Difference between revisions of "Essay:Rebuttal to Biblical scientific foreknowledge"

Revision as of 04:42, May 28, 2016

This article is intended as a rebuttal to the points in the Biblical scientific foreknowledge (hereafter called BSF) article.

Unlike most essay pages, anyone is welcome to contribute. We ask that you abide by the usual guidelines—do not remove non-vandal, non-parody, non-libelous material without discussing it first on the talk page, or explaining after-the-fact for serious problems.

Unlike some other rebuttal pages, that are about verifiable scientific facts, theories, and observations, the points made in BSF are claims that various scientific and engineering achievements were foreseen or predicted in the Bible, and would have been made sooner if people had read the Bible more carefully. And that failure to read the Bible closely has obstructed the advancement of science by failing to see these scientific truths.

The items in BSF take a wide variety of forms (unlike the items in, say, Counterexamples to Relativity, which are about specific observations that can be evaluated objectively). Many of the BSF claims are of a nebulous nature and can't really be evaluated or refuted, and this article will not attempt to do so. This article will therefore address only a subset of the claims in BSF.

This article will maintain a very specific and narrow focus on the various claims of BSF. It will not address whether the various scientific and mathematical theories or advances are true, but simply on the issue of whether those advances could have been made, with the specificity with which they were eventually made, much sooner than they were had the Bible been studied more closely. This is what the BSF article claims.

1 Geology

2 Agriculture

3 History

4 Medicine and biology

5 The Bible and health practices

5.5 Anesthesia

That people sleep, and have diminished sensitivity to external stimuli while sleeping, has been known since the dawn of mankind. That any kind of surgery is both painful and dangerous has been known from the dawn of mankind until the 19^th century. The danger arose because of infection, and it wasn't until the discoveries of Joseph Lister that this could be solved. The problem of the pain of having one's body tampered with was another problem. The realization of this problem did not require reading of Genesis. What was required was a way to force the patient to be asleep, even while being operated on. The account in Genesis gave no practical insight into how to accomplish this. The Genesis account indicates that the forced sleep was the result of divine intervention. It gives no hint of how mere mortals could do this. What was required was the discovery, around 1846, that diethyl ether does the trick. The Genesis account gives no hint of the efficacy of diethyl ether, or of any other method of forced sleep that mere humans could use.

5.8 Eyesight

The cited article is about the restoration of sight to a blind person through the implantation of an "artificial silicon retina". It describes his ability to see, among other things, faces, tree leaves, flying geese, and streetlights. But there is absolutely no mention of the sensation of trees walking.

The actual test of an item in BSF is whether the information in the cited Bible passage could have guided scientists into making their discovery earlier. It is simply not credible that a description of "trees walking" could have informed the invention of the artificial retina.

6 Cosmology

6.1 Distance of Oldest Star to Earth

6.2 Planet formation

6.3 Extraterrestrial life

6.4 Starlight Problem

6.5 Number of stars

6.6 Uniqueness of stars

6.7 Spherical Sun and Earth

6.8 Earth free floating in space

6.9 Cosmic Background Radiation

6.10 Meteoroids

6.11 Stellar proper movement

6.12 Space flight

6.13 Expanding universe

7 Meteorology

8 Physics

8.1 Immense power within atoms alluded to in 2 Peter chapter 3

8.2 Impossibility of a Grand Unified Theory

The phrase "Grand Unified Theory" (GUT) in physics generally refers to the unification of the electric, magnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear forces. This has already been achieved, if one ignores the obvious incompleteness of not unifying the gravitational force. (The theory that will do the latter is called a "Theory of Everything", or "TOE".) The GUT is properly called "Quantum Chromodynamics", or "QCD". For example, the prediction of the Higgs boson, and the subsequent experimental verification of it, were acheivements of QCD.

The notion that no theory unifies light and matter is preposterous. One only needs to strike a match to see the interactions of orbital electrons producing light. The details of this were worked out by Niels Bohr in 1913, though the fact that some kind of connection was present had been known long before that.

The item in BSF claims that the Bible asserts that light is "incapable of theoretical unification with matter." If scientists had accepted that, instead of advancing science, it would have obstructed the advancement of science. It would certainly have stopped Niels Bohr's work in 1913, and would have stopped physics at least as far back as the theory of electromagnetic radiation worked out by Larmor in 1897.

8.3 Light and color

8.4 Action-at-a-distance

8.5 Quantum mechanics

8.5.1 Observation of the wave function

8.5.2 Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

8.5.3 Wave-particle duality

8.5.4 Quantum tunneling

8.6 Classical relativity

8.7 Modern relativity

8.8 Second Law of Thermodynamics

8.9 Nature of air

8.10 Conservative forces

The CBP translation seems to be saying that light and shadows don't "turn", that is, light advances in straight lines. This is true, if one ignores phenomena like reflection and refraction. But to say that the electric and magnetic fields don't "turn" is simply not true. The E and B fields in circularly polarized (but travelling in a straight line) light turn constantly.

More to the point, the statement that electromagnetic forces are conservative, such that their line integrals over a closed loop are zero, is simply not true. This condition is equivalent to the curl being zero. But Maxwell's Equations give very definite values for the curls:

Changing fields (as is always the case with light) lead to nonzero curls, that is, nonconservative fields. Furthermore, even in a static situation, an electric current leads to a nonconservative magnetic field.

It is fortunate that James Clerk Maxwell did not allow a reading of James 1:17 to deter him from his research.

9 Mathematics

9.1 Zero

9.2 Banach-Tarski Paradox

9.3 Axiomatization of Arithmetic

9.4 Infinity

9.5 Set theory

9.6 Calculus

9.7 Arithmetic with Negative Numbers

9.8 Indeterminacy

10 Sociology

10.1 Trolls

10.2 Crime

11 Zoology

12 Linguistics

13 Economics

14 Government and Politics

15 Engineering

References