The Bible Is Not a Science Book

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People keep trying to make the Bible something it's not.


On one side you've got folks treating it like a science textbook, then tying themselves in knots when it doesn't read like one. On the other side you've got folks who say that means it's anti-science, or useless, or just old stories.

Both sides are missing the point, and it's the same point.

The Bible was never trying to be a science book. It doesn't lay out formulas or run experiments. That's not its job.

But here's what's always struck me: for a book that isn't trying to do science, it sure gets the natural world right an awful lot.

Three thousand years ago, Ecclesiastes described the wind blowing to the south, turning to the north, going round and round, ever returning on its course. That's global wind circulation — the kind of thing we didn't map until the last couple of centuries.

Job talks about God drawing up drops of water that distill as rain. The water cycle, plain as day.

And Psalm 8 mentions "the paths of the seas." In the 1800s, a naval officer named Matthew Maury read that verse and took it seriously enough to start charting ocean currents. They call him the father of oceanography now. The currents were there all along. The verse just told him where to look.

Now, I'm not saying the Bible is a secret science manual. That's the same trap in reverse. I'm saying it's interesting — and I think it's honest to admit it's interesting — that a book with a completely different purpose kept getting the physical world right.

Because the purpose is the thing people trip over. Ask what the Bible is for and you'll get a hundred answers, most of them arguments. But read it straight through and the answer is pretty plain: it's the story of how God redeems us. From original sin, from the fall, all the way through — one long plan of redemption playing out across centuries, landing on a cross and an empty tomb.

That's the economy God works in. Not the economy of laboratories and peer review. The economy of faith.

In God's economy, faith is the currency.

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