Question from Brian (the earlier one):
What is the best way to refute the Bible?
Answer by SmartLX:
Don’t bother to refute the whole thing, and keep your goals in mind.
There are those who believe that every word of the Bible is literally true, but there isn’t an equal and opposite faction of people who think every single word is false, and for good reason. The Bible uses some real locations (Jerusalem, Babylon, Alexandria) and involves real people (Nebuchadnezzar II, Pontius Pilate) and describes some events we have no reason to doubt (the spread of Christianity in the first century). Forrest Gump does the same with 20th century history, so it’s no indication of the veracity of the overall narratives, but not everything in there is completely baseless.
So if you’re not about to refute the whole Bible in one go, you need to decide which specific position you want to refute. In principle, the easiest one to topple is the doctrine of Biblical literalism/inerrancy (even if the two are officially distinct, they’re very close). It’s the idea that there are absolutely no errors in the Bible, and every claim is literally true. You can refute that just by establishing a single error or contradiction, no matter how small or insignificant.
The Skeptics’ Annotated Bible is your best friend here; check out the Contradictions and Absurdities sections for a wealth of issues. As you know, Brian, other websites have made a point of responding directly to every item in the SAB. SAB links to many of these, so pick the stuff where you don’t buy the counter-explanations, or there are none.
(A word on these counter-explanations, after reading a bunch of them: many explain away contradictions by suggesting specific interpretations or extra undocumented events which, if correct, reconcile bits of the Bible with other bits. There’s never any evidence that these interpretations are the correct ones, or that the extra events happened. Therefore while the explanations may stop one from establishing that the Bible is definitely in error in a specific case, by no means should they reassure anyone that it is definitely internally consistent.)
Otherwise, you can attack the big issues where a literal reading of the Bible contradicts whole areas of physical science – biology, geology, astrophysics, time, etc. You’re in for a bigger fight in that case, because tremendous resources have been devoted to defending the Bible against science (or as a creationist would say, defending it with science).
If you want to go past the inerrantists and refute the Bible to the extent that it convinces a broader range of Christians and Jews that their faith is misplaced, you have to go after the core events. For Jews it’s the lives of Moses and King David, for Christians it’s the life and particularly the rebirth of Jesus and for certain subsets of both groups it’s Genesis. If the last two times I’ve properly discussed Jesus with a Christian have established anything, it’s that it can be bloody hard to visibly move people an inch on issues they well know are the linchpins of their beliefs.
If you have any success in this area, I certainly want to hear about it.