Waters above the skies?

R Hoeppner's article, "The Gap Theory of Creation", states that "The Bible is not a science book but... where it touches on proven science it is accurate and reliable".

(The article can be found here.

I feel that to say both of these things togther is a double standard that gives Bible defenders an easy way out.

This is because wherever the Bible gets science wrong it could be argued that the writer of the particular biblical book is not writing scientifically.

The problem is that this could be said of most or all of the Bible, and if this is the case, it is not fair on skeptics to use any of its purported scientific accuracy as anything other than cases in which people's belief, based on ordinary observation, happened to concur with what science later confirmed through testing.

Indeed, many things concluded through ordinary observation could be proven true through scientific testing - if science bothered to test them. Science tends to focus its efforts on things that are not yet obvious. We know the earth is a sphere because so many people claim to have seen it as a sphere or travelled around it, which is why this is not the focus of science today. But before that was known, someone had to travel around it or use some other means to find out.

There are, in fact, statements in the Bible that are proven to contradict science. Just one example is that Psalm 148:4 refers to "waters above the skies" (or even "the heavens" in some versions, which is even more problematic). There are waters in the skies - clouds and moisture - but there are no waters above the skies. However, ancient mythological views of the universe, including non-Judao-Christian ones that held vastly different beliefs about God, also held that there was water above the sky, and even that the sky held it up. So which is more plausible: that a biblical book that held a view similar to that of many other ancient ones is also based on mythology, or that a body of water that Jews believed to exist above the skies in Old Testament days - when no-one could go there to check - disappeared before our day, when we can verify that there is no water there?