I've been thinking about what it would take to earnestly believe in the God of the Bible as well as have assurance that one would achieve salvation and everlasting life. I would argue that this could not be done, and I call it the Inefficient God hypothesis.
The argument goes like this: Assume I am someone who genuinely wants to believe and do what is necessary to be saved. I would then open the Bible and try and make sense of everything that is said. However, the Bible is not clear and concise on many points, so I would want clarification. This is where I run in to a problem. I can ask 100 people and get 100 different answers, for a variety of reasons:
1) The Bible can and does lose meaning because none of us live in the centextual culture or time of when it was written
2) Translation poses problems of meaning, context, insinuation, and expectation of certain cultural, historical, and linguistic foreknowledge from the period in which it was written
I propose that God would want us to understand his guidance and requirements without much room for misinterpretation. However, the Bible is the most interpreted and reinterpreted book ever. I propose that it is essentially impossible to understand the meaning of everything in the Bible, thus it is impossible to know exactly what God wants. One would expect God to anticipate this and make sure that a more clear and concise compilation would be written so that room for error would be minimized, yet we have thousands of Christian denominations that insist they are correct, and we have arguments over single passages which could never be resolved.
Even the United States Constitution, a document of only several pages, is open to interpretation which is never settled to everyone's satisfaction.
Shouldn't God be better at transmitting his Word than this?
This is a summary of the Inefficient God hypothesis. In short, this is a reason why I do not believe that the Bible is divinely inspired.