Ancient Israelite cosmology shows why the Bible is not a science textbook

Ancient Israelite Cosmogeography

 

Introduction

 

The recently released images of our universe captured by the James Webb space telescope bring home just how ancient and vast it is. Currently, the universe is believed to be 13.8 billion years old, and while we don’t know how large the entire universe is, the observable universe is estimated to be around 93 billion light years in diameter, and consists of around 200 billion galaxies.

The current view of the universe as an unimaginably vast expanse containing hundreds of billions of galaxies is a fairly recent view, dating back around 100 years. Prior to the early 20^th century, astronomers believed the Milky Way composed the entire universe, and what we now know as galaxies were called spiral nebulae and believed to be located in the far reaches of the Milky Way. We know that the sun is not the centre of the universe, but that view only appeared in the late 18^th to early 19^th centuries following considerable astronomical observation and theorising. Heliocentric cosmology, which argues that the earth revolves around the Sun was famously advanced in 1543 by Nicolaus Copernicus, though was first proposed by the Greek philosopher Aristarchus of Samos in the 3^rd century BC.  Belief in a spherical earth first appeared among a number of Pythagorean philosophers in the 5^th century BC. Prior to then, ancient people believed that the earth was flat, covered by a solid dome, and lay at the centre of the universe.

How not to Prove All Things

A few days ago, I ran across a collection of Christadelphian fundamentalist essays on a somewhat eclectic range of subjects, whose main unifying theme appears to be areas where fundamentalist theology come into collision with the modern world. One long, rambling article attempted to cover evolution, but unsurprisingly failed to engage the scientific evidence for evolution, taking refuge in that old fundamentalist standby, the appeal to the "shifting sands of science" trope. Amusingly, the anonymous author used that exact phrase,

Science is changing all the time. What may be considered today to be scientific fact may turn out to be rejected in years to come. It is therefore very difficult to see how any faith can be placed in the shifting sands of current scientific thought.

telegraphing to any halfway informed observer that they were completely ignorant of the epistemological basis of science, and why the tentative, provisional nature of scientific truth, where things are held subject to potential falsification by new evidence is exactly why science is so powerful. Any attack on evolution that fails to examine the evidence, offers as justification a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science, and spends most of its time on a long rambling fundamentalist distortion of the relevant Biblical texts is automatically wrong.

    That is however not what really caught my eye about this collection of articles. What caught my attention was an article on archaeology and the historical context of the Bible. While this subject is not one that I cover at the website, one paragraph in the essay caught my eye as it neatly encapsulated the poverty of thought and utter surrender to fideism that underlies the mindset of those who wrote this collection of fundamentalist essays:

We cannot learn anything useful from archaeology. If the evidence tells us something which supports what the Bible says, then we have learnt nothing – we already knew it to be true. If the evidence tells us something different to the Bible then again we have learnt nothing, since we must reject the evidence. If the evidence adds to the account of scripture in a complementary way then using it in our understanding is adding to scripture, an idea we have already rejected. Emphasis mine

We must reject the evidence. Fundamentalism in five words. If the evidence falsifies the worldview then you reject the evidence.  Replace 'archaeology' with 'science' and you have the same fideistic approach to the subject that characterises fundamentalist attacks on evolution. This is sadly not a parody of fundamentalist thought but the real thing. Inculcating impressionable young people with this material is simply priming them for a crisis of faith when one day they actually look at the evidence rather than blindly rejecting it and realise their fundamentalist faith is a house of cards that will fall at the slightest touch.

    The collection of essays bears the title Proving All Things, but all that is being proven here is that by starting with your conclusion and automatically excluding all the evidence that bears upon your subject, you can prove anything, and if you can prove anything you have really proven nothing.