Pages 2-5: autumn 1990 WHAT ABOUT SCIENTIFIC FOREKNOWLEDGE IN THE BIBLE? Farrell Till Any

Pages 2-5: autumn 1990


WHAT ABOUT SCIENTIFIC FOREKNOWLEDGE IN THE BIBLE?

                           Farrell Till
   
   Any challenge to the Bible inerrancy doctrine will sooner or later encoun-
ter the scientific-foreknowledge argument.  "If the Bible is not the inspired 
word of God," the inerrancy spokesmen ask, "then how do you explain the 
many examples of scientific foreknowledge in it?"  The claim implied in this 
question is that men writing in an age of relative ignorance indicated in 
various passages of the Bible that they understood scientific truths that were 
completely unknown at the time.  The response the question seeks is that 
these scientific facts could not have been known to Bible writers without 
God's having revealed them during the verbal inspiration process.  They see 
this as a compelling argument for the inerrancy doctrine.

   A basic problem with this argument is the same as the one found in the 
familiar harmonious-content, unity-of-theme, and fulfillment-of-prophecy 
arguments so often presented in the Bible's defense.  It is based more on 
speculation, imaginative interpretations, and wishful thinking than on verifia-
ble facts.  As I write this, I am engaged in a written debate with a Church-
of-Christ preacher who, in trying to use this argument, threw a volley of 
speculatively conceived questions at me in his second affirmative manuscript. 
How did Moses know of woman's seed being involved in the conception of 
children, (Gen. 3:15)?  How did Isaiah know in his day that the earth is 
round, (Isa. 40:22)?  How did Job know that the earth rests on no material 
foundation, (Job 26:7)?  How did Moses know that life is in the blood (Gen. 
9:4), when medical science didn't know it until a late date?  How did David 
know of the moon's bearing witness (Ps. 89:37) to the sunlight on the other 
side of  the earth?  How did David know that there  are paths in the seas 
(Ps. 8:8) long before oceanography and Matthew Maury's work found it so?

   These are the questions exactly as he fired them at me.  Not once did he 
take the time to explicate  scripture references to show reasonable proof that 
the writers meant what he was interpreting them to mean.  He just tacked the 
references onto his questions as if this alone were enough to establish that 
the writers had intended the meanings he was attributing to them.  

   Any verbal communication, however, whether oral or written, must be 
interpreted before it can be understood, and this is doubly true of written 
statements.  Participants in oral communication enjoy the advantage of voice 
inflections and body gestures to help them establish or determine meaning, 
but this advantage is lost in written communication.  Written statements, 
then, often require careful explication to determine meaning.  Without it, the 
risk of misinterpretation increases.

   But in the volley of questions listed above, not even a hint of explication 
was in evidence. What explication, for example, is involved in asking, "How 
did Moses know of woman's seed being involved in the conception of children, 
(Gen. 3:15)"?  There is none.  The intended impact of the question depends 
on two assumptions (aside from the assumption that Moses wrote the book of 
Genesis): (1) the word seed in this passage  refers to the ovum that the 
female contributes to procreation and (2) the existence of the ovum was 
unknown when Genesis 3:15 was written.

   To assess the plausibility of the first of these assumptions, we must 
examine the passage that the question alludes to. After their disobedience to 

Yahweh's command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, 
Yahweh pronounced  curses upon all parties involved in the act.  To the 


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serpent, he said, "Because you have done this, cursed are you above all 
cattle and above all wild animals; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you 
shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the 
woman and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and 
you shall bruise his heel," (Gen. 3:14-15, RSV).

   To assert that the word seed in this passage refers to the ova of the 
woman is almost too ridiculous to warrant serious comment.  For one thing, an 
ovum is only a female germ cell that cannot develop into a person unless it is 
first fertilized by the male counterpart, so if ova were the intended meaning 
of the word, how could the "seed" of the woman ever bruise the head of the 
serpent?  

   The Hebrew word translated "seed" in this passage is zera, which could 
mean both seed, in the sense of  plant ovules, or posterity (offspring or 
descendants).  It is the same word that was used several times in Genesis 
1:11-12 in reference to the creation of vegetation that yielded seed after "its 
kind."  The meaning of the word here seems rather obvious; it was a refer-
ence to the seed produced by plants like corn, alfalfa, and turnips. The seed 
of a plant, however, is something radically different from the ovum of a 
woman. A plant seed is actually an embryo (formed from the union of the male 
and female germ cells) encased in a shell with an endosperm that will provide 
the germinating embryo with food until it is mature enough to survive on its 
own.  A seed, in other words, is the offspring of a plant.  It is to the plant 
what an embryo in the womb is to a woman, so certainly a woman's ovum 
alone cannot be considered biologically parallel to  a plant seed, because it is 
only half of what a seed is. The one is just a female germ cell; the other an 
embryo formed from the union of both the female and male germ cells.  

   If we are to understand Genesis 3:15, then, we must think of zera as a 
Hebrew word that most often meant offspring.  In many places in the book of 
Genesis alone, it was clearly used in this sense.  Yahweh  
said to  Abram in Genesis 12:7, "Unto thy seed [zera] will I give this land." 
In Genesis  13:16, Yahweh promised Abram, "I will make thy seed [zera] as 
the dust of the earth." After showing a willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac 
at Jehovah-jireh, an angel of Yahweh told Abraham, "I will multiply thy seed 
[zera] as the stars of the heavens and as the sand which is upon the sea-
shore; and thy seed [zera] shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy 
seed [zera] shall all the nations of the earth be blessed," (Gen. 22:17-18). 

   In these and other passages too numerous to cite, the Hebrew word zera 
was obviously used to indicate offspring or descendants.  Since this meaning 
also fits appropriately into the context of Genesis 3:15, only someone desper-
ate to find support for an indefensible position would ever feel a need to 
interpret it as a lesson in modern biology by a primitive writer.  Most English 
translations, in fact, use offspring or descendants in all of these passages as 
well as many others in which the King James and American Standard Versions 
translated zera as seed.

   If these facts leave any doubt about what the Genesis writer meant in 
referring to Eve's "seed," Genesis 16:10 should remove it.  In her flight from 
the wrath of Sarah, Hagar, Abraham's concubine, was visited by an angel of 
Yahweh, who promised her, "I will greatly multiply thy seed [zera], that it 
shall not be numbered for multitude."  In the translations referred to above, 
the word descendants is used where seed appears in the KJV and ASV.  Yet 

if zera meant ova in reference to Eve's "seed" in Genesis 3:15, consistency 
would require the proponents of this argument to believe that it also meant 
ova when referring to Hagar's seed.  Hence, we would have an angel of 
Yahweh promising Hagar that she would produce so many ova that she would-
n't be able to count them.  Such is the predicament that inerrancy propo-
nents get themselves into when they try to manufacture evidence out of 


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nothing.

   Isaiah 40:22 speaks of God who "sitteth above the circle of the earth," 
but there are many explicative problems that must be resolved before one can 
present this as proof that Isaiah knew the shape of the earth in a time  when 
no one else did. For one thing,  how can we be sure that Isaiah was speak-
ing literally  in the passage?  He also spoke of "the four corners of the 
earth" (11:12), but if I should cite this verse as an example of scientific 
inaccuracy on the part of a Bible writer who thought the earth was square, 
inerrancy advocates would demand proof that Isaiah had intended literal 
meaning.  By the same token, then, they should be prepared to prove that 
Isaiah's reference to the "circle of the earth" was meant literally. 

   Even if they could successfully do this, they would then have to prove 
that Isaiah meant circle in the sense of sphere.  Plates and disks are circular 
in shape as well as spheres, and, as practically any general encyclopedia will 
confirm, some ancient cultures before and during Isaiah's time thought that 
the earth was a flat disk.  To find evidence of scientific foreknowledge in 
Isaiah 40:22, then, the inerrancy advocates would have to prove that the 
passage referred to a spherical rather than a discoid circle.  I seriously 
doubt that they can ever do that, but until they do, they have no argument.

   The main weakness of this argument, however, is the fact that the shape 
of the earth was known in Isaiah's time.  In discussing the spherical era of 
Earth's history, the Encyclopedia Britannica (Vol. 6, 1978, pp. 1-3) explains 
that ancient astronomers determined that the earth was round by observing 
its circular shadow move across the moon during lunar eclipses.  The Egyp-
tians and Greeks as far back as 2550 B.C. (more than a thousand years 
before Moses) knew not only the earth's spherical shape but also its approxi-
mate size.  The Grecian philosopher Pythagoras, who was born in 532 B.C., 
defended the spherical theory on the basis of observations he had made of 
the shape of the sun and moon.  If this information was generally known by 
educated Greeks and Egyptians before and during biblical times, how can 
anyone say with certitude that Isaiah couldn't have known about it?

   If space allowed, I would explicate the other scriptures mentioned earlier 
that are often cited as evidence of scientific foreknowledge in the Bible, but 
these are enough to demonstrate the  problems that the inerrancy proponents 
must solve before rational-thinking  people can take their argument seriously. 
If Pythagoras could observe the sun and the moon and thereby reason that 
the earth was also spherical in shape, why couldn't Job have looked at the 
moon or the sun and concluded that the earth, like them, was suspended in 
space on nothing?  Why couldn't Moses, if he was indeed the author of Gene-
sis, have observed that when blood is drained from the body, life flowed out 
with it so that in some sense life was "in the blood"?  Just why does this 
have to mean that Moses knew that blood carries oxygen to cells throughout 
the body and thereby sustains life?  Why does "paths of the seas" in Psalm 
8:8 have to be a reference to ocean currents like the Gulf Stream and the 
North Atlantic Current?  Why couldn't it just as easily have been a reference 
to ocean trade routes that the ships of that time traveled?  The Hebrew word 
orach translated paths in this passage in fact meant "customary road."  And 

even if it was a reference to currents in the oceans, how can anyone deter-
mine today that knowledge of those currents was completely unknown at that 
time? Simply because it isn't now known that it was known doesn't prove that 
it wasn't known. So inerrancy proponents aren't the only ones who can ask 
questions.  Those of us who reject the inerrancy doctrine have a lot of ques-
tions to ask too, especially on this matter of alleged scientific foreknowledge 
in the Bible.

   Like so much of the other "evidence" that Bible fundamentalists offer as 
proof of the inerrancy doctrine, they see scientific foreknowledge in the Bible 


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only because they so desperately want to see something that can form a ra-
tional basis for their faith.  In the same way, they see prophecies and their 
fulfillments in passages so obscurely written that no one can really determine 
what the writers originally intended in the statements.  In the face of une-
quivocal inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible text, they see unity 
of theme because they so desperately want to see unity of theme.  

   This approach to Bible interpretation has at times caused them major 
embarrassment. In 1939, for example, George DeHoff wrote a biblical apology 
entitled Why We Believe the Bible.   An entire chapter was devoted to the 
scientific-foreknowledge argument in which he cited Job 26:7 as supporting 
evidence, (p. 50):

     Astronomers have discovered that there is a great empty space in 
   the North.  It contains no moving planets and shining stars. By 
   turning their telescopes to the South, the East and the West, men 
   may behold countless millions of stars invisible to the naked eye but 
   when the telescope is set exactly to the North there is a great 
   empty space.  For this, astronomers have been unable to account. 
   They did not know until recently that there was such an empty 
   space, yet Job declared, "He stretcheth out the North over the 
   empty places [sic] and hangeth the earth upon nothing," (Job 
   26:7).

DeHoff's conclusion was that "Job could not have written by guess.  It must 
be that he wrote by inspiration of God." 

   For years, this scripture was cited from Church-of-Christ pulpits as 
compelling evidence that the Bible was divinely inspired, but there was just 
one thing wrong with it.  The premise on which it was based wasn't true. 
There is no "empty place" in our northern space. Everywhere astronomers 
look, they find space filled with galaxies and stars.  That includes our 
northern space too.  So wherever DeHoff got this argument, he didn't get it 
from science, and he will find no support for it in scientific circles.  

   Inerrancy advocates in the Churches of Christ are now admitting that 
they erred in using Job 26:7 as an example of scientific foreknowledge in the 
Bible.  In the September 1989 issue of Reason & Revelation, Dr. Bert Thomp-
son summarized the traditional DeHoffian interpretation of Job 26:7 and then 
said this, (p. 35):

     This writer has so used the verse himself in the past, but does 
   so no longer, because of problems associated with such interpreta-
   tions.  For example, if we attempt to convince people that this 
   verse is to be taken literally, how do we then consistently  deal 
   with  statements in the chapter which are obviously figurative 



   (such as verse  11: "The pillars of heaven tremble, and are aston-
   ished at his reproof")?  Further, there seems to be no empty space 
   in the north.  Instead, "billions of stars and galaxies extend out-
   ward in all directions," (Donald B. DeYoung, Astronomy and the 
   Bible). 

We congratulate Dr. Thompson for finally recognizing an obvious flaw in 
a popular inerrancy argument. It gives us hope that he might someday 
see the flaws in other inerrancy arguments too.

   Something that has long perplexed me is the way that inerrancy 
proponents can so easily find "scientific foreknowledge" in obscurely 
worded Bible passages but seem completely unable to see scientific error 


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in statements that were rather plainly written.  There are too many to 
discuss, but Leviticus 11:5-6 can serve as an example.  Here "Moses," 
after having identified clean animals as those that "chew the cud and 
part the hoof," said, "And the coney, because he cheweth the cud but 
parteth not the hoof, he is unclean unto you. And the hare, because 
she cheweth the cud but parteth not the hoof, she is unclean unto 
you."  Deuteronomy 14:7 also described the hare and the cony as cud-
chewers, but in reality they are not. They  do not have compartmental-
ized stomachs that ruminants must have in order to be cud-chewers. 
Inerrancy champions have stumbled over these passages with various 
attempts to explain them.  Gleason Archer justifies the classification of 
hares and conies as cud-chewers on the grounds that they "give the 
appearance of chewing their cud in the same way ruminants do," 
(Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, p. 126).  Yet after all has been said 
on the matter, the fact remains that hares and conies are not cud-
chewers.  But "Moses" said that they were. 

   One would think that if God were going to arm his inspired writers 
with scientific foreknowledge about complex matters like the "seed of 
woman" and the shape of the earth, he could have easily programmed 
them to know the simple fact that hares and conies aren't cud-chewers. 
That he didn't reveal this to them, as well as other things, certainly 
doesn't help the scientific-foreknowledge argument.

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