Modern Science in the Bible

Modern Science in the Bible: Amazing Scientific Truths Found in Ancient Texts (original title: Moderne Wetenschap in de Bijbel: De Bijbel is de wetenschap 3500 jaar vooruit) is a book by Dutch Young Earth creationist Ben Hobrink, published by Gideon in 2005. The book advocates biblical literalism in order to promote its key claim, biblical scientific foreknowledge, whilst also attacking evolution and other modern scientific views on the origin of Life, the Universe and Everything. The book is available in several languages, including Dutch, English, Arabic, Farsi, and Russian.

Structure of the book
Modern Science in the Bible is divided into eight chapters, plus a preface and some, such as a list of references. The chapters are as follows:
 * Chapter 1: Modern Science in the Bible?
 * Introductory chapter, in which Hobrink explains why he decided to write the book. Note that Betteridge's law of headlines applies.


 * Chapter 2: Combat of epidemics
 * Hobrink does his best (but fails) to contend that the existence of ethical 'advanced' precautions against epidemics (e.g. kicking people suffering from leprosy out of the camp) show the Bible's divine origin.


 * Why God — in all his omnipotent omnibenevolence — didn't just proactively prevent all epidemics simply by not willing the relevant pathogens into being in the first place remains unexplained.


 * Chapter 3: Hygiene
 * More of the same, but this time about circumcision (which is not a hygienic practice to begin with, but a form of unnecessary surgery that risks infection) and washing yourself carefully behind the ears.


 * Chapter 4: Food
 * Hobrink goes on picking cherries whines on about how perfect the Biblical food laws are. For some reason, mouth-watering verses like 's "thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man" are ignored.


 * Chapter 5: Natural sciences
 * Striking out from the topics he is actually familiar with (biology and especially food sciences), Hobrink decides to subject physics, astronomy, geology, poetry, Bible interpretation and mathematics to his unwanted advances.


 * All the while, Hobrink conveniently ignores any arguments that might otherwise upset his pet theories on various highly im plausible events, like the construction of an Ark by a senior citizen, or the premise of a hard reset global flood actually having taken place.


 * Chapter 6: Creation or evolution?
 * Despite the fact that this has nothing at all to do with Biblical scientific foreknowledge, Hobrink feels that he must help some of his orthodox buddies who are struggling to continually invoke the balance fallacy get over the giant pile of evidence against a recent creation (read: evidence in favor of evolution) by devoting the longest chapter of his book to this task.


 * In doing so, he manhandles not just biology and the first and second law of thermodynamics, but pretty much everything substantial produced by science in the past 150 years or so.


 * Dusting off every old Creationist hobby horse, Hobrink naturally invokes irreducible complexity, presents c-decay as a solution to the starlight problem, dabbles with baraminology and actively mistakes 'evolution' for just about any theory that he does not like, including abiogenesis, deep time and cosmology generally (most prominently regarding the formation of the solar system).


 * Chapter 7: The reliability of the Bible
 * Using a good deal of irrelevant facts, Hobrink decides to 'prove' the Bible's reliability. It goes about as well as one would expect.


 * Chapter 8: Some more facts
 * Hobrink employs random 'facts' to end his book. As usual, they are quite irrelevant (though they still serve nicely as stuffing).

After this comes a list of 'specially recommended books', as well as an extensive list of references and an index.

Probability theory
The maor famous of these is Jesus's prophecy of his Second Coming within a generation.

Hobrink's sources
Having followed a scientific education, Hobrink appears to have realized that he must support his statements with references. He has therefore filled the back of his book with 31 pages of sources, Bible references and 'specially recommended' books, magazines and websites. Many of these, however, are not recognized by the scientific community as reliable sources. A breakdown of the different sections and references follows below.

Books
Hobrink has filled three pages with a list of books, magazines and websites he considers especially relevant or interesting, and which he wishes to recommend to his readers. They include, but are not limited to:


 * Chapters 2 and 3
 * None of these diseases, by S. I. McMillen.
 * This is the infamous book Hobrink has plagiarized without any reference, until Tjerk Muller caught him on this (see below).


 * Chapter 5
 * Many Infallible Proofs by Henry M. Morris.
 * Morris is often regarded as the founder of creationism, but modern creationists aren't terribly fond of using him. For reasons. Hobrink claims the book is "about physics and creation/evolution", but Morris was not a physicist, but trained in engineering. And yeah, engineer.


 * Chapter 6
 * Darwin's Black Box, by Michael Behe.
 * Behe's work revolves around his claims about irreducible complexity, which has been debunked many times, including during the Dover Trial. Nevertheless, Hobrink often refers to Behe in claiming life is too complex too have evolved.


 * Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, by Michael Denton.
 * According to Hobrink, this book is about "the impossibility of evolution", notwithstanding the fact that Denton's work has been debunked by the scientific community. He also likes to call him an "evolutionist", which seems at odds with the above claim and with the quotes by Denton which Hobrink uses: usually they amount to "Neither of the two fundamental axioms of Darwin's macroevolutionary theory [...] have been validated by one single empirical discovery or scientific advance since 1859."


 * The Biblical Basis for Modern Science, by Henry M. Morris.
 * One of Morris's less known books. Despite his claims to the contrary, science is not based on some sort of 3000-year-old book.


 * Scientific Creationism, by Henry M. Morris.
 * See above.

Magazines
Rather than some evil liberal anti-Christian proper scientific journals such as Nature, Hobrink brings you peer-reviewed masterpieces things that make the Daily Mail look like quality press such as:
 * Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research
 * Creation Research Society Quarterly from the Creation Research Society
 * Creation ex Nihilo from the Creation Science Foundation, a United Kingdom-based Young Earth Creationist group. This was its name between 1986 and 2001; by the time Hobrink's book was written (2005), it had changed to simply Creation.
 * Origins by the Biblical Creation Society, another UK Creationist group.
 * Wort und Wissen - apparently Germany is infested with creationists, too. Could it have something to do with that guy that claimed that Copernicus was wrong, "denn also stehet geschrieben durch den Propheten"?

Anyone missing a particular journal?

Websites

 * Access Research Network, the badly formatted website of an American group of cdesign proponentsists;
 * Answers in Genesis - although their 'journal' was not listed, Hobrink apparently felt the urge to include Answers in Genesis's website in this list;
 * Biblical Creation Society, publishers of the magazine mentioned above;
 * CreaBel, a Belgian YEC group;
 * www.creationsciencemovement.com, a link that does not work but is supposed to link to the website of the Creation Science Movement;
 * Creaton, a Dutch group of YECs that neither knows how to spell 'creation' nor appeared to be very interested in their website (for some years consisting of the text "This is going to be Creaton's new website" with their logo below it; it seemed like a reasonable display of all of the compelling evidence for Young Earth Creationism);
 * Creation Research Trust, a British group of Young Earth Creationists whose website looks even worse than that of Access Research Network (though, we'll have to admit, not quite as bad as that of ZetaTalk);
 * Degeneratie, based on the book by Hobrink's buddy Peter M. Scheele. The site claims that '15,000 copies have been sold', of which 5,000 sold on the day of publication, implying that it has sold about 1.5 copies a day for the next 18 years. Scheele's main claim revolves around de-evolution, or the loss of genetic complexity in organisms, which supposedly contradicts evolution. Hilariously, this is a textbook exercise in evolution for Dutch high school students. But as we know, creationists are no strangers to misunderstanding basic science.
 * Institute for Creation Research, run by the organization of the same name.

Hobrink's references
In total, Hobrink uses 450 references. As one might expect, however, many of these are written by creationists. In an interview, he stated that:

Of course, instead of actually reading some proper scientific literature (or even popular science books, such as A Brief History of Time or Climbing Mount Improbable), all Hobrink apparently read were creationist books.

Chapters 1-4 are pretty reasonable, citing no more than 25 creationist sources. However, as soon as we enter Chapter 5, the creationist-counter starts producing significantly more dings - the first page of references for Chapter 5 has 10 creationist references, on a total of 18. The whole of Chapter 5 cites 22 sources that are identifiable as written by creationists by merely looking at their name. Chapter 6 breaks all records: 70 out of 100 references are to other creationists. Most cited are Michael Behe, Michael Denton, Henry M. Morris, William Dembski (whom Hobrink calls 'Demski') and Andrew Snelling. Many others are from popular science magazines, or from completely non-scientific ones (mostly Reader's Digest). Of the grand total of six references to actual scientific journals, the most recent one is an article in Nature from 1995 concerning the Earth's magnetic field.

Acclaim
A quick Google search for 'Ben Hobrink' returns dozens upon dozens of pages, most of them from Christian websites, and mostly filled with praise for Hobrink. They include interviews and totally unbiased book reviews. A letter to the editor, published in Christian newspaper Nederlands Dagblad (ND) also references Hobrink's book as an example of a book that can be used to explain to children "what is wrong with evolution". Dutch creationist "science magazine" Weet. also published an article praising Hobrink's explanation of the eighth-day circumcision. Ellips, a creationist magazine, also reviewed the book, and - unsurprisingly - concluded it was great.

Accusations of plagiarism
Not only do the weak of mind like to cite this book as a standard work of science, and are many miserably deceived by the rhetoric and nonsense which Hobrink displays in this book - apparently, he can even get away with it! On his blog, theologian (and anti-creationist) Dr. Taede A. Smedes has accused Hobrink of committing plagiarism, which was first discovered by theology student Tjerk Muller. It appears that Hobrink has almost literally copied long passages on Ignaz Semmelweis from S. I. McMillen's None of these Diseases with no attribution but an appearance on the list of 'Specially recommended books'. On 17 August 2007, this story made it to the press: ND published two articles on Hobrink's alleged plagiarism. Even now, when searching "Ben Hobrink" on Google (Google.nl, that is), the second and third 'suggestions' are "Ben Hobrink plagiarism" and "Ben Hobrink plagiarizes".

Hobrink later stated that he was grateful to Smedes for pointing out this 'error' and claimed to have amended it. In the 2009 edition, this 'amending' consists of a single reference to McMillen and the note at the bottom of the page that "I have taken the story about Semmelweis, liberally translated, from S. I. McMillen." The way Hobrink phrases it does not suggest that more than two pages of his book have been almost literally copied from McMillen. Smedes has, of course, also noticed this, and posted it on his blog once again. Given the fact that the edition used in writing this page was published nearly a year after Smedes's post, one may safely assume that Hobrink has not changed anything this time. In a 2015 interview, Hobrink referred to the plagiarism case, claiming that Smedes (whose name was not mentioned) hardly used any factual arguments and suggesting that all the fuss about this plagiarism may have boosted the sales.

Other criticism
Taede Smedes calls it 'disturbing' that Christians (particularly the orthodox ones) are so fond of Hobrink's book. It is indeed disturbing, since a little critical thinking and some insight into the state of affairs will pop Hobrink's book as a chain of argumentative balloons, filled with little more than air. But apparently, the wish to have tangible evidence that the Bible has a supernatural Origin, is stronger than reason.

The aforementioned Taede Smedes has published more articles on his blog criticizing Hobrink, including an essay by Tjerk Muller (the same person that first pointed out Hobrink's plagiarism) in which he exposes Hobrink's use of quote mines and cherry picking. Examples include:
 * Hobrink's claim that the Bible prohibits the consumption of fat: in, God forbids the Israelites to eat the fat of any land animal. There are, however, many passages in the Bible in which God appears to support the sacrificing of fat &mdash; something which, if fat is bad, seems rather odd.
 * According to Hobrink, the Bible shows advanced scientific knowledge when it states (in ) that "He that toucheth the dead body of any man shall be unclean seven days." To become clean again, said person must wash themselves multiple times. Meanwhile, the Bible says nothing about all those other circumstances in which one should also wash one's hands (and other body parts) very thoroughly.

Atheist blog De Atheïst has published a long and well-referenced article containing detailed criticism of Hobrink's book, taking down points such as the apparent rules for 'biblical hygiene', circumcision, and the water cycle, as well as pointing out Hobrink's cherry picking.

Christian blog Goedgelovig has criticised Hobrink and other Dutch creationists, such as David Sörensen, Tjarko Evenboer and Peter Scheele, calling Hobrink a 'plagiarist'. Cees Dekker, a Christian and the Netherlands' most cited physicist, and also a former intelligent design proponent who is now actively fighting creationists, stated on Twitter that he thought "Ben Hobrink is a nice guy but his popular book 'Modern Science in the Bible' is really not that good". Dr. René Fransen, an evangelical Christian, journalist and former biologist, has pointed out that Hobrink's reasoning can be refuted with a single example of Biblical unscientific foreknowledge, of which he gives several.