The Bible's been accused of being an
outdated book of superstition, written by people who didn't understand
the scientific workings of the real world. This accusation is patently false. Not only does the Bible not contain errors
and superstitious statements, but it contains amazing scientific facts that
were written down thousands of years before we-- in modern scientific times--
understood how important they were. I'm going to give you a list of six scientific
facts that validate the Bible. Number 1: Blood being the liquid of life. In the 21st century,
we understand how important blood is. We have studied it and seen its capabilities
and its importance to life. But that knowledge was not
well known in the past. In fact in the past, ignorance of
just how important blood is has caused some learned men to do
some very tragic things. Up until the 19th century,
doctors believed that harmful vapors entered the blood and caused sickness. For this reason, those doctors would literally
bleed their patients by putting leeches on them or cutting the veinS and arteries
in the elbow and getting that blood out. The first president of the
United States of America-- George Washington--
came down with a cold and his doctor was called
and he literally bled him to death. So what's that have to do with the Bible? Well, thousands of years before this
lethal practice of bloodletting was en vogue, the Bible stated in Leviticus 17:11,
"For the life of the flesh is in the blood." And just a few verses down it said
that an animal’s "blood sustains its life." Today, we completely understand
the truthfulness of this biblical statement. But how did an ancient shepherd
like Moses in 1450 BC know that the life of the flesh is in the blood? It took the modern scientific
medical community thousands of years and thousands of
lives to discover this truth. Scientific Fact Number 2:
Sanitation Practices. Some of the worst plagues in modern times
have been caused by improper sanitation practices. In 1846, the city of London
had a terrible cholera epidemic. Sixteen thousand people had been killed. Why could the doctors of the day
do nothing to combat this deadly disease? You see, the city of London
had a serious problem with sewage. The streets were filled with raw sewage
that people would literally open their second and third story windows
and dump into the streets. Now, as we know
in our modern scientific era, raw sewage carries disease
and causes all types of medical problems. If the people in London in 1846 had
turned their Bibles to Deuteronomy 23:12, they would have read this:
"Also you shall have a place outside the camp, where you may go out; and you shall have
an implement among your equipment, and when you sit down outside, you shall dig
with it and turn and cover your refuse." Thirty-three hundred years
before London's epidemic, the Bible had implemented a plan
to stop such epidemics before they started. Amazing Scientific Fact Number 3:
An Understanding of Germs. In 1847, about 18% of women who went in to a
modern medical facility to give birth would die. That's 1 out of every 6.
Why was the death rate so high? The medical professors and the students,
before they would give the treatments to the live women,
they would do autopsies on dead women. And then they would not wash
their hands properly. They would many times wash them in a bowl
with no germ killing agent whatsoever, dry them on a dirty towel, and then perform
those examinations on live women. If you're looking at that from a
21st century observer’s point-of-view, you realize that's terrible. They're passing germs from the dead bodies
of ladies of dying and giving those germs to the live women because
they're not washing their hands. But to Europeans in the
middle of the 19th century, that idea of passing a germ?
It was a completely foreign idea to them. When the doctors and medical students
implemented handwashing procedures, the death rate plummeted
from 18% to about 2%. These doctors in the mid-1800s
had made an amazing discovery! Or had they? Is it possible that the
doctors simply rediscovered something that had
already been known? Almost 3500 years before
the 1850s the Bible stated, "He who touches the dead body
of anyone shall be unclean seven days. He shall purify himself with the water on
the third day and on the seventh day; then he will be clean. But if he does not purify himself on the third day
and on the seventh day, he will not be clean." You'll find that in Number 19:11-12. The Israelites were instructed to wash their
hands in water with germ killing agent in it, 3500 years before in modern medical times
we knew that should be done. Amazing Scientific Fact Number 4:
Ship Engineering. While you don't go to the Bible for blueprints
for a huge barge, you don't think, it just so happens that maybe
that it is where you go. In Genesis 6:15, the Bible says that a man
by the name of Noah builds an ark that's 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide
by 30 cubits high. And it just so happens this is a ratio of
30 X 5 X 3--length to breadth to height. For thousands of years, the ark was
the largest floating ship on record. In 1844, a man name Isambard K. Brunel
built a huge ship called the Great Britain and he used a similar ratio to that
of the ark--30 x 5 x 3. As it turns out, the 30 x 5 x 3 length to
breadth to height ratio is the perfect ratio to build a huge boat that doesn’t need to
go anywhere very quickly, but needs to stay afloat and carry
tons and tons of supplies. That same ratio--30 x 5 x 3--was used by
ship builders in World War II when they built ships called Liberty Ships that were designed
to carry tremendous amounts of cargo. You see, Brunel and those engineers
that were building those Liberty Ships, they had generations
of ship building knowledge. But Noah’s was literally
the first of its kind. Where did he get
that kind of information? I would suggest to you
from the Master Ship Builder. Amazing Fact Number 5: Quarantine. In today’s world of advanced medicine
and understanding of germs, the idea of quarantinin sick
patients and separating them from those who are well,
well it’s standard practice. But it certainly wasn’t in the
ancient world because they didn’t understand germs
until about 200 years ago. And they didn’t see a need to keep sick people
separate from people who are not sick. The Bible, however, thousands of years
before modern medical science understood the spread of germs,
detailed measures to prevent their spread. In the book of Leviticus, we read
that people with diseases such as leprosy were instructed to dwell alone--
outside the camp. We read that in Leviticus 13:46. And if and when and individual got close to
somebody who was not diseased, this diseased individual was told to cover
his mustache or upper lip and cry, “Unclean!” Why? Why do we tell our children to
cover their mouths when they cough? Well, to keep that diseased spittle from going
into the air and from infecting others airborne. When we look at these instructions in Leviticus
and we see that Leviticus had an understanding of contagion and quarantine
that surpasses that of any other nation, it’s interesting that the
Encyclopedia of Medical History says this: “The idea of contagion was foreign
to the classic medical tradition and found no place in the
voluminous Hippocratic writings. The Old Testament, however, is a rich source
for contagionist sentiment, especially in regard to
leprosy and venereal disease.” Here again, the Old Testament exhibits amazingly
accurate medical knowledge that surpasses anything known that the humans who were
alive at the time during the writers’ lives could have possibly come up
with on their own. Amazing Scientific Fact Number 6:
Food Regulations. In the United States, we have the Food
and Drug Administration. It’s the FDA. And it is designed to make regulations
that keep people from getting sick from food borne diseases mostly. Knowing that certain kinds of food such as
pork are more prone to carry disease, the FDA will make a regulation like this:
You can go into restaurant. You can order a beef steak that is rare. But if you go into that restaurant and you
order a pork chop, you can’t order rare. Why? Because pork--
if it’s not cooked properly-- has a much higher probability
of causing some types of disease. We know that in modern times. But the Bible—especially the Old Testament--
written some 3000 years before modern times exhibits a knowledge of food borne diseases
that surpasses anything that was around during the time of the writers. For instance, when you look in Leviticus 11,
it mentions that pork was not to be eaten. That’s a wise regulation, as we have seen. Even the modern FDA puts regulations
in along those lines. The text also forbids the consumption of bats.
You say, “Well, I don’t want to eat a bat.” Well, some people do. In fact, around the world bats
in some places are a delicacy. Why not eat bats? It just so happens that bats have a very high
probability of carrying viruses that can be caught by humans,
especially the rabies virus. Also in Leviticus 11,
we read that things like lizards, salamanders, amphibians
are not to be eaten. Well, why? Lizards, salamanders, amphibians, etcetera
have about a 90% contamination rate of Salmonella. Salmonella, a bacteria that causes many people
to get violently sick and some of them to die. You see, the Bible never gets a single medical
fact wrong and it exhibits a knowledge of scientific facts that is
thousands of years ahead of its time. That scientific accuracy proves
the Bible’s Divine origin.
