The biblical writers didn’t know a lot of things we know today. That’s especially true when it comes to areas like medicine, engineering, and science. Today, many Christians want to make the Bible a source of science due to the perceived threat of evolution. Other Bible believers try to force certain passages into teaching evolutionary theory. But the biblical writers had no concept of a theory that was formulated in the nineteenth century. Both approaches are flawed and don’t allow the Bible to be what it is.
The biblical authors were premodern and therefore prescientific in the modern sense. The Bible itself informs us of this in some transparent ways. For example, ancient Israelites believed the seat of emotions and decision-making was the internal organs (heart, intestines, kidneys; see Ps. 16:7; 26:2; 31:9; Prov. 20:27; Jer. 11:20; Rev. 2:23). We use such language today metaphorically because we know that emotions are brain-based. Biblical Hebrew doesn’t even have a word for “brain.”
Hebrews 7:4–10 mentions that the descendants of Levi existed in the loins of Abraham. We know from modern science that a person’s full genetics result from conception, an insight into procreation of which the author of Hebrews would have had no concept.
Biblical cosmology is also prescientific. For example, many interpreters see in Old Testament passages a three-tiered universe: heavens above, earth beneath, and water under the earth (Ex. 20:4; Phil. 2:10; Rev. 5:3). This perspective would have been common throughout the ancient Near East and Mediterranean.
The biblical writers had no intention (or ability) to teach modern science in Genesis or any other passage. They put forth ideas that transcend the facts of biology, physics, chemistry, and any other hard science: God created the world and everything in it. This assertion does not contradict science, though many scientists want to resist it. God in his wisdom gave us a truth proposition that surpasses scientific theories and debates. Let critics deride the Bible for not being what it wasn’t intended to be—they will sound hopelessly foolish.