Robots and Religion

3 Comments

One of the constant duties I have as a “Robot Dad” (Soccer Mom just doesn’t apply here) is seeking funding for my daughter’s high school FIRST Robotics team. Always a supportive layman in the scientific venture to understand our world, I have encouraged this interest although I am pretty hopeless when it comes to understanding how it all works. So last night I found myself at a fund-raising, public-awareness event at the local minor league stadium. The Somerset Patriots stadium is just down the road, but I’d never been to a game before. I really don’t feel comfortable participating in crowd dynamics; I’d rather sit back and analyze than participate. And I have no real interest in sports. I wondered how I was going to survive being in such a foreign environment for several hours. Then my wife pointed out a, as it were, godsend.

Last night was “Faith Night” at the Somerset County Ballpark. The event was sponsored by Somerset Christian College, “the ONLY licensed and accredited Christ-centered, evangelical, undergraduate college in New Jersey.” Located in the appropriately denominated Zarephath, New Jersey, the small, extremely doctrinal college bought the privilege of a pre-game sermonette. Not too often does a public sporting event begin with references to “our Lord Jesus Christ;” I looked around for him but then remembered he’d been hit by a car just under two weeks ago. One of the administrators addressed the crowd and, trying to capture the elated, anticipatory feel of the moment, compared his college to a baseball game. I was busy handing out fliers and missed the early stages of his rhetoric, but when I heard him say, “third base is love,” my mind shifted to a more familiar baseball analogy I’d learned in high school. I imagined the prospective students’ interest when he went on to declare, “home base is Heaven!”

As two Christian motorcycle clubs solemnly rode their hogs around the field and local Catholic schools hawked their own fliers in competition, the sound system belted out any pop songs that had the word “faith” in them, no matter what the context. It was a circus-like atmosphere. I was surrounded by techies deeply immersed in science and human learning. We, in turn, were surrounded by an aggressive Christianity eager to claim as much territory as possible. Above it all wafted scents of searing flesh and deep-fried snacks. It seemed to me that a microcosm of American life was indeed evident at the stadium last night. Perhaps there is nothing as American as baseball after all.

Lead us not...

Indiana Wants Me

Leave a comment

The conservative evangelical Christian camp sometimes makes blogging on religion just too easy. The paper this morning reveals yet another evangelical, abstinence-only soap-boxer being caught with his boxers down. Indiana Representative Mark Souder is stepping down because of an extra-marital affair. To fill in the gaps on other such evangelical infidelities, I recommend Max Blumenthal’s Republican Gomorrah.

No, I do not rejoice in such revelations. The suffering of families brought on by such blatant hypocrisy cuts me deeply. The lesson we should all be learning from this is that self-righteousness is a sham. For all their faults, the more liberal factions of society are ready to admit that people are people and not cookie-cutter angels. They are inclined to admit that temptations exist, yet statistics demonstrate their marriages tend to be more secure and less plagued with infidelity. I tend to think it is because evangelical teaching has lost sight of what is truly important: people have always been, and still are, people. The belief that God has made one class of people better than others, and that saying sex doesn’t exist gives you the right to live in a pre-Edenic fantasy world, the Neo-Con is in very deep denial. No wonder many evangelicals distrust psychology!

I often ponder why this disconnect should exist at all. It seems that evangelicalism has been singularly poor at providing the tools to cope with reality. If temptation doesn’t exist for the blessed, then why bother developing strategies to deal with it? When the newspapers come out, it is easier to cast the first stone at the liberal media for airing dirty laundry than it is to examine your own hamper. Yet even the Bible itself has one important character criticizing the religious establishment as whitewashed tombs. No, I do not respond with glee to the sad outing of Mark Souder. I simply wish evangelicalism would truly advocate the honesty upon which it claims to be based.

Awaiting the Evolution

Leave a comment

My daughter’s taking the mandatory New Jersey high school biology tests this week. Probably designed to ensure that basic health risks are factored and understood, it is one of the few bulwarks of the correct teaching of evolution in the United States. As anyone who follows my college Michael Zimmerman’s blog in the Huffington Post realizes, Creationism is a constant menace to our country. Although many simplistically assume that the threat is gone, it is, alas, sleeping but not dead. Perhaps quiescent under the administration of a moderate president, the Creationists have not gone away. I fear an imminent backlash along with popular apocalyptic hype for the year 2012. The Creationists are out there, just beyond the perimeter fence. I can feel it.

Having grown up under the umbra cast by the Creationists, I know their resiliency well. In a high school current events class, I participated in a Creationist-Evolution debate that classmates still remember some three decades later. It would be a situation laughable if it weren’t such a serious threat. While society has continued to evolve since Scopes, most Americans are still convinced that there is something insidiously evil about evolution, as if the devil generated the first simple cells and set the entire process running. In a society where Creationists daily benefit from the advances of science – as any search for evolution on the internet will demonstrate – they hold their feet firmly on the brakes nevertheless, awaiting a snow-white stallion at the parting of the literal clouds overhead.

I am not alone in foreseeing this whiplash that’s about to come. Many analysts who know the radical Evangelical camp share my fits of nerves and jitters. The educated elite suppose they’ve been eliminated, but those of us who know the world of the uneducated faithful tremble with a fear not inspired by the Maya. Sarah Palin is one of the most popular people in this country right now, and the Creationists, I assure you, are already staring at their watches and counting each passing tick.

Neo-Cons marching straight to the polls

Wicker or Wicked?

2 Comments

While I continued officially unemployed I keep to a strict regimen of not watching television except on the weekends. Since we don’t have cable or even a digital conversion box, my viewing is limited to grainy VHS tapes or DVDs. Many of them I’ve watched over and over. Last night I picked out one of perennial favorites, The Wicker Man (1973, of course!) for late-night viewing. Although classified as a horror film, the only terror comes at the very end in a scene that I always find difficult to watch. What keeps me coming back to this film is its unrelenting criticism of religious hypocrisy. (That and the longing evoked by the footage of a Scotland I left many years ago.)

Briefly told, a Highland police sergeant, Neil Howie, is lured to a fictional Summerisle in a mouse-and-cat game where he ends up the victim of a neo-pagan cult. The stunned Christian constable cannot believe the superstition evident on the island could still exist in modern Britannia, leading to one of the highlights of the film. Questioning Lord Summerisle, played by a striking Christopher Lee, Howie accuses him of paganism. “A heathen, conceivably,” Summerisle concedes in a tight shot, “but not, I hope, an unenlightened one.” Howie is shown growing increasingly rude and unsympathetic, forging a makeshift cross to lay over a Druidic burial. He threatens Lord Summerisle with being investigated by the authorities of the Christian nation under whose aegis he falls. The tensions between religions grow until the final scene.

The constant interplay between control and conviction raises again and again what the true nature of religion is. Summerisle reveals that the neo-paganism began as an expedient way to encourage the locals in growing new strains of crops. The images of palm trees in the Hebrides may seem unwarranted, but having strolled among them on the Isle of Arran nature itself belies the orthodoxies of convention. Does religion rule by force of law, depth of conviction, or pure expediency? The makers of the film were wise enough to leave that to the viewer to decide. No wonder that on many a bleary-eyed weekend night, ousted from my once stable career by the overtly religious, I choose to watch, yet again, The Wicker Man.

Expect a Miracle

1 Comment

The Pope has been in Portugal. No visit to Portugal would be complete without a stop at the shrine of Fatima. Named for one of the most fascinating characters in Muslim history, Mohammed’s strong daughter Fatima, this small, centrally located town had no claims to fame until 1917. Suddenly three children declared that the Virgin Mary had appeared to them while tending their sheep. The story is about as eerie as the canonical photograph of the unsmiling youngsters. Their sincere proclamations were met with acceptance by many war-weary Europeans and predictions began to emerge from these visions. On October 13 that year some 70,000 pilgrims alleged that the sun itself danced, twirled, and took on new colors. Astronomers reported no solar anomalies at the time.

The events at Fatima have fascinated both religious and secular explorers of the supernatural. The religiously devout claim nothing shy of a miracle while those seeking more dramatic non-theistic explanations claim that aliens were behind the show. Whether or not a physical event transpired, something out of the ordinary occurred in Fatima that day. Now a permanent shrine graces the location. If the apparition appears again, she will be comfortably housed in doors, out of the elements. She might even see one of the bullets fired at Pope John Paul II during the famous assassination attempt. Many believe the Pope’s survival was itself a miracle.

Gnu version of Virgin under Glass

Now Pope Benedict XVI has visited the shrine where heaven once touched earth. Afterwards he climbed into the Popemobile, the motorized bullet-proof reliquary that allows papal viewing by the faithful while protecting Rome’s most valued asset. The message is clear: it is wonderful to believe in miracles, but it is prudent never to trust in them. Two of the three children (Jacinta and Francisco) died before they reached twelve, felled by the famed Spanish Influenza. The miracle that could have preserved their young lives never occurred. Lucia alone survived to 97. Expect a miracle? The odds are hard to predict on that one.

Lessing Down Your Kierkegaard

3 Comments

The Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped by again yesterday. They were very friendly and polite, and even remembered my name from the last visit. One of the missionaries was new to me, and she assured me that God’s name is Jehovah. She said the Bible proved this. The missionary who’d spoken to me before knew I was a former professor of religion. Nevertheless, they both worked at trying to get me to see the light. I extended to them the courtesy I extend to my students and blog readers, namely, of not revealing my own personal religious convictions. It must be really frustrating to try to convert someone when you don’t know what they already believe!

The point I never have the heart to bring up is God’s name. In fact, no one is certain as to what the divine name is in the Judeo-Christian tradition. “Yahweh” is the closest approximation, based on present conventions of transliterating Hebrew and reconstructing vowels that were never recorded. The word “Jehovah” is historically well understood. It begins with the Jewish reticence to speak God’s name aloud during the second temple period. In order to assure that a reader didn’t accidentally blurt out the divine name when reading Scripture, the Masoretes took the convention of writing the consonants of Yahweh (yhwh – Hebrew has no capital letters) with the vowels for the epithet “lord,” adonai in transliterated Hebrew. The initial J comes from the fact that to get a “y” sound in German a “j” is used. So we get the “J” from yhwh, the “a” from adonai, and alternate from there “h-o-v” (again, because of the Germanic origin of the word, a “v” was used instead of “w”) and finally, “a-h.” All together, this word, which was never used in biblical times, becomes Jehovah, a new name for God.

I admire the conviction of those who stop by a stranger’s house and present their views. When pressed to accept, however, I threw them Lessing’s rings. Gotthold Lessing once suggested that God gave humanity three golden rings: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What God did not give was the answer to which religion was the true one. I placed this conundrum before my earnest guests, but they already had the answer that had flummoxed Lessing. I suggested that if one’s conviction is strong, now borrowing from Kierkegaard, then one must follow that conviction. No, I was told, for the Bible reveals the whole truth. I mentioned that not all religions utilized the Bible in that way. I was told the Bible reveals the whole truth. About that time I had to run off to administer a final exam in a Bible class. The exam covered Ezekiel. And I knew, with a shudder, that Ezekiel had been told to look out from the watchtower!

Ezekiel or Charles Taze Russell's watchtower?

Ch-ch-changes

8 Comments

Podcast 20 is here! For those who are wondering, it was a long semester with daily class prep, so I did not have the opportunity to record any podcasts. The topic of this discussion is how religions naturally must change over time. Even though religions are by nature conservative, if they last long enough they will face advances in human culture and experience. This creates a dilemma that is not often addressed. It’s evolution on a religious scale.

Thus Spake Zarathustra

4 Comments

Preparing for another round of my annual course on Ancient Near Eastern Religions, I have been brushing up on Zoroastrianism. For this I generally first turn to Mary Boyce’s standard introduction, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. The book was written in the 1980s and is showing its age a bit, but it remains a seminal introduction to a religion whose humble position among world belief systems belies its overwhelming impact. A strange fact about the religion is that many of its main tenets have been summarily dismissed by the more politically influential religions of antiquity while its secondary features have been dramatically embraced. The classic example is dualism.

Zoroastrianism was founded on a dualistic principle: Ahura Mazda was the entirely beneficent, good creator, while Angra Mainyu was the powerful principle of evil. This cosmic struggle tapped deeply into all aspects of life, leading to the beliefs in two afterlife realms (which evolve into Heaven and Hell), two very powerful entities (that become the God versus Satan paradigm), and two dispensations (present age as opposed to future age, the ultimate source of the apocalypse). Indeed, it would be difficult to recognize Christianity without Heaven and Hell, the Devil, or the final judgment. Boyce carefully traces the earliest evidence for Zoroastrianism back to its formative period and offers detailed explanations for each aspect. Beyond this, however, Zoroastrianism became a forgotten faith, an abandoned parent.

It is a fact that religions evolve. Many believers like to trust that they have the straight information directly from the founder’s mouth and that their brand is the authentic brand of faith. All religions, however, if they survive long enough, change to meet the needs of present-day adherents. Again, Zoroastrianism is instructive. Believing in the sacred nature of fire, during the industrial revolution the use of fire for profane work, such as running a steam engine, was considered inappropriate. How were Zoroastrians then to keep up with society without softening their stance on the secular use of fire? The struggle was real and has never been fully resolved. The same exercise could easily be applied to other religions as well. Until the Zoroastrian-inspired apocalypse arrives, religions will have to adjust to continual societal change and accept that quantity of belief does not affect quality.

Popes and Props

3 Comments

Something to believe in?

Like the pain from an old sports injury (or Sarah Palin), the Shroud of Turin just won’t go away. Decades after radio-carbon dating demonstrated what many had suspected all along – the shroud is a medieval devotional replica – true believers are still trying to find ways to prove that the cloth is physical evidence of the resurrection. Never one to shy from controversy, Pope Benedict XVI has endorsed the authenticity of the forged artifact. No matter how far science goes, it seems, it just can’t pry the hands of a needy faith off that piece of fabric.

The Shroud of Turin first appears in the historical record only in the sixteenth century. Prior to that a back-story has been composed that takes it all the way to the first century in Jerusalem. Hungry for proof of the truth of their conviction, thousands of Christians fervently believe this sheet is the tangible evidence of resurrection. What seems to have been forgotten in this whole debate is the Bible itself. Not one of the four divergent Gospel accounts of the resurrection (some of the most wildly disparate material in the whole of Sacred Writ) mentions the miraculous capture of a resurrection photograph. The Gospel writers, never shy about flashing miracles across their narratives, do not tout an artifact as proving the resurrection. The force of apostolic conviction was enough for the first century crowd.

Believers in the modern world lack such conviction. Too many forces in the natural world conspire against the supernatural. A faith shaken by science and the competition of hundreds of other religions desperately needs a sky-hook on which to hang certitude. Yet the Bible itself speaks to this very issue. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” the writer of Hebrews declares. It seems, however, that true believers throughout history feel a little more comfortable with something palpable, just in case faith is not enough.

Militant Evangelists

3 Comments

It is not often that the military gets to rebuke an evangelical, no matter how much the evangelist may deserve it. In the world of Christian crusaders few come close to the stature of Billy Graham, a man who has had more than half a century of undue influence on American culture. At a library book sale a couple weekends ago a middle aged-couple hovering over the religion books (where I have professional obligations to hover) were discussing how they’d read all of Billy Graham’s books. When the family business passed to Franklin Graham, however, the scepter failed to be firmly grasped by the blushing co-regent. At the center of controversy since his comments about Islam beginning in 2001, Graham the younger was recently stricken from the (apparently) prestigious Pentagon prayer service roster.

I have to admit that I was surprised to learn that the Pentagon has a regular prayer service. My image of the military is one of beefy guys (and some gals) with ultimate confidence in their weapons and more than enough brashness to go around. They don’t project the down-on-your-knees-before-the-almighty image. “Guided by the beauty of our weapons,” as Leonard Cohen once sagaciously quipped, the military gets first crack at technological advances and heavy metals. The basic components of carnage and devastation. Yet they pray.

The old adage that there are no atheists in fox-holes glosses military service with a divine prerogative, so when these tough guys rebuff a famous evangelist there must be a story behind it. The military’s refusal to dis Islam displays a sensitivity uncharacteristic of most evangelical rhetoric and theology. The Religious Right’s revisionist claims that America was founded as a Christian nation are impotent without their WMD. Even so, the program should continue. “I don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up,” do you?

When Enola Gay comes to play

Thoughts Off de Waal

1 Comment

Although Frans de Waal’s Our Inner Ape was published half a decade ago, the monograph remains terribly relevant. I gave some primary impressions of the book last week, but one section has remained firmly in my head and has mingled with all the harsh rhetoric in the news about health care reform in the United States. Asking the question of whether Homo sapiens are still evolving biologically, de Waal withholds his final opinion on the matter, but he points out that statistics indicate Americans are falling behind much of the rest of the developed world in terms of general health. This he ascribes to the competition inherent in a free market economy that favors the best health care only to the wealthy while the average citizen is offered substandard options. The numbers bear him out on this – he notes that on the standards utilized to measure general health, the United States is not even in the top 25 industrial nations.

With the conviction of a true prophet, de Waal notes that privatization of health care has led to a precarious imbalance in medical care in the United States, where the top 1 percent of citizens has more income to spend than the bottom 40 percent combined. This, he believes, is because we have lost sight of the altruism inherent in apedom. Although the great apes are endangered (ironically, by their overly greedy genetic cousins) their societies show no such disparity. An ape family will assist a weakened or feeble member and give it extra care to ensure that it is offered a life as comfortable as possible. They do not discard the fragile and “expendable” members. Republicans, however, wave placards trying to shout down basic health coverage for the poor.

Does biological evolution continue among the human species? Have we stopped natural selection’s eternally ticking clock? Only time will tell. It does seem, however, that the very Bible pounded by the Religious Right (health care reform’s greatest opponent) would argue that the apes got it right. We should care for the poor, disadvantaged, and underrepresented. While the Tea Party belles are busy trying to rewrite history with America founded as a Christian nation they daintily wipe their mouths on the pages of the very book they treasure so deeply and claim as their authentic heritage.

The Cross in my Pocket

2 Comments

A local woman, whom I can only assume carries a prosperity cross, has won a 211 million dollar New Jersey lottery jackpot. As I had written some months back, when I received my prosperity cross, I tried my hand at the lottery with no rewards. Having had a dream of riches a few weeks back, I again attempted the lotto, with the added ethical motivation of assisting our state’s beleaguered educational system. Still no prosperity. It seems that the divine attention was focused a few miles north and a few days late. The happy winner has gone on record (in the New Jersey Star-Ledger) as saying, “I give God all the glory for this blessing that he has given me… He has seen and knows the highs and lows of my life, and knows the good I have done, and the good I can accomplish in his name.”

This innocent statement, no doubt whipped to a froth by prosperity gospelers, reveals all the difficulty of the weekend warrior prayers for good weather. Tweaking the world in one corner, as chaos theory demonstrates, leads to disaster in another. Not that our thankful lottery winner will unleash untold evil on the world, but it is time that people of all religions stop to consider the implications of the divine bursting in upon the mundane. In my experience, when such people are asked why God chose them and not someone else, they wax mysterious and intimate that only God knows. It is part of a great cosmic secret, only cryptically hinted at in the Holy Bible.

Call it sour grapes, or the grapes of wrath, or any other viticultural metaphor, but God does not direct the lottery. Too many truly good people suffer far too much for such easy answers. Those who promote the prosperity gospel are not among the paragons of human achievement or selfless nobility. Rather they are the idols of the self-important and acquisitive entrepreneurs. I wish our New Jersey lotto winner well – I hope she will steer clear of the prosperity gospel and actually put her money to good use.

Hate, in the Name of Love

6 Comments

I knew I was in trouble when I looked up the concept “codependency” on Wikipedia this morning and read, “This article has multiple issues.”

I was reminded of an article my wife pointed out to me on MSNBC earlier this week concerning Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church. My thoughts about religious freedom clash with my outrage over what may be legally classified as a religion. I’ve mentioned Phelps before, but the deeper issue here is whether freedom of religion can truly be free. Westboro is being sued (rightfully, imho) in a case that is going to the Supreme Court. His codependent hatred is causing excessive grief to the father of a soldier killed in Iraq. Phelps claims it is God’s will that he spread his Gospel of Hate.

Reading Frans de Waal’s Our Inner Ape, it quickly becomes apparent that empathy is what makes human society possible. Without our ability to feel for another, nature would lead us on a selfish rampage that would not be satiated until everyone but the alpha male was ruthlessly butchered. This seems to be Phelps’ idea of Heaven. It should be a stark warning sign when apes have better bred manners than a pastor.

Hatred and religion may form a codependent bond. Each feeds off the fear and distrust of the other, striking blindly at anything that is different, challenging, or unclear. Religion does have its noble children – those who in the name of their faith try to make life better for others. If the world were run according to Phelps’ religion, however, I would opt for life on the planet of the apes.

Not My Cup of Tea

1 Comment

The cutesy and puckish title of “Tea Party” is intended to sound whimsical among a group of political activists who lack imagination and creativity. They wear biblical-sized blinders that block out all enlightenment, trying to appear trendy and radical when what they really want is a return to the Dark Ages. Trying to make turning the clock back on progress chic and sexy, they stand for old-fashioned selfishness and the preservation of privilege for those who deserve preferential treatment – others just like them.

They grab headlines and limelight. So diametrically opposed to the progress that the real Tea Party (in Boston, 1773) strove for – progress against the privileged and mighty holding down those at disadvantage, the Tea Party movement seems to have convinced the media that it is worthy of their absconded moniker. Once again the Bible finds itself slave to an outlook. Ironically, Christians who look to the Bible as an unchanging anchor in modern society have no desire to return to the dietary restrictions and apparel requirements of yesteryear. They do not comprehend the vast gulf in morality outlooks that separate flat-earthers from space-age technocrats. A disconnect that would short-circuit the most robust processor drives their fantasy-world desire for a yesterday than never really existed.

What can a concerned biblical scholar do? Is it possible to force a conscientiously willful party that disregards facts and history to face reality? Perhaps the response should be that of the eighteenth-century Bostonians: board their ships of privilege and jettison their valued cargo utilized to create and uphold a system of abuse. Should that happen, we would soon see front-page pictures of Boston Harbor bobbing with saturated Bibles.

Mutiny on the Bountiful?

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.