I believe that the Hebrew Bible is literally true, including its account of creation. I also believe that modern science is indispensable for understanding and navigating the future. In this essay, I argue that these commitments are not in conflict, by focusing on philosopher Hans Reichenbach’s response to philosopher David Hume’s problem of induction.

Consider the following dialogue between a philosophy professor and a student:

Professor: The sun has risen every morning in the past. What, if anything, justifies our expectation that it will rise tomorrow?

Student: The apparent rising of the sun is explained by the earth’s rotation on its axis. Since the earth has always rotated on its axis, we can reasonably expect the sun to rise again tomorrow.

Professor: And how do we know that the earth will continue rotating tomorrow?

Student: Because motion persists unless acted upon by an external force, Newton’s First Law.

Professor: How do we know that Newton's First Law will continue to hold tomorrow?

Student: Because it has always held in the past.

At this point, the justification has come full circle. Each explanatory step appeals to a deeper law or regularity, but the final support for that law rests once again on past success. The student’s responses are entirely reasonable within ordinary scientific reasoning, and they reflect how science is typically practiced and taught. They offer explanations that work remarkably well in guiding expectation and action, even though they leave unresolved the underlying philosophical question of why such expectations are rationally justified in the first place.

This is precisely the difficulty that David Hume identified as the problem of induction. Any attempt to justify our expectations about the future by appealing to past success seems to assume what it is meant to establish, namely that the future will resemble the past. Appeals to natural laws, causal principles, or scientific regularities merely defer the problem, since the justification for trusting those laws ultimately rests on their having held in previous cases. Hume’s challenge is not to explain how induction works in practice, but to ask whether it can be rationally justified at all by reason alone, without circularity.

If we wish to understand the foundations of science itself, however, it is essential to confront Hume’s problem of induction, since without some response to that problem there is no rational basis for scientific belief, which ultimately depends on inductive inference. The only response in the literature to Hume’s problem that I have found convincing is Hans Reichenbach’s pragmatic justification of induction. Reichenbach essentially argued: Either the future resembles the past or it does not. If it does not resemble the past, then all predictions about the future are equally reasonable in principle. If the future does resemble the past, then it is logical to make predictions based on the assumption that the future resembles the past. Hence, the most reasonable predictive strategy assumes that the future resembles the past, since this strategy is optimal in both situations. Notice that this resolution does not claim that the future resembles the past. It claims only that the optimal procedure for predicting the future is based on the assumption that the future resembles the past.

The following is a great dilemma that has confounded many religious people: The Biblical account of world history contradicts the majority consensus of scientists regarding the history of the universe. For instance, according to the Hebrew Bible, the universe is less than six thousand years old. According to science, the universe is billions of years old. This is a huge discrepancy. Some religious apologists have dealt with this discrepancy by being liberal with definitions, for instance redefining the word "day" in the Hebrew Bible to mean a period of time, since by Einstein's Theory of Relativity, time is relative and a day could not have even been well-defined until the fourth day of creation when the sun was created along with the moon and the stars. Others have put forth scientific arguments for a young earth. And some have even put forth arguments that the scientific evidence for an old universe is just a test of one's faith - if one believes the universe is billions of years old, he rejects the authority of the Hebrew Bible and therefore lacks faith.

Another great dilemma for many religious people concerns evolution. According to evolutionary theory, primitive forms of life developed through random mutations into the higher forms of life we see on earth today over millions of years. This stands in contrast to the account in Genesis, which states that animal life and humans were created on the fifth and sixth days of creation as distinct species. And there is also the account of a global flood in which only Noah and his family survived, which the book of Genesis describes as having occurred a few thousand years ago, and for which most scientists say there is no supporting geological evidence.

One possible response to the tension between the Hebrew Bible and science is to challenge modern scientific claims directly. I once adopted this strategy, holding that scientific theories about origins were either unreliable due to the inherent uncertainty of science, or the result of unwarranted extrapolations from present observations into the distant past. I defended this view in debates over evolution with limited persuasive success. In retrospect, the weakness of this approach was not that it was demonstrably false, but that it failed to address the questions that most naturally motivate scientific inquiry, such as where we come from and how the world came to be. The account in Genesis was not written to satisfy scientific curiosity or to function as a technical explanation of natural processes. Rather, it presents a compressed and schematic account of realities whose full complexity lies beyond current human understanding. Unsurprisingly, this proved unsatisfying to those seeking a scientific explanation. This realization led me to reconsider not the truth of science or the Hebrew Bible, but the grounds on which scientific claims about the distant past are justified.

My current approach therefore avoids attacking science and instead examines the grounds on which scientific claims about the distant past are justified. Reichenbach’s pragmatic defense of induction makes clear that induction earns its authority through successful prediction of future events, not through retrodictions about the past. This is especially true of unique and unrepeatable occurrences that cannot be experimentally re-entered or varied. Because only future-directed predictions admit of direct empirical testing, claims about the distant past do not enjoy the same kind or degree of pragmatic justification within Reichenbach’s framework as predictive laws governing repeatable phenomena. Consequently, disputes over whether the universe is thousands or billions of years old lack the epistemic standing of predictive scientific claims, since they cannot be adjudicated through future predictive success. Reichenbach’s solution does not license belief in any particular historical narrative; it only licenses methods that prove themselves through future success.

It is important to note that not all retrodictions are epistemically on the same footing. In many cases, scientific inferences about the past are justified precisely because they contribute to reliable predictions about the future. For example, engineers often infer the past cause of a structural failure in order to predict how similar structures will behave under comparable conditions and to prevent future failures. In such cases, retrodiction is not an end in itself, but a tool for improving future-oriented prediction. These predictions are conditional and model-dependent: their success does not establish that a particular reconstruction of the past is uniquely correct, but only that the model in which the reconstruction is embedded is internally coherent and practically useful for prediction. By contrast, retrodictions that concern unique, unrepeatable events in the distant past, such as the precise origin of the universe or the detailed history of early life, do not play this predictive role. They do not guide future action, nor can they be tested by their success in prediction. Within Reichenbach’s pragmatic framework, such claims lack the same rational authority as inductive predictions that bear on the future.

Seen in this light, the conflict between Genesis and science arises only when scientific retrodictions are treated as if they carried the same pragmatic authority as predictive laws, a status that Reichenbach’s justification does not grant them. Reichenbach’s justification applies only to inferential methods whose success can be evaluated through future experience, a condition that predictive laws satisfy but most claims about unique events in the distant past do not.

This does not mean that claims about the past are irrelevant in every context. The events described in the Hebrew Bible are not offered as scientific reconstructions intended to support prediction or technological control. Rather, they function as the foundation of a religious worldview that shapes how people understand themselves, their obligations, and their relationship to God. In this sense, biblical claims about the past have profound implications for the present and the future, not by guiding empirical prediction, but by grounding meaning, moral responsibility, and communal identity.

From this perspective, the authority of the Hebrew Bible does not rest on its ability to compete with scientific retrodictions, but on its role in shaping how one ought to live. The Exodus, the giving of the Law, and the account of creation matter not because they allow us to predict future physical events, but because they define who we are and how we are to act. These are practical consequences of a different kind, and they fall outside the domain to which Reichenbach’s pragmatic justification of scientific induction applies.

Science governs what we can expect; the Hebrew Bible governs what we are for. Confusing these domains produces a false conflict that dissolves once their distinct forms of justification are understood. I hope this essay has shown that one can affirm the Hebrew Bible, including its account of creation, as literally true, while also recognizing modern science as indispensable for understanding and navigating the future.