Scientific Foreknowledge in Sacred Texts - Criticism

Criticism

Critics of sacred text scientific foreknowledge believe that parts of various sacred text may simply contain observations regarding aspects of the technology of the times. Scientific and engineering knowledge have been documented in early cultures that claimed no divine guidance. For example, scientists of Ancient Egypt documented knowledge of engineering and anatomy that were unknown to medieval Europe thousands of years later, such as the existence of cerebrospinal fluid; see Ancient Egyptian medicine and Ancient Egyptian technology.

Another criticism points out that the process of scientific foreknowledge only works in reverse; few advocates of scientific foreknowledge use sacred texts to predict the next scientific breakthrough. Only once a new scientific discovery occurs do proponents of scientific foreknowledge scan the text to look for a verse that can be said to have predicted the latest discovery. Thus, since the process only works in reverse and the text cannot predict new discoveries, the text cannot be said to contain scientific foreknowledge.

Farrell Till asserts that biblical passages with supposed foresight can be interpreted in a number of ways, and that believers "see prophecies and their fulfillments in passages so obscurely written that no one can really determine what the writers originally intended in the statements." Till is an author with master's degree in English (and a former pastor and missionary of the Church of Christ) who has had public debates with well-known Bible inerrantists such as Norman Geisler and Kent Hovind.

Richard Dawkins claims that religious proponents "cherry-pick" passages that fit a certain framework and disregard or even dismiss the vague rest, saying that those are meant to be figuratively and loosely interpreted.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote in her book "Purity and Danger" that the biblical cleanliness passages merely represent cultural concepts of symbolic boundary integrity.

A number of classical Muslim scientists and commentators did not believe in the scientific exegesis of the Qur'an; Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī (973-1048), one of the most celebrated Muslim scientists of the classical period, assigned to the Qur'an a separate and autonomous realm of its own and held that the Qur'an "does not interfere in the business of science nor does it infringe on the realm of science." These scholars argued for the possibility of multiple scientific explanations of the natural phenomena, and refused to subordinate the Qur'an to an ever-changing science.