Right To Think

Thanks to Andrew Parker’s recent book The Genesis Enigma, there are new rumblings in the creationist world claiming that actually, Genesis makes a lot of sense when you compare it to the “scientific” version of Earth’s creation. The order of events, they say, appears to be the same as in the geological record, and since the ancient goat-herders who dreamed the story up couldn’t possibly have known about cosmology and geophysics, this similarity suggests that Genesis was divinely inspired, Therefore, God exists. QED.

I hate to burst your bubble, theists, but claiming that Genesis is the same (or even close to) the actual order of events is a bit like arguing that the plot of The Hunt For Red October closely reflects the narrative of The Odyssey, because they’re both about sailors. Here is the Jewish sequence of events, as laid out in Genesis 1:

1) Day One. The Earth is formless, and all that exists is water (verse 2).
2) Light appears, cycle of day and night begins (verses 3-6).
3) Day Two. A “firmament” is created, which divided the water into two parts, above and below (verses 6-7).
4) All the water below the firmament is gathered together “in one place”, and dry land appears (verses 9-10)
5) Day Three. Plants (grasses, seed-bearing plants and fruit trees) are created (verses 11-12).
6) Day Four. God creates the sun, moon and stars (verses 14-19).
7) Day Five. God creates aquatic life (including, specifically, “great whales”) and birds (verses 20-23).
8) Day Six. God creates land animals (verses 24-25).
9) God creates Man (verses 26-27).

Leaving aside the argument that using “Day” to mean “ an epoch of several million years” is not an interpretation readily suggested by the text, here’s what’s wrong with the idea that the above represents the same sequence of events as the “scientific” explanation:

1) Earth is “without form, and void”. I’ll grant that the loose aggregation of particles which eventually created our planet could be described thus. But this idea of everything being covered in water is just odd. The only water that could have existed in the accretion on Earth would have either been frozen solid or locked in chemical combination with other elements. It certainly would not have been the “deep” described in Genesis.
2) A cycle of day and night without the Sun (which won’t be manufactured until Day Four, remember) is quite simply ridiculous. Day and night result from the rotation of the Earth combined with the light from the sun – without a directional light source (which Genesis doesn’t yet have), you can’t have day and night.
3) The nearest parallel in reality for this event would have to be the “Big Whack” or Theia Impact, the hypothesis which describes the creation of the moon by extraterrestrial collision. Such an event would have created enough energy to release water molecules into the early atmosphere, which I suppose could be argued to be “above the firmament”. However, if this is indeed the event referred to in Genesis, we face the slight problem that it also created the moon – which by the Genesis account, isn’t due for two more days.
4) Dry land has been around for a while on our early proto-planet – as we’ve already seen, the water was locked up in what we would consider “dry” matter. So, rather than creating dry land from the water, it would be more historically accurate for God to create water from dry land – which is emphatically not what He does here.
5) Plants, even the algae, mosses and lichens which formed the first examples of botanical life, would really have struggled to exist without the sun to power their photosynthesis. As you know, we’re still waiting for the sun to turn up… On top of that, Genesis specifically references “seed-bearing herbs” and “trees which bear fruit”, both of which are very late evolutionary adaptations by the plant kingdom. Fruit-bearing trees, for example, didn’t turn up until after the advent of land animals (since without animals to eat the fruit and thus increase the plant’s propagation prospects, there was no biological incentive to develop such a strategy).
6) The sun, moon and stars turn up. Hurray! Of course, this rather ignores the fact that in reality, the stars actually existed long before the Earth (in fact, as Fred Hoyle’s work showed, without the stars generating heavier elements than hydrogen and helium, there wouldn’t have been anything to make the Earth from). And as we’ve already established, leaving the creation of the sun until this late stage constitutes some very poor planning on God’s part.
7) Life arises in the oceans? Fair enough, that gels well with what we know from biology. But whales? They evolved from land-dwelling mammals that returned to the oceans, but since there aren’t any land animals yet, there’s nothing for the poor whale to evolve from. As for the birds, they too are descendants of land-dwellers – dinosaurs, in this case – and so are also rather short of any ancestors from which to inherit their characteristics. God jumps the gun again.
8) Land animals appear – now, God, you may have some birds and whales. The idea that “cattle and creeping thing[s] and beast[s] of the earth” all turned up together simultaneously is more than a little flawed, but Day Six is at least sort of in sequence.
9) And finally, Homo Sapiens – that’s pretty much in the right place.

So one day out of six seems to be in the right order. For comparison, here’s the order we would expect if Genesis followed the evidence:

1) Sun and stars (Day Four)
2) Earth, dry as a bone (Day Two, afternoon)
3) Day and night (from the Earth’s rotation, effectively contiguous with the creation of the Earth) (Day One)
4) Clouds, water and oceans (Day Two, morning)
5) Moon (Day Four)
6) Fish (or “sea creatures”, to be more exact – microscopic zooplankton and phytoplankton) (Day Five)
7) Plants – but only mosses and ferns, no flowering plants yet. (Day Three)
8) Land animals (Day Six)
9) Flowering plants (Day Three)
10) Birds (Day Five)
11) Man (Day Six)

Sorry, but as far as I can see, Genesis is no closer to reality than the Babylonian or even Shinto equivalent. If you chuck in enough creative interpretation (a la Andrew Parker) you might be able to shoehorn it into the scientific facts, but I don’t own a shoehorn that big!

Gotta love those medieval gargoyle builders – obviously someone was not a fan of Archbishop Konrad of Cologne. He was a bit of an arse, with a career notable mainly for regular bouts of treachery, so it’s easy to see why the architects of this particular church might have been a little… imaginative in their depiction of him. For one thing, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have been that flexible – no yoga in the Middle Ages, you see (leastways not in Cologne).

(hat tip, as always, to FailBlog)

My good friend andywoo (also known on this blog by the handles andybeingachristian and andyinthepiewithalmonds) has an interesting post up at My Big Fat Words on the nature of truth (that should probably be capitalised: the nature of Truth). He’s arguing against the idea of subjective truth, the post-modern concept that all perspectives can be equally valid. I agree with him… up to a point.

In any instance where a statement can be wholly true or false, it can only be one or the other*. We may not know which it is, but we can safely say that if proposition A is true, it cannot also be false. andywoo then applies this logic to religion, pointing out that the claims of many faiths are mutually exclusive, and therefore that if one is true, the others must be false. Again, all well and good. The problem arises when one tries to establish which of these opposing religious viewpoints is correct.

The only tool, and I do mean the only tool, available to theists when they grab their metaphysical plastic shovel and delve into the Pic’n’Mix of religion, is faith. Muslims have faith in the words of the Qur’an. Christians trust the Bible. Buddhists are confident of future Nirvana, Hindus believe in Krishna, Mormons rely on the words of Joseph Smith. If you have faith that one of these religions is true, you can automatically discount the others as false. The reason this is problematic is the subjective nature of faith. Truth may be objective, but faith certainly isn’t, and using a subjective tool to establish an objective fact is doomed to failure. It’s as though I set out to determine the boiling point of water by “believing” it to be 70°C: no matter how strongly I have faith in the 70° theory, I can only find out the truth of the matter by actually measuring the temperature of boiling water. If I rely solely on my belief, on my intuition that water boils at 70°, then I will forever be mistaken. Not “using a different perspective”, not “perpetrating an equally valid viewpoint,” I will just be wrong.

For this reason, we can only arrive at the truth by objective means. That means examining evidence, collating data and giving credence only to that which can be proven. Only then do we stand a chance of finding out what is and is not actually true.

*I’m ignoring quantum in this. It is possible for two contradictory statements to be simultaneously true when referring to the quantum state of a particle prior to observation (see Schrodinger’s Cat), but for the purposes of this post I’m only concerning myself with formal logic.

It’s carnival time again! Welcome to the 134th Carnival of the Godless.

And the nominees are: first up, Ron Gold of The Invisible Pink Unicorn, presenting the IPU Awards for 2009. Hotly contested, the IPU Awards celebrate both the wisest of skeptics and the most foolish of theists; by comparison the Academy Awards look like a WI jam-making contest.

If you enjoyed that, chanson is soliciting nominations for the first Spawn of Brodie Awards at Main Street Plaza. It’s LDS-centric, of course, but since they’ll probably baptize you by proxy once you die, I reckon your vote’s as good as any Mormon’s.

Whilst we’re on the subject of Mormons, how many people (outside of Utah) have actually sat down and had a conversation with one (at least a conversation that ran to more than, “Get off my doorstep!”)? Marc at Desertscope has done so, at length, and recounts some of the highlights.

To complete the Mormon hat-trick, Craig over at Yes I Am explains the fundamental hypocrisy of the Mormon stance on gay rights.

Elsewhere, TJ Morgan deals with the topical subjects of Haiti and Pat Robertson, but rather than go down the well-trodden path of “Robertson is an imbecile” (we KNOW that already), Travis looks at why Pat’s ideas are really no weirder than those of other Christians.

In a similar vein, Cubik’s Rube looks at a slightly less noted, but equally inane, Christian response to the Haitian disaster, that of Archbishop Sentamu of York. Half-assed theodicy, anyone?

Worried about the modern scourge that is identity theft? Alexander Bisignano at Chromosone Chronicles reckons it could get a lot worse… Looks like Brad Pitt may have cause for alarm.

The Elf on a Walkabout that is Louis Farnham has been visiting some Thai Temples, and discovering that they’ve made vast (and profitable) improvements on the traditional church collection plate.

Larry Wallberg (whom some of you may remember as the author of No More Hornets, but who now runs My Old Kentucky Homesite) still has a bee in his bonnet about the Ten Commandments, which apparently can be displayed in US courthouses – if you’re a theocratic moron like Judges McKeague and Forester. Mind you, if they have to be on show, Larry has found a way of making them a bit more globally relevant…

Lancelot Kirby, the Polymath from Portsmouth, has important news – it seems he’s finally divined the Republican Master Plan, and it doesn’t involve getting Palin into office.

Over at The Gaytheists, Michelle Bell has a go at explaining technology to small children. I need some practice at that myself, so thanks for the advice, Michelle.

It seems creationists never tire of being told that they’re wrong, which is why we’re thankful Ron Britton never tires of telling them. His latest victim at Bay of Fundie is YEC Marcus Ross and his ridiculous arguments for why Darwin was wrong. This is part of a series of fiskings, so don’t forget to read the others.

And finally the Arizona Atheist takes down all the major arguments for God in one fell swoop. No-one can accuse the guy of not being thorough.

The next Carnival will be partying at Homologous Legs on Valentine’s Day, so get your romantic submissions in.

From a recent discussion on Facebook’s AANR group:

Gagan Khan wrote:

Starting from the smallest to the biggest.

1) The infinitely small electrons revolve around the nucleus of the atom.

2) Muslims go round the Kaaba, which is at the geographic center of the Earth. At the time of Hajj, only black and white dressing is worn by all people.

3) The moon revolves around the earth

4) The earth revolves around the sun and billions of other planets and satellites revolving around their suns/stars.

5) Our Solar System is revolving around may be the center of the Universe or another super massive galaxy/Star

Just wondering if there is some kind of link?

Naturally, the good folk of AANR tore him a new one in moments for such a piss-poor apologetic, citing the faults in his understanding of particle physics, cosmology and (needless to say) basic logical inference. It’s hardly worth repeating their fisking here, though feel free to follow the thread itself if you’d like to see how it’s done. What I’m interested in here is the oft-repeated claim that the Kaaba is the “geographic centre of the Earth”. It seems to be bandied about quite a lot by Muslims, so let’s look at what they’re trying to say.

First off, it’s clear to anyone who isn’t a flat-earther (and that’s not as unpopular in Islam as you might expect) that Mecca can’t be at the centre of the Earth. Balmy as the Saudi summer is, it falls somewhat short of the 7,000°C temperature at the planet’s core. Muslim geographers, then, must be referring to Mecca as the centre of the Earth’s surface. But how can you pinpoint a centre for the surface of a sphere?

Well, as you might expect, I did some digging. Unsurprisingly, it appears that the main Muslim argument for Mecca being the centre of the Earth is, “it just is, alright? Now shut up, or there’s a jihad right here with your name on it, infidel.” Some Islamic apologists, though, have attempted a more “scientific” explanation…

The first of these relies on the idea that the Neil Armstrong and his team discovered that the Earth emits “special radiations” when they landed on the Moon in 1969. These “special radiations” turned out to emanate from – you’ve guessed it – the Kaaba, and Armstrong & co. published these results online for 21 days, before realising the dangerous truth of what they’d uncovered and deleting the document from the web. This proves that Mecca is the centre of the Earth, because of it’s “special radiation”.

Did you spot the mistake? Neil Armstrong found evidence for the Kaaba’s radiation in 1969, and published the information on the internet… in 1969. How many people were surfing the web in the late 60s? Not that many – ARPANET, the predecessor of the intertubes we know and love, only went online in ’69, and was probably not available to Muslim fundamentalists wishing to prove their point (seeing as how it was restricted to the US Defense Agency). Apart from Muslim apologists, no-one, including Neil Armstrong, seems to be aware of this suppressed document, so I think we can put this theory straight in the bin labeled, “Stuff they just made up.”

The second argument concerns the Earth’s magnetic field. Apparently, the Kaaba is a magnetic “equilibrium zone”, and this proves that it is positioned exactly halfway between the North and South poles. How it manages this feat in spite of being some 2000km north of the equator (which actually does demonstrate a degree of magnetic equilibrium) is beyond me. The “stuff they just made up” bin is looking pretty full…

These arguments are both the work of Dr. ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid of the Egyptian National Research Centre, who appears obsessed with making the world replace Greenwich Mean Time with “Mecca Mean Time”. Ever wondered why Egypt isn’t a leading scientific power? I imagine Dr Sayyid may have something to do with it… He did lead me, however, to an argument which at least makes a sort of sense; namely that Mecca’s distance from the North and South poles creates the Golden Ratio.

Maths time. Mecca is 7,632km from the North Pole, and 12,372km from the South. The ration of these two distances is 1.621 – sort of vaguely close to the Golden Ratio of 1.618… The ratio of the distance from the North Pole to the South Pole (20,004km) and from Mecca to the South Pole is 1.617, which is actually quite close to the Golden Mean, although again, it isn’t actually the right figure. By rounding both ratios to the number we want to arrive at (hey, it works for economists), it is established that Mecca, whilst not at any geographic “centre”, at least occupies a slightly interesting position on the map. Of course, this means that any other point along the same latitude is also the centre of the Earth, so the Sudanese town of Salala, Borj-Mokhtar in Algeria, Quang Ha in Vietnam and many other towns and cities are equally unique.

Whenever a religion tries to make scientific statements about the real world, it invariably results in an embarrassment for the religion concerned. Dr Sayyid joins Ken Ham, Kent Hovind and many more in being the drunken uncle dancing to ABBA at his religion’s wedding party.

I was chatting with a work colleague a few weeks ago (back when I had a job, before Babyshui became my primary employer) and he mentioned that he, too, was an atheist. Fantastic, I said. What was it that drove him to atheism? Was it the weakness of theistic arguments, the lack of evidence of the divine, the problem of suffering, the increasing advances of empirical science, the hypocritical behavior of the religious… what had brought him to the conclusion that there was, in fact, no god? His response? “Dunno, really. Never really thought about it.”

Now, I’d like to claim this as a victory for atheism. After all, if my co-worker can arrive at the nonexistence of God without even putting his mind to it, it’s clear that atheism functions as a sort of default setting in the human mind. ‘Twas not ever so – a few millennia ago, our knowledge of the world was such that most folk who sat down to consider the universe couldn’t help but assume divine intervention – where else did the rain come from? Nowadays, however, your average Joe has enough of an education to avoid the need to posit gods as a cause for natural phenomena, and so those who don’t give the issue much thought are as likely (probably more likely) to be atheists as anything else.

I’d like to claim a victory, but I can’t. In fact, I’d rather spend time with a fervent believer who has at least thought about their faith than an atheist who just finds all that philosophy stuff a bit dull, so ignores it. The claims made by religion have truly gargantuan ramifications if true, and so it behoves any human who encounters them to grant them consideration. True, they don’t stand up under scrutiny – a bright four-year-old can demolish the Cosmological Argument in seconds (and many, I’m glad to say, do), but to simply ignore the issue, to wallow in intellectual lethargy on the topic of religion, seems to me as ignorant as unquestioning acceptance of the faithful’s creed. The person who is an atheist simply because they’ve “never really thought about it” is as mentally bankrupt as the pew-filler who goes to church each week for the same reason.

I call this blog Right To Think because I believe we are granted that right by the very nature of our minds. Just as the right to vote, the right to free speech or the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness implies (to me at least) an obligation to exercise that right, so too does our right to think impel us to use our minds. Atheism through lack of thought is a cop-out – our highly customizable brains should never be left on the factory settings, no matter how sensible the default position.