Book Review: and God said...Science confirms the authority of the Bible.

Abou-Rahme, Farid

and God said… Science confirms the authority of the Bible.

134 pp

John Ritchie Limited, Kilmarnock, Scotland, 1997

As the subtitle indicates, Abou-Rahme has set out to show how science confirms scripture. The four parts of his book are (I) Science and the Bible, (II) Creation or Evolution, (III) Evidence for the Flood and Noah’s Ark, and (IV) Written That You Might Believe. Coming from John Ritchie, as it does, we know this work will be fundamental and evangelical. In fact, I find that Abou-Rahme disbelieves in the “big bang”, believes in creation by the hand of God in six literal days “a few thousand years ago,” believes there was a vapour canopy above the earth before the Great Flood, believes the mountains were formed after the Flood, and believes that men and dinosaurs walked the earth together.

Abou-Rahme has totally confounded “evolution as science” with “evolution as philosophy.” The latter is firmly atheistic and obviously a Christian can have no part of it. But the author seems to have tied salvation to right-understanding of science and to a belief in creation (in six days, etc.). In fact, at several points in his work, he escalates almost to a rant against “false” science, “so-called” science, “betrayal”, and so on. To put it simply, his thinking is “top down.” This means that he has all his doctrines lined up and now he’s trying to fit the facts into them. This is exactly what the Roman Catholic priests did to Galileo— they had the Bible verses that said the earth is firmly established and cannot be moved. “Unfortunately”, Galileo had facts on his side and knew that the earth goes around the sun.

A “bottom-up” approach, on the other hand, would deal with “facts” that the author never considers. For instance, what about the “red shift” and the calculations of star–distances into the millions of light years? And the red shift also indicates the universe is expanding. If we reverse this process, the only conclusion is that at one time “everything” was together, and this would have been the point of the “big bang” (caused by our Creator).

The Bible does not spell out how God made the plants or the animals. Nor does it spell out how He gave life to the first plants and animals, nor how He formed the first humans. In fact, there must have been death before Adam or what would he have eaten (i.e., vegetables and fruit)? What came in with Adam was, sadly, spiritual death.

There are other facts that the author blatantly denies or ignores with little or no evidence but lots of “faith”— the succession of strata and fossils, radiometric dating, application of the laws of thermodynamics, and DNA analysis of Neanderthals.

Abou-Rahme thinks that evolution has God “sit back and wait”, but then I wonder why God should have to hurry. And he never deals with “the appearance of age.” This factor alone can make God out to be a liar. Why not accept the “appearance” of age, as “true” age? Does he think the Americas drifted away from Europe and Africa overnight, or during the Flood?

Let’s leave the creation of the universe for the moment, and move on to the flood. Has he never heard that in the glaciers of both the Arctic and the Antarctic, there are successive layers of snow deposited to the extent of 180,000 years? And in fresh-water lakes in Japan and elsewhere there are undisturbed sediments or varves going back as much as 35,000 years; tree-rings can take us back 12,000 years. These are facts— our job as Christians is to interpret them, not deny them. Because God inspired the Bible and made the worlds, His Word and His Works have to agree— never mind what the scientific term might be— creation, evolution, or whatever.

All this brings to mind Augustine’s remarks, “Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars…it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics.” Abou-Rahme pooh-poohs and even mocks the work of such faithful Christian scientists as Denis Alexander, Francis Collins, Darrel Falk, Deborah & Loren Haarsma, Keith Miller, John Polkinghorne, and Howard Van Till, who are better educated, and deeper thinkers than he. To quote from Denis Alexander, “Personal saving faith in the God who has brought all things into being and continues to sustain them by his powerful Word, is entirely compatible with the Darwinian theory of evolution which, as a matter of fact, provides the paradigm within which all current biological research is carried out. There is nothing intrinsically materialistic, anti-religious or religious about evolution…Christian campaigns against evolution represent a giant “red herring”, distracting believers from far more important pursuits.”

My summary of this book is brief: I’m inclined to suggest that the best service John Ritchie can offer the Christian community is to recall every copy and pulp the lot.

Reviewed by Glenn Wilson