God’s Truth
The Bible and Science 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
Professors Say It Is True
Phibber personally knows two full professors in British universities and at least a dozen doctors nearly every one of which believes the bible is true. Apparently there are thousands more! Since there must be millions of scientists in the world it is encouraging that only a small percentage of them think like Phibber, believing that a super being, God, came to earth under the pseudonym of “God’s Son” to save us all from His own punishment, that dead men can be returned to life and that other supernatural events can happen contrary to the laws of nature that God himself invented. It is difficult for me to understand how a man can believe in the supernatural and still be a scientist. But I am jumping the gun!
Phibber tells us that science explains to us “how” things happen but the bible tells us “why” they happen. “Why?” is, of course, the ultimate question and if you believe the bible gives you the answer that is your delusion. The answer is, I presume, that God willed it. But as any child knows that is only an answer for the deluded because it begs the question, “Why is there a God?”
Phibber tells us that the bible tells us why we die. It is because of sin. Without sin we would live forever and we can do by believing in Christ. Well forever is a long time so, as a scientist, Phibber might have thought, “here is a real chance to prove my beliefs”. Let us take a sample of men, some chosen for their sinful lives and some chosen for their holy lives, and see whether the distribution is skewed meaningfully toward the holy people.
Of course, we have problems at once because sinful lives can mean dissolute lives and holy lives can incorporate healthy lives. But by choosing the sample carefully it ought to be possible to allow for such factors, and since forever is an infinite amount of time even small differences in holiness should make huge differences in lifespan. Curious that Jesus, who was perfect, should die at 33 and Hitler should live to 56, but we scientists know this is not a scientific sample.
Oh! Do I hear Christians protesting that they are not talking about physical life but spiritual life. So sin is not why physical death has entered the world. I’m getting confused again. The goalposts are shifting once more.
Conflict
To return to Dr Ernest Phibber, he agrees that sometimes the bible and science come into conflict. Needless to say, when they do, it is science that is wrong! Nevertheless, “we must do this [look at the conflict] in a spirit of reasonableness”. Cough! Um. Sorry!
First, consider miracles. Phibber confesses, “We scientists are just as human as anyone else. We make the same foolish mistakes, and we suffer from vanity, impatience and prejudice, just like the rest of mankind”. No! Not you, Ernest. Surely, not you!
After confession, we now get a little philosophy of science. A scientist who declares that miracles cannot happen is merely expressing his own prejudice and not a fact of science. To prove it, he quotes lengthily from some fellow that nobody ever heard of. His argument is that the scientist begins with the belief that events which cannot be explained by natural law cannot happen. Since he has already excluded them, the scientist cannot legitimately claim to prove they are impossible. That is the argument.
The scientist is concerned with investigating the physical universe. A constantly growing wealth of experience shows that, by assuming that nature is governed by recoverable laws, we are able to explain what is happening. Everything begins by being unknown, but gradually it is fitted into one or other category or law, and resides there happily because, when an event is repeated, we can trace the law or category that explains it. When something happens that cannot be so explained—and everything has been in that category once upon a time—the scientist tries to formulate laws that will bring it into the book of the explained.
Thus from our growing experience and our ability to formulate rules we become able to predict what will happen when a certain concatenation of events occurs. Scientists use the laws of nature to predict what will happen.
If you have followed this so far, you will appreciate that miracles cannot occur because anything that occurs that our present knowledge is unable to explain becomes the subject of investigation precisely so that the laws which govern it can be brought within the realm of the known.
Now, it is obvious that some events occur only extremely rarely because the conditions under which they occur are rare. If such an event, though rare, is spectacular, it will be noticed and yet will not be subject to investigation. Such an event might be called a miracle by a gullible person but scientists would say, “If only…” They want to measure it, count it, record the conditions, and so on but are unable to do so because the event is rare and unpredictable until its laws have been formulated, and it is hard to formulate them because it is rare and unpredictable. So ghosts, UFOs, aliens, ball lightning, foo-fighters, and miracles prove hard to investigate. Since scientists, like anyone else, have a living to earn they find something easier to look at.
So Phibber is right when he says that scientists do not believe in miracles. If it happened in this concrete world in which we all live, it is by definition natural and not miraculous. It is, by definition, capable of investigation though it might be too difficult in practice. No doubt we are in the realm of semantics here, but it defeats me how any scientist could believe in miracles in principle. What are the criteria that Phibber, who claims to be a scientist uses to decide that something is in the realm of the natural or in the realm of the supernatural?
The truth is that, in practice there are no criteria. The scientist must be ready to investigate anything that has happened in the world. He might be forced to lay it aside as too difficult to investigate at present, but that would not mean it was a miracle unless the meaning of miracle is expanded from the meaning of “a supernatural event” to the meaning of “a rare event”—the meaning used perhaps by most people.
Oddly enough, Phibber accepts this. He confesses again, “it is reasonable and necessary for every scientist to say to himself, ’I shall assume that miracles are not occurring in my laboratory today’”. One might add, “or in my field work today” since scientists do not only make observations in their laboratories. But Phibber wants both ends of the candle. He asserts that scientists cannot say “miracles never have occurred, anywhere, and never will”. Such a statement is “absurd”. Therefore, Phibber concludes, the miracles in the bible could have occurred. And, equally, fairies can appear at the bottom of your garden.
Miracles
Phibber turns science on its head even by his own account. He has told us that, in practice, the scientist must disregard the occurrence of miracles, but then goes on to say that, if they are attested in the past and particularly in the bible, then we must be ready to accept them. Most scientists would say the exact opposite. Since we have not been able to investigate them we must regard them as likely to be delusions, illusions or indeed frauds, all of which are far more likely to have occurred than a genuinely rare event of nature, and infinitely more likely to have happened than an event which is unnatural.
So, is it likely that biblical miracles happened? Phibber begins to persuade us. Miracles are what you would expect in the bible, he tells us. The whole of Christianity is a miracle, its inspired bible, its saviour god, Jesus, his resurrection, the Christian reward of eternal life, God hearing a prayer. All are miracles. Hence a few more miracles in the stories of Jesus and the apostles should not be surprising to us. They provide an internal consistency that any valid scientific hypothesis needs to be acceptable.
One could use arguments like this about Hans Anderson’s book of fairy tales. We are back with Phibber’s usual self-delusion—scientists must not make any assumptions, but it is not only all right for Christians, it is required, if you are to follow the argument. I do not believe that Christianity is a miracle, or the bible or the supernatural saviour, the resurrection, that we shall have eternal life or even that God answers prayers. The only internal consistency that I see is that Christians delude themselves into believing a lot of things that ten year olds would reject if they were offered to them as the fairy stories that they really are. And Phibber presents this as an argument!
He goes on to add that another reason for accepting the miracles is that they are “eminently sensible”. They are healings, restoring the dead to life, saving ships from being wrecked and feeding or succouring the needy. Only the cursing of the fig tree seems uncharacteristic. Again Phibber seems to believe that he has an argument, as if cursing someone to death or illness, or willing ships to be wrecked would not be miracles. Whether they were used for good or ill, if they were supernatural, they would be miracles no less. Phibber is being carried away by goodness.
He claims they were all necessary. But why was it necessary to curse the fig tree? Even on the argument of Phibber that it symbolised the rejection of the Jews by God, why was it necessary? God had no need to demonstrate to the gentiles that the Jews had been rejected and by so doing introduce centuries of additional suffering into the world. Why were all the cures necessary? If they were indeed necessary, why were other equally meritorious cases ignored? If God can effect cures for some, then why allow all the rest, millions of people, to suffer?
Gratuitous
Were they just gratuitous demonstrations of God’s power? Why was it necessary to raise Lazarus from the dead? The incident is totally irrelevant except as a miracle. Yet Phibber tells us that none of the miracles were intended merely to demonstrate Jesus’s power because he refused to do it in Matthew 4:1-10 when tempted by the devil.
In Matthew 12:39, Phibber could have added, Jesus refused to give a sign to this “evil and adulterous generation” while yet giving signs all over the place! Walking on water and silencing storms, feeding four or five thousand all sound like signs to me, and, if they were in truth miraculous, was it necessary for Jesus to be flamboyant about it? If he really was trying to avoid giving signs then why could not all of these miracles have been done by God with no intervention from Jesus. Could it be that the only necessity of all these miracles is to persuade the gullible—scientist or otherwise—to believe that this man was something out of the ordinary? In other words, despite the denial in the bible, they were nothing less than signs!
Though it is far from what Christians would want to believe the whole nonsense of biblical miracles is explicable. Many of the miracles are coded information! Jesus was a true pretender to the throne of Israel in the sense that he believed he was the messiah sent by God to drive out the foreigner and to set up the kingdom of God on earth. He was a member of the religious sect of Essenes who had entered into a New Covenant with God to preserve a truly holy remnant of Israel. The Essenes saw prophecies in the scriptures and believed that the prophecies applied to the times they lived in. God was about to send his saviour and start the kingdom.
Jesus, however, differed in one important respect from the everyday Essene. The everyday Essenes considered it necessary to keep a remnant of Israel pure in readiness for the End Time. And they were that pure remnant. Jesus led the sect of Essenes, the Nazarenes, who believed the End Time had come. They determined not to forget the earlier covenant between God and the whole of Israel and believed it was the duty of the remnant, in the last days before the kingdom started, to warn the whole of Israel of the coming visitation and give them the opportunity to repent and therefore be eligible to enter the kingdom.
Pursuing this idea Jesus went about, like John the Baptist, preaching the kingdom and inviting doubters and skeptics to repent and join him. The doubters and skeptics were sick—spiritually sick—and had to be cured. By converting them to a belief in the coming kingdom Jesus was curing them. In those days all sickness, whether spiritual or physical was thought to be caused by demons. So in curing Israel of spiritual sickness he was casting out demons.
Non-healing miracles were coded parables which the gospel writers have disguised as real events. Jesus himself tells us he was speaking in code by using the expression “those that have ears to hear”. Why did Jesus have to speak in code? Because he was advocating a revolt against Roman rule and he could not let the Romans or their spies know directly what he was calling for. Eventually Jesus was hanged as a pretender to the throne of Israel because that is precisely what he was, even though his motive was not personal gain but was to do the will of God. None of this is far from the Christian story but is much more credible.
To round off, Phibber tells us that the biblical miracles are much more sophisticated than the silly miracles of Tobias, for example, in the Apocrypha. But are they any different from the miracles of Appolonius of Tyana or Simon Magus or those of the Arabian Nights or the Mahabharata or the Legends of King Arthur? Perhaps they are. Precisely because they were not miracles, they seem to be on an altogether more modest plane.
