Biblical defenders

I have struggled with this a lot. And explaining it will probably take several posts, since I've been thinking about it for a long time. Most time, I'm like this. I'll think about something for 3 years or so, before either getting anywhere or giving up.

Frankly, I am not even sure where to begin. So let me start here.
Let's pretend that people in the world fit into two groups. Let’s say that there are Biblical critics and Bible defenders. Let’s say that the Bible defenders believe that the Bible is in-errant in some variation -- perhaps there are differences in details, but in general, they agree on this. And let’s say that the Biblical critics don’t believe in its infallibility.

You could say that the burden of proof is on the defenders, since they are the ones who are asserting that there is some action needed as an outcome of their thesis. But that depends on the jury. So in reality, it seems like the burden in the West is really on the critics, since there is so much history and tradition based on the Scriptural infallibility. So it seems that the critics are up against it.

The critical arguments can basically be categorized into several groups that can be divided into 3 main categories:

1. Inconsistencies between our modern knowledge and the Bible

2. Inconsistencies between Biblical ideas in different parts of the Bible

3. Inconsistencies between factual data in different parts of the Bible

I guess I would see this in this order from the least provable to the most provable. That is, the fact that the Bible may seem inconsistent with something we believe today may not be easy to substantiate and may not even matter. Someone could believe that the reference is totally symbolic. Or, one could believe that the knowledge today is flawed.

At the next level down, looking for ideological differences in the Bible is more significant than looking for areas that may seem difficult to believe or understand. But it is still filled with issues. Many Bible scholars have spent their lives researching some of these issues only to come up with totally different conclusions.

Looking for factual differences in the Biblical text, though, is most demonstrable.

In addition, each general category has a couple sub-categories. Naturally, there are a million ways one could break this up and this is only one.

I'd like to dig a little deeper into each of these in separate blog entries, since I want to keep each blog entry somewhat manageability short.

But I think this is fairly accurate in how Biblical critics approach things. I think almost every argument against the Scriptures can fall into one of these three areas.
I think a lot of these arguments are just noise, which I'll discuss later. But some are worth looking into.

Keep watching for the rest of the thoughts on this.