Bad Bible Science

Yeah, it's been a while. Aside from my new Wii, there was the show I played (and by show I mean about two and a half songs) at the grand opening of a friend's new restaurant, a desperate search for new boots, and a fire in my apartment complex that has me in the midst of a desperate search for new lodgings. And a desperate attempt to break my lease on the grounds that an apartment that is covered in soot and smells like ozone and melted plastic and gives me headaches and upsets my allergies is a Bad Thing. So that's that.

Today I'd like to begin talking about something that I, in all reality, should have blogged about a long time ago. I received it from a creationist preacher on campus at least a year and a half ago and proudly affixed it to my corkboard. Somehow, though, the little bastard slipped my mind. What is this that makes me so proud, you ask?

It is the fantastic news that Science Confirms the Bible!

Check out this puppy. I know it's too small to read. I couldn't find a legible image file anywhere on the net and my scanner is down (by down I mean "not plugged in and I'm too lazy to plug it in and it hardly worked at all when it was plugged in, anyway") so I couldn't make my own. I recieved this little piece of heaven from a big fat man in the dead of winter. I was waiting for a bus when he approached me. His breath steamed in front of his face as he said "Hello, son. Did you know that science confirms the Bible?" Right to the point. At least there was no small talk about my day or my love life before he broke out the evangelism. I've noticed that every missionary I deal with calls me "son." I don't like it. My dad doesn't call me "son." It's an irritating diminutive. Anyway, Buddy broke out the small cardboard tract at left and began to tell me how, unlike what you're taught in school (the implication being that schools, being tools of the godless, liberal establishment, lie), the Bible is full of things that were later confirmed by science, thus proving it is a scientifically accurate piece of material. I looked at him funny, told him I was an atheist, and caught my bus. It was too cold to waste my energy and I was hardly prepared for this new strangeness. Later, at home, I looked over the card and had a long, hard laugh. I showed it to some friends and we all had a long, hard laugh. See, we're all hard-nosed, no-nonsense, science-type assholes. The great wish was that Buddy the Creationist had approached all of us in a group on a warm spring day, so we could have torn him to shreds. Instead I took the path of least resistance and more heat. So, after much ado, we come to the fun: fisking the shit out of this religious nonsense. I'll do half today and half tomorrow; otherwise, the post would be far too long.

You can read the tract in its entirety on this page. Basically, it's broken down into the three columns you can see above. They are "The Bible," which contains some quote from the Bible, "Science Now," which (ostensibly) contains some bit of knowledge culled from modern science, and "Science Then," which (again only ostensibly) contains some piece of information from some mysterious "Old Science." In general, the Bible quotes are tortured intepretations, the "Science Now" items are either completely trivial, questionably accurate, or nonsensical, and the "Science Then" items are ideas taken from various mythologies or shit that, as far as I can tell, was just made up for this tract. There really is no such thing as "science then;" science is a relatively modern phenomenon and the closest one can come to "science then" is philosophy and mathematics, so when necessary, I'll appeal to the ancients, as it seems to me that this tract, when it says "science then," really means "ancient knowledge." Note, however, that ancient philosophers, wrong or right, were not scientists; thus, the statements about "science then" will be appraised for their historicity, while it will be duly noted here that, to wit, the entire premise of colum three is complete bullshit prima facie and none of it is fucking science. Let's take this one triad at a time, in the order given above. All Bible quotes are from the King James Version, the favored translation of evangelicals everywhere.

The Bible	Science Now	Science Then
The earth is a sphere (Isaiah 40:22).	The Earth is a sphere.	The Earth was a flat disc.

Isaiah 40:22 says "It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:" It isn't even a complete thought. Not only that, nowhere does it make anything regarding a clear claim that the Earth is a sphere. "The circle of the Earth," in fact, is far more likely to mean a flat disc, as a circle is a 2-dimensional shape, the 3D analogue of which is a sphere. It is also entirely possible that "circle of the earth" is a piece of poetic language. The Bible is very given to that sort of thing. And the Earth, incidentally, is not a sphere. It is very close to being a sphere, but its rotational motion causes an equatorial bulge that makes it slightly ovoid. Maybe I'm nitpicking, but it is an untrue statement that modern science considers the Earth a sphere. People in general consider it a sphere probably because they don't know the whole truth, and it's close enough as makes no matter, but it's just not 100% accurate. It is also patently false that the Earth was though to be a disc by ancient thinkers. Eratosthenes proved it in the 3rd century BC, and even calculated its equatorial circumference to within 500 km. This was a generally acknowledged fact until the middle ages when education broke down, but the thinkers of the period all openly acknowledged the Earth's roundness. At no point since the pre-Socratics has any serious intellectual believed the Earth to be a flat disc. It is a modern myth that, until Columbus, everyone thought the Earth was flat. Maybe the writer of this tract was educated at Unseen University.

The Bible	Science Now	Science Then
Incalculable number of stars (Jeremiah 33:22).	Incalculable number of stars.	Only 1,100 stars.

"As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured: so will I multiply the seed of David my servant, and the Levites that minister unto me," Jeremiah 33:22. This is clearly an offhand reference meant to be used as a metphor for the children of David's line. Most often when the Bible uses the phrase "host of heaven," it means the bunches of angels that live there. This, then, is a selective interpretation where "host" is taken to mean "stars" for the purposes of the tract. The idea that anything is, in principle, incalculable, is patently unscientific. It is the religious who say, "Well, that looks hard. We can't do it. It's a permanent mystery." In principle, the stars are quite calculable. Astronomers have estimated around 70 sextillion in the known universe. Granted, they haven't been counted, but an estimation of the number proves that, to modern science, the number of stars is indeed calculable. The third statement is accurate in a far as Ptolemy estimated 1,100 stars in the fixed 8th sphere. But Ptolemy thought the Sun rotated around the Earth, and he was no scientist.

The Bible	Science Now	Science Then
Free float of earth in space (Job 26:7).	Free float of earth in space.	Earth sat on a large animal.

"He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing," Job 16:27. How does one hang something on nothing? The act of hanging implies some sort of hanger on which the hung item is hung. I suppose herein one could find an argument for some sort of "Intelligent Hanger." Literally speaking, though, this passage is gibberish. Science no more confirms the idea that somebody hung the earth on nothing than it confirms the existence of Mooninites. As the idea is meaningless babble, its just plain useless. Moreover, Earth does not "free float" in space. It is held into a pretty damn stable orbit by gravitic forces caused by the many other masses with which it interacts, all of which are affected by its own gravity. Sure, it's not turtles all the way down, but neither is it a free float, just hanging there on nothing, going wherever it will (or won't). It's in motion and its motion is regular and predictable. We also see here once again an argument I will dub "Appeal to Discworld." No intellectuals of the past ever thought that the earth was on an animal. This is an idea that came completely, 100% out of various religioustraditions.

The Bible	Science Now	Science Then
Creation made of invisible elements (Hebrews 11:3).	Creation made of invisible elements (atoms).	Science was ignorant on the subject.

"Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear," Hebrews 11:3. This piece of scripture is a confusing mess. On one hand, I want to say that the "things which do [not] appear" refers to the word of God, as the worlds were framed by it, and thus it makes them up. Of course, the second clause could be simply an elaboration rather than a reference, saying that the word of God framed creation such that it is made out of invisible stuff. In either case, this interpretation is less tortured than most of the rest. It is, however, hardly scientifically accurate. Atoms are not invisible. Atoms are very, very small. One look at Google images brings up this page full of images of atoms taken with scanning tunnelling microscopes and atomic force microscopes. "Invisible" doesn't really mean "cannot be seen with the naked eye." Were that the case, anything behind me would be invisible to me. The contents of my closet would be invisible. Now, while the door is closed, the contents of my closet are not visible, but they are not invisible. "Invisible" implies that something cannot be seen in principle, and we're back to nonscience again. What's really funny about this one is that the whole idea of atoms was dreamt up by the philosopher Democritus, way back in the BCs. Atomism was big there for a while, and some intellectuals thought that "creation" was made of very tiny little particles. Other intellectuals had their own ideas for what made up the base substance of the world, more or less materialistic, but in general, "the ancients" were far from silent. Sounds like the author is the one suffering from ignorance of the subject.

The Bible	Science Now	Science Then
Each star is different (1 Corinthians 15:41).	Each star is different.	All stars were the same.

"There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory," 1 Corinthians 15:41. I was unaware that "glory" is a measurable empirical quality. Apparently I was wrong and the Bible is right. This statement in no way claims that the stars are physically different. They differ in glory, which is like saying they differ in mercy. Stars can't have these qualities. It's nonsense. And it's trivial to say that modern science claims each star is different from each other star. Hell, that's just common sense given what we know about our ever-changing universe. Nothing is perfect or permanent; no matter how much two things look alike, they are invariably fundamentally different. This isn't really science. It's just...there. It's easy to see, though, why Aristotle, with his very limited view of the cosmos, would have thought that all stars wer perfect and fixed, though I'm not certain that he or anyone else ever said that they were all exactly the same. That one, I'm pretty sure, got pulled out of an ass somewhere, just like this entire triad of quotes.

The Bible	Science Now	Science Then
Light moves (Job 38:19,20).	Light moves.	Light was fixed in place.

"Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof, That thou shouldest take it to the bound thereof, and that thou shouldest know the paths to the house thereof?" Job 38:19,20. What the fuck does this mean? It certainly doesn't seem to say anything near "light moves." In fact, it seems to say that light dwelleth somewhere, which would imply a lack of movement. These verses are in the middle of a scene where God is asking Job a bunch of questions, none of which is intended to make any metaphysical or quantifiable statements anyway. This thing sucks in and out of context. This is not an idea that was later confirmed by science. It's not even an idea. It's just words on a page. And where the hell did they get the idea that "science then" says that light was fixed in place? These really seem to be getting worse and worse. Now they're just making shit up.

There, ladies and gentlemen, is the first half of the wonderful tract "Science Confirms the Bible,"which intends to prove that the Bible made quantifiable predictions that were later confirmed by modern science. It's a strange idea, really, because most of the evangelical movement is based around rejecting science. I guess they use it as a buzzword when they need to sound impressive to dimwitted folks. I think I've shown here that the first half of this tract is almost entirely based on bad theology, bad science, and bad history all in one. Tomorrow I'll show the same for the rest of it. Stay tuned!

Edit: Check out part II over here.