This is what we normally call “science”. Science is merely a means for discovering how the physical world operates. Science consists of data obtained by research. Then this data is interpreted by “scientists”. Each scientist has his/her own personal philosophy and this determines how they will interpret the data. A scientist who rejects God will hold an evolutionary view point. Other professional scientists who accept the reality of the Creator will interpret the data to fit the biblical perspective.

For more than a century, atheism had essentially owned the realm of scientific thought. But starting about 50 years ago, a strong movement among professional scientists began who believe that the world was created by the supernatural God as described in the first two chapters of Genesis.

This movement has created an enlightenment that is as profound as the enlightenment that occurred 500 years ago when such scientists as Galileo first proposed that the earth revolves around the sun rather than visa versa. The modern creation scientists have taken a fresh look at the Bible in relation to the scientific data and that look has been exciting to the Bible believing Christian. Contrary to the notion that the Bible is antiquated in the field of science knowledge, it is increasingly understood that the Bible has always revealed accurate scientific truths about the earth and all life found on it.

What would you think about a person who had advanced knowledge about the mysteries of nature several hundred or even several thousand years before human science discovered the same things? If such ancient persons had knowledge that a mortal could not have possessed in their own time, would that suggest that the person was more than a genius? Indeed, we would conclude that such persons were informed by a higher Being Who had passed knowledge on to Bible writers out of His own creative design.

The Bible does reveal knowledge that was not known by mankind in the time of its writing. In other words, the Bible possessed advance knowledge about science that the writer could not have read or heard from anyone living in his own time. We will examine a few of the advanced biblical revelations about science in this lesson.

The Earth’s Shape

This has long been a subject of great interest and debate. We are all aware that in A. D. 1492, Christopher Columbus excited the imagination of his contemporaries by proposing to sail west fromSpain farther than anyone believed possible. According to the popular thought of his day, the world was like a flat table with an edge over which a ship would plunge into some abyss. It is reported that Columbus had reasoned that the world was spherical out of the simple observation that the horizon at sea always spanned a limited distance. From any point, one could not see past the horizon and this could only be explained by a spherical shaped earth.

Thinkers of that day could have turned to the Bible for insight about this question, for it definitely spoke on the subject. If the reader will turn to Isaiah 40:22 you will see what God said about this before man discovered the spherical shape of earth: “It is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth.” Here the earth’s shape is spoken of as a circle. Isaiah, the penman of this verse, wrote about 700 B.C., which was 1400 years before Columbus and 2,000 years before our time. Though it is true that a circle need not be a sphere or globe, it is also true that every sphere is a composite of many circles of equal diameter and circumference. A circle is certainly suggestive of a sphere to the discerning Bible reader. So the Bible was the first to reveal that earth is a sphere.

The Earth’s Support

The question of what supports the earth had long mystified the ancients. In some parts of the world, people pictured the world sitting on the back of a giant turtle. And several hundred years before Christ, the Greeks had invented a god upon whose back the earth supposedly rested.

The Scriptures suggested no such foolish inventions. Turning to Job 26:7 we read: “…He [God]…hangeth the earth upon nothing.” The ancients of Job’s time surely didn’t know about the mysterious force that we know today as gravity. In fact it wasn’t until Isaac Newton, some 300 years ago, that man was able to think about an invisible force that acts over a distance upon a solid object such as a planet. That force explains how the earth is kept in a circular orbit around the sun. The earth is at the perfect distance from the sun to prevent it from being pulled into the sun but the gravitational force is sufficiently strong to prevent the earth from escaping, and so it does the only other thing possible – travel perpetually around the sun.

We know today how refreshingly true the Bible has spoken all along about this incredible arrangement – for indeed the earth hangs in the nothingness of space! We should wonder how this ancient writer could have known about this fact thousands of years before the discovery of gravity. Serious consideration will bring us to the inescapable conclusion that God was His mentor and gave him the knowledge to write accurately.

The Orbit of the Sun

We are long past the idea that the sun orbits around earth as the “established scientists” once thought. Today we understand that the opposite is true, that the earth rotates around the sun. Our solar system consists of our sun around which nine planets (with their moons) revolve. In this arrangement we picture the sun sitting in a fixed position in space with the planets whirling about it. Is this so?

It is not. Please turn to Psalm 19 and examine verses 1-6 which read in part as follows: “The heavens declare the glory of God [v. 1]…In them hath He set the tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. His going forth is from the end of heaven, and his circuit [circle]unto the ends of it…” [vs. 4-6].

In these remarkable verses the sun is described as traveling on a circuit (circle or orbit) through the heavens (space), just as a strong man would run a race on an oval race track! It is known in modern astronomy that our sun is not fixed in one position but is in fact traveling along a great circular path through the Milky Way Galaxy. As it travels this great circular path, it carries the nine planets, including earth, with it. So we are in effect traveling piggy back with the sun through the galaxy just as the writer of Psalms long ago stated.

Isn’t that amazing? Remember that the Psalms were written by King David of Israel a thousand years before the birth of Christ, long before man had any scientific inkling of this astronomic fact. None of the ancients of David’s day could have had any clue about this from their general observations of the constellations. Where then could David have learned this marvelous truth? Only from God, the author and architect of the heavens!

The Watery World

Ours is a watery world with about 70 % of the earth’s surface covered by seas. It has been said that even today we know more about outer space than we do about the world beneath the surface of earth’s oceans. Each year, new creatures are discovered that modern oceanographers previously had no clue about.

How much could the ancients have known about the undersea world? With no submarines, diving suits, underwater cameras, or remote mapping equipment, how would they know anything about the form of the ocean bottom? They might have thought the oceans to be shallow or bottomless, mountainous or flat. Most of what we know today about the oceans is less than 60 years old. Let’s now consider what was recorded in the Bible about the watery world of earth more than 3,000 years ago.

First we direct our attention to Psalm 8:8 where the Bible uses the term “paths of the sea”. We know what a path is – something like a narrow roadway where people or animals travel along an established route with definite boundaries. The Hebrew word from which this word path is translated means a “well trodden road”. This is an accurate description of the ocean currents which were first discovered by human science about 150 years ago. Ocean currents are highways of water with edges that are defined well enough to be approximately mapped. These currents are indeed highways of life because the vast bulk of marine life, from the microscopic plankton to the great whales, routinely navigate these waters while traveling around the world.

Plunging now beneath the sometimes violent and sometimes calm surface of the oceans to their always tranquil mysterious depths, we will glide downward past great mountain ranges into deep canyons with vertical walls that plunge thousands of feet beneath even the floor of the oceans. What could the Bible writers, if they were not inspired of God, have known about such submarine topography? And yet we hear David, three-thousand years ago, use the term “channel of the sea”(II Samuel 22:16). The translators of the King James Version chose the word channel from a Hebrew word which meant tube, bed or valley. Whether in English or Hebrew, the Scriptures here do accurately describe the topography of the submarine depths. The descriptions certainly would create an accurate picture in the minds of Bible readers.

Before leaving our journey to the bottom of the sea we should check out some additional wonders. Scattered across the floor of the ocean there exist numerous places where hot gases from within the earth escape through “vents” as they are called by oceanographers. These vents are actuallyundersea geysers where superheated water and gases are released from the crust of the earth into the ocean depths. The Bible writer knew about these as well. In Job 38:16 the ancient writer spoke of the “springs of the sea”. A spring is where water gushes up out of the earth to the surface of land. So a spring in the sea can only be the same except it bubbles up at the very bottom of the oceans. From where, we should consider, did this writer gain such modern knowledge about the undersea geysers on the floor of the ocean?

The Earth’s Creatures

The Bible also contains revelations about earth’s creatures that have long preceded scientific knowledge.

Let’s start in I Corinthians 15:20 where Paul the Apostle stated the following: All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another of beasts; another of fishes, and another of birds.” The reader may regard this statement as self evident but it was not evident to medical scientists early in the twentieth century who attempted to transplant tissues and blood serum from animal to man or between people. The results of these efforts were disastrous because the immune systems of the recipients of such attempted transplants rejected the foreign tissues with disastrous complications. Today, such transplants are only successful when powerful immunosuppressant drugs are used to suppress the immune system’s natural rejection of the foreign tissues. Those researchers of a hundred years ago were like the sea captain described in Acts 27:10-11 who would not listen to a man inspired from God and so suffered great disaster. Once again, the Bible was first in truth!

Let’s now think about the ancient creatures that we call dinosaurs. The discovery of dinosaur fossils several hundred years ago perplexed many Bible believers and caused many to reject the Bible on scientific matters and still others completely lost confidence in the Bible on any matter. It is supposed to be axiomatic that dinosaurs must have lived millions of years before any humans. We wonder how humans could have even lived with such creatures as Tyrannosaurus Rex with its six inch teeth and enormous size. Other dinosaurs such as the Brontosaurus with its gargantuan body and treelike tail seem to be equally out of place among humans.

And yet we now know that dinosaurs did not sneak up on the ancient Bible writers. If the reader will turn to Job 40:15-24 we will examine a creature that lived in the time of Job. Accepting the tenets of evolution, some Bible expositors have interpreted this creature to have been a crocodile, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, elephant, or whale. Which is it? Or is it any of those things? That’s easy to discern with just a little thought. What is the creature described in these verses? The Bible writer calls him “behemoth” which refers to an immense creature. Certainly any of the above might fill this description if we only consider size. But we need to interpret all of the data that the Bible lists here.

This creature has the following characteristics: it ate grass, had an enormous tail like a cedar [tree], and it lived on land, probably along the edges of water where reeds grew. The description of this animal indicates that it wasn’t just large like a crocodile or even a rhino or hippo or elephant, but it was incredibly huge with enormous strength in its abdominal muscles and huge bones as strong as iron.

At any rate we can eliminate all of the above proposed animals as being Behemoth. Since the creature was a land dweller the whale is eliminated. Since it ate grass the crocodile is also eliminated. The hippo, rhino and elephant are left. However all of these must also be eliminated because none have a tail that is anything comparable to a cedar [tree]. Now what is left? Nothing that we have ever seen in the flesh. But this Bible animal does perfectly fit the description of an enormous plant eating dinosaur such as Brontosaurus. Notice also that the Lord told Job (verse 15) to ‘behold’ or see this creature. That would be ludicrous if Job had not actually seen such a creature. And if he had seen the creature, then it lived during his time.

Long before the first dinosaur fossil was discovered the Bible had already described at least one major type of these marvelous, now extinct creatures. And the reader may be surprised to know that human footprints have been discovered inside or alongside fossilized dinosaur footprints. You may actually see these for yourself by visiting the Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texassouth of Ft. Worth. This museum has conducted careful X-ray studies on these human footprints and showed that they were not carved or artificially placed.

For More Information…

There are hundreds of books and videos produced by creation scientists around the world that reveal the amazing accuracy of the Bible on matters of science. These scientists are fully professional scientists who received advanced degrees from the same universities that evolutionary scientists studied at. The materials are written or produced for the general audience with other technical materials increasingly being written for professional scientists.

One excellent organization for these materials is the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). (You can visit their online store at www. icr.org or call at 800-628-7640 for a brochure.) CaprockBaptist Church will be stocking some of these books and videos in the church library.

Some excellent books and speakers on the subject:

  1. Science and the Bible by Dr. Henry Morris (available through ICR).
  2. The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel, Zondervan Books, 2004. (Available by ordering through Christian bookstores)
  3. The Flood by Alfred Rehwinkel, Concordia Publishing House (ISBN 0-570-03183-4), 1951 (although this book is older, it is still a most relevant book).
  4. Acts and Facts available monthly for free from ICR.
    Each month short articles are presented about the latest discoveries relevant to the Bible and science.
  5. Footprints and the Stones of Time, by Dr. Clifford Wilson and Dr. Carl Baugh, 1996, PCM Christian Press.
    This book shows pictures of dinosaur and human footprints that are side by side.
  6. The Lie, by Ken Ham, 1987, Creation-Life Publishers, P.O. Box 1606, El Cajon, Ca., 92022.
  7. Fossils: Key to the Present, Richard Bliss, Gary Parker & Duane Gish, 1980, (Available through ICR).
    This book documents the fact that “fossils” support the biblical creation rather than evolution.
  8. Many children’s books and videos are available from ICR for education purposes and to supplement public school science textbooks by parents at home.
  9. Many other excellent creation science organizations exist world-wide staffed with professional scientists who are fully degreed at the Masters and PhD level by certified universities. One such organization is the Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texas operated by Dr. Carl Baugh.
  10. The reader could do an internet search using “creation science” as the key search word to find an abundance of organizations and writings. (Note: the reader will have to use discernment in selecting some of these materials because some writers, who claim to be creationists, actually believe in an earth that is of evolutionary ages. Other writers may not be educationally qualified in the area of science.)

I recommend that you start with materials from ICR because these are unconditionally recommended because of the professional qualifications of the writers.

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