The previous post ended after the first chapter of Genesis. As we have seen, the entire text is rife with scientific errors. These are not errors that are contrived and difficult to observe and understand; the most obvious of these is the fact that the creation and properties of the stars are completely wrong. It is telling that many creationists are willing to try and convince people of the validity of a young Earth and the creation story, yet don't seem to be arguing about the compositions of stars. This is because unlike the creation of Earth, a subject we know a lot about yet not enough to give hard facts, it is a losing argument.
Following is the next chapter of Genesis. This uses the same translation as I used in the previous post found at the following link; http://library.thinkquest.org/29178/agenesisS.htm
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts.
2 And by the seventh day God completed His work which He had done; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.
3 Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.
As previously explained, the scientific creation of the Earth comes about by a process of a star producing the necessary elements to create a dense body, that star spewing it's contents into space once it goes supernova, and the parts proceeding to coalesce around another star. This process, from what we can observe takes a very long time. Certainly the estimate of seven days is way short of the true length of time needed, which is closer to billions of years from the first ignition of the star that creates the necessary components. Earth itself is believed to have formed about 4.54 billion years ago, as part of a solar nebula, a ring of dust that contributed not only to the formation of our own Sun, but the creation of the other planets of the solar system. It's worth noting that no mention of these other planets is made in any part of the Genesis creation story.
4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made earth and heaven.
5 Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth; and there was no man to cultivate the ground.
6 But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.
Another example of the metaphysics present in the Genesis account, the book describes how water used to be distributed by rising from the ground in a mist. This celestial watering method appears to have fallen out of favour of God later on to be replaced by rain. Mist of course is known to exist, but it does not spring out of the ground. It is formed naturally by water droplets suspended in the air at ground level, much like clouds in the upper atmosphere are, when the air is particularly cold. Even if water were to spring from the ground as described, there is no real system by which this can occur. There would have to be a necessary amount of pressure distributed evenly beneath the ground that allowed the mist to be push up out of the ground. The ground could conceivable hold all the moisture to be distributed, however it would quickly become spongy and swamp-like, certainly unsuitable for larger plants such as bushes to root effectively.
7 Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
8 And the LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed.
While the idea of humans being formed out of dust is ridiculed by some, there is a small grain of truth to this. Abiogenesis theories (the study of the formation of life) suggest that the first forms of primitive life, nothing more than self-replicating proteins encased in lipids, might have first began within certain formations of rocks that provided a molecular "scaffolding" around which these organic chemicals could have formed and then bonded. However, this again is a natural process, and is only applicable to the very first creations of life. No "breath of life" is necessary for this process to take place. The spontaneous creation of humans in this manner would be akin to a bomb exploding in the middle of a building and all of the bricks falling in the impact back into their original position, leaving the building intact. As it happens we know a lot about our biological history, and clear relations to the Great Ape family of animals and a common ancestry with them show that we emerged, like all other life on Earth, from the process of evolution, a topic I shall cover at a later date.
9 And out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers.
11 The name of the first is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.
12 And the gold of that land is good; the bdellium and the onyx stone are there.
Mentioned here is the river of Pishon and the land of Havilah. While there are some theories as to the exact location of the Pishon within the real world, there is no clear evidence exactly where this river can be found. Indeed, the text seems to suggest that the following four rivers converged on the point where Eden can be found.
13 And the name of the second river is Gihon; it flows around the whole land of Cush.
Again another river and land are mentioned. While the Gihon doesn't have a definitive real-life equivalent, Cush is often associated in other parts of the Bible with Ethiopia. This is an important fact to keep in mind in regards to the other two rivers;
14 And the name of the third river is Tigris; it flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
Unlike the other two rivers above, the Tigris and the Euphrates are both rivers that can be positively identified. They happen to run almost parallel to each other, starting Turkey before moving into Iraq. Though they have their origins in the eastern part of Turkey, the Gihon, if it does indeed flow around Ethiopia as it suggested, is about a thousand miles away from it's source. At present there is no direct river running from Turkey to Ethiopia, and neither the Tigris nor the Euphrates come close to it, with both rivers running off into the Persian Gulf long before they run anywhere nearby. Young Earth creationists tend to disregard ideas such as tectonic plate movements since the requisite millions of years needed cannot work within the the short time scale of 6000 years. Even a catastrophic event such as the Great Flood, another subject I shall be covering later, wouldn't have changed the geography so drastically to remove a river running from eastern Turkey all the way to Ethiopia, or indeed move the entire land of Ethiopia far enough away from Turkey and Iraq to make the geography work.
15 Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.
16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely;
17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die."
This is quite an obvious statement to make, one that has been made by many over the years, but if God had created a paradise for humans to live in why place a tree within that would cause humanity to be cursed forever? Logistically this is like a parent giving their child a series of toys along with a knife, and then telling them not to play with the knife. Invariably curiosity will get the better of the toddler and you'd most likely be taken away for child abuse. As is mentioned in the later parts of Genesis, the concept of sin and by extension good and evil were not present in the mind of the first humans. This is something we shall discuss later on.
18 Then the LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him."
19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.
20 And the man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.
As is the case with the repeated creation of the Heavens, God is said to create every animal and the birds again in this chapter. This is nothing short of a blatant contradiction, one that doesn't require an understanding of science to see. One also has to wonder how, logistically, Adam named every creature on the face of the Earth, and indeed why Adam doesn't go to the trouble of naming any of the vegetation, or any marine animals.
21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh at that place.
22 And the LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.
23 And the man said, "This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man."
This passage is of particular contention amongst many religious groups, specifically in relation to attitudes towards women. Since Genesis claims that woman came directly from man this is seen by some as a license to consider women lesser creatures to men, subservient due to their method of creation. As we know from science however this is just not true. For one thing, it would be impossible to recreate a female from the tissue sample of a male owing to the fact that the DNA, the genetic code that determines the outcome of an organism's physical properties, is markedly different for males and females. DNA is paired up in most organisms in strands known as chromosomes. Everyone has two pairs of each chromosome, with only one from each parent contributing to their offspring. Even if the XY chromosomes, the pair of DNA structures that contribute towards the sex of a person, were manually changed by God, there would still be a major issue with inbreeding owing to Adam and Eve's genetic similarities. Incest, as it happens, isn't much of a problem for the Bible in terms of explaining creation, since such actions are required to explain how the entire of humanity could come from a single biological pair. The act of incest is genetically detrimental to humans however, since genetic diseases such as hemophilia can only be expressed if the chromosome pairs from both parents carry the mutated gene, described as being recessive. An incestuously conceived child will most likely suffer from sterility, stunted growth, increased asymmetry of the face and reduced resistance to disease. Presumably the second generation of humans descended from Adam and Eve would have expressed many of these physical disorders, provided that the mechanisms behind genetic inheritance were the same.
24 For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
There is not much to say about this passage, apart from to note the mention that Adam and Eve were not ashamed of their nakedness, a phenomena attributed to the Bible to their lack of understanding of good, evil and knowledge. In a sense this is the Bible's argument for the old saying "Ignorance is bliss". This continued idea of Adam and Eve being devoid of Sin (in the literal, Biblical sense of the world) brings into question the significance of the idea of Original Sin, a topic we will go into with the next post.
Part 3 coming sometime next week.
Showing posts with label Creationism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Creationism. Show all posts
Saturday, 10 May 2008
Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Creation and it's place in faith Pt 1.
One of the many questions we as humans have the unique ability to ask is "Where did we come from?". We live in a world where actions lead to consequences; a knocked-over vase will invariably fall to the ground and shatter into thousands of tiny shards, pressing down on the accelerator of a car will make it travel forwards and so on. Therefore, via a process of backwards reasoning, it is easy to see why we, as a species, would come to the conclusion that there was some initial action, performed by an entity, that created our world and everything we see in it. Since we live in a world in which vases don't spontaneously launch themselves off tables, or where cars are capable of propelling themselves without activating their internal combustion engine without some kind of force behind it, invariably the source of this action is labeled God or something similar.
However, as explained in the previous post, none of the ancient myths regarding the creation of our world in particular carry any explanation as to the Universe at large. Indeed, it seems that the Gods of religions over the years were content to concern themselves with the immediate vicinity of a single planet. Our observations of the speed at which galaxies move and background heat radiation in the deepest reaches of the Universe have shown that there was indeed some cataclysmic event, colloquially known as the "Big Bang", that was the initial action. Yet despite this grandiose event, one that is worthy of note being as it is the creator of everything we see and are, goes completely unmentioned in the texts of every religion on the planet today. Really the modern rationalization in many moderates, a result of these recent understandings of our Universe and particular place in it, are not the result of the insight of their respective texts but rather their understanding of reality based on remarkably short-sighted viewpoints.
It's with this in mind that we can turn to the texts of creation myths with a critical eye and effectively ignore the bigger questions of the Universe as a whole. Unless one were to produce a religious text that gave mention to the billions of galaxies we see and detailed their creation process, we can safely assume the average religious text only covers the celestial or divine events that resulted in our world. There are many myths that could be analysed, but for our purposes we shall look at the creation story as told (twice no less) in the book of Genesis, the first religious text in Judaism and Christianity, and to a lesser extent Islam (though the Islamic recounting of the creation of the world is notably different in the detail). Many issues regarding the teaching of evolution and intelligent design stem directly from this book, with the assumed age of the Earth by creationists, a mere 6000 years, a result of literally counting back through the generations described in the Bible. We shall take the text line for line, pausing to add commentary where it is necessary and to discuss some of the major scientific errors present.
This translation is from the following website; http://library.thinkquest.org/29178/agenesisS.htm
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Immediately, on the very first line, the Bible gets it downright wrong. Unless the heavens, a term often used in the Bible to describe the immediate sky around the Earth, could be construed as the depths of space, this line grossly understates the necessary steps needed to create a planet. We know from the observation of other celestial bodies that planets do not simply pop into existence. There is a very clear series of steps we can follow. The denser elements, such as the majority of metals and importantly organic elements that give rise to life, are created deep within the burning furnace of a star. Stars are gigantic nuclear reactors, with their primary source of fuel being hydrogen. The processing of hydrogen into energy acts as a molecular laboratory, producing elements with higher proton and neutron amounts. Once a star goes supernova, after it has long since burned out all of it's hydrogen fuel, these elements are spewed into space. There they begin to gather back together through gravitational forces, and if the clouds of dust are fortunate to gather in an orbit around another star (see the rings of Saturn for a smaller scale demostration, or the asteroid belt in our own solar system), they will eventually gather together to form a planetoid. This isn't even mentioning the necessary prerequisites that bring the star into existence, a process that occurs deep in Nebulae, colossal gatherings of gases that provide the atmospheric conditions for hydrogen to ignite and produce a star.
2 And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
As was mentioned above, dust clouds only ever coalesce into suitably large bodies around other larger gravitational forces, such as suns. Further into the text this inaccuracy is even more striking and obvious. It's also worthy that the Bible describes the Earth as being covered in water. More on this particular point below. As a final note, it is odd that God is described as a spirit "moving over the surface of the waters". This is a distinctly tangible prescence for a supposedly omnipresent God. Indeed, this ability of universal observation is a trait that only seems to have latched onto God later on in the Bible.
3 Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.
4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
Even a child will tell you that light and darkness do not require separating from each other. Wherever light is produced, darkness will be eliminated. Light itself is a form of electromagnetic radiation, with visible light a stupendously small section of possible "bandwidths" of this radiation. What our eyes perceive is effectively this radiation, which travels in the form of waves, shaped much like the waves you see in the ocean. These waves travel into our eyes, interact with the various components of the eye, producing an image that is sent to the brain. Darkness itself is not really a tangible entity, as it is merely a state in which no visible light rays are present. Radio waves are another type of electromagnetic radiation, though the crests of the waves are much further apart. Shorter wavelengths produce X-rays and Gamma Rays, often used in medical application but deadly to humans and other types of organic life in large doses. Yet none of these different wavelengths produce any kind of visible light for us to see. Our eyes are blinkered to the vast array of the electromagnetic spectrum, an analogy eloquently expressed by Professor Richard Dawkins as "the mother of all Burkas". If the eyes of the Burka were an inch long, representing our perception of electromagnetic radiation, the Burka would be massive in size, with many miles of materials covering the body, and equally as much covering the head. So even when we humans may see darkness, "light" is still present.
5 And God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
It is worth pointing out now that the Bible refers to a day passing. This is important further on in the text.
6 Then God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters."
7 And God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so.
8 And God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.
Firstly, it's worth noting that God appears to have made a blunder in regards to the creation of the Heavens. Remember back in the very first line, God is described to have created the Heavens and the Earth. Unless this is a very badly written prose that fails to properly attenuate the present action of the protagonist (in this case Yahweh), the action of the creation of the Heavens is performed twice. Secondly, the "expanse" as described in this passage is a literal covering that is said to cover the entirety of the Earth. Heaven, in a very literal sense, is real according to the Bible, an actual tangible plot of land floating above the Earth. Our travels to the moon and expansion, however small, into the deepest reaches of space via satellites, have proven this theory to be utterly false. Also note yet another mention of a day passing.
9 Then God said, "Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear"; and it was so.
10 And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters He called seas; and God saw that it was good.
Credit where credit is due, this description is somewhat marginally accurate. It is true that the seas as they are present on the Earth are not a permanent fixture. The geography of the globe changes over many millions of years, the production of plate tectonics which see massive sections of land moving and grinding against each other on top of a "bed" of viscous magma. These movements can be seen in mountain ranges, where plates have driven against each other literally forcing the ground up into the air, or conversely in the centre of the Atlantic Ocean in the form of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. However, the idea of water gathering together to form dry land is contentious. The net amount of land present on Earth is a result of two factors; one is the amount of water present that isn't currently in a vapour or ice form, and the other is the natural layout of the surface of the planet. Though the continents have moved away and towards each other over many millions of years, the general size of the land has remained constant. The unique shapes of the present continents suggest that at one point the entire of the Earth's landmass was a single Supercontinent known as Pangaea. Taking all this into account, the Bible's description of the creation of the land is remarkably simple in the context of what we now know about plate movements.
11 Then God said, "Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind, with seed in them, on the earth"; and it was so.
12 And the earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit, with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.
13 And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.
There are a few errors to point out here. First is that, as we shall soon see, at this point in the creation story there is no Sun present to allow the plants to photosynthesize. Though plants are capable of living for short periods without sunlight, many species will quickly wither and die if they are not exposed to some form of light. In regards to the order of the creation of organisms on Earth in general, evolutionary science has shown us that animals and plants evolved at around the same time and parallel to each other. One did not come observably before the other. This isn't even mentioning the millions of years prior to any multi-cellular organisms being present, where the most complicated life were single cell Prokaryotes. Then again, many believers may disregard the process of evolution as being against the idea that God created life on Earth. This is a subject we will look at in greater detail sometime in the future, but for now it is important to note that plants and animals do not appear at different points in the observable timeline of life on Earth.
14 Then God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years;
15 and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth"; and it was so.
16 And God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also.
17 And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth,
18 and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good.
In this section, the "greater light" and the "lesser light" are the sun and the moon respectively. Immediately, we see a problem since the moon itself does not produce any light. As Earth's only visible satellite from the surface of the planet, the light we see is the result of light from the sun reflecting at various angles. As the moon orbits the planet it "waxes and wanes", creating the unique passing of light over the surface. The Bible appears to imply that the moon produces it's own light and given governance over the night. Still this could be seen as allegorical, but after all what we are supposedly reading is an accurate record of the creation of Earth. Stars are mentioned, but their composition isn't given. Indeed, with their position in "the expanse", the literal dome over the planet, the Bible completely and utterly gets it wrong on this front. We know what stars are; they are massive spheres that burn hydrogen. Our Sun is such a star, while the ones we see in the sky are massive distances away. Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth apart from the Sun, is 4.2 light years. Light years is a unit of measurement, with one light year the distance a ray of light can travel in a vacuum over the space of a year. This is a insanely huge distance, close to 9.4 trillion kilometres. Thus the Bible's idea of the stars, stuck onto a dome just a few hundred feet above the surface of the Earth, is downright childish. Lastly, it is only at this point that the sun is even created. Prior to this day and night was cycling somehow, yet even the most creative mind would be hard pressed to figure out how exactly this is probably without a sun present to define the start and end of each day. God may have created light prior to this and separated it from the darkness, but there is no mention of the passing of that light over the Earth, or indeed if it does pass at all.
19 And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.
As we have seen in the previous paragraph, this is now technically the first day.
20 Then God said, "Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens."
21 And God created the great sea monsters, and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
22 And God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth."
23 And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.
Again like the idea of plantation being present before animals, evolutionary speaking birds did not come before land animals. Modern day birds are direct descendants of Dinosaurs and other such therapods. While there is some accuracy in water-bourne organisms coming before land animals, water being the optimum environment for life to emerge, it is still after the production of plants, again events that did not happen separately but concurrently with each other.
24 Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind"; and it was so.
25 And God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
Since in the previous lines no mention was made of single-cell organisms or dinosaurs, it's no surprise then that land animals are all created at once in a similar vein. This is again a gross simplification, though not as starkly inaccurate as the previous order. However it is again noteworthy that land animals and birds have evolved in tandem with each other, and indeed land animals far predated their flighted cousins.
26 Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
27 And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
28 And God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
It may be a moot point to bring this up before we have fully discussed the issue of evolution, but the spontaneous creation of humans is again inaccurate to reality. Modern humans, like every other organism, are the result of millions of years of evolution. In our case we diverged from the "Great Ape" families such as chimpanzees and bonobos some 2.5 million years ago. It is also odd that God would say "let Us make man in Our image". God is supposed to be a single entity, the only entity present since the beginning of time. Just who is this "Us" and "Our" that God refers to? Even more telling is that God mentions "Our image". This suggests that God, anthropomorphically speaking, bares at least a passing resemblance to humans. Of course, this idea of personifying deities is nothing new. The pantheon of Greek gods all had distinctly human traits associated with them. Thus it is no surprise this same occurrence happens with the God of the creation story. In this sense, it is God who resembles us rather than we resembling God, a theme that I shall discuss in further posts.
29 Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you;
30 and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food"; and it was so.
31 And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
It is worth pointing out that, while as omnivores we are capable of eating a variety of food substances, the vast majority of plants and meats are not suitable for human consumption. In mild cases they may induce vomiting and in more severe cases death. Even in relatively biologically benign countries, such as the UK, many berries found on trees and bushes contain deadly chemicals such as cyanide. Uncooked meat in particular can be dangerous, with shellfish (any kind of organism that "sifts" it's food in order to eat) a major cause across the world. A counter argument to this would be that this was the perfect "Garden of Eden" as discussed later in the book of Genesis, though at this point there is no distinction between the plants of Eden and the plants outside of this garden.
Part 2 coming up within the next few days.
However, as explained in the previous post, none of the ancient myths regarding the creation of our world in particular carry any explanation as to the Universe at large. Indeed, it seems that the Gods of religions over the years were content to concern themselves with the immediate vicinity of a single planet. Our observations of the speed at which galaxies move and background heat radiation in the deepest reaches of the Universe have shown that there was indeed some cataclysmic event, colloquially known as the "Big Bang", that was the initial action. Yet despite this grandiose event, one that is worthy of note being as it is the creator of everything we see and are, goes completely unmentioned in the texts of every religion on the planet today. Really the modern rationalization in many moderates, a result of these recent understandings of our Universe and particular place in it, are not the result of the insight of their respective texts but rather their understanding of reality based on remarkably short-sighted viewpoints.
It's with this in mind that we can turn to the texts of creation myths with a critical eye and effectively ignore the bigger questions of the Universe as a whole. Unless one were to produce a religious text that gave mention to the billions of galaxies we see and detailed their creation process, we can safely assume the average religious text only covers the celestial or divine events that resulted in our world. There are many myths that could be analysed, but for our purposes we shall look at the creation story as told (twice no less) in the book of Genesis, the first religious text in Judaism and Christianity, and to a lesser extent Islam (though the Islamic recounting of the creation of the world is notably different in the detail). Many issues regarding the teaching of evolution and intelligent design stem directly from this book, with the assumed age of the Earth by creationists, a mere 6000 years, a result of literally counting back through the generations described in the Bible. We shall take the text line for line, pausing to add commentary where it is necessary and to discuss some of the major scientific errors present.
This translation is from the following website; http://library.thinkquest.org/29178/agenesisS.htm
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Immediately, on the very first line, the Bible gets it downright wrong. Unless the heavens, a term often used in the Bible to describe the immediate sky around the Earth, could be construed as the depths of space, this line grossly understates the necessary steps needed to create a planet. We know from the observation of other celestial bodies that planets do not simply pop into existence. There is a very clear series of steps we can follow. The denser elements, such as the majority of metals and importantly organic elements that give rise to life, are created deep within the burning furnace of a star. Stars are gigantic nuclear reactors, with their primary source of fuel being hydrogen. The processing of hydrogen into energy acts as a molecular laboratory, producing elements with higher proton and neutron amounts. Once a star goes supernova, after it has long since burned out all of it's hydrogen fuel, these elements are spewed into space. There they begin to gather back together through gravitational forces, and if the clouds of dust are fortunate to gather in an orbit around another star (see the rings of Saturn for a smaller scale demostration, or the asteroid belt in our own solar system), they will eventually gather together to form a planetoid. This isn't even mentioning the necessary prerequisites that bring the star into existence, a process that occurs deep in Nebulae, colossal gatherings of gases that provide the atmospheric conditions for hydrogen to ignite and produce a star.
2 And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
As was mentioned above, dust clouds only ever coalesce into suitably large bodies around other larger gravitational forces, such as suns. Further into the text this inaccuracy is even more striking and obvious. It's also worthy that the Bible describes the Earth as being covered in water. More on this particular point below. As a final note, it is odd that God is described as a spirit "moving over the surface of the waters". This is a distinctly tangible prescence for a supposedly omnipresent God. Indeed, this ability of universal observation is a trait that only seems to have latched onto God later on in the Bible.
3 Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.
4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
Even a child will tell you that light and darkness do not require separating from each other. Wherever light is produced, darkness will be eliminated. Light itself is a form of electromagnetic radiation, with visible light a stupendously small section of possible "bandwidths" of this radiation. What our eyes perceive is effectively this radiation, which travels in the form of waves, shaped much like the waves you see in the ocean. These waves travel into our eyes, interact with the various components of the eye, producing an image that is sent to the brain. Darkness itself is not really a tangible entity, as it is merely a state in which no visible light rays are present. Radio waves are another type of electromagnetic radiation, though the crests of the waves are much further apart. Shorter wavelengths produce X-rays and Gamma Rays, often used in medical application but deadly to humans and other types of organic life in large doses. Yet none of these different wavelengths produce any kind of visible light for us to see. Our eyes are blinkered to the vast array of the electromagnetic spectrum, an analogy eloquently expressed by Professor Richard Dawkins as "the mother of all Burkas". If the eyes of the Burka were an inch long, representing our perception of electromagnetic radiation, the Burka would be massive in size, with many miles of materials covering the body, and equally as much covering the head. So even when we humans may see darkness, "light" is still present.
5 And God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
It is worth pointing out now that the Bible refers to a day passing. This is important further on in the text.
6 Then God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters."
7 And God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so.
8 And God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.
Firstly, it's worth noting that God appears to have made a blunder in regards to the creation of the Heavens. Remember back in the very first line, God is described to have created the Heavens and the Earth. Unless this is a very badly written prose that fails to properly attenuate the present action of the protagonist (in this case Yahweh), the action of the creation of the Heavens is performed twice. Secondly, the "expanse" as described in this passage is a literal covering that is said to cover the entirety of the Earth. Heaven, in a very literal sense, is real according to the Bible, an actual tangible plot of land floating above the Earth. Our travels to the moon and expansion, however small, into the deepest reaches of space via satellites, have proven this theory to be utterly false. Also note yet another mention of a day passing.
9 Then God said, "Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear"; and it was so.
10 And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters He called seas; and God saw that it was good.
Credit where credit is due, this description is somewhat marginally accurate. It is true that the seas as they are present on the Earth are not a permanent fixture. The geography of the globe changes over many millions of years, the production of plate tectonics which see massive sections of land moving and grinding against each other on top of a "bed" of viscous magma. These movements can be seen in mountain ranges, where plates have driven against each other literally forcing the ground up into the air, or conversely in the centre of the Atlantic Ocean in the form of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. However, the idea of water gathering together to form dry land is contentious. The net amount of land present on Earth is a result of two factors; one is the amount of water present that isn't currently in a vapour or ice form, and the other is the natural layout of the surface of the planet. Though the continents have moved away and towards each other over many millions of years, the general size of the land has remained constant. The unique shapes of the present continents suggest that at one point the entire of the Earth's landmass was a single Supercontinent known as Pangaea. Taking all this into account, the Bible's description of the creation of the land is remarkably simple in the context of what we now know about plate movements.
11 Then God said, "Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind, with seed in them, on the earth"; and it was so.
12 And the earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit, with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.
13 And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.
There are a few errors to point out here. First is that, as we shall soon see, at this point in the creation story there is no Sun present to allow the plants to photosynthesize. Though plants are capable of living for short periods without sunlight, many species will quickly wither and die if they are not exposed to some form of light. In regards to the order of the creation of organisms on Earth in general, evolutionary science has shown us that animals and plants evolved at around the same time and parallel to each other. One did not come observably before the other. This isn't even mentioning the millions of years prior to any multi-cellular organisms being present, where the most complicated life were single cell Prokaryotes. Then again, many believers may disregard the process of evolution as being against the idea that God created life on Earth. This is a subject we will look at in greater detail sometime in the future, but for now it is important to note that plants and animals do not appear at different points in the observable timeline of life on Earth.
14 Then God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years;
15 and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth"; and it was so.
16 And God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also.
17 And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth,
18 and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good.
In this section, the "greater light" and the "lesser light" are the sun and the moon respectively. Immediately, we see a problem since the moon itself does not produce any light. As Earth's only visible satellite from the surface of the planet, the light we see is the result of light from the sun reflecting at various angles. As the moon orbits the planet it "waxes and wanes", creating the unique passing of light over the surface. The Bible appears to imply that the moon produces it's own light and given governance over the night. Still this could be seen as allegorical, but after all what we are supposedly reading is an accurate record of the creation of Earth. Stars are mentioned, but their composition isn't given. Indeed, with their position in "the expanse", the literal dome over the planet, the Bible completely and utterly gets it wrong on this front. We know what stars are; they are massive spheres that burn hydrogen. Our Sun is such a star, while the ones we see in the sky are massive distances away. Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth apart from the Sun, is 4.2 light years. Light years is a unit of measurement, with one light year the distance a ray of light can travel in a vacuum over the space of a year. This is a insanely huge distance, close to 9.4 trillion kilometres. Thus the Bible's idea of the stars, stuck onto a dome just a few hundred feet above the surface of the Earth, is downright childish. Lastly, it is only at this point that the sun is even created. Prior to this day and night was cycling somehow, yet even the most creative mind would be hard pressed to figure out how exactly this is probably without a sun present to define the start and end of each day. God may have created light prior to this and separated it from the darkness, but there is no mention of the passing of that light over the Earth, or indeed if it does pass at all.
19 And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.
As we have seen in the previous paragraph, this is now technically the first day.
20 Then God said, "Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens."
21 And God created the great sea monsters, and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
22 And God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth."
23 And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.
Again like the idea of plantation being present before animals, evolutionary speaking birds did not come before land animals. Modern day birds are direct descendants of Dinosaurs and other such therapods. While there is some accuracy in water-bourne organisms coming before land animals, water being the optimum environment for life to emerge, it is still after the production of plants, again events that did not happen separately but concurrently with each other.
24 Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind"; and it was so.
25 And God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
Since in the previous lines no mention was made of single-cell organisms or dinosaurs, it's no surprise then that land animals are all created at once in a similar vein. This is again a gross simplification, though not as starkly inaccurate as the previous order. However it is again noteworthy that land animals and birds have evolved in tandem with each other, and indeed land animals far predated their flighted cousins.
26 Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
27 And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
28 And God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
It may be a moot point to bring this up before we have fully discussed the issue of evolution, but the spontaneous creation of humans is again inaccurate to reality. Modern humans, like every other organism, are the result of millions of years of evolution. In our case we diverged from the "Great Ape" families such as chimpanzees and bonobos some 2.5 million years ago. It is also odd that God would say "let Us make man in Our image". God is supposed to be a single entity, the only entity present since the beginning of time. Just who is this "Us" and "Our" that God refers to? Even more telling is that God mentions "Our image". This suggests that God, anthropomorphically speaking, bares at least a passing resemblance to humans. Of course, this idea of personifying deities is nothing new. The pantheon of Greek gods all had distinctly human traits associated with them. Thus it is no surprise this same occurrence happens with the God of the creation story. In this sense, it is God who resembles us rather than we resembling God, a theme that I shall discuss in further posts.
29 Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you;
30 and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food"; and it was so.
31 And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
It is worth pointing out that, while as omnivores we are capable of eating a variety of food substances, the vast majority of plants and meats are not suitable for human consumption. In mild cases they may induce vomiting and in more severe cases death. Even in relatively biologically benign countries, such as the UK, many berries found on trees and bushes contain deadly chemicals such as cyanide. Uncooked meat in particular can be dangerous, with shellfish (any kind of organism that "sifts" it's food in order to eat) a major cause across the world. A counter argument to this would be that this was the perfect "Garden of Eden" as discussed later in the book of Genesis, though at this point there is no distinction between the plants of Eden and the plants outside of this garden.
Part 2 coming up within the next few days.
Monday, 5 May 2008
The (mostly) empty universe
Throughout much of human history, where science could not answer questions we would fill in the blanks with myth. Old Norse mythology claimed that our world was sand witched between various others containing mythical entities such as Aesir or Dwarves. Greek mythology had our world carried on the shoulders of the Titan Atlas, whose name to this day refers to maps of our planet. Taoism has Pangu, the de facto creator of the Earth, pushing the ground and the sky apart before becoming the various elements of our universe, including the wind, stars, sun and moon. Whether or not any of these stories provoke a feeling of grandeur and untold complexity, the truth of the matter is they are, in cosmological terms, remarkably stunted. None of them even hint at the utter vastness of our Universe. Many of these creation myths seem content with describing the creation of the Earth as a one-time deal, without any mention of other planets, and stars an arbitrary element without real purpose.
Cosmology and the observation of our Universe, even on a local scale, has produced a reality that no creation myth comes close to describing. To say that our planet is small in comparison to the Universe at large would be a gross understatement. If one were to make an analogy, if the Universe were represented somehow in terms of the Earth itself, our planet wouldn't even be the smallest part of the smallest element of the smallest atom. Our Universe is vast, more vast than any one human could possibly comprehend. It is not inconceivable to assume that if every human were to document each inch of the sky in terms of stars, planets and so on, we wouldn't have covered a fraction of what was present in the Universe by the time we died.
In this sense, the idea that Earth was created specifically by God for the purpose of his divine plan is in many ways ridiculous. Talk to any believer and more often as not they will recount to you just how significant our small planet really is, how is it the only planet that God has seen to grace with life. Looking beyond the fact we've yet to find hard evidence of sentient life in the Universe, taking this viewpoint when considering the Universe at large takes a mind-bogglingly rejection of basic facts.
The amount of redundancy, according to Theists, is staggering on a scale that is difficult to communicate. Let's start out small; consider our own solar system. Arguments on the status of Pluto or other bodies as planets or not aside, it is clear to us that there are other planets currently orbiting our Sun. On clear nights at the right times of year with telescopes you can easily confirm this yourself, with both Venus and Mars clearly visible. However many planets there may be around our Sun, it is clear only one houses life at present; Earth. Currently there are theories that life may be present on Mars in certain underground caverns, and the icy waters of Io, one of the satellites of Jupiter, may prove fruitful. Even evidence of simple bacterial life was found in meteorites from Mars. When considering the necessary unique construction of our planet as sole benefactor to human life, one has to take a long think as to what possible purpose the other planets might serve in a Theistic world. Certainly they were never intended for us to live on, given their considerably hostile environments compared to our own. Their gravitational fields have no effect to us on Earth, and we never come close enough to their orbit for them to have any real significance. In short, the other planets in our solar system, as is the life that was once, and could still be present, on Mars, are redundant.
It is hard to truly express just how redundant a lot of Universe is if you believe that the Earth is the only planet of worth, or at the very least the only planet worthy of God's good work. No single figure can hope to express it adequately, and many people will just not even give the idea any thought. But if it is indeed true that the entirety of creation is present solely for one planet, ours, amongst all others, one has to wonder just why God would throw so much into such a relatively small project.
Cosmology and the observation of our Universe, even on a local scale, has produced a reality that no creation myth comes close to describing. To say that our planet is small in comparison to the Universe at large would be a gross understatement. If one were to make an analogy, if the Universe were represented somehow in terms of the Earth itself, our planet wouldn't even be the smallest part of the smallest element of the smallest atom. Our Universe is vast, more vast than any one human could possibly comprehend. It is not inconceivable to assume that if every human were to document each inch of the sky in terms of stars, planets and so on, we wouldn't have covered a fraction of what was present in the Universe by the time we died.
In this sense, the idea that Earth was created specifically by God for the purpose of his divine plan is in many ways ridiculous. Talk to any believer and more often as not they will recount to you just how significant our small planet really is, how is it the only planet that God has seen to grace with life. Looking beyond the fact we've yet to find hard evidence of sentient life in the Universe, taking this viewpoint when considering the Universe at large takes a mind-bogglingly rejection of basic facts.
The amount of redundancy, according to Theists, is staggering on a scale that is difficult to communicate. Let's start out small; consider our own solar system. Arguments on the status of Pluto or other bodies as planets or not aside, it is clear to us that there are other planets currently orbiting our Sun. On clear nights at the right times of year with telescopes you can easily confirm this yourself, with both Venus and Mars clearly visible. However many planets there may be around our Sun, it is clear only one houses life at present; Earth. Currently there are theories that life may be present on Mars in certain underground caverns, and the icy waters of Io, one of the satellites of Jupiter, may prove fruitful. Even evidence of simple bacterial life was found in meteorites from Mars. When considering the necessary unique construction of our planet as sole benefactor to human life, one has to take a long think as to what possible purpose the other planets might serve in a Theistic world. Certainly they were never intended for us to live on, given their considerably hostile environments compared to our own. Their gravitational fields have no effect to us on Earth, and we never come close enough to their orbit for them to have any real significance. In short, the other planets in our solar system, as is the life that was once, and could still be present, on Mars, are redundant.
Head out a bit further, to other stars in our galaxy. Our Sun is just one of many stars clumped together in a galaxy formation. The amount of stars in a single galaxy is difficult to give a precise number for, but estimates put it between two hundred billion and four hundred billion stars. Attempting to convey just how vast a number that is is difficult for humans, because we rarely have to deal with numbers so large. To put it into some kind of context, with the most conservative estimate possible of two hundred billion, if one were to count from one to this number, and each number took a second to say, it would take approximately six thousand, three hundred and thirty seven years to finish counting. While not every star in our galaxy would have planets, there is still the problem of what purpose the huge amount of other stars would serve given we get all of our needed heat and light from our Sun already. The approximate percentage redundancy of stars in our universe, if you consider our star to be the only significant one, is 99.99999999995%.
Now let's consider the rest of the Universe, namely all the other galaxies. While we cannot say for certain how many galaxies exist given that what we can observe of the Universe is based primarily on the speed of light (namely certain galaxies being so far away that the light they emit has yet to reach us), approximations put it at the hundreds of billions. This is again a vast number. In this sense we're not just talking hundreds of billions of redundant stars, but hundred of billions of billions of redundant stars. To put this kind of redundancy as a percentile would be futile as it would take several pages to type out the value. If one were to apply the same logic of counting every second to count all of the stars in the Universe, even if you were to have begun counting at the believed creation of the Universe, some 13.7 billion years, you still wouldn't have finished it to this day, and would most likely have many more billions of years left to count. It is near to indescribable just how much of our Universe is redundant if you truly believe that the Universe was created for humans alone. This isn't even considering the vast distances between the galaxies which are usually exponentially greater than the size of the galaxies themselves, distances in which nothing but the occasional single atom can be found.
It is hard to truly express just how redundant a lot of Universe is if you believe that the Earth is the only planet of worth, or at the very least the only planet worthy of God's good work. No single figure can hope to express it adequately, and many people will just not even give the idea any thought. But if it is indeed true that the entirety of creation is present solely for one planet, ours, amongst all others, one has to wonder just why God would throw so much into such a relatively small project.
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