Ross MacKenzie has a nice breakdown of what motivates – and what is wrong with – attempts to identify ahead-of-its-time knowledge of science in the Bible. Some of these are very dubious – far from being the idea design for a ship, the box-shaped humongous ark may not have been seaworthy at all. Others are so vague as to be ridiculous – such as “Genesis 1” being matched with “Hubert Spencer’s Scientific Principles.” Many are simply wrong – Leviticus 11 has nothing to do with diseases being transferred from animals to humans. And some misunderstand the text and do not take it literally enough – the stars were thought of as angelic or divine beings that literally sing, not as giving off “signals.” That last instance illustrates the main problem that predominates throughout – the reading back of modern science into texts which not only did not articulate it ahead of its time, but frequently express themselves in ways which, if taken at face value, are at odds with the conclusions of modern science, reflecting their ancient context and its assumptions about the cosmos.
But I’m taking this too seriously. Even the title is poorly thought out. Bibles are “real” – you can pick one up and look at it. But that is presumably not what this list is aimed at showing.
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