Science in Scripture: a whole-text audit

This page carries almost no weight in the final sum. It is here so you can watch us check the evidence our own side likes to cite, and report what fails.

The short version

1. The popular list is long, and we traced every item.

   "The circle of the earth" (Isaiah 40:22), "hangs the earth on nothing" (Job 26:7), Maury and "the paths of the seas" (Psalm 8:8), prothrombin on the eighth day, the "stretched-out" heavens: 28 claims in all, each followed back to its source.

   The evidence ↓
2. We scored every natural-world passage, not a highlight reel.

   60 items, including the solid sky, the windows of heaven and the pillars of the earth, on rules fixed in advance, under a strict and a charitable reading.

   The rules ↓
3. Zero hits.

   No item shows knowledge unavailable in the ancient world. No popular claim holds as stated; 12 hold in a weaker form. The hygiene laws are sound practice for their time. The cosmos texts use the ancient Near Eastern picture of the world.

   The analysis ↓
4. Accommodation, not foreknowledge.

   Scripture speaks of nature "in a popular style", as Calvin put it. That view is neutral on this evidence. The claim that the Bible holds hidden science is not neutral: the audit counts against it, so we drop it.

   Accommodation ↓

The question

Do the Bible's statements about the natural world (cosmos, earth and water, animals and plants, medicine and hygiene) contain knowledge their authors could not have had? That is the claim of a popular literature, from S. I. McMillen's None of These Diseases to Ray Comfort's Scientific Facts in the Bible.¹ Four hypotheses make different predictions:

So the audit can tell the first two apart from naturalism. It cannot tell accommodation from naturalism, because they predict the same verses. Christianity as historically held is the accommodation view. That is why this page sits near 1.

Rules of evidence

Fixed before scoring:²

• Universe. Every passage that makes a claim about nature, including the ones a highlight reel leaves out: the firmament, the waters above, the windows of heaven, pillars and foundations, an immovable earth, falling stars, storehouses of snow, the animal and plant claims of the Law and the Gospels, and every verse on the popular lists. Parallel passages are merged into one item, so repetition inflates nothing. Total: 60 items.
• Scores. Specificity of the plain sense (0 poetic or vague, 1 some content, 2 specific and checkable). Available in antiquity (1 if attested in Near Eastern, Egyptian or Greek sources before or near the text, or visible to the naked eye). Strained (1 if the foreknowledge reading needs a non-standard word sense or ignores the context).
• Verdicts. Hit correct, specific, plain reading, and not available then. Notable correct or sound, but available. Neutral poetic, idiom, ritual, or correct only under a strained reading. Miss the plain sense, read in its ancient context, says something false about nature.
• Two readings, both reported. Strict: what the words most likely meant to the first hearers (the standard lexicons). Charitable: the most generous defensible reading (phenomenological language, idiom, genre). The honest result is the pair, not whichever helps.
• Popular claims. Each item that carries a popular claim gets a second verdict: Pass as stated, Partial a weaker version holds, or Fail.

The evidence

The texts a highlight reel leaves out

Under scientific revelation these should not exist. They do, across many books:

• "God made the expanse, and divided the waters which were under the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse" (Genesis 1:7, WEB); "You waters that are above the heavens" (Psalm 148:4, WEB).³
• "All the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the sky's windows opened" (Genesis 7:11, WEB).
• "The pillars of the earth are Yahweh's. He has set the world on them" (1 Samuel 2:8, WEB).
• "The world also is established. It can't be moved" (Psalm 93:1, WEB), one of the verses used against Galileo.

The Hebrew word for the "expanse", raqia, comes from a verb for beating metal thin. Read strictly, these are 10 misses in the cosmology group alone. Read as poetry, they are neutral. Either way they are the ancient three-tier world: waters above a solid vault, a flat earth on foundations, the deep below.

The 28 popular claims, traced

None passes as stated. Twelve survive in a weaker form, almost all of them hygiene and rain. Sixteen fail.

"The circle of the earth"

"It is he who sits above the circle of the earth" (Isaiah 40:22, WEB). The word is chug. Brown-Driver-Briggs glosses it "vault; only of vault of the heavens", and its other uses are "He walks on the vault of the sky" (Job 22:14, WEB) and "he set a circle on the surface of the deep" (Proverbs 8:27, WEB).⁴ A disk ringed by water is exactly the ancient picture: the Babylonian Map of the World draws a circular land inside a ring of ocean.⁵ Hebrew had a word for a ball, dur, used in Isaiah 22:18 ("throw you like a ball"); Isaiah 40 does not use it.⁶ And the Greeks reached a round earth by argument, not revelation: Aristotle pointed out that the earth's shadow on the moon in an eclipse is always curved.⁷

Job 26:7, the best item

"He stretches out the north over empty space, and hangs the earth on nothing" (Job 26:7, WEB). In its plain sense this is striking and true as far as it goes, and we score it Notable. Three controls keep it from being a hit. Anaximander (c. 610-546 BC) held, in Dirk Couprie's summary, that "the earth floats free in the center of the universe, unsupported by water, pillars, or whatever",⁸ and the book of Job is commonly dated to the same period or later, though its date is uncertain. The same book says "Its pillars tremble" (9:6, WEB) and asks "Whereupon were its foundations fastened? Or who laid its cornerstone" (38:6, WEB). And "the north" (tsaphon) over "empty space" is sacred geography: Zaphon was the mountain of the gods.

Maury and "the paths of the seas"

The story: Matthew Fontaine Maury, the naval officer who charted the winds and currents, heard Psalm 8:8 read on a sickbed and resolved to find "the paths of the seas". The trail ends in 1915. Maury's own 1855 letter on science and the Bible does not link the verse to currents. His daughter's 1888 biography dates his idea for wind and current charts to his 1831 voyage on the USS Falmouth and never mentions the psalm. The earliest printing we could find is Katherine Stiles' introduction to a 1915 sketch by his son, and there the verse leads him to deep-sea soundings, not to currents.^9,10 In the verse itself, "whatever passes through the paths of the seas" closes a list of creatures (birds, fish, and the rest of sea life).¹¹ Maury's real achievement, compiling ships' logs, stands either way.

The eighth day and vitamin K

"He who is eight days old will be circumcised among you" (Genesis 17:12, WEB). The popular claim, from McMillen summarizing a 1953 pediatrics text, is that prothrombin, a clotting factor, sits at about 30% of normal on day 3 and peaks at 110% on day 8, making day 8 the ideal day. We could not see the 1953 page. We could check the standard reference values for healthy newborns, reproduced in the British haematology guideline of 2002.^12,13

The level rises steadily and never exceeds the adult value in the first six months. Preterm infants show the same shape (53% on day 8). One caveat: these infants received vitamin K at birth, which blunts the dip in days 2-5, but a dip cannot turn into a peak above the adult level. What survives is modest: classic vitamin K deficiency bleeding usually appears on days 2 to 5, so day 8 falls after the classic window, something careful observers could learn without any chemistry.¹⁴ Bleeding can still occur later in the first months, so day 8 is not uniquely safe. The text's own logic is the mother's seven days of impurity, plus one (Leviticus 12:2-3).

Where the text does well: hygiene

Eight of the ten medicine and hygiene items are sound practice: isolation with timed re-inspection ("He shall dwell alone. Outside of the camp shall be his dwelling", Leviticus 13:46, WEB), washing after discharges and after touching a corpse, burning or scraping mouldy material, passing booty through fire or water, latrines outside the camp. A doctor bound by Numbers 19 would have washed after touching the dead, which is what Semmelweis imposed in 1847, cutting maternal deaths in his clinic from 11.4% (1846) to 1.27% (1848).¹⁵

But none of it was unavailable. Centuries earlier, King Zimri-Lim of Mari wrote of a palace woman with a contagious rash: "Give strict orders that no one drink from the cup where she drinks, that no one sit on the seat where she sits, and that no one lie on the bed where she lies".¹⁶ The reasons the Law gives are holiness and impurity, and some of its mechanisms are not contagion at all: impurity spreads by "overshadowing" in a tent, and the cleanser is the ash of a red heifer. The disease, tsaraat, is not Hansen's disease.¹⁷ What is distinctive is the procedure (inspection, re-examination, re-admission). Sound practice for its time; not germ theory.

"He stretches out the heavens"

Ten verses say that God stretches out, or stretched out, the heavens: "He stretches out the heavens like a curtain" (Psalm 104:2, WEB); "who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in" (Isaiah 40:22, WEB). A popular argument says the Hebrew verb, natah, is in a continuous form, so God is still stretching them: the expanding universe, or even dark energy. Its best-known version adds that some verses use a completed form, and that a stretching both finished and ongoing is "identical to the big bang concept of cosmic expansion".²⁰ We checked every verse in the tagged Hebrew text.^21,22

The count holds, with one correction: Isaiah 48:13, "my right hand has spread out the heavens" (WEB), sometimes listed as a fourth completed form, uses a different verb. The inference does not hold. Hebrew has no "continuous tense". A participle can describe ongoing action, but in these hymns it names God by what he does, and the same form is used of acts that are finished: "he who created the heavens and stretched them out" (Isaiah 42:5, WEB), "him who made the Pleiades and Orion" (Amos 5:8, WEB), and "God has made the earth by his power" (Jeremiah 10:12, WEB), in the very verse that uses the completed form of "stretched out". If the participle made the stretching ongoing, it would make the creating of the heavens ongoing too. And any mix of forms can be read as "finished and ongoing", so the reading cannot fail. A tent "to dwell in" is pitched once; nothing in the image tells an expanding universe from a fixed canopy, let alone an accelerating one. A striking, repeated image, not a prediction.

The analysis

The asymmetry is the finding. Where the text legislates practice, it is sound for its time. Where it describes the cosmos, it uses the ancient picture.

The likelihood model. A likelihood ratio says how much more probable the evidence is under one hypothesis than another; 1 means no difference. If scientific revelation were true, some share p of natural-world statements would be hits. Seeing none in 60 has probability (1 − p)⁶⁰. Under naturalism, with a chance-hit rate of 0.005, it has probability 0.74.

Sensitivity. Give the claim its best case: date Job before Anaximander and read 26:7 apart from 9:6 and 38:4-6. That makes 1 hit in 60, and the ratio becomes 1.6 at a hit rate of 0.02, 0.65 at 0.05 and 0.054 at 0.10. Even then the data favour revelation only if revelation produces science about once in 50 statements, at which point it looks like luck. Flipping every contestable call (Job 26:7, Ecclesiastes 1:7, the bat, the insects) moves at most one item to a hit and changes the miss count by two. The world-structure texts are a second strike we do not put a number on.

Accommodation against naturalism. Both predict these data, so the ratio is 1 by construction. We give it a range of 0.7 to 1.2: lower if you think an inspiring God would have avoided structural statements about the cosmos, or that accommodation is an assumption fitted after the fact; higher for the sound purity laws, which are a little better than an arbitrary ritual code would be. (We used to add credit here for the non-divine cosmos of Genesis 1; the Genesis page already counts it, so we no longer do.) That central 1 is the number this page sends to the unified model.

Accommodation: the principle that cuts both ways

None of this would have surprised the Reformers. On the waters above the expanse, Calvin wrote that it "appears opposed to common sense, and quite incredible", that "nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world", and that "He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere." On the "two great lights" he noted that astronomers prove Saturn "is greater than the moon", and concluded: "Moses wrote in a popular style things which without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand".²³

Galileo made the same case in 1615: the scriptural writers spoke "to accommodate them to the capacities" of the common people, and were "Far from pretending to teach us the constitution and motions of the heavens". He quoted a churchman: "the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven. not how heaven goes."²⁴ Augustine, centuries earlier, had warned Christians not to talk nonsense about nature in front of unbelievers.²⁵

Desacralized nature and the rise of science

There is one thing the text says about nature that was distinctive. Genesis 1 names no astral god: the sun and moon are "the greater light" and "the lesser light", made objects with a job, and "He also made the stars" (Genesis 1:16, WEB). Israel is told not to worship "the sun and the moon and the stars" (Deuteronomy 4:19, WEB), and creation has fixed "ordinances" (Jeremiah 31:35-36, WEB): "He has made a decree which will not pass away" (Psalm 148:6, WEB). The New Testament adds that in Christ "all things are held together" (Colossians 1:17, WEB), a claim that the world depends on God at every moment, not a description of the forces that bind matter. Many read Genesis 1 as deliberate polemic against Babylonian astral religion.²⁶ The same chapter of Job has "the laws of the heavens" (38:33) and "the treasuries of the snow" (38:22), and Psalm 148 puts its unbreakable decree two verses after "You waters that are above the heavens" (148:4): lawful order is a theological conviction, not a physics.

Did that conviction help produce modern science? Whitehead thought so: "the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology."²⁷ Foster, Hooykaas, Harrison, Hannam and Stark argued versions of the thesis.²⁸ Efron, Lindberg and Freeman pushed back: Greek science came first, medieval natural philosophy drew on Greek and Arabic sources, and Islam, with an equally sovereign Creator, did not produce a Scientific Revolution. Harrison himself argued that the "voluntarism" version should be dropped.²⁹

We give this no number. It is evidence about the fruitfulness of a worldview, not about inspiration; Judaism and Islam share it; and it overlaps the intelligibility of nature on the fine-tuning page.

Objections

What this shows, and what it doesn't

What we don't claim

• "Isaiah 40:22 shows the Bible knew the earth is a sphere." Chug is a circle or vault; the picture is a disk; the word for a ball, dur, is not used.
• "Job 38:14 describes the earth's rotation." Haphakh means "is changed"; a seal rolls over flat clay.
• "Job 26:7 shows knowledge no one else had." Anaximander had it; Job's date is uncertain; Job 9:6 has pillars.
• "'Stretches out the heavens' predicted the expanding universe" or "is unique among religions". A tent image, with completed verb forms and ancient parallels; similar phrasing is claimed for other scriptures too.
• "Maury discovered ocean currents because of Psalm 8:8." The earliest printing found is from 1915; absent from his 1855 letter and his daughter's 1888 biography.
• "Prothrombin peaks at 110% on the eighth day." The standard data give about 59% of the adult level, with no peak.
• "Leviticus 17:11 anticipated blood circulation" or "would have stopped bloodletting". Folk physiology in a ritual context; bloodletting persisted among Bible readers.
• "The purity laws show germ theory" or "anticipated Semmelweis". The practice converged; the rationale is ritual; impurity spreads by overshadowing; the cleanser is heifer ash.
• "Leprosy quarantine." Tsaraat is not Hansen's disease.
• "Biblical quarantine was unique." Mari isolated a contagious patient centuries earlier.
• "The dietary laws are a health code." No health reason is given, and the New Testament sets them aside.
• "Job 38:16 foretold hydrothermal vents." Ancient cosmic geography; springs in the sea were known and tapped.
• "Ecclesiastes 1:6 describes the jet stream" or "1:7 the water cycle". Ambiguous observation, with Greek parallels.
• "Genesis 10:25 refers to continental drift." Peleg sits inside a human genealogy.
• "Hebrews 11:3 foresaw atoms", "Psalm 102 the second law", "Job 38:7 stellar radio". Strained readings.
• "The mustard seed is the smallest seed" as botany. Orchid seeds are far smaller; the saying is proverbial.
• "The hare really does chew the cud." Re-eating droppings is not rumination; call it phenomenological description.
• "The Bible contains no scientific errors." On a strict reading 17 of 60 items are false. It speaks in the phenomenological language of its time.
• "Christianity gave birth to science." Contested; at most one contributing condition.
• "The Hebrew of 'stretches out the heavens' is a continuous tense: dark energy." Hebrew has no continuous tense; 7 of the 10 verses use a participle that is also used of finished acts, and 3 a completed form.
• "Four verses use the completed form of natah, including Isaiah 48:13." Isaiah 48:13 uses a different verb; there are three.
• "The firmament is the moment the early universe became transparent." The waters above remain a present reservoir in the text; at most a resonance found after the fact.
• "'I am the light of the world' (John 8:12) is physical data about light." In John, light is revelation and life (John 1:4-9).
• "Hebrews 11:3 is the holographic principle" or "refutes physical realism". It says the world was made by God's word; it names no mechanism.
• "Colossians 1:17 describes the force that holds atoms together." It says all things depend on Christ; theology of sustaining, not physics.
• "Genesis 1:1's numbers are a divine fingerprint." True arithmetic (7 words, 28 letters, letter values summing to 2701 = 37 × 73), but with a long menu of "significant" numbers and free choice of which to report, such matches are expected.²²
• "The Bible says God made 'the unchangeable laws of nature'." Not a biblical phrase. Quote the verses instead: "the ordinances of heaven and earth" (Jeremiah 33:25), "a decree which will not pass away" (Psalm 148:6).

Sources

1. S. I. McMillen, None of These Diseases (Revell, 1963; rev. with D. E. Stern, 1984); R. Comfort, Scientific Facts in the Bible (Bridge-Logos, 2001); R. T. Boyd, Boyd's Handbook of Practical Apologetics (1997). The claims as quoted by their users; not checked against every edition.
2. Our scoring script and its output: truth/research/calc/06-audit.py and 06-audit.out.txt (all 60 items with their S, A and R scores, the exclusions and the likelihood model).
3. World English Bible (public domain), verse texts via bible-api.com (translation=web).
4. Brown-Driver-Briggs, chug (Strong's H2329): "vault; — only of vault of the heavens", at Job 22:14, Prov 8:27, Isa 40:22. biblehub.com/hebrew/2329.htm (checked).
5. Babylonian Map of the World, British Museum BM 92687 (first millennium BC). Summary: Wikipedia.
6. Brown-Driver-Briggs, dur (Strong's H1754): "circle, ball", the sense "ball" at Isa 22:18. biblehub.com/hebrew/1754.htm (checked).
7. Aristotle, On the Heavens II.14, tr. J. L. Stocks: "in eclipses the outline is always curved". MIT Classics (checked).
8. D. L. Couprie, "Anaximander", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. iep.utm.edu/anaximander (checked).
9. "Invasion of the Bible Snatchers: Ray Comfort's 'Scientific Facts in the Bible' – Paths of the Seas", Amateur Exegete (2 Jul 2020), with page citations to the primary texts. amateurexegete.com (checked).
10. D. F. M. Corbin, A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury (1888), pp. 22-23, 158; K. C. Stiles, introduction to R. L. Maury, A Brief Sketch of the Work of Matthew Fontaine Maury during the War 1861-1865 (1915), p. 3. Both checked in the archive.org scans (Corbin pp. 22-23, 158-160; Stiles p. 3).
11. R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985), pp. 15-16, on the line as poetry for sea creatures. Via source 9.
12. BCSH Haemostasis and Thrombosis Task Force, "The investigation and management of neonatal haemostasis and thrombosis", Br J Haematol 2002;119:295-309; Table I reproduces M. Andrew et al., Blood 1987;70:165-172 (term infants), Table III Andrew et al., Blood 1988;72:1651-1657 (preterm). PDF.
13. Our interpolation and comparison: truth/research/calc/06-prothrombin.py and 06-prothrombin.out.txt.
14. Talk.Origins Index to Creationist Claims, CH135.1, citing B. Zipursky, Br J Haematol 1999;104:430-437. talkorigins.org (checked).
15. E. A. Carson & N. Toodayan, "Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818-1865): herald of hygienic medicine", Medical Journal of Australia 209(11): 480-482, 2018 (11.4% in 1846 to 1.3% in 1848; 1.27% is 45 deaths in 3,556 births, Semmelweis's own 1848 figures). mja.com.au.
16. "Controlling epidemics in the Ancient Near East", CSMC Hamburg, Mesopotamian Bulletins, 29 Feb 2020, quoting J.-M. Durand, Documents épistolaires du palais de Mari III (LAPO 18), nos. 1163-1165. csmc.uni-hamburg.de (checked).
17. Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Leprosy", Jewish Virtual Library; "Biblical leprosy: a dermatologist's perspective", Hektoen International (2023), hekint.org.
18. "Chewing the Cud", Ministry (Aug 1968), citing a 1955 Science note on caecotrophy. ministrymagazine.org.
19. J. Arditti & A. K. A. Ghani, "Numerical and physical properties of orchid seeds and their biological implications", New Phytologist 145 (2000): 367-421 (0.31-24 µg); black mustard seed (about 1-4 mg): PROSEA, Brassica nigra, prosea.prota4u.org.
20. H. Ross with J. Rea, "Big Bang—The Bible Taught It First!", Reasons to Believe, 1 July 2000 (seven participles; four completed forms, counting Isaiah 48:13). reasons.org (checked).
21. Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible: the Westminster Leningrad Codex (4.20) with morphology tags. github.com/openscriptures/morphhb (checked).
22. Our verb-form and Genesis 1:1 checks: truth/research/calc/06-natah.py and 06-natah.out.txt (every verse with natah and "the heavens"; Isaiah 48:13; the participle controls; Genesis 1:1 counts).
23. John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses called Genesis, tr. J. King, on Gen 1:6 and 1:16. CCEL (checked).
24. Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615). Internet Modern History Sourcebook (checked).
25. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram I.19.39 (paraphrased, not quoted).
26. G. F. Hasel, "The Polemic Nature of the Genesis Cosmology", Evangelical Quarterly 46 (1974): 81-102.
27. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925), ch. 1. Project Gutenberg #68611 (checked).
28. M. B. Foster, "The Christian doctrine of creation and the rise of modern natural science", Mind 43 (1934); R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (1972); P. Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge UP, 1998) and The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (2007); J. Hannam, God's Philosophers (2009); R. Stark, For the Glory of God (Princeton UP, 2003).
29. N. Efron, "Myth 9: That Christianity Gave Birth to Modern Science", in R. L. Numbers (ed.), Galileo Goes to Jail (Harvard UP, 2009); D. C. Lindberg, review of Hooykaas (1975) and The Beginnings of Western Science (2nd ed., 2007); C. Freeman, review of Hannam, New Humanist; P. Harrison, "Voluntarism and early modern science", History of Science 40 (2002): 63-89, with J. Henry's reply, History of Science 47 (2009): 79-113.