Friday, November 11, 2011

Isaiah, chapter 6:3

If science is, as Harvard’s chemist-president James Bryant Conant once wrote, “an interconnected series of concepts and conceptual schemes that have developed as a result of experimentation and observation and are fruitful of further experimentation and observations,” the Bible has nothing at all to say about such a thing.

The very concept is alien to it. Despite the pretentions made for it and the claims made in behalf of it by its devoted partisans, the Bible itself has no such pretentions and makes no such claims.

Nowhere in scripture are the faithful enjoined to take as scientific and observable fact the Bible’s description of phenomena: the accounts of creation, the sun standing still at the battle of Jericho, the fish swallowing Jonah; these are not presented as articles of fact or of faith, essential to belief and salvation.

It is not that the Bible has “good” science or “bad” science. It has no science, for that is neither the language in which it was written nor the mind with which until fairly modern times it was read.

To impose the constraints of science upon the Bible is to force it into a role for which it was never intended, and to which without violence to author, text, and reader, it cannot be adapted.

Peter Gomes