February 13, 2007

The historical/scientific accuracy of the Bible

As a matter of clarification, here is some stuff that questions the historical and/or scientific accuracy of the Bible. One of the previous comments claims that the Bible has been "proven" to be true; this is simply, as an empirical matter, not true.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that, technically speaking, no scientific account can EVER be proven, simply as a matter of logical principle, not even the theory of gravity. In science, nothing is proven, if by proof you mean something as concrete as a mathematical proof, according to logical principles: science works according to supporting evidence. Logical deduction does not apply to science.

Empirical induction does apply to science, however. In other words, the more evidence there is to support a scientific theory, the more reason there is to believe in its accuracy rather than on some other theory.

The second reason, now that we are talking about supporting evidence for the Bible, is that the empirical evidence does not support the Bible's account. For instance, the biblical account is that God created the universe somewhere between 6 and 10 thousand years ago. There are numerous, independent sources of evidence that contradict this: astronomy calculates that given the distance of other stars from Earth, the fact that light is a constant (which is itself supported by Einstein's theory of relativity) would mean that it would have to travel for a certain amount of time in order to reach the Earth. Once you calculate this, it turns out that the universe is something at least 15 billion years old! That's a gigantic margin of error for the biblical account. Archeology, with the aid of chemistry principles, also indicates that fossils we have found on earth are up to 3 or 4 billion years old; the hominids from which we evolved, for instance, can be directly traced back up to 3 million years ago (that would be Lucy: Astralopithecus Afarensis). There are many other scientific findings that directly challenge the age of the earth as given by the Bible. Fossils of old organisms, which existed and went extinct long before human beings, like dinosaurs, also falsify religious scripture.

So, if all the independent evidence leads to the same conclusion, and I can show you more scientific literature on this if you wish, then the bible has not actually been proven true, even on the weaker version of 'proof' as simply being supported by the evidence.

This is not to say, however, that God does not exist. Science can't prove that, or that he exists, so any conclusion about God's existence based on scientific evidence or lack thereof will ultimately be based on a logical fallacy called the argument from ignorance.

The important point about these findings is that many of them have been found independently of each other, which means that different scientific disciplines cohere with one another creating a picture of the world that is supported from many different scientific points of view. The more that separate theories cohere, the more reason there is to believe that they are true.

Here is a video of the popular magicians Penn & Teller doing a show on the Bible's accuracy. There's some explicit language in there, so please do not feel offended, but do pay attention to how the believers and the skeptics differ in their explanations.



For those of you who do not know much about evolution, since Lori and I were having a conversation on this, I'm including to a media player to a podcast, Evolution 101, dedicated to explaining evolution in terms as easy to understand for lay people as possible, which you can find on the right side of this blog. Some versions, especially the ones on molecular genetics (episodes 108-114), are a bit technical, since that's the guy's specialty, but overall there is a lot you can learn from these short sessions. The episodes are ordered chronologically, starting from the bottom, so scroll down, click on the desired episode and learn away.

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