Science Proves the Bible

Many people believe science and the Bible are in opposition to one another.

The truth is that science and the Bible are in perfect alignment. In fact, science proves that the Bible is God’s Word.

Every Word Is Inspired

The Bible is a unique book. There is no other book on Earth that says anything like what the Bible says. And it makes claims about itself that you won’t read in any other book.

2 Timothy 3:16-17 make an amazing claim: They tell us that all Scripture, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, is inspired by God and that all of it is profitable and worthwhile.

Do you believe that? Do you believe that God inspired every word of it, that it’s all profitable? Even most people who consider themselves Christians don’t believe that. Have you proved that? Is it even possible to prove that?

Proving that the Bible is the Word of God is an exciting thing to study. The more you study into it, the more you realize how miraculous it is that we have this book. The better you know it, the more you realize this had to be inspired by God.

The Bible was written over a period of about 1,600 years by about 40 different authors from every walk of life, in different places, in different languages and at different times. Yet somehow, this book is perfectly cohesive and coherent. The later books consistently allude to, quote, interpret and fulfill the earlier ones.

The New Testament directly quotes the Old Testament more than 300 times, and some people count the allusions to earlier scriptures to be over 2,000. The Old Testament refers to itself dozens of times, and modern cross-reference databases map hundreds of thousands of thematic and verbal links across the whole Bible.

How is such consistency possible? Because this book wasn’t written by men. It was inspired by God. There was a master Author working through all those different personalities with His Spirit to provide a unified, consistent message and directing how it was all recorded.

Revelation 22:6 testifies that everything in the Bible is faithful and true. Verses 18-19 clarify that God directed this whole project. He made it exactly how He wanted. He codified, canonized and preserved it.

Once you’ve proved that God inspired the Bible, that changes the way you view what’s written in it. You won’t try to reason around it. You’ll say, “If that’s what God says, then that’s the truth.”

This is an important truth to prove and then hold fast to—so when someone tells you something contrary to the Bible, you won’t be shaken from it.

The Bible is not specifically a science book, but the mind that authored the Bible is the same mind that authored the physical universe and every aspect of scientific inquiry. That means the Bible is totally consistent with true science—no discrepancies or disagreements.

In fact, the Bible is full of facts people couldn’t have known unless they were revealed in the Bible. God knows how things were made and how things work. So when He inspired these things and had people record them, they recorded them in ways consistent with reality.

The Paths of the Seas

Matthew Maury lived in the 19th century. This man loved the sea, joined the Navy when he was 19 years old, and sailed around the world. He was on the first warship that circumnavigated Earth. He is considered the father of oceanography. He discovered the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Maury also loved the Bible, and he was especially intrigued by Psalm 8. In this psalm, King David was meditating on the heavens, man’s role in creation, and God’s love for man: “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas” (verses 6-8). When Maury read the final phrase of verse 8, he wondered about “the paths of the seas.” When you’re out on the ocean and look around, you just see waves—no paths or roads.

But Maury knew it must mean something. He began researching and documenting. In his article “The Pathfinder of the Seas,” Seth Malone wrote, “He requested that both naval and civilian ships alike document wind, water and weather patterns on their voyages (a practice still employed to this day for scientific research). He poured over old, seemingly boring naval logbooks where captains recorded wind speeds and ship location. He even sent out literal messages in bottles which, when found, contained instructions to return the bottle to Maury so he could more accurately understand these ‘paths of the seas.’ Today, we know them as ocean currents.” These currents follow definite paths in the ocean.

This is an amazing example of a statement in the Bible easy to overlook but perfectly consistent with what science has found.

“Maury’s discovery of ocean currents would revolutionize the world,” Malone wrote. “Before Maury’s research, a voyage from New York to San Francisco around the tip of South America (this is before the Panama Canal) took 188 days. In 1851, within only a few years of Maury beginning to document ocean currents, the Flying Clipper made the voyage in an astonishing 89 days.” The time was cut in half because of the knowledge of “the paths of the seas.” Following ocean currents still saves the modern shipping industry considerable fuel costs and countless other resources.

Uncovering God’s Design

Believe it or not, modern science would not exist without the biblical perspective.

Ancient pagan cultures like the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians viewed the world very differently than we do. They believed it was controlled by capricious forces; that storms, seasons, the motion of the planets and other natural events were random and chaotic or caused by the whims of the gods. The universe seemed irrational and unreliable. If things change inexplicably from day to day, they reasoned, why bother looking for natural order and laws?

Herodotus, the ancient historian, recorded that the Egyptians thought the Nile flooding every year was the goddess Isis crying for the god Osiris, flooding the plains with her tears. But then someone came along and realized it was happening at certain times and that there must be a reason for it. Once they stopped thinking it was flooding due to the gods, their perspective changed.

The scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries was led by men who believed the universe was created by a God of order, logic and law. They supposed that if they studied His handiwork in creation, they would find law and order. The great majority of influential scientists from that time were devout Christians. They saw no conflict between science and the Bible. They respected the Bible and were religious. Many scientists explicitly saw the work they did as uncovering God’s design. Johannes Kepler saw the planetary motion as God’s geometry unfolding in the heavens. Galileo famously said that God authored two books, the Bible and nature, and that the two are perfectly compatible with each other. René Descartes and Isaac Newton both searched for the universal laws of nature.

Interestingly, false religion is often hostile to scientists. Orthodox Islam is one example that author Rodney Stark explains in his book How the West Won: “Many Muslim scholars have held that efforts to formulate natural laws are blasphemy because they would seem to deny Allah’s freedom to act. … Thus, did the Chinese, Greek and Muslim images of God and the universe deflect scientific efforts. But the scientists that were looking for laws found them. It thus could be said that the proposition that the universe had an intelligent designer is the most fundamental of all scientific theories. And that has been successfully put to empirical tests again and again.”

False science is incompatible with true religion, and true science can be incompatible with false religion. But true science and true religion are perfectly compatible.

Job Proves Science

As far as we know, Job is the earliest written book of the Bible. Job lived even before Moses, who wrote the Bible’s first five books. At that time, ideas about Earth, sun and stars and other aspects of creation were wild. The dominant idea was that Earth was flat, disk-shaped, floating on or held above a cosmic ocean, with a solid dome or vault arching overhead to hold back the waters above. But several details in the book of Job show that God knew exactly how it all worked—because, of course, He made it.

Job 26:7 says God hangs the Earth upon nothing. It is a globe suspended in space. The earliest instance outside the Bible of a concept of a spherical Earth unsupported in space came from an Indian astronomer named Aryabhata in the fifth to sixth centuries a.d. He described the Earth as a sphere, rotating on its axis, suspended without visible support. But Job knew this thousands of years before because God revealed it to him.

Verse 8 says, “He wraps the waters in His clouds [which otherwise would spill on earth all at once], And the cloud does not burst under them” (Amplified). That is quite a description. Not just “It rains,” but saying that clouds, which look insubstantial from our perspective, somehow suspend tons of water without tearing open and dropping their water. Job 36:27-28 describe the hydrological cycle, with water being drawn up as a vapor, condensing into clouds, and falling again as rain. Everything is consistent with what science later discovered.

In Job 38, God Himself starts speaking. And what He says shows that He knows exactly how it all works.

In verse 16, God asks Job if he has entered into the “springs of the sea.” That is likely a reference to deep-sea hydrothermal vents, or underwater hot springs, that release superheated, mineral-rich water. These weren’t discovered until 1977 in the Galapagos Islands.

In verse 31, God asks Job: “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?” Look up at the night sky and you will see many constellations. Most are like two-dimensional patterns of unrelated stars—a connect-the-dots with all the dots vastly different distances from the Earth. Pleiades is different. This constellation is also known as the Seven Sisters, an open star cluster in the middle of the constellation Taurus. It is actually composed of hundreds of stars that formed together from the same molecular cloud and that remain bound together by mutual gravitational attraction. God described it as the “sweet influences,” or bands, of Pleiades! Not until 1767 did an English clergyman and astronomer named John Michell find that Pleiades must be physically chained together by gravity.

The Bible is full of such examples. Other ancient writings from the time are full of scientific inaccuracies. Some scientists in ancient Greece, leading up to the time Greece became a world empire, made some impressive discoveries—but right alongside them were some phenomenally bizarre ideas. In the sixth century b.c., Anaximander thought the sun, moon and stars were holes in vast wheels of fire wrapped up in dark mist. In the fifth century b.c., Empedocles proposed that in an early stage of the cosmos, disconnected body parts wandered the earth separately—heads without necks, arms without shoulders, eyes without faces—and randomly fused together into strange combinations (e.g. creatures with human heads on ox bodies). Most combinations died, but every so often, chance produced workable forms. This was a bizarre forerunner of natural selection.

Amazingly, you never read anything like that in the Bible. Everything checks out. It might be stated poetically, but it’s accurate. It doesn’t contradict the facts. And again, it was written hundreds or thousands of years before science caught up.

Health Laws Save Lives

Sanitation in the ancient world was horrifying. Up to even a couple hundred years ago, virtually everyone lived in primitive, unhygienic conditions. There was no water for washing, very little wood for cooking, no firewood, no refrigerators. Most people faced the possibility of wild animals attacking them in their tents.

Life expectancy was short. When the Israelites arrived in Canaan, the average lifespan was about 30 years. More than half the people died before they turned 18. In Egypt, it was even worse. Why? Because poor hygiene, contagious diseases and epidemics were rampant. And medical treatments were abysmal: such as dressing a wound with weird mixtures of blood, animal parts and even excrement. Unsurprisingly, they often made things worse.

But the laws of Moses saved millions of lives. They would have saved many millions more had more people followed them.

Did you know that the idea of toilets came from the Bible? Through most of history, even up to 200 years ago, most people would just relieve themselves right outside their house. They would dump their chamber pots out the window, in the street, or in an open sewer. But 3,500 years ago, in Deuteronomy 23:12-13, God commanded the Israelites to go outside the camp to defecate and to dig a hole and bury the excrement. This keeps the water supply from contamination and prevents all kinds of diseases.

God also gave many laws about regularly changing and washing clothing, washing yourself when you’ve been in contact with someone who’s had a disease or with a dead body. God gave laws protecting food and water supplies and established the law of quarantine (Leviticus 13-14). In 14th-century Venice, a doctor realized that the Jews were getting sick far less than other people. He implemented quarantine for the city, and it saved numerous lives.

In his book Modern Science in the Bible, Ben Horink writes, “In primitive conditions, in particular, the laws of Moses are shown to be totally unsurpassed systems of measures, something without par in history. Professors of medical history express their great admiration for these marvelous regulations relating to public health. Outside the Bible, nowhere in antiquity are such effective and systematic regulations found for the prevention and cure of diseases.”

In Deuteronomy 7:12 and 15, God promises that He will take away sickness and disease from those who keep His health laws. These laws were revealed in the Bible long before they were discovered by science. Had they been practiced, they would have saved millions of lives through the centuries.

This is all wonderful proof that the Bible was not written by a bunch of uneducated nomads. And it is only a small amount of the proof that all of it was inspired by God and is profitable for us. Studying these truths, revealed by the Almighty Creator of the universe, will strengthen our faith that this is, indeed, the Word of God!