Stephen Fry on The argument from scripture
Fry regards scripture as great literature but terrible science, dubious history, and often appalling morality.
Fry, a lifelong reader and lover of literature, treats the Bible and other scriptures with the seriousness due to important literary and historical documents — but not the reverence due to divine revelation. He has spoken eloquently about the King James Bible as a monument of English prose while firmly denying that literary beauty constitutes evidence for divine authorship. Homer's Iliad is also beautiful; no one concludes that Zeus exists.
His moral objections to scripture are fierce and specific. Fry has pointed to the Bible's endorsement of slavery, its treatment of women as property, its commands to commit genocide, and its threats of eternal punishment for finite offences. These are not, he argues, the pronouncements of a loving God — they are the product of Bronze Age tribal societies projecting their prejudices onto the cosmos. The moral progress of civilization has consisted largely of learning to ignore the worst parts of scripture.
Fry is also sceptical of the historical claims of scripture. The Gospels were written decades after the events they describe, by anonymous authors with theological agendas. They contradict each other on basic facts. As a matter of literary criticism, they show clear signs of being crafted narratives rather than eyewitness accounts. This does not make them worthless — but it makes them unreliable as evidence for the supernatural.
“It is a strange kind of loving God who would create a being capable of rational thought and then demand that it not use that capacity when evaluating his own existence.”