Modern English translations get around this by … punctuation. "You should not eat the following birds, this bird and that bird and the other bird (etc.) and still another bird; or the bat.
That’s fine, but a critic would nonetheless be well within his rights to state that the bat is listed among the “birds,” as this is how the verse is written in Hebrew (where there are no semicolons).
Zev Steinhardt
You’re probably not going to find anything that will be sufficiently proved wrong for the taste of an ardent litteralist.
As this thread shows, any contradiction or factual error will be countered by arguments as convoluted as necessary. Either by stating “It’s not what the bible “really” says” (say, in the case of the four corners of the earth, or of the hebrew word that could actually mean “llama” :rolleyes: ) or by just stating that the bible is right and the fact as we know them are wrong, like in the case of say, the flood, Noah and his Ark.
As for the historicity of events mentioned in the bible, the case is even more hopeless. There’s no reason to believe there has ever been an exodus, but barring a time machine, you can’t prove there wasn’t any. Some of the claims made are normally impossible, but they’re miracles, and you can’t prove that the red sea didn’t part, for instance. Some aren’t miraculous but completely outstandish. For instance the number given in the bibe for Hebrews leaving Egypt is higher than the total estimated population of the whole Nile delta. But the litteralist will just tell you that the historians are wrong and the bibe right until you bring them a complete and detailled population census. And then, they’ll find something else to explain away your new evidences (the census have been purged by the Egyptians so that the success of the Hebrews wouldn’t be aparent in it, for instance).
So, no…you aren’t going to find anything false enough in the bible to convince a litteralist. But note that using the same kind of reasonnings, nobody is going to prove to my satisfation that the comics about Batman and Superman aren’t accurate accounts of factual events, either.
You’ll only be able to convince someone who hasn’t already made his mind on the issue or is quite open-minded. But the more they believe in the bible being litterally true, the less they’re likely to examine the elements objectively rather than desperatly search some convoluted way to explain them away. The last resort being that they don’t understand or have an explanation, but there must be one that someone better informed than themselves would know or understand.
The best arguments should be contradictions within the scriptures, but it doesn’t seem to be an issue for believers, either (like the two genealogies for Joseph, the two accounts of the creation…I believe there’s also somewhere in the old testaments two different figures for a head count of some sort, but I don’t remember where).
You’ll never win, except if your coworker is genuinely ignorant of the lack of factual accuracy of the bible and willing to educate himself. But in this day and age, you need to have put some effort into ignoring the issue, hence he probably did. Look at the debate about creationism and evolution. I assume it’s hard not to be aware of it in the USA.
My first thought was the reference to the “four corners of the earth.” Which is a decent example, if your point is that the chroniclers of the Bible were not perfect & inerrant. It does nothing to disprove the claims of witnessing the extraordinary & the miraculous.
Um…
Coneys (=rabbits) are sort of one-stomach ruminants. Instead of regurgitating, they pass the food through the whole GI tract twice. Watch your rabbit eat out of its own anus in the morning. So, yeah, that’s cud-chewing, or close enough to have been the same word in ancient Hebrew.
Oh, Cal covered that.
Similarly, that we don’t know whether Shafan and Arneves referred to lagomorphs or to cameloids isn’t so much a dodge as a demonstration of human fallibility. Sometimes we really don’t know, & it’s not a cheat. (I expect it is hare & coney, but who knows?)
Yup, that got covered too.
Um, I don’t know why archaeologists dismiss the story of Israelites being slaves in Egypt. Since it clearly refers to a rather small tribal group, I don’t see how it’s going to be disproven.
Most of the miracles, as a rule, aren’t disproven or disprovable. Bad examples.
Recent creation of the Earth has some geological evidence against, but throw in a miraculous Flood & that does some strange stuff to the fossil record.
Um, well…
A big problem is that there are people on one side who twist everything they don’t understand so it will make sense, & people on the other side who twist everything they don’t understand so it will look “provably” false. The latter being like Revtim in this very thread.
The one major “Biblical” claim which is demonstrably false is the imminent Second Coming of Christ. Of course, since imminence is typically expressed in modifier words (adjectives & adverbs) rather than subjects & verbs, Christians manage to tune that one out. Anyway, cut out the Christian New Testament, & you won’t have to worry about that false prophet.
Maybe he mistook some thick, yellowish decomposition fluid coming from the carcass as honey, and the carrion fly maggots happened to be sweet enough to mask the taste.
You have probably never eaten rancid lion with larvae, so you can’t prove the hypothesis wrong.
It would probably be hard obtain honey from a hive in a dead lion, too. Hmmm. Hard to test this.
And I never thought about how gross that story was. 
-d
Isn’t there some unsurmountable timing problem with the known years of the Census and the rule of Herod, vis-a-vis Jesus’ birth? Don’t have my references to hand.
Others:
There are dozens more.
I think we can safely say “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” has conclusively been proven false . . . unless we’re talking about three-by-six foot plots . . .
Joseph Campbell once said something to the effect that reading the Bible or any other mythological text literally is like going to restaurant and seeing something you like on the menu and then eating the menu.
Precisely, acording to the bible, that gives the number of people involved, it’s not a “small tribal group” but a very large one (I’m sorry, but I don’t remeber the exact number. It’s something like half a million men, plus women, plus children…)
Excellent analysis of pseudo-rationalized Bible-thumping!
True Blue Jack
Yer bringin’ thet thar “evolution” crap into this. No one wit’ half a brain believes that order began with an explosion. Anyways it’s all jes’ a “theory”. Like gravity. 
Here is a point more …uh… fundamental that no one has ever offered, AFAIK. So I have reason to believe that this is an essentially original thought.
The Spirit of God “moved over the waters”. “Waters” not ice at absolute zero. However it came to be that the molecules had enough average kinetic energy to form liquid water, they would inevitably radiate e-m energy up to a certain frequency in the “infrared” range.
Infrared could of course be considered “light”, albeit not visible light, which is what we first think of. I can just hear the fundies being quick to scream the latter.
But even that would depend on the relativistic frame-of-reference. Approach the earth at a fairly high fraction of c and the relativistic “blue shift” * factor would cause the e-m to be received as within visible range.
(I don’t recall offhand the relativistic adjustment of the Doppler shift equation, and it wouldn’t do me much good without being able to attach the frequency of infrared emerging from (minimum) 0 degrees C ice (about 273 kelvins). But perhaps one of the Dopers present has both of these plus the frequency of the red-end of the visible light band.
- Asimov once complained about the misleading sound of both “red shift” and “blue shift” – or better still “violet shift”. He believed that people would get the idea that shifted frequecies/wavelengths get compressed at one of the limits of the visible band. (There actually is crossover in and out of said range.) He much preferred “redward” and “violetward”.
True Blue Jack
Maybe the timing is impossible but here is something else.
Augustus is arguably the most rational of the Emperors. It’s hard for me to imagine the least rational having a census of “all the world” (the whole Empire)involving every man jouneying back to his birthplace. Such censuses were not about individuals except insofar as they possessed property. It would make no sense unless at least most people still had most of their property back in their birthplaces.
If it had happened there would have been a record. The closest thing is a census involving three provinces. Not “all the world”.
As simple as that.
True Blue Jack