Against Creationism, Part One: Bare-Bones Argument

For those of you in a hurry, here is a bare-bones argument against creationism.

·         Creationists say that God created a perfect world (Genesis 1).

·         Creationists say that God created a world that could not evolve.

·         If species cannot evolve, then they will become extinct as the world changes.

·         Therefore God created a world that was not built to last.

·         But this contradicts Genesis 1, in which God said his creation was “very good.”

Some creationists will respond that God did not intend the world to last very long. I have had some of them tell me this. But this contradicts the Bible.

·         If the world was not built to last, it was not “very good.”

·         Genesis does not say that God intended the world to be temporary. The creationists just made that up.

Many creationists will say that God cursed the world in Genesis 3, which means that it is NOW no longer very good. But this does not change the fact that Genesis 1 does not say God intended the world to be temporary.

Creationism is incompatible with a belief that a competent Creator made a perfectly-functioning world.

I have now concluded—for this reason and for another I will present in the next essay—that it is a total waste of time to present evidence against creationism. I used to spend a lot of time trying to disprove creationism using evidence from fossils, DNA, etc. I now see it is a waste of time because creationism is incompatible even with the Bible.

Human Nature in the Bible and in Lucretius

It is interesting that the pagan philosopher Lucretius, a Roman living in the early Christian era, had a better understanding of human nature than did any of the writers of the Bible. Lucretius wrote De Rerum Natura, usually translated On the Nature of Things, although I sometimes wonder if a better translation might not be On the Backside of Nature. Ha. It is a long poem about what Lucretius thought was everything. All about matter (he said everything was made from particles), every aspect of science, and the entire history of the world, ending with the Plague of Athens (which leads historians to believe that he died before finishing the poem). As is any work  from two millennia ago that attempts to be scientific, it has some howling mistakes, but was a pretty good try. In later essays I will tell you more about this remarkable work, even though I find it difficult to read. But for now I would like to focus on his theory of the origins of human society.

Lucretius described prehistoric men in Book Five. He said they were stronger than modern men, “of larger bones and heavier frame” (Book Five, line 927), their strength not sapped by exposure to heat or cold, and without agriculture. They would sleep at night under blankets of leaves. Night did not frighten them. They lived off of wild fruits and seeds, which, it so happened, were bigger than modern wild fruits and seeds. They slaked their thirst from streams and springs, which Lucretius poetically described (“living water…Laved the moist rocks…O’er the green moss it trickled…”). They hadn’t figured out how to use fire or make clothes from animal skins. In addition, each man looked out for himself, unconcerned about the common good: “Whate’er chance offered unto each he took, well schooled to live and thrive each for himself alone.” Not only that, but they made reckless love: men and women either chose their lovers or else men would fight for women—or sometimes buy their love by giving them “arbute berries, acorns, [or] gathered pears.” They hunted wild animals with clubs or by throwing rocks at them. The certainty of death did not frighten them; in fact, if they knew they were going to die, they would drink poison.

Then, said Lucretius, humans began to get soft when they formed families and started living in huts and forming pacts with neighbors. They had primitive languages, at first just imitating the sounds of things, in a manner not entirely different from the way animals (including mythic Molossian hounds) communicate by making different sounds for different meanings. Then, humans received the gift of fire not from a god but from nature, and once they had it, they could cook and soften their foods.

The next step was when humans with the best ideas began to persuade other humans to follow them, and begin to live together in cities, which led toward civilization but also toward oppression; in particular, whoever had the most gold had the most power, regardless of the fact that other people were smarter or lovelier. Lucretius notes that true happiness is to be found in “simple modesty with heart content; For where a little is, there is no lack” (lines 1124-1125), but civilization glorified the rich. Within and between nations, men fought one another for gain: “So it is now, and evermore shall be” (line 1138).

So kings did fall, and all the ancient pride

Of lordly thrones and haughty scepters lay

O’erturned in lowly dust; and stained with blood

The glorious diadem of kingly heads

Beneath the feet of swarming mobs…

(lines 1139-1143). Sounds like the poem Ozymandias, doesn’t it? Only Lucretius wrote this almost two millennia earlier than Shelley. But in some cases, Lucretius said, people “might of their own accord submit themselves to regulations” (lines 1152-1153), allowing the rule of law to create peace rather than having constant war. Men grew weary of a life of violence, he said.

Next Lucretius explains the origin of religion. It began with dreams, in which people saw great and powerful beings. It was not a big stretch to attribute to these gods the origin and operation of the heavens and the Earth. It almost sounds like Lucretius was an atheist—not only because, throughout his poem, he attributes everything that happens in the natural world to particles, but also because in Book Five he wrote, “O hapless human kind, when unto gods such deeds it hath assigned…” (lines 1194-1195). He describes religious practices, such as sacrificing beasts at altars, with scarcely-concealed disdain. It is far better, Lucretius says, “To view all things with heart and mind at peace” (line 1206). Lucretius implies that it is pretty stupid to believe that lightning bolts and storms at sea are caused by angry gods; so if you are caught out in one, you may get lucky or you may not, but don’t bother with supplications to the gods.

To finish out Book Five, Lucretius writes about the history of metallurgy, then of war, culminating in the use of elephants as fighting machines. He speculated in lines 1343-1345 that things might have gone differently on some other world. He said men, not women, made the technological advances and invented agriculture. Then he ends his discourse on the history of civilization with the intention of the flute. Isn’t that nice?

Very well. From our modern viewpoint, Lucretius’ history of humankind is pretty weird, especially the part about men buying love from prehistoric whores by offering them arbute berries (genus Arbutus, family Ericaceae). Where the heck did he get that idea?

But remember that Lucretius was working from a position of having absolutely no data about human prehistory. The only other cultural groups of whom he knew, such as the Etruscans and Gauls, were not substantially different from Romans prior to civilization. (Gauls were, we must remember, an agricultural society that replaced previous tribes in what is now France at least six thousand years before Lucretius wrote.) Lucretius had no information about primitive people. (Do we? The supposedly primitive Amazonian tribes are actually the remnants of a collapsed Amazonian civilization.) As Lucretius wrote, the bones of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal and the cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet were hiding, completely unknown, in European caves. So he resorted to speculation. It was either that or not write anything at all.

But, against all odds, Lucretius’ picture of human prehistory and history is not too different from our modern understanding, and strikingly different from Genesis. Genesis does not even recognize a prehistoric phase of human history: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden were already completely modern, had the capacity for language, and within one generation their children had the ability to raise crops and livestock. Today we understand that the human body has, indeed, evolved to be more gracile largely because of the invention of cooking and of society. According to Richard Wrangham’s “cooking hypothesis,” cooking allowed more protein for the evolutionary expansion of the brain. And most paleoanthropologists understand that, since primitive humans fought with weapons or, sometimes, figured out ways to not fight, their canine teeth evolved to be smaller. That is, we have bigger brains and smaller teeth because of cooking and cooperation—which is exactly what Lucretius said two thousand years ago. And Lucretius explained how religion evolved. He didn’t quite get it right—his version omits the role of sexual selection in the origin of religion—but at least he understood that it evolved, which Genesis says nothing about. In Genesis, religion began because God walked around in the Garden of Eden and chatted with Adam and Eve. And Lucretius had the same disdain for religious practices that most modern scientists have.

There you have it. With regard to the origin of humans, and of human society, the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius was more correct than even a figurative interpretation of Genesis.

Why Genesis is Wrong, Even Figuratively, Part Two: Male and Female Created He Them

The second reason that I consider Genesis to be wrong, even when interpreted figuratively, is that Genesis 1 is all about strict and absolute categories. The most popular figurative interpretation of Genesis 1, known as the Framework Hypothesis, explains the days of Genesis as categories for classifying the universe. On the first three “days,” got sets chaos into order; on the second three “days,” he fills them up. Days 1 and 4 are about the heavenly realm: light and darkness made distinct, then filled with sun, moon, and stars. Days 2 and 5 are about the fluid realm: air and sea made distinct, then filled with fishes and birds. Days 3 and 6 are about the solid earth: land and sea made distinct, then land filled with creeping things, one of which was humankind.

This is a nice figure, but we must not take it too seriously. There is no absolute distinction between light and darkness, atmosphere and outer space, land and sea. The world also has dawn and dusk, penumbra, an exosphere that intergrades without boundary into outer space, a world of marshes and estuaries.

Genesis also says that organisms reproduce after their kind. In general, this is true. Species are not simply useful categories of organisms but are realities. Still, the boundaries among species are sometimes indistinct. As a botanist, I will use a plant example. For example, Quercus stellata (post oak) and Quercus macrocarpa (bur oak) are distinct species, but there are a few regions in which they hybridize, producing a hybrid known as Quercus x guadalupensis. The hybrids are rare and, presumably, less specialized than the parents; they probably cannot grow as well in dry as do post oaks, or soil as moist as do bur oaks. Rare though they be, they exist. There are many hybrids between different species of the same genus in plants, and, among orchids, even between different genera.

Genesis 1 also makes an absolute distinction between male and female. This distinction is useless for plants (but Genesis 1 does not apply it to plants). But even in animals, the male-female distinction is imperfect. Whole phyla of animals (for example the phyla that contain snails and earthworms) consist largely of bisexual individuals. In some fish species, individuals may grow up as females then, when they are large enough to be successful fighters, they change into males. Moreover, the natural world contains ambiguity of sexual behavior. Homosexuality is very common in many animal species, where it functions as social bonding (since it obviously has no reproductive function).

The male-female distinction is imperfect in the human species as well. Most individuals are heterosexual males or females. But many humans are gay or lesbian or bisexual. Speaking as a very, very heterosexual male, I admit I cannot understand these people’s feelings, but I acknowledge them and I accept them. I accept their testimony about themselves. They tell me nature has made them so and it is not a choice they made. In particular, there is no small number of people who are physically one gender and psychologically another. Many Native American tribes have long recognized the legitimacy of men who assume female identities: formerly called berdache, this identity is now called “two-spirit.”

There are some people who are born as little girls and then, at puberty, turn into young men. This happens because the gene that produces juvenile testosterone function is blocked, with the result that they develop as little girls. However, their adult testosterone function works fine, and they develop male characteristics at puberty. Of course, they cannot completely turn into men; they retain many feminine characteristics as adult males. The Dominican village in which this commonly occurs refers to them as a third gender: guevedoce, or eggs-at-twelve. A similar phenomenon occurs in Papua New Guinea, where these individuals are called, in pidgin, turnim-men. Nature does this to them, their chromosomes do this to them, and scientists know exactly how.

The absolute categorizations of the universe that are implied in even a figurative reading of Genesis 1 are therefore imperfect. This does not present any great problem unless you are a creationist or a fundamentalist. Creationists insist that “after their kind” means that evolution cannot occur. This is based on taking “after their kind” too seriously. Fundamentalists insist that all humans are either male, or female, or deviants who must be restricted or punished in some way. This is based on taking the phrase “male and female created he them” too seriously. One example of this is a certain state-funded university whose academic vice president rejected the tenure application of a transgender woman on religious grounds. At this point, Genesis 1 becomes an oppressive and oppressing chapter of scripture, even if no attempt is made to force Earth history into a six-day schedule.

Why Genesis is Wrong, Even Figuratively, Part One: Human Nature

Most readers of this blog know that the creationist insistence on a literal reading of Genesis is completely wrong. One reason for this is that they are picky about which parts they take literally and which parts they consider figurative. They say the Genesis days are 24 hours but they do not believe the “firmament” is actually firm, as implied in the original Hebrew of Genesis 1, or that rain falls through the “windows of heaven” as stated in Genesis 6. Same old, same old, I won’t bore you with this.

What I consider more interesting is that Genesis is wrong even as a figurative picture of the universe, life on earth, and humankind.

One example of this involves human nature, human evolution, and the origin of society. Christian evolutionists (they do exist) have struggled to figure out which stage of human evolution was represented by Adam and Eve. They believe God made Adam from the “dust of the ground,” but that this phrase refers to matter, which includes DNA and cells. Perhaps, they speculate, that there was a point in history in which the spirit of God infused itself into an existing animal species, Homo sapiens. For centuries, even conservative Bible believers have speculated about the existence of “Pre-Adamite” humans.

However, there appears to be no abrupt point in human evolution in which an animal species became suddenly spiritual. Christians in science who try to reconcile Genesis and evolution have had a devil of a time.

And, I believe, they need not bother. The picture of human origins in Genesis is all wrong. It depicts a primordially sinless human race, which experienced “The Fall,” after which humans had a sinful nature. There has never been a time when humans or any of our evolutionary ancestors have not been fighting and killing one another. As far back as you look, you find what we would call sin. Recently, it was reported that one of the Homo heidelbergensis bodies in Sima de los Huesos in Spain was a murder victim at least 350,000 years ago.

And, furthermore, the Christian story depicts humans as falling not only from primitive sinlessness but into modern depravity, or “original sin.” That is, that modern human nature is evil, unless the person has the Spirit of God living in him or her. But this cannot be true. Human nature is not entirely evil. Human nature is characterized by (imperfect) goodness and altruism within groups—cooperation, even love. It is also characterized by genocidal evil between groups. Human nature has both.

So, for example, good Jewish soldiers under Joshua could carry out genocide against Canaanites with not a second thought, because the Canaanites were outside their group. Good Christian Massachusetts pilgrims could slaughter Pequot villagers with scarcely a second thought because the Pequots were not in their group. (I say scarcely, because in his own record of the events, William Bradford was actually bothered by the screams of the Native Americans as they burned or were shot; however, in God’s name, he suppressed those inconvenient humanitarian thoughts.) In the Confederacy, until recently revered by the state of South Carolina and still worshiped by hundreds of thousands of Christian racists, Christian men and women could torture slaves because they classified slaves as “other,” in particular as property rather than persons. As Jon Stewart and associates said, it is difficult to kill a person, but easy to kill a heretic.

One reason we know the Bible is wrong about human nature is that those religious humans who supposedly have the Spirit of God living in them are no better than any other humans, on the average. Conservative Christians are no more or less likely than anyone else to commit fornication, adultery, financial crimes, etc. The constant stream of Christian televangelist scandals is no different than revelations of scandals in any other group of people, except that televangelists proclaim themselves to be morally superior. Reverend Ted Haggard’s homosexual partner was not bothered by the relationship itself, but by Haggard’s hypocrisy—that’s why he spoke out. If there is an indwelling Spirit, it has no overall effect on Christians compared to non-Christians. I know good Christians and good non-Christians and so do you.

There actually is some good news in human history. Humans have gradually (on the whole, not in every individual instance) expanded their compass to include more and more humans in their group. Who could forget the Wedgwood medallion of the early 19^th century, depicting a slave in chains, with the words, “Am I not a man and a brother?” Including slaves in our human family is the only reason they ever got freed.

Therefore, the real picture of human history has been a gradual widening of humanitarianism rather than a sudden Fall from sinlessness into depravity. Furthermore, much and perhaps most of this expansion has occurred in the last few hundred years, long after the completion of the New Covenant and the founding of the Christian Church. In Christian doctrine, New Testament principles as expounded by Jesus were the ultimate expression of goodness, and there has been no improvement since that time.

Consider, for example, Christopher Columbus, about whom I will write as we get closer to October 12. When Columbus tortured and enslaved Native Americans, he was either evil or not. If we believe that the Bible condemns such actions, then Columbus was evil, and we cannot do such things today because they are evil. But if we believe that Columbus was a hero who brought the light of Christianity to the heathens, then he was not evil, and we should be able to do such things today.  No Christian should say “It was OK for Columbus to do those things but it would be wrong for me to do them,” because that implies that during the two thousand years since the New Covenant began God somehow changed the rules.

An evolutionary view, in contrast, would say that since the time of Columbus we have widened our compass of humanitarianism. We can say the standards of good and evil are different now than in Columbus’ day. We cannot condone Columbus (he should have known that rape and murder were wrong) but we can perhaps understand him better. Unlike us, he was raised to think that anyone who was not a member of his holy Catholic Church should die.

In conclusion: Genesis is wrong about human nature and its origin. Genesis implies, even figuratively, that primitive humans were sinless, and modern humans are depraved unless God saves them. An evolutionary view indicates that human nature has always been both good and evil and that morality has evolved.

Creationists Take Genesis, but not Jesus, Literally

Most creationists are protestants and fundamentalists. Some are Catholics, but the last few decades and the last few popes have not been very good for the remaining Catholic creationists. Creationists, as most of you understand, are (primarily) Christians who insist on a “literal” reading of the entire Bible.

Well, not quite. When it comes to The Last Supper that Jesus shared with his disciples before his crucifixion, protestant creationists hastily abandon their literalism. According to the Bible, Jesus book the (unleavened Passover) bread and said, “This is my body.” You will find this in Luke 22 and in Matthew 26 as direct gospel accounts and it is repeated by the Apostle Paul in First Corinthians 11. Later, he took “the fruit of the vine” which everyone except teetotalers recognize as wine and said, “This is my blood.” (I suppose it could be juice from some other vine. In one novel manuscript, I describe a desert church that used gourd juice.)

Jesus does not say “This represents my body” or his blood. It says that it is. He then says, do this in remembrance of me. But nevertheless the bread is his body and the wine is his blood. Only Catholics, during the communion service they call the Eucharist, take this statement literally. According to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the wafer actually becomes the same “substance” as Christ’s body, and the wine the same substance as Christ’s blood. The bread is still gluten and starch, and the wine is still resveratrol and ethanol and anthocyanin and sucrose, but the inner “substance” is transformed into Christ’s body and blood. (I wonder what Catholic physicists have to say about transubstantiation.) Protestant and fundy creationists, during what they usually call the Lord’s Supper, alter the plain meaning of scripture and twist it to mean that the bread and grape juice are just meant to make us think about Jesus’ body and blood. They throw literalism out the window where, one would think, it matters most.

“Well, of course,” they could say, “Jesus didn’t actually mean his actual body, because He was sitting right there holding the bread which was molecularly distinct from his body. And He couldn’t have actually meant his actual blood which was still inside of his arteries and veins.” But if this is so, it makes Jesus seem pretty stupid. If it was so blinking obvious that the bread was not actually his body, why would he say that it was? Was he lying, or was he stupid? (Or was he speaking symbolically? No, creationists will not permit Jesus to do this.)

I first encountered this contradiction when I read a book about 25 years ago (which I might not have read were I not asked to review it) of letters exchanged between a literalist creationist and a scientist who was also a Catholic. Personally, I have no interest in this argument, but it does show that creationists are no more faithful to the Bible than other religious people.

And yet creationists present themselves to the rest of us as practically the owners of the Bible. They imply that if you don’t agree with them that the Earth is young, then you need not bother believing in Jesus. But, they think, it is just fine to believe in Jesus without believing that the communion bread is his body and the communion wine is his blood.

A New YouTube Channel

I have just started a new YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/darwinandthebible. On this channel, Charles Darwin goes through the Bible and comments on it. I did not want to clutter up my science-based YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/StanEvolve) with religion, so I created this new channel. I also limit the religious content of this blog. My other blog is where I usually put the religious content.

The purpose of the new Youtube channel is to explore what we can learn from the Bible not by reading it as a devotional, the way conventional religious people do, or by attacking it, as anti-religious people often do. The Bible is a collection of books in which many people over the course of a millennium have struggled with the big issues (where did we come from, where are we going, what are we doing here, and why do bad things happen). They came up with many different answers (thus contradicting one another). But maybe we can have our own minds challenged by the stories they came up with to express their thoughts.

So if this sounds interesting to you, check it out. If not, just keep coming here and to the StanEvolve channel on YouTube. But I expect that some of the things you will see on the darwinandthebible channel will be ideas, some of them possibly outrageous, that you have probably not heard before. Among the topics already posted:

1. The Bible is not a book. It is a collection of contradictory books written over a millennium. The Bible contains no list of books that are supposed to be in the Bible.
2. Genesis 1 is not a history of the Earth, either correct or incorrect, but a portrait of "creation."
3. You can think of Genesis 1 as a song in the style of Rodgers and Hammerstein.
4. You can even think of Genesis 1 as a description of life colonizing a volcanic island. I realize that this interpretation is wrong, but hey, it works as well as other interpretations, and better than most.

See you there. Or, I'll just keep seeing you here.

Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf Part Seven: Genetics

First, a couple of announcements. First, you don’t want to miss my new Darwin video in which Darwin uses a hookah pipe as an advanced piece of scientific research equipment and for hypothesis testing. Second, my website no longer has original essays, though the previous ones are still archived; I wish to move my essays to my blogs, mostly to this one. The website is now mostly a clearinghouse of links to other things. Now on with the new topic: the Bible and genetics.

The Bible presupposes that characteristics that an organism acquires during its lifetime can be passed on to its offspring. In so doing, the Bible is no different from what everybody, including scientists, thought until a little over a century ago. But to a creationist literalist, the Bible cannot be wrong about something even if every human being was wrong about it until almost two thousand years after the last of the Bible was written.

The most noticeable example of “Biblical Lamarckism” is in the story of Jacob and Laban in the book of Genesis. Jacob was if anything very tricky. He tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright. And he tricked his relative Laban out of some goats too. Jacob was shepherding Laban’s goats, and made a deal: Jacob would get to keep all of the speckled goats, while Laban got to keep the pure white and pure black goats. Sounds like a deal, Laban said. But Jacob had a plan. (He almost always had a plan, except one night when he was terrified of having to face Esau, his defrauded brother, the next day.) Each evening the goats would come to the water trough to drink and to copulate. (Mommy, what does copulate mean? Be quiet and read your creationist book.) Jacob set up a little wall made of alternating dark and light boughs. The goats would see the striped pattern and have striped offspring, which Jacob got to keep. The clear implication is that the goats had striped and speckled offspring because they saw the stripes at the trough. This is a clear Biblical teaching of Lamarckism. Most of us interpret this to mean that Jacob just thought that the goats had striped offspring because they saw the stripes. But the clear implication in the story is that seeing the stripes caused the offspring to be striped. Creationists ought to have trouble with Mendelian genetics.

There is an easy Mendelian explanation for what happened. The genes from the black goats and from the white goats mixed to form striped and speckled goats. That is, the black and white goats were homozy-goats and the striped goats were heterozy-goats. But this is what science, not what Genesis, says.

The ancient Hebrews also had a very limited idea of what we today call genetic variation. They did not know about many species of animals, or different races of people. They knew about “Ethiopians,” but did they have any idea about the blonds and redheads up north? For aught they knew to the contrary, all genetic variability within each animal species could be contained within a pair of animals on Noah’s Ark, and all human diversity could be contained within Noah’s family. But we know that each species of animals (and everything else) has more genetic variation than could possibly be contained within two individuals, even if God chose the two most diverse and different individuals (for example, two animals of genotypes A1A2 and A3A4 for gene A). No more than four alleles for each gene could be so preserved to account for the whole world of diversity within each species. Modern creationists get around the human problem by claiming that Noah’s daughters-in-law were black, oriental, and white. The Bible mentions nothing of the sort (although it sounds like a good premise for a sitcom), but creationists have never been hesitant to make stuff up about God.

If I may stray a moment from the topic of genetics, I might mention that Biblical biogeography is also wonderfully strange. All the animals debarked from Mt. Ararat in what is now Turkey, and somehow most of the marsupials went to Australia, except for Pogo the Possum, who always had to be different from the others and went to North America. This is just one example. There are hundreds of examples of animals—and plants too—whose geographical distribution looks as if the taxonomic orders and families of which they are a part evolved in the locations where they now reside, rather than migrating there from Ararat. In his book The World That Perished, the father of flood theology John C. Whitcomb answered the question of why the marsupials all went to Australia. He said, in effect, they hopped.

The ancient Hebrews did as good a job as anyone else at figuring out how traits passed from one generation to another. They did as good a job as Darwin, whose pangenesis theory is almost painful to read—such a wrong theory from a man who got almost everything right. But you cannot base the science of genetics on what the Bible says. Darwin did do one thing much better than the ancient Hebrews, however. He extensively studied the genetic (“heritable”) variation in plant and animal species, and knew that there was a lot more of it than met the eye. This was the basis of natural selection.

Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf Part Six: Continents

It is with considerable relief when I say, Congratulations to Barack Obama for winning a second term. I was afraid that Mitt Romney would make devastating cuts to science and education, cuts that would actually not reduce the deficit very much. At the same time, almost exactly half of the voters voted against Barack Obama. His next four years may be even harder than his previous four years.

Now back to our series about the many ways in which science differs from traditional religion.

The Biblical view of the Earth is that orderly dry land is surrounded by chaotic oceans; in fact, one of God’s earliest acts of creation was to set a boundary between land and sea. The landlubber Israelites were frankly afraid of being out on the ocean (so am I). The God of orderliness had created dry land as the place for people to live.

But the Israelites had no idea that the continents moved around. Of course, neither did anybody else. The idea of continental drift was proposed by Alfred Wegener in the early twentieth century, and accepted only decades later by geologists. You cannot fault the Bible for omitting continental drift, unless you believe the Bible to be the outline of all scientific truth, in which case you have to reject continental drift.

But it is a little more complicated than this. Creationists believe that God sent a Flood upon the Earth, saving only Noah and his family (which, they imagine, contained black, white, and oriental daughters-in-law) from which all the people of the Earth are descended. This was such a severe disruption to the stable continents that all sedimentary rocks (of which continents largely consist) and all volcanic and metamorphic layers between them were produced at that time. Where did all the land come from? Not from day three of Genesis 1, but from the big piles of mud left over after the Flood of Noah. The problems with this theory could fill a book, and have filled many books.

But it gets even more complicated than this. Genesis 10:25 said that in the days of Peleg (a mysterious patriarch about whom little is known) the Earth was divided. This was after the Flood. Let us consider the tremendous scientific implications of this verse, if we take it literally. This verse literally says the Earth was divided. The word for “earth” is the same Hebrew word that is used for the entire planet (see here for concordance references). The word for “divided” refers to cutting entirely in half (see here for concordance references). To really take this verse literally, we have to say what one creationist (Walter Brown) once said in a public forum at the University of Illinois: this was when God created the Atlantic Ocean, causing the Eurasian and North American plates to diverge. But the word literally means to split into pieces, thus we must go way beyond continental drift and believe that the entire planet was split in two. One of the halves must be the one we are on, and presumably the other half has been lost. This would mean that, even right after the Flood, Earth was a much bigger planet, which would give it stronger gravitation, which would make birds unable to fly and large animals (as they are currently designed) unable to walk… This quickly leads to absurdity. Therefore, creationists such as the people at Answers in Genesis claim that “earth” in this verse refers to the people of the Earth. They refuse to allow this interpretation for the very same word in reference to the whole Earth being covered by the Flood, or to God creating the whole Earth in Genesis 1. Apparently, creationists have appointed themselves as the official “deciders” of which passages are to be taken as scientifically literal statements and which are more figurative.

It gets even stranger. Something interesting happened during King Solomon’s coronation parade. “And all the people went up after him [King Solomon], playing on pipes, and rejoicing with great joy, so that the earth was split by their noise.” Some translations say that the earth rumbled with their noise, but the actual Hebrew words refer to the Earth itself actually splitting. Most of us would assume this is the figurative equivalent of “ear-splitting,” and some Bible translations take the liberty of translating it, “The earth rumbled with their noise.” But if you base your science on a literal interpretation of the Bible, you have a problem here. Creationists quietly accept the figurative meaning of this verse.

There are whole continents of difference between the ancient religious view of the earth and the modern scientific one.

Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf Part Two: The Heavens

In a previous blog entry, I wrote about the vast gulf between science and religion with how to determine what is true. I now continue this series about how different science and religion are from one another.

Before Copernicus and Galileo, most people viewed the sky as some kind of sphere or series of spheres on which the stars rotated around the Earth, and each planet (as well as the sun and moon) had its own sphere. Either that or they thought the sun, moon, and stars were gods. This was certainly the view of the writer of Genesis 1, who used the term “raqia” for what is usually translated “firmament.” Did you ever wonder why Genesis called the sky “firmament,” which sounds like “firm”? Because “raqia” is derived from “raqa,” which means “to beat out,” or stamp out, often used for metal beat into a thin sheet. This is the way the word is used in Exodus 39:3, Numbers 16:39, Isaiah 40:19, and Jeremiah 10:9. It refers to trampling or stamping with the foot in 2 Samuel 22:43, Ezekiel 6:11 and 25:6. Figuratively, this can mean “an expanse,” but literally it refers to a metal dome. (See here.)

This does not mean, of course, that the Biblical authors were somehow anti-scientific. They shared the view that nearly everyone had until recently. Copernicus believed in the heavenly spheres; he just made the sun the center, and Earth was on a sphere. Nobody accuses Copernicus of being anti-scientific. It was not until the twentieth century that scientists understood that many of the “nebulae” were faraway galaxies. But the Bible certainly cannot be used as a literally accurate basis for astronomy. Many scientific Christians simply point out that this was not the purpose of Genesis in the first place.

The Bible refers to stars falling from the sky. Isaiah said it (Is. 34:4), Jesus said it (Matthew 24), and Revelation uses the phrase at least twice, in chapters 6 and 8. Of course this cannot literally happen. We all use the term “falling star” figuratively for meteors. No problem, unless you base your science on the Bible. The Biblical view of the universe, like all views of the universe before Kepler and Newton, is vastly different from the modern view shared by everyone, even most creationists.

Let the Earth Bring Forth Plants

The first chapter of Genesis in the Old Testament is a hymn to an orderly and bountiful cosmos. Surprisingly enough, it begins by describing a universe that existed before God began to create. This universe had two problems: it was chaotic and empty (the old King James English says “formless and void”). During the six days of creation, according to this hymn, God solved these two problems. On the first three days, he brought order into the heavenly, the fluid, and the earthly realms: making light separate from darkness, air separate from water, and land separate from sea. On the last three days, he filled the heavenly, fluid, and earthly realms: filling the heavens with stars, the water and air with fish and birds, and the earth with “creeping things.” It is obvious to everyone except creationists that this chapter was never, even when it was first written, intended as an historical description of the history of the cosmos. It described the work of creation as categories, not as a timeline. Astronomy, geology, and biology now provide explanations for the processes of creation described poetically in Genesis.

As beautiful as it is, however, the first chapter of Genesis reflects the human-centered viewpoint of the time in which it was written (about 500 BCE), a viewpoint to which most modern people still cling, even if they are not particularly religious. This viewpoint puts humans at the pinnacle of creation, something that most people (including those who think they understand evolution) still do. The writer of Genesis did not praise humans as much as you might think, however: humans were created on the same “day” as all of the creeping things. Humans did not even get their own special day of creation. But Genesis clearly states that humans rule all of the creation, and uses terms that imply that humans have the right to conquer and rape the creation.

One example of this domination is the creation of plants. Plants appear on Day 3, along with the dry land. That is, in this hymn, plants are not considered to be living organisms; they are just a part of the landscape. In a sense this is true: any landscape without plants is quickly ravaged by erosion, as I have explained in my book Green Planet. But the God of Genesis does not give plants any role of their own other than to be eaten by animals. Behold, he says on Day 6, I have given you every green plant for food.

But plants are organisms. They’ve got to make a living like everybody else. Plants have populations that evolve. It is not in the interests of the plants to just sit there and allow themselves to be eaten by animals. The plants that natural selection favors are those that can avoid getting eaten by animals.

As a result, the world is not just a big salad bowl. Nearly every wild plant has several or many characteristics that make it unpalatable to animals. In some cases, plant defenses are clearly visible: spines on cactuses, stinging hairs on nettles. In other cases, the defenses are invisible but even more effective. Most plants have leaves that are at least mildly toxic. Plants produce thousands of different kinds of chemicals that are toxic to animals. Some of them accumulate poisonous mineral ions out of the soil and put them in little sacs (vacuoles) in the leaf cells, where the poisons will not harm the leaves but will harm any animal that chews the leaf, breaking open the sacs of poison.

Humans have bred crop and garden plants that are palatable, and this has created for most of us the illusion that plants are just waiting to be eaten. They are like Al Capp’s cartoon shmoos, which fall all over themselves in an attempt to get eaten, with stupid grins on their faces. Be warned: wild plants do not have brains, they are in fact stupid, but evolution has produced in them many defenses that appear to those who study them to be very clever. Wild relatives of crop plants, such as beans, tomatoes, and potatoes, are poisonous. Some tribal peoples subsist on wild cassava. But they have to boil and squeeze the cassava pulp to remove poisons first.

Even the parts of plants that are not poisonous are not simple gifts to feed animals. Many species of plants produce soft, colorful, sweet, fragrant fruits. These fruits make themselves very visible to animals, and reward the animals for eating them. Such fruits, abundant and hanging low, are in fact part of our image of paradise. (The word paradise itself comes from the Persian word pairidaeza, a walled garden.) But the plants have something to gain from this arrangement. The fruits have seeds in them. Animals usually eat the entire fruit, swallowing the seeds. It is just too much work for the animal to pick out the seeds, especially since the pulp clings closely to them. Plants cannot move around and carry their seeds to new locations, nor can the seeds move under their own power. Many plants therefore get animals to carry their seeds to new places by getting the animals to eat them. They pay the animals by feeding them the sweet and nourishing pulp of the fruit. The animals deposit the seeds, along with a pile of fertilizer, far away from the parent tree. Both the plants and the animals benefit. In other cases, plants take advantage of the animals. Seeds with spiky burs entangle the fur of mammals, which carry the seeds to a new location while they are trying to scrape the burs from their fur.

Plants and herbivores are involved in what has been called an arms race. Plants evolve defenses, and herbivores evolve ways of circumventing the defenses. Plants then evolve new defenses, and herbivores evolve ways of circumventing these as well. For both the plants and the animals, this interaction is expensive. The plants have to use their energy and molecules to make poisons rather than using them to grow new leaves and roots. Animals have to use energy and molecules to digest the plants despite their defenses. In human societies, spending more money on defense means spending less on growth (such as infrastructure and education). Plants and animals find themselves in the same predicament as humans do.

This is coevolution: natural selection favors plants that are prickly or poisonous, but not so much that they cannot grow, and animals that can tolerate or avoid the poisons, but not so much that they divert too much energy away from their own metabolism, movement, and growth.

One you have learned about the coevolutionary relationship between herbivores and plants, you can never again look at a serene natural landscape the same way as before. The Lord is my shepherd, said the psalmist, leading sheep into green pastures. The psalmist also said that God prepared a table for him in the presence of his enemies. But the psalmist could not have guessed that, to a certain extent, the green pastures themselves were one of the enemies. There never was a natural Garden of Eden in which all the plants were uncomplicatedly nutritious.

This entry was part of my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, published earlier this year by Prometheus Books.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Four. The Lost Paradise of Carl Baugh

In my previous entry, I described the psychological experience that I had when I visited Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texas on March 5. Baugh created an aura of scientific truth by presenting little fragments of information, just enough to mesmerize the audience. I mentioned that the actual claims he made were incredible, and had no scientific or Biblical basis. I present these claims here.

First, Baugh claimed that a chemist in Louisiana (Edward Boudreaux) had proved how God created the Earth from a ball of plasma (which is a form of matter in which electrons are torn away from nuclei in atoms). The chemist’s calculations proved that such a ball of plasma would have cooled down in 47 hours, which was plenty of time for the “dry land to appear” on Day 3 of Genesis 1. There is, of course, no mention of any ball of plasma in Genesis. So why would anyone go through the trouble of inventing the idea that God created the Earth from a ball of plasma? According to Genesis 1, before God began to create the heavens and the Earth, there was water. Therefore, some creationists claim, God made everything out of water. Everything, including uranium and lead and other heavy atoms. The only way for God to do this would be to transform the water into plasma, which could then form into every kind of atom. Therefore one motivation for this theory was to make sense out of the Biblical statement that water existed before the universe.

The second motivation was to prove how there could be both uranium (a radioactive element) and lead (a product of radioactive decay) in the crust of a very young Earth. The fact that there is lead in the rocks makes it look as though the Earth is old. But, Baugh claimed, Boudreaux’s plasma theory shows how the original rocks could have had both uranium and lead in them. (Baugh, and the chemist he was quoting—the one who had written the book the last copy of which sold for a hundred dollars—seem to have overlooked the fact that it is not just uranium and lead that allows scientists to calculate the age of the Earth, but the fact that zircon crystals contain both uranium and lead.) It may have occurred to you that, while God was performing miracles, he could have just made the uranium and lead and all the other atoms, skipping the plasma stage. Boudreaux’s calculations are totally unnecessary, because they simply posit a different set of miracles.

Next, Baugh started telling tall tales about what the Earth was like before the Flood. What a fantastical world! Creationists often claim, without Biblical evidence, that the pre-Flood Earth was surrounded by a vapor canopy, which would have created worldwide tropical conditions and very high atmospheric pressure. I expected to hear about this from Baugh, but he barely mentioned it. Instead, Baugh made the claim that, prior to the Flood, the Earth year consisted of only 336 days, allowing the moon to circle it exactly twelve times at 28 days per cycle each year. In some unexplained way, the Flood slowed down the revolution of the Earth but not of the moon. Now, what is so important about the 28-day cycle of the moon? You guessed it—because the moon regulates the ovulatory cycles of women! Most of us would assume the ovulatory cycle fits the moon, but Baugh claims God made the moon fit the ovulatory cycle, and the Earth fit the moon. The whole movement of the Solar System was originally created for the sake of the ovulatory cycle of women. None of this is in the Bible but, well, at least nobody can accuse Baugh of misogyny, can they?

Baugh was on a roll. We all know that the surface of the moon has dark patches created by volcanic eruptions. But, Baugh claimed, before the Flood, the moon had a perfectly smooth surface. In some unexplained way, the Flood caused volcanic eruptions on the moon. A pure white moon would have been seven times brighter than it is now, and it would have emitted light at 518 Hz (I didn’t quite follow this part) which would have stimulated DNA repair enzymes that would have allowed people to live over nine hundred years—but only if the moon was brighter. (It is not quite clear how moonlight could have gotten through a thick canopy of water vapor.) The moon had phases before the Flood just as it does now, explained Baugh. Apparently the reason for this, if I understand his explanation, was that an unrelenting full moon would have worn people out by making them have sex every night for nine hundred years. I may be misunderstanding this just a little, but I am not making it up. (From what I have read about Baugh’s look-alike Garner Ted Armstrong, the latter might have attempted such a marathon.)

It is both entertaining and disturbing to see that many creationists think that God has given them permission to just make stuff up and claim Biblical authority for it. This practice is without theological justification, but it works. Baugh craves adoration, and there was a room full of people giving it to him, gladly yielding to him the authority to invent scripture as he goes along. Meanwhile he raises thousands of dollars to buy Bibles to prove what the exact words of the Bible ought to be. I wonder why he does this. Since he just makes stuff up, about changes in the length of the year and the face of the moon, why does he need to be so careful about the exact wording of the Bible?

The high air pressure underneath a vapor canopy would, Baugh claims, have caused giant vegetables to grow and animal wounds to quickly heal. Off to the side of the museum is what looks like a gigantic barrel, which Baugh intends at some future date to make into a hyperbaric chamber, with high air pressure (and presumably a source of 518 Hz light). Maybe he will grow some giant vegetables in the barrel, or maybe he will experiment on himself to see if he heals up quickly. Hospitals do in fact use hyperbaric treatment to help wounds to heal. If this is all that Baugh wants to prove, there is no need for him to have his own hyperbaric chamber. So why is it there? Maybe he and his staff someday will disappear inside and live forever, in complete separation from the world of inconvenient reality.

I then proceeded to look at the displays in the museum, about which I will write in the next entry.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.