Conclusion

Remember our objective? We wanted to assess whether or not the Bible was dependable enough to be used as a sole source of authority. If we could find any cases where the Bible was in error, then any assertion made in the Bible would need corroboration by independent and valid sources and methods, i.e. statements in the Bible would become questions, not answers.

What have we found?

The Bible is internally contradictory, inconsistent, and inaccurate. We’ve seen hundreds of cases where the Bible, itself, made contradictory and incompatible statements about very important theological and natural topics. We’ve seen that the Bible said things that are patently false. We’ve seen errors in arithmetic, history, geography, translation, and editing. The Bible occasionally described a natural world that was clearly at odds with the facts of nature which it said God created.
Most of the Bible was not written by the people claimed. Most of the authors of the Bible are unknown, i.e. anonymous, If we don’t know who these authors were, we cannot know how reliable their testimonies were. We cannot know whether their testimonies were accurately acquired, described, passed-on through writing or oral tradition, copied by later scribes, or translated. We cannot even know whether the Bible includes all of the works which comprised the word of God or whether some works were included which were not really the word of God. Even if these words were not corrupted by the time they were incorporated into the Bible we now have, many of the words have changed their meaning over the centuries.
The Bible portrayed God as a lying war criminal who violated even our own flawed standards of justice, morality, and ethics. The writers claimed that some of the worst atrocities the world has ever seen were done in the name of God. They clearly tried to justify their own foul deeds and the despicable behavior of their associates.
The standards of behavior codified in the Bible’s laws violate the most basic principles of American society,