What About Scientific Foreknowledge in the Bible?

From *The Skeptical Review*, July-August 1990:

by Farrell Till
Any challenge to the Bible inerrancy doctrine will sooner or later encounter the scientific-foreknowledge argument. "If the Bible is not the inspired word of God," the inerrancy spokesmen ask, "then how do you explain the many examples of scientific foreknowledge in it?" The claim implied in this question is that men writing in an age of relative ignorance indicated in various passages of the Bible that they understood scientific truths that were completely unknown at the time. The response the question seeks is that these scientific facts could not have been known to Bible writers without God's having revealed them during the verbal inspiration process. They see this as a compelling argument for the inerrancy doctrine.

A basic problem with this argument is the same as the one found in the familiar harmonious-content, unity-of-theme, and fulfillment-of-prophecy arguments so often presented in the Bible's defense. It is based more on speculation, imaginative interpretations, and wishful thinking than on verifiable facts. As I write this, I am engaged in a written debate with a Church-of-Christ preacher who, in trying to use this argument, threw a volley of speculatively conceived questions at me in his second affirmative manuscript. How did Moses know of woman's seed being involved in the conception of children, (Gen. 3:15)? How did Isaiah know in his day that the earth is round, (Isa. 40:22)? How did Job know that the earth rests on no material foundation, (Job 26:7)? How did Moses know that life is in the blood (Gen. 9:4), when medical science didn't know it until a late date? How did David know of the moon's bearing witness (Ps. 89:37) to the sunlight on the other side of the earth? How did David know that there are paths in the seas (Ps. 8:8) long before oceanography and Matthew Maury's work found it so?

These are the questions exactly as he fired them at me. Not once did he take the time to explicate scripture references to show reasonable proof that the writers meant what he was interpreting them to mean. He just tacked the references onto his questions as if this alone were enough to establish that the writers had intended the meanings he was attributing to them. Any verbal communication, however, whether oral or written, must be interpreted before it can be understood, and this is doubly true of written statements. 

Participants in oral communication enjoy the advantage of voice inflections and body gestures to help them establish or determine meaning, but this advantage is lost in written communication. Written statements, then, often require careful explication to determine meaning. Without it, the risk of misinterpretation increases.

But in the volley of questions listed above, not even a hint of explication was in evidence. What explication, for example, is involved in asking, How did Moses know of woman's seed being involved in the conception of children, (Gen. 3:15)"? There is none. The intended impact of the question depends on two assumptions (aside from the assumption that Moses wrote the book of Genesis): (1) the word seed in this passage refers to the ovum that the female contributes to procreation and (2) the existence of the ovum was unknown when Genesis 3:15 was written.

To assess the plausibility of the first of these assumptions, we must examine the passage that the question alludes to. After their disobedience to Yahweh's command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Yahweh pronounced curses upon all parties involved in the act. To the serpent, he said, "Because you have done this, cursed are you above all cattle and above all wild animals; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel," (Gen. 3:14-15, RSV).

To assert that the word seed in this passage refers to the ova of the woman is almost too ridiculous to warrant serious comment. For one thing, an ovum is only a female germ cell that cannot develop into a person unless it is first fertilized by the male counterpart, so if ova were the intended meaning of the word, how could the "seed" of the woman ever bruise the head of the serpent?
 

The Hebrew word translated "seed" in this passage is zera, which could mean both seed, in the sense of plant ovules, or posterity (offspring or descendants). It is the same word that was used several times in Genesis 1:11-12 in reference to the creation of vegetation that yielded seed after "its kind." The meaning of the word here seems rather obvious; it was a reference to the seed produced by plants like corn, alfalfa, and turnips. The seed of a plant, however, is something radically different from the ovum of a woman. A plant seed is actually an embryo (formed from the union of the male and female germ cells) encased in a shell with an endosperm that will provide the germinating embryo with food until it is mature enough to survive on its own. A seed, in other words, is the offspring of a plant. It is to the plant what an embryo in the womb is to a woman, so certainly a woman's ovum alone cannot be considered biologically parallel to a plant seed, because it is only half of what a seed is. The one is just a female germ cell; the other an embryo formed from the union of both the female and male germ cells. 

If we are to understand Genesis 3:15, then, we must think of zera as a Hebrew word that most often meant offspring. In many places in the book of Genesis alone, it was clearly used in this sense. Yahweh said to Abram in Genesis 12:7, "Unto thy seed [zera] will I give this land." In Genesis 13:16, Yahweh promised Abram, "I will make thy seed [zera] as the dust of the earth." After showing a willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac at Jehovah-jireh, an angel of Yahweh told Abraham, "I will multiply thy seed [zera] as the stars of the heavens and as the sand which is upon the seashore; and thy seed [zera] shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed [zera] shall all the nations of the earth be blessed," (Gen. 22:17-18). 

In these and other passages too numerous to cite, the Hebrew word zera was obviously used to indicate offspring or descendants. Since this meaning also fits appropriately into the context of Genesis 3:15, only someone desperate to find support for an indefensible position would ever feel a need to interpret it as a lesson in modern biology by a primitive writer. Most English translations, in fact, use offspring or descendants in all of these passages as well as many others in which the King James and American Standard Versions translated zera as seed.

If these facts leave any doubt about what the Genesis writer meant in referring to Eve's "seed," Genesis 16:10 should remove it. In her flight from the wrath of Sarah, Hagar, Abraham's concubine, was visited by an angel of Yahweh, who promised her, "I will greatly multiply thy seed [zera], that it shall not be numbered for multitude." In the translations referred to above, the word descendants is used where seed appears in the KJV and ASV. Yet if zera meant ova in reference to Eve's "seed" in Genesis 3:15, consistency would require the proponents of this argument to believe that it also meant ova when referring to Hagar's seed. Hence, we would have an angel of Yahweh promising Hagar that she would produce so many ova that she wouldn't be able to count them. Such is the predicament that inerrancy proponents get themselves into when they try to manufacture evidence out of nothing.

Isaiah 40:22 speaks of God who "sitteth above the circle of the earth," but there are many explicative problems that must be resolved before one can present this as proof that Isaiah knew the shape of the earth in a time when no one else did. For one thing, how can we be sure that Isaiah was speaking literally in the passage? He also spoke of "the four corners of the earth" (11:12), but if I should cite this verse as an example of scientific inaccuracy on the part of a Bible writer who thought the earth was square, inerrancy advocates would demand proof that Isaiah had intended literal meaning. By the same token, then, they should be prepared to prove that Isaiah's reference to the "circle of the earth" was meant literally. 

Even if they could successfully do this, they would then have to prove that Isaiah meant circle in the sense of sphere. Plates and disks are circular in shape as well as spheres, and, as practically any general encyclopedia will confirm, some ancient cultures before and during Isaiah's time thought that the earth was a flat disk. To find evidence of scientific foreknowledge in Isaiah 40:22, then, the inerrancy advocates would have to prove that the passage referred to a spherical rather than a discoid circle. I seriously doubt that they can ever do that, but until they do, they have no argument.

The main weakness of this argument, however, is the fact that the shape of the earth was known in Isaiah's time. In discussing the spherical era of Earth's history, the Encyclopedia Britannica (Vol. 6, 1978, pp. 1-3) explains that ancient astronomers determined that the earth was round by observing its circular shadow move across the moon during lunar eclipses. The Egyptians and Greeks as far back as 2550 B.C. (more than a thousand years before Moses) knew not only the earth's spherical shape but also its approximate size. The Grecian philosopher Pythagoras, who was born in 532 B.C., defended the spherical theory on the basis of observations he had made of the shape of the sun and moon. If this information was generally known by educated Greeks and Egyptians before and during biblical times, how can anyone say with certitude that Isaiah couldn't have known about it?

If space allowed, I would explicate the other scriptures mentioned earlier that are often cited as evidence of scientific foreknowledge in the Bible, but these are enough to demonstrate the problems that the inerrancy proponents must solve before rational-thinking people can take their argument seriously. If Pythagoras could observe the sun and the moon and thereby reason that the earth was also spherical in shape, why couldn't Job have looked at the moon or the sun and concluded that the earth, like them, was suspended in space on nothing? Why couldn't Moses, if he was indeed the author of Genesis, have observed that when blood is drained from the body, life flowed out with it so that in some sense life was "in the blood"? Just why does this have to mean that Moses knew that blood carries oxygen to cells throughout the body and thereby sustains life? Why does "paths of the seas" in Psalm 8:8 have to be a reference to ocean currents like the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Current? Why couldn't it just as easily have been a reference to ocean trade routes that the ships of that time traveled? The Hebrew word orach translated paths in this passage in fact meant "customary road." And even if it was a reference to currents in the oceans, how can anyone determine today that knowledge of those currents was completely unknown at that time? Simply because it isn't now known that it was known doesn't prove that it wasn't known. So inerrancy proponents aren't the only ones who can ask questions. Those of us who reject the inerrancy doctrine have a lot of questions to ask too, especially on this matter of alleged scientific foreknowledge in the Bible.

Like so much of the other "evidence" that Bible fundamentalists offer as proof of the inerrancy doctrine, they see scientific foreknowledge in the Bible only because they so desperately want to see something that can form a rational basis for their faith. In the same way, they see prophecies and their fulfillments in passages so obscurely written that no one can really determine what the writers originally intended in the statements. In the face of unequivocal inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible text, they see unity of theme because they so desperately want to see unity of theme. 

This approach to Bible interpretation has at times caused them major embarrassment. In 1939, for example, George DeHoff wrote a biblical apology entitled Why We Believe the Bible. An entire chapter was devoted to the scientific-foreknowledge argument in which he cited Job 26:7 as supporting evidence, (p. 50):

Astronomers have discovered that there is a great empty space in the North. It contains no moving planets and shining stars. By turning their telescopes to the South, the East and the West, men may behold countless millions of stars invisible to the naked eye but when the telescope is set exactly to the North there is a great empty space. For this, astronomers have been unable to account. They did not know until recently that there was such an empty space, yet Job declared, "He stretcheth out the North over the empty places [sic] and hangeth the earth upon nothing," (Job 26:7).

DeHoff's conclusion was that "Job could not have written by guess. It must be that he wrote by inspiration of God." For years, this scripture was cited from Church-of-Christ pulpits as compelling evidence that the Bible was divinely inspired, but there was just one thing wrong with it. The premise on which it was based wasn't true. There is no "empty place" in our northern space. Everywhere astronomers look, they find space filled with galaxies and stars. That includes our northern space too. So wherever DeHoff got this argument, he didn't get it from science, and he will find no support for it in scientific circles. DeHoff's conclusion was that "Job could not have written by guess. It must be that he wrote by inspiration of God." 
 

Inerrancy advocates in the Churches of Christ are now admitting that they erred in using Job 26:7 as an example of scientific foreknowledge in the Bible. In the September 1989 issue of Reason & Revelation, Dr. Bert Thompson summarized the traditional DeHoffian interpretation of Job 26:7 and then said this, (p. 35):

This writer has so used the verse himself in the past, but does so no longer, because of problems associated with such interpretations. For example, if we attempt to convince people that this verse is to be taken literally, how do we then consistently deal with statements in the chapter which are obviously figurative (such as verse 11: "The pillars of heaven tremble, and are astonished at his reproof")? Further, there seems to be no empty space in the north. Instead, "billions of stars and galaxies extend outward in all directions," (Donald B. DeYoung, Astronomy and the Bible).

We congratulate Dr. Thompson for finally recognizing an obvious flaw in a popular inerrancy argument. It gives us hope that he might someday see the flaws in other inerrancy arguments too.
 

Something that has long perplexed me is the way that inerrancy proponents can so easily find "scientific foreknowledge" in obscurely worded Bible passages but seem completely unable to see scientific error in statements that were rather plainly written. There are too many to discuss, but Leviticus 11:5-6 can serve as an example. Here "Moses," after having identified clean animals as those that "chew the cud and part the hoof," said, "And the coney, because he cheweth the cud but parteth not the hoof, he is unclean unto you. And the hare, because she cheweth the cud but parteth not the hoof, she is unclean unto you." Deuteronomy 14:7 also described the hare and the cony as cud-chewers, but in reality they are not. They do not have compartmentalized stomachs that ruminants must have in order to be cud-chewers. Inerrancy champions have stumbled over these passages with various attempts to explain them. Gleason Archer justifies the classification of hares and conies as cud-chewers on the grounds that they "give the appearance of chewing their cud in the same way ruminants do," (Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, p. 126). Yet after all has been said on the matter, the fact remains that hares and conies are not cud-chewers. But "Moses" said that they were. 

One would think that if God were going to arm his inspired writers with scientific foreknowledge about complex matters like the "seed of woman" and the shape of the earth, he could have easily programmed them to know the simple fact that hares and conies aren't cud-chewers. That he didn't reveal this to them, as well as other things, certainly doesn't help the scientific-foreknowledge argument.