The Occulted Body Humankind

In scripture we are told that God made man in his own image.

Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them (Gen. I. 26, 27).

It is so stated not only in the Christian Bible but also in the holy writings of nearly all enlightened people. The Jewish patriarchs taught that the human body was the microcosm, or little cosmos, made in the image of the macrocosm, or the great cosmos.

In “Old Testament” writings, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are nearly always invoked together. God remembers the covenant which He has made with the three Patriarchs, and will therefore liberate their descendants from the bonds of Egypt (Ex. ii. 24).

"Abot," the Hebrew equivalent of the term "Patriarchs," is applied to the heads or fathers of the Jewish nation, namely, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Talmud distinctly says that the title "Abot" belongs only to the "Three," and the title "Amahot" (= "matriarchs") only to the "Four," namely, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah (Sem. i. 14; Ber. 16b).

This definition is made to bar the sons of Jacob from being reckoned as patriarchs (Rashi, ad loc.). Accordingly all Jews are born equal and can not claim any distinction of birth.

This analogy between the finite and the infinite is said to be one of the keys by the aid of which the secrets of the Holy Writ are unlocked. There is no doubt that the Old Testament is a physiological and anatomical textbook to those capable of reading it from a scientific viewpoint.

In any event, the consensus of the vast majority of knowledgeable biblical scholars, representing a broad range of denominations and philosophies, is that the literal-inerrant approach to the Bible is simply not defensible -- the Bible as we read it today is a product of both human and divine elements.

Much of the evidence for this consensus view can be seen by a careful study of the Bible itself, without any recourse to "higher criticism." Issues include translation errors, text inserted or changed by copyists, missing books and passages, questionable inclusions, literary passages, passages assuming the ancient cosmology, accounts written after the fact, genealogical discrepancies, numerical discrepancies, and discrepancies on matters such as violence, treatment of women and whether children are to be punished for the sins of parents or ancestors. 

 

To answer the question of whether the Bible can rightly be considered a scientific work, even in part, we need to carefully analyze what the Bible says on scientific matters:

Mathematics

The ancient Hebrews, as well as the early Christians, evidently used the decimal system of enumeration. But there is no suggestion that they understood the full system of arithmetic using positional notation with zero (this was first discovered in India prior to 500 CE) [Ifrah2000, pg. 346-347].

There is also no indication that they understood the Pythagorean theorem (the formula relating the lengths of sides in a right triangle) or other principles of elementary geometry, even though these were known in the ancient world by roughly 500 BCE. Likewise, there is no suggestion of more advanced mathematics, such as the rudiments of integral calculus discovered by Archimedes roughly 250 BCE.

Along this line, it is amusing to note that the biblical passages 1 Kings 7:23 and 2 Chron. 4:2 indicate that pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, is 3.0, whereas we now know that pi = 3.14159....

No number can claim more fame than pi. But why, exactly?

Defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, pi, or in symbol form, π, seems a simple enough concept. But it turns out to be an "irrational number," meaning its exact value is inherently unknowable.

Computer scientists have calculated billions of digits of pi, starting with 3.14159265358979323…, but because no recognizable pattern emerges in the succession of its digits, we could continue calculating the next digit, and the next, and the next, for ten thousand years, and we'd still have no idea which digit might emerge next. The digits of pi continue their senseless procession all the way to infinity.

It is interesting to here note that the circle has long been a standard symbol of the Infinite.

Ancient mathematicians apparently found the concept of irrationality completely maddening. It struck them as an affront to the omniscience of God, for how could the Almighty know everything if numbers exist that are inherently unknowable?

Whether or not humans and gods grasp the irrational number, pi seems to crop up everywhere, even in places that have no ostensible connection to circles. For example, among a collection of random whole numbers, the probability that any two numbers have no common factor — that they are "relatively prime" — is equal to 6/π2. Strange, no?

But pi's ubiquity goes beyond math. The number crops up in the natural world, too. It appears everywhere there's a circle, of course, such as the disk of the sun, the spiral of the DNA double helix, the pupil of the eye, the concentric rings that travel outward from splashes in ponds. Pi also appears in the physics that describes waves, such as ripples of light and sound. It even enters into the equation that defines how precisely we can know the state of the universe, known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

That such a fundamental number is wrongly stated in the Bible makes you wonder.

In spite of the fact that the context of these Old Testament verses clearly suggests an informal approximation, not a precise statement of mathematical fact, an 18th-century German Bible commentary attempted to explain away this discrepancy by using the imaginative (if pathetic) suggestion that the circular pool in Solomon's temple (clearly described in 2 Chron. 4:2 as "round in compass") was instead hexagonal in shape.

Even in the 21st century, some are still unwilling to accept the obvious conclusion that the Bible is simply mistaken on this minor point.

Certainly a better approach is that recommended by the medieval Jewish theologian Maimonides: "You ought to know that the ratio of the diameter of the circle to its circumference is unknown, nor will it ever be possible to express it precisely." [Maimonides1168]. In other words, pi cannot be given exactly as the ratio of any pair of integers, a fact that was later proven in 1768.

Astronomy.

There are a surprising number of verses mentioning various stars and constellations in the Bible. Job 38:31-33 (KJV), for instance, declares, "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth [meaning unknown] in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus [Ursa major] with his sons [cubs]? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?"

On the other hand, nowhere in the Bible is there any detailed information on these astronomical objects, or any suggestion that they should be studied in a scientific manner. For example, nowhere do we read in the Bible any suggestion that the sun is just another star.

Creation.

The Genesis account of the creation describes, in general terms, the formation of the earth (some say the entire universe) and the rise of various classes of living organisms. With regards to the time scale, if one accepts that the word "day" in Genesis be read in a more general sense as a period of time (as is the case even in modern English), then the "conflict" between the biblical account and the scientific largely disappears.

One quibble here is that while plants such as ferns preceded most animals species, scientists have concluded that flowering plants were a more recent development in geologic history. At the very least, it is clear that the ancient biblical prophets and scribes recognized the hierarchical organization of the biological kingdom.

Beyond the rudiments mentioned here, there is essentially no technical, quantitative information in these passages that could pass as scientific in our modern sense, one way or the other. For additional discussion, see Creation.

Cosmology.

Numerous biblical passages state or at least presume the ancient geocentric cosmology -- the earth is flat, is encompassed by a circle (like a coin), is set on a foundation of pillars and is immovable, with the sun and other heavenly bodies moving on transparent spheres of crystalline material a few thousand feet above the earth. The following is a very brief sample:

1 Sam. 2:8: "... for the pillars of the earth [are] the LORD's, and he hath set the world upon them."

1 Chron. 16:30: "... the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved."

Psa. 93:1: "... the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved."

Psa. 104:5: "[Who] laid the foundations of the earth, [that] it should not be removed for ever."

Eccl. 1:5: "The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose."

Isa. 40:22: "[It is] he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof [are] as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.

Nowadays virtually everyone concedes that such passages were intended only as literary figures of speech, not as assertions of scientific fact. These conclusions are agreed to by virtually all modern biblical readers.

But why then should Gen. 1-2, which also describes the physical creation, be singled out for a very literal interpretation?

Physics.

There is absolutely no hint whatsoever that biblical peoples understood anything in the arena of what we now know to be modern physics. To state the obvious: the equations of quantum mechanics and relativity, the two cornerstones of the field, are not to be found in the Bible! Even the much more basic laws of motion that Galileo and Newton discovered are completely absent from the Bible, even in rough, intuitive form.

Chemistry.

There is no hint of modern chemistry in the Bible.

Geology and paleontology.

There is no mention of fossils or the nature of rock formations in the Bible.

Biology.

Except for the brief outline of the creation in Gen. 1-2, the only references to biology in the Bible are a few fleeting references on the nature of plants and animals. As one amusing example, Lev. 11:6 instructs that rabbits are to be considered "unclean" in Jewish law because they "chew their cud" (they don't).

Quantitative analysis.

One clear characteristic of modern science is its reliance on highly precise, quantitative measurements (often made using advanced technology) and the analysis of such measurements using statistical methods. None of this is to be found anywhere in the Bible.

The functions the human body, the attributes of the human mind, and the qualities of the human soul, have been personified by the wise men of the ancient world, and a great drama has been built around their relationships to themselves and to each other.

Drama. Yes. Such as the story of the Exodus of the Hebrews from their oppressors, the Egyptians. The story as historical fact is disputed. But who doesn’t relate to some form or anther of oppression in their life?