Biblical Inerrancy and Papal Infallibility: Twin sisters of uselessness

Protestant Christians often criticize the Catholic doctrine of Papal Infallibility. 

The argument goes like this:  if the Catholics are going to protect this doctrine by pretending that it only takes effect in limited circumstances (such as when the pope speaks to the entire church upon an issue of faith or morals), and if they further insist this authority hasn't been exercised by the pope more than 5 times in the last 2,000 years, then how can Catholics claim God thought giving such authority to men was a useful good?

Can we seriously say that God wanted the church to be sure of Mary's bodily Assumption (declared infallible by Pope Pius XII in 1950, see here), but not about Jesus being fully equal with the Father (neither Pope Sylvester I nor any Pope after him made infallible pronouncement about the majority vote at Nicaea)? 

Well gee, what's more important?  Jesus' equality with the Father, or Mary flying into the sky?   Most Protestants think your eternal fate is affected by whether you say Jesus was creature or creator,  but no Christian seriously thinks your eternal fate is decided based on what you have to say about Mary flying into the sky.

That is a strong attack on the feasibility of Papal Infallibility.  The more a person needs the ability they actually possess, and yet the more they avoid employing it to solve problems, the more stupid they appear to be.  If this ability wasn't exercised more than 5 times in 2,000 years, doesn't there exist a substantial likelihood that the ability actually never existed?

I don't see how such attack is diminished when the subject becomes biblical infallibility or "inerrancy".

First, inerrancy has a worse track record than papal infallibility.  The latter has at least assured us Mary went bodily into heaven, bible "inerracy" has done precisely nothing to guarantee that any Christian doctrine is true, except inerrancy itself, which merely fallaciously begs the question.  That is, nobody can really demonstrate how it is that the doctrine of inerrancy actually does anything in the practical world to move people from error into truth or preserve them from falling into error.  Another way of putting it would be to say that inerrancy presents itself as a tool to be employed to achieve some type of goal, but what that goal is, cannot be reasonably determined.  There is nothing about "bible inerrancy" that provides infallible assurance that your interpretation of the bible is correct...or that you are correct in your decision to say certain biblical ethics apply to modern day Christians, etc.

Second, suppose for a moment that the U.S. Constitution was the inerrant word of God.  Do you suppose this new truth would suddenly cause America's legal system to finally come to agreement on what the Constitution does and doesn't allow?  Hardly.  It's inerrancy would do precisely nothing to put an end to the aggressively polarized legal wars between the ACLU and everybody else, as they verbally masscare each other on whether the Constitution supports gay marriage, death penalty, etc. 

So we'd then be reasonable to question that assumption:  Why are you saying the U.S. Constitution is the inerrant word of God, when such a doctrine appears to be little more than a useless academic question whose answer provides no real-world benefits and appears to do little more than convince people to become obstinately bigoted about how correct they are?

Third, it is reasonable to ask inerrantists what purpose there is in going around arguing in favor of bible inerrancy and fending off skeptical attacks:  doing this isn't going to settle any doctrinal controversy (attacks on inerrancy continually convince people that this doctrine is false).  And when we do hear of the occassional unbeliever or Christian who changes their mind and concluded the bible is "inerrant", in nearly every case this is not the result of years of scholarly study, but the result of other influences.  There's no shortage of fundies on the internet who swear they were professional atheist bible critics for decades before the truth finally brought them kicking and screaming over the line, but we have to decide on a case by case basis which of these mostly anonymous loudmouths are telling the truth and which are just trying to save face.

Fourth, inerrancy's uselessness and danger is legitimately inferred from the fact that it emboldens heretics to think their faulty opinions are beyond criticism, a thing that dims one's prospects for enabling them to see the error of their way.  Do you find it difficult to persuade Jehovah's Witnesses of how wrong they are?  Might their view of the bible as inerrant be some of what's causing them to think their interpretations of it are beyond reasonable criticism?  How short of a walk is it, really, from "the bible is inerrant" to "my interpretations of the bible are inerrant"?

Fifth, inerrancy has done much to hurt the cause of likemindedness demanded by the biblical authors (1st Cor. 1:10, Philippians 2:2, 4:2).  Geisler's criticism of Mike Licona is just the tip of the ice-box.

Finally, the obvious fact that God is quite capable of accomplishing any purpose he has for humanity without requiring that they first become perfect, makes clear that God can also guide you by use of imperfect teaching resources, such as sinful family, friends or Christian teachers.  If you don't tell everybody in the world to fuck off merely because their sin nature leaves you no infallible assurances they won't mislead you, then apparently it really is stupid to pretend that one little authentic error in the originals of the bible opens the floodgates to perpetual satanic indecisiveness.

The "assurance" and "comfort" that "inerrancy" brings is completely hollow, given the rat's nest of finger-pointing heretics who all adopt the doctrine,  and would only sound edifying superficial ungrounded persons whose idea of security is still at the level of an infant.

For all these reasons, I insist that the practical uselessness and controversial nature of papal infallibility constitute the same problem for bible inerrancy.  In both cases, the doctrines give you something to yap about, maybe even feel confident about, but at the end of the day, the most practical real-world good that is accomplished by "knowing" that the bible is "inerrant" consists of its tempting people to do what they usually do anyway, and falsely move from "inerrant source" to "inerrant interpretation".

I'm open to any Christian scholar or apologist correcting this blog piece by pointing out how the demonstrable theological good of inerrancy outweighs the demonstrable sins of pride, slander and closed-mindedness everybody knows this doctrine motivates people to commit.  While in academia there is distinction between the bible's inherent inerrancy and one's interpretation of the bible, this distinction evaporates in the real world.  "You can know that pre-millenialism is true because that's what god's inerrant word teaches."  If people are not truth-robots, a doctrine like inerrancy will likely cause more harm than good.

But if the inerrancy of the bible doesn't provide you with a way to infallibly interpret the bible, then the doctrine appears to do what Papal Infallibility does...solve precisely nothing, create unnecessary controversy and give the church yet another doctrine to divide over.

For all these reasons, I would argue that if the bible teaches inerrancy, the problems outlined herein would justify rejecting the doctrine.

Frank Turek's Big Bang is evaporating

Frank Turek appears to have done more than any other Christian apologist to convince others that his particular creationist version of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe not only implies god's existence, but is the only form of the theory that deserves any comment.

The trouble with Turek's theory is as follows:

First, I think the theory is total bullshit, it is a poster-child for ad hoc excuse making, as the theory .  Reminds one of a Christian apologist who is losing a debate, and who thus automatically assume any logically possible alternative they can conjure up to get away from a beating, is the only reasonable hypothesis.

Second, many creationists who decry evolution also say the Big Bang theory is false scientifically AND biblically. AiG and ICR deny it outright, see here and here.  I agree with them, especially on the bible:  one standard rule of hermeneutics is that how the originally intended readers would likely have understood the bible author's words, must weigh heavily on any interpretation purporting to be "objective".  There is simply no fucking way that pre-scientific goat-herders would have either read Genesis 1-2 or any Psalms, and left room in their minds for the possibility that all this happy horseshit was the result of a cosmological explosion.  It is more consistent with patterns of ANE thinking to assume they would have understood such biblical wording to be saying God created the universe the way a carpenter builds a house.

Discoveries in the ways ANE people thought are forcing inerrantist Christian scholars to make damning admissions and otherwise set forth ridiculous trifles in the effort to protect the biblical wording from the charge of error.  See discussion of John Walton's "Lost World of Scripture" here, where Walton reluctantly admits he must disagree with Whitcomb and Morris's attempts to show the scientific "inerrancy" of Genesis 1-2.  He also says:

The point is, when believing in inerrancy is a requirement to be a Christian (which some Christians infer—if not outright claim), that can be a pill too big to swallow, especially when there is data in the Bible that doesn’t seem to fit what most people understand by inerrancy.

Apparently, conceptions of the universe aren't the only theories undergoing inevitable evolution.  God's biblical truths are about as infallible as geocentrism.

Third, in the August 2014 issue of Sky and Telescope, we were told that there was no "before the Big Bang".  See here.

Fourth, In the February 2019 issue of Sky and Telescope, bets are hedging:  now we are being told

The Big Bang theory doesn't rule out the possibility that there was some pre-existing universe from which ours sprang...there are almost as many theories as there are theorists..."  (p. 18).

Fifth, Turek's argument that the BB was the beginning of the universe, is a misunderstanding:

Was the Big Bang the origin of the universe?
It is a common misconception that the Big Bang was the origin of the universe. In reality, the Big Bang scenario is completely silent about how the universe came into existence in the first place. In fact, the closer we look to time "zero," the less certain we are about what actually happened, because our current description of physical laws do not yet apply to such extremes of nature.  (see here)

Sixth, there are BB models that assume the universe has always existed, one is called the Endless Cycle model, which allows for a universe trillions of years old, which moves us much further in the direction of "infinite universe" than the standard model which says the age of the universe is merely in the billions of years:

The Cyclic Theory agrees that there was some violent event 14 billion years ago – we still call it a "big bang" – but this was not the beginning of space and time. The key events causing the creation of matter, radiation, galaxies and stars occurred billions of years before the bang. Furthermore, there was not just one bang. The evolution of the universe is cyclic with big bangs occurring once every trillion or so, each one accompanied by the creation of new matter and radiation that forms new galaxies, stars, planets, and presumably life. Ours is only the most recent cycle.(see here)

 Finally, new discoveries allege that there are not just trillions of stars, but trillions of galaxies:

 Up to now, astronomers usually said we know of about 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe (meaning out to our event horizon, a look-back time of 13.8 billion years). Now the number can be said to be about 2 trillion, with the caveat that this estimate doesn't go back a full 13.8 billion years, it's 600 million years short. (here).

One of the most fundamental questions in astronomy is that of just how many galaxies the universe contains. The landmark Hubble Deep Field, taken in the mid-1990s, gave the first real insight into the universe's galaxy population. Subsequent sensitive observations such as Hubble's Ultra Deep Field revealed a myriad of faint galaxies. This led to an estimate that the observable universe contained about 200 billion galaxies.
The new research shows that this estimate is at least 10 times too low. (here)

And don't even get me started on the linguistic absurdities of the standard BB model, whereby we are supposed to believe incoherent concepts like the "beginning" of "time", which logically implies a time before time.

I do not propose the new developments to make an infinite universe the only reasonable interpretation.  I'm more conservatively only setting forth such official science statements to show that Frank Turek's Christian dogmatism about how the BB implies a limited universe, is entirely unwarranted and smacks more of preaching to the choir, than of dispassionate scholasticism.

I would think it borders on dishonest for Turek to pretend that his particular version of the BB theory is so sufficiently supported that he can just pretend that the other models, which admit the universe has an infinite history and size, are unworthy of serious consideration.  Even if a big bang happened, no, Dr. Turek, that does not automatically imply a "spaceless, timeless, immaterial intelligence".