The Bible indicates that early man was highly intelligent and knew far more than we give him credit. Humanity did not simply evolve upward as the secular world tries to claim. For example, the Babylonians knew of the "Horns of Venus." They also wrote of a crest of a planet. How could ancient Babylonian priests watch the phases of Venus without a telescope?
Until the invention of the telescope by Galileo, mankind had known nothing of these satellites. The priests of Babylon could have had a telescope. In the British Museum there is a remarkable piece of rock crystal, oval in shape and ground to a convex form. It was found in Sargon's palace in Nineveh. It looks like a lens from a telescope.
The ancient Egyptians had a special hieroglyphic for the number of one million. But it was not until Descartes and Leibniz in the seventeenth century did the modern world gain any conception of millions in mathematics.
Pythagoras (530 BC) deduced that the earth is a sphere and Aristarchus of Samos (310-230 BC) insisted that it revolves around the sun.
Eratosthenes (276-195 BC) curator of the Alexandrian Library, calculated the terrestrial circumference with a slight error of only 225 miles!
Plutarch gives the distance from the earth to the sun as 804 million stadia. This is almost the figure accepted by astronomy today.
Empedocles (494-34 BC) argues that light required time to travel. He also had a concept of the mutation of the species. Lucretius (95-56 BC) was aware of the uniform speed of falling bodies in a vacuum.
All of this historical evidence are but signposts and large arrows pointing back to the fact that the Bible has a legitimate story to tell. It is inspired by the Spirit of God. Without question, the Scriptures are historical and lead to these truths accurately. We see signs in ancient history of the markers of the Word of God. --Dr. Mal Couch (2/12)
