Board index ‹ Science and the Bible

[Cool Beans]

I've been told There is science in the bible. Which passages are scientific?

[jimwalton]

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.

[Lol HaHa]

The book of Enoch describe the earth as disc with bottom floating in nothingness, that’s sounds like a globe in space to me

[jimwalton]

That does sound like a globe in space to me, but the ancients had no way of seeing the Earth from outer space (duh) so could only go by their worldviews. The common concept of the ancient world was that the Earth was a flat disk held up by the pillars of the earth. Also under the disk were the cosmic oceans. Above the disk was the solid dome of the firmament; inside of it were the sun and moon, stars and planets. The firmament was held up by the high mountains—the place of the gods. (In biblical world view, God's throne sat on top of the firmament, outside of it.) On the disk of the Earth, then, were the regular mountains, the land and rivers, etc. On am ancient Babylonian map that has been found, the land mass of the Earth was about 3000 miles in diameter.

Sort of like this (though I've seen better graphics): https://cathedral.org.sg/uploads/blog_post_pictures/Cosmogony1.jpg

[Lol HaHa]

Thank you for responding and I think your points are valid, but their were also those who thought the earth was a globe in Ancient Greece because people inferred so by seeing the earth curve in the distance from the top of a ships mast

[jimwalton]

Yes, I'm sure that's true. The Greeks were good at math and observations like that. I was specifically talking about the ancient Near East—like from 6000 - 1000 BC, and in Sumer, Babylon, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Canaan. But I wouldn't be surprised that there were exceptions, and especially a different Greek perspective of those who were so close to the sea.