I recently received a comment from a Christian pointing out that the Bible supports fasting for health reasons and that a scientific study has shown that fasting can be beneficial to cancer patients on Chemotherapy. The commenter then added that “this was another case of science catching up with God’s advice.”
First, I want to state that I am skeptical about this study. Don’t get me wrong, it may be legitimate and fasting very well may be helpful in certain controlled situations, but the Christian linked to an online news article that did not provide a link to the actual study or mention what journal the study was published in or whether or not it had been peer-reviewed. So I have no idea if this was a legitimate study or something created by homeopathic nuts.
Second and most importantly, are you fucking kidding me??? Rant time…
Science catching up to God’s advice???? really??? Like when the Bible says that women came from the rib of a man? Is there a scientific study that catches up with that? Or when Jesus saw “all four corners” of the Earth? Or when God caused the Sun to stand still? Or when the Bible says that Heaven is a physical place in space that can be reached by building a really high tower??? I guess science is really behind when it comes to SCIENCE!!!! The Bible sure does know better. LOL!!!
The fact is that even a broken clock is right twice a day and in this situation, we aren’t even sure that the broken clock got it right even this one time. But I’ll give the Bible writers the benefit of the doubt here and say that maybe, just maybe they might have gotten a few things scientifically correct. This might be because people did use their observations and might have actually figured stuff out back in the day, before that stuff was tested under controlled situations in our more modern day. That doesn’t mean that God got it right; it just means that some people were smarter than most of the other people of that day.
Take Democritus for example. He was an ancient Greek philosopher who first theorized about the existence of atoms long before they were discovered in a lab. I guess science finally caught up with Zeus. No, obviously Democritus was a smart and observant human being who had a hypothesis that was proven to be correct much, much later.
This doesn’t mean that every ancient belief must be true and that science will evidentially catch up to all these notions regardless of how ridiculous they may or may not be. It means that people are smart and clever. But for every smart and clever ancient idea that turns out to have some scientific validity, there are about a million things that ancient people got completely wrong!
Do Christians really want to look at the Bible scorecard when it comes to science? Please, talking snakes and burning bushes are just the beginning of this crap. Let us not forget that ancient Christians once thought it was heresy to claim that the Earth was not the center of the universe. The fact is that the Earth isn’t even the center of our galaxy. It isn’t even the center of our solar system. But you don’t hear Christians talking about how the Bible needs to catch up to science when it comes to cosmology, do you?
What we see are Christians who find some random verse in the Bible that they often take completely out of context and then reinterpret through the lens of modernity to support something that science has already shown to be true. Then they claim that God beat science to it. I call bullshit!
In fairness, many Christians (to their credit) realize today that the Bible is not a science book and that God did not author it. The Bible is a series of books written anonymously by ancient people for various reasons – scientific accuracy was not one of them. There is absolutely zero science in the Bible. If you get your science education from the Bible, you are a moron! I’m sorry, but there is no way to sugarcoat it. There is no hidden healing code in the Bible. The number of verses in which any character talks about curing cancer is exactly zero. God has no scientific advice because God doesn’t exist. He is a character in a series of ancient books and that character only has the scientific knowledge of the ancient goat-herders who made him up.
Related articles
- Secret cancer cure found in Bible? (examiner.com)
- The Bible Cured Cancer! (skepticink.com)
- Ancient Knowledge vs. Modern Knowledge (dangeroustalk.net)
- ‘Scientific Method led me to Jesus Christ’ (skepticink.com)
- Why there is no such thing as a good Christian (examiner.com)
- Review: ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About God’ by Rob Bell (examiner.com)
- 5 Best Books To De-Convert A Christian (skepticink.com)
