Dinosaur Ark

7 Comments

Over the weekend I had a detailed comment left on my post about the discovery of Aardonyx celestae, found here. Since the comment is a lengthy rebuttal, my answer begged to become a post of its own, so I present it here. The first remark I have to make is that my commenter wrongly suggested two problematic assumptions: I “don’t care” about correctly representing Creationist viewpoints and that I “ridicule Christians.” For those many students who have taken my classes over the past 17 years, it is always clear that I respect all religious viewpoints; in fact, empathy is generally cited as one of my main characteristics. I vehemently defend the rights of individuals to believe the religion they believe to be right – e.g., I do care. As for the ridiculing Christians concern, I ridicule no person. I will, however, point out viewpoints that are ridiculous, “Creation Science” being one of the most obvious. As is clear to anyone who takes the time to survey Christianity, the large majority of Christians in the world have no problems with evolution. A small but vocal sub-sect of the religion, mainly based in America, is the main Christian group that supports Creationism.

My theological assailant tells me that the Hebrew word for “kind” in the Noachian account is “min” (the root, marked as “dubious” in the standard lexicon, is myn) and that it is “much broader” than the word translated “species.” The problem here is that the ancient Semitic viewpoint has been left unaddressed. For the ancient Israelite dog was dog and wolf was wolf, and ne’er would the twain meet. Arguing that a limited evolution has taken place in order to make room on the ark is a fatal flaw to the position. Once it has been admitted that the Noah story is not literally each and every species known, it is the equivalent to the ark springing a leak mid-deluge. The commenter’s examples of animals breeding only “within their kinds” is also problematic. Such “kinds” are not recognized by “nature” and numerous examples of viable offspring crossing species have been recorded. Nature simply doesn’t abide by the neat and tidy categories that the ancient Israelites recognized. Suggesting that two sauropods were all that was needed on the ark to produce everything from Titanosaurus to Anchisaurus is a stretch for even “day-age” theorists since the genetic differences between them are as immense as their body size differentials. This slippery use of the word “kind” has all the imprecision of a god-of-the-gaps.

Did God say to take seven pair of each clean animal? My Bible reads “two of each kind” in Genesis 6.19. But wait, the story changes in Genesis 7.3. Could it be that we have two separate sources (or “kinds”) here? My commenter does not inform me where the fresh-water fish came from; after God blew the water out of the cosmic dome (Genesis 8.1) they must have had time to evolve while the salt leeched out of the low-lying basins left behind by the flood and its marvelous geography-forming power. Good thing Noah had plenty of fresh water on the ark!

“Take time to consider what scientists have already said on the issue,” my debate partner adjures me. That’s just the problem, however. I do read what the scientists say. And all of them who write without a Genesis bias tell me that the ark story is not scientifically feasible. More than that, being a life-long Bible reader, I came to that conclusion as well, based on the genre of the story (myth). I never claim to be the first to find contradictions that prove problematic for the Bible – I simply try to make my readers consider the implications of the fact that such contradictions indeed exist.

What I find so interesting about such criticism is that the author of the comment has not tested his/her hypothesis about what I actually believe. On principle I do not share my personal religious beliefs on my blog, just as I do not share them in the classroom. What I believe is immaterial to the issue of Creationism; in this issue the facts speak for themselves. The fact is “Creation Science” is science fiction.

7 thoughts on “Dinosaur Ark”

  1. Jonathan

    The “contradiction” is ridiculous. Everyone knows there were no dinosaurs on the Ark. *That’s* why they’re *extinct*! 😛
    I’m always fascinated to see how some folks spin elaborate explanations for the scientific inaccuracies in Genesis. But if they lose the essential point of simplicity, it’s hard to call the explanations “science.”

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  2. jimgetz

    I ran through Gen 1-11 in my classes on Thursday. In one class an argument developed over how I was reading the text. For one group my reading was too literal, for the other it wasn’t literal enough.

    The underlying issue of course was that reading the text “literally” (i.e. literarilly) entails a conflict with the scientific paradigm of rightness that both groups wanted to see in the text. Both groups wanted the Bible to by right, but neither could look beyond a scientific epistemology.

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  3. Smoore

    Thank you for your response. I will do my best to address your points.

    You say that the majority of Christians accept evolution, and that may be so. However, majority opinion doesn’t always equal the correct opinion, so it is not enough to conclude that Christianity and evolution can be reconciled based on majority believe. At one point, most of the Western world accepted geocentricism. It wasn’t until scientists such as Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei (both Christians) proved that the earth and planets did, in fact, orbit the sun that this myth was debunked.

    To really understand whether the Bible can mesh with evolution, we must look at the Bible itself. I’m not going to focus on the creation week or whether “yom” represents a literal 24-hour day. You probably know all about that argument already. Suffice to say, I am arguing from a straightforward, literal, unadulterated reading of the text. There is a problem, though, when Christians accept evolution. With the close of the sixth day in the creation account, God declared that all He made was “very good.” When Jesus testified that “only God is good” in Mark 10:18, that sets the standard of good as being on par with God. So for creation to be “very good,” there cannot be any evil in it whatsoever.

    Death is described from Genesis 3 on as a punishment for sin. Romans 8 says that creation groans in painful anticipation of the coming “freedom of the glory of the children of God.” First Corinthians 15 says that the last enemy to be defeated is death. All this strongly supports that death is part of the curse in Genesis 3, and that before said curse, creation was to be upheld without sickness, injury, or any other malady that plagues our world today.

    Evolution cannot match this. Evolution requires death from the simplest of lifeforms to the most complex of creatures. If you argue that we see this in the fossil record, I will tell you that I see Noah’s flood. To say that God used death as a means to create the “very good” world He made is to create a false god altogether.

    Furthermore, the doctrine of the Messiah was first laid out in Genesis 3:15. This is in connection with the serpent bringing death, so that when the woman’s Seed crushes the serpent’s head, death is finally defeated and the curse is repealed. If this promise came a few billion years after creation, then what would be the point of promising a Savior to end death, which was apparently God’s tool for creation?

    From this, it is impossible to reconcile a believe in evolution with a belief in the Bible. Christians who claim to do so either have not examined the issue clearly or have bought into compromise theories (such as the gap theory) that supposedly correct this important detail.

    You say that my explanation of the Hebrew word “min” isn’t sustainable, and I apologize if I was unclear. First off, there are around two thousand years covered from Genesis 1 to Genesis 12. It is a very brief account. The point isn’t to explain every detail, only to say that it happened. Yet what details it does give are true.

    I’m not sure where your disagreement lies in this issue. I reviewed my original comment and felt like I wrote clearly there. The Noachian account never claims to take two of every known species of animal. That would be absurd, and you would have every reason to point it out for being ridiculous.

    SearchGodsWord.com defines the word “min” (there spelled “miyn”) in the same way I did (http://www.searchgodsword.org/lex/heb/view.cgi?number=04327). While I don’t own a copy of Strong’s Lexicon, it appears that the website is quoting from that.

    You wrote, “The commenter’s examples of animals breeding only ‘within their kinds’ is also problematic. Such ‘kinds’ are not recognized by ‘nature’ and numerous examples of viable offspring crossing species have been recorded. Nature simply doesn’t abide by the neat and tidy categories that the ancient Israelites recognized.”

    Starting with the end and going back, I don’t know for certain what the ancient Israelites recognized. Since the most accurate record we have of their culture is the Bible, that would seem to be the best indicator of what they thought. Regardless, Moses wrote Genesis and the Law some time between 1496 and 1456 BC (between the exodus and when he died). According to SearchGodsWord.com, there is only one usage of the word “min” or “miyn” outside of the Pentateuch, and that is in Ezekiel. This is hardly enough to give us an understanding of what the Hebrews believed regarding this word.

    Rather, to know what the word means, we must go back to how the Bible uses it. Genesis 1:11-12 says, “Then God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them’; and it was so. 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.” Then a few verses later, “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. … 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’ …. God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind” (vv 21,24-25). Thus a kind, according to Scripture, designates a group of animals that can breed together but cannot breed with members of another such group.

    You said that nature does not recognize these kinds, and that “numerous examples of viable offspring crossing species have been recorded.” As I wrote before, we have no contradiction here. According to the Bible’s own definition of this term “kind,” if two species can breed together then they are members of the same kind. [There is a newer branch of creation science called baraminology (from the words “‘bara” and “min”) that tries to examine and isolate the barriers between kinds.] These boundaries aren’t always easily defined, although it is generally safe to say that if two species closely resemble each other (such as the Galapagos Land Iguana and the Marine Iguana, or the polar bear and the grizzly bear; both pairs have produced documented hybrids). What we do not see in nature is an elk (deer kind) breeding with a gazelle (cattle kind), or parrot with a finch. This fortifies the biblical concept of kind, and it is plainly observable in nature.

    Next in the paragraph, you said, “Suggesting that two sauropods were all that was needed on the ark to produce everything from Titanosaurus to Anchisaurus is a stretch for even ‘day-age’ theorists since the genetic differences between them are as immense as their body size differentials.” Here I must confess that I was probably unclear with my meaning. The fossils of these different species of sauropod were all buried during the flood. With such a variety within this kind already present, Noah probably didn’t take one pair of animals to represent every living species of sauropod. More likely, he took, say, two Brachiosaurs. If God used only eight people to produce the seven billion people alive today, plus extinct populations of humans like Neanderthal, then He could have just as easily taken two sauropods to represent that kind after the flood. We know from Behemoth in Job that some dinosaur-like creatures existed after the flood.

    You point out that the word “kind” has a slippery meaning. That is true, although it is not detrimental to the text. It is slippery because the original animals that God created no longer exist, and all we have are thousands and millions of species that have descended from them. It isn’t always easy to know where a line should be drawn. But it is not detrimental because regardless of how large each kind truly is, it is clear that the word is much larger than a species.

    You brought up the different accounts of God’s instructions to Noah regarding the number of animals. In Genesis 6:19-20, God gives Noah the original number of two of every kind. Later, in Genesis 7:2-3, God adds to this instruction by having Noah take five additional members of every clean kind. This is hardly a contradiction. Noah was five hundred years old when God gave him the first set of instructions. The dimensions He gave were large enough to hold the greater number of animals, but probably for simplicity, He only mentioned the pairs because that wasn’t important yet. A hundred years later, when Noah is finished and God is ready to begin the flood, He tells Noah about the extra animals because it was only important during the loading process. God already ensured he would have room, so He was just telling Noah the most important details when he needed them.

    You also point out the adverse conditions that fish, particularly freshwater fish, had to live through. The following two articles from the Institute for Creation Research touch on this topic, although there is still more work to be done. http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=351 and http://www.icr.org/article/how-could-fish-survive-noahs-flood/.

    In response to my advice to read what other scientists have said, you said that “all of them who write without a Genesis bias tell me that the ark story is not scientifically feasible.” This statement is problematic because someone without a Genesis bias is someone who has a bias against Genesis. It is impossible to both believe the flood happened and that it did not, so whenever there is a dispute, the creationist will say it happened and the evolutionist will say it did not. Creationists look at all the fossils buried under massive rock layers as the work of a year-long, catastrophic flood. Evolutionists look at the same fossils in the same rock layers as being the result of isolated catastrophic events over millions of years. An evolutionist will automatically say the flood is impossible because he looks at the evidence through his own bias. No scientist is neutral, on either side of the argument.

    I really do not know what your personal religious beliefs are. Your previous article took a pretty derisive look at the Bible, which suggests that you do not believe it to be true or the word of God. To be fair, I have looked into the claims of evolution before with an open mind. I have considered their merits and found that they came up wanting. So when I ask you to be open-minded in considering alternatives to your own beliefs, I say that from the position of one who does attempt to do that himself.

    I am troubled by your closing statement: “The fact is ‘Creation Science’ is science fiction.” That you say this so assuredly means you are unwilling to look at it from a non-confrontational perspective. On what basis is it “science fiction”? If you mean because it is at odds with the accepted hypothesis of evolution, then your definition of science is different than mine.

    I suppose that by reading the rest of your blog, I would see more of these contradictions that you have pointed out. I genuinely would like to read more some time, but I have two weeks before finals, so I think I should delegate my time to studying first.

    Good day, sir. It has been fun.

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    • Thomas

      Smoore, I know I must be butting in on a long-standing debate you and Steve have been having, but I did want to point/ask a few things. The first is that I think you ought to be a little more careful when you say something like:

      “…it is impossible to reconcile a believe [sic] in evolution with a belief in the Bible. Christians who claim to do so either have not examined the issue clearly or have bought into compromise theories…”

      Do you really know this about ALL Christians (myself included) who believe in evolution? We either haven’t looked closely enough or have compromised? It may be worth the effort to find out why some Christians have left creationism and come to embrace evolution. May I point you to Coming To Peace With Science by Darrell Falk and The Language of God by Francis Collins?

      The second thing is that the problem of death before the fall is not something that proceeds only from evolution. You still have that problem even if you reject evolution and embrace an old earth.

      Thirdly, a question for you. You say that you have read about evolution and found it wanting. May I ask if you have read anything written by a proponent of evolution, someone who makes the case for it and gives reason why? Or have you read about evolution only from books by those who reject it? I am curious to know what you have read.

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  4. Smoore

    I would like to point out to Jonathan that within the Bible, post-flood, several dinosaur-like creatures are mentioned. The most common are Leviathan and Behemoth in Job. Others include “fiery flying serpents” and “fiery serpents,” the latter of which seem to be distinct from vipers.

    Outside of the Bible, there are countless dragon legends from around the world that must have some factual basis. I wouldn’t be so assured as to say there are any living today, although rumors of the “mokele-mbembe” and others in Africa are prevalent enough to have launched a few expeditions, the most recent of which being in 2009 with the MonsterQuest TV show on the History Channel.

    If you accept the long ages of evolution by default, then obviously the dinosaurs went extinct millions of years ago. But if you are willing to consider a much shorter timeline for the world, then dinosaur-human interactions are not so hard to accept.

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  5. Henk van der Gaast

    I remember Ren and Stimpy as well. I get most of my great arguments in science from just one scene.

    As obscene as it would be to Steve, my own proposition is that the events of the flood are long dead recollections of events that occurred before the proposed Noah was a little boy. There seems to be a lot of near east collections that predate the biblical account that was redacted about 600 BCE.

    I am amased at the chronologies of the previous poster. Could it be that Avrams culture came after that of Moshe’s? Its very clear from the bible when they thought Moshe’s troubadors were on the hop from the land of the pointy buildings. Its a pity that those “hints” are wasted on the poster.

    I am afraid to say, by my reckoning that the levantine culture encompassing a number of tribal groups and nations are now more clearly defined than just the second guessing of the almost Baalistic culture of Yahweh (or possibly Yah/Yaw).

    Steve has made me reconsider (by directing me to further skepticism of my own posits) decades old views that I had. This didnt only involve the constant excavation of the bible and Mesopotamia but the ugaritic and associated cultures of the Sinai , the digs in Syria the observations from Hittite and egyptian lore.

    To put it in a nutshell, if I didn’t believe in parroting creationist antiscientism 30 years ago, I certainly have had a few knobs twiddled in my brief stay on Wiggins net archaeology.

    I suppose people like being bored. Not reading the big picture means you miss the entire mythology of the bible.

    That is very sad, but I am impressed that somebody who hasn’t been to college can write so eloquently.

    I have a 18″ * 18″ box full of calculators I have dispossessed students of over my career. Would the creation movement like to take them when they get to prophecy in their next lecture in 2059? Best to be prepared.

    I’ll provide instructions for the most likely electron pathway within these technologically mind blowing instruments. You see, the great water sprite really didnt have time to sort out poles. Its in the bible…

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  6. Henk van der Gaast

    May I point out that science is basically a method that leads us to further understanding nature.

    Everything we hope to do will lead us to an even better understanding.

    It entails a healthy dose of skepticism!

    Since creation “science” hasn’t made posits that are testable (at least that haven’t miserably failed examination) the “science” component in the term is generally rejected by our rationalism.

    You can only cook from a cookbook.

    On the other hand…”rightness”, goodness!

    It’s almost up there with philosophical entities such as “Heart”, “Soul”, “Mind”, “Morals” and “Consciousness” as used in current vernacular.

    Not quite the convenient short hand the other terms use for exhaustive scientific investigations over the past.

    Think I’ll have a “quantum leap”. If I actually ever worked out what that entailed (I’d hate to defy any exclusion principle).

    Pet peeves, you’ve caught me out guys.

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