Jack Haas wrote:
> Greetings: Bernard Ramn's The Christian View of Science and Scripture
> (1954) helped many evangelicals to put to rest the notion that the
> Bible contained statements which anticipated modern scientific
> discovery/technology - the atomic bomb, submarines, gravity, etc.
> etc., etc. Sadly, the notion crops up in a recent publication of a
> respected ministry.
>
> "Not one, but five writers of Scripture describe God's
> 'stretching out' of the heavens. >From a scientist's
> perspective, these ancient writers predict the
> twentieth-century discovery of continual cosmic expansion.
> (1) The book of Romans tells readers that the entire
> creation is subject to the law of decay. Again, a scientist
> would see this statement as an obvious reference to the
> second law of thermodynamics. (2) The apologetics
> importance of these two points cannot be overstated. They
> demonstrate that the Bible - long before scientific
> observation and experimentation - identified the basic
> features of the big bang universe; expansion (from a
> beginning point) and cooling"(1) Job. 9:8, Ps. 104:2, Isa.
> 40:22, 42:5, 44:24, 45:12, 48:13, 51:13, Jer. 10:12, 51:15,
> Zech. 12:1.(2) Rom. 8:19-22.
>
> I suspect that most members of this list are as dubious about this
> notion as I am. It would be helpful to a younger generation if some
> of us would update the case against this idea. I would be willing to
> pull together your points for the ASA web page.
>
I dealt briefly with the idea of "Science hidden in the Bible"
in an article in the PSCF 48 (1996): 82. The idea that the world which
the Bible speaks of is the real world which modern science deals with is
correct, and can be seen (putting the best construction on it) as the
inspiration for the belief that things like the expansion of the
universe or the 2d law of thermo can be discovered in scripture. But
the way in which it's applied in the type of statement you cited shows
no regard at all for the fact that scripture contains a variety of
literary types and different ways of thinking about human experience and
the world.
Furthermore, there are different levels of understanding. Of
course the biblical writers, and everybody else in the ancient world,
knew that things fall to the ground, and if you want to count that as
knowledge of gravity, so be it. But it isn't Newton's law or
Einstein's. Everybody knew that things come apart & decay - that & how
to escape from it was the major concern of Greek philosophy, so it is
hardly an insight unique to the Bible. But it's misleading to count
Romans 8:18-25 as a statement about the 2d law of thermodynamics as if
it encoded d'Q/T > 0.
And then there is the fact that all the supposed truths of
modern science hidden in the Bible are after the fact. Did anybody
before Friedmann, Hubble _et al_ interpret Is.40:22 as a statement about
the recession of galaxies? The Bible contains a great deal of
figurative language (though it is not exclusively so), and once a
scientific discovery is made it isn't hard to find a biblical text which
"predicts" it, especially if one has the notion that the whole of
scripture can be treated straightforward 20th century scientific journal
prose. The fact that Islamic apologists do the same type of thing with
the Qu'ran (See K.A. Wood, "The Scientific Exegesis of the Qu'ran: A
Case Study in Relating Science and Scripture", PSCF 45 (1993):93) shows
how easy & how meaningless the game is.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
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