St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology (Mar 2024)
Biblical Criticism and Modern Science
Abstract
It is no accident that the birth and growth of the modern sciences took place in tandem with the birth and growth of modern biblical criticism within the context of (largely European and North American) Christian societies from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Both kinds of enterprise – science and biblical criticism – were made possible by (and contributed to) the changes in attitude towards religious authority and Christian theological tradition that flowed from the European Reformations and Enlightenment into what we characterize today as modernity. Each enterprise has developed its own specialized and distinctive methods for ‘reading’ its core subject matter (whether the natural world or ancient scriptural texts), but it is common to find these methods conflated when it comes to biblical texts which tell of the natural world. For instance, the creation story of Genesis 1 is frequently read at a popular level in light of Big Bang theory (and vice versa), while many creationists rely upon the Genesis texts to inform their own ‘creation science’, thus diverging from mainstream scientific views on the age of the earth and the status of evolution. Critical biblical scholars, for their part, have resisted naïve identifications between biblical narratives and scientific theories, pointing out that ancient texts require sensitive and historically-minded handling. This article explores ways in which the core biblical texts of creation and miracle have been understood and interpreted by fundamentalists, scientists, and critical biblical scholars in modern times.
