Scientific Confirmation Of Biblical Events

For Traditionalists, the miraculous events recorded in Scripture are true, proofs of the truth of the Catholic Faith, and are an effect wrought in nature by the direct intervention of God. There are those non-Christians, open to the claims of the Bible and the Church, but they seriously call into question the historicity of certain events/miracles. Finally, you have those unbelievers who use certain biblical accounts as "proof" that religion (in general) and the Bible (in particular) are "fairy tales" and openly mock said accounts incessantly. 

 One of the stories most ridiculed is that of Jonah. In the Old Testament, the Book of Jonah (chapters 1-4) tells us that Jonah was told by God to warn the people of Nineveh to turn from their evil ways. Jonah tried to flee from God in a ship. The prophet was thrown overboard where a big fish (sometimes called a whale) swallowed him. He remained alive inside the fish for three days, during which he prayed to God for deliverance. The fish vomits Jonah onto land, and he goes to Nineveh to preach, and the people repent. 

The Bible never expressly declares the story of Jonah to be miraculous, but people take it for such. A friend of mine recently pointed out to me some scientific literature which could be applied to Jonah and the big fish. To the consternation of non-believers, it actually makes an excellent case that, while directed by God, it may be scientifically possible to live inside a fish for three days.    

This post will demonstrate that what has been scoffed at for centuries actually has found scientific backing. That doesn't mean miracles aren't real or every event in the Bible can be explained scientifically, but rather that some events can be so explained and put the lie to the oft heard contention that science and the True Faith are incompatible. 

(N.B. The contents of this post were compiled from a multitude of sources both in print and online. I take no credit for any of it. All I did was condense the material into a terse and readable post.---Introibo). 

A Fishy Story?

For the atheist devoted to the belief that there is no God, one might search the depths of all the Earth’s oceans and find no empirical evidence of divine influence. Never mind that three-quarters of the global seafloor has not yet been mapped by high-resolution imaging technology. (See NOAA, “How Much of the Ocean Has Been Explored?,” oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/facts/explored.html).  

The celebrity  atheist biologist Richard Dawkins pokes fun at the story of Jonah and other biblical miracles, calling them “nonsensical” or “just plain weird.” (See The God Delusion (2006), pg. 268). From the perspective of naturalism, which since Darwin has become the prevailing philosophy of science, the biblical text is implausible because it seems to defy what science teaches is possible. Naturalistic science supposedly has exposed the story of Jonah to the bright light of reason and rescued modern thought from "superstition and ignorance." 

New Testament scholar, textual critic, and Protestant turned atheist, Dr. Bart Ehrman, argues that Jonah is a story, not a biography.(See “The Bible’s Best Known Short Story: Jonah,” blog post, January 1, 2022, ehrmanblog.org/the-bibles-best-known-shortstory-jonah).  

Although not a biologist himself, Ehrman considers it self-evident that “back then…zoological knowledge was…undeveloped.”(See "The Bible’s Best Known Short Story: Jonah,” blog post, December 30, 2021, ehrmanblog.org/the-bibles-best-known-shortstory-jonah). Thus, the writer of Jonah simply did not know that whales’ mouths and bellies are just too small to accommodate a grown man, even if whales had been known to the pastoral people inhabiting the Ancient Near East.

The Catholic exegetes have always (rightly) considered the story of Jonah to be literal history and not some allegory told to convey a moral truth, as Modernists teach. Jesus Himself refers to Jonah having been “three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (St. Matthew 12:40). If Jesus were speaking allegorically, that would call into question His own historical death and bodily Resurrection, which He foreshadows by referring to Jonah. To call into doubt Our Lord's Resurrection is heretical. 

Science Sheds Some Light

Miracles are exceptions to common human experience and incompatible with what we understand about the world through science. Obviously, we do not see large fish (whales) going around swallowing swimmers, let alone those swimmers later emerging from their bellies to tell about it. We do not think of huge fish as inhabiting the waters of the Ancient Near East. On the face of it, it seems unreasonable to believe that an ancient writer on land would have specific knowledge about sea creatures, or that a man could fit inside the mouth of a fish, escape its teeth, breathe air, and survive its digestive secretions.  However, is what Jonah experienced (and non-believers mock) something that could also happen without miraculous intervention?  To the chagrin of Dawkins and company, the answer is YES.

1. What type of fish could Jonah have encountered?

The first question to address is what species of sea creature swallowed Jonah. In the Masoretic Text, the Hebrew phrase for the creature is dag gadol, meaning simply “big fish,” as it is rendered in all major English translations (Jonah 1:17). The Greek Septuagint also translates the Hebrew as “big fish.” Similarly, in the Greek New Testament, Jesus says that Jonah was in the belly of the "big fish." (St. Matthew 12:40), which can refer to any large sea creature. 

However, Jonah could have been swallowed by an actual whale. The most probable species encountered by Jonah was the fin whale. This is the second-largest whale species on the planet, measuring up to 22 meters in length and weighing 40–50 tons 

(See education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/big-fish-history-whaling)

It happens to be the most common whale to inhabit the Mediterranean Sea. (See “Are There Any Whales in the Mediterranean," musee.oceano.org/en/resources/are-there-any-whales-in-the-mediterranean).

Historical evidence shows that ancient mariners in the North Atlantic and North Pacific were familiar with whales, which were hunted as early as 4,000 years ago, although it is doubtful that Ancient Near Eastern seafarers would have had contact with North Atlantic mariners in pre-Roman times.(See op. cit.)

Significantly, Jonah writes that “The waters closed in over me” and “weeds were wrapped about my head” (Jonah 2:5), but he mentions no lacerations or bleeding, which would be consistent with entering the mouth of a fin whale, as it lacks teeth.

2. Is it really possible for a fin whale to swallow an adult human being?

Whereas skeptics assume that a man would not fit within the mouth or belly of a whale, field measurements indicate otherwise. The cross-sectional area of a fin whale’s mouth is determined by the dimensions of its skull and jaw which, when open, reaches 8 meters squared, which compares gapingly to the 2.2 meters squared of a standard residential door. (See Jeremy A. Goldbogen, Nicholas D. Pyenson, and Robert E. Shadwick, “Big Gulps Require High Drag for Fin Whale Lunge Feeding,” Marine Ecology Progress Series 349 (2007): 289–301, doi.org/10.3354/meps07066).

Further, the pleated walls of its buccal cavity are highly distensible, so that when the whale lunges to feed, it takes in an enormous volume of sea water. This lunge-feeding behavior was not well-studied until the 1980s. (See Jeremy A. Goldbogen, “The Ultimate Mouthful: Lunge Feeding in Rorqual Whales,” American Scientist 98, no. 2 (March–April 2010): 124–131, doi.org/10.1511/2010.83.124). 

3. How could a person survive three days with the digestive juices in the stomach and with no oxygen?

Jonah could not get through the fin whale's esophagus.  Jonah would have been confined in the whale’s voluminous oropharynx. The oropharynx is the middle part of the throat.  During feeding its distension enlarges the whale’s underside, corresponding to the biblical word “belly” (Jonah 1:17, 2:1–2). Therefore, there would be no digestive juices.

By far the greatest threat to Jonah’s life would have been an inadequate air supply to sustain him for three days and three nights and avoid asphyxiation. An air pocket might provide enough oxygen to sustain Jonah for a few hours, but the buildup of exhaled carbon dioxide would have overtaken him before he ran out of oxygen. Notably, as the fin whale is an aquatic mammal, it also requires air and surfaces every 5 to 15 minutes to take air in through its blowhole. (See  A. W. Vogl, H. Petersen, K. N. Gil, R. L. Cieri, and R. E. Shadwick, “The Soft Palate Enables Extreme Feeding and Explosive Breathing in the Fin Whale (Balaenoptera physalus),” Integrative Organismal Biology 6, no. 1 (July 9, 2024): obae026, doi.org/10.1093/iob/obae026). 

As fin whales’ observed feeding behavior can include skimming at the surface, intake of air along with water could have periodically refreshed Jonah’s air supply. (See National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Fin Whale,” last modified November 22, 2024, fisheries.noaa.gov/species/fin-whale).

The fascinating case of  Harrison Okene is instructive as to survival in pockets of air. Okene was the lone survivor of a tugboat that encountered a rogue wave off the coast of Nigeria in 2013. He was locked in a tiny bathroom the morning the boat capsized. The boat then sank, upside down, landing 30 meters below the surface on the sea floor. Okene found himself trapped in the four-foot room, where for nearly three days he survived by breathing from a pocket of air. (See Paula Cocozza, “I Survived Three Days in a Capsized Boat on the Ocean Floor — Praying in My Air Bubble,” The Guardian, September 26, 2023, theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/sep/26/i-survived-three-days-in-a-capsized-boat-on-the-ocean-floor-praying-in-my-air-bubble; “Divers Find Man Alive in Sunken Tugboat,” Associated Press, December 3, 2013, youtu.be/ArWGILmKCqE). 

A diving medicine expert estimated that the 13.5 meters cubed volume of Okene’s air bubble would have allowed him about 56 hours of life. 

(See “The Science Behind Man Surviving Underwater for Three Days,” National Geographic, December 5, 2013, nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/131204-nigerian-air-bubble-survival-shipwreck-viral-video-science). 

Summary: It is possible for a man to live inside a whale for three days.

Conclusion

I am not claiming that the story of Jonah wasn't a miracle. This information merely demonstrates the ignorance of those who deride this Biblical story as "nonsensical," and "just plain weird."  Not all divinely ordained events that appear to us to be miracles require the suspension or violation of natural laws. Jonah's watery adventure can (possibly but improbably) occur outside the miraculous as well.

As Traditionalists we must affirm miracles:

From the Oath Against Modernism promulgated by Pope St. Pius X for all clerics on September 1, 1910:

Secondly, I accept and acknowledge the external proofs of revelation, that is, divine acts and especially miracles and prophecies as the surest signs of the divine origin of the Christian religion and I hold that these same proofs are well adapted to the understanding of all eras and all men, even of this time. (Emphasis mine)

From the Vatican Council (1870):

If anyone shall say that miracles are impossible, and therefore that all the accounts regarding them, even those contained in Holy Scripture, are to be dismissed as fables or myths; or that miracles can never be known with certainty, and that the divine origin of Christianity cannot be proved by them; let him be anathema.

It's nice to know that a Biblical event skeptics have laughed at for years, can be vindicated by the very science they claim disproves God. "For professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." (Romans 1:22).