Why reveal rules against mixed fabrics (Lev 19:19) but not reveal Maxwell’s equations or germ theory? Why is there nothing revealed that surpasses the knowledge or experience of the men who were inspired to write the book?
This error is called concordism, and it’s rooted the notion that the Bible is intended to be a science book. It’s not. The Bible is trying to tell us specific things about God, and His relationship with man - that we’re fallen, in need of redemption, and we have a glorious Redeemer in Christ, who is fully God and fully Man. Maxwell’s equations would be a pointless detail in that narrative, so God didn’t reveal it.
Where science is relevant, it’s referenced, and it’s right. The account of a universe which progresses in stages from pure light (and energy) to a material world, to lower-level living organisms on up to man is substantially the same whether you read Big Bang cosmology or Genesis. In fact, when the Big Bang theory was proposed (by a Catholic priest, no less), it was derided as smacking of religion - for just this reason.
Or take the kosher laws. They served three purposes: (1) they marked the Jewish people as called and different from the rest of the world, (2) they created some of the first taxonomies [the forbidden animals were almost exclusively those which behaved deviantly from the rest of their family, like shellfish, which don’t act like fish at all], which would later be useful for scientific purposes, and (3) health reasons. The forbidden foods, we now know, were dangerous to eat, particularly in days before refrigerators or proper food storage. Foods like pork and shellfish killed a lot of people, and here, the Jewish people survived (without even knowing why) by keeping kosher. So while the germ theory isn’t presented
as such, the One inspiring the Mosaic Law seems to have known the germ theory Himself, and legislated with it in view.
If the books of the Bible are inspired you would expect them to be remarkable works of literature and sources of knowledge, but there is nothing in them out of the ordinary for the time they were written in.
This isn’t true at all. What are you comparing it with? The whole notion in Genesis of Creation
ex nihilio is millennia ahead of where anybody else was in terms of understanding the origins of the universe. Even modern scientists didn’t grasp this until the mid-20th century. Perhaps your error is equating “knowledge” with “meaningless trivia about science” rather than “immortal truths about God.”
