Scientific Facts In The Bible 2 by Rev. Christie Bature: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Returning to Scientific Facts in the Bible

Continuing a study through the small book Scientific Facts in the Bible by Ray Comfort, the message returns to where the previous session left off, having recently finished reading about D.L. Moody in another book, 10 Christians Everyone Should Know. Science agrees with the Bible far more than many realize, and it is worth walking through some of these facts one by one.

The Bible and the First Law of Thermodynamics

Genesis 2:1

The original Hebrew uses the past definite tense for the word finished, indicating an action completed once and never to occur again. Something that is finishing has not yet finished, but something that is finished has ended permanently. Creation was finished once and for all, precisely what the first law of thermodynamics states: the law of the conservation of energy and mass, which holds that neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed, because creation has already been finished. It was this law that led to the discarding of Sir Fred Hoyle's steady state, or continuous creation, theory, which proposed that matter and energy were constantly being created at points in the universe he called Itrons. The first law of thermodynamics states the opposite: there is no creation ongoing today. It is finished, exactly as the Bible states.

The Bible and the Dimensions of Ships

Genesis 6

God gave Noah the dimensions of a 1.5 million cubic foot ark. In 1609, at Hoorn in Holland, a ship was built after that same pattern, with a ratio of 30 to 5 to 3, revolutionizing shipbuilding. By 1900, every large ship on the high seas was inclined toward the proportions of the ark, a fact verified by Lloyd's Register of Shipping in the World Almanac.

The Bible and Meteorological Laws

Ecclesiastes 1:6

Scripture describes a cycle of air currents two thousand years before science discovered that the air around the earth runs in huge circles, clockwise in one hemisphere and counterclockwise in the other.

Science Bowing to Scripture

Richard Wurmbrand, author of Proof of God's Existence, observed that as science advances, it discovers what was said thousands of years ago in the Bible. Science keeps finding out what scripture had already stated many years before. Science bowing to scripture, science submitting to scripture, this is the pattern that runs through the rest of this study, beginning with the incredible book of Job, written around 1520 BC and filled with scientific facts. Scientist Charles Burckhalter of the Chabot Observatory said that his study of the book of Job compared with the latest scientific discoveries brought him to the conviction that the Bible is an inspired book, written by the one who made the stars.

The Book of Job and Science

• Air mass. Job 28:25 Scripture tells us there is a weight for the wind, long before it was recognized in the sixteenth century that air has weight. The same passage speaks of water having weight; the vast amount of water covering the earth balances the gravitational effects of the sun and moon so precisely that the resulting energy is safely dissipated in the waters.
• The earth's rotation. Job 38:12,14 For ages, scientists held to a geocentric view, believing the sun revolved around the earth to produce night and day. Yet scripture describes the earth as being turned like clay to the seal, the picture of a clay vessel being rotated on a potter's wheel, an accurate analogy for the earth's rotation on its axis.
• Springs of the sea. Job 38:16 Modern deep-sea cameras have discovered hot water vents on the ocean floor releasing huge amounts of mineral-rich superheated water, springs in the darkness already described in Job.
• Light. Job 38:24 Sir Isaac Newton discovered that white light is made of seven colors that can be separated and then recombined into white light again, a discovery science made centuries after Job first spoke of it.
• The way of light. Job 38:19 Job asks where the way is where light dwells. Modern science has discovered that light, being electromagnetic radiation, has weight and travels at approximately 186,000 miles per second, which is why a room floods with light the instant a switch is turned on.
• Dinosaurs. Job 40:15-24 Science can only speculate as to why the dinosaurs disappeared, but this passage describes a great creature called Behemoth, the largest of all creatures God made, plant-eating, with great strength in its hips and a tail like a large tree, unlike the hippopotamus, whose tail is closer to a small twig. It had very strong bones, lived among the trees, drank great amounts of water undisturbed by a raging river, and appeared impervious to attack. Yet scripture says that only its Maker could cause the sword to approach it, suggesting that it was God himself who brought the dinosaurs out of existence.

Medical Science and the Bible

The law of hygiene. In 1845, a young doctor in Vienna named Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was horrified at the death rate of women who gave birth in hospitals, as many as thirty percent dying after childbirth. He noticed that doctors would examine the bodies of the dead and then, without washing their hands, move directly to examine expectant mothers, since the presence of microscopic disease was still unknown. When Semmelweis insisted that doctors wash their hands before each examination, the death rate dropped immediately from thirty percent to two percent. Leviticus 15:13 had already instructed that a person be cleansed by bathing in running water, while doctors until recent history washed their hands in a still bowl of water, leaving invisible germs behind.

Mind and body. Medical science has come to understand the strong relationship between mental and physical health, something scripture revealed as early as 950 BC. Proverbs 14:30 A sound heart is life to the flesh, but envy is rottenness to the bones. Proverbs 15:30 The light of the eyes rejoices the heart, and a good report makes the bones healthy. Proverbs 16:24 Pleasant words are as an honeycomb, sweet to the soul and health to the bones. Proverbs 17:22 A merry heart does good like medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones.

Bacteria. Exodus 23:31 Israel was instructed not to eat flesh torn by beasts in the field, but to cast it to the dogs, a provision that protected against bacteria carried in a predator's teeth or left on meat exposed to the sun, thousands of years before bacteria were ever identified by modern science.

Fat intake. The American Heart Association identifies saturated fat, trans fat, and dietary cholesterol as factors that raise blood cholesterol, a major risk factor for coronary heart disease, and a University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center study linked saturated fat consumption to a leading cause of cancer among men. Leviticus 7:22-24 instructed the Israelites, while still wandering in the desert, not to eat the fat of ox, sheep, or goat.

The immune system. Genesis 17:12 Male babies were to be circumcised on the eighth day. Medical science has since discovered that the coagulating factor in the blood, prothrombin, is at its highest on day eight of a newborn's life, the very day the immune system is also at its peak, before both begin to decline.

Laws of quarantine. Leviticus 13:46 A person with leprosy was to dwell alone, outside the camp, for as long as the condition remained. Formal quarantine was not adopted by modern medicine until the seventeenth century; during the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the sick and the dead were often kept in the same room as the rest of the family, the epidemic blamed on bad air or evil spirits. The historian Arturo Castiglione noted that careful attention to the medical commands revealed in Leviticus could have saved untold millions of lives, and that the laws against leprosy in Leviticus 13 may be regarded as the first model of sanitary legislation.

Science and the Book of Genesis

Scientists have often grown uneasy to find their discoveries leading them back to Genesis chapter one. Time magazine, December 1976, wrote that most cosmologists agree the Genesis account of an initial void may be uncannily close to the truth. The Wall Street Journal likened the Big Bang to an uncanny resemblance of the Genesis command, \"Let there be light.\" U.S. News and World Report, March 1997, noted that new revelations about supernovas, black holes, quarks, and the Big Bang suggest to some scientists a great design in the universe.

Princeton physics professor John Wheeler wrote in Reader's Digest, 1986, that slight variations in physical laws such as gravity or electromagnetism would make life impossible, and that the necessity to produce life lies at the center of the universe's whole design. Stephen Hawking acknowledged in the Austin American Statesman, October 1997, that the universe and the laws of physics seem to have been specifically designed for us, noting that if any one of roughly forty physical constants had even slightly different values, life as we know it could not exist.

Researchers cited in U.S. News and World Report, December 1995, found that nearly all modern humans are closely related genetically, tracing back to one shared male ancestor, popularly called the Y-chromosome Adam, indicating a single point of origin from which humanity spread. About eighty-five percent of the earth's rock surface is sedimentary rock, indicating that the world was once covered by water, according to Peter and Paul LaLonde's 301 Startling Proofs and Prophecies.

Sir Fred Hoyle, professor of astronomy at Cambridge, calculated the likelihood of life arising from inanimate matter at one chance in ten to the power of forty thousand, comparable, he said, to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials there. He concluded that if the beginning of life was not random, it must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.

Almost all forms of complex life require both a male and a female to reproduce; one cannot carry on life without the other. Matthew 19:4 He who made them at the beginning made them male and female. This mutual dependence poses a real difficulty for a strictly evolutionary account, since it is hard to explain how each sex could have developed such complementary reproductive systems independently of the other.

Science expresses the universe in five terms: time, space, matter, power, and motion. Genesis 1:1-2 perfectly reveals all five: in the beginning is time, God created is power, the heavens is space, the earth is matter, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters is motion. The first thing God tells humanity is that he controls every aspect of the universe.

Genesis also differentiates humanity from the animals. Scripture teaches that animals were created without understanding, while humans are made in God's image, aware of their own existence, capable of appreciating beauty, of forming systems of justice, and of pursuing discovery in ways no other creature exhibits.

Scientists Who Believed the Bible

Many of the great scientists who founded and developed the key disciplines of science were creationists, not evolutionists, and their names remain synonymous with the rise of modern science.

• Physics: Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, and Kelvin
• Chemistry: Boyle, Dalton, and Ramsay
• Biology: Ray, Linnaeus, Mendel, and Pasteur
• Geology: Steno, Woodward, Brewster, and Agassiz
• Astronomy: Kepler, Galileo, Herschel, and Maunder

It was the Roman Catholic Church, not the Christian faith broadly, that opposed Galileo. William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday, and James Clerk Maxwell were all committed Christians, and are counted among the fathers of modern science.

• Boyle, the first scientist to distinguish compounds from elements, was a lay preacher.
• Faraday, discoverer of electromagnetic induction, once preached from the Bible alone, saying his own words could add nothing to God's word.
• Maxwell, who discovered magnetic flux, wrote a prayer surrendering his life entirely into God's care.
• Kepler believed the chief aim of investigating the external world was to discover the rational order and harmony God had imposed upon it.
• Lord Kelvin wrote that science positively affirms creative power with regard to the origin of life.

Much of modern scientific knowledge rests on the discoveries of other Bible-believing scientists, among them Leonardo da Vinci in experimental science and physics, Francis Bacon in the scientific method, Samuel Morse who invented the telegraph, William Petty in statistics and economics, William Durham in ecology, James Joule in thermodynamics, Henri Fabre in entomology, and Joseph Henry, who developed the electric motor and the galvanometer.

Arthur Compton, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, said that science is the glimpse of God's purpose in nature, and that an orderly universe testifies to the greatest statement ever uttered: in the beginning, God. Isaac Newton considered his theological writings more important than his scientific work, stating that all material things were composed and set in order by the counsel of an intelligent agent, and that it is unphilosophical to seek any other origin of the world.

Joseph Lister, founder of antiseptic surgical methods, wrote that he was a believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity; his contributions to medicine are credited with saving more lives than anyone except Pasteur. Blaise Pascal, one of history's greatest mathematicians, laid the foundation for hydrostatics, hydrodynamics, and differential calculus, and is remembered for his wager: that a person who chooses to be a Christian loses nothing if it turns out there is no God, having lived a fuller life regardless, but gains everything if there is a God and a judgment, while the skeptic loses everything.

Sir John Frederick Herschel, an English astronomer who discovered over five hundred stars, said that all human discoveries seem made only to confirm ever more strongly the truths already contained in scripture. His father, William Herschel, also a renowned astronomer, said that an astronomer without devotion to God must be irrational.

Albert Einstein was not an atheist, though he did not accept the God of the Bible. He wrote that science can only be created by those imbued with the aspiration toward truth, a feeling that springs from the sphere of religion, including the faith that the laws governing existence are rational and comprehensible, and that he could not conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith.

Dr. James Simpson, who discovered the anesthetic use of chloroform and laid a foundation for gynecology, went on to become personal physician to the Queen of England. He said that Christianity works because it is supremely true and therefore supremely liveable, and that there is nothing incompatible between religion and science. When asked what his greatest discovery was, he replied that it was not chloroform, but knowing that he was a sinner who could be saved by the grace of God, adding that a person has missed the whole meaning of life if they have not entered into an active, living relationship with God through Christ.