Did the Bible predict modern science better than ancient scientists did? Funny to ask. Because naive Muslims have been making the same embarrassing claim for the Koran. Over a decade ago I published an article showing how silly conservative Muslim apologists were for claiming the Koran miraculously predicted scientific facts, by demonstrating that the Epicureans (and I just used the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius at that, and thus left out many other items that could have been added), who were the least fully scientific of the philosophers of the era who produced scientific results, got right a hell of a lot more, and more precisely and clearly declared their results, than the Koran, and all explicitly through just armchair reasoning from basic observations. No miraculous communications from angels. No telecom with the gods.

That article was Predicting Modern Science: Epicurus vs. Mohammed. In that I show several logical flaws in these kinds of arguments: (1) they use a fake translation (they ignore the actual language of the text in its actual context) to “invent” a better fit with modern science post hoc (a common scam run by psychics called retrofitting); (2) they ignore the fact that mere armchair thinking often had already produced the same conclusion or comparable conclusions and often in fact more and better conclusions (thus negating any claim that such “hits” required miraculous powers or informants); (3) they get ancient science wrong (e.g. they claim that ancient scientists hadn’t discovered a thing, when in fact they had); (4) they cherry pick bizarre data so as to rely on luck giving them hits (in any vast enough tome of baloney, you will inevitably find random matches with the truth by mere chance), but miss the fact that if one actually had a miraculous line to prescient scientific knowledge, you’d be reporting way more useful shit than this (compare the relative utility of knowing that cosmic expansion or heliocentrism are true, and knowing the germ theory of disease or the basic principles of electricity—for a religion that supposedly prioritizes the welfare of humanity).

Now there is an image going around (evidently even favorably shared by actual scientists in some cases) making the same stupid claim for the Christian Bible. It’s so bad I was laughing out loud before I even finished the third line. It has been debunked before (e.g. here and here). But since ancient science is my field, I figured my own fisk would be of use to the world. So here goes…

It says across the top “how many ‘coincidences’ does it take,” with “coincidences” in scare quotes, and then across the bottom says “until one concedes that there is no such thing,” which is a multiply stupid statement. Obviously there is such a thing as a coincidence; the most charitable thing I can suppose is that the chart’s composer sucks at grammar. There is also no awareness of what the actual frequency of random chance correct guesses would be in a tome of such enormous size. But cleaning up their awful, the point they are attempting to make is that this chart (consisting of eleven lines of material in between those two headlines) shows the Bible is more scientifically prescient than chance can explain, therefore it must have been inspired by spacefaring extraterrestrials with advanced scientific knowledge…oh wait, I mean…by invisible immortal ghost-monsters telepathically communicating with ancient novelists…er, I mean, by baby Jesus. Or proto-fetal Jesus, since this was in many cases before he was a baby. Or dead Jesus. Since in other cases it is supposedly coming from his reanimated corpse in outer space. But point being, these are supposed to be amazingly accurate guesses, outdoing even ancient scientists in their knowledge of the universe.

I could not trace the origin of this exact chart. Versions exist all over, with different counts of items, in different order, but usually otherwise verbatim. The closest to a version of this chart I could find is in Anthony Walker’s Transformation: Living a Christian Life, in which he says “the Bible is the only book that is accurate in all scientific details” and “it has never been proven incorrect in one scientific aspect” (pp. 23-24). The data would seem to suggest that this is the most astonishing line of bullshit ever uttered in the history of the human race: just survey RationalWiki, Iron Chariots, Skeptics Annotated Bible, Science and the Bible Archive, Freethoughtpedia, and ironically, Discovering Islam; I also highly recommend Ed Babinski’s excellent article “The Cosmology of the Bible,” in The Christian Delusion, which puts the Bible’s “science” in the context of its surrounding cultures, finding it pretty much is just copying them, often badly, and getting things just as wrong in result. But whatever. My interest for now is just in this chart.

Some of the content of the chart going around now is nearly forty years old at least. Google traces some of it as far back as 1976, when some of the lines now in it were probably composed by Hugh Ross. A scientist. Who should have known better. Sometimes you find its data extracted and expanded upon, unsourced, like here (where sixteen items instead of eleven are cited, by adding such facepalm-worthy boners as that Job 38:24 describes the spectral theory of light and the solarthermal theory of wind production, merely because it says, “How is light scattered, how is the east wind dispersed across the earth?”). If anyone wants to untangle the complex history of this chart, I welcome it, but I won’t be doing that. I’ll just address the chart with its eleven items lately circulating. I’ll also first address the twelfth item that appears on Walker’s chart but not on this one (I suspect it was cut to make the chart more easily formatted as a perfect square for graphical convenience on the internet):

The chart has three columns:

• The first column says “The Bible,” and lists what the Bible supposedly says, with the verse. The only time the chart’s composers show any interest in sourcing their claims. As we’ll see, this lack of sourcing causes many mistakes.
• The second column then says “Science Then,” and states what supposedly scientists of the time believed. It never dates either the books of the Bible, or the scientific knowledge it is being compared to, which is detail worthy of a good facepalm. Because the Bible’s books were all written in different centuries over the course of a thousand years. And scientific knowledge continually advanced in that period. (It also varied by culture, but I am charitably assuming they mean by “science” the most advanced science of the period, as anything else would be an immediate fallacy.)
• The third column then says “Science Now,” and states what the actual scientific truth of the matter is. We are supposed to be impressed that the Bible matches this column and not the second.

Here is what happens when we look at all eleven items on the chart, in the chart’s own order (the twelfth, appearing only on Walker’s version, I’ll start with first, even though it comes last)…

That Science of Washing

Walker’s twelfth claim, cut from this chart, but matching the same column headings, reads as follows:

• The Bible: “When dealing with disease, hands should be washed under running water,” citing Leviticus 15:13.
• Science Then: “Hands washed in still water.”
• Science Now: “When dealing with disease, hands should be washed under running water.”

I have no idea where they get the idea that ancient medical texts recommend only washing in still water. I also wonder at why, if the Bible was so particularly informed on this, Jesus said this very Levitical law was to be abandoned, and that we are not to wash our hands anymore at all, even when preparing food (Mark 7). And of course, it would be impressive if the text actually explained the germ theory of disease, instead of simply mentioning a custom someone could simply have noticed worked better or logically should (if you need a spiritual stain to “go away,” you need a cleanser that “goes away” as well). This is not a sign of miraculous access to scientific knowledge. But it’s worse than that. Every column is wrong.

First, the Bible. Not one word is said in that chapter of Leviticus about disease in general (much less wound care, where this would be especially important). The Jewish idea of uncleanness is about spiritual infection, not biological. One became “unclean” by merely touching any corpse at all, even of an insect (Lev. 5)—and in the Mishnah, that includes dry bones, tombstones, even the shadows of tombstones (tractate Niddah). It included statues (Lev. 7:21). It included the homes of dead people and any open container whatever (Number 19). It included touching a woman, any part of a woman, during or even near to her period (Lev. 15), or even for a week after she gives birth—to a boy, that is; two weeks if a girl (Lev. 12). It included touching a man, any part of a man, or anything he has touched, after any time he has ejaculated, until sundown—because the position of the sun cures imaginary diseases (Lev. 15). It included eating bacon or shellfish or touching a bunny rabbit—or any object that has touched any of these things or anything that has touched such objects (Lev. 11).

And so on. All absurdities. This is massively ignorant of any science of disease. It’s not much better when they even do include things that could possibly present a biohazard (Lev. 13-15), e.g. their fear of blood, poop, snot, and leprosy (the only disease ever distinctly named in the Bible), since there they don’t even know how diseases work or how to diagnose them, and worse, are ignorant of the actual vectors for infection. It’s well and fine to obsessively avoid anyone bleeding, although that’s an ignorant over-protocol, but in fact most diseases are transferred by invisible shedding of bacteria and viruses, even by the touching of a door knob by a man not visibly shedding any fluids at all, or speaking to you in close proximity. And notice, nowhere in Leviticus do they realize gloves or face masks might be useful, or how to sterilize an infected area (e.g. a doorknob) beyond just outright burning it, which is an amusingly primitive over-protocol, or washing it—in plain water (because the gods communicating to the authors of Leviticus didn’t know about soap). This is not a sign of knowing how science works.

Indeed, as I noted, the only actual disease ever mentioned in the Bible is leprosy. The Bible has no other knowledge of distinct diseases. It knows symptoms but not causes. And it probably didn’t really even know leprosy either. And nowhere does the Bible express any awareness that nearly every disease it records symptoms of has a cure. Instead, it thinks if you cast a spell by having your local wizard stab two turtledoves, all will be well (Leviticus 15:14). The magical spell the text implies in fact was probably even more elaborately ridiculous (Lev. 14:4-7). So much for the Bible being miraculously prescient about science.

But the kicker is this. Leviticus 15:13 doesn’t actually mean running water in the necessary sense. It isn’t so specific. Greek translations by ancient Rabbinical experts didn’t even include the qualifier. But that qualifier, when included, means living water. Which refers to the source of the water: natural rather than human (Gen. 26:19). “Living” water (which did indeed “run” but didn’t have to be running when you bathed in it: Numbers 19:17) had magical power. For example, in the leprosy-curing magical spell, if you stabbed a dove over an earthenware pot that sat above living water, it had magical power to cure. Note at no time does that water touch the dove or the pot or the wizard—or the patient. It’s just being there has this magical power, by proximity (Lev. 14:4-7). You then were to dip the second bird, while still alive, in the blood of the first bird, then into the living water, and wave this bird around the house, along with sprinkling the first bird’s blood and some of the “living water” all around in the leper’s house seven times, and waving about more magical ingredients like hyssop and cedar, to magically sterilize the home (Leviticus 14:49-53). Which then letting the second bird fly away free will accomplish. Because that’s how science works.

Second, Science Then. Were ancient health care providers only instructed to wash with still water? I’d be curious how the chart’s author knows that or what their source for it is. Much less, for when Leviticus was written. For wound care, even pre-Biblical Egyptians and Sumerians (and then the Greeks and Romans who inherited this knowledge) knew how to reduce infection with antibiotic agents (honey) and sealants (grease) and disinfectants (vinegar and turpentine, as well as premixed wine, which had a high alcohol content). You don’t find this knowledge in the Bible. And the Egyptians didn’t learn it from ghosts or space aliens. They just figured it out—by luck, trial and error, and rudimentary observation. This belies the stupid idea that someone similarly figuring out running water works better than still at decontamination must require a miracle.

Although, again, the Bible wasn’t aware of biological contamination. It just thought uncleanness was a magical force residing even in bunnies, dry bones and menstruating women. So it wasn’t basing its “running water” idea on observation. It was basing it on the logic of wizards: surely the best way to get that magical taint off of your skin was to start with magically fresh water (because water from a natural source can’t ever be contaminated—oh wait…) and expel that water from your skin quickly so it can carry the magic taint away (an effect its “running” served to accomplish, if even in fact it still had to be running to have this power).

But now let’s compare this feeble wizardry-passing-for-science in the Bible with the actual height of ancient science: the best knowledge and theories they accomplished before modern times (because basically no medical knowledge was acquired in the “Middle Ages” in between—in fact, most of it was then forgotten and had to be rediscovered before it could be advanced upon). We have medical texts on disease care and wound care. It’s discussed in Celsus’s first century Medical Encyclopedia and in various books by Galen, among elsewhere. They are filled with much better, more detailed, and more practical advice about reducing infection and contamination—despite not fully being aware of everything. They name and classify and catalog the symptoms and progression of many diseases. And amongst a lot of bad ideas as well, they also had a plausible scientific theory of contamination (by small and thereby invisible “disease particles”), and even toyed with the idea of biological infection (disease transfer by animals too small to be visible to the human eye). None of this can be found in the Bible.

Before the Christian era, Varro, in On Agricultural Matters 1.12.2-3, said he and others believed “certain animals grow” in swampy places “that are too small to be seen and float in the air, entering the body through the mouth or nose, causing serious diseases.” And disease ‘seeds’ were also widely imagined as (sometimes mutating) chemicals passing through the air, water, or food, a theory articulated in Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 6.1090-1144, and still debated two centuries later in Plutarch’s Tabletalk 8.9. The chemicals and procedures used by ancient medical practitioners were kept or designed to combat the transfer of these infection particles (whether imagined as living or not). Would that the Bible had said that. And yet, again, none of these scientifically prescient ideas was miraculous.

Third, Science Now. One word. Soap. The idea that modern science “teaches us” that we must wash our hands under running water is not true. Still water will be fine if you use a sterilizer. Soap is just the most common such. We have a whole array of sterilizing agents now, just as I noted ancient doctors had, and we have even better ones now. None of which are ever mentioned in the Bible. No angels or aliens ever thought to tell the Biblical authors about sterilizing agents. Moreover, as I noted, the Bible did not mean running water like out of a tap. It meant living water, as in water procured from a natural source, “uncontaminated” by such human instruments like, you know, plumbing.

Modern Christians Suck at Geometry

On the chart circulating now, the first item listed reads as follows:

• The Bible: “The earth is a sphere,” citing Isaiah 40:22.
• Science Then: “The earth was a flat disk.”
• Science Now: “The earth is a sphere.”

Aside from the strange inconsistent way the chart uses capitalization (why is “disk” is not capitalized but “Sphere” is?), the biggest boner here is that whoever compiled this one (and it looks like the actual astronomer Hugh Ross did) doesn’t know the difference between a sphere and a circle. A basic geometry fumble. Here is the reality:

First, the Bible. Isaiah 40:22 does not say the earth is a sphere. It says it is a circle. Which is flat. The word for circle is chuwg (Job 22:14 and 26:10; Proverbs 8:27). The word for sphere is duwr (Isaiah 22:18). The latter can also mean circle. But the former never means sphere. It refers to walking around a thing (a two-dimensional activity). The word for ball, instead, derives from heaping things up, from huts to garbage piles (a three-dimensional activity). Even Greek translations by ancient Rabbinical experts used gyron, “circle,” rather than sphaira, “sphere,” so even they understood this to mean circle and not sphere. So, in fact, Isaiah 40:22 says the earth is a flat disk. Like every other culture thought at the time. Babinski’s chapter cited above goes into more detail comparing the ancient Hebrew cosmology of the structure of earth and heavens throughout the Bible, well establishing it was the same primitive model adopted by everyone else of the time, not some fancy new scientific one.

Second, Science Then. In actual fact the sphericity of the earth was not only scientifically known by the time of Aristotle (at the dawn of the 4th century B.C.), but had been empirically proved by scientific means in the centuries before him (Aristotle records at least six correct scientific proofs of the earth’s sphericity). We don’t know when exactly the idea was first proffered, or first proved, but it was likely first being toyed with or demonstrated by Thales in the 7th century B.C. and certainly by other Greek astronomers not long after. That the earth was a flat disk was still assumed by Hecetaeus in the 5th century, but possibly the then-growing astronomical discoveries to the contrary were not standard knowledge yet. They were by the end of that century. Not only did they know it was a sphere, but two centuries before the Christian era, Eratosthenes empirically determined the diameter of the earth (accurate to within a 10% measure). Note that (a) none of these facts are in the Bible and (b) none of them required miraculous communications with gods or aliens.

Third, Science Now. Though here at least the chart gets modern science right, if we accept the vagueness one would also have to charitably ascribe to the ignorant Isaiah, it might be worth noting that it is technically untrue. Modern science has found that the shape of the earth is an oblate spheroid, fattened at the equator, whose shape is actually always changing (geologically, and tidally). I don’t mention this to be cheeky. I mention it to illustrate the difference between what amazing scientific knowledge looks like, and random retrofitted bullshit pulled out of a giant hat of ancient poetic expressions of human ignorance. Even the ancients had a fully developed lunisolar tide theory (thanks to Seleucus, pupil of Aristarchus, who was also the first to propose the heliocentric theory), and thus knew the shape of the earth changed with the position of the sun and moon due to an attractive force projected by each (Strabo, Geography 3.5.8 and 1.1.8-12; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 2.99.212-218 and 2.102.221; etc.). Apparently, like Bill O’Reilly, God didn’t know that.

How Many Stars?

Second in line is this:

• The Bible: “Innumerable stars,” citing Jeremiah 33:22.
• Science Then: “Only 1100 stars.”
• Science Now: “Innumerable stars.”

The weirdest thing here is that the chart’s author thinks the inability to count is more scientifically accurate than an actual count. I mean, even a pigeon on my windowsill knows the number of stars are innumerable. How is that miraculous knowledge? Charitably, though, I’ll assume the claim is meant to be more cognitively impressive: that the number of stars is infinite. Otherwise, there is nothing impressive about saying you failed to count how many there were.

First, the Bible. The actual verse says, “As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured: so will I multiply the seed of David my servant, and the Levites that minister unto me.” To begin with, this is just a poetic expression for what we would today describe as “I’ll give you such a shit-ton of babies you won’t even be able to count them any more than you can stars or grains of sand in the sea.” In other words, it simply says no one could count the stars or sand grains then. It isn’t saying the stars are infinite in number. Nor, incidentally, is it saying they aren’t 1100 in number. Just because the author thought no one could count them then, doesn’t mean had they counted they wouldn’t have gotten 1100 as their result. It would be impressive if the Bible gave an actual count of stars here, and science confirmed that that was exactly the number of stars there were.

Second, Science Then. I don’t know where the chart’s author got 1100 as the number of counted stars in antiquity. Jeremiah lived in the 7th-6th century B.C. No one by that time had made much of an effort to chart the entire star field. Astronomical cultures like the Babylonians had named a lot of them, the ones they found useful for their calendrics and astrology, but they never tried to name them all. The first attempts at a comprehensive map of the stars began among the 3rd century Greek astronomers. Hipparchus in the 2nd century B.C. got as far as around 850 before death interrupted his progress. Though notably, by comparing his charts with previous ones, he discovered precession: the fact that the sky not only rotates, but wobbles like a top describing a complete circuit over 25,000-35,000 years.

The number of charted stars rose to 1,022 under Ptolemy in the 2nd century A.D., the last star chart we still have from then. This is close enough to “1100” that I suspect this is what Hugh Ross meant (the originator of this line of the chart, best I can tell). He must have rounded up, or followed some modern author on ancient astronomy who had done so. The problem is, this number was never a claim that “this is how many stars there are.” It is, rather, only the number Ptolemy could in his lifetime record the position and longitude of, give a name to, and include in his star catalog for the use of other astronomers (and for making future calculations like those of Hipparchus). He probably simply “updated” the data of Hipparchus by calculation, and only made independent observations for his additions (and only confirming that their relative positions matched expectation).

So it’s disingenuous to claim that ancient astronomers thought there were only 1100 stars. Ancient astronomers just happened to chart and name 1100 stars (or so). That’s not the same thing. To the contrary, they were well aware the number grew with observation (Ptolemy knew he had to add more to the chart he inherited from Hipparchus, for example). Indeed, they knew the number of stars physically increased over time (Hipparchus famously observed and charted the first supernova, and concluded that this meant new stars form). And some had even already proposed they were infinite in number. That was actually one of the armchair calculations of the Epicureans, who had pretty good logical arguments for the conclusion (falling foul only at the point of not considering non-Euclidean geometry). As Lucretius records, they had even anticipated that stars were in fact distant suns, with their own associated planets. You don’t get anything as amazingly prescient in the Bible. And yet, this was not a miraculous guess. It was just a smart one.

Third, Science Now. Of course, we only happen to now know that we can’t count the stars because most of them are beyond the luminal horizon (i.e. so far, their light hasn’t even reached us yet to be seen, much less counted). We suspect the number might be literally infinite (if inflation could possibly have had that effect), although they could be finite, and in which case they might one day be counted by estimate. If ever we know the size and average stellar density of the universe, we can calculate to a roughly accurate figure the total number of stars there can be in it. Notably, three centuries before the Christian era, Archimedes did this to calculate the number of grains of sand that could fill the then-known universe, so as to make an upper bound to the total number there could be, in his book The Sand Reckoner, a feat incomprehensible to Jeremiah.

But if, of course, we mean the number of stars that are visible to us now, we actually can count those, and are actively doing so. We’re even naming them (or rather, computers are; but we built and programmed the computers, so we get the credit). If the Bible had given us such an estimate as that (the number of trillions of stars that would be visible within the next few thousand years) or told us that the number of visible stars will increase with time, or that most of the visible stars actually don’t exist anymore (the stars having died long since their light left them to reach us), we might have had something impressive. But “we can’t count them” is not even remotely an impressive thing to say.

What Does the Air Weigh?

This line reads:

• The Bible: “Air has weight,” citing Job 28:25.
• Science Then: “Air is weightless.”
• Science Now: “Air has weight.”

This one looks more interesting than it is.

First, the Bible. Job was written over the course of the 6th to 4th centuries B.C. The verse in question says, “[God decides] the weight of the winds, the measure of the waters” and decrees lightning and rain, and otherwise governs the natural world. This does not actually say air has weight. It certainly does not say what air weighs, which would be a scientifically impressive thing to report. What it clearly refers to is dynamic pressure. The Bible just didn’t have the vocabulary to distinguish changes in air pressure (wind force) from the Neutonian concept of mass. Job is saying that God decides how strong the winds will be. Obviously, since saying what the air in a wind “weighs” would be a pointless thing to reference here. He is talking about governance, and thus about visible phenomena: Who decides when a breeze becomes a gale? God.

Second, Science Then. How does the author of this chart know that ancient scientists said air is weightless? In fact, ancient scientists were well aware that it wasn’t. Already by the time of Democritus, whose ideas promulgated in the very same centuries of the composition of Job, air was regarded as a collection of atoms with weight. Even Aristotle’s competing theory of five elements regarded air as having relative weight (it was heavier than fire) and of having momentum (air could produce friction against objects moving through it, and propel objects). Aristotle even claimed directly to have weighed air (On the Heavens 4.4), and although the surviving description of his experiment would not have worked, he nevertheless believed, and taught, the result. (Thus proving that one needn’t miraculous communications from the gods to claim this; one could accidentally come to the same conclusion even by a mere scientific error.)

Possibly already by the time of Strato, the third to chair Aristotle’s school, and Philo (an engineer of Byzantium), and certainly by the time of the physicist Heron in the first century A.D., actual laboratory experiments using instruments were already being done to demonstrate the weight and density of air, and using air as a conveyor of force. Strato, certainly, concluded that air had weight, and rose not because of seeking a natural place as Aristotle argued, but because heavier objects displaced lighter ones—a principle proved and fully mathematized by Archimedes a century later (for water as the surrounding medium). Strato had already proposed, and by the time of Heron it had been experimentally proved, that hot air rises and cool air descends; and that this was a function of air density was also demonstrated by experiment (though they had not yet mathematized that concept as Boyle would, or made precise measurements of specific effects as Galileo would).

From what we can tell from Simplicius, the 2nd century A.D. astronomer and physicist Ptolemy (in a work that did not survive the Middle Ages) had merged the atomist and Aristotelian principles of air having weight. His conclusion was that if by “weight” we mean downward force (a distinct property from mass), air only has weight until it reaches its “natural place,” which for him was simply where it met an equilibrium of pressure. Which is correct (when excluding the question of atmospheric pressure). To tease out the separate issue of mass was another matter that wouldn’t be explored experimentally for over a thousand more years. And the Bible shows no signs of grasping this distinction either. The distinction did loosely exist among ancient scientists (the idea of mass as a property of a body resisting motion, for example), and air was regarded as having mass in that sense. Even Aristotle knew air resisted motion, and the atomists held that to be the case even as a matter of dogma, while Roman physicists employed the fact of air having a force-carrying mass to move objects in machinery through artificially produced air pressure.

Notably, Strato regarded wind (and thus wind force) to be a product of differences in air pressure caused by differences in temperature, and Heron used this principle to power machinery—inventing the wind-powered water pump, for example, as well as using artificially heated air to displace water and thereby open a door by the resultant shifting of weight (and allowing the cooled air to retract, allowing the water to return to its vessel, closing the door). This is all vastly more sophisticated than anything we find stated about air in the Bible. And yet it’s not even yet modern science.

This ancient understanding of air’s weight and mass, and its uses and relations to wind, was not fully worked out. But even after accounting for all the differing views and ideas about it, no one of the era believed “Air is weightless.”

Third, Science Now. Of course we now know from abundant empirical discovery that air is made of atoms, as all ancient scientists of the Greco-Roman era agreed it was, and we likewise know what it’s precise molecular weight is, and how the weight of any volume of air is a function of its atomic weight and the density of the air in that volume, which in turn can be a function of temperature, all concepts even the ancients had worked out (just not to a mathematical law—nor had they yet measured the mass of air, at all much less per atom). We also know clearly now the distinction between weight and mass—and momentum, the property closer to what Job was trying to describe—something the ancients hadn’t fully worked out but were toying around with different ideas of. The Bible? Doesn’t come anywhere near this. Had the Bible told us that air consists principally of oxygen and nitrogen and traces of a few other things, and what the atomic weight of oxygen and nitrogen were, that would have been hella impressive. But the Bible isn’t impressive. Not even at all. Much less hella.

What Kind of Stars?

This one is a classic example of the chart’s author not realizing the Biblical authors are using the known science of their time to build their cosmology from. This line reads:

• The Bible: “Each star is different,” citing 1 Corinthians 15:41.
• Science Then: “All stars were the same.”
• Science Now: “Each star is different.”

This one is just silly upon silly.

First, the Bible. 1 Corinthians was written by Paul in the 50s A.D. The passage in question says each star differs in its “glory,” and we can plausibly assume he meant luminosity. So far so good. Although note, this claim does not exist in the much older Old Testament books. I wonder why it only appears in the newest books?

Second, Science Then. Oh, I know. Because the differing luminosity of stars was a standard instruction point in basic astronomy class in the schools of Paul’s time. Though astronomy classes specifically were taken only by the most well-heeled or ambitious teenagers of the time, even basic grammar school and advanced rhetor’s classes (of the sort Paul we know took, because he writes Greek with a skill only those who had taken such coursework could accomplish then) included this rudimentary data in the glossing of poetry. The fact is, over a century before the Christian era Hipparchus created a six-point scale to describe (and in fact track over time) the differing magnitude of stars. This scale is still used today (though expanded to account for stars so faint only telescopes can detect them). The underlying idea became integrated into ancient textbooks like Intro to the Phenomena by Geminus (who wrote just before the Christian era). So when Paul repeats this knowledge, that is in fact all he is doing: repeating common science knowledge promulgated in the schools Paul attended.

Third, Science Now. We know so much more now about how stars differ from each other, well beyond luminosity, which in fact is not even an innate property of stars, but a conjoined function of innate luminosity and distance from earth (and, sometimes, intervening dust etc., and insofar as it affects spectral visibility, the Hubble shift as well). Had the Bible told us of the existence of neutron stars or black holes or red giants or white dwarfs, and what made them differ from each other not just in appearance but internal mechanism, that would have been impressive. But “some stars are brighter than others” is an observation any idiot will make.

Ah, Once Again, the Velocity of Light

Muslim apologists have tried really embarrassingly to claim the Koran predicted the speed of light. It didn’t. But now Christians are trying a weaker claim for their holy book: that it at least got the fact right that light has a velocity.

This line reads:

• The Bible: “Light moves,” citing Job 38:19-20.
• Science Then: “Light was fixed in place.”
• Science Now: “Light moves.”

What a bizarre example.

First, the Bible. Job says, “Where does light dwell? And darkness, where does it dwell? That you may take it to its territory, and that you should know the paths to either’s house?” Huh? How does this say light moves again? It doesn’t. Oh well. Really what Job is saying is that it is absurd to think light and darkness can be contained in a place, that there is a place you can go to where they reside. This in no way requires light to move. It simply requires light to not be collectible into a pot, say, in the same way darkness cannot be. You can’t go gathering it up, and it doesn’t come from anywhere, it just is. Notably, Job has no knowledge of there being a difference between light and darkness—the latter is not for him the absence of the former, but is in fact its own separate substance. This is hardly a scientifically accurate grasp of reality.

Second, Science Then. But you know who did say light has a velocity? Ancient scientists. Yup. Lucretius argues light has a finite velocity in De Rerum Natura 2.144-156 and 4.183-216. He also presciently argues that light is made of particles (2.144-156, 4.183-216, 4.364-378, 5.281-305). His reasoning isn’t totally sound. But that just goes to show you, once again, one could get this one right even by erroneous armchair reasoning back in the day. No miraculous telecoms needed. In fact, in the 2nd century A.D., Ptolemy, the greatest scientist of vision in antiquity, not only said light moves and has a finite velocity, but he even proposed that the index and laws of refraction (which he was the first to begin experimentally documenting) were a product of variations in the velocity of light, which happens to be correct (this he begins to discuss at the end of the surviving fragment of Optics 5; the remainder of that and the following chapters did not survive the Middle Ages, which is shocking, considering the lost chapter 6 covered his measuring experiments with concave and convex lenses!).

I cannot even understand where the chart’s author got the idea that anyone in antiquity thought light “was fixed in place.” I don’t even know what that means. Obviously light sources could be created and extinguished. So no one would have imagined light as “fixed in place.” I can only suppose Hugh Ross sucked so badly as a writer that he meant light’s velocity was mistakenly thought to be infinite, such that when you started a fire, the light from it instantly traveled from source to destination, becoming a fixed object in effect.

Third, Science Now. Why couldn’t God tell the author of Job the velocity of light? Oh, right. Because God doesn’t exist. Duh.

Oh, and you know what? Modern science entails that, according to the Theory of Relativity, from God’s frame of reference, light doesn’t move. It’s fixed in place. Oops.

Earth Floats

The sixth line says:

• The Bible: “Free float of earth in space,” citing Job 26:7.
• Science Then: “Earth sat on a large animal.”
• Science Now: “Free float of earth in space.”

Why is the author of Job imagined so gifted with science lessons from God? Because cherry picking retrofitted bullshit in a large collection of texts will produce random clustering like this. Not the answer the Christian wants. But there it is.

First, the Bible. The passage reads, “[God] stretches the north [i.e. the sky] over empty space [i.e. the air], and hangs the earth upon nothing.” This contradicts the very same book when it says the earth was laid on foundations (Job 38:4-6). There are only two logically possible options: the earth rests on a foundation, or the earth rests on nothing. The same book of Job says both things. This is a common scam used by storefront psychics: say every possible thing is true, and then when one of those things comes true, as it necessarily must, claim you made a miraculous prediction. And hope the rubes don’t notice you predicted the opposite as well. Just, you know, don’t call attention to that. Like this chart’s author.

Well, or perhaps we should notice that hang and rest are not the same thing. God does not hang the earth on anything. He rests it on something: the pillars of the earth. For “the pillars of the earth are Jehovah’s, and he has set the world upon them” (1 Sam. 2:8, with which fact the author of Job agrees: Job 9:6, obviously the foundation on which earth is set that Job 38 refers to). Either way, you don’t get any prescient science out of this.

Second, Science Then. Of course, that the earth hung unsupported in the cosmos was the standard view of ancient scientists ever since the discovery that it was a sphere. The notion existed in some cultures even before then. After all, even random guessing will get you this result 50% of the time. But in the Greco-Roman era, the earth was regarded as having no support and needing none, either because it was the center of the universe (thus a correct conclusion from incorrect reasoning: so much for this being miraculous), or because everything was eternally falling through the void. The latter was the atomist view, which is technically correct. It was missing only a universal law of gravitation—which Greco-Roman scientists had long been considering, as discussed by Plutarch in the first, being the astrophysical, half of his treatise, On the Face in the Orb of the Moon. I have no idea where the author of the chart (in this case, definitely not Ross) got the idea that ancient scientists thought the earth rested on an animal. Throughout Western cultures, pre-scientific cosmology imagined the earth rested on pillars. The idea of it resting on animals was Asian (indeed, even in Western mythology, Atlas held up the sky, not the earth).

Third, Science Now. Of course in fact the earth does not just float free in space. It does not “hang upon nothing” but in fact is bound to the sun and thus anchored into its orbit by gravity, by which means the sun is in turn bound to the core of the galaxy, and the galaxy to its local cluster. What a thing it would have been had the Bible said that!

Cyclones!

The seventh line reads:

• The Bible: “Winds blow in cyclones,” citing Ecclesiastes 1:6.
• Science Then: “Winds blew straight.”
• Science Now: “Winds blow in cyclones.”

First, the Bible. The passage says, “The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it turneth about continually in its course, and the wind returneth again to its circuits,” in the context of saying the sun does the same thing, and so does the water that cycles somehow between rivers and ocean—the implication is that somehow the water travels under the land to refill the rivers. A clear description of the actual hydrological cycle (the water of the sea evaporates, is carried as clouds by wind over land, where they discharge as rain, to flow back to the sea through the rivers—none of which is described in Job 38:25-30 or Ecclesiastes 1:6-7, despite it being claimed to be) is already found in the De Rerum Natura of Lucreius (6.495-523). The atomists simply guessed that, based on armchair reasoning from some few observations. Yet the Bible couldn’t even give us that. Instead we get some vague handwaving about how the water comes back to its source somehow. But the point being, Ecclesiastes is engaging in armchair reasoning: he assumes everything must be a cycle, from the analogy of the sun, and so says this must somehow be the case for water, and so it must somehow be the case for the winds. In fact, what he describes is not a cyclone: the wind blows south, then it blows north. This was simply an observation of the fact of where he stood: the wind keeps changing direction back and forth. This is in no way a prescient scientific discovery.

Second, Science Then. As I already noted, ancient scientists believed wind was caused by pressure differentials caused by temperature differentials. Which is correct. That’s some impressive guesswork! Yet, they didn’t need miraculous communications to get this idea. If a far more impressive guess can result from unaided armchair reasoning, Ecclesiastes looks wholly unintelligent by comparison. Of course, observed wind patterns in the Mediterranean world did not match Eccesiastes. But they were well aware that the wind changes directions back and forth, not only because they observed the fact, but because air must continually return to replace displaced air. And Ecclesiastes in fact says nothing more than this. The ancients, by contrast, knew that the sun’s heat (and thus season, and time of day, and local topography) drove the winds and aided in determining their direction throughout the day. Ecclesiastes mentions none of this.

Third, Science Now. That wind must blow in cyclones in the loose sense that air must return to replace the air that has moved is actually an obvious deduction of logic, so it’s hardly an impressive prediction for science. What would be impressive is explaining something that wasn’t obvious. Like the existence and physics of the jet stream. Or that there are winds on Jupiter but not on the Moon. And since winds don’t always form regular cyclone patterns on the earth’s surface, but complex interactive networks of air exchanges, even if Ecclesiastes said “winds always travel in circles,” Ecclesiastes would be wrong. If, for example, Ecclesiastes had said there are “six major wind belts around the world” that move in alternating directions, we’d be looking at remarkable knowledge. Knowing your local winds change direction is not remarkable knowledge.

Let’s Go Live in Ocean Valley

The eighth line says:

• The Bible: “Ocean floor contains deep valleys and mountains,” citing 2 Samuel 22:16 and Jonah 2:6.
• Science Then: “The ocean floor was flat.”
• Science Now: “Ocean floor contains deep valleys and mountains.”

First, the Bible. Neither passage cited says any such thing. 2 Samuel simply says “the channels of the sea became apparent” when God shook the earth. This simply refers to the channels containing the sea. In other words, the conduits of the sea. He is describing the incredibly wrathful scene of the earth being shaken like a bath tub, and the sides of the tub normally covered by water being laid bare. These are simply the shelf of the land as it descends into the valley that forms the sea. There is no reference here to hidden valleys beneath even that. The Jonah passage, meanwhile, with the statement “as the waters compassed me about…the deep was around me and the weeds were wrapped about my head and I went down to the bottoms of the mountains, the earth with its bars closed upon me,” describes the same visual fact: that the foot of every mountain ends in the valley of the sea. Thus, to sink to the bottom of the sea, is to sink to the bottom of the mountains. Not secret hidden underwater mountains. The mountains. As in, the mountains on land. There is no reference in either passage to underwater mountains and valleys, deep or otherwise.

Second, Science Then. No one knew what was under the sea. So no ancient scientist said it was mountainous or flat. It’s silly to claim that was what they assumed. To the contrary, they were well aware the topography could be complex. This was a heavily seafaring culture, and seafaring required awareness of the differing topography of regions of sea, as some channels were shallow and some deep, some had underwater rocks, others not. The notion that there could be more down there was already explored in the imagination of Plato with his legend of Atlantis (a story that entails there being an island, hence a mountain, under the sea). And Eratosthenes (and others before and after him) wrote about paleontological discoveries of sea fossils on mountaintops, concluding that those mountaintops must have once been under the sea. Such a view entails recognizing the possibility of mountains (and thus, by converse relation, valleys) beneath the sea still. Astonishing that God didn’t think to tell his publicists about sea fossils on mountaintops. What PR for Noah’s tale that would have been!

Third, Science Now. We now have good bathymetric maps of the sea floor all over the earth. There are indeed mountains and valleys, in fact crevices of vast depth beyond imagining. Notably the Bible doesn’t mention cracks six miles deep where the pressure is a thousand times greater than atop the sea. That would indeed have been something startling for Job to know. But we also now know about entire oceans that no one in the Bible knew existed. It’s strange that Christian apologists think it impressive that someone in Biblical times could vaguely imagine hills and valleys might be under the Mediterranean (the only sea of great size they knew), even though of course they didn’t (as we just saw, no one in the Bible ever said any such thing), yet none of the angels bending their ear thought to tell them about the Americas. Or the Pacific. Or even, in fact, the Atlantic.

Blood Is the Lifeblood of Bloodlife

The ninth line says:

• The Bible: “Blood is the source of life and health,” citing Leviticus 17:11.
• Science Then: “Sick people must be bled.”
• Science Now: “Blood is the source of life and health.”

First, the Bible. When Leviticus says “the life of the flesh is in the blood,” it’s referring to magical spellcasting (the powerful use of blood in atonement magic), and avoiding the magical contagion that comes from consuming blood (a non-existent worry that betrays a profound ignorance of science). That’s not exactly sciency.

Second, Science Then. The chart’s author clearly is stretching this one, since the logic of their argument requires that ancient scientists not know that blood is necessary for sustaining life. Which is of course ludicrous. Everyone was well aware that blood is necessary for life (except for all the life on earth that doesn’t use blood…which is actually most of the life on earth). And already centuries before the Christian era, anatomical investigations and experiments had been conducted (such as by Herophilus and Erasistratus) that determined why the blood was necessary for life, the only detail about blood that can actually be called a scientific discovery. A detail nowhere found in the Bible. To the contrary. It took these empirical physiologists to discover, by ordinary human means, what the authors of the Bible were never told by their celestial informants: that blood carries air from the lungs and nutrients from the stomach (and intestines) to the rest of the body, and then carries waste products down to the kidneys for filtration out into the bladder for eventual removing as urine (they had not yet discovered the respiratory cycle, which included gas waste sent back to the lungs).

Instead, the chart’s author is trying to make a dig at the medical practice of bloodletting. Ironically, considering the disturbingly obsessive importance of a bloodletting mutilation to the Bible’s god: circumcision. If the author thinks bleeding is bad for you because you need that blood, then evidently no one in the Bible got that memo, as they dangerously bled every male baby born. Often adults, too (Joshua 5). On God’s orders. Case in point is Exodus 4:

And it came to pass on the way at the lodging-place, that Jehovah met Moses, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a flint, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet. And she said, ‘Surely a bridegroom of blood art thou to me’. So he let him alone. Then she said, ‘A bridegroom of blood art thou, because of the circumcision’.

Yeah. God goes up to Moses and tries to kill him. For some reason (WTF?). Then Moses’ bedmate bleeds his son and throws the bloody mutilated body part at his (Moses?) feet. Then casts a spell—uttering a phrase of power after correctly performing the blood ritual. Then God says, oh, okay, my bad. And leaves them alone (WTF?). This isn’t like the cutting out of hundreds of the foreskins of corpses and delivering them as a wedding present (1 Sam. 18; 2 Sam. 3). That totally makes sense. I mean, who wouldn’t want a pile of those at their wedding? But hacking them off of living people, even babies, and throwing their shed blood around. That’s weird.

It also has to be said, from a Christian POV, we must conclude God doesn’t really think we need our blood in us all the time, because he designed women to bleed automatically for days of every month. Evidently, “the life of the flesh is in the blood,” so women need to dump theirs on the ground periodically. That makes sense.

Back to reality, though—where gods don’t make people, and thus aren’t responsible for this really shitty reproductive system design in women, and where we all know circumcision absent modern medicine was a really fucking stupid idea—bloodletting as a medical practice was not done in ignorance of the role blood played in sustaining life and health. It was done in awareness that blood also carried the pathogens and toxins causing illness. Which is also true. And why we actually still bleed people (see below). More importantly, however, ancient scientists disagreed on this. Erasistratus actually argued bloodletting was a bad idea. Galen argued the reverse. Guess which doctor Medieval Christians agreed with and thus preserved the writings of? Hmm.

Third, Science Now. We have a much better grasp of how to more effectively interact with the blood supply than Galen and other bloodletting advocates knew. We now know their ancient opponents like Erasistratus were right, and that all their reasoning was crap in practice, but not wholly wrong in theory. Similar reasoning explains our resort to chemotherapy to kill cancer: we deliberately poison the body and destroy our entire body’s ability to replicate cells (and thus heal or replace things like hair or stomach lining), in the hopes that this will kill the cancer faster than the body. And we still do bleed people, but we know how to do it in better moderation now (e.g. we draw blood all the time as a diagnostic tool, or to reuse it for other patients), or we do it by replacing bad blood with better: this is called exchange transfusion. We remove blood, clean it, and put it back in: this is called dialysis. And some diseases actually still do require, it turns out, straight out bloodletting. So this chart’s author does not have a fully accurate idea of what modern medicine has found to be the case. Just as they don’t have a fully accurate idea of what ancient scientists thought about bloodletting. Or what their own Bible actually thinks about dumping our blood out (in women, naturally; in men, by mutilation).

The Elements Invisible

The tenth line says:

• The Bible: “Creation made of invisible elements,” citing Hebrews 11:3.
• Science Then: “Science is mostly ignorant on the subject.”
• Science Now: “Creation made of invisible elements (atoms).”

First, the Bible. Hebrews says, “By faith we understand that the ages were prepared by a word of God, so that what is seen came to be from what is not visible.” That says nothing about the elements of creation. When the Bible does get around to talking about the elements, it says they are demonic beings (Galatians 4). So much for science. What Hebrews 11:3 is saying is that you can’t see God speaking. Yet his words brought into being the visible world (and will likewise the future world that will replace it). Science has yet to support any part of that.

Second, Science Then. Holy shit. Science was mostly ignorant on the subject? Um. No. Ancient scientists invented the idea of the world being made of invisible elements. They even named them: atoms. Atomists even proposed early ideas of molecules and molecular physics (e.g. explaining olfactory sensation as molecules of atoms forming a shape that fits a microscopic receptor in the nose: De Rerum Natura 2.414-417, 2.680-683, 4.673-705). Even scientists who rejected the atomist model argued that the elements that composed all things were nevertheless still invisible particles, individual molecules of water, earth, air, fire, and ether or pneuma, that could be mixed in different proportions. That every object in the world is made of invisible elements has always been the working theory of science since at least the 5th century B.C.

Third, Science Now. Imagine if the Bible told us about the Periodic Table and the Standard Model. That’s science. Nothing of it is in the Bible. Nothing more need be said.

The Wellsprings of Life

The eleventh and final line says:

• The Bible: “Ocean contains springs,” citing Job 38:16.
• Science Then: “Ocean fed only by rivers and rain.”
• Science Now: “Ocean contains springs.”

First, the Bible. The author of Job actually seems not to be aware that the source of the oceans is rivers and rain. The point of the statement in context is that Job should be humble because unlike God he does not know the source of ocean water. So this author seems to imagine that the seas are entirely supplied by springs, by analogy to desert oases. Which is ridiculous. But typical primitive thinking. There is nothing scientific going on here.

Second, Science Then. In actual fact the earliest “scientific” speculation as to the origin of the oceans held precisely that: that in fact there was a vast reservoir of underground water that bubbled up to become the oceans, lakes, the source of all wells and rivers (including famously mythical subterranean rivers). That, in fact, the earth floated on a great singular sea, personified as Oceanus, of which the visible seas were just bits poking up through holes in the land. Saying Job had not visited this vast subterranean mega-ocean supplying the visible seas is not declaring anything scientific, but in fact quite the reverse. Even still in the Roman era, Stoic scientists, as reported by Seneca in his Natural Questions, believed the seas (and all water sources on earth not supplied by rainfall or snowmelt) were supplied by vast underwater springs where cold air had descended and condensed into water and drained into deep crevices, to bubble up again as a universal water supply. Scientifically false. Yet identical to what’s said in Job.

Third, Science Now. Almost all of the water sources for the oceans are rivers and rain (and snowmelt). Not springs. In fact, hydrothermal vents just recycle sea water. They do not supply it. Whereas suboceanic aquifers are sealed off from the seas above them and don’t supply them with water. If perhaps the author of Job knew both facts and recorded them accurately, describing the vents and what they do, and the aquifers and what they don’t do, that would be a marvel. But just thinking there “must” be springs that supply oceans just as there are springs that supply rivers and lakes is not scientific. It is, actually, quite the reverse.