Is Your Holy Book Inerrant

Think Yours Is? How About All the Other Holy Books?

Photo by Alex Stepanishchev on Unsplash

This article is one of a series of articles introduced by Flawed Reasons to Believe in God. If you’re new to the series, you should read the Introduction before (or after) reading the material below.

Does your Holy Book tell you that all its claims are true? Most texts of the world’s 13 largest religions explicitly state that they are inerrant. Those tomes that don’t include scripture asserting their total veracity make claims that imply their words are the truth with a capital T, so we can say that each presents its holy test/s as inerrant.

Are such declarations justified? The answer is an obvious no because each belief is mutually exclusive; if one has true core principles, the others are all false. To make matters worse, when we include smaller religions and subvariants of the large ones, the count is not 13 but 4,200 religions. Humans are obviously skilled at inventing fake messages from the gods. Even if men got one right, they originated 4,199 false gods. Given man’s propensity to create gods, it is highly probable all 4,200 claims to have detected the undetectable are garbage meant to benefit kings and priestly sets.

That doesn't rule out the possibility that one religion’s holy book is the inerrant word of a god, but Bayesians…