Creationists spend a lot of time arguing that the statements Scripture makes that relate to science (concerning the physical cosmos) and to history (e.g. concerning events like Noah’s Flood) have much evidence to back them up. But is this to say that we should view Scripture like it’s a scientific textbook? I believe the answer to that question is clearly no. Scripture was not given to uncover all the mysteries of creation. That may not seem like a greatly important point, but I’m convinced that we need to understand this so as to rightly divide some issues.
Scripture itself explicitly states this point. Many times in the book of Job, for instance, the point is made that while God controls all aspects of the cosmos, that man only faintly knows about any of this. “Where were you when I founded the earth?! Tell me, if you know? … Surely you know, for weren’t you born then? and the number of your days is so great!” (Job 38:4, 21) Or as ‘the teacher’ put it: “Everything has (God) made beautiful in its time, … yet man cannot find out the work which God has done from its beginning to its end.” (Eccl 3:11)
A consequence of all this is that Scripture should not be seen as attempting to answer all kinds of scientific and cosmological questions, some of which we moderns now have answers to, such as ‘How does the sun circle through the sky once per day?’ ‘How did God found the earth?’ (i.e. What makes for the stable situation we experience?) These and many other questions were understood to be great mysteries. (Modern pride check: for every such answer we moderns have found, we’ve gotten 15 questions in its place that are even more profound.) The Genesis creation account, for example, clearly intended only to give a limited insight into that original creation, for how much information could be packed into 30 to 40 sentences? Certainly not a physics or biology textbook’s worth! And yet, when it says that all things came into being within six evening-morning periods (i.e. ‘days’), this account clearly gives a radically different age to the cosmos from a supposed 13+ billion year age.
There is no problem as such if the Hebrews did not know that the earth revolves around the sun, as Nicholas Copernicus discovered, any more than they needed to understand that all matter in the cosmos has a very small amount of attraction to all other matter, and that the strength of that attraction is described by an inverse square law (i.e. gravity). What is important is that Scripture does not give an erroneous reason for such things.
Another critical point to understand is that scripture usually describes things from an earthly perspective. Thus “up” and “down” are terms relative to one standing on the earth. It is natural that this was so, for Scripture was given to the sons of men, for whom the earth alone was designed as a habitable home. As such, it is not a problem that a ‘sunrise’ is described as the rising of the sun, when we in fact know today that it is actually the earth rotating on its axis once per day that produces the sun’s apparent ‘rising.’ From earth’s perspective though, the sun does rise. It’s a relative question.
“These are but the outer fringes of his ways, how faint the whisper we hear of Him! And who can understand the thunder of his power?” Job 26:14
- Nicholas Petersen
- By: firstchurch
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One Response to Quantum Physics & Scripture
Great article brother!