SCIENTISTS IN THE BIBLE

Those observers of miracles in the Old and New Testament are often unfairly characterized as being totally ignorant of the laws of nature and therefore seeing miracles where there were none. In actuality, they were shrewd observers of the natural phenomena around them and not nearly as naïve has has sometime been assumed. And a few of the people could almost be called proto-scientists.

Gideon (Judges 6:36-40)

Gideon has been rightly criticized for not believing God's word that he would be a great warrior. Instead he asked for some proof. However, I must admit that before trusting my own life to the word of some angel I had never seen before, I would probably have also asked for some sort of reassurance.
So Gideon first says, “I am going to lay a fleece of wool on the threshing floor; if there is dew on the fleece alone, and it is dry on all the ground, then I shall know that you will deliver Israel by my hand.”

So far, so good. But Gideon doesn't stop there since he now says, “Let me please make trial with the fleece just once more; let it be dry only on the fleece, and on all the ground let there be dew.” At this point, even some of Gideon's staunchest supporters tend to criticize him for not believing the word from God. By the way, the Hebrew word translated as “trial”could just as well be rendered as “experiment.”

But in Gideon's defense, I believe that as a scientist, he just chose the first trial as a control test since, so I have been told, even modern desert Bedouins hang out fleeces at night to collect the morning dew. Since he now knew that it was possible for his requested result to be met, the real test was to see if God could reverse the results when asked. And God, as an even better scientist than Gideon, doesn't criticize him since He understands the necessity of this second part of the experiment to prove that the first result wasn't just a natural phenomenon.

At this point let me jump ahead in time by several millennia for the story of another budding scientist, myself. My first research project in graduate school was based on a U.S. patent which claimed that one could obtain a desired chemical product D by passing a mixture of A and B over a bed of a specific catalyst C at elevated temperature. (Catalysts are substances that facilitate chemical reactions without themselves being consumed in the process.) The problem was that the yield of D was only 2.5% of the theoretical expected amount.

When I repeated the conditions laid out in the patent, I did indeed obtain 2.5% of the desired product. So my assignment was to increase that yield substantially. I wasted several months repeating the reaction with a variety of different catalysts, but try as I might, I always got exactly 2.5% of product. 

Quite belatedly, I had a brainstorm and carried out the reaction over inert glass beads in place of a catalyst, only to get exactly 2.5%. In other words, the so-called catalyst had absolutely no effect on the reaction taking place, it was merely the elevated temperature that did it. And if I had carried out that control experiment first, as Gideon did, I could have saved myself months of effort.

Elijah on Mt. Carmel (I Kings 18) 

“Chose one bull, cut it in pieces, and lay it on the wood, but put no fire to it. Call on the name of your god”...but there was no voice, no answer, and no response.
Elijah built an altar. Then he made a trench around the altar...Next he put the wood in order, cut the bull in pieces, and laid it on the wood. He said, “Fill four jars with water and pour it on the burnt offering and on the wood...Then the fire of the LORD fell and consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stone, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench.”

Another high point in the OT is when Elijah has a battle with the hundreds of Baal followers on top of a mountain. As an even better scientist than Gideon, Elijah not only sets up a control test for the believers in Baal (an identical altar with a bull to be sacrificed), but purposely stacks the deck against his own experiment (Baal was known as a god of thunder and lightning; there were a number of prophets of Baal praying versus one lone prophet of Yahweh; and Elijah's altar was doused with water). This is because a true scientist throws every obstacle he can think of in the way of his own theory, and actually tries to disprove it. Only when it meets every test is it elevated to a law. 

Philistines and the Ark (I Samuel 6:7-9)

Even the Philistines practiced scientific methodology when they sent the ark of the covenant back to the Jews on a cart pulled by cows after they suspected the ark as the cause of a plague among them. Their priests said, “Get ready a new cart and two milk cows that have never borne a yoke, and yoke the cows to the cart, but take their calves home, away from them. Take the ark of the LORD and place it on the cart...Then send it off, and let it go its way. And watch; if it goes up on the way to its own land, to Beth-shemesh, then it is He who has done us this great harm, but if not, then we shall know that it is not His hand that struck us; it happened to us by chance.”
And the cows headed off to Israelite territory instead of returning to their calves as would be expected under natural conditions.
At that point, the real question at hand was to whether the Philistines would accept the results of their own test as proof of the superiority of Yahweh over their idols or whether they would continue to worship them anyway. And this is the same question facing every person today.

The Apostle Thomas (John 20:24-29)

He is the only one of the eleven apostles who was not present when the resurrected Christ appeared to the others. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Thomas might even be called the patron saint of scientists because of his demand for physical evidence for everything. He was certainly w ahead of those in the Middle Ages who were still parroting the “facts” of Aristotle and other ancient “experts” rather than testing them to see if they were true. After all, the theory of spontaneous generation of living animals from water was only disproved in the mid-18th century by the simple experiments of Pasteur and others.

But although the idea of resurrection from the dead did not fit into Thomas' worldview at all, to give him credit, he immediately changed his mind once he saw the living proof right in front of him. Unfortunately, there are all too many people today who hold on to discredited political or religious views even when the evidence against them is overwhelming if they just open their eyes and swallow their pride to admit that they were wrong.