A caller asks Tim Staples why he believes in the bible when the writers make claims that science has disproved. The caller uses the global flood as an example, and Tim responds citing biblical references, church history, and church councils.
Transcript:
So, I wanted to ask, why do you believe the Bible, when the Bible makes accessible claims, disproven by modern science?
And there’s not… Yeah, the only problem is Gabe, there’s no claims made by the Bible that are disproven by modern science.
The global flood?
Okay, well Gabe, I don’t believe there was a global flood.
So why does the Bible trust it does? The Bible doesn’t say it does. See, Gabe, understand that when the ancient people… Now, by the way, I should say, Gabe, that as Catholics, we are permitted because there’s never been an infallible pronouncement from the church that declared there was a worldwide
flood in a strict literal sense. The church has never taught that. You can go through all 21 ecumenical councils, teachings of… you know, definitive teachings of popes, and it simply is not there. The fact is, the church permits us to believe that there was no universal flood. Understand that, Gabe, when the inspired scriptures were written,
they are… You know, a lot of people have a wrong idea of what that means.
Inspired scripture does not mean that God dictated everything to the inspired authors so that it is God himself that is using perfect grammar, perfect language, perfect even science. No, we believe that the inspired authors use their intellect, their will, their understanding of culture and language. In fact, this is why some books of the Bible, even in the New Testament, have better Greek than others. Some of them… I remember my Greek professor saying, you know, some of them, you know, a few of them, the grammar is not very good at times. And others like… I mean, Book of Hebrews is a very…
It’s written by somebody who really knew Greek really, really well, and it was in St. Paul. But we’re not exactly sure who. It may have been Apollos, may have been… It was probably someone, Pauline, who had contact with Paul, but it certainly wasn’t. It’s pretty certain today that it was not Paul. But anyway, here’s the point. Is that they will use also categories that were well known at the time to communicate truth. Let me… Gabe, I’ll give you an example.
A weatherman today in San Diego may say, “Sunrise tomorrow is…” What? “6 o’clock or 5.45, whenever it is.”
Would we say that, oh boy, that weatherman, he must be a geocentrist because he believes the sun rises. Oh my gosh, how can he be so stupid? But no, he doesn’t believe the sun actually rises and the earth stays still, but we use what we call phenomenological language. In fact, all languages employ phenomenological language to express realities as they are perceived. Like in Daniel chapter 12, when Daniel talks about the resurrection and says, “Those who are asleep in the dust will rise.” Now, he doesn’t literally mean that people are sleeping in the dust and they’re going to rise. But phenomenologically, if you look at a dead body and it comes to life, it looks like it’s sleeping and it comes to life and rises. And so that’s the way language develops over thousands and thousands of years, is we speak of things in the way that they appear. So, no, the weatherman is not saying he’s a geocentrist, he’s simply using language the way the language is employed at the time in which he is speaking in the same way. When you talk about the flood, the flood can be understood as, yes, the whole world was flooded, but it can be understood as the whole world as perceived by the ancient writer. The ancient writer had no idea that there was a continent on the other side of the planet. He had no idea Columbus wouldn’t come along for a long, long time. So, his whole world flooded, absolutely. So, in that sense, yes. And by the way, there is a lot of evidence, yes, scientific evidence, not for the entire world being flooded,
but for a massive flood or perhaps a series of floods. Most likely, at least it may well have been one massive flood that various different cultures comment on that are from that area. I mean, that’s one explanation. There could have been multiple massive floods, but most likely there was this massive flood in antiquity that was devastating,
took away entire peoples in particularly populated areas and so forth, and that’s the way it gets communicated down through the centuries. And of course, God used that and Noah and so forth as a, you know,
to kind of further God’s covenantal relationship with his people. So, the thing is, Gabe, and I know you and I have talked about this before, there’s a fundamental flaw with folks who want to employ the Bible as a scientific book, and it is not. It is a book about salvation. It uses real history, absolutely, and I believe the flood was a real historical event in order to communicate essential teachings concerning salvation. But we don’t want to, and I’ll toss out another idea here, Gabe. The book of Genesis is not about talking snakes.
You know, we don’t have to believe as Catholics there was a literal talking snake. The inspired author uses a story that was a popular story in the culture in which he lived. And in fact, there are similar stories told, for example, the Anuma Elish among the Babylonians, and we have other cosmological sorts of stories of beginnings in other cultures. They’re very different from what we find in Genesis in many ways, but in some ways, there are parallels, which seem to indicate that there was somewhat of a common story that was told way back when, but with the divergences of cultures and so forth, we have divergences of religions as well. And so, there you go.
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