Divine Inspiration

In various places across the interwebs, Sam Harris, a public intellectual and one of the leading New Atheists, has claimed that the Bible is not divinely inspired.

Chris Varga

Jan 9, 2019 — 8 min read

Photo by Shai Pal / Unsplash

In this précis, I’ll unpack the logical form of Harris’s argument, and consider its merits in light of what the Bible says about its own inspiration.

The Argument Stated

The following transcript from one of Harris’s interviews is a good summary of the argument:

The fact that you and I could improve the Bible with very little thought (just take out the worst passages that have no possible redeemable content this year or, I would argue, any other year, and the Bible is already improved), […] the fact that we can edit it to anyone’s advantage, is a problem for the idea that this was written by an omniscient being and not to be superseded by any human effort, now or generations from now. […] Just think about how good a book would be if an omniscient being wrote it. It’s very easy to see what could be in there that would still astonish us. It’s very easy to see what could be in there that would prove, just based on the time of its emergence, that this couldn’t have been the product of merely human minds.¹

If we distill the claims made in the transcript, the argument basically takes the form of a syllogism:

The Bible can be improved.
An omniscient being probably wouldn’t write a book that could be improved.
Therefore, an omniscient being probably didn’t write the Bible.

It is easy to see how the first premise comes straight from the transcript. As for the second premise, since Harris never specifies exactly why the fact that the Bible can be improved is a problem, we can only try our best at a charitable interpretation. The initial statement of the second premise above is reasonable, but perhaps we could make it stronger in order to force a stronger conclusion:

An omniscient being would never write a book that could be improved.

This stronger phrasing would allow us to conclude that an omniscient being did not write the Bible, not merely that it is unlikely. However, this phrasing (“would never”) is probably too logically strong for its own good. For all it takes to refute the claim that an omniscient being would never do something is to simply show that, for all we know, an omniscient being might want to do it under certain circumstances. Thus, while the stronger phrasing of the second premise would give a stronger conclusion, it is also much more susceptible to refutation.

On the other hand, if we use the weaker formulation (“probably”), then the premise is easier to defend, but the conclusion is not compelling; a defender could reply that, while this argument indeed provides some evidence against divine inspiration, there is also other evidence for it. The task would then be to weigh the evidence for and against divine inspiration, which is admittedly a subjective task. In the end perhaps the evidence for and against would simply cancel each other out.

In any case, whichever formulation of the second premise we prefer, it does not change the core of the argument’s logical thrust: the Bible can be improved in some way, but if an omniscient being wrote it, that should not be the case. As it stands, therefore, the argument is valid. But is it sound? Not likely; both premises are questionable. Furthermore, as we will see, the argument as a whole relies on a dubious assumption about the purpose of the Bible.

The Argument Analyzed

The most obvious problem with Harris’s argument is the vague claim that the Bible can be improved. Improved for who exactly, or for what purpose? Harris never explicitly says. Yet, improvement is always relative to some goal. You can say that Jackie Chan’s backflip can be improved because he fell; but if his goal was to fall for a movie stunt you would be wrong.

So, in order to evaluate this argument, it is crucial that we consider what Harris has in mind when he talks about improving the Bible. And if the improvement of a thing is relative to its purpose, then it is also crucial that we consider what Harris thinks, in turn, about the following question: what is the purpose of the Bible?

The Purpose of the Bible

If we look carefully at the way Harris talks about the Bible in various places, he most likely has in mind two specific ways that it can be improved.² First, Harris thinks the Bible could be updated to reflect modern views about sex and marriage. Second, he thinks it could be more scientifically accurate. These ways that Harris thinks the Bible can be improved reveal what he thinks its purpose is: to give us moral or scientific facts.

Now, if this is what Harris thinks the purpose of the Bible is, then it is easy to see why he thinks it can be improved. However, it is also easy to see that the idea that God wrote the Bible merely in order to provide ancient people with, say, scientific knowledge that they couldn’t have gotten otherwise, is implausible. Rather, when we take a look at the Bible’s own claims about why it was written, we see a different picture.

According to the Bible itself, the reason it was given to mankind was to provide us with knowledge of God (cf. John 20:31, 1 John 5:13), to bring God’s people comfort and joy during times of persecution (cf. Psalm 119:28,35,45,47,52), and to cause us to consider our attitudes and behavior in light of God’s good character (cf. 2 Timothy 3:16, Hebrews 4:12). So, rather than merely providing us with a list of facts in order to save us the trouble of doing science, the Bible is instead intended to lead us to wisdom and relationship with God (cf. Proverbs 2:6).

In summary, then, the problem with the first premise in Harris’s argument is that he imposes a standard on the Bible that it was never intended to meet. Harris assumes that the purpose of the Bible is to provide us with certain kinds of factual knowledge. However, he neglects what the Bible has to say about its own purpose, which, on the contrary, is to provide us with wisdom and personal knowledge of God. When evaluated in this context, most of Harris’s complaints about taking out the “worst” passages of the Bible disappear.

In truth, perhaps the very act of wrestling with difficult passages in the Bible, as many of the faithful have done throughout history, was intended to lead us to wisdom and deeper into relationship with God rather than finding all the answers.

Futuristic Facts and Time Travel Paradoxes

So much for the first premise of Harris’s argument. However, even if we were to grant that premise for the sake of argument, the second premise also faces problems. The key question here is why an omniscient being would write a book that would become “outdated” over time. Or, to put it another way, why wouldn’t an omniscient being include “futuristic” knowledge in the Bible to somehow prove its divine inspiration? As Harris puts it, why couldn’t God just have put in a modern fact (perhaps from quantum mechanics) that would prove, “just based on the time of its emergence, that this couldn’t have been the product of merely human minds.”

Given our discussion about the purpose of the Bible, it should already be clear that this question is wrongheaded. It already assumes that the purpose of the Bible is to somehow prove God’s existence by including some facts that couldn’t have been the product of merely human minds. Yet if that isn’t the purpose of the Bible, then asking why God didn’t do that becomes a non sequitur argument.

But alas, perhaps we can face this futuristic facts question more directly in order to show its absurdity. Does it even make sense to think that an omniscient being would want to put some specific futuristic knowldge in the Bible? Or better, would it even be possible?

First of all, think about the original audience of the Bible: given that they would lack the background to understand, say, the theorems of quantum mechanics, including some info from modern physics in a random verse would make absolutely no sense to them. Furthermore, it is important to remember that an omniscient being would know whether including such knowledge in the Bible would lead to unfavorable historical consequences: such a being would be able to see into the future. In fact, the very notion of providing people in the past with too much knowledge arguably leads to time-traveler-like paradoxes. For instance, perhaps if God were to have given too much information about the future to people in the past such as Moses, it would have disrupted God’s plans for Israel’s future, and caused a later person never to be born.

An Accommodating God

These absurdities aside, and contrary to Harris, it is rather entirely plausible that an omniscient being would want to write a book that would relate to its original audience on their own terms. That means it would include references to their culture and concepts they could understand, even if that meant such a book could be factually “improved” by the time it got to us modern people. The Old Testament scholar John Walton articulates this point well:

God has accommodated himself to the world of ancient Israel to initiate that revelation. We therefore recognize that although the Bible is written for us (indeed, for everyone), it is not written to us. In its context, it is not communicated in our language; it is not addressed to our culture; it does not anticipate the questions about the world and its operations that stem from our modern situations and issues.³

Indeed, according to Christian thought, just as the God of Israel revealed himself as Jesus of Nazareth in a particular period of history — which means he followed certain customs, wore certain clothes, and spoke certain languages — God also revealed the Bible into particular periods of history. If that is the case, then it is only natural that the Bible would contain some of the values and perspectives of the period of history in which it was revealed. As the theologians of old put it, the Bible is the word of God, in the words of men.

Thus, the second premise of Harris’s argument is also problematic. It relies on the dubious assumption that an omniscient being could somehow make the Bible “future-proof” without disrupting his other plans for history, and that he would want to do that even if it were possible.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Harris’s argument against divine inspiration is unpersuasive. The first premise, that the Bible can be improved, is vague and only has force if one makes the assumption that the purpose of the Bible is to convey factual knowldge. If the purpose of the Bible is, rather, to give us wisdom and help us know God, then Harris’s claim that the Bible can be improved loses most of its force. Similarly, even if the first premise were true, the second premise, that an omniscient being would never write a book that could be improved, also fails. It is, on the contrary, entirely plausible that an omniscient being would want to write a book that could be “improved” in order to more effectively communicate to Israel on their terms, and to accomplish his specific purposes in history.

Reflecting on the fact that the words we have in the Bible today are exactly as God wanted them to be — otherwise an omniscient and omnipotent God would not have let them be as such — should cause Christians to cherish the fact that Scripture still speaks to us today.