. Modern science and the Bible
do not agree. William Bacon Stevens, 1815-1887
What if science as at present understood and the Bible do not
agree? Shall we be troubled thereat?
I think not. I rejoice to know that what is
termed modern science and the Bible do not agree. I would be
sorry if they did agree. Modern science is changeable.
The Bible is unchangeable. The science of today is not the
science of last year and will not be the science of the next
year. The Bible of today is the Bible
of all the Christian centuries, and will be a thousand years
hence just what it was nearly eighteen hundred years ago when
the canon of Scripture was closed. Mark the changes which have taken
place along the whole line of sciences since the beginning
of this nineteenth century. What a catastrophe then would
it have been Had it been proved that the Bible and science, as
known at the beginning of this century, fully agreed, that all
the assertions of the Bible could be squared with the facts of
science as then understood, The great tidal waves of science,
which have rolled over the world since, would have left the Bible
stranded and ruined. And just so now, could it be
made clear today that every truth in the Bible accords with the
received theories of science, What would become of the Bible
fifty years hence, when science will have moved on with even
more rapid strides, and left behind more wrecks of theories
and more stranded speculations? In the meanwhile, the Bible stands
still in the solitary grandeur of its own perfection. It waits,
as the ages roll on, for confirmation and acceptance. It was said by
one of old, God is patient because He is eternal. And the Bible,
as the book of the God of Truth, has this attribute of its divine
author. Its strength is to sit still. It does not go out hastily to
meet a half-formed science and embrace it as an ally, lest it
should turn into a foe. It calmly tarries in the consciousness
of its own truth. as the advances of science come
nearer and nearer, and every advance of true science does
bring it nearer to the Bible. The opposition to that Bible
comes only from a class whose utterances Paul has justly characterized
as the profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely
so called. These differences between science
and Scripture cannot be settled because science is not settled,
and science will never be settled so long as there is an undiscovered
fact in nature or an inquiring mind in man. Forever, O LORD,
your word is settled in heaven. Psalm 119.89 The grass withers,
and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever. Isaiah 40.8