Truth
Science in the Bible?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 07 August 2002
God and Science
Some apologetic load of garbage on the web claims to resolve the conflict between the bible as the word of God and Science.
It is the popular belief that the Bible and science are at odds, that intelligence is on the side of unbelief, and that only childish or sentimental or uneducated people still trust the contents of the Bible.
Quite so, but being a Christian page it falls into the category of the childish, sentimental and uneducated. It says we should examine the evidence before deciding, as if scientists habitually do not use evidence fairly whereas Christians do!
It is the purpose of the Christian evidences set forth here to show the correlation of Christianity to fact.
So we can look forward to some novelty. The Christian authors goes on to say, quite truly:
Science, which is knowledge, is the organized body of observation and experiment on present (repeatable) processes.
The author is setting science up for a clout in the mouth:
Science can examine and analyze present processes and materials, but science cannot say conclusively how things came into existence, because origins are not subject to experimental verification. Science can only show what can be verified now, not what has happened in the past. That is for historians, biographies, and autobiographies.
So, historians, biographers and autobiographers have no need to be scientific? Perhaps not autobiographers because mainly they are telling tall stories for the purpose of self-aggrandisement, but historians and biographers have a duty to be scientific, or no one will believe what they write. Today, history is a scientific study of the past.
Science An Adjunct to Scripture?
The Christian continues:
If the God of the Bible is a reality, He cannot contradict His speech in Nature by His speech in Scripture. If the Author of Nature and Scripture are the same God, then the two books of God must eventually recite the same story, as science discovers more and more and continues to discard theories that contradict the reality of nature. Science merely documents nature, while God is the reality lying behind all phenomena, supporting it, directing it, and explaining it. We must be ready to hear the voice of science and the voice of Scripture on common matters. Scientific knowledge is invaluable for a knowledge of the Bible—at least to know it fully and completely.
This sounds fine up to the point where the Christian starts to make Christian assumptions. If God created Nature, then certainly it would give no one any confidence in Him or His Word that it contradicted His Word, but, suddenly, we are no longer talking hypothetically. Suddenly we are not considering “what if” God were the creator, “God is the reality lying behind all phenomena, supporting it, directing it, and explaining it”. Science suddenly becomes an adjunct to scripture. It is not knowledge as the Christian first declared, but “simply the process of discovering the mechanisms of nature, which God has put in place to make our universe work as it does”.
This is sleight of hand, and an excellent example of how dishonest Christians are. How does the Christian know what has suddenly become true for him. He said that science was knowledge but now we find:
Both science and theology deal with the same universe, one part is physical and the other invisible.
The great discoveries that the Christian makes are revealed line by line without any evidence at all. Poor old science has to have experiments and observations but the Christian can dispense with all that. Whatever he says is true with no need of experiments or observations. Theology deals with the invisible universe, but the Christian has not told us how. Now he does:
Through the Scriptures we discover the origin, purpose and end of the created universe. The reliability of the Scriptures can be validated by logical examination of evidence, just as valid scientific data can. Through science we find clues, analogies, confirmations of the existence and nature of the invisible universe.
It seems that we treat the content of the scriptures in the scientific manner, to check its validity, but you can be sure than when we do it, and find that the scriptures are not what they seem, the Christian will object and have some excuse ready. What of theology, though, this science of the invisible universe?
It is the intent of science to amass all the facts about the universe in its countless facets; it is the function of theology to give these data their purpose and theological ordering.
Perhaps the Christian will begin to tell us how. So far, we have the authority of the scriptures but we are entitled to check what it says, but nothing has been said about checking theology. Anyway, the author wants to tell us now about what Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), the famous British philosopher declared after practically a lifetime of study—there are five fundamentals of science—time, force, action, space, and matter. It might be useful for the reader to know that Spencer was a man who ended up sinking in esteem by the end of the nineteenth century to unfathomable depths. He was a man who declared that reading other people’s books gave him a headache, doubtless an exaggeration, but much of what he wrote was speculative, and, actually grounded in religion!
Still, the Christian tells us that Spencer was merely echoing what had been written by a man more than 3,000 years before—That man was Moses in Genesis 1:1:
In the beginning [time] God [force] created [action] the heavens [space] and the earth [matter].
A black hole, a little closer to creation than Genesis, perhaps?
The author declares that “with the very first verse of the Bible, it becomes crystal clear to the open-minded inquirer that there is something special, something unique, about the sacred text”. Well, if the world consists of the five things that Spencer highlighted, it would be hardly surprising if they did not appear in everything that was ever written that derscribed anything going on in the real world.
When Adam and Eve were driven out of Paradise [time], they were compelled [force] to build [action] a house [space] on unfertile soil [matter].
This is not a biblical story but the beginning of one of Grimm’s fairy tales. The elements mentioned by this Christian author occur in the initial few sentences of almost every fairy tale the brothers Grimm wrote. Here’s another:
Once upon a time [time] there was a young fellow who enlisted [action] as a soldier, fought bravely [force], and was always [time] in the thick of things [space] when the bullets [matter] were whistling about [action].
But let us take up the author on the scientific examination of the scriptures. He says that Moses wrote this story, but how does he know? The Word of God does not say he did. It is another Christian and Jewish assumption that Moses wrote the first five books of the bible. It was not an easy task to complete because he was dead before he finished, but by what must have been a remarkable miracle, he managed to record his own death.
The Christian author now tells us:
A closer examination of the Book reveals many startling scientific facts, placed there hundreds or thousands of years before they were known to the modern scientific mind buried like precious gems within the text of the Bible.
Astronomy
• 1. Job stated, in speaking of God (Job 26:7):
He stretcheth out the north over the empty space, and hangs the earth upon nothing.
Today, we know the earth is literally “hanging upon nothing,” our Christian guide to the Word tells us, but “it was not the concept of Job’s day”.
Men in Job’s time felt the earth was possibly suspended on the backs of four elephants, which stood on the backs of a giant turtle! Or, they felt that the earth was suspended upon the shoulders of a supernaturally strong man! There were many odd views about the condition of the earth, but none stated the matter in the clear and correct manner as did Job. A lucky guess—when everyone else was wrong?
The Christian depends, as all Christians do, on the ignorance of his audience, and their utter inability to verify anything. They are taught just to believe, so no verification is needed. Some ancient mythologies held it that the earth was carried by a turtle and four elephants, but it is quite wrong to pretend that this was a scientific outlook. Greek mythology also had it that a giant, the Titan Atlas, held up the heavens on his back, not the earth. The Christian author has mistaken pictures of Atlas carrying a sphere for him carrying the earth, but the sphere is likely to have on it the constellations. It is the sphere of the heavens, and what is more the images are often back to front because the picture is meant to be a view of the heavens from the gods’ own side—outside the sphere of the stars, in other words!
In fact, the Greek philosophers, who were the first natural scientists had realised that the earth was a sphere that rotated in the heavens either around the sun or in some ideas around a central fire that the sun itself reflected, probably before the biblical book called Job was written. Only Christian fundamentalists think Job was written before the fourth century BC, well into, or after, the Persian period.
What needs to be asked however is whether this Christian interpretation is right. Just a few verses on (Job 26:11), Job thinks that the heaven has pillars! So, the earth rests on nothing but it has pillars to keep up the heavens. If we can take it that the cosmic scene that Job is describing is based on Genesis, it seems that Job is simply describing the situation in Genesis, that having separated the primeval waters into heavenly waters and abyssal waters, the earth was separated from the latter. It therefore stood between the two lots of waters hanging apparently in empty space beneath the north pole. It is not a modern description.
• 2. Our guide next tells us that Isaiah 40:22 said: It is he [God] who sits upon the circle of the earth. The Christian author wants us to believe that the expression underlined means the spherical shape of the earth, but that is not true, and it is obviously not. God does not sit on the earth whether it is spherical or otherwise. The spherical thing that he sits on is the spherical vault of the heavens, and that is what the expression means. It means the “circuit” or “compass” of the earth. The same word is used in Genesis 13:10 when it speaks of the circuit of the Jordan, meaning the land around it. The heavens circle, circuit or compass the earth, and God sits on them. The rest of the verse adds to the metaphor talking about the curtain of the heavens, spread out as a tent. Plainly the whole reference is to where God dwells, not to the spherical earth. This is not another lucky guess, just phony Christian interpretation.
• 3. This trickster now goes on to Psalms 19:6, which, he says, contains several interesting “facts”. In speaking of the sun, the psalmist says:
His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and the circuit unto the ends of it; and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.
The apologist says that critics laugh that the sun does not circuit the earth, as this passage implies. Thankfully, though, scientists found out that the sun does turn out to be moving in space, in the arm of the galaxy it is in. It is moving through space in an orbit around the galaxy. This is the circuit the author wants us to believe the psalmist meant! Now in the previous verse the sun is a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, an old metaphor for sunrise, and Psalms 19:6 is the completion of the metaphor with the sun going forth to circuit heaven to the ends of it, such that nothing is hid from its heat—plainly meaning during the day.
In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun or which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoices as a strong man to run his course. His going forth is from the end of the heavens, and his circuit to the ends of it, and there is nothing hid from the heat of it.
There is no mistaking the whole metaphor, and it has nothing to do with the sun orbiting the galaxy. The sun is passing across the sky as it seems to do for us all, every day! It is not another lucky guess, as the dunce of a Christian facetiously asks. It reveals Christians apologists as mountebanks and liars.
The dim witted apologist writing these pages thinks it is remarkable that the psalmist should have known that the sun is the source of the heat on the earth (“and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof”). What is remarkable about this, only the apologist can say. The ancient near east is largely an extremely hot and arid place. No one living there can not be aware of the heat of the sun. Only idiotic and arrogant fundamentalists think it is remarkable.
Oceanography
• 4. Now we get to what the Christian author calls oceanography. We are told that Solomon wrote:
All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place wither the rivers go, there they go again.
The source of this is Ecclesiastes 1:7 which this intellectual thinks was written by Solomon because it ascribes itself to him. No biblical commentators agree that the ascription is genuine and point out that it soon evaporates and the author becomes no ruler. He is not feted as a ruler at the end. Most important of all, every clue it contains shows it was written in the Hellenistic period, about 800 years after Solomon supposedly died, and the author even speaks of rulers who followed Solomon. Fundamentalists depend upon their readers being as dim witted as they are.
The author of this website wants us to be amazed that the ancient Greeks understood the cycle of water upon the earth, yet water was one of the four elements and in some of the early Greek speculation, it was the prime one, upon which everything else was based. The bible in Genesis has the same belief. It is very ancient, going back to the Babylonians from whom many of these biblical legends originate. It is plain that this Christian apologist thinks that ancient people were like cavemen. It is astonishing to him that the author of Ecclesiastes writing only about 200 BC should have noticed, “if the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth”. This ignoramus tells us that Amos 9:6 says “he calleth for the waters of the sea, and poured them out upon the face of the earth; the lord is his name,” as if it meant the author knew the hydrological cycle. The passage is a reference to the deluge sent by God as a punishment, not as a blessing. Again, the author pretends it was known when the bible was written. Just a lucky guess? Nope, just idiotic exegetes.
• 5. Our guide now turns to Psalms 8:8 which apparently inspired Matthew Fontain Maury (1806-1873) into researching the currents in the seas. The passage is describing the dominion given by God to man over the earth:
The birds of the heaven, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passes through the paths of the seas.
Maury discovered the circulation of the water in the oceans, and wrote the first book on oceanography, though it is no longer used as this Christian admirer of Maury claims as a basic text. Indeed, because Maury was a biblical literalist, like his fan, the book failed to take into account whatever was not considered by Maury to be literally compatible with the bible and quickly became dated, but he still has the first claim on the study of ocean currents. His fan writes:
Maury “took God at His Word” and found that Word to be fully accurate!
Unfortunately, it was not, as we have just noted, but to imagine that the metaphor “the paths of the seas” means the system of ocean circulation is simply crazy. Indeed,the metaphor might properly be read the paths of Yam, Yam being the ancient Canaanite god of the sea, and possibly identified at an early date with Yehouah on His way to monotheism. In short, it might easily be a biblical admission that the Israelites were polytheistic, as honest scholars recognize.
• 6. Job was asked by God (Job 38:16):
Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the recesses of the deep.
The word translated “recesses” is also translated as “search,” because it refers to places that need to be found out about, and so are hidden. The “deep” is the “abyss”, the Hebrew word “Tehom” which is is identified with the Babylonian chaos monster, “Tiamat”. The “sea” of the previous sentence is the word “Yam,” the Canaanite sea god. God is taunting the poor mortal, Job, that he has no more chance of knowing such things than he has of knowing death, and being able to report on it. This deceiver, however, thinks it means the ocean depths, and tells us that the bible knew something that was not known by science until 1873 AD.
So, we are asked: How did Job know the recesses of the deep were there, when they weren’t discovered for centuries?
First, “Tehom” is not simply the sea, as we saw, but something mysterious and chaotic, and, second, it was God who was speaking about them—Job doubtless remained baffled by what he meant, whatever it was.
Physics
• 7. Our blind guide now leads us into the superlative knowledge of physics the bible has to enlighten us. Moses wrote:
The heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.Gen 2:1
Apparently, this is interesting because Moses, by using the past tense, indicated “an action completed in the past, never again to occur”. Amazing! Our Christian tells us this is “exactly what the First Law of Thermodynamics says!” We are also told correctly that “this law (often called the Law of the Conservation of Energy, and/or Matter) states that neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed”. What, though, has it to do with a Hebrew past tense? If God, as many, if not most, Christians think, created the heavens and the earth ex nihilo then He was indeed breaking this law, presumably one that He formulated himself. Otherwise the apologist’s point is lost here.
• 8. Now, we move on to the Second Law of Thermodynamics: everything is running down as entropy, randomness, is increasing. The earth is likened to a garment that will wear out whereas God will endure forever, in three places in the bible (Isa 51:6; Ps 102:26; Heb 1:11). Today, the Second Law has been formulated, so we can see that it applies, and always did apply. The fact that ancient people also noticed that things like garments wear out, can hardly be considered a formulation of the Second Law. Moreover, the history that the Jews were taught by the Persians was a linear history. Most ancient religions had seen history as a series of annual cycles, but as soon as the progression from a Creation to an Eschaton is part of religous theology, then the whole of Creation is seen to be wearing out as it progresses to the End Time. Our guide asks us:
Eventually the universe will wear out. The bible writers knew it, and stated it clearly. We didn’t discover it until a few years back. How did the Bible writers know?
First, since most people in the west were obliged to be Christians on pain of death for almost two millennia, the keener ones, at least, must have known what Christian theology told them—eventually the world would end. That surely is the point of the Christian scam called salvation. Second, what no one knew until science discovered it was the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which explains why it will wear out like a garment, and indeed, explains why garments wear out too.
Human Biology
• 9. The blind Christian continues that Moses told the Israelites (Lev 17:11-14) that “the life of the flesh is in the blood”. Leviticus is one of the books attributed by Jewish tradition to Moses, so our biblical literalist repeats it. In fact, there is not a respectable scholar that will not admit that the book was written after the so-called “Exile,” and refers predominently to the ritual and sacrifice of the temple of the Persian and Hellenistic periods. This webwriter says
Moses was correct. Because the red blood cells can carry oxygen (due to hemoglobin in the cells) life is made possible.
Christian says we know today that “the life of the flesh is in the blood,” but apparently ancient people did not realise it! It is simply puerile to think that no one until Leviticus was written had noticed that blood was comnnected with life. The whole point of sacrificing anaimals was because of the lifeblood. All primitive people had noticed that when people and animals were wounded, they died as the blood oozed away. Blood was always life blood, and the Christian is just trying to make out for even more ignorant Christians that only worshippers of the Hebrew God knew it.
• 10. According to the Old Testament (Gen 17:12), “circumcision was to be performed on the eighth day of a newborn male’s life”. Our guide asks us:
Why the eighth day?
Our guide tells us that only after the eighth day has the infant developed enough vitamin K to prevent infant haemorrhagic sickness. In fact, the vitamin is produced in the infant’s gut by gut bacteria and this takes a few days of life to develop, but in ancient days with cleanliness less than it is now, the bacteria will have invaded sooner than today. The vitamin stimulates production of prothrombin in the liver, and we are informed:
It is only on the eighth day that the percentage of prothrombin climbs above 100%!
Climbs over 100 per cent of what? Presumably the Christian doctor means reaches its full value, or reaches a peak value, but his terminology does not give us confidence. Anyway, as ever, the Christian is amazed by this and asks us:
The only day in the entire life of the newborn that the blood-clotting element prothrombin is above 100% is day eight. Therefore, the best day for circumcision is the eight day! Did Moses have access to modern day scientific knowledge, or did God tell him to write this?
Needless to say, Moses did not know this, perhaps because all the historical evidence is that Moses is mythical, but even the actual authors of Leviticus did not know it, and if the Christian is claiming that God told them, why did they not write it down? What is obvious is that the priests carrying out the circumcision would soon have realised that the eighth day was the optimum one simply out of practice. More of the infant boys would perhaps have died by bleeding if earlier circumcision were attempted. Since circumcision was introduced to substitute for sacrifice of sons, it would have been pretty pointless if they had been dying anyway. Even so, old fashioned circumcision was not really circumcision at all but simply nicking the child’s foreskin. Even that would have had some risk, but it is doubtlful that it would have been too serious, and the time might have been adopted because it was when all sacrifices had to be made.
• 11. Now we come to conception, or so it is meant to be by our ignorant advisor on matters scientific in the bible. We are told that Genesis 3:15 has, “between her seed and thy seed”. This shows that a female as well as a male has the seed of life, yet Moses could not have known that in his day, presumed to be about 1400 BC.
Ancient writers believed that only the male possesses the seed of life, and that the female was nothing more than a “glorified incubator”. How was Genesis so accurate?
For the rational mind, this is evidence that Genesis was not written by Moses in 1400 BC, but sometime towards the end of the first millennium BC. By the beginning of the new era, Galen knew that women had seed. The question though, is does the word translated “seed” mean “ova,” as our blind guide thinks? The word literally means “seed,” as in grain, but it also meant the fruit of the plant, and by extrapolation, the offspring of animals and particularly humans. Biblically, “seed” means “children” or “descendants,” and that is what it means here. There is not the least implication that God was telling the serpent the true facts of life. He was cursing it to be bruised on the head by the human descendants of Eve, while it bruised the heel of humans. So the answer is that Genesis was not so accurate. Everywhere else in the bible the assumption is that the woman is merely the field into which male seed is implanted. If God knew it was not so here in Genesis, why does He make out the ancient mistaken view everywhere else?
Biology
• 12. Turning to biology, the web author tells us that Moses, still writing Genesis, apparently, knew all about genetics because Genesis declares that animals and plants produce “after their kind”. This was quite astonishing for anyone to know when the bible was written, it seems. The Christian apologist cannot distinguish between observation and theory, but that is typical. There can be no doubt that ancient people understood that mice did not give birth to elephants, or even cabbages to coconuts. What they did not know was why this was so, and no one knew until recently the reason why. In the passages mentioned (Gen 1:11-12; 21; 24), God is actually violating His own rule by creating life, so the bible tells us that the rule is false, for God at least. In popular superstition, it is true that people thought women could give birth to rabbits, and some did! They also thought for a long time that unattended linen could spontaneously generate mice and that the worms that appeared on decaying flesh arose spontaneously. These were all the false beliefs of Christians who obviously did not accept that Genesis could be literally true.
Our blind guide concludes by saying that because cells come only from pre-existing cells, according to Rudolff Virchow, and “this law has no exceptions,” it is a major flaw in the theory of evolution. Christians wilfully chose to misunderstand and misrepresent evolution. Virchow wrote a law for what is true today. It was not meant to stand for how cells changed over millions of years. There is no exception to the fact that life passes on its own “kind” to other life, but over millennia the genetic make up of the life can, and often does change, and with it so do the characteristics of the life form. That is not difficult to understand, but these fundamentalists will not try to understand it.
Moses did not show he had any knowledge of genetics, and he did not even write Genesis. This is childish fancy.
• 13. Paul (1 Cor 15:39) stated:
There are four fleshes—those of men, beasts, birds, and fishes.
Our guide says, “today, every evolutionist acknowledges this truth,” and wants to know how Paul, an itinerant preacher, knew this? Well, for anyone shopping in a market, it is not a hard conclusion to come to, but it is obviously false to the evolutionary biologist, or most modern schoolchildren. How is a squid to be classified in this “truth?” How is a whale? How is a locust or a crab? What of the flesh of a maggot or a mushroom, even? Paul shows us that he had been shopping recently and says nothing wise, but that is not surprising because he advocated that we should all be fools, and Christians like this take him at his word.
• 14. Our guide now tells us that Paul (Acts 17:25) also said:
He [God] giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.
As in the case mentioned above, the author of this page, berates Christians, it seems for not noticing this for centuries because they spent their time trying to be Count Frankenstein, creating life of their own, or at least trying to show spontaneous generation actually happened. As usual, we are asked facetiously, “How did Paul know this almost 2,000 years ago? One of those lucky guesses?” Presumably Paul knew it for the same reason that Blind Guide thinks he knows it—he had read it in Genesis! Apparently this Christian teacher did not realise that Paul had Genesis to read even in those days. It does not make it any more scientifically correct than it is today. It is not.
Geology
• 15. So we come to geology and the “Worldwide Flood of Noah”. Our author admits it “has been ridiculed often,” but evidently not often enough for this dunce. Almost all the scientific authorities cited as examples are from the nineteenth century as if science has made no progress at all since then, and here is another example—Edward Suess, the Austrian geologist who discovered evidence of the supercontinent Gondwanaland. Suess noted that sedimantary rocks had been laid down as sediments, and therefore underneath water!
This explains why you find shells on the tops of mountains. Coincidence?
Er, no! Blind Guide thinks it is evidence of the biblical flood but, even in the bible, the flood did not last longer than a year, though the bible is confusing about how long exactly. A flood so short would not have left vastly different types of sedimentary rocks such as we see everywhere. It would have cause essentially one layer with some stratification based on particle size possibly, the larger particles being at the base. No such simplistic regularity is found because the sedimentary rocks of the earth have been laid down over thousands of millions of years. There is a similar argument about the fossils found in the layers. They would not have been separated into characteristic layers had the flood been a one off rapid flood.
It is true that often fossil cemetaries of species are found, and Christian wants them to be places where the animals sought refuge on high ground, but such graveyards have all the characteristics of being laid down in low land, often on a river delta or in a shallow lake and not on the top of mountains. They are often jumbled together, which is a sign of a flood all right, but of a flash flood not a gently rising water level over forty days, or whatever. These were animals that had been washed downstream in an instant violent flood, not a slow gentle one.
No fundamentalist Christian however will consider real evidence, but only what suits them. The animals thus found are often dinosaurs and have no modern mammals mixed with them simply because there were none. The mammals were only rat like creatures living among the feet of the dinosaurs, if they were lucky. Blind Guide however brings us to graveyards of quick-frozen Mammoths in Siberia. This quick freezing is apparently caused by the flood—that’s it. No explanation. The Grand Canyon was also cut by the flood. Ho hum. All of these events happened at vastly different times, as geologists know, but not Christians who want to be fools for God.
• 16. The apologist now asks us:
How would you get all those animals in the Ark?
The answer is, it seems, given by Ernst Mayr, a leading taxonomist, who lists only 17,600 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. This number could fit into a large boat like an ark with comfort. Well, the number would have to be 35,200 to allow for two of each (Gen 6:19), or it might have to allow for seven of each (Gen 7:2), or at least of some mammals and the birds of the air, multiplying up the numbers considerably.
Furthermore, the species mentioned by the great Ernst Mayr do not cover every creeping thing of the ground (Gen 6:20), whch seems to mean that all insects, worms and spiders had to be kept too. If they were not, how did these species survive the flood. Since there are almost a milliuon species of insects that have been identified, and there might be many more yet undiscovered, poor Noah’s problems are not as simple as our simple Christian make them seem. Thomas Huxley commented that God had an unusual fondness for beetles. Are we to suppose that Noah did not keep space for all these beetles, or did God secretly make them new after the flood in a creation He has not told us about?
Archaeology
• 17. The apologist next turns to archaeology because it apparently has confirmed the bible record time and time again. Indeed it has in many cases but regettably in many more interesting ones, it has not. What is more, Blind Guide seems to think that ancient mythologies are as true and as authoritative as the bible itself. Perhaps that is because the bible actually copies some of these ancient mythologies proving that it was not a divine revelation to Moses or anyone else, but a compilation of older stories. The Christian “scholar” gives us some true but unremarkable examples such as that some ancient cities of the bible have been found mentioned at sites like Mari, but no one doubted that they existed and indeed continue to exist in some cases. However, the Christian is typically indiscriminating in his use of evidence. Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees, but no Chaldees existed at the putative period when Abraham lived. In fact, since Abraham’s family are associated with Haran and several nearby cities, it is most likely that he came from Urfa, later called Edessa. That is the belief of the Moslems whose founders, the Arabs, are supposed to be descendants of Abraham.
This Christian believes the reign lengths of the ancient Sumerian king lists, lists that were intended, just like the genealogies of the scriptures, to give antiquity to the race, and so were extended in time by making the people live longer than they do now. No serious scientist could imagine any such thing. The evidence, such as it is, is that people lived shorter lives in general, though wealthy people might have lived as long as we do on average today. Cetainly life expectancy at birth was much shorter than it is today.
Where the wonderful Moses mentions the Greenhouse Effect is hard to find. Our guide think the reference to a mist is it (Gen 2:6) but it means simply a mist to most commentators.
• 18. Now we are told that “Archaeologists have found many accounts of a Great Flood which are amazingly parallel to the Bible”. There is nothing amazing in it, since the authors of the bible have used these earlier fantasies to pad out Genesis. Our guide finds the similarities striking, and one might say they are so striking that they merely confirm what is obvious—that the author of the flood accounts in the bible has essentially copied more ancient accounts from Babylon. “Mere coincidence?” he asks. Not in the least. Plagiarism.
• 19.
Noah’s actual ark is still in existence on Mt Ararat in Turkey: some claim to have seen it. Due to its being under snow most of the time, and being located close to the Russian border, it has been extremely difficult to prove this conclusively.
The Christian is not attending. The formation has been well investigated. TV programmes have been made of it. It has been shown conclusively to be a natural rock formation that does indeed have the rough shape of a large boat. Our clever guide cannot seem to imagine that the legend of the flood might actually have been made up about this formation to explain it. It is likely to have been known to the Assyrians who conquered the country of Urartu (Ararat) in the ninth century BC.
• 20. In a catch all section we are told:
- the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1-9),
- Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 18-19),
- Jericho (Josh 6)
have all been proven by archaeology, and so “are no longer regarded as myths”. Needless to say this is a lie. The biblical story of the Tower of Babel is thought to refer to the great temple of Babylon, destroyed or at least damaged by Xerxes in about 486 BC. The connexion with language might have been a reference to the large numbers of pilgrims who attended this sacred place, but otherwise the biblical story is still a myth. Sodom and Gomorrah have been the source of endless speculation just like Atlantis, but nothing has ever been found to even confirm that they were real. Jericho is perhaps the oldest city in the world, some say, but archaeology has shown that it could not have had its walls knowcked down by Joshua invading around 1200 BC because it was deserted at the time and had no walls.
Atomic Physics
• 21. In an amazing penultimate section, the Christian professor will tell us how the bible explains atomic physics to us. Da! Da!
The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth and the works that are therein shall be burned up ... the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved.2 Peter 3:10-12
Our guide tells us that people disbelieved this because it was impossible for the whole world to be burnt up. “Two generations later science discovered atomic energy”. So what does our Christian conclude:
In these verses God is prophesying how the world would come to an end through an atomic reaction that actually melts the basic building blocks of matter itself. That is an atomic physics statement from a fisherman of 2,000 years ago! Mere chance? No chance!
But this supposed fisherman was actually merely saying what John and Jesus had said themselves. Didn’t the Christian author know that? It was the common belief since the Persian Zoroastrian religion adopted it that the world would end up destroyed by fire, however the fire might have been effected in practice. Why is the Christian author not praising the foresight of the Persian god, Ahuramazda? It was the Persians who gave everything significant about Judaism to the Jews, including their ideas about how the world would end.
Numerology
• 22. Lastly the Blind Guide tells us all about the futile and boringly insane work of a man called Ivan Panin, who found numeric clues and codes throughout the Hebrew scriptures, initially ignorant that there is no such thing as an authoritative script, so all such codes ultimately are meaningless. All of the biblical books have been multiply edited and had insertions added and bits cut out, but apparently all this redaction was done by redactors who knew they had to keep the numeric balances. Despite it, errors crept in. Panin, realising this, undertook to restore the text to its original form before the codes got mixed up, and does it even for the Greek New Testament, finding exactly the same to be true. So, he ends up putting in the codes he claims were there originally. Clever stuff, and popular for cracked pots.
Others have done similar things and, only a few years ago, someone wrote a best seller about supposed biblical numeric codes. The work of Barbara Thiering, though not numerical, depends upon word codes and time codes, and seems just as incredible. Ancient people were even known to have done such things. Books were published in which each chapter was written without using the letter that signified the number of the chapter, a feat that might be more remarkable than the one Panin claims to have discovered. There is never any lack of enthusiasts who will do such things, but they never lead on to new knowledge because they are all a pure waste of time.
It is hard to see why Christians who believe Paul’s dictum, “If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise,” should imagine that God should make belief in His revelations depend upon advanced mathematicians working out how Greek and Hebrew, and presumably Aramaic words can be made into numbers that mean an enormous amount to those who accept it as miraculous. If Christians have to be fools, then how did they get to have advanced mathematics and knowledge of dead languages? Why doesn’t God make the holy words glow with a supernatural light. That would convert everyone.
Neverthless, for Christian cranks trying to find proof of God, this numerology seems to be it. It is not science.
Conclusion
Our Christian professor of science concludes:
No fact of science is in conflict with the scriptures! Both science and Christianity deal with the same universe. The emphasis in science is on the visible universe, and of Christianity the emphasis is on the invisible universe, but it is one universe!
We have been given no way of investigating this invisible universe that Christianity emphasises, so we have to take it only on the authority of Christians and the set of holy works that they have passed down to us. What we do know is that the bible is an ancient and, by modern standards, an ignorant book. It is suitable for people who insist on being ignorant, but not for others.
This dishonest person has this to say with their infinite cheek, no doubt granted them by God:
Truth is truth and facts are facts no matter who develops them!
No one can deny that, but truth is indivisible and facts are not subject to interpretation. What Christians habitually do is to make truth into lies and lies into truth. Facts mean just whatever the Christians decide they mean.
