[deccan]

Electrum said:
If one takes the time to seriously read & look into the Bible, you find that, though it is not a science book, where it touches on science, it is in perfect harmony with established scientific fact. The same holds true for other areas, as in history & geography. It soon moves to amazement when it comes to examining Biblical prophecy to historical events.

Since no one has come forward to the dispute this, I am going to do so.

You are quite correct that strong, unqualified statements concerning the Bible should not be made without having first made a serious attempt at studying the subject first-hand. Now, let me say that I have read the Bible, cover to cover, several different Versions of it in fact. On the hand, and while this may or may not be true for you, I believe that while many theists do, understandably, have first-hand knowledge of their religious canon, they have relatively little knowledge of the origins of that canon, and the process by which it came into their hands.

There are a lot of Bible-bashing sites on the internet, and I once ran one myself. I won't point you to them since I find that most of them are too partisan, focus too much on nitpicking and try too hard to grasp at tenuous straws. However, I will rely on Wikipedia, which being a community, open-to-everyone effort, should be a much more neutral, qualified, source of information.

First of all, Biblical canon looks at the various different "books" that compose the "Bible" and explains which are canon to which religious denominations and how they became canon to that denomination. The point here is that at various different points in history, different Groups of people had to gather around in a meeting and sit down to decide what God supposedly did say, and what he did not say.

Next, The Bible and history examines whether or not the Bible is actually scientifically and historically correct as you claim.

In any case, some quotes from the Wikipedia page here:

On Genesis:

The Biblical creation tale, up to and including the deluge are not a subject of dispute in the scientific community. They are generally regarded as a myth. The arguments raised come cosmology, geology, evolution (in particular fossil evidence), and textual analysis of the Bible itself, showing similarity to other mythologies.

On Jews living in Egypt:

The number of Israelites stated in the Bible, 600,000, cannot be taken at face value, as this number is thought to exceed the total Egyptian population at the time. A common suggestion is that the word "thousand" should be interpreted here as meaning "family", which gives a figure much more compatible with the historical record.

On Joshua:

The historicity of the book of Joshua is today strongly suspected, as archeological research found no evidence of a massive population increase in Canaan during this time period. At this time the land had a population of between 50,000 and 100,000. Kathleen Kenyon excavated in Jericho from 1952-1958, using improved methods of stratigraphy, and found many details which would seem to conform to the Biblical account of the conquest of Jericho, but she determined that the siege took place 150 years too early for it to have been the city Joshua's army destroyed. She dated the city by the absence of a type of imported pottery common to the era around 1400 B.C. She concluded, as had Sellin and Watzinger before her that the Biblical account of the conquest of Jericho was untenable.

For anyone interested in a detailed account of scientific errors committed in the Bible or scientifically unsound teachings perpetuated by Christian denominations throughout history, Whitehead's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom is an old but still very useful read that is now in the public domain.

Finally, Wikipedia has a page on Alleged inconsistencies in the Bible which details some of the inconsistencies within the Bible itself.

Now, I note that you do not claim that the Bible is wholly inerrant, "merely" that it has proven to be correct on an impressive number of matters. How much "correctness" should be regarded as being truly "impressive" is a really subjective matter of course. For example, I might say that the "Dao De Jing" is impressive, simply by virtue that it contains a large number of self-evident "truisms".

In the case of the Bible, personally, as I believe that it was written purely by men without divine knowledge, I would still expect these men to be reasonably intelligent, knowledgeable and relatively well-travelled, persons, and that the accuracy and correctness of their work to reflect that ability. Consequently, in order to seriously claim that the Bible is "impressive" above and beyond that standard, would require that the Bible include information that could not be known at that time and incur a far higher burden of evidence.