Fallible Certainty: Answers to jswranch, Part 3

Finishing up with jswranch’s comment on The Canon: Fallible Certainty post (see part 1 and part 2)…

I am not going to answer all of jswranch’s remaining comments because they are all basically the same objection that I mentioned in my Part 2 reply. His main assertion is that without an infallible organization on earth to declare what is or isn’t God’s Word, we cannot trust what scripture says because we do not infallibly know it is scripture. Apparently faith in God is not good enough, we need to have faith in an infallible organization of men to provide the certainty that RC’s demand.

Let me just briefly answer some of jswranch’s final thoughts:

Can we be infallibly certain an infallible book even exists? We cannot.

But apparently we can be infallibly certain that an infallible organization of men exists. Please, explain that one.

-If we deny that God established an institution of fallen, sinful human beings to infallibly teach the Gospel and the scriptures to us because they are fallen, sinful persons, can we believe that the Holy Spirit used fallen sinful human beings to even write infallible, inerrant books? No.

Huh? I haven’t seen anyone make that argument. The question is not COULD God create an infallible organization, the question is DID he.

Here are jswranch’s final 2 comments:

-(See above) Assuming FCIB (fallible collection of infallible books), does a source we can be dogmatically certain of exist by which we can know that there is such a thing as a bible? No. Assuming FCIB, we cannot be certain there is such a thing as the Bible. If you disagree, site a source we are certain of. A response such as a quote from lets say 2 Tim 3:15, begs us to state that we cannot be infallibly certain 2 Tim belongs in scripture. Can we say with certainty that we know scripture even exists or is inerrant from any source such as Acts 2:42? No. Why? Because we cannot be infallibly/dogmatically certain Acts is scripture.

-Can we be infallibly certain Jesus rose from the dead? No. First, we have already established that we cannot be infallibly certain of anything. Second, we do not infallibly have any source that tells us He did rise from the dead. Some books tell us he rose, but we are not certain those books are actually scripture, therefore we cannot be certain he rose from the dead if FCIB is true.

I am not going to answer these here as they boil down to the same issue – how does an infallible organization change anything? How can you ever infallibly prove that God established an infallible organization of men to infallibly validate the infallibility of scripture? How can you not see that problem?

I really cannot see how your objection, jswranch, can be chalked up to anything but a lack of faith. Seriously, I cannot even follow your logic – I would expect these kinds of objections from an atheist. To answer you I would have to start from the same point I would with a non-believer, and I don’t have the time right now to type all that out.

I may or may not come back to these last items in the future as they are very revealing of the Roman Catholic mindset. For now I'm done.