Subject: Scientific Errors in the Bible Date: 21 Feb 90 02:16:23 GMT Sender: usenet@lll-wi

Path: ncsuvm!ncsuvx!lll-winken!sunlight.llnl.gov!loren
From: loren@sunlight.llnl.gov (Loren Petrich)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism
Subject: Scientific Errors in the Bible
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Date: 21 Feb 90 02:16:23 GMT
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV
Reply-To: loren@sunlight.llnl.gov (Loren Petrich)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
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        A close reading of the first few chapters of the Bible reveals
not one, but two different -- and contradictory -- stories of
creation. These are from two of the (at least) four traditions that
are interweaved in the first books of the Bible, the Priestly and
Yahvist traditions, out of the set that includes the Elohist and
Deuteronomist traditions. This conclusion is reached by consideration
of stylistic elements (for example, the Priestly tradition is heavy on
statistics, the Yahvist and Elohist traditions refer to the Deity as
"Yahweh" and "Elohim", respectively, and the Deuteronomist tradition
is found in the Book of Deuteronomy), and is generally accepted by
non-literalist Biblical scholars (for a good introduction to the
historical background behind the Bible, see _Asimov's Guide to the
Bible_, both volumes).

Here is the order in the first (Genesis 1), the Priestly tradition:

Day 1: Sky, Earth, light
Day 2: Water, both in ocean basins and above the sky(!)
Day 3: Plants
Day 4: Sun, Moon, stars (as calendrical and navigational aids)
Day 5: Sea monsters (whales), fish, birds, land animals,
creepy-crawlies (reptiles, insects, etc.)
Day 6: Humans (apparently both sexes at the same time)
Day 7: Nothing (the Gods took the first day off anyone ever did)

        Note that there are "days", "evenings", and "mornings" before
the Sun was created. Here, the Deity is referred to as "Elohim", which
is a plural, thus the literal translation, "the Gods". In this tale,
the Gods seem satisfied with what they have done, saying after each
step that "it was good".

The second one (Genesis 2), the Yahwist tradition, goes:

Earth and heavens (misty)
Adam, the first man (on a desolate Earth)
Plants
Animals
Eve, the first woman (from Adam's rib)

        Then, there follows the story of the serpent leading Eve, and
Adam, to eat that (unspecified) fruit, and get expelled from the
Garden of Eden, whereupon that serpent was ordered to crawl on its
belly (no mention of how it moved about before that). The Deity is
referred to as "Yahweh" here, and creates plants, animals, and finally
Eve for a lonely Adam. Yahweh seems to be trying to fix his creation
as he goes, with not too satisfactory results -- his prime interest
commits a big no-no (why not simply create a psychological inhibition
to eating forbidden fruit? It would probably be more reliable).

        Neither tale, it must be said, has much resemblance to the
geological record, but in all fairness to the inventors of these
tales, the geological record only became clear in the nineteenth
century. I am not denying that one can come up with a Bible
interpretation that somehow harmonizes these two tales, but such an
interpretation would require rejection of the dogma of the literal
truth of the Bible -- two contradictory statements cannot be true at
the same time.

        The first of the two stories is sometimes claimed to be a good
match; "Let there be light" supposedly means the Big Bang. But the Big
Bang happened well before the Earth even existed. There are other
discrepancies. The Sun is almost certainly slightly older than the
Earth, and the Moon is as old as the Earth, or a bit younger (from
current theories of planetary formation; the time differences are ~100
million years out of 4.6 billion years).  The stars have no single
age, but have been forming ever since the galaxies came into existence
(or even before!); some are older than the Earth, some younger. The
order of appearance of various is terribly mixed up. Though blue-green
algae are much older than any multicelled animal, the first land
plants appear ~400 m.y. ago, as opposed to the first sea animals ~600
m.y. ago.  Flowering plants (the most common land plants) appeared
about ~120-150 m.y. ago, well after the first land animals appeared,
~400 m.y. ago. Also, flying animals appear after closely related land
animals appear; flying insects after early wingless ones, pterodactyls
after proto-dinosaurs, birds after certain small carnivorous
dinosaurs, and bats after early placental mammals.  Some sea animals
are descendants of land animals; consider (partially aquatic) otters,
seals and sea lions and walruses, penguins, alligators and crocodiles,
and sea turtles and (completely aquatic) whales and dolphins, sea
snakes, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs.

        The second of the two stated that humanity originated in the
Garden of Eden or a garden in Eden (depending on which translation you
read). "Eden" turns out to be some marshland near where the Tigris and
the Euphrates Rivers flow into the Persian Gulf. And where did
humanity actually originate? Charles Darwin proposed Africa because
that's where our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and
gorillas, live. This hypothesis turns out to be correct for nearly all
of the hominid species, including _Homo sapiens_. All the earlier
hominid species, the Australopithecines and earliest _Homo_, are found
only in Africa; later species, like _Homo erectus_ and _Homo sapiens_,
seem to have originated in Africa and spread to other parts of the
world.

        Concerning the Flood, the Biblical tale is a copy of an old
Mesopotamian tale; the Tigris and Euphrates rivers sometimes flood,
and a flood can seem like one of "all the world" to someone living in
nearly level terrain. In the tale of Noah's Ark, we do not learn why
Noah did not take advantage of this wonderful opportunity to get rid
of all the "unclean" animals once and for all.  In early modern times,
it was commonly thought that fossils were the remains of animals and
plants buried in the Flood; the Free Thinker Voltaire felt compelled
to discredit this seeming evidence for Noah's Flood -- he suggested
that fossils were fakes or were dropped by pilgrims. But closer
examination of fossils suggested too-neat layering for an all-at-once
flood, and Flood advocates retreated to some of the most recent
sediments (see Stephen Jay Gould's essay "The Freezing of Noah" in
_The Flamingo's Smile_). In the early nineteenth century, even that
seeming evidence was shown to be the work of glaciers (floods of solid
water), and only in the more northern parts of the globe. Gould even
reproduces the "recantation" of one of the last reputable "Flood
Geologists", concerning this subject.

        And in several places in the Bible, the sky is referred to as
a vault, with the stars stuck on it. Genesis 1 refers to water above
this vault (an idea no doubt borrowed from the Babylonian cosmology,
which pictured the Earth as a flat disk inside a cosmic bubble in a
cosmic sea). The Book of Revelation states that the stars will someday
fall out of the sky like figs from a tree. The Bible says little about
the shape of the Earth, referring in one place to the "circle" of the
Earth (a disk shape), and in another place to the "four corners" of
the Earth (a rectangular surface shape). In one of the Gospels, the
Devil tempted Jesus by taking him up a mountain where he could see
"all the kingdoms of the world" (no further info on this remarkable
mountain). This would only be possible if the Earth was flat.

        The Bible does indicate more clearly, however, that the Earth
is motionless. Witness Joshua's telling the Sun (and not the Earth) to
stop just so he could win one of his battles, and some of the Psalms
that state that the Earth is motionless. The Joshua story can be used
to find a Biblical estimate of the distances of the Sun and the Moon
from the Earth. Since we are told that the Sun was stopped to
illuminate the Valley of Gibeon, and the Moon to illuminate the Valley
of Aijalon, we conclude that either one of them would have been
insufficient for both -- and that requires that the Sun be low when
viewed from the Moon's valley, as it were, and vice versa. This
implies that the distances to the Sun and the Moon are comparable to
the distance between the Valleys of Gibeon and Aijalon, which is about
10 mi.

        In all fairness to the writers of the Bible, none of this
cosmology is any worse than the cosmological pictures developed by
surrounding peoples, with one exception. Ancient Greek
proto-scientists (if that is the proper word) were, without any modern
technology, able to establish that the Earth was approximately
spherical, and were able to work out the approximate size of the Earth
and the distance to the Moon. The distance to the Sun was more
difficult, and almost all were agreed that the Sun moved around the
Earth. But this knowledge was gained only after the Old Testament was
written, though some of the writers of the New Testament may have
learned of Aristotle's demonstration of the approximate sphericity of
the Earth three centuries ago. The Greeks had data which anyone else
living before modern times could collect, but they put the pieces
together in the right fashion, and, for some reason, there is no hint
of that in the Bible.

        There are further scientific difficulties in the Bible, In one
of the Books of Kings, there is a reference to a "molten sea" with a
diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits. This
would imply that pi = 3. Though this is certainly a convenient
approximation (5% too small), it is not exact. Thus, one part of the
Bible is not "absolute truth". In the part of Leviticus which lists
proscribed animals, we find that rabbits (or hares, depending on the
translation) chew the cud and that grasshoppers have four legs. Since
rabbits twitch their noses, that might lead to the misunderstanding
that they are ruminants; but the number of legs possessed by
grasshoppers should have been easy to find, since several people in
the Bible reportedly ate grasshoppers, and one can always count the
number of legs a grasshopper has before eating one. But this may have
been an extrapolation from knowledge of larger multi-legged animals.
There is also the classification of bats as birds, even though a bat
looks a lot like a mouse with front legs turned into wings, and most
other "birds" don't.

        Finally, I note that the New Testament contains the view that
disease is caused by demonic possession and can be cured by exorcism.
Jesus himself was something of an exorcist. He drove some demons into
the Gadarene swine, and drove them into a lake, which suggests that he
may have been unable to destroy these demons. He even states in his
Sermon of the Mount that his followers ought not to brag about such
accomplishments as how many demons they exorcised. Maybe the reason
that crucifixes are supposedly so effective in driving out demons is
because they duplicate the effect of Jesus the Exorcist. One wonders
what effect the symbols of other religions would have -- has anyone
ever tried exorcism with a Star of David or a star and crescent or a
Hindu mandala or a Yin-Yang symbol or a statuette of the Buddha or a
miniature Greek temple column or an Egyptian ankh or a Hammer and
Sickle?

        As I noted earlier, it is possible to get around all these
difficulties by stating that the Biblical statements in question have
a higher level of truth than simple literal meaning, but such an
escape hatch requires rejecting the hypothesis of the literal truth of
the Bible.

        And the implications for Fundamentalist dogma? Simple. In _The
Great Monkey Trial_, by L. Sprague deCamp, we read of some Tennessee
mountain folk who denounced William Jennings Bryan (the Ronald Reagan
of the day) as a heretic because he believed that the Earth is round.
They wanted "good Christian books" for our schools which teach the
flatness of the Earth. A flat-earth evangelist of the time, Wilbur
Glenn Voliva, proposed that Bryan and him should run for the
Presidency on a platform to eliminate the twin heresies of evolution
and the roundness of the Earth. Voliva believed that, if the Earth was
moving, there would be a big wind, which is not observed. He also
believed that it would be wasteful for God to put the Sun about 150
million kilometers from the Earth -- after all, the Sun was created to
light the Earth. He also complained about the "so-called
fundamentalists who strain out the gnat of evolution while swallowing
the camel of modern astronomy" (for more, see Martin Gardner's _Fads
and Fallacies in the Name of Science_). I wonder why present-day
Fundamentalists do not call for equal time for flat-earth science in
our schools.

        And why don't they push for a revisionist taxonomy that places
bats among the birds instead of the mammals? Or to have the schools
give equal time to the "demon theory of disease" whenever they discuss
the "germ theory of disease"?

[Original article's follow-up...]

        I had received the response to my article on the two creation
stories in the Bible that one can somehow fit the Adam-and-Eve story
into the Sixth Day of the first story. But I believe that this fit
cannot be made. Why? Look again at the orders of creation:

        The Six-Day Story:

Day 3: Plants
Day 5: Sea animals and flying animals
Day 6: Land animals, then humanity (both sexes)

        The Adam-and-Eve Story:

The first man (Adam)
Plants
Animals (both land and air)
The first woman (Eve)

        The contradiction between the orders of creation between the
two stories is rather glaring. There are other contradictions. As I
mentioned earlier, in the first story, God creates according to a
carefully laid-out plan, one set of entities at a time. He says after
each episode of creation that "it was good," indicating that he is
very satisfied with what he has done. On the seventh day, he rests
from his labors (though we are not told why an omnipotent being might
need to rest). In the second story, he seems to be fixing up as he
goes, only to see the principal objects of his attention commit a
grave no-no. Here goes: I create the first man, but he's all lonely. I
create some plants for him. He's still lonely. I create lots of
animals for him. He's still lonely. I create a woman for him, and he
seems satisfied. I tell those two not to eat any fruit from that Tree
of Knowledge, but that pesky snake talks them into eating some of its
fruit anyway. I kick those two out of that garden, and I order that
snake to crawl on its belly. Creating a Universe seems more trouble
than it's worth!

        Methods of creation differ; in the first story, God "says"
"Let X be!" and X comes into existence; while in the second story, God
uses a more physical approach, molding the first man out of dirt
(yecch!) and then breathing on it. And likewise for the first woman.
One doesn't have to know much chemistry to tell the difference between
human flesh and typical dirt. The level of anthropomorphism differs;
the second story features God "walking" in the Garden of Eden; while
the first story says that the first people, at least one of each sex,
were made "in his image" (nothing on which of the two sexes resembles
God more). I have always suspected that it is really the other way
around.

        I am not sure what the "traditional" answer to this conundrum
is (maybe it's simply "shut up and believe, you rotten infidel!"); but
whatever it is, I'm sure that this analysis will hold up despite of it.

        There are other curiosities. The Exodus of the Israelites from
Egypt is an event not mentioned in any Egyptian chronicle; they barely
mention Israel. There isn't even a "prettified" version like "Our
great Pharaoh went on an expedition to chase down those rotten
rebellious slaves and died a noble death in a big flood." It has been
suggested that some of the Exodus events are garbled memories of the
explosive volcanic eruption of Thera ~1400(?) BC (see Sagan on
Velikovsky).

        And the Joshua miracle (he told the Sun and the Moon to stand
still just so he could win one of his battles) -- it is not mentioned
in _any_ other contemporary chronicle. If it happened, it would have
took place in ~1200 BC. But Egyptians and Mesopotamians (in what is
now Iraq) had had written language for over two thousand years, and
their chroniclers would have written at length on this event, had it
have happened. But they say NOTHING about this alleged event. There is
the question of why the Earth's rotation and the Moon's motion were so
carefully restored afterwards. That is evident from the study of such
pre-Joshua monuments as the Great Pyramid of Egypt (check out _Science
and the Paranormal_, Abell and Singer, eds.). It was constructed
according to some precise astronomical alignments. The edges of this
pyramid were aligned on north-south and east-west directions, as
determined by post-Joshua surveying. And one tunnel is aligned to
point at the star Thuban in Draco, while another points at the
constellation Orion, as determined by extrapolating post-Joshua
measurements of precession. The Milankovitch climate cycles over the
last couple million years have a component due to precession; its rate
seems unchanged from its post-Joshua value. So, if this miracle
happened, the Earth must have started rotating again with exactly the
same position of spin axis, relative to itself and to the stars, and
at exactly the same period as before. The Moon must have started
orbiting at exactly the same distance as before. A simpler hypothesis:
this alleged event never happened.

        Immanuel Velikovsky certainly understood these problems with
these alleged Biblical events, which is why he proposed his
bouncing-planets hypothesis. He claimed that these catastrophes were
remembered not only in the Bible, but in a host of other ancient
legends. Carl Sagan has written a truly devastating criticism of his
theories (check out _Scientists Confront Velikovsky_ or _Broca's
Brain_ or _Science and the Paranormal_). I wonder, where is the
Velikovsky cult now? Have they been claiming that the recent flyby of
Neptune (and the not-so-recent one of Uranus) provide yet more
evidence for the correctness of Velikovsky's theories? That would be
in line with what they have claimed for _every_ other Solar System
discovery since Velikovsky published _Worlds in Collision_.

                                                        ^
Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster                    \  ^  /
        loren@moonzappa.llnl.gov                      \ ^ /
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"Crucifixes are sexy because there's a naked man on them" -- Madonna