Scientific Foreknowledge In The Bible?

A Christian, Walt Jr., makes some unwarranted claims concerning scientific foreknowledge in the Bible. Farrell Till sets him straight. From the Errancy Discussion list, April 7, 1997:

WALT JR

Though science has proven the earth is round, nowhere does the Bible teach that the earth is flat. In fact, Job 26:7 says, God "suspends the earth over nothing", and Isaiah 40:22 says God "sits enthroned above the circle of the earth." The passages about the four corners of the earth is clearly figurative language that the Bible uses. As a person who is constantly talking about figurative language and metaphor, Campbell's approach to biblical interpretation makes no sense.

TILL

First of all, the earth doesn't hang on nothing. It is held in orbit by the gravitational attraction of the sun, but Job 26:7 also says that God stretches out the North over empty space. What does this mean? For years, apologists argued that there was a vast empty space in which no stars were located, and that this space was directly north with reference to the earth. This empty space has been disproven, and so we don't hear biblicists looking for "scientific foreknowledge" in the Bible referring to this anymore. As a child, however, I was taught that this was a good prooftext to use in confounding atheists. Verse 9 in this chapter says that God "encloses the face of his throne and spreads his cloud upon it." So why haven't our space explorations located God's throne? It must be up there somewhere above the clouds. Verse 11 says that the "pillars of heaven tremble." Where are these "pillars of heaven"? Why haven't they been found? Verse 12 says that God "stirs up the sea with his power," which should be considered with verse 8 that says God "binds up the waters in his thick clouds." In these verses, we have clear evidence that the Hebrews believed in a god of the gaps. He was the explanation for everything that couldn't be understood.

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. 

Scientific Boo-Boos In The Bible

From *The Skeptical Review*, January/February 1991 issue:

By Farrell Till

Bibliolaters claim that the Bible is inerrant in every detail, in matters of history, science, geography, chronology, etc., as well as faith and practice. It is a claim that has won wide acceptance among fundamentalist Christians, but, as is true of most zealotic tributes that have been paid to the Bible, it has no basis in fact. As past articles in TSR have clearly shown to anyone who really wants to know the truth, the Bible is riddled with mistakes. Many of those mistakes were scientific ones.

The creation account in Genesis divided time into days and the days into evening and morning for three days before the sun was even created (1:1-19). "There was evening and there was morning," we are told, "one day... a second day... a third day," but as any astronomer knows, evening (night) and morning (daylight) result from the earth's rotation with respect to the sun. With no sun, there would have certainly been evening or night, but there could have been no morning.

On the fourth day when God created the "two great lights" (the sun and the moon), he created the stars too. This creation of the rest of the universe was treated by the Genesis writer(s) as if it were little more than an afterthought: "he made the stars also" (v:16). To the prescientific mind that wrote this, it probably made sense. To him (her), the earth was undoubtedly the center of the universe, but today we know better. The solar system of which earth is only a tiny part is itself an infinitesimal speck in the universe. Surely, then, the creation of the stars would not have occurred so quickly and suddenly if six days were needed to create the world. Scientists now know that the creation of stars is an evolutionary process that is still ongoing. Matter coalesces; stars ignite, shine, and eventually burn out or explode. From the existence of heavy elements in our solar system, astronomers generally agree that it formed from debris left over from a supernova that occurred billions of years ago. The prescientific Genesis writer knew none of this, however, and that is why he viewed the creation of the universe as an Elohistic afterthought. No modern, scientifically-educated writer would have made that mistake.