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The Bible & Science
The Bible is not a book of science, though the first Chapter of Genesis, as the nineteenth-century sociologist Max Weber points out, is the necessary prelude to science. It represents the first time people saw the universe as the product of a single creative will, and therefore as intelligible rather than capricious and mysterious.
Nature has no divinity. Indeed, in the Hebrew Bible, it became “undeified” as G. W. F. Hegel put it. Hegel observed (in lectures notes his students published after his death) that it was the Israelite religion described in the Bible that altered the very nature of nature itself. This is an interesting point, which would explain the first verse neatly:
“In the Beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
It means that the heaven was created first. That is: earth is not the center of the universe. In the scientific view (the Big Bang) there is also considered to be a beginning, not only for Earth, but for the entire Universe. This does represent a point of agreement between them.
Not only is the Old Testament Israelite religion viewed as historical, in contrast to the nature religions of the pagans, but the nature of the Old Testament is also seen as unimportant and inert, in contrast with the sacred nature of the pagans. In his 1965 classic, The Secular City, theologian Harvey Cox wrote that the Bible “opened nature for science” by beginning a “disenchantment process” that wrested nature free from Gods and God. “This disenchantment of the natural world,” Cox wrote, “provides an absolute precondition for the development of modern science.”
In itself nature is not dramatic, it is not wonderful, it is not miraculous; it is a mean. The great Italian Israeli Bible scholar Umberto Cassuto described this Israelite rejection of nature poetically in his commentary on the creation story in the Book of Genesis:
“Then came the Torah and soared aloft, as on eagle’s wings, above all these nations. Not many gods but One God … not a deity associated with nature and identified with it wholly or in part, but a God who stands absolutely above nature, and outside of it.” (Cassutto 1961, 8)
Bearing in mind that autistic people are deprived of theory of mind, they cannot therefore do religion. “God wants you to do …” is a meaningless statement. What you don't know is that neither can we be brainwashed by voices of disbelief – secular atheism. Where Christians believe that Yahweh is the all-powerful and all-knowing creator of the universe, Skeptical atheists believe that nature is all there is. As Gunter Grass wrote, “The only time I’m religious is when I’m sitting in the woods with paper and pencil, admiring what nature has come up with.” I’ve never been awestruck by nature. And I am not curious or fascinated to explain away the magic of reality. There is no magic to explain away.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Neal on -
Interesting twist, but some areas seem to contradict.
"It represents the first time people saw the universe as the product of a single creative will, and therefore as intelligible rather than capricious and mysterious."
Am I to assume that god isn't mysterious? Doesn't that contradict the thought that "god works in mysterious ways?" I don't find this any more real than a pagan's reverence for nature. In fact, nature should be revered and cared for, not made into a garbage dump because god will remake what we destroy.
“In the Beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
This statement does not agree with scientific thoughts concerning the universe in any manner.
What you don't know is that neither can we be brainwashed by voices of disbelief – secular atheism. Where Christians believe that Yahweh is the all-powerful and all-knowing creator of the universe, Skeptical atheists believe that nature is all there is.
What a twist of thought. We are aware that theists will brainwash the unwary by trying to include magic and miracles into a world that contains neither. God in no way resembles science. God waves a mystical hand and things appear, while science is hard work.
God is for the lazy.
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Permalink Reply by Adriana on -
I don't find this any more real than a pagan's reverence for nature. In fact, nature should be revered and cared for, not made into a garbage dump because god will remake what we destroy.
Ha! Neal, you and are like joined at the hip. I just posted the same thought below.
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Permalink Reply by Neal on
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You have no idea how fast I was trying to reply. I knew the race was on. =)
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Permalink Reply by Neal on
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Besides the humor, I think it might be a bad road to follow that nature is not in any way more important than something that doesn't exist. Is nature more important than ghosts, gods, demons, angels or any other mythical creature?
Why yes, it is so much more important. It supports life, it gives us a clue to how things work, it explains life. The bible explains absolutely nothing.
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Permalink Reply by Michel on -
“In the Beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
This statement does not agree with scientific thoughts concerning the universe in any manner.
Certainly does NOT make it more intelligible.
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Permalink Reply by Claudia Mercedes Mazzucco on -
Genesis is poetry, Michael. It was not written to make the universe intelligible.
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Permalink Reply by Adriana on
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But you just said that the Bible is what made humans realize for the first time that the world, nature, was intelligible. Isn't this contradictory to what you are now saying? Or are you saying that Genesis was written as poetry, but as a side effect it made people realize that the universe was intelligible?
If we are misinterpreting you, can you clarify what exactly you meant by the opening paragraph of your discussion?
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Permalink Reply by Claudia Mercedes Mazzucco on
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No. It is not contradictory. For instance, El Quixote de la Mancha is also poetry. And, at the same time, Don Miguel de Cervantes made people realized that chivalry was a dream, and that many knights were just plain crazy.
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Permalink Reply by Claudia Mercedes Mazzucco on
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Neal,
In recent years, scientists have proposed the first exciting interpretation of the flood in over 150 years of study and speculation. Combining modern geophysics and archeology with Biblical texts and ancient traditions, these scientists have presented astonishing evidence relating to the reality of the Biblical Flood.
About 12.000 years ago, toward the end of the Ice Age, the earth began growing warmer. Vast sheets of ice that sprawled over the Northern Hemisphere began to melt. Oceans and seas grew deeper as a result. Over the next seven thousand years, to about 5600 B.C., the area of the Black Sea was isolated from the Mediterranean. In the meantime, the global sea levels were rising. Around 5.600 B.C., the mounting seas burst through. The salt water of the Mediterranean rose in Marmara, crashed through the natural dam of the Bosporus, poured into the lake with great force, and raised the level of the body of water 280 feet in twelve months.
William B. F. Bryan, who was a student of an expedition from Woods Hole Institution which, in 1961, had discovered that the northern mouth of the Bosporus had slashed a deep undersea gorge through the bedrock and sediment, observed that the gorge was first a tiny channel running down a grassy slope. Within 60 days, “the trickle had become a torrent, then an unimaginable cascade.”
The water cascaded over beaches and up rivers, destroying everything in its path. When the rising waters of the Mediterranean broke through the Bosporus, “ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls … The Bosporus roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days.”
The conclusion was that the Flood might have been a prolonged, huge flume of water from the Mediterranean that broke through a natural dam in the Bosporus Strait and plunged into the freshwater lake that then became the Black Sea. In 1993, a Bulgarian oceanographer, Petko Dimitrov tested the theory by diving off the Danube Delta, in a manned submersible. 404 feet down, he found signs of an ancient beach. The shells from this beach were dated by radiocarbon tests to 7,000 B. C.
Russian scientists found submerged outlet channels of the old Don River, which flows from the north into the sea, as well as other streams and waterways that had once flowed out of the northern steppes across the grasslands of the shore into the freshwater lake. They found new evidence of a marine environment that had quickly destroyed a long established freshwater system.
In 1994, samples of Ryan and Pitman’s shells from widely dispersed sites from the Black Sea were subjected to radiocarbon dating using a highly advanced accelerator mass spectrometry technique; all of them were date 5,580 – 5,470 B. C.
There was not some gradual influx but one great wave. These dates place the Flood within human memory.
The famous oceanographer Bob Ballard was compelled by all of these discoveries. He did find the distinct features of an ancient freshwater lake, 550 feet below present level of the Black Sea. He also found the shells of two extinct freshwater species of saltwater shellfish; they became extinct c. 5,400 B.C. Ballard’s conclusion: “We had closed the circle. No one could dispute that a Great Flood had occurred approximately 7,500 years ago.”
It is thus more than plausible that the Flood story of the Bible records a real and historic event. People lived around a freshwater lake. There was a Flood. They fled and many wound up in the mountainous area later called Urartu. Many of them might have fled by boat. Eventually, people moved south, maybe along the rivers. They dispersed; they spread their language(s), their genes and their historical memories.
The story of the Flood was passed down orally from generation to generation. This would explain why the flood stories of various cultures, from Sumer to India, are remarkably similar. These tales not only tell of the destruction of the world, as it was then known, but also offer hope. Subsets of these people became, among others, proto-Indo-Europeans and Sumerians – the founders of two prominent early cultures of Europe and Western Asia, respectively.
People running for mountains may be the historical truth. It would make perfect sense: in a time of a flood, run for the high ground. Whether or not anyone built a big boat and put animals on it is of less importance to me (then again, if they could, they would have put animals on board so that they could start again). In this sense, the Flood story may be better history than a lot of us would have thought.
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Permalink Reply by Claudia Mercedes Mazzucco on
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Recommended readings: William Tyan and Walter Pitman Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about The Event that Changed History, New York, 1998.
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Permalink Reply by Neal on
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Um, no.
Countering the hypothesis of Ryan and Pitman are data collected prior to its publication by Ukrainian and Russian scientists including Valentina Yanko-Hombach, who claims that the water flow through the Bosporus repeatedly reversed direction over geological time depending on fluctuation in the levels of the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea. This contradicts the hypothesized catastrophic breakage of a Bosporus sill. Likewise, the water levels calculated by Yanko-Hombach differed widely from those hypothesized by Ryan and Pitman.
In 2007, a research anthology on the topic was published which makes available much of the earlier Russian research in English for the first time, and combines it with more recent scientific findings.
A five-year cross-disciplinary research project under the sponsorship of UNESCO and the International Union of Geological Sciences was conducted 2005–9.A February 2009 article reported that the flooding might have been "quite mild".
According to a study by Giosan et al., the level in the Black Sea before the marine reconnection was 30 m below present sea level, rather than the 80 m, or lower, of the catastrophe theories. If the flood occurred at all, the sea level increase and the flooded area during the reconnection were significantly smaller than previously proposed. It also occurred earlier than initially surmised, ca. 7400 BC, rather than the originally proposed 5600 BC. Since the depth of the Bosporus, in its middle furrow, at present varies from 36 to 124 m, with an average depth of 65 m, a calculated stone age shoreline in the Black Sea lying 30 m lower than in the present day would imply that the contact with the Mediterranean may never have been broken during the Holocene, and hence that there could have been no sudden waterfall-style transgression.
Recommended reading: Everything, instead of picking and choosing what seemingly validates crazy.
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