Science and the Art of Biblical Interpretation

I've written lots about what I am against, so what am I arguing for?

First, that the natural world is a continuum with revelation. What I mean by this is that the natural world is like a “fossil” of truth – it provides an accurate picture of what has come before.

An example? The world really is 4.5 Billion years old. Why do we know this? Multiple dating methods converge on this date, using independent properties of matter.

The implication? When Genesis describes creation, it is not describing the events in any sort of scientific manner. This would have come to a surprise to the original hearers, to believers during the life of Jesus, even to early scientists like Isaac Newton.

So how can I justify ignoring the plain meaning of the text? Well, because the plain meaning is not suported by any evidence - none. Not just in the timing of creation (6, 24-hour days), but also in the order of creation (light, day and night before the creation of the sun, for example).

One objection is that this is how God decided to do it; it was a miracle, and one of the (unintentional? unavoidable?) fallouts is that the scientific evidence points in a different direction (old earth), but the Bible sets us straight (young earth). This objection is unassailable – this could be the truth. But when I consider the odd situation that puts us in – the truth (young earth) is of no help to us (for example, flood geology is useless in finding oil), and the scientific “lie” (old earth) proves very accurate and useful information (a good way to find oil) - I am not satisfied with this explanation.

Is this kind of dualism really Biblical? For spiritual purposes, we believe in a young earth, but when we want to have an accurate model of the earth and how it works, we have to resort to the lie of an old earth?

I suppose the same can be said of evolution. In spite of all the hype, no evidence actually exists that disproves evolution, and no support for special creation can be found. What is left is personal disbelief that evolution can work. But inability to believe is not compelling, especially when you follow the evidence, and find that all the claims made to have disproven evolution turn out to be mistaken or worse, fraudulent.

So does that mean that science stands in judgment over the Bible? For me at least, not really. I view science as a natural extension of our curiosity about, and knowledge of, the world. We understand the world in a very different way than did the original hearers of the various books of the Bible. We do not believe in geocentrism. We do believe in the germ theory of disease. From Augustine to Galileo, the church taught that no one lived on the opposite side of the world (the antipodes), because Christ’s message could not have reached them. We now know that in fact people did live there, even before the time of Noah.

God, however, would not have been unaware of any of this. A clear implication is that God spoke to people in terms of their local cultural understandings and expectations. It turns out that the Bible is not a science textbook; God uses the language and experience of the people he is dealing with to communicate to them – how could he do otherwise?

It is true that this opens up sections of the Bible to interpretation; what in the Bible is cultural, and what transcends culture? This is a question that we must, and do discuss (consider the issues of multiple wives, slavery and the role of women to name just a few issues where our modern approach differs from the world found in the New Testament). It is naïve to pretend that we do not reinterpret the Bible for our time and culture. Even literalists have to explain away the order of creation in Genesis and the geocentrism of Joshua; so the question is not IF, but HOW to intepret the Bible. I believe that we must let our understanding of the natural world play a role in our approach to Biblical interpretation.