When the Bible Isn't Scientifically Accurate
“…when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep…” -Proverbs 8:28
Imagine that 1,000 years from now someone discovers books we have written. You need to know that these futuristic people, being the robots that they are, are horribly literal. They are worse than a five-year-old that has no penchant for the use of metaphor. What will happen when they stumble upon some of our phrases?
They’ll be baffled by phrases like “the heart of the city.” “Did these people think there was a physical heart at the center of their cities?” When they stumble upon some poetry and read a line like, “The stars danced in the sky”, they’ll be intrigued by our foolish understanding of the cosmos. “Stars don’t dance, you dummy”.
Not much is at stake here. If we’re shown to be fools it doesn’t exactly unravel a faith. Or at least it shouldn’t. But what happens when we believe that the very words we are reading—say about stars dancing in the sky—are claimed to be written by God Himself? If He is telling us about wisdom being present when he “made firm the skies above” and we’ve discovered that the universe isn’t exactly “firm”, what do we do with that?
We can be super literal robots, I suppose. One option is to attempt to keep your view of infallibility but deny science. “Well, maybe it actually is firm.” This is where some people will argue that the earth is flat. Others will quibble with the words themselves. “Firm doesn’t mean firm…you see the ancient Hebrews…blah, blah, blah.”
Another option is to deny the reliability of the Bible. “It wasn’t written by an infallible God,” you might argue. A passage like Proverbs 8:28 (and all the other scientifically inaccurate language) will be used as proof that it was only written by men of their times—and men with very poor scientific understanding.
Neither of these options are necessary if we allow the Bible to speak for itself. The intention of Proverbs 8 is not to give us a scientific manual for how the world is created. It is entirely okay for human authors to express things as they see them and understand them while maintaining the God-breathed intention of the text. A better explanation is given by Rob Plummer in his 40 Questions About Interpreting the Bible:
Inerrancy allows for phenomenological language (that is, the description of phenomena as they are observed and experienced). Humans often report events they see from their experiential vantage point rather than providing an objective scientific explanation. Thus, we would no more charge a biblical author with error when speaking of the sun rising (Ps. 19:6) than we would chastise a modern meteorologist for speaking of the anticipated time of tomorrow’s sunrise. Neither the psalmist nor the meteorologist is intending to deny a heliocentric (sun-centered) solar system.[1]
Proverbs 8:28 isn’t intending to give us a scientific explanation of creation. What is it doing, though? This passage is here as an appeal to embrace wisdom instead of folly. Wisdom was present when the world was created. Wisdom knows how things ought to work. Why would we want to follow after the flash in the pan that is Folly?
We know quite a bit about the universe these days. Much more than we knew when Proverbs 8 was written. But what happens as we uncover more of the universe is that we also open up doors to even more that we do not know. This Proverb is telling us that Wisdom knows. The path of wisdom is an eternal path without bottom. Again, why would we embrace the transient Woman Folly?
Ultimately, we know that wisdom is pointing to Christ. It is in Christ that the storehouse of all wisdom is found. Thus, we’d proclaim the gospel from Proverbs 8:28 this way,
Creation: Wisdom was present and all things fit together perfectly, the way of wisdom was soaked into all of creation.
Fall: Humanity chose the brief sensation of a forbidden fruit; the way of folly now poisons all of creation.
Redemption: Jesus overturns the curse. He restores us to the path of wisdom and overturns the impact of the curse upon us.
Glory: One day we will live again in a world that is perfectly united to wisdom. The Woman Folly will lay in her grave.
[1] Robert Plummer, 40 Questions About Interpreting the Bible, 43