The Logic Behind Biblical Errancy
It is important to show clearly the logic of the analysis that is to follow. Some people might think that the only way to prove that the Bible is not completely and absolutely true is to prove it completely and absolutely false. However, this reasoning is logically fallacious and is based on the confusion between contrary and contradictory statements. An example will make this clear. Let the statement below be the main proposition, which we shall label A.
| All Chinese today live in China | A |
A statement that is the contrary to the above is A' below
| No Chinese today live in China | A' |
It is obvious that both statements, A and A', are false. Thus if someone made the claim that all Chinese today live in China and asserts that the only way he will accept his statement as false is if someone could prove that no Chinese live in China, we can obviously see that his thinking is logically flawed.
What we need to prove statement A wrong is to write a statement that is contradictory to it. We will label the contradictory statement to A as -A. The relationship of these two statements must be such that they are mutually exclusive. In other words, -A, and A cannot both be wrong or right at the same time; if -A is wrong, then A must be right and if -A is right, then A must be wrong. In our example, the statement that is contradictory to A is given below:
| Some Chinese today do not live in China | -A |
Hence all we need to do to show that the statement "All Chinese live in China" is false, is simply to show that some Chinese today do not live in China.
Applying this logic to our present discussion, the fundamentalist position is obviously:
| Everything in the Bible is true. |
All we need to show to prove this statement false is to find supporting facts for the statement below:
| Some things in the Bible are not true. |
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