Of Ants And Stars - How The Bible Has Been Confirmed By Science

As Christians, we take the Bible for what it is, the infallible word of God. It makes up our entire worldview. It determines our choices. It guides our thoughts. It is our life.

Because we trust the Author wholeheartedly, we have no need for the Bible to be confirmed externally. We don’t need an outside source (like a scientific discovery or a historical document) to “prove” to us that the Bible is true.

For example, we know by faith that the walls of Jericho fell down for the Israelites to enter, we don’t need to find any historical evidence to believe this (by the way, we have found this - we’ll see more about that later). Any historical or archaeological evidence that we find confirming what the Bible says may show to the world that what we believe is true. But such evidence should not make a Christian believe the Bible any more...we should’ve already believed it before the discovery!

The next few posts will list out many of these external confirmations - scientific, historical, and prophetic. But my goal is not to make your faith in God’s word any stronger...as a believer, you shouldn’t need outside information to do that. What I want to do with these posts is give you ammunition. I want you to know what to say when you’re confronted with an unbeliever who is convinced that the Bible is a book of fairy tales.

Today, let’s look at a few of the scientific evidences that support the Bible’s claim to truth.

To be clear, the Bible was never meant to be a scientific textbook. But because it’s the Word of God, it must be true whenever it speaks about science. The Scriptures have often been attacked by skeptics that claim they were written by ignorant men in ancient times who knew nothing about the great scientific discoveries of our day. This may be true concerning the men who were used to write the Scriptures, but it is clearly not true when it comes to the Scriptures themselves.

Laws Of Science

Many of the greatest scientific discoveries in the last few centuries have been discoveries of the different laws of nature. Some things - like objects falling to the ground, birds flying through the air, and the fact that different traits are passed on from one generation to another - have always been known to humanity. But in the last few hundred years, there have been numerous discoveries about why these things happen. Many of these answers to the question “why?” have come from scientific laws.

A law of science is a proven statement that is always true...naturally. No matter how often an experiment is performed, no matter how intensely it is tested, and no matter how opinions change; scientific laws always hold true. All too often, these scientific laws prove more embarrassing for the Bible’s skeptics than they do for believers.

Today, I’ll list three simple, easy-to-understand laws of science as examples. Remember, these have all been established as unchangeable laws that are always true. Looking at just these three natural laws will demonstrate that the Bible is only confirmed by science...not contradicted by it.

The First Law of Thermodynamics

“Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed.”

This means that there is no known natural process that can create matter from nothing. Sure, there are a lot of processes in nature that can change matter from one element to another. But in order for the matter to exist in the first place, there must’ve been a process outside of nature to create it!

Law of Information

“Coded information can only come from an intelligent source.”

This is the reason we can write words on a paper (or a screen), and have someone else read it. Information (specifically encoded information such as written, spoken, and programmed languages) has to come from an intelligent source.

We rely on this law all the time...in fact you have faith in this law right now, without even thinking about it. You took it for granted that I (arguably an intelligent source) wrote this post and then published it for you to read. That’s obvious, right? What’s not so obvious is that someone also wrote the massive amount of programming used to change my keystrokes over here into letters, words, and paragraphs on whatever screen you’re looking at there.

But now let’s think about this, this same type of information is programmed and encoded in every single cell in your body (although in a much more complex way). There is so much information encoded on the DNA of each cell that one ounce of DNA can hold 1.6 trillion gigabytes of data...this is the equivalent of over 400 billion DVD discs in a single ounce of DNA! All of this written code is literally programmed into each and every living cell of humans and animals!

According to the Law of Information, all of this coded information had to come from an intelligent source.

Law of Biogenesis

“Life can only come from life.”

This law declares that life cannot come from non-living matter. Naturally speaking, living things can only be produced from previously existing living things. Matter and energy alone cannot produce a creature that’s alive...no matter how simple and small that living creature may be.

Perhaps, one day, scientists in a lab may be able to form a simple bacteria or other lifeform in a lab. They’ve been working on it for years, using different combinations of elements and energy to try to produce life from non-life. Maybe one day, the brightest minds in the world will finally make life in a lab after countless hours of painstaking work. But what would that prove? The Law of Biogenesis would remain intact...because everyone of those scientists are...alive!

There is simply no known natural process that can produce life from non-living matter.

Those three simple scientific laws are amazing confirmation of what the Bible says. While Bible skeptics have to talk their way around them, the Scriptures themselves completely agree with each of them.

Every field of modern science seems to confirm statements made in the Bible. Let’s look at just a few of these. Notice how many times simple and almost poetic statements in the Scriptures are confirmed by scientific discovery.

Astronomy

Genesis 15:5 “Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.”

The Bible teaches that the stars are innumerable to mankind. Jeremiah 33:22 repeats this idea in no uncertain terms, “As the host of heaven cannot be numbered…” At the time these passages were written, mankind could look up at the sky and count between three thousand and six thousand stars. When the telescope was invented by Galileo, that number jumped to around thirty thousand. Today, scientist have agreed that there’s no real way to know how many stars are out there - we can only guess.

And those guesses are incredible!

To our current knowledge, there seems to be around 100 billion galaxies in the universe, each of them with 100 to 200 billion stars each...so the number of stars is somewhere around 1025. This is a rough guess of about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 septillion) stars! There is literally no way in a million years to count all of these! (It would take our fastest computers more than ten million years just to calculate a number that large, let alone assign a unique number to each star!)

All of that clearly shows us, the Bible was right when it said the stars cannot be counted.

Weather

Did you know that the Bible speaks of the water cycle long before it was known to “science”?
Marcus Vitruvius, a Roman architect, first mentioned the water cycle in 30 BC. He was the first to describe how water vapor ascends into the sky and then falls back to the earth as rain.

But Job 36:27-28 was written over 1,500 years earlier, and it lays out the water cycle in plain detail. “For He draws up drops of water, which distill as rain from the mist, which the clouds drop down and pour abundantly on man.” The Bible was right about the evaporation and condensation of rain long before mankind caught up!

Psalm 135:7 “He causes the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth; He makes lightning for the rain; He brings the wind out of His treasuries.”

Originally, the majority of climatologists thought that a storm had a certain amount of energy to spend. Lightning that flashed out from the storm was supposed to decrease the storms energy and tend to make it fade away faster. Now, however, the consensus is directly opposite! It looks as if we may have been completely wrong about how lightning affects a storm. It seems as if lightning actually increases the energy in a storm and allows it to last longer. Truly, God made the lightning for the rain!

Biology

Proverbs 6:6 Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise.
The Hebrew word used in the Bible for “ant” is the word nemalah. It’s feminine; which is why the last part of this verse is translated “consider her ways”.

It’s only been since the 1800’s that scientists have known that most ants are females. The only males that exist are the few “drones” that leave their colony when they are mature. They fly out in search of a mate, and then die shortly after finding her. Every other ant in the colony, from the queen to the workers and soldiers, are all females. The Bible once again had it right all along.

Fossils

Did you know that the very existence of an fossil confirms the Bible’s truth?

In order for a plant or animal to be fossilized, it had to be buried quickly in some kind of sediment (sand, for example). This is especially true of organisms that were fossilized intact. If this burial were to happen slowly, the creature would simply decay and fall apart.

Take fish for example. When a fish dies today, what happens to it? It floats at the surface and gets picked apart by scavengers, right? How much of that fish ends up on the seafloor? Usually very little. And whatever does make it down to the bottom typically gets picked over even more by bottom-feeders until it is simply gone.

Then why do we find so many thousands of fossilized, intact, fish buried in the rock layers around the world?

The Bible gives a great answer to this question: There was a point when the earth was violently flooded by water...no doubt carrying a lot of sand and sediment with it. This water would have killed millions of creatures around the world and quickly buried them in layers of sand. Over the next few centuries, this sand would’ve hardened into stone and produced what we call the fossil record.

Human Anatomy

Psalm 139:15 (NLT) “You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.”

Psalm 139 is a beautiful description of how intimately God knows us. He knows every single detail about who we are, what we think, and how we’re made. In the middle of this Psalm, we find this verse that speaks of when we were “woven together.” It’s easy to just dismiss this as a poetic description of our time in the womb. But it turns out, we literally are woven together!

As scientist studied the human body under the microscope throughout the 1800’s, they began to see exactly what the Bible describes. Millions of fibers and tissues are literally woven together to form our bodies! Long before we found this out, God dropped a single phrase in a poem to let us know….”I knew this all along! I’ve watched this weaving happen billions of times!”

These are only a few of the many, many times when the Bible touched on science and was verified to be exactly right! Time after time, God’s Word has been proven correct. Even the science textbooks themselves have had to be revised over and over. The different scientific theories have come and gone with new discoveries. And, for all of this change in the scientific community, “the Word of the LORD stands forever.”