The limit comes from asking what each kind of evidence can test at all. A trench in Israel can show whether a gate, a burial style or an inscription fits the world a biblical writer describes. A radiometric measurement can tell you how much of an isotope has decayed in a sample. A comparison of manuscripts copied centuries apart can tell you whether scribes passed a text down faithfully. But no such tool can check whether God spoke, or whether a dead man was raised. Those claims are open to evidence, though not to every kind of evidence.
Set out in its strongest form, the closed-loop argument has five premises and a conclusion, and each premise can be tested against scholars who have done the work: an archaeologist, a biochemist, several scholars of the Bible’s text and history, and a specialist in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
- Outside evidence counts for a belief only if it proves that belief beyond doubt.
- Archaeology has not proven the Bible true.
- Science, through radiometric dating, has already ruled against the Bible’s account of creation.
- No one can know that the text we read is the text first written.
- The Gospels were written too late, and by writers with too much at stake, to count as reliable testimony.