Richard Dawkins on The argument from scripture

Dawkins's treatment of the argument from scripture is characteristically blunt. The Bible, he argues, is a chaotic anthology of texts written by dozens of authors over centuries, edited and redacted repeatedly, translated through multiple languages, and selected from a much larger body of literature by committees with political agendas. The idea that this process produced the inerrant word of an omniscient God strikes him as absurd on its face.

In The God Delusion, he catalogues the moral horrors of the Old Testament — genocide commanded by God, slavery endorsed, women treated as property, children punished for the sins of their parents — and asks whether any honest reader would identify this as the work of a benevolent deity. He argues that Christians and Jews have already conceded the point by refusing to follow the vast majority of biblical commands. The process of selecting which parts to follow and which to ignore requires a moral sense independent of scripture, which undermines the claim that scripture is the source of morality.

Dawkins is equally dismissive of the New Testament's historical claims. The Gospels were written decades after the events they describe, by anonymous authors who were not eyewitnesses. They contradict each other on basic facts — the genealogies of Jesus, the details of the nativity, the circumstances of the resurrection. As historical evidence, they would not be taken seriously in any other context.