The Bible and Science: New Horizons

This is a modern companion article to The Bible and Science by Arthur T. Pierson.

We are indebted to Dr. Arthur T. Pierson (ATP) for pointing out, in the article reprinted in the previous issue of this magazine, phrases in the Bible which did not match commonly held ideas in the ancient world, but which fitted well with what was known by the start of the twentieth century. Further discoveries have been made which vindicate over half of the points which ATP made.

Since his time, astronomers have realised that faint clouds or nebulae are collections of vast numbers of stars thousands of times further away than was suspected in the nineteenth century. Imagine the entire Sahara to be covered with sand to a depth of 50 metres, and the number of grains of sand will match current estimates of the number of stars in the universe (cf. Jeremiah 33:22).

The daily rotation of the earth is not constant as was thought in the nineteenth century. It now takes two thousandths of a second longer than it did in 1900. Broadcast time signals have to be adjusted occasionally to keep clocks in step with the rotation of the earth.

ATP referred to “the correlation and conservation of force”. This was the embryo of an idea which developed into “the principle of conservation of energy”, or “the first law of thermodynamics”.

The air has weight: the translators of the AV did well to render Job 28:25 as indicating that the winds could be weighed in a balance, as there is no other sense is which the winds can be said to be balanced.

Regrettably, the statement that light and sound are of the same nature is incorrect, as is the statement that electricity is a vibration. ATP also appears not to have been rightly informed about the refraction of light. The effect of refraction by the atmosphere is to extend daylight by about four minutes.

The astronomer Mädler was quite right to claim that the sun and visible stars rotate about a common centre. It is now known to be the middle of the Milky Way, and about 60 times further away than the Pleiades.

Benjamin Franklin demonstrated that lightning is a flow of electricity, but ATP calls electricity “lightning.” This is like calling water a raging torrent. In Job chapter 38, Job is humbled and impressed with God's creative power and use of great natural forces, which are far beyond the ability of man to control. ATP, by a leap, turns verse 35 into a prediction that man would be able to control the flow which powers electric appliances. This is almost opposite to its plain meaning that man cannot control the violence of the lightning flash.

The idea that the earth stays in orbit because there are two balanced forces acting on it is a fallacy that persists despite the efforts of generations of Physics teachers. The plain sense of Job 26:7 stands. The earth is not supported by the four elephants of Hindu myth, or any physical substance; rather God has commanded a force, which Isaac Newton called universal gravitation, to keep the earth circling the sun, and to do much else besides. This is a scientific description of one way in which Christ upholds the universe. Colossians 1:17, Hebrews 1:3.

Knowledge of the Solar System has increased greatly in recent decades.  Voyager flew past Io, one of Jupiter's moons, in 1979 and shocked scientists by sending back photographs of continual volcanic activity, far more than was expected. This has been observed ever since, most recently by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2007. Various models for maintaining this activity for billions of years have been proposed, but none match the observations.

On the 14th July this year New Horizons achieved its designers' goal of flying past Pluto and its moon Charon. Scientists who expected to see long-inert frozen spheres were stunned. “Who would have expected to see such young surfaces?” “They have surface areas that have no craters. There must be craters unless they are very young.” Given that by “very young” geologists mean less than ten million years, these observations are no surprise to those who take the time scale of Genesis at face value.

Today, many Christians have allowed themselves to be persuaded by beliefs rooted in atheism, but disguised as science. Rather than interpreting the Bible to fit the current consensus, we must use Scripture to inform our understanding of the claims made in the name of science.