Penn & Teller did a show about the Bible a couple of years ago. Their two interviewees were Dr. Paul Maier, Professor of History at Western Michigan University and Dr. Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society. The video is available here. I have to warn everyone that this video contains profanity which includes taking the Lord’s name in vain.
After watching it I was extremely impressed with Dr. Maier. You have to give him credit for his defense of the faith in this episode. Even with the editing (and trust me, there was editing) he still came off as intelligent, rational, and in control. A couple of things that jumped out at me concerning the skeptics were the way that Penn immediately attempted to poison the well by pointing out that Dr. Maier calls himself doctor while Michael Shermer doesn’t even though he has a Ph.D. — the tone in which he said it was that Dr. Maier was somehow being snooty or an elitist. Well, Dr. Maier earned the right to call himself Dr. did he not? And when we compare the credentials of the two gentleman, there really is no comparison. One has an M.A. from Harvard, a M.Div. from Concordia Seminary, and a Ph.D. (summa cum laude) from the University of Basel (studying under Karl Barth and Oscar Cullman). The other has a B.S. from Pepperdine, a Masters from California State, and Ph.D. from Claremont. I think as far as credentials go they speak for themselves.
As always the skeptics begin with the a priori assumption that the Bible is inaccurate and can’t record accurate historical accounts. This led to them denying any and everything that the Bible said no matter what. An example is when they said there’s no record of the exodus outside of the Bible. Well, ok — but what about the Bible? We can’t say that there’s no record of it at all now can we?
In typical fundie fashion they cry foul when an attempt is made to say that every single part of the Bible shouldn’t be taken in a woodenly literal way. For them ‘literal’ interpretation doesn’t have anything to do with a historical-grammatical hermeneutic which seeks to understand the various genres of literature in the Bible, in light of the various cultural climates, in the milieu of each author’s circumstances. Nope, if one thing is literal (i.e. woodenly literal) then everything else must be as well.
They didn’t seem to care for Maier’s suggestion that we have two authors in Genesis 1 & 2 (which I personally disagree with). The comment in response to this was: “ahh yes, two authors… sometimes the Bible is the word of God, sometimes it’s the word of man, and sometimes it’s the word of two or more men, sometimes the Bible’s literal and sometimes it’s symbolic” — Well, to be more precise we would say that the Bible is the word of God in the words of men. They want to treat the Bible in the docetic manner that many fundamentalist Christians treat it as if there was no human involvement in its production. And as I just stated, yes! sometimes the Bible is literal and sometimes it is symbolic. It’s not as if the Bible is one single book that was written by one single author. It’s an anthology and contains many different kinds of writing and employs many different literary devices. The simplistic straw man arguments of hyper-skeptics are a sure way to not be taken seriously by anyone who knows better.
Things don’t get much better when dealing with the flood. The fundy skeptics cry foul and say it’s ridiculous to believe that you can get 10 billion species on to the ark. OK… but who believes that exactly? And where does the Bible say such? Maier didn’t defend this view so one wonders why it was even mentioned.
My criticisms could go on and on forever* but in the end I fail to be convinced that these skeptics even have a cursory knowledge let alone a knowledge sufficient to rightly criticize the Bible at all.
B”H
*That’s an example of hyperbole for all of my hyper-skeptic friends ;)
Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth 
You have to keep in mind it’s a 20 something minute show, plus they can’t delve too deep or they’ll lose most of their non-informed viewers.
The part about the flood, the Bible says that two of all animals were put on the Ark. Is there some sort of wiggle room with that? Did they misinterpret that? Did the bible really mean that it was a few animals from the area that Noah saved? Please clarify your argument.
Shane: I don’t believe I made an argument about the animals in the flood. I asked a question concerning where the Bible says it was 10 billion species. To my knowledge it says no such thing. A technical note, there were actually 14 (= 7 pairs) of all the clean animals and 2 (= 1 pair) of all the unclean according to the narrative in Genesis 7. Also, how one understands the flood narrative will determine how they answer your question. If they believe it to have been a global flood then I suppose they’d argue from animals all over the globe inhabiting the ark. If they believe it was local then they’d argue for animals from the area that Noah was in. It can honestly go either way.
Hi Nick:
I happened across your reply while surfing the net. To help educate people about the issues raised, there is a good tutorial at: http://www.helpmewithbiblestudy.org/5system_moses/bc1.aspx, and a good literary analysis of the flood within it at: http://www.helpmewithbiblestudy.org/5system_moses/dh11_flood.aspx.
Blessings in your work and blog,
Doug