th-century English problems, not problems in the Hebrew.
Muslims have been making this exact argument for centuries — the Quran has no contradictions, the Bible has many, therefore one is preserved and one is corrupted. Then you read the Quran closely and the same kind of problems show up. Funny how that works.
One error doesn't sink it. Ten thousand people each deciding which errors don't count, and ending up with ten thousand different 'true' versions — THAT sinks it.
The cope is always the same: when it's right it's literal, when it's wrong it's 'metaphor' or 'cultural context'. You can defend literally any book with that move, including Harry Potter.
The Torah says the earth was made before the sun. Genesis 1 has plants growing on day three and the sun showing up on day four. Plants. Before. The sun. I'm supposed to stake my eternal soul on the editorial standards of people who got that order wrong?
Show me the original manuscript with zero copy errors and we can talk about inerrancy. We don't have it. We have copies of copies of translations of an oral tradition. The honest position is humility, not certainty in either direction.
Lovely sentiment, but that's not what's preached from the pulpit. They say 'every word', and they vote, legislate, and disown their kids on the basis of 'every word'. Soft believers don't get to launder the claims of the hard ones.
Even one error doesn't disprove God. It disproves a specific claim ABOUT a book. Plenty of believers never thought the thing was a science textbook and sleep fine.
Grew up being told the Bible was inerrant. The day my youth pastor admitted Mark 16:9-20 was added later and isn't in the oldest manuscripts, my whole framework cracked. If men added verses, men can subtract them too.
As a Jew this fight is so Christian-coded. We've argued WITH the text for two thousand years. Contradictions aren't bugs, they're invitations to debate. The idea a holy book should read like an instruction manual is the weird modern part.
Authority was never about being factually flawless. It's about whether the moral vision is true. Did it make you more honest, more generous, less of a coward? A map can have a smudge and still get you home.
And THAT is the whole game right there. If the meaning depends entirely on which scholar you trust about a dead language, in what sense did the average believer ever read 'the word of God'? They read a committee's best guess.
This. The fundamentalist and the angry atheist actually agree on one thing: that the text must be read flatly and literally. They're the same brain in two jerseys.
Order of creation in Genesis 1 vs Genesis 2 don't even match each other. It's not modern science vs ancient book, it's the book vs the book. That's the part apologists never want to sit with.
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