Religion vs. Science the Vast Gulf Part Five: Weather and Climate

I just uploaded a YouTube video about Darwin visiting the Petrified Forest in Arizona. The petrified wood comes only from ancient conifers, none from modern trees, proving that it could not have been produced by a big Flood. See other videos here.

This is the fifth in a series of entries about the vast difference between the modern scientific view of the world and the view that people had of the world at the time the Bible was written.

To the Biblical worldview, the climate of the Earth is directly controlled by God. And there are many, many religious people who believe this today. Their proof? Genesis 8:22, in which God makes a promise: while the Earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease. I have several students each semester who quote this verse in their supposedly scientific papers on the subject of what I now try to call global climate disruption. In this, they are imitating their great Christian hero, Senator James Inhofe, who quotes Genesis 8:22 whenever the subject of climate comes up in the Senate.

Modern science has demonstrated that Earth’s climate is controlled by many complex factors. In any given year, it is affected by changes in the angle of the sunlight, by the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, by the amount of energy coming from the sun, by ENSO patterns, rain shadows, etc. Long-term changes are caused by periodic oscillations in Earth’s orbit, movements of the continents, etc. A religious person could claim that God works through these natural laws; but we are not talking about that kind of religious person. We are talking about people who believe God is forbidden to use figures of speech. Forbidden, I presume, by them.

That is, we know what causes the seasons. The Earth moves, and is tilted, and as a result a lower angle of sunlight creates winter, and a greater angle of sunlight creates summer. Psalm 93:1 clearly states that the Earth does not move, and it was this verse that got Galileo in trouble with the Catholic Church. Creationists no longer claim that the Earth does not move, but they do so mainly by arbitrarily assigning a figurative meaning to the psalm.

We also know what causes wind and rain. Air blows from high to low pressure areas, and rain results from the condensation of water vapor. In contrast, the Bible says that rains caused Noah’s flood because the windows of heaven were opened. Job referred to the storehouses of the wind. These are perfectly good figures of speech, and are apparently accepted as such even by creationists. But they have to violate their own assumptions by doing so.

There is a dark side to creationist beliefs that God has made sure that global warming has not occurred. At the moment, creationists are denying that global warming is happening (step one), or if so, that humans are causing it (step two). They deny that we should be doing anything right now to reduce carbon emissions. God put all that coal in the ground during the Flood (thoughtfully picking out just the conifers and keeping out the flowering plants) so that we could burn it right now. Not slowly, over centuries, but right now. This is because many of them think Armageddon is right around the corner, so why wait?

But at some point even creationists will have to admit that global warming is a reality. However, when they do so, they will go directly from steps one and two to step three: It is too late and there is nothing we can do about it. They circumvent the entire process of trying to bring our carbon emissions under control. And they will give their own religious twist to step three: they will say that global warming, which in upcoming decades will be greater than most of us have even been able to imagine, is God’s punishment upon the world. Punishment for what? Probably for homosexuality. After all, God said that while the Earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease. Creationist stage three belief concerning global climate disruption is that it will in fact occur while God is carrying out His end-time Apocalypse.

By the way, why did God make the Genesis 8:22 promise? One might think there is a lofty reason, based upon Jesus’ version of God. But according to verse 21, the reason is that Noah offered a sacrifice of clean meat on an altar, and when God “smelled the pleasing odor,” he made the promise. So if you ever want anything from God, invite Him to a barbecue. Yeehaw!

Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf Part Four: You Are What You Eat

I continue the series of posts about the many ways religion, especially Christianity, differs from science. The first entry was about the scientific method. The second was about the sky. I posted part two before I had heard about Bill Nye and the creationists in 2006. Bill was giving a lecture in Waco, Texas, in which he mentioned that the moon does not create its own light, but reflects the light of the sun. Some creationists walked out, since Genesis describes the moon as “the lesser light,” which to them meant that it emits its own light. My guess is that this viewpoint does not represent most creationists.

In the previous essay, I wrote about how carbon-based life forms cannot be made from the dust of the Earth, taken literally. But there is a temporal dimension to this also. Your atoms are in a state of continual turnover. You are losing some, and gaining some, from the food that you eat, which is carbon-based. There is a reason Captain Kirk did not share a sandwich with the silicon-based Horta.

Which brings up the important subject of what we should eat. While Jesus considered it to be of secondary importance (It is what comes out of a man, not what goes into a man, which defiles him, he said), there are nevertheless laws of food and health. And the Biblical dietary laws contrast with the scientific dietary laws. The U.S. government guidelines for nutrition look pretty different from Leviticus 11.

The Old Testament Jews were very concerned about clean vs. unclean foods. Leviticus has quite a list of unclean foods. Many of them seem arbitrary. But modern scientists have figured out some likely reasons for some of these laws. For example, why did Jews hate pigs so much? And they have hated pigs for a long time. Archaeologist Israel Finkelstein has unearthed evidence that the Jews were not very different from surrounding tribes even during the heyday of Solomon, and that Jerusalem of Solomon was not the glorious city that the Old Testament describes. But even in the sites of their earliest villages was the remarkable absence of pig bones. We all know pigs are dirty. Of course, the reason they are dirty is we keep them dirty. Wild pigs are no dirtier than other wild animals. Pigs spread parasites, but so do cows. Smallpox apparently evolved from cowpox early in human village life.

One possible reason that the Jews proscribed pork is one I heard from José Lutzenberger, former Secretary of the Environment in Brazil. He spoke at the Prairie Festival at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. (He didn’t keep his job too long. As someone pointed out, he was serious about environmentalism, and appointing “Lutz” as Secretary of the Environment in Brazil was like appointing Wes Jackson as Secretary of Agriculture in the USA.) He said that cows, horses, sheep, and goats did not compete with humans for food; they ate grass and other things that humans cannot digest. But pigs eat some of the same things we do, and therefore may compete with humans for food. A rich man could fatten his pigs while poor people starve in the ancient, or not so ancient, world. Pigs were, to Lutz, a symbol of poor environmental stewardship in ancient times. I’m not sure if he had any scientific evidence, but his statement has stayed with me for many years.

The Old Testament laws also proscribe shellfish. The reason was obvious: spoiled shellfish can make you very sick. They knew this back in ancient times. There was a good chance that any shellfish, by the time it reached the hills of central Judah, would be spoiled. A more recent custom is to eat shellfish that have been harvested only in the months with the letter R in them (that is, not May, June, July, or August). Today we know that shellfish that have fed upon dinoflagellates (“red tide”) can have neurotoxin. So this made sense.

But the modern view of nutrition is totally unlike that of the Old Testament (and New). We can eat fat foods, but only a little bit, and most of our fats should be unsaturated, e.g. from olives and nuts. We need to eat a lot of vegetables and fruits, and get lots of exercise during the ordinary course of a day. This was not so important in the old days when food was often scarce, and when people walked everywhere—there was no stair-vs.-elevator decision for them to make. Their laws worked for them, imperfectly, and our laws work for us. (I’m about to eat some chicken thigh meat, because my cravings are prehistoric in origin.)

This may seem like a small matter, and Biblical literalists do not, to my knowledge, attack nutritionists. I have not heard creationists say, while engulfing fat steaks, “God guarantees my health because I avoid pork and shellfish.” But modern nutrition science does show, just as clearly as modern evolutionary science, that our scriptures were the products of their time, reflecting the best understanding that people had back then, rather than inspired and infallible scientific truths.

Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf Part Three: Dust of the Ground

Last night, a big dust storm blew across Oklahoma. It was visible from outer space, and brought precious topsoil from Nebraska. It has been about seventy years since Hugh Hammond Bennett convinced the Senate to establish what was then called the Soil Conservation Service. Have we learned anything?

I now continue my series about the many ways in which modern science differs from the Biblical worldview--a series that does not include any discussion of evolution. The first essay is here and the second is here.

Most biology courses begin with atoms and molecules. Organisms are mostly made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus, organized mostly into carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. You don’t usually hear any religious people objecting to this. But they should, if they are Biblical literalists.

Genesis 2 describes the creation of man (and later of woman, after he created the animals). And God made man from the dust of the ground. One time, back when I was a theistic evolutionist but a Christian believer, I taught in a Sunday class that this could include organic molecules. A creationist in the class said that this was not so; dust is dust, that is, very fine soil particles blowing in the wind. Not DNA, proteins, and such.

Well guess what. The dust of the ground consists of very different atoms from organic sources. The dust of the ground consists mostly of silicon and oxygen. You cannot take a handful of dust and turn it into an organism without changing the atoms.

And then there is the breath of life. Genesis 2 says that God breathed the breath of life into the lump of clay and made it a living soul. Now, both of the main Hebrew words (ruach for breath, and nephesh for soul) are broadly interpretable. Ruach (Greek: pneuma) can mean breath, wind, or spirit. Nephesh can mean body or soul. But to a literalist, it should be disturbing to realize that life results from the production of ATP by mitochondria. “Breath of life” and “metabolism by mitochondria” can be forced to reconcile, but this is not how the ancient mind thought of life.

One could say that Genesis 2 says that God made humans from pre-existing organic matter—actually, from pre-existing hominins. Many religious people use this as a way of reconciling Genesis with human evolution. But this is not satisfactory to a literalist creationist. How can a creationist accept biochemistry?

Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf Part Two: The Heavens

In a previous blog entry, I wrote about the vast gulf between science and religion with how to determine what is true. I now continue this series about how different science and religion are from one another.

Before Copernicus and Galileo, most people viewed the sky as some kind of sphere or series of spheres on which the stars rotated around the Earth, and each planet (as well as the sun and moon) had its own sphere. Either that or they thought the sun, moon, and stars were gods. This was certainly the view of the writer of Genesis 1, who used the term “raqia” for what is usually translated “firmament.” Did you ever wonder why Genesis called the sky “firmament,” which sounds like “firm”? Because “raqia” is derived from “raqa,” which means “to beat out,” or stamp out, often used for metal beat into a thin sheet. This is the way the word is used in Exodus 39:3, Numbers 16:39, Isaiah 40:19, and Jeremiah 10:9. It refers to trampling or stamping with the foot in 2 Samuel 22:43, Ezekiel 6:11 and 25:6. Figuratively, this can mean “an expanse,” but literally it refers to a metal dome. (See here.)

This does not mean, of course, that the Biblical authors were somehow anti-scientific. They shared the view that nearly everyone had until recently. Copernicus believed in the heavenly spheres; he just made the sun the center, and Earth was on a sphere. Nobody accuses Copernicus of being anti-scientific. It was not until the twentieth century that scientists understood that many of the “nebulae” were faraway galaxies. But the Bible certainly cannot be used as a literally accurate basis for astronomy. Many scientific Christians simply point out that this was not the purpose of Genesis in the first place.

The Bible refers to stars falling from the sky. Isaiah said it (Is. 34:4), Jesus said it (Matthew 24), and Revelation uses the phrase at least twice, in chapters 6 and 8. Of course this cannot literally happen. We all use the term “falling star” figuratively for meteors. No problem, unless you base your science on the Bible. The Biblical view of the universe, like all views of the universe before Kepler and Newton, is vastly different from the modern view shared by everyone, even most creationists.

Oklahoma Teachers Evolution Workshop, Part Seven

As the Teachers' Evolution Workshop sponsored by Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education drew to a close on October 9, we had presentations and discussions by high school teachers about how to teach evolution, usually in interesting laboratory settings.

Andrea Blair, high school teacher in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and a graduate student at the University of Tulsa (where she spends time studying the anatomical structure of amphibians), told the participants about some of the lab activities she has devised or adapted. Some were versions of the natural selection simulations that have been used in many classes for decades; for example, to simulate natural selection of light vs. dark moths against light vs. dark bark, based on the twentieth-century studies by H. B. D. Kettlewell. But the greatest amount of discussion came in response to Andrea's investigation of radiometric dating. Students begin with a box of coins, all heads-up, which represent radioactive atoms. Then the students shake the box just once, count and remove the tails-up, which represent atoms that decayed. The students repeat this over and over, and generate a graph of radiometric decay. But they do so by stimulating a random process (actually a quantum process). I, for one, have never heard about this activity from anyone else.

Andrea also described how to use different colors of beans to represent alleles in a population. Students randomly draw pairs of beans that represent diploid individuals in a population. Then, natural selection can be simulated on the simulated diploids. The advantage of this activity is that students can see the effect of natural selection not on phenotypes but on allele frequencies in a population. This activity can be modified to simulate genetic drift and founder effect.

One thing that Andrea emphasized is that these activities are cheap and easy. You don't need a budget for prepared teaching materials or for computer simulation software. Best of all, students are learning about the processes of evolution, without feeling like "evolution" is being pressed upon them.

And with this, the workshop ended. The participants were, we hope, inspired and equipped to teach evolution in creative ways and to deal constructively with inevitable conflicts. The setting, the University of Oklahoma Biological Station on the shore of Lake Texoma, was restful and beautiful.