Let’s remember that the Old Testament was written more than 2,500 years ago by people who essentially contended that God told them what He did. Gerald Schroeder notes, “These commentaries were not composed in response to cosmological discoveries as an attempt to force an agreement between theology and cosmology…. Theology presents a fixed view of the universe. Science, through its progressively improved understanding of the world, has come to agree with theology.”
Leading scientists have, sometimes reluctantly, endorsed this conclusion. Arthur Eddington, who finally conceded the veracity of the Big Bang, acknowledged that “the beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look at it as frankly supernatural.” Arno Penzias, who won the Nobel prize for his discovery of the cosmic background radiation that corroborated the Big Bang, said, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole.”Astronomer Robert Jastrow puts it even more vividly. “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak. As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
I am not citing the Bible to prove that God created the universe. I am citing it to show that the biblical account of how the universe was created is substantially correct. The Bible is not a science textbook. It does not attempt, as science does, to give a detailed account of how the universe and the earth were formed into their current shapes. But what it does say about creation—about the fact of creation and about the order of creation—turns out to be accurate. In a manner that once would have seemed impossible, the Bible has been vindicated by the findings of modern science.
