Tag: creationism

The Theory Of Evolution

~ AlienCG ~ Leave a comment

I have a love-hate relationship with videos that discuss the Theory of Evolution. I understand the theory (theory, by the way, is a body of knowledge made up of facts, laws, and theorems that support the premises made), but I am unable to articulate into words that would make other understand it. In other words, I am not a teacher. There are some things that I can explain about the theory to give it clarity and keep people from making the same, dumb assertions that people like Kent Hovind, Ken Ham, Ray Comfort, and others of their ilk continually make.

The Theory of Evolution only addresses the diversity of life on the planet. It does not explain the origin of the universe, stars, galaxies, planets, or life itself. Those are different fields of science and each of those fields are at different stages of development. To use an analogy, I am an electronics technician at the PCB (printed circuit board) level which means that I can diagnose and repair a board by replacing integrated circuits (ICs) and discrete components (resistors, capacitors, etc.). I do not need to know how ICs are made or how the PCB is produced in order to do my job. I do know how those things are done and they do not help me in my job at all. What I do need to know are the mathematical laws and theorems associated with electronics theory. There’s that word again.

The word “theory” is not a guess or an assumption. My degree is related to the field of Electronics Theory which is supported by Ohm’s Law, Kirchoff’s Law, the concepts of series and parallel circuits, alternating and direct current (AC and DC), and many other things. The same goes for Evolutionary Theory in that there are laws, theorems, axioms, and other things that support the overall body of knowledge. To be honest, evolution is better supported than gravity in many respects. The theory of evolution is the basis of modern biology.

We are way past Darwin. Darwin wrote books on the subject of evolution, but since then, and even in his own lifetime, Gregor Mendel expanded on it with the discovery of genes. In the 1860s, Friedrich Miescher discovered deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), in the 1950s Waston and Crick, using x-ray crystallography developed by Rosalind Franklin, discovered the double helix structure of DNA. By 2003, the human genome was completely sequenced and progress marches onward and upward. Charles Darwin would be impressed by the work done since his initial discovery.

Science continues to search for answers to the mysteries of the natural world. This is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to the Theory of Evolution and there are far better resources to search out. There is no controversy and even if (and that’s a massive “if”) the theory is completely disproven, that would not make creationism true by default. Creationism is not science in any sense of the word. Maybe I’ll dive into that next week.

Saturday Sermon: Young Earth Creationism

~ AlienCG ~ 1 Comment
How did I get home?

Welcome again to another Saturday Sermon. This week’s topic is inspired by the story of Noah and his floating zoo. There are many people who believe that the Bible is a direct telling of the history of life, the universe, and everything and the faulty math of a 17th century archbishop provides their timeline. I speak, of course, about Young Earth Creationists.

A quick disclaimer before I begin, I am not going to be talking in detail about the science that easily and thoroughly refutes the ideas of Young Earth Creationism. I am not a cosmologist, biochemist, biologist, geologist, archeologist, or paleontologist, and have no credentials to debate these topics. That’s not to say that I don’t understand science; I understand a lot of it in my mind, but I do not have the ability to explain it myself. Anyway, on to the sermon.

One of the mainstays of biblical literalism is the idea that the Genesis account is exactly how everything came into being. It is touted by the likes of Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, and other preachers and proselytizers as the alternative to evolution. However, that is not at all the case. In actual scientific terms, evolution refers to the biological process of change in populations of species over time. Creationists tend to lump everything including the Big Bang theory, galaxy formation, the formation of our solar system, formation of earth, and abiogenesis as well as the aforementioned biological process under the umbrella term, “evolution”.

Young Earth Creationism is the idea that everything in the universe was poofed into existence in six literal days six thousand years ago. Six thousand years? Yes, Archbishop James Ussher, obviously in a moment of boredom, decided that he would work his way backward through the Bible and add up the ages of the patriarchs in order to calculate the exact date of creation. The date calculated was October 22, 4004 BCE and Noah’s flood happened in 2350 BCE.

Creationism is not science. It’s the assertion that the Bible is literally true and the flood of Noah actually happened. It did not. How do we know? There are records of at least a few civilizations that were shockingly unaffected when a GLOBAL FLOOD washed everything off the face of the earth (or under the face of the earth? Around the face of the earth?) except for a bronze-age floating zoo and a six hundred year old man and his family.

While I am not a qualified scientist in any of the above-mentioned disciplines, I can look at the story of Noah’s Ark and say, without hesitation, that it absolutely, positively, DID NOT HAPPEN. How did Noah and his three sons gather all of the animals from all over the world, including from Antarctica, Australia, and the Americas?

Also, Chapter 1 of Genesis has the order of creation in one way, but in Chapter 2 it’s in a different order. Right there we can clearly see that Bible is not the literal telling that Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis tries to tell us it is. There are also creationists that claim that Moses wrote Genesis and that it’s the oldest book of the Bible. Job is generally agreed to be the oldest book in the Bible.

Genesis is collection of parables that were handed down orally until they were written down, or they were stories adapted from earlier writings, such as the Sumerian tablets or the early writings of Zoroastrianism. The Bible is not a history or a science book, It’s a story book that people believe in.

Announcements:

Not much in the way of announcements, but I would like to welcome those who have liked my posts and commented. I will be responding to comments if I haven’t started already.

Genesis Chapters 9 and 10

~ AlienCG ~ 1 Comment

Chapter 9

God tells Noah that all animals will now fear humans (and boy do they ever), but you shouldn’t eat and animal that is still alive. There’s also some eye for an eye stuff in the form of,

“6Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed; for in his own image God made humankind.”

Bibles, Harper . NRSV Bible with the Apocrypha (Gen 9:6, p. 42). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

We get more repetition from Genesis 8 that God will never again destroy the entire earth with a flood. So he’s saying that he may destroy the earth again, but it will be in some other way? He seals the deal with a rainbow. Except, he says that the rainbow is to remind him not to destroy the world a flood again.

Verse 18 makes it sound like we might expect some other sons to leave the ark as we are, once again, reminded of their names. Noah somehow, in some unspecified amount of time, plants a vineyard, grows the grapes, picks them, ferments them, and gets drunk on the wine laying naked in his tent. His son Ham, who we are reminded time and time again is the father of Canaan, walks in on this and goes to tell his brothers who walk backward with a cloak to cover the old man.

When Noah awakens, he somehow knows that Ham saw him nekkid and curses Canaan and asks God to bless his other two sons and make Canaan their slave. This story seems completely unrelated to the rest of the flood narrative. I’m just glad it’s over now.

Chapter 10

This is the Table of Nations which explains how all the nations of the world were descended from Ham, Shem, and Japheth. As it turns out, shockingly, Ham is the father of Canaan <–#END SARCASM–> and Egypt. Here’s another problem for young earth creationists, if the flood happened anytime between 2430 and 2475 BCE (there are at least three different creationist groups that claim a different year for the flood), Egypt’s history goes back to 3100 BCE and there is no mention of global flood. Wouldn’t that be notable? Wouldn’t one of Ham’s relatives have written, “…where were we before all that flooding?”

As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, there were plenty of cultures that were well-established before the supposed Beginning which, according to James Ussher, took place in October 4004 BCE. None of them write about a global flood around the same time. Sure, they had floods, but that is the peril of living next to a river as most civilizations did.

One other thing, because I’m me, I have to chuckle at the name Nimrod. That is all.