Deep Space and the Dome of Heaven

Recently, several conservative Christian media outlets reported on a geological discovery published in the journal Nature. Geologists have reportedly found more evidence of a watery layer between the earth’s surface and its core. Being a non-geologist, that’s about all I can say about it without making a fool of myself. I also can’t comment on the validity of this research, although it does appear that related discoveries have been in the news for several years. But, for the purposes of this article, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that these news outlets are telling Christians that these discoveries “[affirm] the Holy Bible’s explanation on where water on Earth came from”, according to Christian Today. The reference here is to the “fountains of the great deep” in Genesis 7:11 that, in the biblical story of the Flood, are one of the sources of watery destruction. In fact, this “great deep” shows up quite a lot in Scripture, leading some to expect that such an underground ocean literally exists.

As I wrote in November, these sorts of apologetic efforts stem from a well-meaning but misguided desire to “prove” the Bible’s authority by showing that it contains accurate scientific details that the writers couldn’t possibly have known without divine aid. The problem, as I argued, is that these attempts ultimately do damage to the Bible’s reputation by forcing it to provide information that it wasn’t meant to give.

But some Christians will respond, “why couldn’t the Bible predict modern scientific discoveries? After all, it is divinely inspired!” It’s a reasonable question. The Bible tells us about the nature of ultimate reality in all sorts of ways. Why not the nature of our physical reality as well?

An assumption behind these questions is that the Bible’s references to the natural world are basically interchangeable between the ancient and modern worldview. Thus, whatever words like “heavens”, “sea”, and “earth” meant to the original writers of Scripture, we can substitute our modern understandings of these words without doing harm to the text. In the case above, these Christians reflect this common belief. They assume that when the Bible speaks of a massive underground body of water, it can equally reflect a modern and ancient conception of this geologic feature.

The problem is that the biblical references to this underground ocean reflect an ancient cosmology that is completely, categorically, and irreconcilably different than our own. The “great deep” has no possible equivalent in modern cosmology. Equating the “great deep” in Scripture with any scientifically detectable underground body of water is to fundamentally misunderstand the ancient world in which it was written.

Kyle Greenwood’s new book Scripture and Cosmology: Reading the Bible Between the Ancient World and Modern Science, which is the focus of this series, demonstrates persuasively why this is the case. Part 1 of Greenwood’s book walks through each “tier” of the ancient universe, from heaven to earth to sea to underworld. He presents historical and archaeological evidence from the world of the Bible—the so-called “ancient Near East”—and shows how this cosmology influenced the biblical writers.

For the purposes of this essay, let’s focus on one particular feature of ancient cosmology: the “cosmic ocean”. The people of the biblical world assumed that what we think of as “outer space” is actually a universe-wide ocean. As Greenwood explains, this is an entirely rational belief if one pictures the universe based on everyday observation and intuition. Why is the sky blue? Where does rain come from? Ancient people figured that the sky was blue because there was a giant cosmic ocean high above the earth. Greenwood states that, “It was a nearly universal truth [in biblical times] that the sky was a solid structure…it served as a barrier for the upper waters” (54). And precipitation came from this cosmic ocean above the sky. Coupled with the common experience of finding water deep in the ground, “the ancients conceived of the earth arising out of primordial waters, called the cosmic ocean…the earth was thought to be surrounded by these cosmic waters” (62). This picture of the world is found in numerous literary and visual sources (many just discovered in the last century) and Greenwood details a large number of them.

Of course, just because the ancient Egyptians or Babylonians thought something doesn’t automatically mean the Hebrews agreed. After all, their beliefs about God were foundationally different than the polytheism of the surrounding pagan nations. And, as Greenwood readily admits, many modern scholars have over-emphasized the similarities between the Hebrews and surrounding cultures. But still, “the authors [of Scripture] shared a common cognitive environment that colored their view of the cosmos” (41), and so we should not be surprised that the Bible reflects these beliefs.