Biblical inerrancy — again

Ken Ham is taking a trashing just now for his claim that belief in a literal 6-day Creation is a test of Biblical authority.

It pains me to say it, because Ken Ham is a godawful con artist, but he’s right about this: The whole of the Biblical narrative and Christianity’s promise of salvation hangs on the historicity of the related tales of the Creation and the Fall.

To put the matter simply, the Church Fathers — Irenaeus and Augustine, especially — believed in the truth of those tales, and constructed a set of doctrines which rely on their historicity, and those doctrines go to pieces if you try to re-interpret them as allegory.

Consider, for instance, the incontestable certainties that Adam and Eve were not historical persons, and that there was no Fall.

No Adam and Eve –> No Fall –> No Original Sin –> No need for Salvation

Some believers try to evade this by resorting to something called ‘theistic evolution,’ the claim that evolution was God-directed toward the development of human beings. This fails theologically, and fails immediately; it is not on the obscure outer-reaches of Christian teaching that problems are encountered.

• There is still needed an act of disobedience, the guilt for which is genetically projected into eternity upon the descendants of … whom? And what was that act?

• So much for the claim that death was unknown prior to the Fall.

• And what ground is there for saying that God is good if his route toward the creation of his beloved pets — Us — entailed billions of years of needless animal suffering?

Christianity has nothing on offer without salvation from Original Sin — and Original Sin is nonsense. Christianity is not true, and its ethical teachings aren’t worth the human misery it has caused.