Science and the Bible

My friend handed me an article on how NASA scientists proved two miracles in the Bible. He got it on the internet. The article said one scientist who tried to calculate exactly where a space probe needed to be to go into orbit around a distant planet kept coming up with the wrong figures despite his best computer work.

“The problem,” he told a colleague, “is that when I use calculations based on time, I’m off by over a day.” Time he needed to account for went back at least eight millennia in order to establish the distance and location of the planet.

The colleague, according to the story, said the solution to the anomaly was in the Bible, two places where the sun and stars operated erratically. When those hours were entered into the calculations, the scientist was finally able to successfully conclude his calculations.

My friend was so pleased to give the story to me because it proved to him that the Bible could be taken literally, miracles included.

When I had a chance, I checked a website that researches urban legends (www.about.com) where I learned the story was a variation on one written in the 1930s about an event in 1890 where a mathematician could not solve a different problem until he took into account the two Bible stories. The scientists who had been named in each story did not happen to have any witnesses to the conversations and the respective colleagues had both died. Notes on the respective calculations had also not been kept. NASA scientists, when asked about the story, said they never needed to use past time in any of the calculations they do because they work with current speed and direction of their targets to anticipate their future locations.

My friend’s “proof” was based on stories which themselves had no corroboration.

I got the article on Monday. The Friday before, the newspaper carried a story from Associated Press in which the writer pointed out a place where science and the Bible agreed. The article opened with a paraphrase of “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” The writer then described several experiments where people were asked to rate their degree of happiness and then were asked about the use of their incomes. Those who spent about 7 percent or more of their incomes on others (gifts to family and friends plus gifts to charities) tended to be the most happy and those who spent only on their own needs and wants were the least.

I think my friend missed an opportunity to make his point in a better way, one I could agree with, and one that would not be debunked as an urban legend.

But I rarely hear from evangelical friends about how social sciences support many religious concepts in the area of compassion, forgiveness, and other matters of human relations. That kind of science doesn’t seem to carry any weight for those bent on proving the Bible is true.

When “science” is touted as proving Biblical stories that are only about events, how strange is that? But real science is ignored or, as in the issue of evolution, is condemned when it is more successful describing reality than the Bible.

What keeps me from getting all upstrung about it is this: more important than what they say or believe is how they act. And how I act as well.

It’s by our fruits that we’ll finally be judged.