The Bible, Science, and Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience has an iron grip on large parts of the Christian community. The people in these various camps will find it next to impossible to engage with intelligent, educated people to any real degree. They'll be laughed off, and they're deluded enough to think they're being persecuted for the Lord's sake. Meanwhile, they accuse Christians who reject their interpretations of being "compromisers" and agents of deception.

I well remember the time when a lady tried telling me that dinosaur bones were a satanic deception. She was completely serious and was actually angry that I believed otherwise. I was a small child at the time, and remember that I just nodded compliantly in response, hoping to put some much-needed space between me and the big, angry lady as quickly as possible.

The Bible is not a science book. It was written to, and by, ancient peoples who didn't know even a fraction of what we know today, and it often employs poetic language that should not be interpreted literally or as some kind of scientific commentary.

For instance, Psalm 104:5 says that God "set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved." Some have taken this to mean that the modern understanding that the Earth rotates on its axis and orbits the Sun must be false (another alleged NASA hoax). It must be remembered, however, that the psalmist did not understand the "earth" in the sense that we do, that is, of its being a planet. The term is probably better translated "land," as this is what the ancients knew (and, often in scripture, "the land" refers to the limited area in which particular events are taking place, rather than all land everywhere). To the ancients' way of thinking, the land, the sky, and the sea all had their designated "places" in the scope of creation. That's what the psalmist is talking about here: how all things are subject to the order God has established in creation rather than being in some kind of chaotic flux. This certainly conforms to what we have learned by the scientific method (and particularly so within the lifetime of human beings), but it should not be taken as an exhaustive commentary on the composition of our planet.

Even those passages where God himself speaks of what he has made should not be taken as necessarily literal or precise. God used simple terms to communicate with people of simple understanding, and he often used poetic comparisons, just as we do today when explaining things to children. When my six-year-old son tells me, "Look, Daddy! The sun's going down!", I don't subject him to a lesson in cosmology. He has some growing up to do before we get into all of that, just as the human race has had some growing up to do in terms of its understanding of the universe.


* Image courtesy of NASA.

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