by jimwalton » Sun Jul 05, 2020 4:00 pm
There is science in the Bible, but no passage is scientific. The science we see in the Bible is the science of their era, which we now know to be wrong. But that's OK because our science of 50 years has been proved to be wrong also. Science keeps progressing and refining—it's one of science's strengths.
The authority of the biblical text doesn't rely on its scientific accuracy. God accommodated their scientific understanding to reveal Himself, just as He would if He revealed Himself to us in our era. The authority of the text is in what God was revealing about Himself, not the scientific mindset in which that revelation happened.
The worldview expressed in the Bible, since you asked, assumes that the world is a flat disk, that the sky is a solid dome, that the sun moves across the sky, that the mountains held up the heavens, that they knew nothing of outer space, that they thought the planets were wandering stars, that the oceans were places of non-order and chaos, and that there was no separation between natural and supernatural. These viewpoints were common everywhere in the ancient Near East, and the writers of the Bible wrote within that scientific milieu. There is no insistence, though, that the Earth is flat, that the sky is solid, and the solar system is geocentric, or that the stars were inside the dome of our Earth. They are expressing their worldview, not cosmogonic truth.
There is science in the Bible, but no passage is scientific. The science we see in the Bible is the science of their era, which we now know to be wrong. But that's OK because our science of 50 years has been proved to be wrong also. Science keeps progressing and refining—it's one of science's strengths.
The authority of the biblical text doesn't rely on its scientific accuracy. God accommodated their scientific understanding to reveal Himself, just as He would if He revealed Himself to us in our era. The authority of the text is in what God was revealing about Himself, not the scientific mindset in which that revelation happened.
The worldview expressed in the Bible, since you asked, assumes that the world is a flat disk, that the sky is a solid dome, that the sun moves across the sky, that the mountains held up the heavens, that they knew nothing of outer space, that they thought the planets were wandering stars, that the oceans were places of non-order and chaos, and that there was no separation between natural and supernatural. These viewpoints were common everywhere in the ancient Near East, and the writers of the Bible wrote within that scientific milieu. There is no insistence, though, that the Earth is flat, that the sky is solid, and the solar system is geocentric, or that the stars were inside the dome of our Earth. They are expressing their worldview, not cosmogonic truth.