Science. Religion. They're always at odds, right? Nope. Did you know the Bible seems to accurately
portray the brightness of stars? And that there's some evidence of the great flood? Keep watching.
Two chapters of Genesis tell the story of Adam and Eve:
a specific take on the origin of man that almost everybody is familiar with.
"Fruit tree in the middle of a garden with a 'don't touch' sign — why not
put it on top of a high mountain? Or on the moon?"
And while it's understandably challenging to imagine a person
being formed out of another person's rib, science says it's likely that
all of Homo sapiens really did have a common ancestor — a so-called "Mitochondrial Eve."
Homo sapiens may have originated in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago,
a period of time during which the world's climate was undergoing some drastic changes.
The shared ancestor of all modern humans may have been a Homo erectus female who lived
at some point between 500,000 and 50,000 years ago. This theory is supported by the
fact that Africa has more genetic diversity than every other region on Earth combined.
Meanwhile, Leviticus 17:11 mentions that the life of a creature is found in its blood.
Interestingly enough, you could consider a literal interpretation of this idea to be
scientifically accurate. For one thing, blood travels around the body and supplies oxygen,
nutrients, and other vital elements that are crucial for survival. But it also protects
the body via infection-fighting agents, prevents blood loss through clotting,
and regulates body temperature. The Bible wasn't wrong when it suggested that blood gives us life.
Ancient ideas about water's relationship with the planet can be traced from as early as 1,000 B.C.,
when the Greek poet Homer depicted Earth as, quote, "floating on a primal ocean."
Of course, man's understanding of the water cycle has greatly improved since then.
Nowadays, scientists understand that Earth's hydrologic cycle
involves water's never-ending movement and state changes across, above, and even within the planet.
The hydrologic cycle theory is typically thought to have been discovered by Bernard Palissy,
a hydraulics engineer who, in 1580, suggested that it was possible to
maintain a river with just rain. His theories would be tested nearly a hundred years later,
but they only gained traction among scientific thinkers in the early 1900s.
If you interpret a few passages from the Bible in a certain way, you'll find some alignment
with how modern science understands evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. For instance,
Ecclesiastes 1:7 describes how water flowing from streams into the sea eventually returns
to its point of origin. Meanwhile, both Amos 9:6 and Job 36: 27 and 28 reference water
rising from larger bodies of water such as seas or streams, and then falling back to Earth as rain.
As the Bible wasn't written with scientific accuracy in mind, spotting the points of
alignment can often require an open mind. Mostly, this means accepting that not every interpretation
of the Bible is literal. For example, Isaiah 40:22 talks about "the circle of the earth,"
which some interpret as a reference to Earth being circular when seen from outer space.
There's photographic proof of this, of course. The famous photo "Earthrise," which was snapped
on December 24th, 1968 by Apollo 8's crew, shows Earth as an orb floating in space.
But the idea that Earth isn't flat isn't exactly new — thinkers such as Pythagoras
and Erathosthenes were already toying with the idea long before Jesus Christ was born.
There are more lines in the Bible supporting scientific truths about the Earth itself.
Take Job 28:5, for instance, which mentions how hot the Earth is deep inside. Indeed,
temperatures inside the Earth can rival the degree of heat on the Sun's surface.
Another noteworthy example is found in Job 26:7: Here, the chapter's writer discusses how the
Earth is simply floating in space, unsupported by any fixed physical structure whatsoever.
Obviously, there's no way the Bible's authors could have known about all this for certain,
but it's still remarkable how well this particular dogma has aged.
Judging from what today's scientists know about the stars, Jeremiah 33:22
had the right idea when it suggested that the stars in the sky were "countless."
As it turns out, there could be up to a trillion stars in a single galaxy. That's just a rough
estimate, though, based on the evidence that astronomers, astrophysicists, and other space
scientists have to work with. Applying some good old-fashioned math makes the picture even clearer:
Across the universe's 100 billion galaxies, there could be approximately ten billion trillion stars.
Meanwhile, a literal interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15:41 would reveal
an impressive level of cohesion with modern astronomy, in terms of stars' brightness or
magnitude. This Bible verse talks about the different "splendors" of the Sun,
the Moon, and all the other stars in the universe. Specifically, Corinthians says:
"Star differs from star in glory."
In fact, there's a clear scientific reason why certain stars look brighter to Earthlings than
others. Stars vary in brightness from the vantage point of people on Earth, and this depends on
factors such as the amount of light energy a star emits or how far it is from the planet.
It was the Greek astronomer Hipparchus who first developed a chart of the different
degrees of stars' brightness, some 200 years before Corinthians was written.
"Well, it was nice to meet you, God. Thank you for the Grand Canyon,
good luck with the apocalypse. Oh, and by the way, you suck!"
The Bible doesn't pull any punches when it comes to the end of the world. The
Book of Revelation paints a particularly dramatic picture of how it'll all go down,
but it's not the only apocalyptic verse in the holy book. In fact, at one point the
Bible even mentions how the stars in the sky and other celestial bodies won't last forever,
centuries before modern science could support this with evidence.
According to Matthew 24:35, both heaven and Earth will eventually "pass away."
In the context of astronomy, stars reach the end of their lives once
they've exhausted all the nuclear fuel that keeps them burning. The bigger the star,
the faster it burns through its hydrogen fuel. And when the fuel's completely depleted,
the star either collapses into itself or becomes a black hole, depending on its size.
A black hole has an incredibly strong gravitational field due to the star's mass;
it's so strong that not even light can escape its pull.
For a long time, however, the existence of black holes couldn't be proven with direct evidence.
The first-ever photograph of one was taken on April 10th, 2019 — a historic endeavor that
required 200 scientists and eight super-powerful telescopes located across five continents.
According to Hebrews 11:3, God didn't make the universe "out of what was visible."
One way to interpret this is that the building blocks of the universe are
imperceptible to the naked human eye. And of course, physics supports this notion, too.
Atoms make up pretty much everything that the human senses can perceive. Identical atoms,
when bound together, form the chemical elements,
which are the simplest forms of substances obtainable through ordinary chemical processes.
Atoms are so small that, if you were to take 100 million atoms of hydrogen and line them up,
they would not exceed a centimeter in length. And they're made up of even smaller particles:
It would take a thousand protons or neutrons to match the diameter
of a single atom of hydrogen. Protons and neutrons, in turn,
are a thousand times bigger than electrons and quarks. Does your head hurt yet?
One of the most well-known stories from the Bible is the tale of the world-engulfing
Great Flood and Noah's ark. This story is spread out across three chapters of Genesis,
detailing how one man and his family successfully constructed an ark and
saved all the animals of the planet from a massive flood.
Interestingly, there are various kinds of sedimentary rock across the planet with different
chemical compositions, serving as geological evidence that at some point in Earth's history,
huge floods could have actually occurred. However, it is highly unlikely that water
engulfed the Earth's entirety in a single flood, as the Flood story suggests.
This is because it's not possible for the rock deposits to have formed simultaneously,
going by fossil evidence and basic scientific knowledge. It's possible,
however, that the Great Flood was a regional flood that looked apocalyptic to anyone affected by it.
And then there's the ark. At first glance,
it may seem impossible for such a vessel to properly accommodate
35,000 different animal species and float. In 2014, however, students from the University of
Leicester students crunched the numbers and learned that such an ark could indeed float.
Whether all the animals could actually fit in there, however, is an entirely different question.
“ cluck.”
The way it was told in 1 Samuel 17, it might be difficult to picture how David, a small boy
with a slingshot, took out the battle-hardened brute Goliath. However, if one theory about
Goliath were true, then David's victory was a likely outcome — if not a foregone conclusion.
Many people mistakenly think that David's slingshot was little more than a child's toy.
While a slingshot may not sound as impressive as, say, a sword or a pike, it could be an
absolute killer in the right hands. And David was working with arguably the best bullets available:
the stones from Elah Valley were made of barium sulphate, which were twice as dense as ordinary
stones. In other words, David's slingshot was a 35-meter-per-second death dealer,
hitting his gigantic foe with the awesome power of a .45 caliber pistol.
That's just half of it, though. Goliath may have looked imposing,
but the way he was described in the chapter suggests that his gigantic frame may have come
at a terrible cost to his health. The author Malcolm Gladwell has theorized
that Goliath actually suffered from acromegaly, an overproduction of growth hormones due to a
tumor on the pituitary gland. This would also mean that Goliath likely had poor eyesight.
Acromegaly can cause a person to lose their peripheral vision, limiting what they can see
to what's in front of them. In the end, Goliath probably didn't stand a chance.
Numerous creation myths from various cultures assert that the mountains of Earth were manually
crafted by deities. That's why it's a bit strange that the story of Creation in the
book of Genesis doesn't directly mention God shaping the mountains by hand. As it turns out,
this small omission could be interpreted as having some slight bearing in real-life science.
At least two passages from the book of Psalms talk about underwater mountains.
If these texts are interpreted literally, they may actually be referring to seamounts.
These are mountains formed from powerful volcanic activity underneath the ocean.
Just like terrestrial mountains, seamounts become rich grounds for biodiversity to flourish, due to
the fact that they help bring nutrients from the seafloor to the flora and fauna that live near the
water's edge. It has been estimated that there are approximately 30,000 seamounts under the ocean.
Joshua 10:12 attributes a key biblical victory to the fact that God supposedly made the Sun
"stand still." Two men of physics saw this as an opportunity to shed light on what could have been
a remarkable astronomical phenomenon — and the only tools at their disposal were words and math.
In a paper published in 2017, Sir Colin Humphreys and his partner,
W. Graeme Waddington, discussed how this game-changing event could have
actually been a solar eclipse. They started by speaking to a Semitic languages professor
to determine if the account, originally written in Hebrew, could be interpreted as an eclipse.
After learning that it was possibly an annular eclipse, they cross-referenced
it to another source, the ancient Egyptian-made Merneptah Stele, to strengthen their hypothesis.
Not content with what they'd unearthed, the two scientists even went so far as
to calculate for the exact date it happened. By performing some fancy arithmetic, Humphreys and
Waddinton were able to pinpoint a date for the day God stopped the sun: October 30th, 1207 B.C.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more Grunge videos about your favorite stuff are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.