Scientific Proofs of the Inspiration of the Bible

One of the biggest ongoing debates in our civilization and culture today revolves around God and the Bible. One side argues that there is no God, that the Bible is just a myth, a book that was written centuries after it claims to be, that God Himself, the notion of a Creator, is just a myth, a fable, as Karl Marx referred to God in religion, as the opiate of the masses, something to keep them satisfied there. Of course, we would naturally beg to differ quite a bit about that. We do have faith in the Creator God and the Bible, but that faith isn't simply a blind faith. It's a faith that is built, in many cases, on supportable facts. We just concluded a Bible study last time, a multi-part series of Bible studies on how various archaeological finds confirmed the Bible, that it was written when it claims to have been written, and it were beginning about 1500 BC and on up to the 90s AD with the Apostle John. The things I covered in that series prove that those portions of the Bible are true and that they can be historically verified by the historical and archaeological evidence that people have uncovered since then. But because the Bible was true, does that mean that it was divinely inspired? Because those are actually two different issues.

We covered in that series of studies about how the Bible was true, historically with the facts that are recorded in there. But whether it's divinely inspired is a different issue altogether.

And what we'll cover today in today's study are various proofs that the Bible was indeed inspired by God. What we'll be talking about today is scientific truths revealed in the Bible long before scientists figured them out. And I touched a little bit about that in the opening prayer. Basically, we'll be talking about different scientific proofs that are recorded in various places, typically just in passing in God's Word. And yet, there are scientific facts that it took mankind, scientists, others, literally thousands of years in many cases to figure out. So this does prove that the Bible was something that was inspired when God could write things, record things in His Word. And yet mankind did not realize and understand the truth of those things for thousands of years. So that's some of the things we'll go through in the study today.

The Bible contains many scientific and medical facts, again, written literally thousands of years before they were discovered. But how did the Bible writers know these things? Think about that for a minute. How did Moses, for example, know to write down various principles about diet, about health, about hygiene, about how to prevent sickness, the spread of sickness, things like that.

How did he write down things that medical doctors and researchers wouldn't discover for 3,000 years?

How did that happen? How did some of the Bible writers understand basic facts about the structure and about the origins of the universe? About meteorology, about the weather, about geology, even thousands of years before they were discovered just in the last few centuries, and in some cases just within the last few decades, and in some cases actually within the last few years. How did the Bible writers know about these things that long ago, thousands of years ago, when the pages of Scripture were written?

And what do these things tell us about the Bible? Does it tell us that the Bible writers who lived thousands of years ago were simply lucky guessers? That they just wrote these things down, just out of thin air? Or does it instead tell us that the Bible was indeed inspired by the Creator who made the universe, who made the earth, who understands how it works, how it was formed, how it was all designed? Not just the earth, but everything within it. And it reveals some of those facts under divine inspiration, too, those men who wrote the words of Scripture. As we'll see today, there is only one conclusion that one can come to when we look at the evidence. So let's look at some of the evidence of scientific truths revealed in the Bible long before scientists figured them out. One of the first truths is that the Bible revealed that the earth floats in space unsupported by anything. Job 26 in verse 7 tells us that He, referring to God, hangs the earth on nothing. We take that for granted today, but if you think back to the ideas of mankind thousands of years ago, people used to have all kinds of ideas about the earth. And most of them had no clue whatsoever that the earth was just hanging in space, suspended in thin air, as you might put it there. One common idea, which I was showing a little bit before as I was setting this up, in ancient India they actually believed that the earth was supported on the backs of four elephants. If you look closely you can see the elephants here, who in turn stood on the back of a giant turtle. And that was their concept of the earth. It was essentially this disk here with a sun floating above it, supported on elephants and a giant turtle. There's a joke I recently read about in researching this material here. This famous astrophysicist was giving a lecture at one of the big Ivy League universities back east about the origins of the universe, the Big Bang Theory, and all of this, and how the earth and gravity interact, and all of this.

This Indian lady came up to him and said, you know, I want you to know you've got it all wrong.

One of the points he had discussed was this idea of the elephants on the back of the turtle.

He said, well, what do you mean I've got it all wrong? He said, well, there are no elephants involved. It's just turtles. And he said, turtles, what do you mean? And she said, well, it's just turtles all the way down supporting the earth. It's rather funny looking at that. But that is one of the common ideas that literally millions of people have believed over the centuries there, that this is the way the earth is supported here. However, there's the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. And it really wasn't until we were able to send astronauts up into space, and they were able to look back at the earth and take photos like this one. This is a famous photo of one of the early moon missions there. This is the earth actually rising over the moon's surface from back in the late 60s, perhaps early 70s here. It was only then that we began to realize how tiny and how fragile and how beautiful this glowing, the pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan referred to it here, how fragile and beautiful the earth is suspended amidst all the blackness of outer space there. It's really, really striking to see a photograph like this for the first time. And again, it was only within the lifetime of most of us that this really sank into human beings, that the earth is just this tiny pale blue dot hanging there in space suspended among nothingness there. Job, however, is one of the earliest books of the Bible, perhaps the first to be written, as many biblical scholars believe. And yet here it was revealed that the earth truly does hang on nothing, as we read there, floating in space. And yet this was recorded thousands of years before human beings finally figured it out on their own. Another thing that the Bible revealed is that the earth is round. Again, we take that for granted, and yet you probably still hear of the flat earth society and people like that who are convinced, absolutely convinced, the earth is still flat, that it's a flat disk, whatever there. I don't know whether they're into the elephants or turtle thing, but they do believe the earth is flat there in space. But the Bible, however, reveals that it is indeed round. Isaiah 40 in verse 22, speaking of God, the Creator, says, it is He who sits above the circle of the earth. Circle isn't necessarily the best translation. It can mean compass, other words, a lot of Hebrew words are somewhat difficult to define. But it basically indicates something that is round. They didn't necessarily have a word for a ball, like we do, or spherical. So this is the way they would have expressed it in Isaiah's day, that God sits above the circle of the earth, indicating that it was round.

And again, this is something that took mankind thousands of years to figure out.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle, you've probably heard of him, is generally credited with being the first person to suggest that the earth's shape is spherical, at least the first, as modern scientists would understand and agree with it. And yet, these words we just read were written by the prophet Isaiah about 300 years before Aristotle lived and taught and suggested that.

So here again is something that is revealed in the Bible, the shape of the earth, as a sphere, well before modern man, or even the best scientist of the ancient day, came to understand that fact.

The Bible also revealed that the earth is not stationary, but that it rotates.

Now, if you think about that from the perspective of an ancient person, I mean, we're all here stationary. We're not moving, right? It sure seems that way. Certainly, they would have not comprehended that the earth is a ball that is spinning through space at thousands of miles an hour, and that it's rotating. It's just totally counterintuitive, because we don't sense any motion whatsoever when we're standing or sitting or anything like that. So this would have been just an incomprehensible concept to ancient man. And indeed, it was until much, much later that mankind was finally able to figure that out. But again, let's go back to the book of Job, perhaps the oldest book in the Bible. And it says, Job 38, verses 12 and 14, this is God speaking to Job. And he says, Have you commanded the morning since your days began?

This is part of God's challenge to Job there in the last few chapters of the book, one of the most fascinating portions of Scripture, I think, to look at from a scientific basis. But he says, Have you, Job, commanded the morning since your days began and caused the dawn to know its place?

And then he goes on and he says, describing the sunrise and the morning and so on, it takes on form like clay under a seal. And it's kind of hard to understand what this is really talking about, unless you're familiar with the clay and the seal metaphor that God is using here to help Job understand some things here. And frankly, I don't think even Job understood this after God was describing it here. But what is this reference here to the earth taking on form like clay under a seal? It makes no sense we don't realize what's really going on here. Seals in that time, this is showing two of them here, these are made out of stone. They're about the size, maybe an inch long, quarter inch, half inch thick, with a hole drilled through them.

And a cord would be put through them and an individual would wear them around his neck.

And a seal was used to indicate ownership. You might think of a judge or somebody stamping his signature on a court document or something like that. This performed the same type of function in that day. I've talked about seals and shown some in previous studies on archaeology and so on, but this is the earliest forms of seal. These are called cylinder seals because they are a cylinder.

And when you roll them out on a piece of clay, it forms an image like this of the cattle here, cattle and some weed or barley here in the background. Or this other one here which shows some sort of dragon-like creature and some type of fowl in the sky there. And as they unrolled, it would form a continuous picture here. So when these officials, royalty people like that, wanted to seal and to authorize a document, what they would do is take the seal off their neck and they would roll it across a piece of clay that was used like we would use. We don't use it today, but 100 years ago, it was quite common to seal documents with hot wax. They would rip hot wax on it and stamp on there with a seal. This is the same basic principle. It was actually being used about 4,000 years ago. So when it talks about the earth taking form like clay under a seal, this is what is being talked about, this process of rolling this cylinder seal across a block of clay. So what God is saying to Job here, and the wording is quite hard to follow, difficult for us to understand today, but in Hebrew, and Job is written in some of the earliest forms of Hebrew, of any of the scriptures. That's why a lot of scholars think it was probably the oldest book of the Bible written even before the five books of Moses, which are in a later form of Hebrew.

But what he's saying here is that as the earth rotates and the sun rises, that it lights up the earth as it rotates here. And when it's talking here about the earth taking form like clay from a seal, as you would roll the cylinder seal across here, the shape would begin to emerge. And in the same way as the earth rotates and the light is shining on it, then you see the form and shape of the earth emerge because of the light coming on it. Again, it's a hard concept for us because of the ancient language that's used here and the analogy here. But that is apparently what is being talked about here. So here in the oldest book of the Bible, we find, stated in here, the concept that the earth is actually rotating and is not perfectly still here. This is something, again, that was written in the book of Job thousands of years before the best and brightest of human brains were able to figure this out.

The Bible also revealed—now, again, keep in mind, these are all things that we take totally for granted today, but yet they were totally shocking concepts up until the time that they were discovered and received wide publicity. For thousands of years, mankind did not understand these basic things about the earth and the universe here. So another thing that the Bible revealed is the existence of outer space beyond our atmosphere. Again, it's something we take for granted because we've seen the Hubble space photos, we've seen the telescope, perhaps we'll look through telescopes and seen the rings of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter or things like that.

And yet ancient man had no concept of these things. As it says in Deuteronomy 10 in verse 14, "... indeed heaven and the highest heavens belong to the Eternal your God, also the earth with all that is in it." Now notice the wording here, "... indeed heaven and the highest heavens." Now, to an ancient Israelite who would have been hearing Moses or reading these words here, heaven did not have the connotations that we place on it today. We hear the word heaven and we think of people sitting on the clouds, strumming the harps and the angels with the wings and pearly gates and all that kind of stuff. The whole concept of heaven has been polluted by the false religious ideas we have now. Heaven to an ancient Israelite, the Hebrew word, would have simply meant the sky. It's what was above your head. It's where the clouds were. It's where the birds flew. That sort of thing. That was heaven as they understood it. The word had no connotations that we commonly associate with it today about the place where God lives and that sort of thing. That just was beyond their comprehension. A better word, if you're reading through the Old Testament or the New for that matter, instead of reading heaven, just substitute mentally the word sky in there and things will become a lot more clearer to you. That's the way the ancient peoples of the Bible would have understood the word is referring to sky. So what it's saying here is indeed the sky and the highest skies, the sky that's beyond the sky, further out, something beyond that, belong to the eternal your God and also the earth with all that is in it. So ancient peoples weren't sure what to make of the of the stars and the sun and that sort of thing. They understood the sky. They knew that there's clouds and birds and so on, but they know and they know that the sun and the stars are beyond that because they're clearly behind the clouds and the birds and that sort of thing. But they just weren't sure about that. They had all kinds of bizarre ideas about what was beyond the sky, beyond the clouds and birds and so on there. A lot of crazy ideas. We won't go into a lot of that right now. But here this refers to something that is beyond the sky, the highest heaven, something further out there. And today we're still figuring out, yeah, I should have shown this earlier, yes, this is when you use the word heaven, this is what an ancient Hebrew would have thought about this. And they could understand a little bit about again the stars and the sun and so on. They knew that they moved. They could track the motions of them and so on. But they really had no concept of what it was really like. And today we are still figuring out how vast the heavens that it refers to here, the highest heavens, really are.

Now we have the Hubble telescope, for instance, that can see as far as about 13 billion light years.

A figure that's just incredulous for us, just almost beyond our comprehension.

But we still do not know with even with great things, inventions like the Hubble telescope, how far the highest heavens truly extend. 13 billion, 14 billion light years, 15, 20, 30. We don't really know because we haven't invented something that's powerful enough to see that far yet. And actually what you're doing is you're looking back in time. You're looking at the universe, at the stars, at the galaxies, and so on, as they were 13 billion years ago. Not what they look like now. That time has passed. You're looking 13 billion years into the past through some of those Hubble photos and so on. It's just truly mind-boggling. And yet God reveals that there was a highest heaven that belongs to Him, that is His domain. Here long, long before mankind had any type of comprehension about it. The Bible also revealed, and this ties in very much with this, the vast expanse of our universe. The vast expanse of our universe.

Jeremiah, for instance, the prophet, 33, in verse 22, says, as the host of heaven cannot be numbered, nor the sand of the sea measured, so will I multiply the descendants of David my servant and the Levites who minister to me. A prophecy here, but what I'd like to focus in on here is the first part. As the host of heaven, He's not talking about angels, He's talking about the host of the sky, the stars, the sun, the moon, the planets, that sort of thing. As they cannot be numbered. If you go out tonight and you look up into the night sky and it's not clouded, you can see a lot of stars out here under our beautiful Colorado skies. And if you started counting, if you were patient enough to do it, you could count about a thousand, maybe 1,100, maybe 1,200, if you have a really good eyesight, because that's about all the stars we can count with our naked eye. That's about all that are visible. Roughly 1,000, 1,200, something like that.

Until the invention of the telescope by Galileo, that's all that people thought were there.

A thousand of them. And they were able to name a great number of them after the Greek and Roman gods and so on. Well, actually they thought they were gods in many cases, but that's another story. So they could see about a thousand until the invention of the telescope. But now we know that many of what we thought were stars are actually galaxies.

With each of those galaxies containing 100 billion, 200 billion stars, it's just phenomenal. It's mind-boggling how many there are.

So again, now we've seen that... Well, I did a little research in preparing this.

Anybody want to take a guess as to the current estimate of the number of stars?

Anybody want to take a guess? Well, the current estimate, as of earlier this year, is 10 sextillion. That is 10 followed by 21 zeros.

If you want to start counting, go ahead. It'll be in the lifetime of your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand-grandchildren, before you'll be finished counting to 10 sextillion. So it is true, as God revealed to the prophet Jeremiah, The Bible also revealed that the sun moves in an orbit. The sun moves in an orbit. That may be news to a number of us, because this is something that astronomers have only figured out in fairly recent years themselves.

For a long time the concept was that the earth was the center of the universe. After all, look up at the sky and everything revolves around the earth, doesn't it? The sun does, it goes across the sky, the moon does, the stars do, so that obviously means the earth is the center of the universe, right?

For thousands of years that's what mankind believed and thought. Finally, they realized after many years of pondering this that actually it's the other way around that the earth is revolving around the sun.

For many years the common view of the universe was that the sun was the center of the universe. The earth, the Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and the other planets revolved around the sun, the sun being the center of the universe.

But now, however, in recent years, well, let's see, I skipped over the scripture here, Psalm 19 and verse 6, one that we have included in our hymnal for many years, talking about the glories of creation and so on. And describing the sun, it says, Now, you may view that from an earth-centered perspective and say, yes, the sun is rising and going around the earth in a circuit, completing that circuit, but I think there's actually a much bigger meaning to that because it does clearly say that the sun is moving here. It's rising and it goes through its circuit to the other end. But the sun actually has its own orbit. The earth orbits around the sun, but the sun itself orbits around something in two, and that is the center of the Milky Way. Here's a diagram of the Milky Way galaxy, the center here, where many believe there's a black hole in the middle, quite possible. These are the different arms that spiral out from the Milky Way and give it its Milky appearance because we are inside one of these arms. Here's a location of the sun. Give us a little perspective on that. The center of the Milky Way to our sun is about 28,000 light years. Nice little weekend trip for you here. The Milky Way galaxy is approximately 100,000 light years across. The Milky Way galaxy is rotating like this, which is creating these arms swirling and trailing out behind it here. However, because it is rotating and spinning like that, that means the sun is making its circuit in its orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. However, it takes a while. It actually takes about 200 million years for the sun to complete its circuit around here. Don't ask me how they came up with that number. I don't know. Beyond my pay grade. But it does take about 200 million years. And by the way, that is traveling at a speed of about 600,000 miles per hour. 600,000 miles per hour. That's how fast the sun is circling around the Milky Way galaxy. And we are circling around the sun, traveling at the same 600,000 miles per hour. So if you ever wonder why you feel tired all the time, it's because you are moving so fast. Took me a while to figure that out. But that's why.

So the Bible also revealed that the universe did not always exist but was created at a specific point in time. Many of you may not realize, but the common view of the universe, even in modern times, even in the 20th century, was that the universe had always existed.

It was very common. You go back and read some of the older astronomy books written in the early part of the 1900s, and that's what you'll find. They believed in what was called a steady state universe. It had always existed. It was always there. It had no beginning, it will have no end.

And yet it wasn't until the latter part of the 1900s that scientists came up with the Big Bang theory, because everywhere they looked in the universe, they saw some things that could not agree with the idea of a steady state universe.

They started noticing Edwin Hubble, for instance, after whom the Hubble telescope is named, started doing studies and found that everywhere you looked in the universe, everything was moving apart from everything else. Everywhere he looked.

And if you calculate back from that, you track everything back to a single point in space. And everything is going out from that. So he was one of the first to realize the universe had to have a beginning, because if everything is moving out, they could not have been doing that indefinitely for all eternity.

So there had to be a point in time when everything was all together, and from there it exploded outwards. Scientists also began picking up echoes, frankly, for lack of a better word, using radio telescopes and so on, pointing throughout the sky.

And what they were detecting was the background noise of a giant explosion at some time in the past. That's the way they characterized it. Thus the Big Bang theory there.

So Genesis 1 in verse 1 tells us, In the beginning God created the heavens, plural, again we talked about that a little bit earlier, and the earth, the heavens and the earth. And scientists would call this the Big Bang, that the universe exploded into existence out of nothing.

Something like this, an artist's depiction of the Big Bang. And then, of course, they believed that the universe began to cool after this big explosion into coalesce into galaxies and stars and planetary systems that we see. However, they were again several thousand years behind the Bible, because it revealed thousands of years ago, in the book of Genesis 1, its very first verse, that God was the one who created all of this and brought it into being at a specific point in the past in time. Before that, there was nothing. The Bible also reveals something that's been discovered in fairly recent years. It revealed that all that we see is made of things that are unseen.

And we would call those unseen things...

Hebrews 11, verse 3, from the New International Version, By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. So everything we see, the entire universe, the stars in the sky, each of us sitting here, this auditorium, this projector screen, all of this is made out of things, according to Hebrews 11, verse 3, that we cannot see.

Now again, this would have been a concept that's totally incomprehensible to ancient man. How in the world? We can see things, so obviously they're made out of things that we see. And yet it wasn't until mankind started studying and getting down to the level of atoms and electrons and protons and neutrons, particles that are so tiny, and they're probably particles, quarks and so on, even smaller than that, that we haven't even discovered yet.

Everything that we see is made, as Hebrews 11.3 tells us, out of things that are unseen, that are so small that we can't even see them. So again, this concept would have just been totally mind-boggling. You told that to an ancient Israelite or Greek or Roman or something that we said, you're crazy, that's an insane idea. And yet it hasn't been until the 20th century that mankind began to unlock the secrets of the universe and the true nature of matter and what everything is composed of. This is just a diagram. Actually, their atoms are so small that they have managed with an electron microscope to take photographs of some of the largest types of atoms. But many of them, if you tried to photograph them, would look probably something like this, just the tiniest, tiniest particle of light that you can imagine there.

And in reality, these atoms, to me, remind me very much of the solar system itself. You have a tiny center, which is the nucleus of the atom, and then you have the other particles, electrons, and so on circling around that. If you remember your basic physics or chemistry classes there.

Again, like a tiny little solar system there. Someone that have just dozens of particles going every which way around it, circling the center of it there. Just amazing things. If we could just see them, but they're so tiny that we cannot. The Bible also revealed... Let's move away from the universe, get it a little bit closer to Earth now, this time. The Bible also revealed that there are paths in the sea. Paths in the sea. We would call them ocean currents.

Ocean currents. How did ancient man know that there were ocean currents? Yes, they probably were familiar with a few of them around the Mediterranean and so on, but how did they know that they existed worldwide? This is actually showing the major ocean currents. You can see the equatorial currents here. You can see the Gulf Stream coming up here, bringing warm water out of the Gulf of Mexico and up the eastern seaboard and over toward northern Europe. This is the type of paths in the sea that Psalms 8 and verses 6-8 reveals.

We're here, God, in a famous passage. We'll just quote part of it. David says, "'You, God, have put all things under man's feet, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, that pass through the paths of the seas.'" This is where this is revealed. He's talking about ocean currents. What other paths in the seas could one be talking about here? That the fish of the sea pass through these same paths here.

Here's a map of it of what we saw earlier showing the major ocean currents. Again, the Gulf Stream up here, probably the most famous ones. But you can see there are major currents all over the world that oceanographers have been able to map. I think it was back in 1806, when an individual was reading the Bible, a scientist, an oceanographer, and read that verse there and said, pass in the seas.

What is that referring to? He made it his life's work to study. He actually went out and mapped most of the major ocean currents there, because he read it here in the Bible. If the Bible says it, it's got to be there. He went out and studied and became essentially the father of modern oceanography here, through his studies there, based on what he read here in this particular passage. Let's see. Another thing that the Bible revealed is that just as there are paths in the waters and the seas, there are also paths in the air.

We would call them air currents today. Ecclesiastes 1, verse 6, says, The wind goes toward the south and turns around to the north. The wind whirls about continually and comes again on its circuit. So it's describing currents in the air that go out and cover the earth, north to south, various directions, and return again to their beginning point. This is a pretty accurate description.

This is a rough graph of the prevailing winds, as we would refer to them today, showing the earth, the continents, North America, South America, and so on. We're familiar living here in Colorado. The wind is primarily coming out of the west here, except when we get our big blizzards where it comes up instead from the east and traps the snow against the mountain. But this is a pattern that is worldwide. It will vary somewhat depending on the seasons of the year, the tilt of the earth's axis, the local weather fronts, high and low pressure systems, and all that sort of thing.

Yet Ecclesiastes, written by Solomon about 1000 BC, referred to this cycle, to the currents of the wind there. How did he know about this? Again, 1000 BC. Solomon was the wisest, smartest man who ever lived. But how did he know about this? How did he know about it that long ago, that far back? Again, truly amazing. Some of them were quite incredible, too. This is an interesting shot I came across. This is after one of the launches of one of the space shuttles off Florida.

Here you actually have wind currents blowing the exhaust and contrails from the space shuttle all over the place. Really strange, bizarre patterns here. There are still plenty of things that puzzle scientists about here. How many of you have ever taken a hot air balloon ride? Maybe up at Steamboat? Something like that? Okay, a few hands there. It's really quite an experience there. I was blessed to be able to do that several years ago up at Steamboat. It really amazed me how the pilot of the balloon, we were aloft maybe a half hour, something like that, taking off from the field down below the Steamboat Grand.

Just by adjusting the elevation of the balloon up or down a few dozen feet, he's able to keep the balloon essentially in a stationary spot there. Yes, it's done in the early morning when the winds aren't high or whatever, but just by adjusting the elevation, he could read without any visual clues that I could detect which way the wind currents are blowing.

In about a half hour from our liftoff spot, we touched down about a half hour later, only about 100 or 200 yards away from where we had taken off. The pilot was that good at evaluating and judging which way the wind is blowing there to bring us down almost in the same spot where we took off from. It was just amazing. If you're a pilot, let's see, I don't know if Paul Price is here today or others, maybe a pilot here, man, you know and understand this.

You know that there are currents up there in the air, and you'd better be paying attention to them. It's led to a lot of disastrous plane crashes from people who weren't observant and weren't taking notice of those types of things. But again, this is something written by Solomon, King Solomon, about a thousand years BC, and he understood that.

Without God himself, actually, divinely revealing it to him.

Another example of modern science that has been discovered fairly recently that the Bible revealed is what is called the hydrologic cycle. Hydrologic cycle. It's a fancy word, but basically it only refers to simply how water cycles throughout the Earth's surface and atmosphere, and how water cycles back again. We find Solomon referring to this in the next verse right after the one we just read. Verse 7, So he's describing one of the great mysteries of science back in his time, and that is, rivers keep running down to the ocean, to the Mediterranean or the Dead Sea where there's no outlet there. They keep running down into it, and yet the sea is never full. It never overflows. It never goes up on the banks and on the shore. So what happens to the water? Where does it go? If it's emptying into a bathtub and yet it never overflows, what would you be thinking about that? So this is the conundrum that Solomon writes about here. So you have all these waters running down in brooks and springs and streams and into rivers and emptying into the sea.

And yet the sea is never full, as it says there. The Mississippi River, for instance, empties about 500 billion gallons of water a day into the Gulf of Mexico. 500 billion. And the Mississippi isn't nearly as large as the Nile or the Amazon. I'm not sure how much they empty into the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic Ocean there. But where does all that water come from? Where does it all go? The Bible revealed the answer through Solomon about 3,000 years ago.

And this is a diagram of the hydrologic cycle, if you don't remember it from your Earth Sciences class. Basically, the rain and ice and snow falls on the mountains, as we have here in Colorado with a lot of snow here. It melts off or runs off down into the streams and rivers. Some of it saturates the ground, goes down and is filtered through the ground. And then, using gravity, it all runs downhill into the oceans, into the seas here.

However, there, the water, the fresh water that was so productive for keeping us alive, keeping animals alive, keeping plants watered and growing and thriving, that sort of thing, goes into the sea and what happens? It becomes toxic. It becomes salt water. It's unusable to plants. It kills them. It's unusable to animals. People. It kills them. Unless you're a fish. So, what happens then?

Well, God has designed an incredible cycle through evaporation, the water, through the heat of the sun. The water evaporates and leaves the salt behind. It goes up and forms clouds. Clouds are essentially just transportation systems. They're water vapor, tiny water droplets. They go back over the land. They rise. They become more dense because of the cold. And it squeezes the water out. And the water falls back on the land in the form of snow and rain. And the cycle continues like that. The amount of water on the earth is essentially unchanged from day one, from the beginning, from God's very first creation.

He's not creating more water. It's a perfect recycling system, believe me! We've been using the same water here for millions and millions of years. And God's system perfectly purifies it through the soil, through filtering everything out there, or filters out the salt, the poisons out of it, through evaporation. It gives us all the fresh water that we need to drink here. Another interesting passage from the prophet Amos in verse 9 and 6.

This is really fascinating. He spells it out even more clearly here. It's referring to God, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the face of the earth. The eternal is His name. So again, it's talking about this cycle of the water evaporating out of the sea and God pours it out in the form of rain and showers upon the earth. Quite amazing there. Here are the wonderful systems that God has designed to keep us alive, to sustain His creation here. It's revealed about a thousand years BC, through Solomon and through the prophet Amos here.

But mankind did not understand this for many thousands of years later. The Bible also reveals, and this is one of my favorites, that there are springs in the sea. Springs in the sea. Again, speaking to Job, God says, Job 38, Have you entered the springs of the sea? He's confronting Job and asking him, you know, Job thinks he's so smart and wise and all-knowing, but God tosses him a few curve balls here.

He says, Job, have you entered the springs of the sea? Or have you walked in search of the depths? This just amazes me because I think, you know, you're Job. You're living maybe 2000 BC, something like that. There are no submarines. There's no scuba gear. There's no way to get down to the bottom of the sea to see what's on the bottom. You cannot do it. You physically cannot do it as far as they knew. It was just all water, all water there, all water all the time. And yet, scientists in more recent years have discovered there are actually springs down there.

Here's a fairly shallow one, and you can see these bubbles here. Well, I say bubbles. It's just the pressure, the water lifting and separating the sand off the bottom of the sandy shore. It's a little more evident in a photograph like this where you see the sea bottom and all these air bubbles rising up out of it here from the pressure of the water coming up through the bottom of the seas, through the bed of the sea. They've actually, in recent years, sent submersibles, super, super tough submarines down literally several miles deep in the ocean, down to the deepest depths of the ocean.

And what did they find? They found springs in the bottom of the sea of water pouring up from the bottom here. And it actually provides a lot of nutrients and so on to plants. I had some other photos, I didn't include them in here, of the different types of corals and strange, bizarre life forms existing around these springs down in the very deepest depths of the sea there.

It's one of the most mind-boggling things. So how did Job know there were springs at the bottom of the sea? Physically speaking, it's just utterly impossible. No human being for his time, not until the 20th, maybe not 20th, 1900s, could have gotten down as much as 100 feet or so of the bottom to understand that. And yet God revealed it to Job, some around 3,500 to 4,000 years ago, that there were springs in the bottom of the sea. That's why it's one of the most mind-boggling things for me, because there's no earthly way that mankind could have known that.

The Bible also revealed that the earth experienced a universal flood, known to us better as Noah's flood. Genesis 7 and verse 17, Now the flood was on the earth 40 days, the waters increased and lifted up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. The waters prevailed and greatly increased on the earth, and the ark moved about on the surface of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth, and all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered.

Here's a diorama at the Creation Museum in Kentucky showing this, the ark there in the background, with people climbing up on the highest points of land to try to save themselves from the rising waters there.

What does this have to do with science? Basically, about 85% of the earth's land surface is covered by one type of stone, and that is sedimentary rock. Sediments, meaning it's deposited by water. You can just look at it and see. Out here in the American West we see so much of the rocks laid bare that you can see them and understand how they were formed. And it's obvious they were laid down by water deposits. They're all nice and level there. Clearly something is smooth them out and lay them down there, just like you might see from a lake or seabed or something like that.

But the Bible revealed long ago that the earth has been covered by water at least twice that we know of. It won't go there, but Genesis 1 talks about the spirit of God hovering over the waters. So the earth there is covered by waters, which we understood to be a flood before the first man was created. And then also here, as we read about in Genesis 7, with Noah's ark. Here you can go to places like the Grand Canyon, one of the more obvious places where you can see roughly a mile, a vertical mile of sediments there, laid down mostly by water. Or also, it may be even more evident from down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, looking up from the surface of the Colorado River. And you just see thousands and thousands of feet of rock that's been laid down by water there. And that helps us understand how 85% of the earth's surface is sedimentary rock. The answer has been right there in the book of Genesis for thousands of years. The Bible also revealed ideal dimensions for building a ship. If you ever want to build your own ship, go to the book of Genesis and you'll find out the proportions to make it. Genesis 6 and verse 14, this is God instructing Noah, and he says, "...make yourself an ark of gopher wood, make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and outside with pitch. And this is how you shall make it. The length of the ark shall be 300 cubits, its width 50 cubits, and its height 30 cubits." So it gives proportions here, and this is roughly a scale model built of the ark to show roughly the size and the proportions of it. 300 cubits long, 60 cubits wide, 30 cubits high. And again, you can get some idea of the scale of it by these giraffes and elephants going up into the ark here. This also is from the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. There's something to give you an idea of the scale of it, built like a giant barge here. Here's the size of it, compared to a Boeing 747, compared to an elephant in a giraffe, and the largest creatures that have ever lived, some of the giant dinosaur species here. And yet, this is the size of Noah's ark in comparison. Really, really quite striking there. Actually, let's see, do I have this in my notes here? Yes, yes I do. It wasn't until 1609 that shipbuilders in Holland decided to build a modern, relatively modern ship using these same proportions. And actually, what they found is that ships built using those proportions were so stable and strong and sturdy and safe in the rough oceans, rough waves and so on of the sea, that it revolutionized shipbuilding from that point forward. As a matter of fact, by 1900, and this is recorded in the Lloyd's Shipping Registry, Lloyd's of London, the big insurance company that used to insure ships and so on, still do, but by about 1900, every major seagoing vessel was constructed to roughly the proportions that are given here regarding Noah's ark.

And actually, here's a photograph of a modern freighter here, and it's built roughly to the same proportions, too. Go back and look at this earlier model, and you can see it. It's pretty evident, just at a glance. It's built roughly to those same proportions here. Even to this day, shipbuilders are using roughly, not exactly, not necessarily, the same proportions that God revealed to Noah for building a stable ship to survive on the high seas that would be very sturdy and stable and survive and carry a very large cargo as well.

The Bible also revealed that the human race came from one common ancestor. We would know him as Adam. Just as II in verse 7, "...and the eternal God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being." And here's an artist's conception of Adam and Eve, the first man and woman.

In 1995, scientists reported that virtually all modern men, 99% of those that they had studied, are closely related genetically and share genes with one common male ancestor. They actually called this the Adam chromosome there at the time.

And that indicates that mankind had to have originated from one common ancestor at one particular spot on the surface of the earth at one point in time.

And actually in fairly recent history as well.

So here it wasn't until 1995 that scientists were able to figure out what the Bible had revealed here in the first chapter or two of Genesis, written about 3,500 years ago.

The Bible also revealed the origin of the sexes.

And we find that here as well in Genesis 1 and verse 27. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.

Now think about having two sexes from an evolutionary standpoint. Because you hear about evolution being responsible for life and the different species and all of this. But having two sexes makes absolutely no sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

Now think about that because evolution is supposed to be all about efficiency, right? It's efficient, survival of the fittest and all of this.

But single-celled creatures like amoebas, one cell, can reproduce just by splitting in half.

Right? Pretty efficient. You don't need another partner of your species to do this. You don't have to dress up on Saturday night dates and all this kind of stuff. You just split in half and you've reproduced yourself. You've passed your genes on to the next generation just by splitting in half. So that's pretty efficient, isn't it?

From an evolutionary standpoint, it's hard to beat that. Pretty good system you've got going there.

So if creatures millions of years ago were able to reproduce just by splitting in half, these single-celled creatures, how did two sexes come into the picture from an evolutionary standpoint? Just think that through sometimes. Think about...it gets mind-boggling. If you try to explain it from an evolutionary standpoint, get into a debate several years ago with somebody who wrote in criticizing some of the stuff in The Good News, he was an ardent evolutionist college student, so I started asking him some of these questions, just sincerely trying to find out what evolutionists think about having two sexes, how that got into the picture. And it finally just blew his mind and he just refused to discuss it anymore.

But if you're a creature and you needed to find another one of your species of the opposite sex to reproduce, well, sorry, but the odds of your passing on your genes just went down pretty astromonomically there. So what gives you the best chance of passing on your genes to the next generation?

Just splitting yourself in half or having to find another of your species of the opposite sex, that's willing to mate with you, good or bad, and then hoping that you and the other member of the opposite sex that you've mated with survive long enough for your offspring to be born. You know, in human beings, that's nine months, and elephants, I believe it's two years, something like that, it varies depending on the species, but if you're going to pass your genes on successfully, you've got to live long enough.

The other partner of your species that you mated with has got to live long enough. And then the offspring, once it's finally born, has to live long enough, several years, and humans, up into the teen years at least, to be able to pass on the genes successfully to the next generation. So if you haven't done that, if you haven't made it through all those hurdles, you're sunk.

Evolutionary, you're at a dead end. You've blown it. You gambled and you lost, big time. So which is easier to go through from an evolutionary standpoint, to go through a whole new generation, to go through from an evolutionary standpoint, to go through all of those steps, to jump through all of those hoops that take place over years in some cases, fifteen years or so, with human beings, or to just split yourself in half? Again, having two sexes makes absolutely no sense from an evolutionary standpoint. To me, it's one of the most easily disproved aspects, easily.

It's one of the better proofs against evolution. It just makes no sense when you think about it from that standpoint. So I'm still looking for an explanation on that. If any of you have one, please let me know. The Bible also revealed that human beings and animals are vastly different. They're vastly different. And we find the reason for that in Genesis 1, verse 26. Then God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God, he created him. Apes, like this orangutan here, share a lot of the same genetic material with human beings. And their brain size in comparison to their body is pretty equal, all things considered, to ours. And yet our capacities are very, very different. We human beings can create art. We can create music. We design and invent things. We build houses.

We build buildings. We create jets. We create helicopters. We've sent man to the moon. We can do things with our minds that no animal has even begun to comprehend there. No animal is capable of doing something like that. They're on a totally different level.

See, some of you got the reason why I put this picture in here. And the reason is, as we read there in Genesis, that man alone is made in God's image. God put in us a spirit, which we understand to be the spirit of man, that enables us to have some of the great creative and planning and thinking abilities that God the Father and Jesus Christ have.

We call it a spirit in man, and that separates us from all the other physical creatures that God has made. God revealed this difference thousands of years ago in the opening verses of Genesis, that He created us in His image with some of His own mental capacities and creative power there. And it gives us a hint of the type of capacities I think that we will have in His kingdom to be able to continue the great legacy of human achievement and invention and creativity and so on.

I think we'll be doing a lot of that in God's kingdom as well. The Bible also revealed the basic laws of biogenesis, that life comes only from existing life. As we read in Genesis 1 and verse 22, we multiply on the earth. He's talking about all, not just...he's not talking just here to Adam and Eve. But the whole creation, the animals, the birds, the fish that He's created, He says, be fruitful and multiply. And this, again, is referring to the laws of biogenesis, that life can only come from life. Even evolutionists do not have an explanation for how life began.

If you think about Darwin's famous book on evolution, what was it titled? It was titled On the Origin of Species. Did he answer the question? No. You can read his book, and it doesn't say anything about the origin of species. It's all about evolution. It's how species supposedly spread and developed and changed into other species over time. But on the origin of species, on the origin of life itself, he's silent.

Because evolution doesn't have an answer for that. Because of the first law of biogenesis, that life only comes from pre-existing life. And that's why scientists have tried to create life for decades now. Thousands of scientists spending millions, billions of dollars trying to create life in the lab. And they haven't come remotely close to it. And they won't, because a basic law of biogenesis is that life only comes from existing life.

Another thing that the Bible revealed is the true origin of species.

Back to Genesis 1, verse 21 and 25.

So what this is telling us here, as modern science is discovering now, and unraveling the genome of different creatures, the genetic code, the instruction book that's embedded in our DNA, is that there are limits to which we can change and modify and evolve, if you will, in a small way.

There, we're different heights. Generally, the human race is a little bit, a few inches taller than we were a hundred years ago. But there are genetic limits to that, beyond which creatures cannot change. That's what scientists are discovering now. And this is what is being talked about here. Creatures reproducing according to their kind, their species, in other words. There, they don't change into other species, don't change into other kinds. And that's why we have horses that produce horses. Why we have hippos that produce hippos. That's why we have polar bears that produce polar bears. That's why we have giraffes that produce giraffes. And koala bears that produce koala bears. And on, and on, and on. The Bible reveals that species reproduce after their kind. They don't evolve into other species. That's why we don't have creatures like the Cottontail Dog, or the Lion-Bredor Retriever, or the Owl Cat, or the Cat Dog, or the Parigator, or the Zebra Porpoise, or the Tiger Horse, or the Bunny Puppy, or the Kitty Chick, or the Bunny Chick, or the Elephant Hummingbird, or the Cheetah-Goal, or the Wolf Owl, or the Toucan Lobster, or the Giraffe Dog, or the Toad Hawk, and this thing, whatever it is. Actually, I think Connie would like to have one of these, because then she'd only have to care for one animal instead of both our dog and me, like she does now. So there's a lot more that we could cover, but we've run out of time for today's Bible study. Hope you've learned a lot from this. Hope it gives you some more things to think about as you study through God's Word and reflect on the great wonders of the field that it took us, mankind, as smart as we are, literally thousands of years to figure out on our own. So again, I hope you've learned quite a bit about scientific truths revealed in the Bible long before scientists figured them out. So the Bible study is now dismissed.