Wednesday, April 25, 2018

CAN I TRUST THE BIBLE? The Logical Rationale, Part 3




In this post, we will begin to explore THE SCIENTIFIC PROOF of the Bible’s accuracy.  Science and the Bible are, very often, pitted against each other—as though they are enemies.  How can this be, since God is the Author of both?  God is Truth and all that is true comes from God.  True Christian faith is not anti-science, and proven science is not anti-faith, since both are grounded in fact.

Now, here is a difference—the Bible is set, fixed, and final—the complete revelation of God to which nothing can be added or subtracted in terms of what we need to know about God and how to have eternal life in Him—to serve and glorify Him.  The Bible doesn’t tell us all we want to know, or all we could know, even all we will know, but it gives us all we need to know for life here and for the hereafter.  Science ever changes—new discoveries are made and knowledge increases.  Old ideas are discarded or amended.  Some have estimated that in the library of the Louvre in Paris, France, there are at least 3and ½ miles of science books that are obsolete.  No one reads a word of them.  The rate at which science and technology are expanding is exponential—so that the science textbook used this year will be outdated perhaps before the year is out! 

Consider once more a vital truth: although the Bible is not a science textbook, the science expressed in the text is remarkable.  It was light years ahead of its day, and where it touches on the realm of science the Word of God is accurate.

For instance, in Acts 7:22, we are told that Moses was learned in all of the science of the Egyptians. …He knew all the latest scientific fads, he was abreast with all the latest scientific discoveries of his day.  These Egyptians were brilliant people [witness their construction of the pyramids, DT]. …Those Egyptian scientists believed…that this earth was hatched out of a great cosmic egg, an egg that had wings and was flying around through space. …That was the latest scientific theory among those who taught in the days of Moses.

So I turn over here to the Word of God expecting to read about that flying egg, for after all, Moses was learned in all the science of the Egyptians.  But I find nothing at all about an enormous hatchery.  Instead of that, I read of creation in the sublimest words that man could pen: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

Those Egyptians also had a science of astronomy.  They believed that the sun was the reflection of the light on the earth, and that the earth was the center of this universe, but in Genesis I find that Moses reversed the order—it is the sun that gives light to the earth.

The Egyptians had a science of anthropology.  They were naïve evolutionists.  They believed that mankind sprang from little white worms that they found in the slime and ooze and mud of the alluvial deposit after the Nile’s annual overflow. …The scientists of Moses’ day with their theory of evolution from worms were not far behind those today who would have you believe that your remote ancestors were fleabitten apes hanging by their tails in a primeval jungle.  I read in the Bible that Moses was learned in all the science of the Egyptians.  But he says nothing about those little white worms and how we were descended from them.  Instead, he writes in the most majestic language in human speech: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”  (W.A. Criswell, “The Bible for Today’s World, pp.18-19)

This introduces our topic.  In future posts, we will roll out evidence after evidence of science that underscores the trustworthiness of the Bible.

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