science anticipated in holy writings

 

The street preacher Ray Comfort has put a piece up on the internet wherein he claims the Bible contains scientific knowledge that was written into the scritpures at a time before such knowledge had been reached by academic study.

Mr Comfort is a New Zealander by birth but spends most of his time in America and or travelling the world.

I admire him for the way he goes into the streets to talk to people about God.

The lynchpin of his street preaching theology, ie that we've all somehow broken the ten commandments, seems sound enough to me even if he does somethimes appear to me to be pre empting the mercy of God.

His apparent hostility to the Catholic church is in my opinion an error of judgement.

I was pleased to see Mr Comfort's piece in which he claimed to have identified ten such pieces of scientific knowledge in the ancient scriptiures.

One of my hobby horses indeed.

I looked viewing Ray Comfort's notion on the matter with relish.

My pleasure lasted only until I viewed the thing.

I found the specific instances of scientific knowledge which he claimed were in the Bible to be unconvincing to say the least.

Still if you find time, gentle reader, I would recommend you view the broadcast.

A Muslim internet commentator who styles himself Ali Dawa has recently created a sensation by saying that he recognises claims that the Quran anticipates scientific knowldge have been debunked.

He choses to believe for different reasons.

My own assessment, the aforementioned hobby horse, is that there are some specificiities in the Bible which uncannily predate known scientific research.

Here are my favourites.

1. The notion evoked in the Book of Genesis that all mankind came from a single pair of human beings called Adam and Eve tallies somewhat with current genetic studies. In 2018 Mark Stoeckle (Rockefeller University, New York) and David Thaler (Basel University Switzerland) published a scientific paper claiming DNA studies indicated all human beings came from a single pair.

2. The Book of Genesis' statement that in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth was dismissed by many scientists in the modern period, including at one stage Einstein. The alternative that they proposed was that the universe always existed, that it was simply a brute fact. In 1963 American physicists Anro Penzias and Robert Wilson published their discovery of background radiation in the night sky indicating a universe that has expanded from a single point. The single point, more correctly a singularity, means the universe we see today has expanded outward from nothingness. The point we call its beginning is the first instance we can notionally consider an existing universe. Scientists generally now accept that the discovery means the universe had a beginning which is a major concurrence with the Bible. The mathematician David Berlinski has commented wryly about the reason so many scientists were reluctant to admit the universe had a beginning: "If it had a beginning, maybe it had a creator." Arno Penzias for his part has stated: "Everything I'm finding out now is ecactly what I would have expected from reading the Book of Paslms, Genesis, the Bible as a whole."

3. The Bible states that all the earth was flooded as a punishment for mankind's sins and that Noah and his family took animals onto a ship called the Ark in order to survive the flood. On every continent of the earth there are peoples, nations and tribes with myths which bear remarkable similarity to the Noah account. Recurrent details such as a single family being saved, a man chosen by God bringing animals otto the ship, and a flood that wipes out the existing world wide civiIisation, suggest that the science of modern ethnography is rather late in the day discovering evidence in these accounts that a world wide flood actaally happened.

4. The Bible states that at one stage in human history, all of humanity shared a single language. I believe from my own studies that coincidences of vocabulary in widely dispersed languages which occur in the ancient forms of those languages before any known contact between the people groups, show there may be scientific specicity to the Bible assertion that mankind once shared a single language. Conventional linguisitc science is slowly catching up on this notion.

5. The Lord Jesus is described by gospel witnesses as saying: "If you make my word your home, you will come to know the truth and the truth will set you free." Psychology and the debased drug prescribing science of Psychiatry have never come up with anything to match  the enabling, liberating, resonant power of the notion that "the truth will set you free."

6. Jesus is also described by the witnesses as saying: "The lamp of your body is your eye. If your eye is in darkness, your whole body will be in darkness." This statement was interpreted by some scholars in the 1960s as indicating that Jesus' knowledge of the human body was limited and that he thought the eye was a lamp. I suggest it indicates a profound knowledge of the effects of objectifying obsession and anticipates in our own day the effects of pornography.

7. The Psalms advise against harbouring hatred in your heart. "Do not bear a grudge. It will only end up harming you." I have personally seen the mind body connection in this regard and science is slowly cottoning on to it. There were times when I hated and I could not even walk. What is in the Psalms in this regard seems absolutely true to me.

(Copies to Ray Comfort and Ali Dawa.)