Bible Ancient View

Writers of the Bible assumed the earth was flat, was made by God in relatively, recent history (about 4,000 years before Jesus) just as it looks now, and that it is a fixed point in the cosmos over which the sun actually rises and sets. While most Christians don’t have a problem in reconciling this biblical view with science there are groups that do not seem convinced. There is in fact a Flat Earth Society, and one well-known group continues to advocate for a six-thousand-year-old earth where humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Others contend that the universe only looks old, that God created the cosmos with “apparent age.” These specific positions are problematic---scientifically and theologically. These other views rooted in precommittment to read the Bible literally at virtually every point despite evidence to the contrary, avoid engaging science by reinterpreting it to conform to that conviction. To the contrary, it is clear that, from a scientific point of vie, the Bible does not always describe physical reality accurately; it simply speaks in an ancient idiom, as one might expect ancient people to do. It is God’s Word, but is has an ancient view of the natural world, not a modern one.