Bias in Science and Belief in the Bible

Millions of Christian living around the world have an unshaken faith in the Bible.  For them it is the greatest and the only absolute standard for determining matters related to creed and conduct.  But there is no shortage of critics against the Bible who would like to tell these people that their belief in the Bible  is foolish because of on reason or other.  There are numerous sociological and anthropological reasons for man's apposition to the Bible, but that is not the topic for consideration in this article.  It will be enough to note that  according to the Bible, people will continue to oppose it as long as they are dominated by their sin natures.

The attacks against the Bible have come  from the simple as will as the learned, in all generations of mankind, but the mode has changed from time to time.  In this generation, the attacks are done in the name of science.  They reason that if the Bible contains scientific errors in its statements, then it is nor a reliable book.  The more the number of these errors, the less is the reliability of the book as a whole.  We must surely grant to the critic that if the narratives in the Bible are erroneous about this world, then its statements about the spiritual world are also suspect.

In the past two hundred years a flood  of anti-Bible  material has been published in the form of articles, books and even learned treatises.  However, with the passage of time many of these writings were exposed to be shallow or biased, so that the information presented in these books against the Bible are more of fiction and less of fact.  One of the reasons that has been exposed time and against the existence of Bias and Cheating in the world of science.

The common notion which people have of scientist is that of men who passionately try to discover the secrets of nature; men who are not influenced by any type of biases or prejudices, whether it be religious, political, racial, or any other type which we can think of.  If this view of the scientists is correct, then science, the product  of their  research also ought to be fully true, objective, and unbiased.  However this is not the truth.  Scientists are men affected by all kinds of biases and prejudices, and their work does contain things which are biased or dishonest.  Many times these wrong conclusions are picked up by the critics who use them to attack the Bible.  For example, in the area of evolution a good number of proof produced to attack the concept of creation come in this category.

Some decades ago the famous Piltdown Man fossil was used to prove evolution and to refute creation.  In the fifties this fossil was discovered to be a fake.  Then there is the celebrated Nebraska Man who was reconstructed from a single tooth, and even presented in a court case to prove evolution.  When the rest of the skeleton was discovered they found it to be a pig instead  of a missing link in man's evolution.  The case of the Embryological proof of evolution is much more interesting.  A scientist produced the pictures of various embryos to prove that the human embryo passes through several stages representing its animal past.  After other scientists studied similar embryos, they exposed this man's work to be deception.  (It is an irony that Indian textbook dealing with evolution still print these pictures and teach it as a proof of evolution, eighty years after it was exposed to be a big lie)

Every generation of scientists will contain some men who are biased and prejudiced in their work.  They will deviate from the higher standards which should govern them.  Some of them will distort the truth, while others will even invent nonexistent data or results to support their claims.  Two scientific works have exposed these practices recently.  One is a research paper published in the reputed scientific journal Nature and the other is a scientific book by the title of "False Prophets".  Both of these documents expose the unbelievably high rate of cheating and deception in the scientific community.  According to them such practices are more widespread in the Biological science in comparison to exact science like physics.

In the remote and also in the recent past many of the biased, prejudiced, and wrong conclusions of scientists were used to attack the Bible.  This is not objectivity.  An honest enquirer  living  in the twentieth century has to accept that the Bible is not in conflict with any firmly established fact of science.  It might come in conflict with false information that is paraded in the name  of science, but then that is not science in any way.  Objective science has never contradicted the Bible.