The Bible Condones Slavery

The moral argument is constantly misheard, so state it precisely. It does not claim that unbelievers cannot be good, cannot tell right from wrong, or cannot raise decent families. They plainly can and do. The argument is not about moral knowledge (how we come to recognize right and wrong) or moral practice (whether we live up to it). It is about moral ontology: what reality grounds genuinely binding moral obligations in the first place.

The Stanford Encyclopedia survey describes this whole family of arguments as reasoning from some feature of morality to God as its best explanation. The Christian is not insisting that atheists have no morals; he is pressing a question the atheist must also answer: when you say an act is truly wrong, not just unfashionable or forbidden by your tribe, what makes that true?

Two features of moral life resist easy reduction.

The first is binding obligation. Most people, on reflection, hold that torturing a child for entertainment is not just distasteful or socially counterproductive but really, mind-independently wrong, even if every society came to approve of it. That is a claim about how things are, not about how we happen to feel. A standard form of the argument grants exactly this: there are objective moral facts, and then asks what best explains them.

The second is human worth. We treat persons as having a dignity that does not rise and fall with their usefulness, their power, or the consensus around them. The weak, the unborn, the enemy, and the prisoner each retain a worth that forbids certain treatment. But if a human being is finally just rearranged matter, naturalism has no stable ground for that non-negotiable worth. Christianity grounds it in persons being made in the image of God: a dignity conferred by the Creator, not earned by achievement or assigned by society.

The unbeliever has real answers here, and they deserve real engagement rather than caricature.

• Morality is an evolved instinct. Very likely our moral feelings did emerge through evolution. But that explains the feeling, not the obligation. If “do not betray your friend” reduces to a useful impulse inherited from our ancestors, then in the cases where betrayal would actually pay, the impulse carries no authority to bind me. Explaining why we have moral sentiments is not the same as showing those sentiments answer to anything true.
• Morality is a social contract. Useful, but it makes the majority the measure. A society that agreed to exterminate a minority would, on this view, be doing nothing objectively wrong; only something others dislike. Almost no one truly believes that. The reformer who stands against his entire culture is often right against the consensus, which means the consensus was never the standard.
• Moral facts simply exist, with no God. This is the most serious option: a non-theistic moral realism on which values are real, abstract features of reality. It should be weighed honestly. But it fails to explain how an abstract value obligates a person or issues anything resembling a command. The atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie felt this so acutely that he judged objective moral facts would be metaphysically “queer,” too strange to fit a purely physical world, and so denied they exist at all. That is consistent, but notice the cost: moral outrage at real evil becomes, strictly, a useful illusion. Theism lets us keep the conviction that some things are really wrong.

The classic counter is the Euthyphro dilemma: is something good because God commands it (then goodness is arbitrary; he could have commanded cruelty) or does God command it because it is good (then goodness stands above God, and we never needed him)?

The Christian answer declines both horns. Goodness is neither an arbitrary divine decree nor a standard hovering above God; it is grounded in God’s own necessary and unchanging character. He does not consult an external rule of love and justice, nor invent one on a whim. He is love and justice, and his commands express what he is. Cruelty was never a live option, because it contradicts his nature.

Here the argument turns pastoral. The same moral law that lets us name evil for what it is also turns and indicts us, which is the honest weight underneath every appeal to the problem of evil. If there is a real moral law, we have all broken it. Christianity does not flinch from that verdict; it answers it with a cross. The God who grounds the law is the God who bore its penalty.

Reliability does not mean we possess the autographs, or that no scribe ever slipped. It means two things: the message the biblical writers delivered can be recovered with confidence from the evidence we have, and that message rests on testimony open to public examination rather than on a private vision no one else could check.

Granting the first point honestly actually strengthens the case. We are not claiming a miracle of flawless copying; we are claiming that the manuscript tradition is rich enough to correct itself and recover what was written.

Critics rightly point out that the manuscripts contain many variant readings; Bart Ehrman’s popular work makes much of the count. But the same scholarship that catalogs the variants also explains why they do not bury the message:

• The large number of variants is a function of the large number of manuscripts. More copies means more differences to list, but it also means far more evidence for reconstruction.
• The overwhelming majority are trivial; spelling, word order, obvious slips, and make no difference to meaning or translation.
• The handful of variants that are both meaningful and genuinely contested are well known, openly discussed in the footnotes of standard Bibles, and do not establish or overturn any core Christian doctrine.

Even on Ehrman’s own account, the central teachings of the faith are not left hanging on a disputed text. Metzger and Ehrman’s standard handbook treats the goal of the discipline as the recovery of the earliest text; a recovery the evidence makes possible, not a loss it makes permanent.

The Bible’s most important claims are tied to public events and named witnesses. Paul, writing within a few years of the events, hands on a creed he himself “received”: that Christ died, was buried, and was raised, and appeared to named people and to crowds, “most of whom are still living”; an open invitation to check (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). Hebrews opens by appealing to God’s speech “in these last days” through the Son, a matter of public proclamation.

Richard Bauckham argues that the Gospels read as eyewitness testimony rather than free-floating folklore: named figures, identifiable tradents, and the controlled memory of communities close to the events. Whatever one finally concludes, this is the opposite of a secret revelation that cannot be examined.

Jude appeals to “the faith entrusted once for all to the saints”; a settled, shared deposit, not a private possession revised at will. The recognition of the canon was likewise a public, communal process: the churches received the writings that carried apostolic testimony, rather than a single authority inventing scripture behind closed doors.

The meme that asks “which Bible is approved by God?” points to a real but often misused question. Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, and Ethiopian Orthodox Christians count Old Testament or deuterocanonical books differently. That should be answered honestly. But those differences are not different New Testaments about Jesus. The major Christian traditions receive the same twenty-seven New Testament books, and the disputed Old Testament edges do not create or erase the apostolic witness to the crucifixion, resurrection, and identity of Christ.

This matters when answering claims that the Bible was secretly stripped of “plain and precious truths,” as discussed in the Bible lost plain and precious truths. A public, widely copied, widely cited text is the hardest kind of document to secretly gut.

Muslim critics sometimes press the Bible with a standard they do not apply to the Qur’an: later manuscripts, collection history, named or unnamed human writers, copyist variants, and canon recognition are treated as fatal for Christianity but harmless for Islam. That is not a neutral standard.

The traditional Sunni account does not present the Qur’an as a leather-bound book written by Muhammad and handed unchanged to later generations. Muhammad recited revelations over about twenty-three years; companions memorized and wrote them; after Muhammad’s death Abu Bakr commissioned Zayd ibn Thabit to collect the Qur’an because reciters had died at Yamamah; and Uthman later standardized the text for the provinces and ordered other Qur’anic materials burned. Muslim writers may argue that this process preserved the Qur’an. But then collection by witnesses, post-event writing, human scribal work, and standardization cannot be used automatically to dismiss the Bible.

The qira’at make the point sharper. Mainstream Islam recognizes multiple canonical readings of the Qur’an. Many differences are pronunciation or dialectal, but some affect wording enough to be represented in translation; Bridges’ Translation of the Ten Qira’at says it footnotes the portion of qira’at variation that affects meaning in English. That does not by itself disprove Islam, just as New Testament variants do not by themselves disprove Christianity. It does mean the slogan “our text has no versions while yours does” is too simple. The better question for both books is whether the public evidence preserves the message it claims to preserve.

The strongest objection, developed in the Bible is corrupted, is the “telephone game”: across centuries of hand-copying, errors must have compounded until we can no longer know what was first written.

But transmission is not a single chain whispered ear to ear. It is many independent lines of copying, beginning early and spreading quickly across regions and languages. Because the lines are independent, a corruption in one branch is exposed by the others; there is no single point through which an error could pass undetected to everyone. The absence of the original autographs is normal for every ancient text and does not prevent reconstruction; for the New Testament the evidence is earlier and far more abundant than for any other work of antiquity. The honest conclusion is not “we cannot know,” but “we can identify the disputed points, and they are few and doctrinally minor.”