Science Facts in Bible Wisdom: Evidence Against Moral Relativity

By Harry W. Miller

Unlike most books attempting to reconcile the facts of science with the wisdom of the Holy Bible, Harry W. Millers book, Science Facts in Bible Wisdom, does not waste the readers time with long, convoluted arguments. Instead, it cuts right through to the substantive evidence to show that todays science is discovering increasingly the very truths that the Bibles wisdom has always contained, citing scientists and the Bible. The bottom line Truth concerning Reality, both for science and the Bible, is that it is not relative or divisive in nature, it is instead relational and unifying. Jesus Christ being the Keystone evidence of that Fact by the complementary, holistic nature of his mortal human yet divine Person. Thus, the Bible tells us, Since the creation of the world his [Gods] invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made [most particularly in the Person of Jesus Christ, born of woman] (Romans 1:20).

Science Facts in Bible Wisdom is in three parts. The first two focus on sciences and the Bibles correlative information concerning the creation of the universe, the human person and the emergence of the subjective consciousness with its two tracks of awareness. The third part focuses upon the more intimate aspects of personal or experiential knowledge such as prayer, miracles, and visions (including two of the authors own), as well as the documentation of near-death and out-of-body experiences by scientists of the International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS).

Within the heart of each human being there resides a deep-seated, spiritual desire to know in both an intimate and substantive fashion that ultimate Source of their existence, most often referred to as God. Humanity is forever reaching out to that ultimate Source, very much as Adam is in Michelangelos classic Sistine Chapel painting, The Creation of Adam.

The NASA photo appearing on the cover of Science Facts in Bible Wisdom, like Michelangelos famous painting, is evidence that even with todays secular culture humanity continues to pursue its innate, even if often subconscious, spiritual imperative to know its Creator, not just spiritually but in truth. Today, however, the search for credible, substantive evidence and that transcendental Truth, God, for which it speaks comes evermore frequently by way of the amazing, new empirical findings of science. Thus, on this books cover, in place of Adams arm reaching out to God, we see instead the space shuttles robot arm reaching out to the visible evidence of Gods invisible nature... the things that have been made (Rom. 1:20).

As this book attempts to show, truth of any kind must always rest upon relevant evidence. But, it can not rest upon self-righteous ideologies nor the blind beliefs of the large assortment of locally popular human traditions (habits). Evidence and reason are always necessary, whether the evidence required and the truth being pursued are of a more visible, tangible kind, as at a crime scene, or if they are of a less visible or ethereal nature. In the latter case, the truth and that evidence which speaks for it must necessarily be articulated by means of an indirect, analogical or symbolic form of language. The only language which can, in effect, make known more clearly the particular nature of such mysterious, invisible truths by making them more concrete to the limited cognitive scope of the human mind.

Such a language must be used by both science and religion. The symbolic form of language favored by science is one comprised of mathematical symbols. On the other hand, the language favored by religion, such as that used in the Holy Bible, must often take on a metaphorical or figurative form in order to make those spiritual things that can not now be seen more concrete to the human understa

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 21, 2006
• ISBN: 9781450046350

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

PART 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

PART 2

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

PART 3

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

EPILOGUE

LIST OF WORKS CITED

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is dedicated with love to my family, each of whom contributed in some way to making it become what it is. My wife’s own religious heritage was a subtle and ever-present influence on my eventual journey into Christianity’s more mysterious depths, a place where, until a few short years ago, I had never gone before. Our children, Janet and David, each placed in my hands a particular book that later became an important part of the book you hold.

Its original inspiration, I believe, came from some probing questions that my daughter asked me more than once back in the ’80s. Why is Christianity special or any different from any other religion? Aren’t they all more or less the same? This book is an attempt to answer those notso-simple questions by using science facts as humanity’s new witness to the wisdom of the Holy Bible.

It is my sincere hope that the evidence offered here will help all God’s people realize that his truth is, indeed, a unified and unifying Truth that only appears fragmented when looked at through the refracting prism (or prison) of human understanding.

PREFACE

Although the subject explored on the following pages may seem to fall beyond the boundaries of the usual ones readers prefer to invest their time and money in, it is one that is nevertheless forever with us, to say the least. One that addresses the most important subject a person will ever consider during their lifetime, whether they want to or not. That subject is the truth concerning God and human existence. Or, to put it another way, what life is really about.

The research done for this book made it extremely clear that while the empirical scientific evidence provided by the visible world may serve as an indispensable factor in coming to more fully know God, that evidence alone is essentially meaningless outside the context of those divinely revealed truths which his son, Jesus Christ, brought to humanity so long ago. As it happens, one German Lutheran theologian, Wolfhart Pannenberg, seems also to have come to that exact same bedrock conclusion. In his book, Jesus: God and Man (Westminster Press: Philadelphia, 1968), one of the very first modern systematic Christologies, Pannenberg follows the theological tradition of both Barth and Bonhoeffer in asserting that the living God can only be known in truth as he has been revealed by the substantive evidence provided by Jesus Christ. That is, one cannot know God first in an abstract, noumenal manner and through that alone come to know Jesus as one with the God of Abraham. For to know the true, living God requires evidence that could only be revealed, once and for always, by and through the Son of God himself.

God’s revelation of his divine plan for a fallen humanity takes place not at the beginning of humanity’s time on earth, but when the time had fully come, [then] God sent his Son, born of woman (Gal. 4:4). That is to say, the fullness (center) of time was that point at which the very Creator of time, the Alpha and Omega, was born into time itself. Only through that substantive, historical nexus of Jesus Christ was/is everything that transpired before and after him in the history of Israel able to be discerned in its proper, holistic, revelatory context. In fact, the destiny of each person’s life also draws its meaning from what Christ did for them historically, once and for all, through his passion on the cross, in his death and resurrection. For Pannenberg, the authenticity of Jesus’ identity as true Son of God is made evident, not by his Incarnation as such, but rather by his unrelenting devotion and obedience to the Father’s will. An obedience to which the numerous, documented miracles emerging from that divine relationship bear witness, the foremost being Jesus’ resurrection (McBrien, 123-24; [For the Son’s obedience, see John 5: 19-24]).

Pannenberg’s insightful discernment of Jesus’ central place as the transcendental nexus of all linear space-time, past and present, is of extreme importance. Without that understanding, complemented by the good news Jesus brought to the world, it is impossible to reconcile the new, empirical truths of quantum theory with the divine, revealed wisdom of the Holy Bible. As a consequence of the lack of such an understanding centered on the person of Jesus Christ, there has been a plethora of books written and published that fall far short of reconciling science facts and Bible wisdom to the extent this book hopefully will do.

Today, most people are familiar with the term scientists use to refer to the beginning of the universe and of time itself, the Big Bang. However, this now well accepted idea was not even developed until the 1940s and 1950s. Before that, ancient cultures and, even much later, scientists such as Newton and Einstein (at first), still believed that the universe was not created at all, but instead had always existed in what was described as a steady state. It was not until the astronomer, Edwin Hubble, in 1929 discovered incontrovertible, empirical evidence that the universe is, in fact, in a constant state of expansion that the long-held human notion of a steady state began to become unraveled and the truth emerged.

Of course, this truth had long before been clearly stated in the Holy Bible; just read Genesis 1:1 or John 1:1. The first scholars to recognize this truth, so long overlooked by secular scholars, providentially, were medieval scholars who had a personal faith in the wisdom of the Bible, individuals such as Jean Buridan, a fourteenth-century professor at the Sorbonne. That faith allowed them to attempt to develop a unified and consistent explanation of the workings (mechanics) of the universe, because it was based upon the revealed knowledge of a Big Bang that had yet to be proven as such! Thus, their very belief that God had created the universe from a nothingness provided the necessary premise from which the paradigm-shifting concepts of inertia, momentum, and inertial motion could be extrapolated, so that Newton could later develop his famous laws of motion.

This historically documented sequence of events would appear to indicate that modern science, physics in particular since it is the quantitative study of bodies in motion, was given its intellectual birth by the Christian faith of those medieval scholars who had the ability, through the grace of God, to discern gospel truth when they read it in the Holy Bible (Woods, Jr., 76-79).

The New Paradigm of life discovered by quantum physics is a nondualistic one. One comprised of the visible world, and that invisible realm from which science says it emerges. This model is totally consistent with the teachings of the Holy Bible. Nevertheless, most science writers will not even consider the possibility that the Bible’s wisdom may indeed be scientifically and historically factual. Thus, as often as not, their books do a great injustice not only to the ancient, revealed wisdom of the Bible, but to any consistent understanding of the recent findings in quantum physics.

Though many such books that view science itself as the one true religion, scientism, could be cited, one example should suffice to illustrate the point that Albert Einstein stated so eloquently: Science without religion [faith] is lame; religion without science [evidence and reason] is blind. But long before Einstein, Jesus warned us: Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall in a pit? (Lk. 6:39).

The book used here as an illustration was very well written. However, when its conclusions were finally revealed, they rested not on substantive facts and evidence, but on blind faith in science alone, pure speculation. For this book, just as so many others, left Jesus Christ and the Bible out of its skewed equations. For starters, though its hypothesis is seemingly predicated on findings from quantum physics, the model of reality used to justify its atheistic scenario totally does away with the nondualistic model of quantum physics. Nevertheless, it goes on to cite quantum physics’ understanding that it is our minds that give reality to the world we see around us. Boldly, the author proposes a notion that allows him to conveniently explain how the world itself could have already existed even before there was any mind (human) or even any life. He simply begs the question concerning a first cause or God by asserting that the world never had a beginning; there was no Big Bang. Instead, he insists it always existed as a self-creating cycle as in Buddhism, and defines human consciousness as a matter of the universe in dialogue with itself. He tells readers that while they have a free will and can determine their personal and corporate future: Only a creature that stood outside the universe—a supernatural god—could see it otherwise. The author then proceeds to explain his new, self-described, radical view of nature by telling readers that as the power of the mind grows, so will its ability to watch quantum systems (the universe) in the past. Thus, from increasingly remote points in the future, an increasingly powerful creative beam of observation will reach back to earlier and earlier times. And so will the cosmic mind-to-come project more readily into the distant past, into the very reality that is necessary and sufficient to give rise to itself. This process will continue until there is a single, all-encompassing mind, coextensive and coinclusive with the entire universe, which through a single, final observation will complete the loop joining Alpha to Omega. What the author calls the watcher at the end of time.

To the uninformed nonbeliever, such flawed theories may well seem to make sense. This particular author goes on to say that our consciousness may dissolve at the point when our brains die. Nevertheless, he manages to assure us we will inevitably (?) be involved in what he calls the cosmic consciousness yet to come. Ironically, for the author of this particular book and all those others who do not yet understand the indispensable nature of Jesus’ person as the true Son of God, such theories are all doomed to fall far short of the truth. For that truth they seek, indeed, begins and ends with the person of Jesus Christ, the Alpha and Omega. And yet, their theories often do, nonetheless, unwittingly contain parts of that truth that God wrote on their hearts, as clearly demonstrated by the intuitive knowledge of a feedback loop or creative point of observation mentioned in the book cited. For that creative point of observation, God’s ever present, divine feedback loop (Mediator) between our visible, space-time world and that glorious, as yet invisible, world of his heavenly kingdom, is none other than the person of Jesus Christ, the beginning and end of all truth and all life.

One needs to understand that ultimate, authentic truth is always the same. It is necessarily one, unique and eternal, like the one correct answer to a problem in mathematics, and it is the same whether it is viewed through facts found in nature or through the wisdom of the Holy Bible. Thus, one may note in the following quotations examples of the kind of correlated evidence concerning substantive truth found in science and in the Bible that is presented in this book.

The Holy Bible’s book of Romans, chapter 1, verse 20, states, "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it [the Truth] to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made [the visible world]. So they [unbelievers in the one, true, living God] are without excuse. Thousands of years later, in 1909, the American psychologist, visionary, William James, wrote, Let empiricism [scientific evidence provided by the visible world] once become associated with religion as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion [hostility to religion], and I believe that a new era of religion as well as of philosophy will be ready to begin" (Wiebe, 215). It is the purpose of this book to help make James’ prescient assertion become a reality.

In the Holy Bible, John 14:9-10, 19-20, Jesus Christ tells his apostles that "He who has seen me has seen the Father [God] . . . . Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me? . . . Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see [discern or know] me; because I live, you will live also. In that day [when Christ is no longer visible in the world] you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me and I in you. Compare those words of Jesus with recent assertions based upon findings in quantum physics as articulated by noted physicists, David Bohm, Lee Smolin, and Gerald Schroeder. David Bohm describes the essential nature of the Implicate realm of quantum physics, a realm beyond this visible world, this way: Object A can be contained within B, while at the same time B is contained within A (Marshall, 197). Physics’ Implicate realm is described as very much like that heavenly realm of which Jesus speaks. Both are invisible metaphysical" realms.

Further, Jesus’ gospel message concerning the importance of relationships, how we are, indeed, our brothers’ keeper, is clearly reflected in Lee Smolin’s bottom line explanation of reality/truth as seen by physics: There are relationships and nothing else (Cole, 163). That is, there are no intrinsically separate entities, things or persons, in the universe, only relationships that subsist within the matrix of a substance, which originates from a Source beyond the visible world. This substance, according to physicist and biblical scholar, Gerald Schroeder, is a wisdom that consists of energy and information. A wisdom from which a proper translation of Genesis 1:1 tells us the universe was made in the beginning: With wisdom, God created the heavens and the earth (Schroeder, ’01, xii).

Numerous comparisons of scriptural passages and recent scientific findings similar to the ones mentioned above are presented throughout the following chapters. Nonetheless, the author makes no claim to expertise in either science or religion. As a result, hopefully, the material presented here is, of some necessity, in language most people should be able to understand. Otherwise cryptic scientific terms are explained wherever necessary before proceeding, for the reader’s benefit. One need not be a rocket scientist or theologian to grasp the simple truth of God’s message of Good News for humanity. After all, Jesus himself declared, I thank thee Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and revealed them to babies (Matt. 11:25).

This is very true. For the minds of young children are far more receptive to God’s evidence. Their mind’s eye, imagination, has not yet been clouded over by acquired prejudicial thinking habits. However, when it comes to the human race in general, God told his prophet, Hosea: "My people are destroyed [not for lack of blind faith, but] for lack of knowledge (Hos. 4:6). Therefore, in the fullness of time" God sent his light, Jesus, into the world to restore the knowledge of that truth long lost in the dark recesses of the human, subjective consciousness. (For references to Jesus as God’s light, see John 3:19-20 and 12:35-36, 46.)

Throughout human history, there have been two distinct ways of envisioning God in the darkness of the human mind. First, there is the dualistic view, which sees God as so totally other that the divinity cannot be identified with human nature, nor the eternal with the historical or the transcendent realm with the world in which we live. Such an either-or, polarized, dualistic view of things marks the difference between a heretical, Gnostic-like view and orthodox Christianity’s more scientifically valid, nondualistic view of truth or reality. The latter view holds that both the visible and invisible things that can be known in truth and in an empirical manner are actual or potential manifestations of the divine presence. Thus, the start of any spiritual journey toward the truth must begin with material realities, such as the world and its history, the Church, and the Holy Bible. Only in that way may one come to know in a substantive way the one, living yet invisible God. This view of truth and/or reality is called a sacramental theological perspective, one which involves the principle of mediation. That means, God’s grace is present in this world and acts upon us continually through secondary causes, but can ultimately only be known in truth, fully and definitively, through the mediating, divine yet human person of Jesus Christ. The Church continues as always to teach that grace, the divine presence, continuously enters into and substantially transforms nature, including human lives. Conversely, the seeming dichotomy of truth and/or reality as created by a heretical, dualistic religious view of nature and grace, the world and the heavenly realm, humanity and God, is a convenient, mental simplification of things that allows the human mind and blind faith alone to devise answers without any use of substantive evidence.

Human existence, as we experience it in its natural and historical state, is wholly oriented toward a divine, transcendental plan that is constantly being worked out within the world through the cooperation (with God) of those who, in faith, are willing to learn. That is, to know, and thereby to believe in that divine yet historical plan as revealed in the Bible and verified by those real, visible things that have been made.

Science’s new, nondualistic model of existence and human consciousness is much closer to Bible wisdom than the older, simpler Newtonian model. It has taken science this long just to finally touch the paradoxical fringes of the Bible’s mysterious wisdom, because the divine wisdom revealed to ancient Jewish prophets was given to them direct from its Source, intact and whole. In contrast, scientific information, as all human, temporal knowledge, is acquired slowly, by bits and pieces over a long period. Science has over time moved closer to God’s truth, simply because all empirical truth is ultimately, simply a manifestation or evidence of the Creator’s existence. It speaks for him. In contrast, faith in those beliefs that are not based upon reliable evidence is little more than faith in human traditions and myths. As Albert Einstein said, Science without religion [faith] is lame; religion without science [evidence and reason] is blind.

Therefore, the most important rule in good science—and this could be said for good, healthy religion as well—is that the clearest picture of the truth can only be achieved if one is both willing and disciplined (humble) enough to follow wherever substantive evidence and good reasoning take them. But today, people are so blinded by the illusions of the visible world that they believe their eternal destiny can be ensured by following any of the countless human traditions purporting to be the truth. (See Luke 6:39.) But the traditions of man of which the Bible speaks are beliefs that have little to do with reality. On the other hand, the sacred traditions of Christianity are grounded upon substantive, historical evidence that one can actually know. The all-encompassing pursuit of God’s truth by the Church over the centuries has not separated the truth of science from the one truth of God. Indeed, it was the Church that first established those universities centuries ago that made major contributions to the development of the empirical methods used by science today in the pursuit of the universal (one) truth concerning human existence.

Conversely, those human traditions (ideologies) that grew largely from the deceitful nature of human, temporal awareness have done more, while serving human convenience and reason, to prevent God’s truth from being unfolded in its glorious fullness than anything else. Such traditions habitually throw away those bits of truth that may be gleaned from primary sources such as the early Church Fathers, rather than risk discovering that their own beliefs may in some ways be wrong. Such a self-centered, polemical attitude toward truth inevitably causes truth itself to be censored. Perhaps, the most blatant example of such censorship among the Christian community was the removal of seven books from the original Old Testament canon. Books long used over the centuries by the early Church until some found them to be contrary to their own beliefs. They suddenly became superfluous or unimportant to the various newer versions of Christianity. This example shows that there are forever those who claim to hold the truth who do not love it enough to protect it nor to truly pursue it. For that could prove inconvenient. (See 2 Thessalonians 2:9-11 and 15.)

Quantum physics’ nondualistic New Paradigm of existence has helped to clarify many of the formerly contradictory-sounding passages of the New Testament. It explains how the things in the visible realm are closely interrelated with, and even influenced by, the invisible realm. Science speaks of quantum systems, expressions of information and energy (wisdom) that are spread throughout the universe. These systems remain invisible until they are actualized and discernible, as, for example, the audible sounds and visible images of radio and television.

When a television set is turned off, the sounds and images that it can make apparent do not suddenly cease to exist. We just lose our ability to perceive them. The unheard music in the air continues with all its notes intact, whether we can hear it or not. In an analogous way, when a person’s soul (being) ceases to inhabit their body, it too lives on as a distinct, living system of energy and information in another realm of existence. Nevertheless, the unique form or configuration of that person remains, and it retains not only its original form (pattern boundaries), its unique identity, but also its constituent information, the history and memories of those things that helped to form and inform that person and make them who they became in life, for better or worse (Schwartz, G., 274-76).

Each person is designed to become all that they can be, a unique and eternal soul, comprised of spirit and substance. Only one thing can stand between what they become, and what they were intended by God to become relative to their special potential and purpose. That thing is their not-so-free will. For the darkened human will is a slave to the needs of one’s animal nature. Thus, if a person comes to bear little resemblance to that higher Self that God intended them to be, it is because they have lost part of their special, personal identity, their unique soul or person. Jesus might tell them I never knew you; depart from me you evildoers (Matt. 7:23). For such people do not follow the will of Jesus or the Father.

Our self-centered animal nature makes it difficult for us to comprehend how we, just like the rest of the universe, are a part of God’s divine plan for the world. Our lives are not our own, but a gift from God. But most people see little connection between their life here on earth relative to God’s plan for them, and their subsequent eternal destiny. That is because the mental images of God that people worship when they practice their faith often have little more to do with the reality of the living God than the fictional, bearded figure of the wizard, Shazam, in some old Captain Marvel comic book. This happens despite the fact that God made it easy for us to know him in truth through his authentic image in his Son, Jesus Christ—not a figment of the darkened human intellect, but a fully divine yet fully human person, mortal like all of us. For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning (Heb. 4:15).

Today, our souls are drowning in a technological flood of information, most of which is unsubstantiated by evidence. So how are we to know where to find the truth? The short answer to that is simply to open our eyes to the evidence, for the truth speaks through the very world that surrounds us. That is why Jesus said to his disciples Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall in a pit (Lk. 6:39)?

"By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear (Heb. 11:3). And it is only through those things in the world made visible by God that we may manage to know him in truth." That is, in a truly specific and meaningful sense. For nothing is meaningful to the human mind in a substantive sense unless it is first made identifiable as a special form. Indeed, forms or configurations are the basis of all languages and mathematics (Schwartz, G., 274). Only they can allow human beings to communicate or inform one another or to search for authentic truths. However, whenever such forms (words) are misused, confusion ensues. God therefore sent the unique person of his only begotten Son into the world, his word, in visible flesh and blood form, so that the unique image, name and identity of the Father, the living God, would not be confused with any other person, word or name under heaven. "For the law was given through Moses; [but] grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known" (Jn. 1:17-18).

Before he was crucified, Jesus responded to Pontius Pilate, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.’ Pilate said to him, ‘What is truth’ (Jn. 18:37-38)? It is the purpose of this book to answer Pilate’s question in a manner that hopefully will open the spiritual eyes of those who, up to this point, have been blind and thought of Christianity as just one more of the countless human religious traditions in the world that are based on faith alone. It most certainly is not. And that, dear friends, in a nutshell, is what makes it unique!

This book therefore presents and endeavors to explain numerous scientific findings, facts, which echo the ancient, revealed wisdom of the Holy Bible. And in so doing, hopefully it will demonstrate that all truth is, indeed, one. It is the unifying Matrix of this one truth to which all lesser truths and persons must necessarily conform or be left alone in eternal darkness. While that one Truth, the living God, has been given a multiplicity of local names and culturally acceptable images, there is only one of those images that conforms fully to the evidence of reality, including an authentic history of the world, as will be shown in the following pages.

Science facts and Bible wisdom, the evidence that speaks for God, is presented in three parts following the introduction in