Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. 2 Timothy 2:15
"A skeptic wrote in:
Why should I believe in your version of Christianity over the thousands of others that exist? Because the Bible says so? Your opponents will say the same thing. The Bible can be used to justify almost if not all interpretations and versions of Christianity. Every Christian believes that they’re right,... That being the case, why should any of us take the Bible and Christianity seriously?
.....your statement is utterly irrelevant. I can use a top-of-the-line
power drill as a hammer if I want; clearly that doesn’t mean I’m using
it properly. Similarly, just because some people use the Bible badly doesn’t mean we should just ignore the Bible.
Of course, your whole assertion is that we can’t know who’s using the
Bible well and who’s using it badly because disagreement exists on what
it says.
But that doesn’t make any sense. It assumes, at a minimum,
that we should reject a knowledge claim if experts don’t all agree on
it. But experts in the epistemology of disagreement themselves disagree
about whether we should reject a knowledge claim if experts
disagree on it. So, the claim on which your argument rests (i.e. we
should reject a knowledge claim if experts disagree) doesn’t satisfy its
own criterion of acceptability, and thus refutes itself. So, it’s necessarily false that we need agreement among experts to believe a knowledge claim—including a knowledge claim about what the Bible means.
And if we don’t even need agreement among experts on the Bible to know
something of what the Bible says, we clearly don’t need agreement among all self-professing Christians. It’s a bit like saying, ‘There are various types of counterfeit money, so real money must not exist.’" CMI
