Science And Bible

Science And Bible

Does science support or contradict the Bible?

The claim that science contradicts the Bible is popular but false, as science actually supports the Bible's details. As archaeology (see Jesus' Tomb, Golgotha, Hezekiah's Tunnel, Gihon Spring, Capernaum (above), Ephesus Theatre), astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and other disciplines of science advance, more and more details of the Bible that seemed improbable have been getting confirmed, not less and less.

For example, advances in medicine, nutrition and pharmacology are shifting the normal distribution of human life expectancy to the right and allowing more people to live past 100 years of age. Yet we cannot surpass - the normal distribution curve has an abnormal right tail - the 120 year limit that God set at the beginning of the Bible: And the Lord said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years." (Genesis 6:3)

And until Galileo Galilei invented the telescope in the 17th century, people could count the 5,000 or so stars visible to the naked eye and dismissed as exaggeration the statement in Jeremiah 33:22 that the stars "cannot be numbered." The 30x magnification of Galileo's telescope raised the number of visible stars to about 500,000 and silenced the majority, but a small minority continued to claim that half million is still a number that can be counted, until later telescopes, including the Hubble, proved that the universe's hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, indeed "cannot be numbered."

What about Darwin's theory of evolution that claims we are simply the product of random mutations over a very long time?

Imagine coming across 10 stones on the ground that form the letter "S." You may look down at those stones and wonder if they had been placed like that by someone or if something random like a flash flood had placed the stones in that pattern. But imagine coming across 10,000,000,000,000 stones on the ground that spell out the entire collection of Shakespeare's plays. You couldn't attribute that to some random cause, could you? You would have to conclude that somebody laid out those ten trillion stones with intent.

What's the point?

Charles Darwin didn't have the electron microscope and assumed the cell - the basic building block of all organisms and the starting point for his theory of evolution - to be just some uniform blob. But today's electron microscope shows each cell to be an incredibly complex organic machine made of about ten trillion atoms that are organized into highly specific, interdependent parts, all of which are needed for the cell to exist in the first place.

What is the point?

Fred Hoyle, the renowned British astronomer and atheist who originally coined the term, "Big Bang" in 1949 had this to say at the end of his career three decades later (Note: There are about 2,000 enzymes in the simplest cell, which is a bacterium, and 'only' about 10⁸⁰ atoms in the entire universe.):

What does the complexity of the cell mean for Darwin's theory of evolution?