Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

I'm an atheist, and I like to discuss Christian apologetics.

Which Is Worse—an Abortion Clinic Shooter or the Clinic Itself? (2 of 2)

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A 2015 shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic that killed three people prompted a conservative response by Matt Walsh (part 1). Walsh denied that pro-life vitriol could’ve played a role in motivating the shooter while reserving the right to trowel on large amounts of that same vitriol.

His denial of responsibility failed.

Dismissing murder

Walsh admitted that the shooter’s actions were bad, but. He couldn’t ignore a grandstanding opportunity to argue the other side of the issue, that the shooter’s target—the abortion providers—are the worst possible people.

George Tiller, the heinous late-term baby executioner who ruthlessly slaughtered thousands of viable and fully developed infants, is the only abortion worker to be killed by an abortion opponent this century. That’s it. One. And he was one of the most dangerous, vicious, and murderous human beings to have ever lived.

You make it sound like working at a Planned Parenthood clinic is no more risky than being a librarian. Not so: there have been 11 murders and 26 attempted murders on U.S. abortion clinic workers. There have been 42 bombings, 188 arsons, and an additional 100 attempts at bombing or arson. And there’s more: vandalism, acid attacks, bioterrorism threats, assault and battery, death threats, kidnapping, burglary, stalking, and more—over 10,000 incidents in all.

Go research why women went to Tiller to get abortions. Was it because they didn’t want to be so fat? Or was it a more substantial reason—birth defects, mother’s health, catastrophic changes in financial status, or something similar?

And let’s pause to listen to your rhetoric. Was Tiller seriously “one of the most dangerous, vicious, and murderous human beings to have ever lived”? Few of us would morally object to going back in time to assassinate Joseph Mengele or Heinrich Himmler or Adolph Hitler. You’ve intentionally put Tiller with this company, so why then do you object to the shooter’s actions?

This hypocrisy is the problem that Walsh can’t acknowledge. He wants to say that the shooter was a killer and Planned Parenthood kills, so they’re in the same boat. But not him—he’s cut from different cloth because he’s pro-life.

But the rage he reveals in this article gives just as strong an argument for a very different arrangement of these three parties: now it’s the killer with Walsh in the same boat because of his venomous rhetoric that could easily provoke violent action. Planned Parenthood is the odd man out because it provides legal abortions before the fetus is a person.

As the article progresses, Walsh is on a roll, and the indignant “Of course we deplore violence—we’re pro-life!” attitude is gone. With no ear for irony, he repeats the line the killer is said to have used:

Planned Parenthood sells the parts of dead babies.

Wrong again. Selling body parts is illegal, and Planned Parenthood doesn’t do that. The mother can choose to donate the fetus for research, and Planned Parenthood can be reimbursed for their costs.

Planned Parenthood is a rotten, corrupt, depraved, vile, disgusting, brutal, murderous conglomerate of butchers and mercenaries.

And yet you wonder how anyone could possibly be incited to violence?

Abortion fanatics hate pro-lifers personally. They hate Christianity. They hate children. They hate life itself. Theirs is the sort of hatred that destroys the soul and dissolves the human conscience. We hate what is evil; they hate what is good.

And now it’s just a rant. This kind of rhetoric is what drove the shooter to kill.

Improving society

Why don’t you [Planned Parenthood] just shut up and work on not killing babies?

And what are you doing, Matt Walsh? Are you focusing on reducing the cause of abortions, unwanted pregnancies?

Among countries in the West, the U.S. compares poorly. In the United States, the annual pregnancy rate was 57 per 1000 women aged 15–19. This was, by far, the highest rate in the 21 countries studied. Compare this to 8 in Switzerland. What are we doing wrong (or what is Switzerland doing right)? There is ample room for improvement.

Is it better sex education? Is it easier and subsidized access to contraception? Whatever it is, cutting the number of abortions by as much as 90 percent simply through honest and open discussion by parents and more effective education and policy by society seems possible. Why are you approaching it the hard way? Instead of swimming upstream, you could work with pro-choice people who want the same thing. It almost sounds like you’re not really serious about this, and abortion isn’t the holocaust you claim it to be.

More to the point, making it “illegal” isn’t the way to do it. The abortion rate was more than twice as high as the current rate in the U.S. before Roe v. Wade made it legal nationwide, and safe and effective abortion by medicine would make it easy to skirt a ban.

The trolley problem

Almost everyone has heard of this thought experiment, but here’s a brief summary. Imagine a trolley that’s heading toward five unsuspecting workers on the track. If it continues, it will kill them all. But there’s a switch, and you can reroute the trolley down another path with only one worker. Would you switch the trolley?

Most people say they would. But what if you’ve got the same trolley heading for the five workers, and you’re on a bridge over the tracks. The only way to stop the trolley is with a large weight in its path. You’re not heavy enough to stop it, but there’s a large man on the bridge who is. Do you push him over?

Most people say they wouldn’t, but it’s the same calculation, five deaths vs. one.

The Planned Parenthood shooter in effect pushed the large man over. He’s taken the unthinkable but logical step—logical given Walsh’s own analysis. Walsh is left fuming about decorum—it’s one thing to label abortion providers as the most wicked scum on the earth, but in polite society one doesn’t actually act on this! He wants his rage but won’t accept the consequences.

Additional pro-choice resources:

But the consequence of using language like that
can be very dangerous.
I think candidates need to step back,
take a deep breath, and understand . . .
we have a responsibility to use
thoughtful and careful language.
— Wendy Davis, the former Texas state senator
who filibustered to block legislation
that would restrict abortion

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/4/15.)

Image from Kit Clutch, CC license
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Which Is Worse—an Abortion Clinic Shooter or the Clinic Itself?

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After a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs four years ago that killed three and injured nine more, I came across a response on TheBlaze, Glenn Beck’s entertainment and news network. The article was “Abortionists and Planned Parenthood Shooter Are Just Two Sides Of The Same Coin” by Matt Walsh. It tried to walk the line between putting pro-choice advocates and the shooter in the same bin (as the title makes clear) and handwaving that the outrageous rhetoric of pro-life fanatics didn’t encourage the gunman.

It failed.

Violent talk has consequences

I’m not Walsh’s audience. He was preaching to his choir, using terms like “pro-aborts” and “abortion fanatics” to refer to people like me, but the article gave an insight into the hostility of and rationalization by this community.

Walsh tried to walk away from any consequences of violent rhetoric from extreme quarters of the pro-life movement.

[Clues that the shooter was unlike the typical pro-life terrorist] has not prevented abortion enthusiasts on the left from gleefully spiking the football as if some point has been proven by the random violent outburst of a paranoid hermit.

Yes, there’s a point: speech can have consequences. Spin a story about how Planned Parenthood is an evil organization, and this kind of violence may be a consequence. If you don’t think it through, impressionable readers might not either. As the Bible says, you’ve sown the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind.

As if we need more examples of speech having consequences, one mother tried to kill herself and her two daughters to avoid the Tribulation predicted by Harold Camping for May 21, 2011 (more here and here). Did Camping deserve no condemnation for saying that the world would end, knowing that some of his gullible flock might take him seriously?

Another example is the person who took the Pizzagate conspiracy theory (invented to discredit Hillary Clinton in her 2016 presidential bid) seriously and shot up the pizza restaurant.

Here’s an example of extreme anti-abortion speech from video evangelist Joshua Feuerstein:

I say, tonight, we punish Planned Parenthood. I think it’s time that abortion doctors should have to run and hide and be afraid for their life. (7/29/15)

After the Colorado shooting, pro-lifers tried to prop up their position by tweeting about “babies” saved. Yes, pro-life rhetoric can have bad consequences.

How pro-life is the pro-life movement?

Walsh says it goes without saying that he was shocked by the shooter’s actions.

It goes without saying because, for one thing, we’re pro-life.

No, you’re pro-birth. How about being pro-health care? Or working to improve the society into which these babies are born? And isn’t it inconsistent when most of those who oppose abortions also accept the death penalty?

For another, there’s no logic in it.

Wrong. You went on and on about the deaths of “over 50 million babies.” That’s nonsense, of course—there’s a spectrum of personhood across the gestation period, and a single cell isn’t a baby, a human being, or a person—but it is quite logical to kill a few lives to save many. You can’t argue that abortion is murder but then claim that murder to reduce abortions is illogical.

The lives that were snuffed out in the front of the building weren’t any more or less human than the lives exterminated in the back. Our humanity does not exist on a spectrum.

Walsh imagines that Homo sapiens DNA is all that makes someone human, but with this he invents single-celled humans. Indeed, humanness does exist on a spectrum. A single cell isn’t very human, while the trillion-cell newborn nine months later is. (If you’d prefer a better word choice, say that the single cell isn’t a person while the newborn is.)

Why shoehorn gestation into a binary situation? Drop the ridiculous idea that a single cell is a “baby” or “person.” Say that the single cell isn’t a person, the newborn is, and it’s a spectrum in between.

[A pro-choice advocate outraged at pro-lifer vitriol is] like a Nazi standing up at Nuremberg and scolding society for hating him.

Nope. The Nazi was on trial for crimes against humanity. Planned Parenthood kills a fetus that isn’t yet a person. Walsh would predictably respond that it will be a person if given time, but this simply becomes the Argument from Potential—it isn’t inherently worth protecting now, but it will be—which is no argument at all.

Apologies

Walsh rejects the shooter’s actions, but he chafes at this obligation.

We’re the ones who have to be seen condemning murder, as if there’s any reasonable question at all about where we stand on the subject?

You demand that moderate Muslims apologize for Muslim violence, don’t you? If so, you can appreciate how we’d like some assurance from the pro-life community that they reject the shooter’s actions that they might have triggered, but there’s still an asymmetry in your favor. The Friendly Atheist blog noted how Muslims were treated after terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 and how much better anti-Planned Parenthood activists are treated.

Unlike the seemingly endless stream of demands and condemnations [aimed at Muslims] that followed the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, no one has suggested that churches in which Planned Parenthood are routinely depicted as the devil’s spawn be closed; no one has demanded that Evangelicals who believe performers of abortions are committing crimes against humanity should be issued with special identity cards; and no one has called for arresting or deporting the inciters who exploit such incidents to whip up hate (and garner more votes).

No, conservative churches and ministries that inspire Christian terrorists are safe. They’re still able to get outraged at women seeking treatment for unwanted pregnancies while denying any responsibility for the consequences.

Concluded in part 2, where the Christian author works himself into a righteous lather.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/4/15.)

Image from sandy Poore, CC license
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Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid #50: The Argument from Biblical Consistency (2 of 2)

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In part 1, we began our critique of the popular argument that the Bible is uncannily consistent, without historical error or contradiction, despite having been written by many authors from diverse locations over 1500 years. We’ll conclude our critique with a search for the Bible’s promised common theme and then wrestle with a challenge aimed at those who doubt the value of this argument.

Problem 2: what’s the Bible’s “common theme”?

Clue #2 to the Bible’s divine authorship, according to these apologists, is its common theme. Here it is in their words:

The Bible has 66 books by 40 authors, written over 1500 years, in 3 languages, on 3 continents, and yet there is one consistent theme: the glory of God in the salvation of man through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel. (Source)

This collection of books shares a common storyline—the creation, fall, and redemption of God’s people; a common theme—God’s universal love for all of humanity; and a common message—salvation is available to all who obey the Gospel and follow God with all of their heart, soul, mind and strength. (Source)

Yet despite this marvelous array of topics and goals, the Bible displays a flawless internal consistency. It never contradicts itself or its common theme, . . . [God’s] love, grace, and mercy [extended] to unworthy people who deserved to be cast into the lake of fire for all eternity. (Source)

Since Jesus isn’t on every page of the Bible (or even in every chapter, or even in every book), this fails.

Even when you look at the Christians’ favorite prophecies of Jesus (Isaiah 53 or Psalm 22), at best you find clumsy parallels with the crucifixion story. If this imagined common theme existed, it would surely be found in these prophecies of Jesus. But read those chapters, and there is no mention of love, grace, mercy, or salvation from hell. There isn’t even death by crucifixion or the resurrection.

A challenge to skeptics: duplicate the Bible’s marvelous record

One source demanded that the skeptic find an example comparable to the Bible’s consistent message despite diverse authorship.

I challenge you to go to any library in the world, you can choose any library you like, and find 66 books which match the characteristics of the 66 books in the Bible. You must choose 66 books, written by 40 different authors, over 1500 years, in 3 different languages, written on 3 different continents. However, they must share a common storyline, a common theme, and a common message, with no historical errors or contradictions.

This challenge flops since the Bible is not particularly consistent. It’s full of contradictions and errors.

But let’s forge ahead and respond to the challenge anyway. Can we find another set of books that comes from comparably diverse origins while being internally consistent? I think we can. Let’s use books written about World War II. Here’s how we can respond to these criteria.

  • 66 books written by 40 different authors. There are 60 thousand books written about World War II. Let’s imagine sorting through these books to find the one percent that fit most harmoniously together—that’s 600 books from 600 authors. Of course, these books could be eclectic and range from high level, comprehensive histories of all theaters of the war to narrow aspects such as the SS, Hitler, Allied air power, the Manhattan Project and so on. But of course the Bible’s books are eclectic as well. Genesis begins with mythology, the books of Kings and Chronicles document history, Esther is the story of a Jewish woman who saved the Jews in Persia, and Amos was a prophet in Israel in the mid-700s BCE.
  • Three different languages. We can find books written in English (from the U.S.), French or Arabic (from Tunisia), and German (from Germany). This was a world war, and we could probably find books from sixty modern countries, compared to a tenth that number for the Bible.
  • From three different continents. The U.S. gives us North America, Tunisia gives us Africa, and Germany gives us Europe. But we can do better. Add books written in Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, Tagalog, and more, and we have Asia. We can also add Australia—that’s five continents. How many languages have WW2 books been written in? Certainly dozens. Perhaps hundreds.
  • Written over 1500 years. No, the Bible wasn’t written over 1500 years. A better estimate is 1000 years: 900 BCE (for parts of Genesis) to 100 CE (Revelation and some epistles). This is where the Bible wins, because the period of authorship of our WW2 books would probably only start in the 1930s. That means that the Bible has a roughly 10× greater date range.
  • No historical errors or contradictions. The Bible is a bigly failure here. It’s hard to quantify this on a Scale of Embarrassment, but one percent of WW2 books, deliberately selected to avoid contradiction, sounds like they would make a more consistent story than the hodge-podge in the Bible. Any Christian apologist who disagrees can start with responding to my list of Bible contradictions.

So how did we do? The Bible wins on timespan by a factor of ten, but our WW2 collection has ten times the number of books, ten times the number of authors, ten times the number of languages, ten times the number of modern countries of authorship, and five continents instead of three.

Instead of WW2, there are many other historical events that would reduce the Bible’s timespan advantage—say, the Battle of Agincourt, the Battle of Hastings, or the Roman Empire—though I don’t know if they could beat World War II on the other criteria.

But this is a tangent. The biggest embarrassment for the Bible in this contest remains. Its errors and contradictions make clear that no omniscient divinity was behind it.

Continue to #51, 3 Stupid Arguments from Alvin Plantinga

Related articles:

Why should one think that God performed the miracle
of inspiring the words of the Bible
if he didn’t perform the miracle
of preserving the words of the Bible?
— Bart Ehrman

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Image from Ryan Wilson, CC license
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Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid #50: The Argument from Biblical Consistency

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If you’ve read much apologetic commentary, you’ve seen this one: the story in the Bible is marvelously consistent despite it being composed of 66 separate books. From 40 authors from all walks of life. In 3 languages. From 3 continents. In different literary genres. Over 1500 years. No, not marvelously consistent—supernaturally consistent! Praise the Lord.

But poke at this argument, and it unravels quickly.

The Christian claim

We’ll start with claims for the Bible’s consistency in apologists’ own words.

The Bible is comprised of 66 Books written over a period of about 1,500 years by over 40 authors from all walks of life, with different kinds of personalities, and in all sorts of situations. It was written in three languages on three continents, and it covers hundreds of controversial subjects. Yet, it fits together into one cohesive story with an appropriate beginning, a logical ending, a central character, and a consistent theme. (Source)

The unity of Scripture demonstrates its supernatural inspiration. Only the one true, holy God could provide us with such a flawless Bible that reveals such a matchless message: the Lord’s staggering love for His creation. (Source)

One of the remarkable features of the Bible is its magnificent continuity. This is because God Himself is the source of the Bible. (Source)

Wow—this sounds like the sycophantic praise North Koreans give their various Great, Dear, and Brilliant leaders. But it’s simply wrong.

Problem 1: the Bible isn’t consistent

In the first place, no, the Bible isn’t consistent. Not even close: the Bible says that Christians sin and that they don’t, that God can’t be seen and that he can, and that works save and that only faith saves. There are two incompatible Ten Commandments, there are two creation stories, and there are two Flood stories.

It can’t get Jesus’s genealogy straight. It’s unclear who the disciples should evangelize. It contradicts itself about whether people deserve punishment for their ancestors’ sins or not. “God is love,” and yet he demands genocide and drowns the world. It says that Satan works for God and then says that he’s God’s enemy. It admits that there are many gods and then says that Yahweh is the only one. The epistles of Paul don’t say the same thing as the gospels, and the gospels don’t even agree with each other. Jesus is wrong about the timing of the End.

And then there are the contradictions about the crucifixion and resurrection. What day was Jesus crucified on? Who brought the spices? Did the women spread the word about the resurrection? The 45,000 Christian denominations show the result of the ambiguity.

Christian apologists will say that these aren’t contradictions, but they agree that they’re apparent contradictions. Consider these book titles that attempt to seal the leaking dike: The Big Book of Bible Difficulties, The Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, Hard Sayings of the Bible, and Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible. These books admit to at least apparent contradictions in a Bible that they say is supernaturally consistent. No omniscient god would create a Bible with contradictions of any sort, apparent or actual, and a Bible full of apparent contradictions that needs weighty books with rationalizing excuses isn’t consistent. More.

You might be able to sidestep a contradiction by labeling an incident or story as allegory, but then you’ve lost any biblical authority. The authority now rests on the person who decides what can be taken literally and what must be allegorized.

The Bible’s canonization process

Some versions of this argument say something like, “When Moses sat down to write Genesis, how could he have known that all the future books would fit nicely together like jigsaw puzzle pieces? Only the hand of God explains this!” But of course the canonization process (the picking of the official books to include in the Bible) worked the other way around. They didn’t look from Moses forward but from their present backwards, picking books that fit with the consensus view as they understood it. The Marcionites, Gnostics, and others were considered heretics from the standpoint of the winners, and the books from the hundreds of candidates were the ones that best fit the Christianity of those winners. It’s odd to celebrate that these books fit well together when they were deliberately chosen to fit well together.

The canons of Christian sects don’t even agree. For example, the books of 3 and 4 Maccabees are included in the Georgian Orthodox Bible, and Tobit and Judith are included in the Roman Catholic Bible, but none of these books are included in the Protestant Bible. “Magnificent continuity” is apparently in the eye of the beholder.

And, as noted in the previous section, these books don’t fit particularly well together. Each individual book was written to serve the purposes of that author, and those purposes varied. The books of the Bible are asked to do what they were never written to do—be consistent. For example, it would make no sense to scold the author of one gospel for telling a different (and contradictory) story from that in another gospel when he had no goal to tell the same story. He was giving his message, not writing a news article.

No, Jesus isn’t on every page of the Bible

Another popular Christian claim is that Jesus is on every page of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments. But if that’s the case, Jews should be an important authority, since the Christian Old Testament is their scripture. And since Jewish scholars haven’t converted, they obviously reject this argument.

Arguing that their bias prevents them from seeing Jesus can be turned around with just as much authority, and now the Christian’s bias is the obstacle to an honest assessment.

When you look at the Bible, the stories it tells are about a lot more than Jesus. In just the Pentateuch (the first five books), we get a just-so story that explains creation. Then God gets annoyed and destroys the world in a flood. Then God promises a great people to Abraham. Then God gives the Promised Land to Moses. Each of these stories reaches a conclusion, and a The End could plausibly wrap up each one. None is about Jesus.

After more adventures of a small country in a dangerous world, we get Jesus in the New Testament. The Christians will tell you that now you can say The End. They will explain these repeated reboots of the story by appealing to progressive revelation—God apparently dribbles out his perfect message over time. But this cuts both ways, and Muslims will tell you that that process continued, and only after adding the Quran can you say The End. And the Mormons tell you that only after adding the Book of Mormon can you say The End. And every cult leader and reincarnation of Jesus will say the same thing.

Concluded in part 2 with a challenge to the skeptic.

Related articles:

That first moment a Christian realizes
he’s wrong about something,
that Christian is going to wonder exactly what else
his onetime hero is wrong about.
(Spoiler: Everything.)
All it takes is one realization
that one thing is drastically in error,
just one brick removed to start the Jenga tower shaking
like the mythic Walls of Jericho themselves.
— Captain Cassidy, Roll to Disbelieve blog

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Image from Andrew Ridley, CC license
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More on the Bible’s Confused Relationship with Science (2 of 2)

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This post wraps up our look at science in the Bible. It’s the conclusion of an analysis of Bible verses that contradict modern science (read part 1). Another recent post looked at Christian claims that the Bible actually anticipated modern science with correct statements about the world that were otherwise unknown during that time.

Let’s continue enumerating scientific errors in the Bible, moving on to cosmology and earth science.

7. The moon creates light rather than reflecting it

God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night (Genesis 1:16).

The sun and moon are said to be greater and lesser versions of the same thing with no acknowledgement that one creates light while the other only reflects it. We see the confusion more clearly in this verse:

The moon shall not cause her light to shine (Isaiah 13:10).

No, the moon doesn’t make its own light.

8. The stars are teeny light sources

The Bible dismisses the stars by imagining their creation this way:

[God] also made the stars (Genesis 1:16).

That’s it. 200 billion galaxies, each with 200 billion stars, are only worth a single Hebrew word in the original (a more literal reading is “[and] the stars”).

We see the stars according to the Sumerian cosmological model here:

God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth (Gen. 1:17).

They’re dismissed as tiny when they’re imagined to fall to earth:

The stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind (Revelation 6:13).

 9. The earth was flooded

The Bible claims that the entire earth was flooded, but the fossil evidence disagrees (long-extinct dinosaurs and modern animals living in the same habitats aren’t fossilized in the same strata).

The geological evidence also disagrees (the oceans have created many rock layers, but nothing points to a global flood).

The DNA evidence also disagrees (clues to a DNA choke point 4000 years ago when there were just two of each “kind” would be obvious in all living land animals).

More about Noah’s flood here and here.

Let’s move on to biology and health.

10. Germs? What germs?

The Bible isn’t a reliable source of health information. When the Pharisees scold Jesus for not following Jewish hand washing rules, Jesus focuses on spiritual defilement and dismisses sanitary defilement.

It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth (Matthew 15:11).

I’ll grant that washing your hands with soap (the simple recipe for which was not included in the Bible) doesn’t touch on spiritual purity, but physical health and basic hygienic precautions are not obvious and are worth a mention somewhere. How about telling us that boiling water minimizes disease? Or how to site latrines to safeguard the water supply?

Apologists have pointed to ritual washing in the Bible, but that counts for little when Jesus rejects it here. (More.)

According to the Bible, evil spirits cause disease. In the story of the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, what sounds like mental illness is actually caused by demons.

[Jesus said to the sick man], “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” (Mark 5:8)

And physical infirmity can also be caused by demons:

There was a woman who for eighteen years had had a sickness caused by a spirit; and she was bent double, and could not straighten up at all (Luke 13:11).

Are some categories of illness caused by demon possession? That modern medicine finds no value in this hypothesis makes clear that they aren’t.

Jesus also thinks disease can be caused by sin:

You are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you. (John 5:14)

For more on the pre-scientific approach to disease given in the New Testament, see this post. For Jesus vs. disease caused by sin and demons, go here.

11. Animals’ offspring change based on what the mother was looking at during conception

Jacob made a deal with his father-in-law Laban. Jacob promised to tend his flocks, but the spotted or black animals would be taken by Jacob as wages. The larger story of Jacob is full of tricks, and he employs one here to tip the balance in his favor.

Jacob took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches. Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted. (Genesis 30:37–9)

This superstition that what a woman sees during pregnancy can affect the baby continues as a myth today.

12. Miscellaneous errors

The Bible betrays its uninformed roots when it says that a bat is a bird (Deuteronomy 14:11–18), insects have four feet (Leviticus 11:20–23), rabbits chew their cud (Lev. 11:6), camels have hooves (Lev. 11:4), and the mustard seed is the smallest seed on earth (Matt. 13:31-32). None of that is true.

Concluding thoughts

The problem with science for many Christians is that a belief built on science must change as the science changes. This won’t satisfy someone determined to create an unchanging worldview. The result is a childish and even fearful relationship to science, embracing it when it appears to support the Christian conclusion and denigrating or ignoring it when it becomes a problem.

To illustrate the tension between religion and science, here’s what Pat Robertson observed about Christians in developing countries. They experience healing miracles far more often than Christians in the West, he says, not because they’re ignorant but because they haven’t been corrupted by education and science.

Overseas, they’re simple, humble. You tell them God loves ’em, and they say, okay, he loves me, and you say God’ll do miracles, and they say, okay, we believe him. That’s what God’s looking for; that’s why they have miracles.

So God is scared of science? He won’t answer our prayers because we’re using the brains he gave us to learn about nature?

There’s no scientific skepticism in these model Christians with their childlike faith, though why that’s a plus, I don’t know. I wonder if Robertson wrestles with the irony that the technology in his worldwide CBN television network was built exclusively on the teachings of science, not God. Be careful, Pat—God is afraid of that science-y stuff.

Let me close with a paraphrase of an idea from AronRa: When the answer is known, science knows it. But when science doesn’t know it, neither does religion.

Since the Bible and the church are obviously mistaken
in telling us where we came from,
how can we trust them to tell us where we are going?
— Anonymous

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/2/15.)

Image from Angel Visha, CC license
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More on the Bible’s Confused Relationship with Science

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I recently analyzed claims made by some Christian apologists arguing that the Bible correctly anticipated modern scientific discoveries. It becomes plain that these were simply science-y sounding verses cherry picked (after the fact) to satisfy a Christian agenda when you see that none taught us anything new about nature. Any insights came exclusively from science.

Augustine (354 – 430) rejected the quest for science in the Bible. He said, “We do not read in the Gospel that the Lord said, ‘I am sending you the Holy Spirit, that he may teach you about the course of the sun and the moon.’ He wished to make people Christians, not astronomers.”

But many Christians ignore Augustine, and the flurry of claims continues. The previous posts analyzed Bible verses that seemed to accurately reveal science. Let’s move on to another category, science claims within the Bible that don’t line up with what modern science tells us. Do they reveal startling insights that modern science must explore, or are they simply the superstitions of primitive pre-scientific people?

We do find startling things in the Bible, but they’re not very scientific. Let’s start with claims about cosmology and the structure of the earth.

1. The earth is immoveable

The world is firmly established, it will not be moved (Psalm 93:1; see also Ps. 96:10, 1 Chronicles 16:30).

Real science tells us that the earth is anything but fixed; it orbits the sun, the entire solar system orbits the galactic center, and the Milky Way galaxy itself moves through space.

2. The earth rests on a foundation

For the foundations of the earth are Jehovah’s; upon them he has set the world (1 Samuel 2:8; see also Ps. 102:25, Ps. 104:5, Zechariah 12:1).

We’re also told what this foundation is made of.

He shakes the earth from its place and makes its pillars tremble (Job 9:6; see also Job 26:11).

Apologists might say that “pillars” simply refers to mountains or bedrock, but a more plausible conclusion is that the literal interpretation was the intended one and that the Hebrew cosmology imagined a flat earth surrounded by or suspended on an ocean, as was popular in ancient Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India.

3. The sky is solid

The cosmology in Genesis makes clear that the earth rests between water underneath and more water in a dome above. We see this in the Noah story when “the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened” (Genesis 7:11). For details, see my post on Noah and Hebrew cosmology here.

That dome must be solid to hold up the water. We also see this elsewhere in the Old Testament:

Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies (Ps. 148:4).

When He made firm the skies above, when the springs of the deep became fixed (Proverbs 8:28).

What is this dome made of? Job suggests that it’s made of metal:

Can you, with him, beat out the skies, strong as a mirror of cast bronze? (Job 37:18)

“Beat out” (“spread out” in some translations) is the verb used for hammering out metal.

We get one more clue from the equivalent Sumerian cosmology. (The Babylonian captivity from 597 – 539 BCE could be where the Hebrews picked it up, or it might have come through trade.) The dome might’ve been made of what the Sumerians called the “metal of heaven,” the metal we call tin.

4. The earth is flat

We’ve seen a flat disk of earth before.

[God] sits above the circle of the earth (Isaiah 40:22).

Our previous analysis showed that this is no reference to a spherical earth (they had another word for “ball” or “sphere”) but simply a flat disk. We also find other clues:

And there was evening, and there was morning, the third day (Gen. 1:13).

The six-day creation story assumes a flat earth because a time reference would’ve been necessary on a spherical earth. To see this, suppose God began creating the plants in the morning on Day Three based on the time in Mesopotamia. If the earth were a sphere, this would mean that God began this project in the evening of Day Two in much of the rest of the world (parts of North America, for example). Only with a time standard (“according to Mesopotamian Standard Time”) would this be unambiguous.

We also find a flat earth in the New Testament:

The devil took [Jesus] to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor (Matthew 4:8).

A high spot to see all the world is possible on a flat earth but not on a spherical planet. And consider that a mountaintop from which you could see everywhere on the earth could itself be seen from everywhere on earth. So go outside and look around. It’s there—the claim that it’s on the horizon somewhere is as reliable as the Bible itself.

5. The earth is at the center of the solar system and the universe

Here’s another verse we’ve seen before that makes clear that the sun moves around the earth.

The sun rises and the sun sets; and hastening to its place it rises there again (Ecclesiastes 1:5; see also Ps. 19:6).

Two more examples are when God played games with the sun, stopping its motion for hours so Joshua could continue killing Amorites (Joshua 10:13) and then moving it backwards to give a sign to King Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:8–11). It’s one thing for God to move things across the sky over a flat earth, but it gets complicated in a heliocentric solar system when “stopping the sun” would require stopping the earth’s rotation.

Could God have used magic to stop the earth’s rotation so that its inhabitants didn’t notice the deceleration and subsequent acceleration (and report it in the biblical accounts)? Could he have maintained the earth’s protective magnetic field that would’ve been lost if the molten iron core stopped rotating? Sure, but the much simpler explanation is that the human authors of the Bible wrongly thought that the earth was at the center of the universe, just like in neighboring societies.

6. Confused creation order

According to the six-day creation story in Genesis 1, God created the earth and land plants in the first three days, but the sun wasn’t made until the fourth. Photosynthesizing plants obviously couldn’t survive without the sun.

Compare the order of creation with the order we’ve learned through science. In Genesis, it’s first earth, then land plants, sun and moon, fish, birds, land animals, and finally humans. Science instead tells us that it was the sun first, then the earth, then the moon. Single-celled organisms were the only life for several billion years. Then photosynthesizing organisms, then land plants, fish, land animals, and finally birds. The Genesis story fails. (The six-day creation story and the Garden of Eden story have many incompatibilities).

Nature is a jigsaw puzzle, and the Bible is the picture on the box top. We’ve been slowly putting the puzzle pieces together for centuries, and we now know the picture on the top is completely wrong.

Concluded in part 2.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God
who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect
has intended us to forgo their use.
— Galileo Galilei

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/30/15.)

Image from Andy Murray, CC license

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