In a scientific age, it is often questioned how an ancient collection of writings can be considered authoritative. When the Bible discusses the natural world, its statements reflect discoveries that humanity has made thousands of years ago and simultaneously contradict the accepted knowledge of every surrounding culture at the same time. Clearly, the answer stands out.
There are several examples that have been described as startling, even by non-religious historians of science.
There was an overwhelming consensus among philosophers and scientists from the time of Aristotle until the early twentieth century that the universe existed forever. Genesis begins with a simple statement that the heavens and the earth had a beginning. Only after Hubble’s observations and the work of Lemaître did the concept of a cosmic beginning become mainstream. When virtually no one else expressed it, the Bible did.
Job, most commonly dated to the second millennium BC, states that God “hangs the earth upon nothing.” Isaiah describes Him as dwelling above “the circle of the earth.” In every major civilization of the period, the world was portrayed as resting on pillars, giant turtles, or oceans. Despite the fact that the human eye could not have seen Earth from orbit centuries ago, the text asserts that planet suspended in empty space exists today.
A thousand visible stars were counted by Greek and Babylonian astronomers as the total number of stars in heaven. His view is that the stars of heaven cannot be counted. Through telescopes, hundreds of billions of stars were discovered within our galaxy and trillions more beyond. The biblical claim was absurd in 600 BC; it has become textbook astronomy today.
According to Psalm 8, creatures pass through “paths of the seas.” Matthew Maury, inspired by that verse, mapped the currents of the ocean and developed modern oceanography. The ancient Near East was unaware of the existence of such highways.
Several books provide detailed descriptions of the hydrologic cycle: rivers flow into the sea, but the sea never fills up, water is drawn up into clouds, and rain falls back on the earth. A complete description of the cycle was not published in scientific literature until the late Renaissance.
Written around 1400 BC, the Mosaic health code resembles a public health manual from a much later era.
According to medical historians, Jewish communities following these regulations experienced significantly lower mortality rates during plagues than their neighbors. During the fourteenth century, when the Black Death killed up to half of Europe, Jewish mortality often hovered around five percent. This result sparked murderous conspiracy theories.
The passages do not seek to teach scientific principles; they simply describe reality as it is. However, every time the Bible asserts something about the physical world, subsequent investigations confirm that assertion, often after centuries of contradictory statements.
During the nineteenth century, many skeptics mocked Scripture as primitive mythology, but microscopes, telescopes, and laboratories repeatedly proved that the biblical writers were correct in every regard.
Our hope rests on Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. However, the Bible’s casual accuracy about the created order on a macro level serves as powerful corroborating evidence for the Christian faith. When a book accurately describes the observable universe this reliably, it deserves serious attention when discussing the unseen God who created it.
An honest response to the discovery that an ancient text written by shepherds, fishermen, and exiles is centuries ahead of great minds such as those of Greece, Egypt, and Babylon is to ask: what else might the Bible be right about?
