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Can you prove the Bible is God's Word? If you can, it could dramatically change your life -- and greatly improve its quality!
Back in 1963, a Gallup poll showed two out of three Americans believed "the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word." Now, however, a Gallup poll in 2022 showed only one in five believe the same thing -- a catastrophic drop! This means that in the past 60 years, America went from a large majority (66 percent) believing the Bible was the literal Word of God to now only a small minority (20 percent) accepting that.
Sadly, most of what you see and read about the Bible in education and the mass media has quite a liberal slant, reflecting a more godless and morally relativistic society. It can easily cast doubt on the overall validity of Scripture. Could you come to doubt it yourself? Where can we look for proof that the Bible is truly God's Word?
The answer is literally everywhere. The evidence is highlighted for us in many scientific fields!
One of those proofs is the amazing design of the human body, with unique features that enable human beings to vastly excel over any other living creature.
Also, archaeological and historical findings support the biblical account, and some of these discoveries are quite recent, as you can read and marvel at in the articles "Recent Discoveries Support the Biblical Record" and "Archaeology and History Confirm Biblical Figures". Space prevents us from covering far more evidence from such fields as biology, botany, chemistry, physics and geology, besides many others.
One field of science that increasingly points to the existence of a Creator God and the veracity of Scripture is the area of cosmology, the study of the universe.
In 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope, close to 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, began sending back spectacular photos of the cosmos.
What the telescope is revealing has shocked the scientific community. It's not been as expected. The universe has turned out to be far more fine-tuned than they ever imagined. How do these discoveries harmonize with the biblical record? Keep reading for the surprising results!
In short, we find many proofs that the Bible is God's Word, if we keep an open mind and the Bible open. We can then see all the evidence that surrounds us, thank our Creator for it and develop a more personal relationship with Him. As King David once said, "I will praise you, Lord, with all my heart; I will tell of all the wonderful things you have done" (Psalm 9:1, Good News Translation).
On July 11, 2022, amazing photographs from the 10-billion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope started arriving in public view. Astronomers, in particular, were awestruck by what it revealed. With its primary 21-ft.-wide mirror and infrared imaging, and placement a million miles from earth at a gravitationally stable location called the second Lagrange point (L2), the telescope showed a universe teeming with galaxies that were more massive, better structured, and formed much earlier than scientists had previously thought.
"Because of the galaxies' age and massiveness," relates science writer Wyatte Grantham-Philips, "the [James Webb Space Telescope] team's discovery conflicts with 99% of existing models for the origins of the universe. The findings call on scientists to rethink fundamental understandings of early galaxy formation.
"'We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find,' [astronomer Joel] Leja said. 'It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question'" ("'Impossibly Massive Galaxies' Discovered at the Dawn of the Universe, Researchers Say," USA Today, Feb. 23, 2023, emphasis added throughout).
How do these unexpected findings of the most advanced telescope in existence match up with what the Bible describes about the origin and development of the universe? You might think this is an unfair matchup, but the results could surprise you. Judge for yourself.
Though finding galaxies fully formed at very early stages, observations with the James Webb Space Telescope remain consistent with the universe having had a beginning.
Science philosopher Dr. Stephen Meyer explains: "If the physical universe of matter, energy, space and time had a beginning -- as observational astronomy and theoretical physics suggest -- it's hard to envision a physical cause for such an event. After all, it was matter and energy that first came into existence at the Big Bang. Before that, no matter or energy -- no physics -- would have yet existed that could have caused the universe to begin.
"Such considerations have led some scientists -- Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, the late Caltech astronomer Allan Sandage and Nobel laureate Arno Penzias -- to affirm a creator beyond space and time. Others remain agnostic about ultimate origins.
"Yet, irrespective of philosophical perspectiv, the vast majority of physicists and astronomers have followed the evidence to its logical conclusion: the universe had a beginning; there was a Big Bang. Certainly, the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed nothing to overturn this consensus or the considerable body of evidence supporting it" ("Here's Why James Webb Telescope Discoveries Are Causing Scientists to Rethink Galaxy Formation (but Not the Big Bang)," DailyWire.com, Sept. 22, 2022).
It should be pointed out that the term "Big Bang" is not a very accurate term and was originally used by British astronomer Fred Hoyle in a derisive way.
"The Big Bang is a really misleading name for the expanding universe that we see," notes John Mather, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and the James Webb Space Telescope's senior project scientist. "The name Big Bang conveys the idea of a firecracker exploding at a time and a place -- with a center. The universe doesn't have a center. The Big Bang happened everywhere at once and was a process happening in time, not a point in time. We know this because 1) we see galaxies rushing away from each other, not from a central point and 2) we see the heat that was left over from early times, and that heat uniformly fills the universe" ("Webb Telescope & The Big Bang," NASA.gov, 2017).
Of all ancient writings, the Bible is the one that mentions a beginning of the universe arising from nothing. As Genesis 1:1 says: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." It is noteworthy that the term used here for "created" is bara in the Hebrew. This word "always means to create, and is only applied to a divine creation, the production of that which had no existence before" (Keil and Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament, note on Genesis 1:1).
The discovery that the universe had a beginning posed a real dilemma for the modern scientific community with its commitment to material naturalism, including the rejection of the need for a Creator. The late NASA executive and astronomer Robert Jastrow readily admitted: "A sound explanation may exist for the explosive birth of our Universe; but if it does, science cannot find out what the explanation is. The scientist's pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation. This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth.' It is unexpected because science has had such extraordinary success in tracing the chain of cause and effect backward in time.
"Now we would like to pursue that inquiry farther back in time, but the barrier to further progress seems insurmountable. It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation.
"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries" (God and the Astronomers, 1992, p. 107).
The James Webb Space Telescope has confirmed the universe has been expanding since its inception.
As reported at Space.com: "[The James] Webb [Space Telescope] was made to observe the most distant galaxies in the universe, and in mid-December [2022], scientists confirmed that they had done just that. The telescope has officially observed the four most distant galaxies known, which also means they are the oldest . . . Researchers confirmed their age, analyzing data from the telescope's Near Infrared Spectrograph to find out how fast the galaxies were moving away from the telescope. This is the galaxies' redshift -- how much the wavelengths of light they shed have lengthened as the universe expands" (Rebecca Sohn, "12 Amazing James Webb Space Telescope Discoveries Across the Universe," Feb. 9, 2023).
Indeed, the Bible repeatedly reveals the universe has expanded from creation. The prophet Isaiah wrote, "Thus says God the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread forth the earth and that which comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it, and spirit to those who walk on it" (Isaiah 42:5).
Jeremiah adds, "He has made the earth by His power, He has established the world by His wisdom, and has stretched out the heavens at His discretion" (Jeremiah 10:12).
Significant among the recent findings of the new space telescope is how quickly and orderly the galaxies formed, even containing advanced metallic elements long before astronomers predicted these could have developed.
A U.S. Cornell University team of astronomers explained: "Most surprising about these galaxies [seen by the Webb telescope], considering their age and mass, was their mature metallicity -- amounts of elements heavier than helium and hydrogen, such as carbon, oxygen and nitrogen -- which the team estimated to be similar to our sun. Compared to the sun, which is about 4 billion years old and inherited most of its metals from previous generations of stars that had roughly 8 billion years to build them up, we are observing these galaxies at a time when the universe was less than 1.5 billion years old.
"'We are seeing the leftovers of at least a couple of generations of stars having lived and died within the first billion years of the universe's existence, which is not what we typically see,' [research associate Dr. Amit] Vishwas said. 'We speculate that the process of forming stars in these galaxies must have been very efficient and started very early in the universe, particularly to explain the measured abundance of nitrogen relative to oxygen, as this ratio is a reliable measure of how many generations of stars have lived and died" ("Astronomers Discover Metal-Rich Galaxies in the Early Universe," Cornell Chronicle, Feb. 27, 2023).
Here again is reported confirmation of the universe being so orderly and amazingly fine-tuned to allow for the existence of physical life.
The key to understanding this orderliness is found in the natural laws God established from the start. Nothing was left to chance. The universe did not blindly or haphazardly "evolve" on its own as many think, but was in fact carefully designed and orchestrated as an elegant expansion, with matter, energy and the physical forces in just the right time, place and proportions. In fact, the cosmic elements continue to follow these interacting physical laws until today, permitting advanced life to appear and thrive.
The Bible speaks of these physical laws created by God that control the universe to produce order, harmony and balance. The prophet Jeremiah was inspired to write, "But I, the Lord, have a covenant with day and night, and I have made the laws that control earth and sky" (Jeremiah 33:25, GNT).
Another startling discovery made by the James Webb Space Telescope deals with the cosmos being controlled by invisible, unknown and enormously great forces as it rushes outward.
In a CBS 60 Minutes interview with journalist Scott Pelley, astronomer Matt Mountain commented about the immense number of galaxies the Webb telescope has detected: "These were not artifacts from the detector. These were not strange stars. The whole of the sky was filled with galaxies. There was no empty sky. And that's when I went, 'This telescope's going to be phenomenal' . . . It tells us that our universe is filled with galaxies . . . There is no empty sky with James Webb. That is what we have discovered" ("NASA's Webb Telescope Captures New Views of Stars, Galaxies and the Early Universe," April 9, 2023).
In later narration, Pelley noted Mountain discussing the finding that "galaxies are rushing away from each other at greater and greater speed, defying gravity. It makes no sense, so scientists infer that there must be unseen elements at work. They call them dark energy and dark matter." Mountain stated: "Whenever you hear the term 'dark energy,' or 'dark matter,' this means we don't know what it is. We're not that imaginative. But it is a force, it is 95 percent of our universe. And we have no idea what it is . . . We are lucky if we even understand 4 percent of our universe today. Astronomy is a very humbling discipline."
Yet, despite astronomy being a so-called humbling career, the majority of today's scientists still refuse to accept the logical conclusion derived from analyzing the exquisitely fine-tuned universe suited for advanced life -- the need to take a Creator God into account.
Interestingly, the Bible tells us that God once asked the patriarch Job some key questions about the cosmos -- challenges He could still pose to astronomers today: "Can you arrange stars in groups such as Orion and the Pleiades? Do you control the stars or set in place the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper? Do you know the laws that govern the heavens, and can you make them rule the earth?" (Job 38:31-33, Contemporary English Version). The answer is still the same. God and His creation of the universe are way out of their league! (See Isaiah 55:8-9; Ecclesiastes 3:11.)
Regarding the invisible force said to underlie 95 percent of the universe that has scientists stumped, God's Word seems to speak to that in declaring: "Christ is exactly like God, who cannot be seen. He is the first-born Son, superior to all creation. Everything was created by him, everything in heaven and on earth, everything seen and unseen, including all forces and powers . . . All things were created by God's Son, and everything was made for him. God's Son was before all else, and by him everything is held together" (Colossians 1:15-17, CEV). Also, "By his own mighty word, he holds the universe together" (Hebrew 1:3, CEV).
So, if dark energy and dark matter turn out to be spiritual in nature or a result of God's spiritual power interacting with physical elements of the cosmos, scientists will never discover what these are through physical means but would be limited to measuring their detectable effects.
Perhaps the findings of the new space telescope can be compared to the answers from an interview The New York Times did more than 40 years ago with a previously mentioned earlier winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Arno Penzias, co-discoverer of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Speaking about the discovery of the universe having a beginning and also of its expansion, he noted, "But it seems to me that the data we have in hand right now clearly show that there is not nearly enough matter in the universe, not enough by a factor of three, for the universe to be able to fall back on itself ever again."
And then followed this remarkable statement: "'My argument,' Dr. Penzias concluded, 'is that the best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole'" (Malcolm Browne, "Clues to Universe Origin Expected," March 12, 1978).
Today, the amazing discoveries and photos from the James Webb Space Telescope have so far confirmed the basic biblical account of the cosmos, described thousands of years ago, when telescopes did not even exist! How could that happen?
Only through revelation from God. Let us treasure the truth He reveals and live by the precepts of His Word. As Moses was inspired to write: "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law" (Deuteronomy 29:29). May we all act on the truth before us!
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