Saturday, April 1, 2017

Questions in Genesis: The Scientific Veracity of the Bible

Questions in Genesis: The Scientific Veracity of the Bible
           
Any time I encounter discussions of the Bible being or not being scientifically accurate, I am reminded of the story of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby.  Brer Rabbit was unwilling to allow the tar baby to be a tar baby and got so upset that this inanimate object would not speak to him that he ends up punching and kicking the tar baby.  The end result is that the tar baby was unmoved and Brer Rabbit ended up in quite a mess.[1]  I see the same thing happen when one tries to fit the Bible into the modern understanding(s) of scientific accuracy.  The Bible does not fit nicely into these categories, and forcing it is not generally helpful.  The reason for this is as follows:

1.      The Bible is an ancient text.  It records history and speaks about the world largely in keeping with the accepted practices of its time periods.  This very nature of the Bible makes it difficult to fit with a post-enlightenment view of science.  The standards of scientific accuracy are a rather recent invention within human history.

2.      The Bible is a religious text.  It addresses reality from a religious perspective.  It even gives two disparate accounts of the creation of the world each of which made a different theological point.[2]  This does not mean that the Bible does not convey truth about reality.  This does mean that the Bible has other concerns than being a scientific textbook.

As a Christian, I view the Bible as the product of God’s condescension to reveal something of Himself to humanity.  As such, I rather expect the language to reflect an ancient worldview and terms to convey the message.  As Saint Augustine taught me, words are signs that signify something beyond themselves.[3]  As such, I do not view the ancient terms and concepts to necessary be the ultimate or intended things signified.  This means that I am not reading the Bible to see what it has to tell me about the science of the physical world, but about the spiritual world and realities.  At the same time, the Bible does address the reality of the physical world.  This is why the Bible is often used with great reliability by archeologists. This does not make the Bible a scientific work.

Some have successfully read portions of the Bible as a science book.  The greatest example of this was Matthew F. Maury.  He was inspired by the phrase “the paths of the seas” in Psalm 8:8.  Partly because of this passage he devoted countless hours of his life to charting the ocean currents while an officer in the U.S. Navy.  His works proved to be of immense benefits to the speed and effectives of modern navigation. 

While this Biblical phrase here was the impetus of his discovery it does not necessarily follow that this was the intended meaning of the text.  Indeed, it is important to consider whether or not Psalm 8:8 is actually referring to oceanic currents or simply using metaphor to describe the movement of sea creatures.  This is a particular difficulty when one is finding scientifically accurate statements embedded in poetic and prophetic works. 

There are examples even within the same poetic book that can be viewed as scientifically accurate and clearly not scientifically accurate.  In Job 26:7 we read, “He hangs the earth on nothing.”  Some have taken this as evidence that the Bible affirms that the globe is suspended in space.  However, we also read earlier in the same work, “who shakes the earth under heaven from its foundations and its pillars tremble” (Job 9:6).  This leads to the rather obvious question of our “scientifically accurate” work, “Does the earth rest upon pillars or is it a sphere suspended in the vacuum of space?”  As a work of science, the Bible is contradictory at this point.  As a work of poetry however, the theological truths are conveyed with powerful imagery, the way that poetic works do those things.

Therefore, when I encounter well-meaning statements along the lines of “The Bible is not a scientific text book, but everything it says about science is true and reliable,”[4] I slightly grimace.  In Joshua chapter 10, our solar system is presented as the sun orbiting around the earth instead of the earth orbiting around the sun.  That is kinda of a problem if we were to read the Bible as being scientifically accurate in all that it says.

To put it colloquially, the Bible is often quite unconcerned with the “actual factual”.  This is clear when one reads the “historical” books of the Old Testament.  The history is told from a prophetic point of view.  The reason Israel suffers military defeat is not because they were yet another region being conquered and ruled by powerful expansionistic empires of the days, but because Israel did not keep the law and so God handed them over to be punished.  This is to say that the Bible was composed by people whose concern was not “history” as we would define “history” today.  Rather, they wrote history from the divine perspective.  This does not negate the things described in the Bible as being a-historical events, but it does mean that we should read the Bible from the perspective of the divine interaction with “human events.” 

This leads me to my concluding point.  If one chooses to read the Bible as though it were written from a post-enlightenment worldview when discussing the world, then one would either have to discount it as being untruthful or attempt to argue that the world is not how it is.  Either approach ultimately fails to read the Bible as it was written; as multiple accounts by multiple authors reflecting on the workings and revelations of God through the medium and world view of their times.  When I apply this conclusion to the Genesis creation accounts, I find that I am not reading these accounts for the sake of gleaning scientific knowledge, but about understanding something about God and how I ought to think and act.






[1] For the full account of this story, consult Uncle Remus.

[2] For further discussion on the disagreements between the two Genesis creation accounts, see my earlier post: https://johnmarkbeazley.blogspot.com/2017/01/questions-in-genesis-part-1-which.html

[3] This is even the case for Derrida, who despite his best efforts cannot be understood if signs did not have particular (even if at times ambiguous) referents.

[4] For an example see  Rick Warren http://pastorrick.com/devotional/english/the-bible-is-scientifically-accurate_579

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