In my previous two apologetics posts, I defended the biblical accounts of creation and primeval human history found in the early chapters of Genesis from criticisms that they are unscientific. These are not the only parts of the Bible that have been criticized as unscientific. There are numerous other aspects of biblical teaching that skeptics have criticized as contrary to science. In this post, I will respond to these criticisms, arguing that biblical teaching is not contrary to reason and science.
In Genesis 6:1-4, there is an account of the “sons of God” taking the “daughters of man” as their wives. This has been criticized as superstitiously teaching that supernatural beings (angels?) and humans can get married and have children. However, this passage is notoriously difficult to interpret, and there are other possible interpretations of this passage. One interpretation is that these “sons of God” are tyrannical human rulers who forcibly take unwilling women as their wives. Another interpretation is that these “sons of God” are the godly descendants of Seth, who are starting to intermingle with the ungodly descendants of Cain. In any case, do we really know for certain that it is impossible that there could be certain supernatural beings who could take humans as their wives? For all we know, it is possible.
The Tower of Babel story (Gen 11:3-9) has been criticized as unscientific for teaching that people could build a tower that could literally climb up to heaven, where God dwells locally. However, there is a strong consensus among Old Testament scholars that in the ancient Near East, the language of “a tower that reaches to the heavens” did not refer to a really tall tower, but to a religious structure called a ziggurat. A ziggurat was a rectangular stepped tower which was believed to provide a way for the presence of a god to come from heaven and be among their worshippers. The purpose of the “Tower of Babel,” then, was not for human beings to attempt to rise up to heaven and become gods; its purpose was to try to get God’s presence to come to earth so that human beings could have access to God’s presence again. God did not frustrate humanity’s attempt to build the Tower of Babel because He thought they could use it to literally climb up to heaven, where He was. God frustrated humanity’s attempt to build the Tower of Babel because He was not pleased with humanity’s theologically erroneous belief that they could manipulate and force Him to be present among them through their own plans and efforts. There is nothing in the Tower of Babel story that teaches that God dwells locally in a heaven that is a short distance above the earth.
Similarly, skeptics have tried to argue that New Testament language about Jesus ascending to heaven and one day returning from heaven teaches that God dwells locally in a heaven that is literally up in the sky. But there is no good reason to think this is true. The New Testament authors clearly believed that God is an omnipresent Spirit who cannot be contained in any particular place. For them, “heaven” was not a location literally up in the sky, but God’s dimension of existence, which sometimes intersected with our dimension of existence in places such as the temple. The language of “ascending” to heaven or “descending” to hell is clearly figurative, just as we today often use “moving up” or “going down” figuratively to mean getting better or worse.
A number of times, the Bible refers to mythical creatures, such as Rahab (Isa 51:9; Ps 89:10), Leviathan (Ps 74:13-14, 104:26; Job 3:8; 26:12-13; 41:1-34), and Behemoth (Job 40:15-24). This has been criticized as unscientific. However, it is important to note that all of these references to mythical chaos creatures occur in poetry. The biblical authors of these poems are not teaching that these mythical chaos creatures literally exist; they are simply reworking well-known ancient Near Eastern language about such chaos creatures in order to make theological points about God and His actions in history.
The old King James version of the Bible contains references to various other mythical creatures: unicorns, dragons, cockatrices, satyrs, and flying serpents. However, this is merely a matter of poor translation into English. Virtually every other English translation translates these terms more accurately as references to wild oxen, jackals, wild goats, and poisonous snakes.
The many descriptions of Divine miracles in the Bible, especially the more dramatic ones like God causing the sun to stand still in the sky (Josh 10:12-14; 2 Kng 20:8-11), are often criticized by skeptics as unscientific. But if God is omnipotent, then there is absolutely no reason He would be unable to perform any miracle He wants, including stopping the earth from spinning while also preventing everything on earth from going flying due to inertia. Miracles do not in any way contradict the laws of nature; they are just events with a supernatural cause. Thus, there is nothing superstitious about believing in Divine miracles.
There is a story in the book of Genesis in which the patriarch Jacob attempts to make Laban’s flocks produce speckled, streaked, and spotted offspring (which Laban had agreed would belong to Jacob) by putting branches with white stripes in front of them while they mate (Gen 30:37-43). This clearly is an example of a superstitious, unscientific belief. However, the biblical text itself does not clearly state that there was in fact a causal relationship between Jacob’s superstitious actions and the offspring produced by the flocks. Later, Jacob states that God was the one who made the flocks produce more speckled, streaked, and spotted offspring, and had revealed this to him in a vision (Gen 31:6-12).
There is a story in the book of Numbers in which the prophet Balaam’s donkey talks to him (Num 21:28-30). This has often been mocked by skeptics as fanciful and unscientific. But the text is very clear that God miraculously caused the donkey to speak (“the LORD opened the donkey’s mouth”). This is not a fairy tale about a talking donkey, but a story about how God used a very unique and shocking miracle to get the prophet’s attention. If God is omnipotent, then there is no reason He would be unable to do such a miracle.
In the Bible’s description of Solomon’s construction of the temple, it states, “he made the sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it” (1 King 7:23). Since the geometric formula for calculating the circumference of a circle shows that the actual circumference of a ten cubit wide circle to be 31.4159265359 cubits, this has been criticized as mathematically inaccurate. However, the biblical author here was obviously just giving approximate figures, rather than mathematically precise figures. Thirty cubits is a perfectly reasonable approximation of the circumference of a circle that is approximately ten cubits wide.
In New Testament Greek, the “heart” (kardia) is spoken of as the seat of the mind (John 12:40; Acts 8:22; Mark 11:23; Rev 18:7; Rom 1:21). This has been criticized as unscientific by skeptics, since we now know that the brain, rather than the heart, is associated with mental activity. However, it is reading far too much into the text to think that incidental references to the heart as the seat of the mind are attempts to make scientific teaching about human biology. This was just the typical language used at the time to refer to the mind, similar to how today we often speak of a person’s family background or lineage using the word “blood,” even though we know that this actually resides in the DNA of their cells.
In one of His parables, Jesus says that the mustard seed is “the smallest of all seeds” (Matt 13:32). Since there are actually seeds that are smaller than the mustard seed, skeptics have pointed to this as an example of a scientific error in the Bible. However, Jesus was probably just saying that the mustard seed was the smallest seed used in agriculture in Palestine at that time. There is absolutely no reason to think that Jesus’s incidental remark about the mustard seed during a parable was intended to be a botany lesson about what the smallest seed in the world is.