My reply to Tremper Longman's apologetics

 This is my reply to an article by Tremper Longman entitled:

5 Common Arguments Against the Bible (and How to Respond to Them)

See here.

The Bible holds an essential place in Christian faith.

Liberal Christians find it less special than fundamentalists.  And plenty of fundamentalists, eager to look like consistent spiritual warriors, are prone to stifle their true problems with the bible and just barge ahead giving every appearance of being strong in the faith. 

The Bible claims to be—and the Church has recognized it as—the Word of God.

False:  The 4 canonical gospels never claim to be the word of God.  Paul usually doesn't specify whether his commentary is from God or his own opinion, when in fact the pattern of the OT prophets makes reasonable the expectation that if he thought his writings on par with the OT, he would make his speaking for god equally as clear as OT prophets did.  The non-Pauline epistles do not claim to be the word of God.  The only NT book that has any hope of declaring itself the word of God is Revelation.  That is, the 4 most important NT books never claim to be God's word, and the one book in the NT that has divided Christianity the most beacuse of its absurd symbolism, is the one that makes the only discernible claim to being the word of God.

The Church through the ages has acknowledged this status by referring to the Bible as its canon, which means that the Bible is the written standard for its faith and practice.

Most of Paul's original converts in Galatia eventually decided he was full of shit and abandoned him.  See Paul's admission to this and his angry cursing of them in Galatians 1:6-9.  Apparently, many Christians who converted under Paul's preaching, found good evidence that his commentaries on the gospel were misleading and heretical.  We have to wonder what NT canon would have been authored by those persons.  But the authenticity of Paul's apostleship is legitimately questionable. 

These are extraordinary claims to make about a collection of ancient literature, and many people in today’s society have great difficulty understanding why Christians would put their beliefs and behavior under the authority of the Bible.

Probably because Christians themselves disagree with each other so much on how to interpret the bible, one gets the feeling that anything written more than 1,000 years ago does not deserve the serious interest of any modern person except those who think it a fun hobby to dabble in ancient theology.  Very few fundamentalist Christians of today would insist that salvation is so important, the atheist parent should just let her child sleep in, avoid school and work for a few days, and study the bible.  But when fundamentalists politely allow their prospective proselytes to prioritize such earthly concerns above salvation-concerns, the fundamentalists are tacitly admitting, whether they admit it or not, that yes, there are some things in life that are more important than checking out Christian claims.  And yet these inconsistent fundamentalists will still warn an unbeliever that they better get saved ASAP, because when they die, their fate will be sealed forever.  Gee, I didn't know that mom's getting Johnny off to kindergarten was more important than her making sure she has successfully steered clear of God's wrath. 

I can think of five common objections that I have heard over the years:

Which means you've never discussed the bible with me. 

The Bible is full of contradictions and discrepancies.

We are reasonable to say this because a) even most Christian scholars deny biblical "inerrancy", and b) there is no rule of historiography, hermeneutics or common sense that requires anybody to prove a contradiction or error in absolute fashion.  Unfortunately for inerrantists, that means our argument that the bible has an error or contradiction can continue to be reasonable, even if the inerrantist can come up with logically possible harmonization scenarios.  Not to mention that the burden of proof is on the fundie since it is by their own admission that the bible is this special book that is so much more astoundingly accurate than other works from antiquity.  Even a fool can tell that nobody could possibly fulfill their burden of proof to show that the originals of the bible were "inerrant" any more than any fool can pretend to show that the originals of the Apocrypha were inerrant.

The Bible is full of violence, genocide, prejudice, and injustice, often commanded by God—and it’s been used by Christians to justify more violence and oppression.

You can skip the Crusades and the Inquisition.  I prefer to stick to the issue of how the biblical intended his contemporary readers to interpret his statements about God commanding his people to engage in violence against infants, children and non-combatants.

The Bible’s descriptions of nature and natural history are hopelessly at odds with science.

They are, and once again, we don't have to prove it absolutely.  And since discusing bible interpretation is a far cry from litigating a claim in Court, it isn't up to the Christian, but the skeptic, to decide which evidentiary standard from a court must be met in sustaining one's interpretation:  whether proving it beyond any reasonable doubt, or proving merely with a preponderance of evidence, or perhaps an even lower standard.

The Bible was written by ancient and primitive people, and has no value to modern people anymore.

That conclusion is obviously reasonable when the subject is any other book written 2000 years ago or more, as even Christians would agree.  The christian apologist doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of "demonstrating" that the bible's applicability to modern people is so clear that those who deny it are "unreasonable".  The most Christians can do is show that THEY are not unreasonable to think the bible applies to today.  But reasonableness doesn't work like accuracy.  Reasonableness is very complex and asks far more questions than simply whether you sided with "truth".  Therefore, even granting that Christians can be reasonable to view the bible as applicable today, does not automatically dictate that those who disagree with them on the point are thus "unreasonable".  Thus there is a significant risk to the Christian that the skeptic's view of the bible as outdated inapplicable ancient speculations about invisible unprovable things, might be reasonable.  

Christians can’t even agree on what it’s saying, so who cares if it’s true or not.

That would only be a weak argument if there were only a few disagreements.  But literally everything in the bible, except perhaps God's existence and Jesus' gender, is a subject of dispute within Christianity.  Worse, those disputes affect salvation related doctrine.  Some Christians are Lordship Salvationists, others are Easy Gracers.  Some Christian scholars adopt Norman Geisler's view of inerrancy, other equally fundamentalist Christian scholars adopt a less rigid form.  Calvinism and Arminianism demonstrate that even Christian scholars disagree with each other about human freewill and divine grace, the answers to which determine whether we view God as a compassionate fair deity or a sadistic puppet-master.  What idiot god would give people an infallible text without an infallible interpretive key?  Maybe the reason God doesn't give us such key is because there was never any good reason to think God wanted anybody living after the first century to correctly understand the bible?  Would your evidence for the opposite view be so compelling as to render the skeptic foolish on the point?

Having thought about these issues over the years that I have been a biblical scholar, I would like to offer the following responses to these objections.

1. It is full of contradictions and discrepancies

It’s not very hard to convince someone that the Bible is full of contradictions—that is, if they don’t know the Bible very well. All you have to do is cite Proverbs, where the author tells us not to “answer (26:4)—or is it, “answer a fool according to his folly” (26:5). Or maybe point out that Matthew places the “Sermon on the Mount,” on a mountain (Matt. 5:1), while Luke says Jesus spoke on a “level place” (Luke 6:17). Is Abijah a good king (2 Chronicles 13) or a bad one (1 Kings 15:1-8)? Were humans created last (Gen. 1:1-2:4a) or first (Gen. 2:4b-25)? Of course, these are just samples from countless others that people like to bring up.

A little digging, however, will show that proverbs aren’t written to give us universally valid principles (“I would always answer a fool according to his folly”), but rather they are true only when applied at the right situation. Depending on the “fool” you are talking to, you have to determine which proverb is relevant to the situation.

You are claiming that the Proverbs authors did not intend to give universally valid principles, but you have not sustained your proper burden.  Indeed you couldn't as the proverbs often counsel against actions that you think are universally evil, such as adultery (2:16).  Proverbs 1:8 forbids the reader from forsaking the author's counsel written therein, which sounds like the author thought deviation from his advice was no more justified than deviation from the law.  It may be true that viewing the proverbs as universally applicable is foolish, because maybe they aren't universal.  But that still leaves open the question of whether the author intended a conclusion that Christians today would consider foolish.  I am not a Christian:  I do not assume the best about the biblical authors.  I am open to the possibility that they wanted their readers to do things which people today commonly regard as foolish.  And it isn't like the evidence in favor of the divine inspiration of the bible is so clear that it makes fools of all skeptics who stay open to the imperfect author's possibly imperfect intentions.

The Gospels are not meant to be simply factual reports, but bring out the theological significance of real events for their intended contemporary audience.

Then the original gospel author, Mark, must have thought what Jesus said and did before the crucifixion was far more important to memorialize in writing than the matter of whether anybody actually ever saw the allegedly risen Christ (i.e., most Christian scholars say mark is earliest, and they also agree authentically Markan text stops at 16:8, meaning the earliest gospel did not say whether anybody ever actually saw the risen Christ).

So Matthew places Jesus’ sermon on a mountain in order to bring out a connection all his original Jewish Christian readers would recognize immediately. Namely, Jesus speaking on a mountain about the law would remind them how God gave Moses the law on Mount Sinai (Exodus 19-24): Luke, written primarily for Hellenistic Christians, would not pick up on that connection so readily.

So did Jesus really preach on a mountain as Matthew says?  or has Matthew placed Jesus on a fictional mountain to stress how important those teachings were?

The same is true concerning the account of Abijah in Kings and Chronicles. These aren’t just collections of data about a king named Abijah. The two histories are using the history of Israel and Judah to answer questions relevant to their time. The author of Kings writes to those who survived the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians to explain why they are in exile. They and their kings broke God’s law and suffer the consequences. Chronicles, on the other hand, was written to the post-exilic community and, among other matters, is interested in choosing events in the life of their kings that show their devotion to God.

have it your way, my skeptical arguments do much damage to fundamentalist Christianity, and none of them bother trifling over such minutae.

As for the two accounts of creation: While they both are interested in telling us who created everything, neither are interested in telling us how he did it.

Or maybe the authors WERE interested, but could not think up a story that would satisfy all their theological needs.

Neither one is telling us the actual sequence of creation, but describes creation in figurative language.

Ah, so what you mean is that the more Christians divide into the Young Earth and Old Earth camps, the more both groups are failing to appreciate the non-literal character of the creation epics?   

We can turn to science and ask the questions how God did it.

No you can't.  You believe God created all things ex nihilo or "from nothing".  Science contradicts that concept.  Zero does not even offer a possibility of producing something.  So while God's creation of things is not logically problematic, the "ex nihilo" version of that fantasy IS.  God's inability to create ex nihilo no more implicates his power than does his inability to create four-sided triangles.  God can never create a four-sided triangle, and he could never derive something from nothing, as both alleged acts are violations of logic.

As I’ve demonstrated, supposed “tensions and contradictions” in the Bible are usually cases where someone misunderstands the genre and purpose of a certain passage, or is measuring the Bible by an inappropriate standard. In my forty-plus years as a professional biblical scholar, I have yet to hear such a claim that really sticks once I do a little digging. I suggest that others do as well.

I've done plenty of digging, and no other historical error in the bible is clearer than the biblical author's lying to the reader in denying David's sexual infidelity in 1st Kings 1:1-4.  The very notion that several adults disregarded sleeping close to the fireplace, or having David sleep with one of his polygamous wives, and thus thought the only way David could cure his night chills was for him to sleep next to a pretty young virgin girl picked at random from the city, is fucking preposterous, and no Christian woman of today would even start to believe a similar excuse if she came home, found her husband in bed with a pretty young virgin girl picked by his friends from another part of town, and listened to him say "I was only trying to get warm, I did not have sex with that woman".   

Yes, this is the part where fuckhead inerrantists suddenly discover that God's people have been wrong for 3,000 years, and 1st Kings isn't history but only satire.   Sort of reminds you of the trifling defense lawyer who asks how the jury can be so sure that those 15 different videos of his client's criminal act weren't all photoshopped.  When bible inerrancy is at stake, no barely possible theory is too stupid or unlikely. After all, inerrantists, being incapable of distinguishing their opinions from God's presence, are obligated to defend their opinions no less vigorously than they defend God himself.

2. It is full of violence, genocide, prejudice, and injustice, often commanded by God—and it’s been used by Christians to justify more violence and oppression

You can skip how those verses were used by christians, and concentrate solely on what those atrocity-texts mean in context.

Yes, the Bible is full of prejudice, violence, attempted genocide, and injustice. The Bible, after all, gives us the brutal truth about sinful human beings.

It also gives us a brutal Iron Age deity who thinks underage girls who have sex in their priest father's house must be burned to death.  Leviticus 21:9.  Her having sex in her fathers house implies she hasn't reached the age of marriage, and therefore hasn't moved out yet, since any fool infidel wife would find it safer to commit sexual sin in her own house where she is less likely to be caught.

Of course, people who bring this charge against the Bible don’t have these instances of human violence and injustice in mind, but rather they are thinking of those many stories where God brought violence on people either directly or through the agency of his followers. Think of the flood story (Genesis 6-9), the killing of the Egyptian soldiers at the Red Sea (Exodus 14-15), or the Conquest (Joshua 1-12).

Don't forget 1st Samuel 15:2-3.  And the soldiers under Moses must surely have thought that his command that they will babies and children (Numbers 31:17) was what God wanted.   

But, while it is hard to get our 21st century Western minds around it, these are stories of justice, bad people receiving the judgment that they deserve.

Wow, I didn't know your theology said 2 year old girls "deserve" to be slaughtered.  Are you a Calvinist? 

God brings the Flood against violent humanity (Gen. 6:11-12);

The flood also destroyed innocent babies. 

he closes the Red Sea against Egyptian soldiers who were trying to kill the Israelites,

The Targum Oinkolos says each Egyptian solider was carrying two angel-faced babies during pursuit of Israel through the parted waters.

and he commands Joshua to fight the Canaanites because their sin had reached “its full measure” (Gen. 15:16).

which means God wanted Joshua to massacre Canaanite babies who did not deserve to endure such brutality.

It’s only people who live in relatively peaceful circumstances who have the luxury of being “turned off” by such stories.

no, Abraham senses injustice in God's alleged intent to destroy the righteous with the wicked (Genesis 18:23 ff), Moses sensed injustice and contradiction within God when hearing of God's intent to kill the post-exodus Israelites (Exodus 32:9 ff), and David senses injustice in God's killing other people when the sin in question was committed by nobody except David (2nd Samuel 24:17).

And it's not just people who live in peaceful circumstance who are turned off by such stories.  lamentations and other bible stories inform us that mothers living in times of war and civil unrest weeped and wailed at the prospect of their kids being killed.

The hard truth of the Bible is that people who reject God and harm other people will eventually receive punishment for them.

Except that none of the babies whom God ordered to be massacared, had ever 'rejected god' nor had they "harmed other people".  if you recognize that skeptics quickly focus on the problem of child massacre, why are you wasting the reader's time talking about how adults "deserve" to suffer God's wrath?  You've answered nothing.

That’s also the message of the New Testament, in the teaching behind heaven and hell.

Except that more and more conservative Christian scholars are adopting a version of unbeliever-afterlife that is less brutal than literal hell fire.  So it appears there are some aspects of NT ethics that do indeed contradict the crass barbarity of the OT god.  

The divine violence of the Bible is part of God’s battle against evil.

The babies among the OT pagans were not evil, so why did God destroy those babies?  Why does the OT god adopt the ancient Semitic view of corporate responsibility?  Because God is partly Jewish?  Or because he was created in the mind of ancient Semitic people and thus can only b e expected to emulate their own views about politics and war?

And this battle develops as time goes on. When Jesus comes, he actually heightens and intensifies the battle so that it is now directly toward the spiritual powers and authorities, and these enemies are defeated not by killing but by his dying on the cross, where he “triumphs” over them (Col. 2:15).

Do you expect a skeptic to take seriously your using a theological speculation from Paul to establish any truth about "god"?  Should skeptics think the debate with you is over after they quote "Origin of Species"?

For this reason, Jesus’ followers, Christians, must realize that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12).

No, another reasonable option is for today's Christians to regard Paul as an inconsistent and deceptive mystic, and realize that, like the canonical gospels, living the way Jesus said to live is all that matters, hence, no need to build a collection called NT canon, and no need to make theology more complex than what Jesus said. 

This battle is won with spiritual (truth, righteousness, peace, faith, the word of God), not physical weapons. Any use of violence today to further or even defend the gospel is sinful.

You are not addressing the skeptics but preaching to the choir at this point.

Even so, this move from physical to spiritual warfare in the Old Testament does not carry with it a critique or rejection of what went on the in the Old Testament. As a matter of fact, the warfare against evil humans and dark spiritual powers come together in the picture the Bible gives us of the final judgment (for instance, in Rev. 19:11-21).

That said, I have to admit that there are matters in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, that I too find hard to understand. In particular, Moses’ instruction that Israel was not to leave alive “anything that breathes” (Deut. 20:16) is difficult for me to wrap my mind around, particularly when Joshua implements this after the battle of Jericho, when the Israelites “utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and donkey with the edge of the sword” (Joshua 6:21). Perhaps, as some scholars suggest, “man and woman, young and old” is just a way of saying “everyone there,” but there were no young people actually there—but why mention the young if they weren’t included? Perhaps, as others suggest, Jericho at this time is a military garrison with few, if any, children, but even if one child died, it is still troubling.

It makes more sense to say that in that environment, the greatest protection to the women and children would be found by their hiding in the military fort.  So the bible specifies the killing of "young" because it was known that the young would be stationed with, or close to, the military forts.

Perhaps—and this view is most likely, in my opinion—Canaanite culture was so thoroughly corrupt that it needed to be totally eradicated.

Blame it on God, who like a neglectful parent, could tell that the Canaanites were becoming more and more disobedient, but god simply sat like a deer in headlights, letting shit get out of control.

Regardless, your opinion is false.  At my blog I refute Turek's view that the children were still alive when the Canaanites put the in the fire.  I refute the popular Christian view that Canaanites engaged in bestiality more than other pagan nations.  If my research is reasonable, it is reasonable to dismiss your theory that they were more evil than normal pagans....leaving you with no rationalization for god's desire to subject them to more brutal treatment, keeping open the option that if god really did this, he is arbitrary.

In the final analysis, I find myself, like Job at the end of the book of Job, bowing before God in spite of his unexplained suffering.

That choice of yours does not mean skeptics are unreasonable to draw negative inferences about "god" on the basis of unexplained suffering. 

For others, the picture of God killing or allowing the death particularly of non-combatants will continue to be an obstacle, but I believe we should resist the temptation to explain it away.

Ah, so you think most Christian "apologists" are not following the Holy Spirit's lead when they start trying to rationalize the OT descriptions of divinely-sanctioned child massacre?  Why should I bother becoming a Christian, if even my obtaining as much as a ph.d in biblical subjects from a conservative bible college or seminary will do nothing to guarantee I'll correctly perceive the Holy Spirit's leading in my life?

 3. Its descriptions of nature and natural history are hopelessly at odds with science

The Bible is not at odds with science in its descriptions of nature and natural history.

I disagree.  I find apologetic attempts to get a spherical earth out of bible statements about the shape of the earth, to be absurd.  But for one example, Genesis 1:24 says God caused the EARTH to "bring forth" such animals.  The problem for you is that because you think God could have created such animals ex nihilo, you have to ask why the biblical author views the earth as assisting in God's creation of such animals (sort of like asking why he made made out of dust instead of ex nihilo).  The likely truth is that the author wrote in a pre-scientific age and tried to do two things:  a) uphold the current view that lesser life forms "come from" certain types of earth substances, and b) ascribe their materialization to "god", whom the author apparently desired to exercise rule and sovereignty over all things.   But the non-scientific concept of abiogenesis in Genesis will not disappear merely because the bible elsewhere says god 'created' such creatures.  "let the earth bring forth" is the Genesis text, and it doesn't mean creation ex nihilo.  It makes the earth a co-creator.  Even as late as Augustine, the popular view was that certain types of living things such as insects would just materialize out of certain substances.

Biblical truth and scientific truth will never conflict as a matter of principle because, as past theologians have told us, God has given us two books to reveal who he is, namely the book of nature and the Bible.

You are merely an inerrantist. 

While these two books will never truly come into conflict, our interpretations of one or the other, or both, may be wrong, which brings the appearance of conflict.

Which is about as stupid as the atheist who says that wherever his doctrine of evolution contradicts something else he believes, he must have interpreted the evidence for evolution incorrectly.

At this point, we need to remember the wise words of Pope John Paul II, “Science can purify our religion; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.”

I guess that imposes an intellectual obligation upon skeptics to involve themselves in the ceaseless word-wrangling that comprises the Young-Earth and Old-Earth creationist controversay..

Genesis 1-2, the main biblical account of cosmic and human origins, describes these events using figurative language, which should be obvious to all readers and has been obvious to most through the ages.

Wow, so even though many creationists who take Genesis literally have gotten 'saved', and walk in light of Christ, and fellowship with other true believers, and have obtained advanced knowledge of biblical matters, and who regularly pray with sincerity, not even becoming THAT kind of person will do anything to guarantee that god will honor your desire to steer clear of misunderstanding?  Why the fuck would I even wave at your god, must less give him a hearing? 

Church fathers like Origen and Augustine recognized that real days with evenings and mornings must have a sun, moon, and stars. Thus the days of Genesis 1—where the sun doesn’t appear until the fourth day—must not be real days. When Genesis 2:7 describes the formation of the first man as God blowing on dust, that too is figurative language. After all, does God have lungs?

Or maybe the pre-scientific author of Genesis, back there in 1400 b.c., seriously thought god had physical attributes that were different than what we call "physical"?  I don't read the modern theology of the NT back into the OT.  Not being an inerrantist, I am reasonably open to the possibility that the earliest Hebrew concepts of God were much simpler than, and contradictory to, the later concepts.  You actually don't know if the reason Adam heard God walking in the Garden was because the author was using figurative speech, or the author believed that God's nature involved some type of physicality, or that God became incarnate in order to "walk".  You also don't know that OT visions of God such as in Isaiah 6 are mere theophanies or figurative langauge.  You only employ that excuse because a literal interpretation would create havoc with certain bits of NT theology, such as the invisibility of God.  You actually don't know whether the author of a story about God sitting on his throne, is engaging in "anthropomorphism", or if he means it literally, or it he is simply saying something inconsistent with his other beliefs.  Gee, no Christian has ever held inconsistent beliefs, have they?

So we don’t need science to tell us that Genesis 1-2, while vitally interested in the question of who created everything—God!—is not at all interested in how he created everything. Thus, we can turn to God’s other book—nature—to answer that question. And through the tools of science, we see that natural history is best understood as a long, slow process of cosmic and biological evolution, leading to the creation of human beings. This presents no real threat to the teaching of the Bible.

But young earth creationist Christains would say you preach a doctrine of demons.  What authority says I am under any obligation to try and figure out which camp is correct, and how long will God agree I can justifibly delay the day of my repentance during this study before he will start expecting me to draw ultimate inferences about who got it right?  Or does your inability to provide a reasonably certain answer to such questions mean you forfeit the right to balk if i choose to answer those questions for myself in a way you personally don't approve of? 

4. It was written by ancient and primitive people, and has no value to modern people anymore

Smart skeptics don't talk like that.  Of course the bible can have value to modern people, just like a broken clock is right twice a day, and you can learn from the clever criminal whose plans were foiled by the police.  Just because the bible isnt inspired by God doesn't mean all of its assertions are false.

The skeptical position is that Christians cannot demonstrate that the biblical warnings of god's wrath apply to modern day people.  the bible was written at least 2000 years ago, and everybody agrees the authors intended an audience contemporary to themselves.  If you come along 2,000 years later and say somebody involved with the production of the bible intended an audience wider than the audience intended by the human authors, YOU have the burden to establish such a thing, skeptics do not have a burden to disprove such a theory.  And YOU have the burden even more since the notion that a book is divinely inspired and applies to society today no less than it did when originally written thousands of years ago, is an extraordinary claim.  Skeptics have no more duty to disprove your speculative hypothesis than we have a duty to disprove any miracles alleged by Benny Hinn.

The Bible was written by ancient people, to be sure. The earliest writings come from the second half of the second millennium BC and the most recent parts from around 300 BC. That’s a long time ago. The New Testament is more recent, but even those books were written almost 2000 years ago. They were written in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek by people who were culturally different from us. Indeed, we often misunderstand the message of the Bible if we don’t remember our temporal and cultural distance from those who wrote it.

Probably because those words are not the message of a transcultural god, it is the message of nobody except the human authors.  Do you seriously think the third person of the Trinity amounts to nothing more than "consider the social context"?  How could the leading of the Holy Spirit be a coherent concept if at the end of the day, correct knowledge of the bible requires study of historical truths no less than correct knowledge of the Inquisition does?  Tagging "the holy spirit was leading me" onto every confession of bible-knowledge discovery gives every appearance of gratuitous afterthought.  

But it’s one thing to say the Bible was written by ancient people and another thing to say that they were written by primitive people. Even without taking into account the claim that these authors speak on behalf of God, such a charge would be the height of our own cultural arrogance. Yes, ancient people did not have computers, cell phones, video games, or even electricity or cars, neither did Shakespeare or Plato, and would we also say that these writers are too ancient to say anything true or meaningful?

You are apparently talking to a very stupid skeptic who doesn't ask the hardest questions.  Skeptics do not claim the bible offers modern man nothing useful.  Skeptics say you cannot make even a minimal prima facie case that any god or biblical author intended his words to educate readers that would live 2,000 years after the biblical author died.  By never constructing even a minimal prima facie case, there cannot possibly be any intellectual obligation on people outside your religion to "prove the bible doesn't apply today". 

We have made remarkable advances in our understanding of natural world since biblical times, and the biblical authors often reflect their ancient worldview (that, say, the world was flat and perhaps at the center of the cosmos). But the Bible does not intend to teach us about cosmology, and the faulty cosmology that it assumes does not affect its intended message.

Norman Geisler and his brand of inerrancy would say you are wrong, and the truth in biblical statements is not limited to spiritual or theological matters, but extends to every biblical assertion about mankind, the earth, the universe, and the laws of physics.

Others believe that the Bible is primitive in its understanding of the supernatural. Dying people are miraculously healed, the dead are brought to life, and the sea opens up to allow the Israelites to escape the Egyptians. But perhaps the modern view of the cosmos as materialistic here is the mistaken one. The Bible is God’s revelation of a dimension that escapes our empirical perception.

Replace "Bible" with any other non-Christian ancient religious text, and your last sentence would function to defend the divine inspiration of even pagan materials.

Jews and Christians value the Bible much more than any other literature, ancient or modern, since we recognize that God speaks to us through the human authors of the Bible (the Hebrew part to the Jews and the Old and New Testaments to Christians).

Skeptics object to the word "recognize".  that implies that there is a truth that you have discovered and accepted. Skeptics think it would be more objective if you replaced "recognize" with "believe".

In other words, while the books of the Bible were not written to us, they were written for us and have continuing relevance for us today.

Unfortunately, you don't quote anything in the bible to substantiate that claim.

5. Christians can’t even agree on what it’s saying, so who cares if it’s true or not

Christians often come to different conclusions on what the Bible teaches on a whole host of subjects. All we have to do is drive down the street and see a Baptist Church on one corner, then a Lutheran Church on another, then a Catholic Church, a Presbyterian Church, and on and on to come to the conclusion that there isn’t one, but a host of different Christian messages.

Excellent point.

Christians disagree on many things, such as as how to interpret Genesis 1-2, how to understand the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of humans, what happens during communion, when someone should be baptized, how the gifts of the Spirit manifest themselves in us, when Christ is going to return, and on and on. Such differences may lead some people to conclude that if Christians can’t agree on what the Bible teaches, then why bother with it all.

That might be what you get from a newbie skeptic.  The seasoned skeptic, like me, would take advantage of Christian doctrinal disagreement as follows:  Most mature Christians will not deny the salvation or sanctification of another Christian merely because the other Christians disagrees with them on how to interpret the bible.  IF then we grant that you are not evincing a lack of salvation or lack of spirit-guided life merely because there's another Christian in the world who disagrees with your interpretations of the bible, then charity forces us to admit that both Christians have equal access to the Holy Spirit. Thus if they continue to disagree with each other, it is because God is refusing to enlighten at least one of them.  By establishing the possibility that God may refuse to honor a saved sincere Christian's request to understand the bible correctly, we skeptics are reasonable to label your god to be an insincere prick.  It hardly requires argument to morally justify one's refusal to seek guidance from an insincere prick.  Probably the better inference from Christian doctrinal disagreement is that there is no god guiding anybody in teh first place, so that naturally, since everybody is deprived of an infallible interpretive key, a large group of equally capable persons will most assuredly interpret the same bible passage in different ways.  What fool trifles that the reason historians disagree about the past is because God sovereignly doesn't want them to agree?  No, we realize that the reason historians disagree about the past is because the source-material documenting the past is often ambiguous.  there is nothing spiritual about it whatsoever.

But such a conclusion misses a very critical point. In the midst of all the disagreements on secondary matters (that some Christians unfortunately treat as more important than they are),

That's another excuse for skeptics to ignore Christianity, they might end up like a lot of stupid Christians, and offend god by making mountains out of molehills.  Sure, maybe skeptics are aleady in trouble with god via unbelief, but that doesn't make it rational to "take a chance" and add the sin of heresy to one's life.  And yet as skeptics look out over the Christian landscape, they can tell that even sincere Christians are often deceived for decades about bible truth.   

nearly all Christians actually agree on the most important matters.

What you meant is that if within the group being studied, there are some Christians who deny doctrines you deem "essential", these are false Christians.  In other words, you refuse to allow that Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses create problems for doctrinal certainty, you will simply insist these people are not true Christians in the first place, which leads to "if you want to find out whether Christians disagree on important doctrinal matters, limit your samples to just Trinitarian Protestants" 

What are these matters? Well, if you want to know what all Christians agree on take a look at the Apostles’ Creed . Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Catholic, and many more Churches all affirm the Apostles’ Creed.

So I was right.  if any 'christian' denies anything in the Apostle's Creed, you will say they are not true Christians in the first place, and thus afford the skeptic no ammo.  How convenient.

Christians also stand united in the clear teaching that the Bible tells us that we were created by God, that we are sinners who need a savior, and that this savior is Jesus Christ, God’s son, who died on a cross and was raised from death in power.As the Westminster Confession of Faith (a Christian creed written in the seventeenth century) puts it, these are the things that “are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation,” and these matters are clear because they “are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.”

You fail to mention other splits within Trinitarian Christianity:  most protestant churches thought 7th day Adventists were outside the pale of orthodoxy until clarification was reached by the efforts of Walter Martin.  Trinitarians disagree with each other on Lordship Salvation v. Easy Grace.  Calvinists and Arminians are in ceaseless disagreement about how one becomes born again, and they disagree on whether Jesus died for every one or only the elect.  The disagree on what level of zeal a truly born again Christian must manifest.   Spiritual gifts are supposed to be god's special miraculous way of guiding the church, but Christians disagree on how those gifts operate, and whether they operate today (i.e., the Trinitarian cessationist will insist that Pentecostals are merely deluded when they "speak in tongues"). 

Conclusion

Let me end by saying that it is never wrong to voice one’s questions about the Bible,

False, Paul prohibited certain bible questions:  1st Timothy 6:4.  Ask enough questions and this usually leads to trifles about semantics and grammar, but Paul's prohibition extends equally to word-wrangling (2nd Tim. 2:14).  And Paul's statement that love believes all things (1st Cor. 13:7) is subtle but obvious request that his audience avoid questioning him. In other words, if you are a loving Christian and believe paul is a true apostle, you will just believe his commentaries are inspired by God and therefore avoid questioning his doctrines or his credentials.  A fine recipe for anti-intellectual or cultic religion.

and these questions are natural ones to ask. I have asked them myself over the years, but they have driven me to a deeper study of the Bible.

That doesn't tip the scale in favor of Christianity.  Another possible consequence of one's deeper study of the bible is apostasy, which was true in my case, and which is the reason give by most ex-fundies as to what convinced them the entire Christian thing was total bullshit.

As I have studied further, I have come to a deeper respect for the Bible as the Word of God and my study continues.

As I have studied further, I have to realize the bible as a purely naturalistic and self-contradictory production.

My hope for others would be that these questions could be catalysts to more interaction with the Bible and not become an excuse for dismissing the Bible.

That is unacceptably naïve:  the way you address certain skeptical claims against the bible is utterly shallow.  You'd be more biblical if you simply parroted Paul and cursed anybody who disagreed with your understanding of the gospel (Gal. 1:6-9).