From *The Skeptical Review*, 1991 March-April:
By Farrell Till
An earlier article ("What About Scientific Foreknowledge in the Bible?" Fall 1990), debunked the fundamentalist claim that the truth of verbal inspiration can be verified by places in the Bible text where writers demonstrated knowledge of scientific facts that were unknown at the time the Bible was being written. The intent of the claim is to "prove" that Bible writers "foreknew" these scientific facts because God revealed them through the process of verbal inspiration, but, as my article showed, scientific foreknowledge in the Bible can be found only in the eisegetical interpretations of bibliolaters shamelessly bent on clinging to an untenable view of the Bible. In reality, there is no more "scientific foreknowledge" in the Bible than in any other literature of the same era.
If it were really true that Bible authors revealed in their works scientific facts that were not discovered until centuries later, this would indeed be a formidable argument for the verbal inspiration of the Bible, but the evidence that bibliolaters point to to prove their theory is entirely too speculative to be convincing. Some inerrantists, for example, have absurdly seen evidence that the Bible foresaw the potential for using electricity to send messages. In speaking to Job from the whirlwind, Yahweh asked him, "Can you send forth lightnings, that they may go, and say to you, Here we are?" (Job 38:35). In Why We Believe the Bible, George DeHoff made this comment on the verse:
Job could not do this but we are able to do so today as we talk on the telephone and radio and send our messages by telegraph. Truly the lightning goeth and saith for us (p. 55).
There are so many absurdities in this application of the verse that I hardly know where to begin commenting on them. For one thing, it violates a principle of common sense that should tell DeHoff and his inerrancy cohorts that a clear-cut, undeniable case of scientific foreknowledge would have to be stated in language so obvious in meaning that there could be no disagreement in interpretation. In my response to Jerry McDonald's article elsewhere in this issue, I used the rule of Occam's razor to discredit his claim that Hosea meant for "the blood of Jezreel" to refer to the murder of Naboth. The rule is equally applicable to DeHoff's claim of scientific foreknowledge in a simple statement about lightning. As long as it is possible for the statement to mean something less complex than the supernatural insight of a primitive writer into the physics of transmitting sound by electricity, then there is no force at all to the claim that this is an example of scientific foreknowledge.
