revelation from scientific or historical evidence. If there is
anything unshakeable in our faith, it will remain when our
false interpretations are stripped away.
At the heart of the perceived deep rift between modern science
and ancient religion is the doctrine of biblical inerrancy—the
idea that the Bible is without fault or error in all it teaches.
Some in fundamentalist communities today understand the
doctrine in terms of an arbitrary inerrancy, especially when it
comes to the topic of human origins—that the biblical texts
are authoritative not just in matters of faith, but in matters
of science and history as well. 5 But biblical inerrancy should
not be taken a statement about science or history. Rather, it
means that we can know with certainty that God is as He
has revealed Himself to humanity in Scripture and that
He is faithful to fulfill the promises He makes therein. This
is not a modern opinion, but an old one: St. Augustine of
Hippo, who lived nearly 1600 years ago, cautioned the early
church against “throwing [themselves] head over heels into
the headstrong assertion” of a literalistic interpretation of
the story of Genesis, lest they be proven wrong by modern
astronomy and geology and, in their foolhardy fixation on
proving their own interpretations correct, would turn others
away from the hope of resurrection promised in the Gospel
story. 6 In 1963, Dr. Richard H. Bube, a Providence native and
Brown-educated scientist, wrote an essay very reminiscent
of Augustine’s argument for an association of evangelical
Christian scientists in response to claims that its members
were rejecting biblical authority by accepting modern science:
“If it is assumed, without due Scriptural support, that the
purpose of revelation is to give mankind a source-book of
information on all phases of physical, mental, spiritual,
sociological, artistic, and scientific life [...] then we have
the greatest difficulty in maintaining the doctrine of an
inerrant Scripture. If, on this stand, we adopt the position
of ‘arbitrary inerrancy,’ we essentially jeopardize the whole
5
“The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.” Alliance
of Confessing Evangelicals
6
Mark, Joshua J. “St. Augustine: from The Literal
Meaning of Genesis.” Ancient History Encyclopedia, Ancient History
Encyclopedia, 28 April 2019
truth of Christianity by attempting to balance the great
wealth and weight of God’s revelation in Christ upon our
ability to show that the words of Scripture can be judged
inerrant even when we examine them on the basis of
criteria they were not written to satisfy.” 7
Throughout the Bible, we find language appealing to dated
ideas of anatomy, cosmology, and biology. Verses about the
“pillars of the earth” (1 Sam 2:8, Job 6:9, ESV), “the dome of
heaven” (Gen 1:6-7) and “the face of the deep” (Gen 7:11) all
reference a picture of the cosmos completely unrecognizable
and irreconcilable to our own. Common among ancient
Egyptians, Babylonians, and Israelites was a cosmology of
a flat Earth surrounded on every side by cosmic waters and
a solid, hard dome of the sky, which, in addition to housing
the sun, moon, and stars, was the only protection against the
waters above. 8,9 If scientific accuracy is taken as the metric by
which we evaluate the Bible’s truth, it fails miserably. There is
a mass of writings online and in print by people attempting to
explain away these discrepancies, but the biblical texts never
claim absolute accuracy in these statements—they never
intended, nor need to. The Christian church has never taught
a “divine dictation” view of the writing of Scripture; instead,
it maintains that the divine inspiration of the biblical authors
was not a heightened state of consciousness or omniscience,
yet remains something that cannot be reduced to mere human
insight. 5 The Bible is a collection of texts telling one unified
story of God’s self-revelation and intervention in human
history, culminating in the person of Jesus. It is a story of the
Divine, transcendent of time and culture, told in the words
of man, who is bound by both. Written by a decidedly pre-
scientific society, the Bible has nothing to say of modern
science and we cannot look to prove it on non-existent claims
of enlightened scientific knowledge. As a result, attempts
to either validate biblical texts with scientific evidence or to
define the role God plays in biological and physical processes
7
Richard H. Bube, “A Perspective on Scriptural
Inerrancy” (1963)
8
“Deep Space and the Dome of Heaven - Articles.”
BioLogos, biologos.org/articles/deep-space-and-the-dome-of-heaven.
9
Greenwood, Kyle. Scripture and Cosmology: Reading the Bible
between the Ancient World and Modern Science. InterVarsity Press, 2015.
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