Unbelievers, particularly of the atheist persuasion, often like to say the Bible cannot be true because there are contradictions in the Bible. These contradictions conflict with the doctrine of Inerrancy, because even if a god exists, it is either not omniscient because it inspired error, or it didn't inspire the Bible because there are errors in it.
But when we fully understand what a contradiction is, we discover that although it can be made to seem that there are contradictions in the Bible, there simply are none. In order for a contradiction to occur, two mutually exclusive statements must be allegedly true in the same sense and at the same time. For example, the statement "I am 10 years old" is incompatible with the statement "I am 100 years old". But if both statements were said by the same individual exactly 90 years apart, it could not be a contradiction, even if they were both read on exactly the same day.
To illustrate how contradictions can appear to happen, consider the thought I had when I got my breakfast this morning. Imagine I and my dog gave you the following two accounts:
Me: I gave my dog the first chicken bite I pulled out of the packet.
My dog: Brian saved me the last chicken bite from the packet, like he always does.
So, which did I give him? The first, or the last?
Yes.
See, although "first" and "last" have polar opposite definitions, the sense in which they were the first and last is different. I set aside the first one I pulled from the packet so I didn't accidentally eat the last one. When I had eaten the rest, the first one pulled from the packet became the last one from the packet, which I then gave to my dog.
This is how many scriptures can be made to seem contradictory when in fact they are not. Time, sense, and even mutual exclusivity, are often misunderstood by unbelievers. A particularly common example is when multiple accounts of the same incident focus on different individuals. Take, for example, the accounts of the demoniacs in Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-20, and Luke 8:26-39. Whereas Matthew says there were two, Mark and Luke only focus on one. However, since they do not say there was only one, a contradiction has not occurred.
Although unbelievers can produce long lists of apparent contradictions, such as the above example of my breakfast time, they will never be able to produce an example of two mutually exclusive statements being true at the same time and in the same sense. Therefore, the contradictions in the Bible argument is invalid.