{"id":4846,"date":"2016-10-04T10:55:08","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T14:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=4846"},"modified":"2016-10-04T10:55:08","modified_gmt":"2016-10-04T14:55:08","slug":"biblical-inerrancy-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=4846","title":{"rendered":"Biblical inerrancy &#8212; <i>again<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><center><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">&quot;Ken Ham Says Believing in 6 Days of Creation Is &#39;Litmus Test&#39; on Biblical Authority&quot; Good night!  <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/AJ9GFzkz6F\">https:\/\/t.co\/AJ9GFzkz6F<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Dee Parsons (@wartwatch) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/wartwatch\/status\/783132045526634496\">October 4, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/center><\/p>\n<p>It pains me to say it, because Ken Ham is a godawful con artist, but he&#8217;s right about this: The whole of the Biblical narrative and Christianity&#8217;s promise of salvation hangs on the historicity of the related tales of the Creation and the Fall.<\/p>\n<p>To put the matter simply, the Church Fathers &#8212; Irenaeus and Augustine, especially &#8212; 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.<\/p>\n<p>Consider, for instance, the incontestable certainties that Adam and Eve were not historical persons, and that there was no Fall.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>No Adam and Eve &#8211;> No Fall &#8211;> No Original Sin &#8211;> No need for Salvation<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Some believers try to evade this by resorting to something called &#8216;theistic evolution,&#8217; the claim that evolution was God-directed toward the development of human beings.  This fails theologically, and fails immediately; it is <i>not<\/i> on the obscure outer-reaches of Christian teaching that problems are encountered.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<p>There is still needed an act of disobedience, the guilt for which is genetically projected into eternity upon the descendants of &#8230; whom?  And what was that act?<\/p>\n<li>\n<p>So much for the claim that death was unknown prior to the Fall.<\/p>\n<li>\n<p>And what ground is there for saying that God is good if his route toward the creation of his beloved pets &#8212; <i>Us<\/i> &#8212; entailed billions of years of needless animal suffering?<\/ul>\n<p>Christianity has nothing on offer without salvation from Original Sin &#8212; and Original Sin is nonsense.  Christianity is not true, and its ethical teachings aren&#8217;t worth the human misery it has caused.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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. &quot;Ken Ham Says Believing in 6 Days of Creation Is &#39;Litmus Test&#39; on Biblical Authority&quot; Good &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=4846\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4846"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4846"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4851,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4846\/revisions\/4851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}