Apologetics Session 9 - The Bible - Part 5

Science and the Bible: General Revelation, Interpretation, and Human Error

With science. Because true science confirms the Bible. It's false science that contradicts it. You would think, right? Because really it's discovering the world that's around us. And if God has created this world, if God has also given us the Bible, we shouldn't find any conflicts between the two, right?

And there aren't any conflicts between the two, is going to be my presupposition here, or my statement. But what we find is, because men interpret the Bible, and because men interpret data and experiments done in science, that's where the conflicts arise.

So if we look at just this little chart here, we're seeing that, okay, God has provided through specific revelation, the knowledge of his scriptures, through the Holy Spirit, to every believer. And through general revelation, God has provided nature.

Is there a conflict between the two? No. God's provided both, and he understands both. Man's interpretation of the scripture, however, theology, and the general revelation given by God, science, this is where we tend to have our problems.

But we should be able to resolve these things, and we shouldn't be at war with science. But over the history, there have been various times that scientists have gone after the church, and different various times the church has gone after the scientists.

So before we get into some specific things, first I want Phil to read my card here, and say, what's the title of my position at work, Phil? I'm chief scientist. That's right, I'm chief scientist at work.

You don't believe me? Here's the card. I appreciated that title when they gave it to me. Does that mean we trust the science? Right. But then I saw an org chart later that had all my companies, you know, like managers, and who's under them, and everything, and my title is actually junior chief scientist.

So I was knocked down a few pegs here. I was like, how could you be a junior chief scientist? Jungle shrimp. He who exalts himself shall be humbled, right? That's probably where that was. But let's talk about some principles we should remember when we're trying to think about how science and the Bible mesh and or collide.

So the first one is that the Bible was not written as a science textbook. The Bible doesn't contradict science, but it also doesn't attempt to explain science in any great detail. The Bible was written by God to explain himself to his creation, to us.

The Bible is his letter to us so that we may know him. Now at times the Bible will provide some scientific truths to convey a message of the reader of the scripture, but the scientific truth isn't going to be explicitly the reason for the passage.

So sometimes we've gotten in trouble here as Christians to say, well, you know, we try to fit something in and say, well, here's a scientific, you know, evidence of a passage, and, you know, because we do some abstract thing, we pull something out of context.

But the scientists do the same thing, because they sometimes will look at the Bible and say, oh, ha ha, the Bible says this. And they don't realize that, you know, they've taken something out of context.

The particular passage they're looking at may be a figurative passage, and that gets into such importance with what Ivan's going to go over, which is hermeneutics, which is, you know, context for sure, cross-references from Bible verse to Bible verse for sure, and then language.

What kind of language is the author using? Is the author using poetic language? Is he using prophetic language? Or, you know, some situation where we should consider, you know, the words that the author is using, and not necessarily jump to conclusions right away.

And we're going to see a lot of examples of that in what we look at, but when Ivan goes through hermeneutics, that's going to be really a study on how to study the Bible, which will help us. So that happens.

That's the first thing. The Bible is not necessarily written as a science textbook. The second thing is, science often, and scientists, often display themselves as the authors of fact and truth. When in reality, science is a very progressive discipline, and it often is not reaching an end goal.

It's continually changing. I don't want to use that word evolving, do I? But what happens is, is often the current theory of the day is listed as, this is fact. But then, as discoveries continue, we find out that that fact wasn't as solid as the scientists thought, so then they say, well, that was just due to a misunderstanding because of a lack of data.

But now, here is the truth, and this is where we are. And it continually changes. We need to understand this, because when somebody says there's something in the Bible that contradicts something that science says, do we know for certain that that scientific truth is really a fact?

You know, are we rock-solid that something known for certain is to be a scientific fact? And even if it is, does it conflict with an interpretation of the scripture that is beyond all that? Meaning that, have they, or have we, interpreted the scripture correctly in the given situation?

So those are, that's the second point, that science is always changing. Then the third issue with all of this, really, is that both sinful men are performing the scientific experiments, and sinful men are also interpreting the Bible.

So both are prone to mistakes. And in particular with scientists, but this can be true of the churchmen also, in an experiment there can be a bias, or a lack of thoroughness, or just an incomplete experiment.

There's a lot of things that can lead to false conclusions in a scientific, in the scientific world. So all these things need to be considered as we go forward. But we shouldn't be afraid of science. I think as believers we should be excited about the world that God has created, and we should be inquisitive in our minds.

When the Bible talks about us being created in the image of God, there's a lot of tremendous things that God has put into our nature about wanting to discover, wanting to create, wanting to find out. We're inquisitive.

We want to know things. And what a great opportunity we have to discover the worlds that he's created. And some of the things we've discovered so far are just mind-boggling. You know, it's amazing that that he, that God has allowed men to discover the things we have, and where we have progressed in technology for sure, right?

We haven't progressed at all in a sense of trying to, you know, become better people on our own. You know, it's the moral nature, the sin nature, that sort of thing. But as far as the gathering of information and the ability to use the physical resources on this earth for communication and for, you know, experimentation and creativity, it's just, just fantastic.

And that should be just a thrill for any believer really, to find out more and more about his world. But let's talk about first some of the conflicts that we have seen over the ages with scientists and church people.

The Myth of the Flat Earth

Oh, look at that topic. Flat earthers. Those church people are flat earthers. Have you heard that somewhere before? You haven't heard that? I've heard a lot of flat earthers try to use the Bible to prove their theories, but yeah.

Okay. Well, there's some interesting history with the flat earth stuff, for sure. Was it really ever taught by the church? Well, in fact, it really wasn't. It really was never taught by the church. I'll read some quotes here.

Christianity has often been held responsible for promoting the flat earth theory. And this was in like the 15 -16 hundreds, mostly, that they said it was prevalent. But then later on, that's when the accusations came.

Yet it was really only a handful of so-called intellectual scholars throughout the centuries claiming to represent the church who held to a flat earth. Most of these were ignored by the church, yet somehow their writings made it into early history books as official Christian viewpoint.

And you can look up the references on this. I'm going to get into some more quotes in a little bit. This man, Stephen Jay Gould, stated, there was never a period of flat earth darkness among the scholars.

All major medieval scholars accepted the earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology. You know, the Greek world knew that back in 240 BC. So this isn't necessarily something that was a big debate, but it became a big debate later.

So here's what happened. So historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says that flat earth, the flat earth flourished mostly between 1870 and 1920. Well, there's some key things that happened during that period.

And it had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over biological evolution. James and Amr wrote, the myth that the people of the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of a campaign by Protestants against Catholic teaching.

And that was that was true. But it gained, this is where it takes off, but it gained currency in the 19th century, so the 1800s, the late 1800s, thanks to inaccurate histories such as John William Draper's History of Conflict Between Religion and Science and Andrew Dixon White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology and Christendom.

Atheist agnostics championed the conflict thesis for their own purposes, but historical research gradually demonstrated that Draper and White had propagated more fantasy than facts. They basically made it up.

They made it up for their own purposes to show that Christians were unintellectual, they ignored proper scientific revelation, and that the church was full of people who weren't using their minds. Well, they had.

Some help, too. True. Do you know when they actually confirmed that the earth was.

Round? Well, I think that was a to the 240 BC, the Greeks, Aristarchus. I don't think the credit was given to Aristarchus in the things that I looked up. I think it was, it might have been Aristophanes, maybe.

Aristophanes, yeah. Aristophanes, yeah. But that was a, that was really a, they actually calculated the diameter here. Pretty accurately. It was fairly accurate. Circumference, yeah. Yeah. Oh, it was the circumference, yeah.

And you can get the diameter through that, but. So it really was never an issue at all, but because scientists were butting heads with Christians over evolution, scientists wanted to show that Christians were locked in some kind of a, you know, uneducated stupor that wouldn't allow them to, you know, actually look at science with a proper eye.

But they did get some help because there was a book written in the early 1800s called A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. And you had to heard this story because this was the, this was a book that was written that was mostly fiction.

But as you can see by the title, it says A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Irving himself admitted he was apt to the, to indulge the imagination. The book concocted an argument between those who commissioned Columbus to go out, basically saying, you're going to sail off the edge of the earth, to the earth, and of course we know that there were some famous things that came from that, which was Kansas's, you know, album, The Point of No Return, like, you know, we all learned that at some point.

We probably read it in school. But that was the, that was what was taught, that this whole idea came from the church and the Bible. Well, after all this misleading information, what does the Bible really say?

Okay, what happens is, is people look at verses like this in Job, and it says, listen closely to the thunder of his voice, and the rumbling that goes out of his mouth. Under the whole heavens he lets it loose, and it's lightning to the ends, the corners of the earth.

And now, how many times in the Bible do we hear the four corners of the earth? Metaphoric description of the earth, yeah. Quite a bit. Yeah. Right. Is the Bible speaking of a literal four corners of a flat, you know, plane?

Well, skeptics have argued that, but the Bible's verse of the use of this figurative phrase was never intent to mean that. And if you think about just common everyday language, Shakespeare wrote, all the world desires her from the four corners of the earth they come, to kiss this shrine, the mortal breathing saint.

This is from the Merchant in Venice. Now, no one assumes that Shakespeare was under the assumption that the earth was flat, but he was using a metaphor, poetic language, bigger speech, to describe from the whole earth, from everywhere on the earth.

And the Bible does the same. It's using common everyday phrases that we all use. Now, what about some other verses in the Bible? There's some other ones that say about the foundations of the earth never being shaken.

Because of that, people say, well, that means that people think it's like kind of a something mounted on a plane, and you know, it's fixed in space, and it doesn't rotate or move or anything like that.

And the Sun doesn't rise or set. Right. We'll get to that in a second. But right now, we're thinking about the flatness of the earth. So it says this, in Isaiah 40, 22, it is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.

Now, we know the heavens aren't a curtain, and we know that a tent, you know, it's not a tent per se, but when he says the circle of the earth, you know, this doesn't say like a circle of the earth. It says above the circle of the earth.

And that's the key, is you need to understand when we're talking about something that's poetic, something that's using like or as, and that's getting into the hermeneutics again. So, you know, how to interpret a verse.

So where does he get this idea of the circle of the earth? Why would he say that, if he thought the earth was flat? Other verses, Proverbs 8, 27, also espouse around earth. And then there's an interesting verse, verses like, and this in Luke 17, where it depicts the Lord's return, and he says that the activity of the people on the earth during that time, some will be sleeping in bed, nighttime, some will be working in the fields, daytime.

Well, how can it be both night and day, if the Sun is illuminating a flat plane? You know, there has to be a concept of rotation and, you know, revolving around the Sun, or the fact the earth goes around the Sun.

So, the Bible isn't saying that it's a scientific textbook, but you need to be careful when you're looking at verses like this and making assumptions that, saying, well, the earth is never going to be shaken.

That means it's on some kind of a foundation that's fixed and not movable. You know, that's a mistake. So, being careful with your language, not making assumptions, and then examining verses that actually say something, like, above the circle of the earth, you know, is where we need to go when we're interpreting the Bible and interpreting, you know, common everyday knowledge in science that we certainly readily understand.

So, I don't think there's any conflicts here. There were people that were pushing that flat earth like the church was teaching it. I don't think the church teaches it today, and I don't think the Bible says it, but they certainly try to make a big deal out of it.

Stars Falling from Heaven and the Day of the Lord

Now, this is a great one. I love this one. The stars falling from heaven. Did you know there was a big controversy over this verse? Well, there is. Revelation 6, 13. And the stars of the sky fell to the earth as a sun-ripe figs when shaken by a great wind.

Stars falling from the sky to the earth. Okay. I am going to now talk about a blog, a science blog, between an atheist and Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter. I have a real problem with Jimmy Carter, okay?

I'm just gonna say that right out the front. He wasn't a scientist. A lot of people believe he's a genius because he's a nuclear physicist, I believe, is his background. And a lot of people also believe he's a very dedicated born-again believer.

He may be a scientist. As far as him being a Christian and knowing what the Bible says, I don't think he knows very much at all. I've seen a lot of interviews with this man, and see, I don't mind as much people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and the people who are very clear about where they are and what they say.

A man like Jimmy Carter is more like a deceiver who mixes truth and error and tries to, you know, convince you of something that, you know, you can twist things the way you want them to be. So let's read what's going on here.

So the blogger says, Thank you so much for talking with me, President Carter. As I warn, I'm going to ask you some tough questions. Did God write the Bible? Answer. God inspired the Bible, but he did not write every word in the Bible.

We know, for instance, that stars can't fall on the earth. That's our verse. Stars are much larger than the earth, so the earth would be smushed, right? It wouldn't work out. And again, well, we'll get this in a second.

That was a limitation of knowledge of the universe or physics or astronomy at that time, meaning that the writers didn't understand what they were writing down. They just wrote down what they thought.

And God didn't inspire it, and God didn't know how he created the heavens and the earth. Basically, the Bible was made up by men. It's basically. So let's go on with Jimmy here. Should we approach the Bible literally or metaphorically?

Well, sometimes, as we said, there is metaphoric language. There's poetic language. But this is what Jimmy says. When we go to the Bible, we should keep in mind that the basic principles of the Bible are taught by God, but written down by human beings deprived of modern-day knowledge.

Again, they weren't smart enough to know what we know now. So there is some fallibility in the writings of the Bible. There's errancy. It's an error. And we know from what Matt already delivered to us, we don't think there's any error in scriptures at all.

And he says, but the basic principles are applicable to my life, and I don't find any conflict among them. Now, the blogger goes on and talks about the Bible inerrancy, which Carter denies, and then more moral issues like homosexuality and other things.

At the end of this, the blogger states, the problem I have with Carter's approach, however, is that from his starting point, I fail to see why you need the Bible at all. That is, if you must constantly use your own moral intuitions to correct what men wrote down and made mistakes, and correct scientific knowledge to understand which parts of the Bible are to be meant literally, and which require a more nuanced approach, then why bother with the Bible at all?

Why not just trust your own judgments directly and cut out the middleman? The blogger is right. If the Bible is right, it is right, and let it speak for itself. If it is wrong, it is wrong, and we should ignore it, and we can throw it out.

There's no point in dancing around phrases or statements to make yourself comfortable and make the Bible say what you want it to say. Both atheists and Christians should be able to agree on this. So, with all that said, Carter made an assumption that says, well, the Bible's in error because the stars fall from heaven.

That's silly. That can't happen. But should there be a controversy over this? Okay. Here's the lengthier verse. You know, Phil, could you.

Read this just up here? And I looked when he broke the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake, and the sun became as black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as a big tree casts its unripe figs when shaken by the wind.

Okay, so this.

Verse in the book of Revelation is a prophesied event, and we see it several times in other sections of the Bible. Rick, could you read Matthew 24 -29?

Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the.

Powers of the heavens will be shaken. And John, could you read Mark 13?

But in those days after the tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

So all three of these verses in these sections of scripture are very similar, talking about the same event, and we should mention a few things at this point. First, Bible critics also say that because we're talking about stars falling from heaven, the only way that could happen would be if we believe in a flat earth again.

They think this is another flat earth verse, so let's just get that out of the way right off the bat. But they also would say, oh well, here's another problem for you Bible people. The moon does not emanate light.

It says right here, the moon will not give its light. The moon does not emanate light. It reflects light. We all know that, but the Bible writers didn't know that, and that's because God didn't tell them that.

They weren't smart enough to know that. But what is the author trying to say here? Is he trying to make a scientific statement about heavenly bodies, or is he trying to warn the listeners of a coming cataclysmic event that will involve extreme physical phenomena?

People in everyday language use things like the moonlight, and I remember there's a song called Dancing with the Moonlight. Yeah, and if you look up moonlight in the dictionary itself, there is a word in the dictionary which says moonlight.

So the fact that the Bible uses light from the moon, we know what that means. It's not like a mystery, but that's just a little aside in those verses, and we'll get to the meat of it right now.

I'm slightly different from moonshine.

So if we break down these verses, it says stars falling from heaven. Well, the Greek word itself, will be falling or falling, is an accurate translation of this Greek root word, pithto. But we have to understand falling can mean a few different things.

The Bible says we can fall from grace, and that doesn't mean a literal falling in elevation or altitude. The Roman Empire fell. Earlier in the book of Revelation, the Apostle John writes, remember therefore from where you have fallen, when he's writing to the church.

So the Greek word pithto can literally mean to fall in altitude, but sometimes it means a failure or a lessening from a previous state. So how are we going to break this down? Let's look at the verses.

It says the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from heaven, the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Well, this event is also cataloged in the Old Testament quite a bit.

So the Old Testament is talking about a great day of judgment that the Lord is going to bring. Let's look at these verses. Dave, could you read Isaiah 13 for us here? The stars of heaven and their constellations will not flash forth their lights, the sun will be dark when it rises, and the moon will shed its light.

Okay, Jacob, could you read Joel 2 .10? Before them the earthquakes, the.

Heavens tremble, the sun and moon grows dark, but the stars lose their brightness.

For the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision, the sun and.

Moon grow dark, and the stars lose their brightness. And Dave, Joel 2 .31? The sun.

Will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes, and it will come about that whatever calls on.

The name of the Lord will be delivered. Now, I highlighted that last part in red for a reason, because this is a scary future prophetic event where the very foundations of the universe and the world are going to be shaken, and this is going to be the great day of judgment for the Lord.

But Joel throws in this sentence, this verse here, after that and says, it will come about that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be delivered. There is going to be mercy still for anyone who's willing to turn and repent.

This is a scary, scary day, a scary, scary time, but God is gracious even in that time if somebody's willing to turn. And that's something I was just really excited to throw in there because that is that is going to be a very, very horrific time for those who dwell on the earth.

So there are also many other verses in the Old Testament I didn't quote there that actually talked about that same event and had the same similar wording. And we can look at phrases like, what does it mean that the moon is going to be turned to blood?

Well, based upon the context of the verses, we compare it with the other verses with the moon. It says the moon is going to be darkened. So it apparently means that the moon is going to have a darkish color, maybe, possibly that.

It might be a miracle sort of thing, but it might be a reddish color, a darkish reddish color, but it will not emanate its light anymore. It will not reflect the light of the sun. So something is going to happen to the moon.

It's going to be a visible change that the people on the earth are going to see. Could it be an eclipse? Could be. There's going to be a lot of things. It's probably going to be more, it seems, like a very, very much a supernatural event, I would say, because a lot of things are going to happen at the same time.

So it talks about the sun being darkened, the moon being darkened, not giving its light. What about the stars of the Old Testament verses? It all says that they are dimming in light, similar to the sun and the moon.

All of them say that. So in the New Testament, when it talks about the stars falling, which could be a literal falling or a diminishing from their previous state, how should these verses be interpreted?

Well, if we cross-reference the same events and see that the stars will lose their brightness, it makes sense from a hermeneutical standpoint to determine that the meaning of the verse and the reasonable interpretation is that the stars of the heavens will also be dimmed as the sun and the moon are.

And that's just Bible interpretation. You know, that's where a lot of these arguments get into trouble. And, you know, it's not really, it's not hard for a believer to go down this path, but if you take a verse out of context and don't realize what's going on in the biblical, you know, statements, and you take it as like, well, that's a scientific error.

You know, you need to comb through. You need to find out what's really going on. And so there's no problem here. There's no conflicts here. But there is a very great day of judgment coming, and I think that's the thing that people should be taking note of, not little scientific, you know, facts that they think are embedded in the Scripture somewhere.

So that was another controversy. How about that rascally rabbit? This one, this one is, this one comes home to me, because after I was a born-again believer, I wanted to tell everyone about Jesus. And there was a particular friend of mine who really wanted to mock me really badly.

He was in college at the time, and he was taking a philosophy class. And for some reason his philosopher went into these two verses, one in Leviticus and one in Deuteronomy. And we don't have to read these, but it basically talks about the rabbit chewing the cud.

So it's like, well, what's up with this rabbit chewing the cud? So my friend was hopping around the room like, rabbit's chewing the cud, rabbit's chewing the cud, Bible's wrong, Bible's wrong, Bible's wrong, because that's not the definition of what chewing the cud is.

And we can get into the definition of what this is right now. But his philosophy teacher, as many philosophy teachers in college these days, are trying to knock down the Bible and knock down the faith of those people who go there, which is a shame.

And they're gonna be held accountable for that, by the way. But the Bible does clearly say that rabbits or hares chew the cud. Okay, it does say that. Nobody's arguing that. And in the modern-day scientific classification system, animals that chew the cud are called ruminants.

Okay, and here's a list of ruminant animals. They have four stomach compartments. They swallow their food in one stomach compartment, it's partially digested, then the food is regurgitated back up. And I'm glad you all had dinner.

It's gonna get better from here, believe me. And then they swallow it back into a different compartment, the process called rumination. We know that. You know, we know what's going on there. But is the Bible wrong?

After all, rabbits are not considered ruminants. They do not have four stomach compartments. How could they possibly chew the cud? What's up, man? That rabbit's got his buffaloed again, just like Elmer Fudd, right?

Oh my goodness. Crazy rabbit. Yeah, well, we need to consider what rabbits do. Again, we need to consider what the Bible's trying to teach there, and we're also trying to consider what rabbits actually do.

They engage in an activity called cicatrophy. I'm not sure I pronounced that right. But they actually poop out two different kinds of feces. One's the more common, harder feces, but then there's a softer fecal pellet called cicatropes.

And these are small pellets of partially digested food that are passed through the animal, but then re-ingested. And it's part of their normal digestive process. I don't want to get too into this, especially this pass-through-the-anus part, but basically the rabbit re-ingests these things, and they serve as an important source of nutrition for the animal.

Is this the same as chewing the cud? Well, in the final analysis, it is. Because what they're doing is they're chewing or re-ingesting incomplete, partially digested food. Why would it be strange to think that centuries ago, chewing of the cud had a broader meaning than the modern definition, classical, ruminant system?

Why would that be considered unusual? The key phrase in Hebrew is alagera, and ala is used extensively in the Old Testament to restore, to take up, to collect, or regurgitate. Now scientists say, well, in Leviticus it obviously means to regurgitate, which is not what's happening.

The rabbits are not regurgitating it back up from a stomach compartment. And they say, well, therefore it's a gigantic error in the scriptures. And alagera is a more, a less common word, so it's more difficult to know exactly what it means.

But what's clear is rabbits, like ruminants, make a constant chewing motion. Like ruminants, they re-digest their food, albeit through a different process. We know that the description given is pretty easy to understand.

Rabbits recover their food and make a constant chewing motion. But since they do not have a split hoof, they are unclean. And that's the point of the whole Bible passage, is these animals are unclean.

Do not partake of them. And once you hear about maybe what their, you know, cleanliness habits are, maybe you wouldn't want to eat of them. So is there a problem with what's written down in Leviticus and Deuteronomy?

I don't think there is at all. People are saying that, well, you know, this chewing the cud means they're ruminants. But that's a more, that's a more like late, that's what science says lately. Back in that day, chewing the cud just meant eating re-ingested food.

It's not a problem, but people are trying to put on us, or put on the Bible, this literal interpretation of Allah, meaning that it's regurgitation, instead of meaning to restore, or take up, or recover, without any particular evidence to do so.

There's no real problem or conflict with these verses, but people have made this a big deal. So I'm okay with the bunny. I'm very much okay with the bunny. Oh, now what about these guys? Here's a problem.

Copernicus, Galileo, and the Church’s Misreading of Scripture

Copernicus and Galileo. This one we do know about. Does the Sun revolve around the Earth? Did people think that the Sun revolved around the Earth? By appearance. By appearance. Did the Church teach that the Sun revolved around the Earth?

You bet it did. You bet it did. And they called Copernicus the devil's agent. The popes and bishops did, but also Luther and Calvin thought that the same Copernicus had somehow undermined the integrity of the Bible.

Copernicus and Galileo proved their position, though, and he also proved that the Roman Church's official teaching on the subject was wrong. What he did not prove, however, and this is important, is that he did not correct the teachings of the Scripture.

What he did correct was the misinterpretation of Scripture by the Church, and that's again where we can get into problems, because sometimes the Church will imply something or take something out of context in the Scripture and, you know, make a doctrine out of it that doesn't exist.

So what happened here? During this most of the 16th and 17th centuries, fear of heretics was spreading, and the Church was was getting fearful. The Church was trying to squash a lot of things, and you know about the Portuguese Inquisition, you know about the Spanish Inquisition, you know about the Roman Inquisition.

These were all inquisitions by the Catholic Church that were trying to suppress ideas and suppress anything that would come against the Bible, and there was a lot of problems with the Church and its teaching back then.

But remember, this is not problems with the Scriptures. This is problems with the visible Church that was trying to stand for truth, but it was going off into bad directions. So they persecuted scientists who formed theories the Church deemed heretical, and there was a war between science and religion, and it continues today.

Copernicus and Galileo, they printed books who were later banned. Copernicus, fortunate for him, he really didn't face any persecution when he was alive, because he died shortly after he published his writings.

So good for him. Galileo, on the other hand, took a lot of heat, and he was tried by that Roman Inquisition, and his books were banned. And the Church disapproved of this theory because they say that the earth is at the center, not the sun.

And they said that Copernicus and Galileo were sinners because they preached through their writing that the Bible was wrong. Well, is the Bible wrong? What does the Bible say about this? Okay. So, these were similar verses that we talked about with the flat earth, but this time we're talking about whether the earth revolves around the sun or whether the earth is fixed.

So, Joshua 10, 13. Kevin, can you see that?

Could you read that? Yeah. And the sun stood still, the moon stopped, until the.

Nation avenged themselves of their enemies. And that was in Joshua. Now, that was a miracle that happened, actually. Right? That was when Joshua was fighting the Amalekites, I believe, and the sun stood still in the Valley of Aduan.