Scripture and Science
While church attendance has declined in America over the last several decades, the Bible continues to top the charts as America’s best-selling book. But strangely, while people buy Bibles, polls reveal that fewer and fewer people actually read the Bible. It seems the Bible has been relegated to a decorative object in our homes instead of a sacred guide that influences our lives.
Reasons vary as to why people no longer read the Bible, but the most common complaints are that it is too difficult to understand or the Bible has lost currency in the modern world. As a person who spent most of his life studying Scripture and trying to help people make sense of it, I find the trophy status of the Bible deeply troubling.
I certainly understand why some people feel that the Bible is out of touch with the modern world. The Bible was written thousands of years ago by multiple authors, spanning well over a millennium. In addition, the Bible was originally written in languages totally foreign to most people, and while modern translations have made the Bible readable, the cultural worldview of the biblical world has little in common with the world we live in today.
The biblical world was a pre-scientific world with little understanding of cause and effect. When an eclipse occurred, for example, it was thought to be a sign from God, not a natural phenomenon of nature. A violent storm that decimated a town was God’s way of punishing a sinful people. When sickness or even an accident resulted in sudden or unexpected death, well, that too was God’s judgement. Today we have a better sense of cause and effect and do not attribute everything that happens as divine intervention.
Modern science has advanced our knowledge of how the universe works and has helped people of faith in today’s world to reconsider how the Bible should be interpreted. Before the advent of science pre-moderns had little reason to doubt the literal interpretation of Scripture. Why should a Christian living in the 13th century question a seven day creation? All that changed when science began to open up our understanding of the universe. When we read the Genesis account of creation, for instance, few people today, even devout people of faith, actually believe in a literal seven day creation. Scientific evidence has enlightened our understanding of the age of the earth and the universe, and by so doing has enlarged our appreciation of the magnificence and grandeur of God’s creation. Just a few hundred years ago Bishop James Usher calculated the age of the earth by adding the generations of people as recorded in the Old Testament and concluded that the earth was created on October 23, 4004 B.C. Such a literal interpretation of Scripture would indeed date the sacred writings and render them suspect for many people.
During the late Middle Ages, when scientific advancement was in its infancy, the church fought against much of what the new science was bringing to light. When scientists such as Copernicus and Galileo theorized that the earth and planets revolved around the sun, the church condemned their works. But in time the evidence became so overwhelming that church leaders had no choice but to recognize that when the Bible speaks of matters such as a seven day creation or the earth as the center of the universe, it should not to be taken literally.
With the unfolding of the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment, biblical scholars came to realize that the value of the Bible lay not in answering questions such as “How was the world created?” but rather in “Why was the world created and Who was the Creator?” and “For what purpose are human beings here?” Questions such as these are beyond the scope of science and are fundamentally religious issues that the Bible bears witness to. Scripture and science came to be appreciated as two separate disciplines with each having a different focus, and each discipline contributing in its unique way to our understanding of the world and human nature. Francis Bacon, the founder of the scientific method, said that God has given us two books to help make sense of our world: The Bible and the Book of Nature. The Bible addresses questions of spiritual concern, while the Book of Nature reveals the workings of the natural world.
The Bible and science have always had a rather shaky relationship, with advocates of each competing against the other in an attempt to prove one as superior. Sometimes I think that science oversteps its boundaries and makes judgements that really belong to the area of religion or ethics, and sometimes religion tries to answer questions for which it has no expertise. Still, we have greatly benefited over the last 300 years from the contributions of both science and Scripture in immeasurable ways.
What troubles me is that in recent years there has risen a movement that seeks to discredit science, especially when the weight of its evidence runs counter to an ideological or political agenda. We see this in people who claim that carbon emissions have no effect on climate change or that vaccines are government’s nefarious attempt to gain control of our bodies. Science should always be held accountable, as should our interpretations of Scripture, but when scientific evidence is rejected simply because it doesn’t fit with our ideological or religious agenda, we become guilty of closing our minds to truth.
At the end of the first millennium and the beginning of the second, one of the world’s great civilizations was the Abbasid caliphate. The Islamic power had taken the works of Plato and Aristotle as well as other great Greek thinkers and mathematicians and used this knowledge to launch the “Golden Age of Islam.” Muslim advances in science, astronomy and math became the envy of the world. Europe, meanwhile, was languishing through what we now call the Dark Ages, with little scientific light. From the 8th to the 13th centuries, the Abbasids enjoyed the highpoint of the Islamic world, but after the 13th century things rapidly began to decline. There were many factors that led to the fall of the empire but one pivotal factor was religion. Some ultra-conservative religious leaders advocated a strict interpretation of the Quran, where anything not found in their holy book was to be discarded, including scientific innovation. A religious fundamentalism soon dominated Islamic cultural life that was opposed to scientific inquiry, and it wasn’t long before the Muslim civilization faded from world dominance.
Abbasid threshold in Karbala, Iraq
In contrast, Europe imported the scientific, technical and literary discoveries made by the Islamic scholars and learned to respect both science and their long-held religious traditions and convictions. Yes, there were many struggles, backward steps, and fierce debates, and even bloodshed, but Europe eventually found a way to balance scriptural beliefs with scientific evidence. Neither field gained mastery over the other, but in time people learned that both science and Scripture had something to offer to humanity.
