Dan Barker on The argument from scripture
Barker, a former evangelical preacher, argues the Bible's internal contradictions and moral failures disqualify it as divine revelation.
Dan Barker spent nineteen years as an evangelical preacher before losing his faith. His treatment of the argument from scripture carries the authority of someone who preached it, taught it, and eventually saw through it. In Godless (2008), he catalogues hundreds of biblical contradictions — not peripheral details but core doctrines — and argues they are fatal to the claim of divine inspiration.
Barker's approach is systematic. He documents contradictions in the creation accounts, the genealogies of Jesus, the resurrection narratives, and the moral commands of the Old Testament God. He argues that these are not difficulties to be harmonised but evidence of multiple human authors with conflicting theologies and agendas.
Beyond contradiction, Barker presses the moral argument against scripture: a book that endorses slavery, commands genocide, and treats women as property cannot be the word of a morally perfect being. If we must use our own moral judgment to determine which parts of the Bible are acceptable, then our moral judgment — not the Bible — is the real authority.
“I did not lose my faith — I gave it up purposely. The only thing I truly lost was the bliss of ignorance.”
“If the Bible is the word of God, it should be the clearest, most consistent, most morally exemplary document in human history. It is none of these things.”