"Avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called" (1 Timothy 6:20): modern readers think Paul is warning against modern science, not false spiritual knowledge.

Paul warns Timothy to avoid "oppositions of science falsely so called" (1 Timothy 6:20). Read today, that sounds like a warning against science itself: biology, physics, and so on. It isn't. The underlying Greek word is gnosis, simply "knowledge," and the KJV translators rendered it "science" because in 1611 that English word just meant "knowledge" broadly, following the Latin scientia. Paul's actual target was a rival system of esoteric religious knowledge, likely an early form of what became Gnosticism, not laboratory work.

English "science" didn't narrow down to mean the systematic study of the natural world until well after the KJV was translated. Plugging in today's meaning turns Paul's warning about false spiritual knowledge into an anti-science proof text it was never meant to be.