Sunday, July 22, 2018

Scientific Predictions and the Bible: Unknown Facts Revealed by God

If the Bible is inspired from the one true God then we would expect its statements about science to be compatible with the characteristics of that God as revealed in the Bible as discussed in the first part of this four part series on Scientific Predictions and the Bible. The scientific statements in the Bible should be accurate, culturally relevant, and instrumental in God's primary goal of redeeming individual people so that they can have a relationship with him. It is also reasonable to propose that scientific statements in the Bible may have a kind of dual understanding just as certain Messianic prophecies have a dual fulfillment as discussed in the second part of this four part series. In this third blog entry on the subject let's look at some cases in the Bible where there is an accurate scientific statement that was not known when the Bible was written but has since been verified.

The most obvious scientific prediction now verified, which has been a major focus of many of the entries on this blog, is that everything in this universe had a beginning in which the space, time, matter, and energy of our universe came into existence. The first verse in the Bible clearly states that the universe had a beginning. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). For at least 3200 years after that statement was written there was no scientific observations or theoretical evidence about the origin of the universe. But for the last 90 years all of the cosmic observations and theoretical developments give a consistent conclusion that this universe had an actual beginning about 13.8 billion years ago.

This discovery is so remarkable and agrees with the biblical prediction so well, that scientists have made amazing comments that indicate the scientific discovery was really first proposed in the biblical writings. The astronomer Robert Jastrow wrote, "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”The physicist Arno Penzias wrote, "The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole."The method God used to bring the universe into existence is not revealed in the Bible, but the fact that the universe had a beginning is clearly stated.

The scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning is overwhelming. I have discussed the observational evidence in an earlier blog entry and some of the theoretical calculations in other blog entries. I don't know if we will ever discover whether God used some kind of physical mechanism to bring this universe into existence or whether it was through a supernatural occurrence, but we do know that the cause must be transcendent, not a part of this universe. Thus, science has affirmed that the universe had a beginning and, by logical implication, that the cause of the universe must be transcendent.

In my opinion there are not too many other scientific statements in the Bible that I can absolutely guarantee were not known by the contemporary writers, but have since been discovered by science. I believe one candidate would be found in Jeremiah 33:22 where God says to the prophet, "I will make the descendants of David my servant and the Levites who minister before me as countless as the stars in the sky and as measureless as the sand on the seashore." There are only a few thousand visible stars and most ancient civilizations would have considered their number as being able to be counted, at least in theory. But the number of grains of sand on the seashore, though finite, is certainly far greater than a few thousand and not able to be counted in any practical sense. I believe that God is making the analogy between the stars in these sky and the sand on the seashore to reveal  that there is an uncountable number of stars, just as there is an uncountable number of grains of sand. Humans did not begin to understand that the number of stars was practically uncountable until the invention of the telescope in the 17th century.

Although I cannot say with certainty that there are a lot of scientific predictions in the Bible that were definitely unknown by the biblical writers, I can say with certainty that there are scientific statements that are extremely accurate that may have been held by at least some people at the time of the biblical writing. Some of those statements are at times misunderstood by Christians to be scientific predictions that no one knew about in ancient times.  However, I do believe that even those accurate scientific statements that are written in the Bible that may have been held by some people give evidence for the divine inspiration of the Bible, for the biblical writers were able to discern truth from error among the many competing ideas about how nature worked in their time. I will discuss many examples of those types of scientific statements in the next, and final, entry on Scientific Predictions in the Bible.

1 Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1978)
2 Malcolm Browne, New York Times, (March 12, 1978)


  1. Not sure how long the water evaporation cycle has been known scientificallywith certainty, but God likens the water evaporation cycle with his Word in Isa 55:10,11 "As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it."

    1. I don't have any definitive answers, but my guess is humans probably understood something about evaporation and the water cycle for a long time given that water vapor is easily observable from a boiling vessel or off a lake with the proper conditions.

  2. Dr. Strauss,

    Often, when witnessing to the evidence that the universe had a beginning, I get an eye-roll and am told something along the lines of "You know there are other theories that accommodate the universe being eternal, right?" Is the big-bang still in as much vogue as it used to be? I see a lot of cosmologists still thinking it might be eternal (Sean Carrol, Alan Guth), and that often comes up in my apologetic discussions.

    1. I don't know of any viable theories that say this universe is eternal and resolve the issues like the low entropy, etc. Alan Guth proposes eternal inflation which still requires this universe to have had a beginning and Sean Carrol's model, which he claims solves the entropy problem still includes a beginning to this universe.