Category Archives: Science

Do Atheists Borrow From the Christian Worldview? A Parable.

Posted on by

Consider this parable:
A certain mathematician, in a philosophical mood one day, wondered what grounded his mathematics. The math works, of course, but he wonders if he’s missing something foundational.
He consults a friend of his, a theologian. The theologian knows almost nothing about mathematics, but he knows his Christianity.
The mathematician says, “Mathematics is like an inverted triangle with the most advanced math along the wide top edge. The top layer is grounded on the math below it, which is grounded on what is below, and so on through the layers, down to arithmetic and logic at the point at the bottom. And that’s where it stops.”
The theologian nodded his head wisely. “I see the problem—what does the bottom rest on?”
The mathematician was silent.
“In your view, it rests on nothing,” said the theologian. “It just sits there in midair. But the problem is easily resolved—mathematics and logic comes from God. There’s your grounding.”
“Are you saying that I need to convert to Christianity to be a mathematician?”
“No, just realize that you are borrowing from the Christian worldview every time you make a computation or write an equation.”
Satisfied that this nagging problem has been resolved, the mathematician returns to his work and thinks no more of it.
The End.
So, is the mathematician any better off? Is he faster or more accurate or more creative? Do his proofs work now where they hadn’t before? In short, did he get anything of value from the whole episode? Not at all.
And note, of course, that the axioms at the bottom of the triangle aren’t taken on faith, they’re continually tested. “1 + 1 = 2” has worked on everything so far, but we’ll take notice if we find a situation where it doesn’t. Some mathematical claims are proven and some are tested, but each is reliable.
I’ve heard this “grounding” or “atheists borrow from the Christian worldview” idea many times, but I’ve yet to discover what this missing thing is that is being borrowed. And suppose the theologian friend had been a Hindu or Buddhist and gave a claim of grounding from that perspective. Would that answer be any less plausible than the Christian one? If they conflict, doesn’t that cast doubt on both of them?
(The Transcendental Argument is the usual form of this argument, and I respond to it here.)
If we imagine that 1 + 1 equals 2 only because God says so, that means that a universe is possible where 1 + 1 doesn’t equal 2. That’s a remarkable claim, and I’d like to see it supported by the theologian rather than simply asserted without evidence.
“God did it” is nothing more than a restatement of the problem. “God did it” is precisely as useful as “logic and arithmetic are simply properties of our reality” or “that’s just the way it is” or even “I don’t know.” An interesting question has been suppressed, not resolved. In fact, by the theologian’s own logic, his answer rests in midair because he provides no reason to conclude that God exists. His claim is no more believable than that of any other religion—that is, not at all. Worse, he proposes to replace the axioms at the lowest level—which continually provide evidence that they are valid—with a supernatural claim without evidence.
The person who stops at “God did it” has stated an opinion only—an opinion with no evidence to back it up. It doesn’t advance the cause of truth one bit.
Mathematics is tested, and it works. Scratch your head about what grounds it if you want, but God is an unnecessary and unedifying addition to the mix.

God is an ever-receding pocket
of scientific ignorance.
— Neil DeGrasse-Tyson

(This is an update of a post originally published 11/25/11.)

Alternative Medicine, Bible Style: Jesus’s Bizarre Approach to Medicine

Posted on by

from Michelangelo's Sistine ChapelReligion in the West is mostly unregulated, like alternative medicine. Both make bold claims without evidence of efficacy. For both, it’s buyer beware. I cringe at the thought of gullible people throwing their money at stuff with bogus claims—homeopathy, magnetic bracelets, detoxing foot pads, aromatherapy, chelation therapy, colloidal minerals, iridology … and religion.
Christians are on the same page when they shake their heads at Scientology, whose story amounts to little more than a $100,000 sci-fi novel metered out in installments, or Heaven’s Gate, the cult whose members killed themselves to get to an alien spacecraft.
Traditional Christians are skeptical of the historical claims of the LDS church. Joseph Smith translated “golden plates” by using magic translating rocks, you say? Show us the plates.
Ditto for Sathya Sai Baba, who had millions of followers and died in 2011. He was an avatar (deity on earth) and performed many miracles, including curing himself of paralysis from a stroke and raising people from the dead. Christians wonder, have scientists corroborated these claims?
They’ll shake their heads at Steve Jobs, who attempted to cure his (very treatable) cancer with alternative medicine. He realized his mistake only when it was too late.
They’ll laugh with skeptics at the end-of-the-world claims of Harold Camping or fans of the Mayan calendar that ended in December, 2012.
But they stop laughing when the topic turns to Jesus.
The healing miracles of Jesus in the gospels record a number of outdated ideas about disease.

  1. Evil spirits cause disease. In the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, Jesus expelled many demons from a man into 2000 pigs, which ran into a lake and drowned. Demons cause physical crippling as well (Luke 13:10–13). We learn that knowing precisely how to expel the various kinds of demons is an art (Mark 9:25). And getting rid of an “impure spirit” doesn’t help because it’ll just find a bunch of its friends and turn the newly cleansed person into a drunken fraternity party (Luke 11:24–6).
  2. Sickness can come from sin. Jesus healed a disabled man at the Bethesda pool but warned him,

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

We also see sickness as a consequence of sin when he forgives the paralyzed man who was lowered through the roof to get access to Jesus (Mark 2:2–12).

  1. Magical healings. Jesus healed a blind man by making mud with his spit and putting that on the man’s eyes. After he washed them, the man could see. (John 9:6–7). But don’t think that this magic is flawless. In the parallel story in Mark 8:22–5, Jesus needs two tries to get it to work.
  1. Healings by Jesus touching. Jesus used touch to cure a leper, a person with a fever, and two blind men. He also raised the dead.
  2. Healings by touching Jesus. A woman touched Jesus and was healed without Jesus doing anything, as if he were a medicine battery.

At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him (Mark 5:30).

  1. Healings with magic spell. We learn that the Aramaic word ephphatha means “be opened” That’s the word Jesus used to cure a mute man (Mark 7:33–5). He said, “Talitha koum!” (“Little girl, I say to you, get up!”) to raise a dead girl (Mark 5:35–42).
  2. Healing at a distance. Jesus doesn’t even have to be there. He healed the centurion’s servant remotely (Matthew 8:5–13).

So what have we learned? According to the gospel story, some illnesses are caused by sin, and others are caused by demons. Expelling demons is a waste of time, because they’ll just return with more demons. Jesus can cure with special techniques, he can cure just by a touch, he can cure by being touched, he can cure with spells, and he can cure at a distance without touching at all.
I don’t know what to make of this hodge-podge of techniques except to wonder why Jesus didn’t just put up his feet and heal thousands of worthy people remotely or eliminate entire diseases like cancer and smallpox.
Apologists may argue that Jesus didn’t cure much because he had no interest in doing so, and yet the gospels disagree. A crowd followed Jesus, and

he had compassion on them and healed their sick (Matt. 14:14).

Seeing a widow at the funeral of her only son, Luke says:

his heart went out to her and he said, “Don’t cry” (Luke 7:13)

and then he raised her son. He heals people, at least in part, for the same reason a modern doctor does, because of compassion. He also used it as proof of his divinity. To the followers of John who asked him if he were the real deal, Jesus said:

Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. (Luke 7:22) 

Reject any claims that Jesus did less healing in his ministry than that done by an average doctor because healing wasn’t important to him.
Alternative medicine vs. religion
Alternative therapies give hope where science offers none, and Americans spend $34 billion each year on them. The same is true for religion, and Americans give three times that amount to religious organizations.
Some of the nutty claims can be put to the test. In a TED video (scroll to 2:20), magician James Randi swallows an entire bottle of sleeping pills. Not to worry—it’s homeopathic medicine, guaranteed to have no active ingredients.
Does Christianity offer anything more? The gospel stories of the healings of Jesus sound like a nutty infomercial rather than historical fact.

Idiots, the lame, the blind, the dumb,
are men in whom the devils have established themselves,
and all the physicians who heal these infirmities,
as though they proceeded from natural causes,
are ignorant blockheads.
— Martin Luther

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/20/13.)
Photo credit: Wikipedia

Why Does the Bible Have No Recipe for Soap?

Posted on by

Bible recipe soapThe Bible has a detailed description of the priestly costume in Exodus 28. Aaron and his priestly descendants certainly looked fabulous, but if the Bible can spend an entire chapter on this, why not a method for making something useful, like soap?
It’s not hard to make. Imagine if the following recipe were a quote from the Bible (give it a King James tone if that makes it sound more authentic):

Pack a wooden bucket with wood ashes. Pour in boiling water. Make a small hole near the bottom so the water can be collected in a pot as it drips out. The liquid is caustic, so don’t let it touch skin or metal. Pour the liquid back through the ashes until it is strong enough to dissolve a chicken feather.
Boil this liquid until most of the water is gone. Add rendered fat from cattle or other animals and stir while cooking until it thickens. Pour into molds and let it harden.

There are lots of tricks to making soap properly, but a priesthood could’ve easily perfected the technique.
With this, the Bible could then add the basics of health care—when and how to use this soap, how water is purified by boiling (actually purified, not just pretend purified with a ritual), how latrines should be built and sited, how to avoid polluting the water supply, how to avoid spreading disease, and so on. Other ideas to improve society come to mind—low-tech ways to pump water, spin fiber, make metal alloys, and so on—but health seems to be a fundamental one to start with.
Several passages have been advanced to argue that the Bible did refer to soap. Malachi 3:2 and Jeremiah 2:22 allude to it, but that word means ashes or soapy plant. In Job 9:30, the word isn’t soap but “snow water” (that is, pure water). Numbers 19:1–12 has been claimed as a recipe for soap, though it’s clearly just a ritual. None of these are soap as we would understand it, as defined by the recipe above. If the Bible did have a recipe for soap, wouldn’t we read in the Bible about people using it and the health improvements that came from the new practice?
The Bible has an abysmal relationship with science (more here and here), unless you see it as simply another book of mythology and superstition, in which case it’s a product of its times like all the rest. Jesus does no better with his attempts at medicine. Wouldn’t someone who preached “Love your neighbor as yourself” bring his A game to the problem of public health?
Another attempt to salvage the Bible argues that its odd dietary rules (no pork or shellfish, no mixing of meat and dairy, etc.) are healthy, but these rules are arbitrary when seen from a modern standpoint. Sure, avoiding pork means that you can’t get sick from eating poorly cooked pork, but can’t you still get sick from eating tainted meat from other animals? An analysis by Mary Douglas (discussed here) makes much more sense out of the ritual prohibitions.
There are two possibilities for the Bible’s health advice.

  • An infinitely loving God created us but just didn’t give a hoot about the health of his creation. He could’ve made healthy practices mandatory rituals, but he didn’t. However, he did care enough about making his priests look sharp to devote an entire chapter to their costumes.
  • The Old Testament was just written by ordinary men and reflects their ordinary knowledge and interests.

Which seems likelier?

Man once surrendering his reason, 
has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, 
and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind.
— Thomas Jefferson

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/13/13.)
Image credit: Arlington County, flickr, CC

10 Reasons to Not Believe Christianity Until You Believe in Aliens

Posted on by

Do you think that Jesus rose from the dead? That he was virgin born? That he sits in heaven at the right hand of the creator of the universe?
That the gospel story is actual history is an immense claim, but Christians say they have the evidence. Let’s test that. If Christians accept this claim, then to be consistent they must also accept any claim with better evidence. Such a claim is that space aliens have visited the earth.
UFO tow truckLet’s compare evidence for these two claims point by point.
1. Recentness of event. You can interview people today who claim to have seen UFOs or encountered aliens. To understand the gospel claims, we must peer back across 2000 years of history.
2. Number of sources. Thousands claim to have been abducted, and the number who claim only to have seen aliens or their technology must be far higher. There were only four gospels, and those aren’t even independent accounts.
3. Period of oral history. The period of oral history is negligible for many alien claims. It may be just hours or days from a claimed event until a newspaper story. By contrast, the Gospels were written decades after the claimed events.
4. Reliability of source. It may be easy to imagine alien claimants as insane, drunk, or uneducated, but one psychiatrist studied 800 claimed abductees and was struck with the ordinariness of the population. Another survey reported that this group is no more prone to mental disorder than the general population.
Question the sanity of those who claims to have seen aliens if you want, but we at least have something tangible—interviews with those people and people who know them, police records, and so on. With Peter and Paul or some other Christian patriarch we have 2000-year-old stories, and ones containing miracles at that. Why argue that they’re accurate?
5. Natural vs. supernatural. The supposed aliens came from a planet (we know about planets) on which there was intelligent life (we know about intelligent life), and they presumably got here in a spaceship (we know about technology and spaceships). This is 100 percent natural.
Science keeps finding strange new animals on earth living in extreme environments—worms that live miles underground, in glaciers, or in hot or cold places at the bottom of the ocean. Is it hard to imagine exotic animals on other worlds? Their discovery would be surprising or even shocking, but we wouldn’t need to discard any scientific laws if aliens presented themselves.
By contrast, the Gospel story requires you to believe in supernatural beings and supernatural events. We have plenty of claims but no scientific consensus that even one is valid.
6. Cultural gulf. The evidence for aliens is from our time, from our culture, and in our language. By contrast, the gospel story is from a culture long ago and far away, and the Greek gospels are already one culture removed from the actual events. Jesus and the apostles spoke Aramaic and came from a Jewish environment; the gospels were written in Greek by authors who lived in a Greek environment.
7. Contradictions. Any contradiction between alien claims can be chalked up to a different space ship or a different alien race. By contrast, the four gospel accounts are trying to document the same events. Important contradictions, such as whether Jesus was crucified after the Passover meal (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) or before (John), are devastating to the claim that the gospels are history.
8. Quality of evidence. On the alien side, you talk directly to people who claim to be eyewitnesses. The argument that the gospel writers were eyewitnesses or close to them is a flimsy tradition.
Our oldest complete copies of the New Testament date from the fourth century. Yes, we do have fragments of New Testament books that date earlier, but these are incomplete and are still copies from one to two centuries after the original authorship.
9. Criterion of Embarrassment. Christians ask, “But who would make up the gospel story? Who would endure the persecution?” First, I never claimed that anyone made up the story, simply that the supernatural elements in the gospel story are easily explained by supposing that it evolved as it was passed along. Second, that defense crumbles when we consider that alien claimants tell their story today despite much potential ridicule. Is a story in the face of persecution strong support for the truth of the story? Okay—then consider it strong evidence for alien claims.
10. Christianity is a different kind of claim, a far less likely kind of claim. Pick an event from history–a battle, a speech, a natural disaster. We have plenty of examples of battles, speeches, and disasters. With UFO visitations, however, we have no examples that are accepted by science, and that’s why historically reliable events are more believable than UFO claims.
But Christianity takes it to a new level of unbelievable. The categories we’re talking about with UFOs–technology, spacecraft, intelligent life forms, and an eagerness to explore–are well understood. The problem with UFOs is not that they’re inherently implausible but simply that we don’t have reliable evidence of one. And that’s why UFOs beat Christianity. UFOs requires a change in degree in our thinking, while Christianity requires a change in kind (we must accept a new category, the supernatural).
If the Gospel stories are credible, shouldn’t alien stories be far more credible? Seen the other way around, Christians who read this and think up many objections to the alien argument need to apply those same objections against the gospel story to see if it holds up. I think they’ll find that the net that pulls in Christianity will pull in a lot of bycatch as well.

Reality is that which, 
when you stop believing in it, 
doesn’t go away.
— Philip K. Dick

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/25/13.)
Image credit: Travel Nevada, flickr, CC

Yet More on the Bible’s Confused Relationship with Science (2 of 2)

Posted on by

Bible scienceThis 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.

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. 100 billion galaxies each with 100 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 tells us 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 disagrees (the impact of the ocean is present in many stone layers, but a global flood isn’t).

The DNA evidence disagrees (clues to a DNA choke point about 4000 years ago should be obvious in all living land animals from their having descended from very few individuals).

More about Noah’s flood here and here.

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 unsanitary 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?

A prior post reviewed apologists’ excitement about the Bible teaching ritual washing, but that can’t count for much when Jesus rejects it here.

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] had been saying 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.

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

Jacob made a deal with his father-in-law Laban to tend his flocks. All the white sheep and goats would remain Laban’s, but any spotted or black ones 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 idea that what a woman sees during pregnancy can affect the baby continues as a myth today, but there is no science behind it.

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 an unrealistic and childish relationship with 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 unscientific or ignorant or gullible 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.

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.

Science is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. We don’t have the box top with the picture of the finished puzzle and we only have some of the pieces, so the puzzle is always incomplete. If a new piece won’t fit in, we have to decide if we’re misunderstanding the piece or if we were wrong about the rest of the puzzle. The Christian view is like having the box with a picture of God on the top and then imagining magic to morph every newly discovered piece so that it fits. “God did it” answers everything, but as an unfalsifiable hypothesis, it answers nothing (more here).

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

Photo credit: Angel Visha, flickr, CC

Yet More on the Bible’s Confused Relationship with Science

Posted on by

Bible scienceI recently analyzed claims made by Christian apologists arguing that the Bible correctly anticipated modern scientific discoveries. It becomes plain that these were simply science-y sounding verses cherry picked 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 into science, 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. This means that God began this project in the evening of Day Two in much of the rest of the world (western 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. (Thanks to commenter RichardSRussell for this observation.)

5. The earth is at the center of not just the solar system but 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 no big deal for God to move things across the sky, but it gets complicated in a heliocentric solar system when “stopping the sun” actually means 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 why imagine that instead of the heliocentric solar system known to science since the early sixteenth century?

6. Confused creation order

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 in Genesis 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 the evidence points to the sun being 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. But Genesis is right that humans came last—yay.

(This is off our topic of science errors in the Bible, but the two creation stories—the six-day creation story and the Garden of Eden story—have many incompatibilities).

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

Photo credit: Andy Murray, flickr, CC