Science is a tool that can be abused!

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_canpakes
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Re: Science is a tool that can be abused!

Post by _canpakes »

LittleNipper wrote:
canpakes wrote:
The chronology above points to an Earth of just over 6,000 years of age.

Which do you believe?

10,000 years was the most I could imagine it to be.
I believe approx. 6000 years is the best Biblical fit.


1. Why would you imagine that the age would be approximately 10,000 years? This seems very arbitrary. On what do you base this revision?

2. Early Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations overlap the calculated Earth Origin date that you've given. What explains this?

For the second question, if you are going to claim that there's a conspiracy afoot, can you tell me what the purpose would be?
_DrW
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Re: Science is a tool that can be abused!

Post by _DrW »

LittleNipper wrote:
The CCC wrote:If you have to posit God onto science to make it work. It is no longer science but religion.


Science is a means to an end. Science allows people to diagnose diseases and develop cures. Sciences enables man to create mechanical transportation. Science helps man understand weather patterns to increase predictability. However, to ask for GOD for help in understanding is not either unreasonable or silly. God already knows all the answers.

Little Nipper,

There is no evidence whatsoever that God knows all the answers, or that God knows any answers, or indeed that God even exists.

Please provide a single example of a scientific fact, or knowledge of a scientific principle, contained in scripture that was not known to humankind at the time the scripture was written down (by humankind).
David Hume: "---Mistakes in philosophy are merely ridiculous, those in religion are dangerous."

DrW: "Mistakes in science are learning opportunities and are eventually corrected."
_LittleNipper
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Re: Science is a tool that can be abused!

Post by _LittleNipper »

DrW wrote:
LittleNipper wrote:Science is a means to an end. Science allows people to diagnose diseases and develop cures. Sciences enables man to create mechanical transportation. Science helps man understand weather patterns to increase predictability. However, to ask for GOD for help in understanding is not either unreasonable or silly. God already knows all the answers.

Little Nipper,

There is no evidence whatsoever that God knows all the answers, or that God knows any answers, or indeed that God even exists.

Please provide a single example of a scientific fact, or knowledge of a scientific principle, contained in scripture that was not known to humankind at the time the scripture was written down (by humankind).



Scientific Facts In The Bible

Carol Brooks

003white In Romans 5 Paul seemed to be saying that something happened to all humanity because of Adam’s sin. That the entire race was affected—not by sinning themselves, but rather through the sin of Adam. These statements are very intriguing especially since they fly in the face of innumerable other verses that say exactly the opposite. However the emerging field of Epigenetics makes it not so hard to believe that Paul was more on target than he could ever have realized. The ‘something’ that Paul referred to, could very well have been a physical change in Adam and Eve’s epigenome, which was then inherited by future generations. For what might be the most astounding scientific fact in the Bible, See Original Sin and Epigenetics





Also See

Scientists are now finding that the universe in which we live is like a diamond studded Rolex, except the universe is even more precisely designed than the watch. In fact, the universe is specifically tweaked to enable life on earth. Anthropic Principles

Contrast the information on this page with the scientific knowledge of the Qur’an. For example Sura 18:86 states "Until, when he reached the setting of the sun, he found it set in a spring of murky water: See Errors in The Qur’an, which Contradict Secular and Scientific Data



Bible1-Bar

“When studying the science of the ancient world, one is more apt to be impressed with its ignorance than to admire its accuracy. However, the Bible offers a definite exception to this rule. The Scriptures are replete with statements suggesting scientific knowledge which predates the corresponding discoveries of secular science. Given that Bible writers were not scientists, and given that the scientific information at their disposal was generally misleading, the accuracy of the Bible can only be attributed to the inspiration of God.” [1]

Examples of the more striking scientific accuracy in the Bible include

The Universe
Time and Space
The Beginning
An Initial Void
An Expanding Universe
Space is Empty
That Hole In The North
Air Has Weight
Those Singing Stars
And There are Quite a Few of Them

The Earth
Atoms
The Earth is a Sphere
The Rotation Of The Earth
The Orbit of The Sun
Gravitational Properties of Constellations
Pangaea and Peleg
First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics
Talking Lightning?
The Treasures of The Snow
The Hydrologic Cycle
Measuring The Waters
Air Currents

The Oceans
The Paths Of The Seas
Mountains Under The Seas
Springs Under The Seas

Misc
The Dinosaur
Precise Dimensions of Noah's Ark
Mathematics

Man
Man from Dust
Adam And Eve
All Humanity is One Blood
Life is in the Blood
Blood Clotting in Infants

Medical Knowledge in Ancient Times..
The Egyptians
Moses
Sanitary Practices in the 19th Century
Sanitary Practices in Moses’ Time
The Minoans and The Romans
Leprosy and Plague.. Hansen’s Disease or a Variety of Infectious Sicknesses
Those Old Time Dietary Guidelines

The End Times
The Second Coming Takes Place During The Day AND Night



The Universe

Time and Space:
Most people read the very first verse in the Bible, without giving it another thought. However a closer examination of this verse reveals that the author of Genesis verbalized exactly the same sophisticated principle that scientists use thousands of years later. Science expresses the universe in five terms: time, space, matter, power and motion. So does Genesis 1.

"In the beginning (time) God created (power) the Heaven (space) and the Earth (matter)... And the Spirit of God moved (motion) upon the face of the waters." [Genesis 1:1,3 … written some 3450 years ago].


The Beginning:
The word "beginning" refers specifically to the beginning of time. However, for many years scientists were convinced that the universe was infinite (without end), and that time had always existed. The COsmic Background Explorer (COBE), also referred to as Explorer 66, was a NASA space mission designed to test the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe and apparently provided evidence that supported the idea that the universe had a beginning..

Note: The Big Bang theory, initially proposed in 1946 by George Gamow, a Russian-born scientist who believed that a primeval fireball, or an intense concentration of pure energy at some finite time in the past was the source of all the matter that now exists in the universe.

I wonder how many billions of dollars Explorer 66 cost. Yet someone only had to open the first page of a $10.00 Bible to know the universe had a beginning, before which there was …


An Initial Void:
A Time Magazine article dated Dec. 1976 said

“Most cosmologists… scientists who study the structure and evolution of the universe, agree that the biblical account of creation, in imagining an initial void, may be uncannily close to the truth.” [Emphasis Added]

Adding

“… in 1929, when Astronomer Edwin Hubble used shifts in the spectral lines of light emanating from distant galaxies to calculate that the islands of stars are moving at tremendous speeds away from the earth−and from each other−like dots painted on the surface of an expanding balloon. To some scientists, this outward rush of the galaxies suggested an original cosmic explosion”. [2]

Edwin Hubble showed that distant galaxies were, receding from the earth, and the further away they were, the faster they were moving, which leads to an interesting conclusion... the earth is the center of God's attention in the universe. Surprise! Surprise! However not only are the galaxies rushing outward, but the universe is also expanding.


An Expanding Universe:
The prophet Isaiah who lived almost 3,000 years ago stated

"It is He that . . . stretches out the heavens as a curtain, and spreads them out as a tent to dwell in." [40:22]

Scientists are beginning to understand that the universe is expanding, or stretching out. At least seven times the Scriptures clearly tell us that God stretches out the heavens like a curtain.


Space is Empty:
In ancient times it was variously believed that the earth sat on a large animal or a giant, or even that a mythical Atlas supported the pillars that held heaven and earth apart, and/or carried the earth around on his shoulders (Where he stood while doing so presents an interesting conundrum). However, in what is probably the oldest book of the Bible, Job, living in an ancient culture that knew nothing about space or planets, asserted that God hung the earth on nothing (1500 B.C.) or, in other words, the earth free floats in space.

"He stretches out the north over empty space; he hangs the earth on nothing [Job 26:7]

A fascinating tidbit from scientific history makes the first part of this verse even more telling. Until very recently scientists believed space consisted of a hypothetical substance called Ether. Note the following from Eric Weisstein's World of Science [All Emphasis Added]

Ether, or luminiferous Ether, was the hypothetical substance through which electromagnetic waves travel. It was proposed by the greek philosopher Aristotle and used by several optical theories as a way to allow propagation of light, which was believed to be impossible in "empty" space.

It was supposed that the ether filled the whole universe and was a stationary frame of reference, which was rigid to electromagnetic waves but completely permeable to matter. Hooke endorsed the idea of the existence of the ether in his work Micrographia (1665), and other several philosophers of the 17th century, including Huygens, did the same. At the time of Maxwell's mathematical studies of electromagnetism (in the 1860’s), ether was still assumed to be the propagation medium and was imbued with physics properties such as permeability and permittivity.

In 1887, a crucial experiment was performed by Michelson and Edward Morley in an attempt to detect the existence of the ether. The experiment, named the Michelson-Morley experiment in honor of its authors, shocked the scientific community by yielding results which implied the non-existence of ether. This result was later on used by Einstein to refute the existence of the ether and allowed him to develop special relativity without this artificial (and non-existent) constraint. [3]

Which bring us to the second half of Job 26:7…


That Hole In The North
Another interesting tidbit that illuminates the Divine origin of Scripture is the recent discovery of a huge hole in space… in the direction of the northern hemisphere

The universe has a huge hole in it that dwarfs anything else of its kind. The discovery caught astronomers by surprise. The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it's also strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale. [4]

This "gap" is in the Northern Hemisphere, lying in the general direction of the constellation Bootes. This "hole in space" is a 300 million light year gap in the distribution of galaxies, has taken cosmologists by surprise, not because it exists, but because it is so big.

Indeed, He stretches out the north over the empty place.


Air Has Weight:
The fact that air has weight was proven scientifically only about 300 years ago. The relative weights of air and water are needed for the efficient functioning of the world’s hydrologic cycle, which in turn sustains life on the earth.

When He imparted weight to the wind and meted out the waters by measure [Job 28:25] [Emphasis Added]


Those Singing Stars...
Science has discovered that stars emit radio waves, which are received on earth as a high pitch. God mentioned this in Job 38:7: "When the morning stars sang together..." In fact…

The galaxy is full of objects that emit radio waves, including black holes and stars of various kinds [5]


... And There are Quite a Few of Them:
The first star catalogue was compiled by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd century ad. Called the Almagest, it listed the names and locations of 1,028 stars. However, because of telescopes such as the Hubble, we now know that...

Stars are not spread uniformly across the universe, but are normally grouped into galaxies along with interstellar gas and dust. A typical galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, and there are more than 100 billion (1011) galaxies in the observable universe. While it is often believed that stars only exist within galaxies, intergalactic stars have been discovered. Astronomers estimate that there are at least 70 sextillion (7×1022) stars in the observable universe. [Wikipedia].

But didn’t God already say that?? [All Emphasis Added]

God said to Abraham 'Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.' And He said to him, 'So shall your descendants be.' (Genesis 15:5)".

'As the host of heaven (stars) cannot be numbered, nor the sand of the sea measured, so will I multiply the descendants of David My servant (Jeremiah 33:22).

"Therefore from one man, ...were born as many as the stars of the sky in multitude-- innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore. (Hebrews 11:12)"

“The Bible asserts that the stars are innumerable (Genesis 15:5, Genesis 17:7, Hebrews 11:12). This does not necessarily mean that we are incapable of mathematically expressing their number. It means that no human has the ability to count them individually so as to achieve their sum. It is claimed that there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. If stars were counted around the clock at one star per second, then it would take over 3000 years just to count these. Add to this the fact that there are as many as 100 billion galaxies. However, there were many scholars prior to Galileo who believed that the stars could be counted, and several attempts were made to do so. Many of these counts arrived at around 1000 stars.” [1]

Which brings Psalm 8: 3-4 to mind

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained; What is man that You take thought of him, And the son of man that You care for him?


The Earth

Atoms:
All matter is composed of atoms. Only in recent years has science discovered that everything we see is composed of things that we cannot see- tiny invisible particles called atoms, made up of electrons and protons, which are really not solids, but positive and negative charges of electricity. Whether he specifically understood it or not, the author of the books of Hebrews wrote about atomic structure, nearly 2000 years before it was discovered by scientists.

By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. [Hebrews 11:3] [Emphasis Added]

Interestingly the atom has a dense center called the nucleus, inside which are neutrons, which have no electrical charge and are therefore neutral and protons, which have positive charges. One law of electricity is that like charges repel one another. Therefore, since the protons inside the nucleus are all positive charges, they should repel one another and scatter, but for some reason they do not. There is a binding force, not yet understood, holding them together. Hmmm!

"For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." (Colossians 1:16-17).


The Earth is a Sphere:
The following statement was made some 2800 years ago (some 750 years before Christ) by a divinely inspired Isaiah.

"He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in." (Isaiah 40:22)

Although Aristotle provided observational evidence for the spherical Earth around 330 BC, most pre-Socratic philosophers, including Leucippus (c. 440 BC) and Democritus (c. 460-370 BC) believed in a flat earth. However, by the time of Christopher Columbus he, and most other educated people of their time, knew that the earth was round. In fact, the Greek mathematician Eratostenes accurately calculated the earth's circumference in the third century before Christ.

“Other statements in the Bible also indicate that God revealed this truth long ago. For example, David said that God has removed our transgression from us as far as the east is from the west (Ps 103:12). On a spherical surface, east and west are infinitely separated in the sense that one can travel indefinitely in either direction without ever attaining the other. However, Solomon described the wind as blowing in circuits, first towards the south and then turning toward the north. North and south are not infinitely separated as east and west, because a southward traveler on a spherical surface will be heading north after crossing the south pole”. [1]

Also take a moment to really consider the next verse.. [Emphasis Added]

"He has inscribed a circle on the surface of the waters at the boundary of light and darkness." (Job 26:10)

Job 26:10 clearly refers to the line of demarcation between day and night. No other interpretation is possible. Such a view of the curved horizon at sunrise or sunset can only be seen from extremely high altitudes reached only by military jets and spacecraft. These writers were given a view of the Earth as a sphere long before Eratosthenes determined that the earth was round in 240BC. He did this by by measuring shadows in Egyptian wells. Although there is a specific Hebrew word for "sphere," the word used in these passages ("khug") can mean both circle or sphere. It refers to the shape of an orange as it might be represented in a two-dimensional picture. [6]

Please note that verses like Isaiah 11:12 that refer to "the four corners of the earth", are a colloquialism that is still used today to portray the four compass extremities of the earth. In fact the Strongs Greek/Hebrew dictionary defines the word "corner" (gonia) as angle, or quadrant.


The Rotation Of The Earth:
was likely revealed in Job 38:12, where God asks of Job:

Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place; that it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it? It is turned as clay to the seal; and they stand as a garment.

“God asks Job if he has ever dictated the time of the morning or the location of the sunrise (dayspring). As soon as the sun is risen, its light will take hold of the ends of the earth in the sense that it touches all of the landscape, and the wicked are shaken out of it (the earth) in the sense that thieves, drunkards, adulterers, and others who practice their sins in darkness are forced to desist from these activities as they retreat from the light. Also, the beauties of the earth are revealed by the light, and its coloration is made to appear as that of a beautiful garment. Finally, the text asserts that God's command of the morning derives from His control of the earth, which is turned as clay to the seal. Hence, the suggestion is that God regulates the morning by rotating the earth as a potter rotates the clay. Yet ancient wisdom would have asserted that God regulated the morning by control of the Sun, and indeed, this is the perception of any uninformed mind”. [1]


The Orbit of The Sun:
Scientists have long believed that the earth revolved around the sun, which was stationary. This caused them to scoff at the following verses which, they said, taught the opposite…

"In them has He set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoices as a strong man to run a race. His [the sun's] going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof." [Psalm 19:4-6]

However, it was later discovered that the sun has a "circuit" through the heavens, just as the Bible says. The Sun - in fact, our whole solar system - orbits around the center of the Milky Way. The Galaxy is so huge that the Sun requires 230 million years to complete one orbit, although it is moving through space at approximately 600,000 miles per hour.


Gravitational Properties of Constellations:
God asked Job

“Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades, Or loose the belt of Orion?” (Job 38:31).

“In the last century astrophysicists have discovered that the stars of Pleiades move in unison with each other, and are thus gravitationally bound. They have also discovered that the stars of Orion are free agents that are not gravitationally bound! Interestingly, the three stars that comprise Orion's belt appear to be closer together than the outer stars in the constellation, but are actually farther apart! (they appear closer together because of the 2-D plane we see them in)”. [7a] All Emphasis Added


Pangaea and Peleg:
The Pangaea theory is the hypothesis that the continents once formed a single landmass (called Pangaea which means 'all lands' in Greek) before breaking apart and drifting to their present locations. Although the idea caused sharp disagreement among geologists, evidence in favour of continental drift is now extensive. Geological similarities on matching continental edges suggest that they were once joined. Also, the continents resemble pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle that fit together perfectly. For example the coastline of the West Coast of Africa fits perfectly with the coastline of East Coast of South America

And what does the Bible say..

Genesis 10:25 speaks of a man, whose name Peleg means division. The text then explains that he was so named because in his days the earth was divided.

However in the interest of fairness, it has to be mentioned that there are those that believe that a far more likely explanation for Genesis 10:25 is that it refers to the division of humans into many diverse communities which started with the linguistic division at Babel. However, this is hard to believe since only eight verses later the Bible states, 'Now the whole earth had one language and one speech' (Genesis 11:1), and as a result of their disobedience, 'the LORD confused the language of all the earth' (Genesis 11:9). .


First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics:
The 1st Law of Thermodynamics states that matter can be neither created nor destroyed, and that the amount of matter in the universe remains constant. If the First Law is correct, which every scientific measurement ever made has confirmed, then the universe could not have created itself, it must have been created in the past, no further creating must be going on, and no loss of creation is occurring. The Bible is the only religious book that correctly portrays the First Law by 1) its description in Genesis of a Creator who is no longer creating, and 2) a Creator who is "upholding all things by the word of his power (Hebrews 1:3)" .

Genesis 2:1 says (after creation):

"Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them."

The Hebrew word used in the above quote is the past definite tense of the verb "finish" indicating an action completed in the past. The creation was "finished" -- once and for all. That is what the First Law of Thermodynamics says. It states that neither matter nor energy can be either created or destroyed. There is no "creation" ongoing today. It is "finished" exactly as the Bible states.

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all systems degenerate from order to disorder, was regarded by Albert Einstein to be the premier Law in science. Again the Bible is the only religious book to accurately describe this Law:

"For the heavens will vanish away like smoke, the earth will grow old like a garment... (Isaiah 51:6)",

and also a New Testament rendering:

"You, Lord, in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You remain; and they will all grow old like a garment; (Hebrews 1:10-11)" [7a]

Also See The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics... A Law Against Evolution


Talking Lightning?:
When God said in Job 38:35 (written 3,500 years ago)…

"Can you send lightnings, that they may go and say unto you, Here we are?"

It certainly seemed to be a scientifically ludicrous statement -- that light can be sent, and then manifest itself in speech. But did you know that radio waves move at the speed of light? This is why you can have instantaneous wireless communication with someone on the other side of the earth. Science didn't discover this until 1864 when "the British scientist James Clerk Maxwell suggested that electricity and light waves were two forms of the same thing". [8]

Similarly, Job 38:19 asks, "Where is the way where light dwells?" Modern man has only recently discovered that light (electromagnetic radiation) has a "way," traveling at 186,000 miles per second.


The Treasures of The Snow:
In the book of Job (written some 3,500 years ago), God asks Job if he had entered into

“the treasures of the snow” [38:22].

I can just hear the critics of yesteryear … Huh! Did He mean that blanket of white stuff that covers everything? What treasures could there possibly be in that? However with the advent of the microscope, man discovered that the ice molecules of each snowflake form in a wide variety of intricate shapes. In other words, each and every single snowflake has a unique and often beautifully symmetrical pattern. Quite a "treasure."


The Hydrologic Cycle:
The Mississippi River, which is just one of thousands of rivers all over this planet, dumps over six million gallons of water per second into the Gulf of Mexico. The answer to where all that water goes lies in the hydrologic cycle, or circulation of the earth's water… something that was not fully accepted until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although the earliest literature indicating an understanding of this cycle was apparently around the third or fourth century BC.. Aristotle demonstrated only a vague understanding of this process… though he recognized that rain came from clouds, he incorrectly postulated that air turned into water and vice versa.

Either way the Bible accurately portrays of this cycle 2500 years before it was widely accepted. Note the following passages:

For He draws up the drops of water, they distill rain from the mist, which the clouds pour down, they drip upon man abundantly. [Job 36:27,28]

The One who builds His upper chambers in the heavens And has founded His vaulted dome over the earth, He who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the face of the earth, The LORD is His name. [Amos 9:6]

It has only recently been learned that most clouds are formed by ocean evaporation, but again the Bible had it right centuries ago:

"All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; to the place from which the rivers come, there they return again [Ecclesiastes 1:7]".

The complex nature of how water is supported in clouds despite being heavier than air is clearly implied when God declared to Job [Emphasis Added]

"Do you know how the clouds are balanced, those wondrous works of Him who is perfect in knowledge (Job 37:16). [7a]

Furthermore...


Measuring The Waters:
Modern science has proved that the quantity of water on Earth is just enough for our needs. If the sea became three meters deeper, the water would absorb all the carbon dioxide and nitrogen, and no creature could live any longer.

Isaiah 40:12 (written 2800 years ago) "Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand..."

We are told that God has measured the waters and set a proper amount of water on the Earth.


Air Currents:
The wind goes toward the south, and turns around to the north; The wind whirls about continually, And comes again on its circuit. [Ecclesiastes 1:6]

The Bible describes the circulation of the atmosphere, and includes some principles of fluid dynamics.


The Oceans

The Paths Of The Seas:
The Bible says

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou makest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, Yea, and the beasts of the field, The birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, Whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas. [Psalms 8:4-8] [Emphasis Added]

When the Bible speaks of “the paths of the seas” it is more than likely that it is referring to ocean currents, which was discovered by man only in the 1850’s. The following history of the discovery of these “paths” has been excerpted from Answers in Genesis…

American naval officer and oceanographer Matthew Maury (1806-1873) who wrote the first textbook on modern oceanography called The Physical Geography of the Sea and Its Meteorology, was a Christian who had no doubts about the accuracy of the Bible. After an accident partially disabled him ending his active duty with the Navy, he was appointed superintendent of the US Naval Observatory in Washington. “In his Bible studies, the words of Psalm 8 stuck in his mind: ‘ ... whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas’. Maury determined that if God’s Word said there were ‘paths’ in the seas, then there must be paths. So he set out to find them.

He studied old ships’ logs. From these he compiled charts of ocean-wind and sea currents. To study the speed and direction of the ocean currents Maury set adrift weighted bottles known as ‘drift bottles’. These floated slightly below the surface of the water, and thus were not affected by wind. Instructions were sealed in each bottle directing anyone who found one washed ashore to return it. From the location and date on which the bottles were found, Maury was able to develop his charts of the ocean currents—the ‘paths’ of the seas—which greatly aided the science of marine navigation”. [9]


Mountains Under The Seas:
When Jonah, who lived some 2,800 years ago, was in the depths of the ocean, he spoke of going down to the "bottoms of the mountains”. [Emphasis Added]

"I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet have you brought up my life from corruption, O LORD my God." [Jonah 2:6]

Only in recent history has man discovered that there are mountains on the ocean floor. The tropical Revillagigedos Islands are the visible peaks of a underwater mountain chain-known as the Eastern Pacific Rise, that stretches all the way to Antarctica. [10]. The deepest part of Mariana's Trench, east of the Mariana Islands, has been measured at 35,798 feet below sea level. Mount Everest is only 29,035 feet high


Springs Under The Seas:
Hydrothermal vents are found in areas of the ocean floor that are spreading, such as at mid-ocean ridges, where tectonic plates are being pulled apart. Molten magma then rises from deep inside the Earth, superheating the cold ocean water around it. The average temperature of deep-ocean water is only 2°C (36°F). The water coming directly from a hydrothermal vent can reach up to 350°C (662°F) and is rich in dissolved chemicals. The hot spring water forms a plume above the vent, somewhat like smoke rising from a chimney into the air.

The first underwater hot spring to be discovered was probably in 1977, when scientists discovered hot springs at a depth of 2.5 km, on the Galapagos Rift (spreading ridge) off the coast of Ecuador. Since then other hot springs have been found at a number of sites along the mid-oceanic ridges, many on the East Pacific Rise. Giant tube worms, huge clams, and mussels all thrive around the hot springs. [11]

Yet once again the Bible was slightly ahead of man’s discovery..

Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the recesses of the deep? [Job 38:16] [Emphasis Added]


Misc

The Dinosaur:
There is reasonable evidence that the Scriptures speak of dinosaurs. As should be expected, this evidence comes from Genesis, the book of origins, and from the book of Job, generally believed to be the oldest book in the Bible.

First, Genesis 1:21 speaks of God creating whales on the fifth day of creation. The Hebrew word translated here as whales is generally translated dragons. It is translated as monsters once, whale(s) twice, serpent(s) thrice, and dragon(s) 21 times.

Second, Job's statements concerning the behemoth (Job 40:15-24) might be referring to dinosaurs. Its tail is compared to a cedar tree. Its strength, and apparently its bulk, is in its loins. It is said to be the chief of the ways of God, and is described as having the ability to drink up a river. No modern animal meets all points of this description. Some commentators think this was a hippopotamus. However, the hippo’s tail isn’t like a large tree, but a small twig. This creature also appears impervious to attack because his nose could pierce through snares

"Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eats grass as an ox. Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moves his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron. He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him. Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play. He lies under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens. The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about. Behold, he drinks up a river, and hastens not: he trusts that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth. He takes it with his eyes: his nose pierces through snares. (Job 40:15-24).

Third, Job's description of the leviathin (Job 41) very much resembles a dinosaur. Some would dismiss this description as fictitious because the leviathin is described as breathing fire; however, some creation scientists believe this could have happened. The creature would merely need glands to produce a chemical which would combust when exposed to air, an idea that is far from science fiction since the bombardier beetle has this ability. The fact that nearly every major culture of the world has traditions about such dragons lends yet further credibility to the possibility of their existence in the past. [1]

Apparently many scholars feel these descriptions refer to mythical or metaphorical animals, or the accounts could have been based on fossil skeletons. Why? Because the simultaneous existence of men and dinosaurs would turn their theories on their collective heads? Fossil Skeletons? Uh Huh! Somebody is going to have to explain to me how (and why) a man living some 3500 years ago would be engaged in an archaeological excavation… leave alone having the wherewithal to carry one out.

Why did the dinosaur disappear? This is something that has modern science mystified, but then Scripture says,

. . . He that made him can make his sword approach to him. [Job 40:19]

In other words, God caused this, the largest of all the creatures He had made, to become extinct.


Most of humankind has been brainwashed (courtesy of National Geographic, Time magazine, CNN and the Discovery channel) into believing that dinosaurs had walked this Earth millions of years ago. While evolutionists continue to maintain that ‘no man ever existed in the age of the reptiles’, the evidence documents exactly the opposite. See Section Dragons and Dinosaurs on THIS Page


Precise dimensions of Noah's Ark
The dimensions of Noah's Ark as described in the Bible are ideal for stability. In fact, South Korean architects who examined the dimensions found that the boat was virtually impossible to capsize! Their modeling and analysis found that the ark could survive waves higher than 30 meters! (note that a typical tsunami is only 10 meters high) [12]. Many other cultures have flood legends similar to the account in the Bible, but their ark descriptions were not very believable. For example, the Babylonian Gilgamesh Flood legend described an ark that was shaped like a cube, which would be horrible for stability.

Mathematics
The Value of Pi...

In the verse of the Bible that contains a circumference and diameter (1 Kings 7:23), the Hebrew word for circumference contains an extra character at the end that can only add value to the word by applying Gematria (each Hebrew letter also represents a number). When taking the ratio of the added character to the value of the original word, the value of Pi is achieved to within 4 decimal places! [A more in-depth article by Chuck Missler can be found at http://ldolphin.org/pi/]. [7a]


Man

Man from Dust
Researchers at NASA's Ames Research Center confirmed that every element in man can be found in the soil, prompting one of the scientists to say

"...the biblical scenario for the creation of life turns out to be not far off the mark". [7a]


Adam And Eve:
The Genesis account of creation asserts that all humans descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve. There is now considerable debate in the scientific community over recent genetic studies which indicate that all men have a common father, and all women have a common mother. In fact, the latter claim is sometimes called the Eve hypothesis. Some scientists are skeptical about these studies, and even those who are supportive would not generally accept the Genesis account; however, Bible believers should expect further research to add yet more evidence supporting these hypotheses. [13]


One Blood:
Until recent times, it was believed there was significant differences in the blood of various human races. However statistical divisions of humanity based on different kinds of genetic data do not group people consistently into races

“…most human variation falls within, not between populations. About 85% of all genetic variation can, on average, be found within any local population, be they Swedes, Kikuyu, or Hmong. About 94% can be found within any continental population… In fact, there are no characteristics, no traits, not even one gene that turns up in all members of one so-called race yet is absent from others.

In fact, even disputing the belief that diseases like sickle cell anemia are race specific diseases, it goes on to say

Doctors were long taught that sickle cell anemia was a genetic disease of Negroes, a marker of their race. Yet sickle cell is found among peoples from central and western Africa, but not southern Africa. It is also carried by Turks, Yemenis, Indians, Greeks, and Sicilians. That's because sickle cell arose several thousand years ago as a mutation in one of the genes that codes for hemoglobin. The mutation soon spread to successive populations along the trade routes where malaria was common. It turns out that inheriting one sickle cell allele confers resistance to malaria and thus provides a selective advantage in malarial regions (inheriting sickle cell alleles from both parents causes sickle-cell disease). In other words, sickle cell … is a marker not of skin color or race but ancestry, or more precisely, having ancestors from where malaria was common. [14]


Life is in the Blood:
Leviticus 17:11, written 3,000 years ago, declared that blood is the source of life:

"For the life of the flesh is in the blood."

Today it is well established that If you lose your blood, you lose your life, however bloodletting or the withdrawal of, often considerable quantities of blood, from a patient to cure or prevent illness was a most common medical practice performed by doctors from antiquity up to the late 19th century. Today we know that not only is bloodletting ineffective for most diseases, in the overwhelming majority of cases it was extremely harmful to patients.


Blood Clotting in Infants:
The Bible consistently says that a baby must be circumcised on the eighth day. For example, in Genesis 17:12, God specifically directed Abraham to circumcise newborn males on the eighth day.

Prothrombin is a plasma protein produced in the liver in the presence of vitamin K. As the name indicates, it is the precursor of thrombin, which facilitates the clotting of blood. If vitamin K is deficient, there will be a prothrombin deficiency and hemorrhaging may occur

Since Vitamin K is not readily carried through the placenta, babies are born with very small amounts of vitamin K in their bodies which can lead to decreased clotting ability of the blood, and leave the newborn more susceptible to hemorrhage. Vitamin K must either be acquired from dietary sources, or as a by-products of intestinal bacteria, therefore most of the Vitamin K needed by the baby is obtained through a slow build up of their gut bacteria after they are born.

Apologetics Press quotes Holt and McIntosh, in their classic work, Holt Pediatrics, which...

observed that a newborn infant has “peculiar susceptibility to bleeding between the second and fifth days of life.... Hemorrhages at this time, though often inconsequential, are sometimes extensive; they may produce serious damage to internal organs, especially to the brain, and cause death from shock and exsanguination” (1953, pp. 125-126). Obviously, then, if vitamin K is not produced in sufficient quantities until days five through seven, it would be wise to postpone any surgery until some time after that. [15]

Which is sufficient reason to wait for a week before circumcision and, in itself, testimony to the accuracy of the Bible, since "prothrombin" and "Vitamin K" would have been Latin and Greek to the people of that time.

However, some believe that God specified day eight, because

On the eighth day, the amount of prothrombin present actually is elevated above one-hundred percent of normal—and is the only day in the male’s life in which this will be the case under normal conditions [15]

However, I can find no corroborating study for the eighth day scenario, which is not to say that one does not exist. Note: In most countries infants are given vitamin K shortly after birth to prevent a rare but potentially fatal condition called vitamin K deficiency bleeding in infancy.


Seed of a Woman?
Please Note: Many Christian apologetic sites use Genesis 3:15 as one more thread of evidence for the scientific accuracy of the Scriptures. The verse says

And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel." (Genesis 3:15 NASB)

They rightly say that until a few centuries ago, it was not common knowledge that women possessed the ‘seed of life’ or, in more technical terms, ovum. Instead, it was widely believed that only the male had the seed of life, and the woman was nothing more than a ‘glorified incubator’. In other words, the Bible knew about the woman’s ‘seed of life’, centuries ago.

However, this is not the meaning of ‘seed’ in Genesis, which has been translated from the Hebrew zera. While the word does mean a literal seed (as in grain or fruit.. Genesis 8:2 and 47:23), and can refer to male sperm (Genesis 19:32), when used in connection with humans, it usually means descendant or offspring, and has often been translated accordingly.

As God told Abraham... "Now behold, I Myself do establish My covenant with you, and with your descendants after you; (Genesis 9:9 NASB)

"I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants, (Deuteronomy 30:19 NASB)

The use of zera in Genesis 3:15 simply refers to Eve's descendant, Jesus Christ, who would eventually bruise Satan on the head. Also to be noted is that God said this to Eve alone, simply because Jesus had a human mother, but no man could claim to be his father. Mary was a virgin conceived by the Spirit of God.


Medical Knowledge in Ancient Times..

The Egyptians
The most complete information about the medicine and pharmacy of ancient Egypt is contained in the famous Papyrus Ebers, a disorganized collection of more than 800 concoctions and magical spells to alleviate suffering. The papyrus dates back to about 1552 B. C. and was discovered by Georg Ebers in 1872-3. Some of the ‘cures’ are…

To prevent the immoderate crying of children a mixture of the seeds of the plant Sheben with some fly-dirt is recommended. (It is supposed that Sheben may have been the poppy). …

To prevent the hair turning grey anoint it with the blood of a black calf which has been boiled in oil; or with the fat of a rattlesnake. When it falls out one remedy is to apply a mixture of six fats, namely those of the horse, the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the cat, the snake, and the ibex. To strengthen it anoint with the tooth of a donkey crushed in honey. …

The animal drugs included lizards' blood, swine's teeth, putrid meat, stinking fat, moisture from pigs' ears, milk, goose grease, asses' hoofs, animal fats from various sources, excreta of various animals, including human beings, donkeys, antelopes, dogs, cats, and even flies. [16]

And, apart from the papyrus..

“The grave of several small children revealed that they had eaten skinned mice just prior to their deaths. The Egyptians believed that the life-giving Nile created mice because these animals emerged from cracks in the mud after the Nile receded each year.” [17]

Moses
Acts 7:22 tells us that …“Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians…” Yet scientific ignorance is conspicuous by its absence in the first five books of the Bible, written by Moses approximately 1491-1451 B.C. In fact the Torah (or law of Moses) not only reveals advanced principles and knowledge about hygiene, quarantine and sanitation far superior to that possessed by the Egyptians and other ancient societies of that day, but also far exceeded medical standards practiced as recently as 100 years ago. Where did Moses get this advanced information?


Sanitary Practices in The 19th Century
Our medical knowledge was abysmal right up to the beginning of the twentieth century. It was not until this century that medical science had a full understanding of the fact that most diseases are caused by infection of microscopic organisms. Accordingly, the medical value of sterilization, sanitation, and quarantines were virtually unappreciated. Please note that the following took place in the 19th century.

In the 1840s, puerperal or childbirth fever, a bacterial infection of the female genital tract after childbirth, was taking the lives of up to 30% of women who gave birth in hospitals. Women who gave birth at home remained relatively unaffected.

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818-65), a Hungarian obstetrician educated at the universities of Pest and Vienna was an assistant professor on the maternity ward of the Vienna General Hospital. He observed that women examined by student doctors who had not washed their hands after leaving the autopsy room had very high death rates. When a colleague who had received a scalpel cut died of infection, Semmelweis concluded that puerperal fever was septic and contagious and that he and the medical students carried "cadaverous particles" on their hands.

He ordered students to wash their hands with chlorinated lime before examining patients; as a result, the maternal death rate was reduced from 12% to 1% in 2 years. Nevertheless, Semmelweis encountered strong opposition from hospital officials as some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands; they felt that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean.

The existence of germs was unknown until around A.D. 1890 when Louis Pasteur demonstrated in his Germ Theory of Disease that most infectious diseases were caused by microorganisms originating from outside the body. While Pasteur was not the first to propose germ theory he developed it and conducted experiments that clearly indicated its correctness, and managed to convince most of Europe it was true. This new understanding of germs and their means of transmission led to improved sanitary standards that resulted in an enormous drop in the mortality rate.

Yet these core principles of sanitation were being practiced by the Israelites thousands of years earlier.


Sanitary Practices in Moses’ Time
“The Israelites were instructed to wash themselves and their clothes in running water if they had a bodily discharge, if they came in contact with another person's discharge, or if they had touched a dead human or animal carcass. They were also instructed to wash any uncovered vessels that were in the vicinity of a dead body, and if a dead carcass touched a vessel it was to be destroyed. Items recovered during war were also to be purified through either fire or running water. In addition, the Israelites were instructed to bury their human waste outside of camp, and to burn the waste of their animals. (See Numbers 19, Leviticus 11 and 15, Deuteronomy 23:12). [7b]

This is the law, when a man dieth in a tent: all that come into the tent, and all that is in the tent, shall be unclean seven days. And every open vessel, which hath no covering bound upon it, is unclean. And whosoever toucheth one that is slain with a sword in the open fields, or a dead body, or a bone of a man, or a grave, shall be unclean seven days. [Numbers 19:14-16]

"You shall also have a place outside the camp and go out there, and you shall have a spade among your tools, and it shall be when you sit down outside, you shall dig with it and shall turn to cover up your excrement. [Deuteronomy 23:10,11]

Whatsoever shall touch the flesh thereof shall be holy: and when there is sprinkled of the blood thereof upon any garment, thou shalt wash that whereon it was sprinkled in the holy place. But the earthen vessel wherein it is sodden shall be broken: and if it be sodden in a brasen pot, it shall be both scoured, and rinsed in water. [Leviticus 6:27,28].

The last is a clear commandment to discard used pottery that may be contaminated with bacteria while metal pots should be disinfected by scouring and rinsing in water.

Until recent years, doctors washed their hands in a bowl of water, leaving invisible germs on their hands. However, the Bible says specifically to wash hands under "running water."

"And when he that has an issue is cleansed of his issue; then he shall number to himself even days for his cleansing, and wash his clothes, and bathe his flesh in running water, and shall be clean" (Leviticus 15:13).


The Romans and The Minoans:
I have read the arguments that even in ancient times people knew about and often implemented good sanitation practices. The civilizations most often referenced being the Minoans and the Romans.. with particular emphasis on the ancient city of Pompeii. [See Footnote For Details]


Leprosy and Plague:
is characterized by disfiguring skin sores, nerve damage, and progressive debilitation. Throughout history, few diseases have provoked more stigma than leprosy, unique in its ability to generate fear.

However it is well to note that when the Bible speaks of “leprosy”, it is unknown whether it is referring to what we understand as leprosy (Hansen’s disease) which, left untreated, has debilitating and well known symptoms usually characterized by disfigured limbs, of which Scripture says nothing. However it is quite possible that Biblical leprosy may have included Hansen’s disease.

Whereas leprosy in Scripture seemed to cover a wider range of infectious diseases (also called plague), and could get quite complicated [See Leviticus 13 and 14]. The general rule however being quarantine, sometimes for just seven days. Careful observation was then made to see if the plague was healed and if it was, the person was declared clean after a ceremony involving two birds and a further seven days of living outside the camp. Infected garments were to be burned if the disease had spread after seven days, otherwise they could be washed twice.

However true leprosy was incurable before the advent of modern drugs and is not all that infectious although according to the Diseases Health Channel by eMedTV, leprosy research scientists still do not completely understand how leprosy spreads, although people who live within the same household as a person with untreated leprosy have an eight-fold increased risk of developing leprosy. [18] Emphasis Added]

Leviticus 13 and 14 mention the ‘marks’ of leprosy on walls and on garments and the priests were instructed to burn the garments of leprosy victims! (Leviticus 13:52), which many thought was quite silly, however M. leprae is a hardy organism and can survive outside the body for up to 45 days. However remember that we do not know if whether Scripture is referring to leprosy as we know it or some other infectious disease. On the other hand a paper published in the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene says the following [Emphasis Added]

Both nasal secretions and skin from untreated MB cases of leprosy are capable of shedding M. leprae to the environment, which may be deposited on either or both the nasal and skin epithelia of contacts with the potential for initiating infection. [19]

Which is why there are very strict commands in the Bible about how to deal with leprosy and other infectious diseases. During the devastating Black Death of the fourteenth century, patients who were sick or dead were kept in the same rooms as the rest of the family. People often wondered why the disease was affecting so many people at one time. They attributed these epidemics to ‘bad air’ or ‘evil spirits.’ However, careful attention (and earlier) to the medical commands of God as revealed in Leviticus would have saved untold millions of lives.

In fact, the laws against leprosy in Leviticus 13 may be regarded as the first model of sanitary legislation and quarantine

And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean. All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be. [Leviticus 13:45,46].


Dietary Guidelines
“By the 1980s, all the health organizations of the United States had adopted low-fat, high fiber dietary guidelines. This was the culmination of numerous scientific studies that had demonstrated that diets high in vegetables, fruits, and grains reduced the risk of heart disease, cancer, and many other diseases. Secular physicians generally agree that these dietary guidelines that were producing longer life spans were first developed by religious movements founded in the 1800s, particularly by the Seventh-day Adventists. Where did the Seventh-day Adventists get their guidelines? From a meticulous and careful study of the Bible. It appears man has finally caught up to the dietary recommendations given by God to the Israelites some 3500 years ago!” [7b]

Additionally Leviticus 11:9-12 says

These you may eat, whatever is in the water: all that have fins and scales, those in the water, in the seas or in the rivers, you may eat. But whatever is in the seas and in the rivers that does not have fins and scales among all the teeming life of the water, and among all the living creatures that are in the water, they are detestable things to you, and they shall be abhorrent to you; you may not eat of their flesh, and their carcasses you shall detest. 'Whatever in the water does not have fins and scales is abhorrent to you.

Scripture states that we should avoid those sea creatures which do not have fins or scales. We now know that bottom-feeders tend to consume waste and are likely to carry disease.


The End Times

Since Ernest Rutherford, who received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1908, is credited with splitting the atom only in 1917, it is quite impossible for people in the first century, to have known anything about the Atom Bomb. However they certainly described it well, speaking about the sky burning up and the earth itself melting. Peter certainly believed this to be true, warning people about this phenomena in a verse quite startling in its clarity.

"But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare. Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat." (2 Peter 3:10-12)

The prophet Zechariah also gave us a chilling message…

"Now this will be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the peoples who have gone to war against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they stand on their feet, and their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongue will rot in their mouth." [Zechariah 14:12]

While the Apostle John described the sun becoming black as sack cloth and the moon becoming like blood

And I saw when he opened the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the whole moon became as blood; [Revelation 6:12]…

which describes the phenomena that would result from massive amounts of dust and debris blown into the sky by multiple nuclear bursts. John went on to say…

"And the atmosphere was pushed apart like a scroll when it is rolled together" (Revelation 6:14).

In a nuclear explosion the atmosphere rolls back on itself It's this tremendous rush of air back into the vacuum that causes much of the destruction of a nuclear explosion. John's words in this verse are a perfect picture of an all out nuclear exchange... The whole world will be literally shaken apart!

While John did not use terms like "nuclear weapons, ICBM's, or fractional orbital bombs." But "hail and fire," "a great mountain burning with fire," and "a great star... burning like a torch." Exactly what we would expect of a First Century man, describing things he had no knowledge of in the only terms he knew to use. Could it be that what John was really witnessing in the Spirit, was an end of the age nuclear holocaust? The effects he describes certainly seem to bear this out.

The poisoning of the waters (Revelation 8:11), the severe reduction in visibility (Revelation 8:12), the death of much of the earth's vegetation (Revelation 8:7), malignant sores (Revelation 16:2), the end of ocean life (Revelation 16:3), and the inability of the atmosphere to block out harmful ultraviolet rays, resulting in severe burns (Revelation 16:8) are all expected results of nuclear war.

However, please note that we are not saying that the world will end in a nuclear holocaust. In fact there are three possible sources of the kind of devastation portrayed above. [20]

[See The End of The Age]

The Second Coming Takes Place in The Day AND Night:
In Luke 17:34–3 Jesus, speaking of His return to earth, makes the following statement.

I tell you, on that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other will be left. There will be two women grinding at the same place; one will be taken and the other will be left. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other will be left."

Which is a clear indication of knowledge of a revolving earth, on which it is day on one side, while it is yet night on the other.


Foot Note
The Minoan Civilization… a peaceful trade civilization which arose on the island of Crete, and lasted from approximately 2700 to 1450 BC, and widely considered to be the foundation of European civilization.

The Minoan Palace of Knossos on the isle of Crete featured four separate drainage systems that emptied into the great sewers constructed of stone. Terra cotta pipe was laid beneath the palace floor, hidden from view. … It provided water for fountains and faucets of marble, gold and silver that jetted hot and cold running water. Harbored in the palace latrine was the world's first flushing "water closet" or toilet, with a wooden seat and a small reservoir of water. The device, however, was lost for thousands of years amid the rubble of flood and decay. [The History of Plumbing - Roman and English Legacy. http://www.theplumber.com/eng.html

However it has to be noted that these discoveries were made in the Palace of Knossos built gradually between 1700 and 1400 BC. If they had the ability to build a palace with Frescoes, a Throne Room, and Aqueducts that brought fresh water from springs about 10 km away, why wouldn’t they be able to fashion a toilet (a seat over drain flushed by pouring water from a jug).

While I understand that the subject being discussed is ancient sanitary practices, I can not resist the urge to bring up one other aspect of Minoan society..

Evidence that suggest the Minoans may have performed human sacrifice has been found at three sites: including a young man, was found in an unusually contracted position on a raised platform, suggesting that he had been trussed up for sacrifice... the discoloration of the bones on one side of his body suggests he died of blood loss. In another location fragments of a human skull were found in the same room as a small hearth, cooking-hole, and cooking-equipment. In the "North House" at Knossos, the bones of at least four children (who had been in good health) were found which bore signs that "they were butchered in the same way the Minoans slaughtered their sheep and goats, suggesting that they had been sacrificed and eaten. [21]


Pompeii, the ruined and partially buried Roman town-city near modern Naples was destroyed, and completely buried, during a long catastrophic eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius spanning two days in AD 79. Excavations reveal not only a large forum in the center of the city, but public baths, a small theater, a large theater, temples, grand villas and 33 bakeries..

“Water closets were in vogue in Pompeii, and archaeologists have found ancient closets in the back of one palace, including a cistern to flush water to the different seats. Near the palace kitchen they also found an arched recess approximately three feet deep. Although the actual wood had long disappeared, archaeologists say they could still see outlines of hinges for the privy seats.” [22]

Note however that while these snapshots of Roman life in the 1st century show a method of disposing of waste it also depicted an abysmal lack of any form of separation of food and waste.

“The kitchen's brick oven sat four feet from the privy. To the efficient Romans who had no inkling of germs, the proximity allowed the easy disposal of both scraps and excrete.” [22]

The Israelites, who did not live in palaces or towns, but in tents in the desert still had a better system in which their excrement was kept far away from their food.


The Romans
Again while it is true that bathing was very important to the Romans and they built numerous public bathhouses in the cities and towns throughout the empire which operated like community centers, there is another aspect to these famous baths..

At first, the Roman baths opened only during the daylight hours, which allowed for the emptying and refilling of the water at least once a day. This helped matters somewhat, in that hundreds would use the same pools of stagnant, germ-ridden, unfiltered, fetid water. The dawn of scientific discovery would not be for hundreds more years. Even the best and brightest of the ancient Romans knew nothing about bacteria and the true causes of disease. [23] [PLACE IN TEXT]


References
All URL’s Accessed September 2009

[1] Examples of Scientific Accuracy in the Bible By David Pyles. http://www.pb.org/pbdocs/bibleac.html

[2] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... -3,00.html

[3] http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Ether.html

[4] Mitchell Waldrop, Delving the Hole in Space, Science Magazine, Nov. 27, 1981.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/pdf_extract/214/4524/1016

[5] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... radio.html

[6] http://www.pytlik.com/observe/deliverus ... re-04.html

[7a] Fred Williams. Advanced Scientific Knowledge. http://www.bibleevidences.com/scientif.htm

[7b] Fred Williams. Advanced Medical Knowledge.. http://www.bibleevidences.com/medical.htm.

[8] Modern Century Illustrated Encyclopedia, Vol. 12

[9] Matthew Maury’s search for the secret of the seas. Answers in Genesis.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creatio ... /maury.asp

[10] http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/N ... e-Sea.aspx ]

[11] Exploring The Deep Ocean Floor: Hot Springs And Strange Creatures… http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/exploring.html
and Hot Springs on the Ocean Floor… http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Ge-Hy/ ... Floor.html

[12] Hong, S.W. et al., Safety investigation of Noah’s Ark in a seaway, TJ 8(1):26–36, 1994. All the co-authors are on the staff of the Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering.

[13] David Pyles. http://www.pb.org/pbdocs/bibleac.html

[14] Race and Gene Studies: What Differences Make a Difference? by Larry Adelman.
http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_0 ... -01-02.htm

[15] Bert Thompson, Ph.D. Biblical Accuracy and Circumcision on the 8th Day.
http://www.apologeticspress.org/APConte ... ticle=1118

[16] S.E. Massengill. A Sketch of Medicine and Pharmacy.
http://www.archive.org/stream/sketchofm ... t_djvu.txt

[17] Daily life of the ancient Egyptians By Bob Brier, A. Hoyt Hobbs. Page 232

[18] http://diseases.emedtv.com/leprosy/how- ... reads.html

[19] Transmission of Leprosy: A Study of Skin and Nasal Secretions of Household Contacts of Leprosy Patients Using PCR. Charles K. Job, Joseph Jayakumar, Michael Kearney, AND Thomas P. Gillis. http://www.ajtmh.org/cgi/content/full/78/3/518

[20] Excerpted and adapted from Nuclear Weapons in the End Times… Does the Bible predict a nuclear holocaust? by Dr. David R. Reagan. http://www.lamblion.com/articles/articles_issues12.php

[21] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civ ... _sacrifice
_Maksutov
_Emeritus
Posts: 12480
Joined: Thu Mar 07, 2013 8:19 pm

Re: Science is a tool that can be abused!

Post by _Maksutov »

Hey, look, Nipper, I can cut and paste too!

Science and History in the Bible

But all other flying creeping things, which have four feet, shall be an abomination unto you. -- Leviticus 11:23

Clearly, anyone who claims to be certain that Jesus was literally born of a virgin is lying. -- Sam Harris, Beliefnet inverview

Genesis

"In the beginning"
When was the universe created?
The Gap Theory 1:1-2
The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn't make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be "the evening and the morning" on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
God lets "the earth bring forth" the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used "for signs". This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read "the signs" in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
God makes two lights: "the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night." But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to "rule the night", does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
"He made the stars also." God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day's work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
"And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth." 1:17
In verse 11, God "let the earth bring forth" the plants. Now he has the earth "bring forth" the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
God commands us to "be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over ... every living thing that moveth upon the earth." 1:28
"I have given you every herb ... and every tree ... for meat."
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God's advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas -- all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
"God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is 13.7 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
God fashions a woman out of one of Adam's ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before -- by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don't eat dust, do they? 3:14
Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
Seth lived 912 years. 5:8
Enos lived 905 years. 5:11
Cainan lived 910 years. 5:14
Mahalaleel lived 895 years. 5:17
Jared lived 962 years. 5:20
Enoch doesn't die he just ascends into heaven. 5:21-24
Enoch lived 365 years before he was taken (alive?) by God. 5:23
When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech's birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
Methuselah lived 969 years. (World record holder.) 5:27
Lamech lived 777 years. 5:31
"There were giants in the earth in those days." 6:4
God tells Noah to make one small window (18 inches square) in the 450 foot ark for ventilation. 6:14-16
Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of "every thing that creepeth upon the earth." 7:8
God opens the "windows of heaven." He does this every time it rains. 7:11
All of the animals boarded the ark "in the selfsame day." 7:13-14
The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
"The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained." This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn't germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
"And the Lord smelled a sweet savor."
Noah kills the "clean beasts" and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all "clean" animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
"Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the Bible to address it. 9:1
According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
"Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered." God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by Bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
"I do set my bow in the cloud."
God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He makes a deal with the animals, promising never to drown them all again. He even puts the rainbow in the sky so that whenever he sees it, it will remind him of his promise so that he won't be tempted to do it again. (Every time God sees the rainbow he says to himself: "Oh, yeah.... That's right. I promised not to drown the animals again. I guess I'll have to find something else to do.").
But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
"Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided."
Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means "division"), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
"The whole earth was of one language." But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
"Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."
God worries that the people will succeed in building a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
Shem lived 600 years. 11:12-13
Salah lived 433 years. 11:14-15
Eber lived 464 years. 11:16-17
Peleg lived 239 years. 11:18-19
Reu lived 239 years. 11:20-21
Serug lived 229 years. 11:22-23
Nahor lived 148 years. 11:24-25
And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years. 11:32
Camels were first domesticated in the tenth century BCE hundreds of years after the biblical patriarchs supposedly lived. 12:16, 24:10-64, 30:43, 31:17, 32:7, 32:15, 37:25
"Abram ... pursued them unto Dan."
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named "Dan" until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
"And they returned to the land of the Philistines." But the Philistines didn't arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE -- 800 years after Abraham's supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1
Laban learns "by experience" that God has blessed him for Jacob's sake. "By experience" means "by divination", at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
Jacob displays his (and God's) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in 30:37-39. 31:11-12
Jacob sent his favorite son (Joseph) to check up on his brothers who were tending flocks in Shechem, which was about fifty miles north of Hebron. When he got there, he found out that his brothers weren't there, but were another thirteen miles away in Dothan. The trip must have taken poor Joseph a week or so. 37:12-17

Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5-15
Exodus

The birth story of Moses is suspiciously similar to that of the birth of Sargon, an Akkadian monarch from the 3rd millennium BCE. (BBC: The tale of the basket) 2:3
The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
If you do what God says, he won't send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise.... 15:26
"The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees." Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 16:35
A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
"In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them."
Believers often say that the "days" of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus

The Bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they "chew the cud" but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not "chew the cud." 11:5-6
Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
Be sure to watch out for those "other flying creeping things which have four feet." (I wish God wouldn't get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You'd think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
God's law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient's right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers

The Israelite population went from seventy (Exodus 1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in 400 years. 1:45-46, 26:51
When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
God sends quails to feed his people until they were "two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth." Taking the "face of the earth" to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day's journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3x1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people.
Although this story is obviously exaggerated, it may have grown from a grain of truth. Common Quail (Cotumix cotumix) migrate twice a year between Africa and Eurasia, and occasional storm-induced "fallout" could make quail appear to rain from the sky. 11:31

God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
"They ... cut down ... a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff."
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that's what you'd expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
"And there we saw the giants ... And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight." This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the "sons of God" mated with "the daughters of men in Genesis 6:4 Of course, these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
Moses hits a rock with his rod and Presto! -- water comes out. 20:11
God sends "fiery serpents" to bite his chosen people, and many of them die. 21:6
God's cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
God has "the strength of a unicorn." Oh heck, I bet he's even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
"He made them wander in the wilderness forty years."
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy

"Ye are this day as the stars of heaven for multitude ... The LORD God of your fathers make you a thousand times so many more."
The author (and God if he inspired him) obviously had no idea how many stars there are. 1:10-11
"The people is greater and taller than we ... we have seen the sons of the Anakims there." More giants in the promised land. 1:28
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
"A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time." (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were "greater and mightier" than the Israelites, who according to Exodus 12:37 and Numbers 1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the Bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
"Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents? ... Who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint?" 8:15
"A people great and tall, the children of the Anakims."
More giants! 9:2
"When I was gone up into the mount to receive the tables of stone ... I abode in the mount forty days and forty nights, I neither did eat bread nor drink water." 9:9
This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
"And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron." 28:23
"The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed." 28:24
"An eagle ... beareth them on her wings."
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
"Their wine is the poison of dragons." I wonder what genus and species the Bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
Joseph's "horns are like the horns of unicorns." 33:17
Joshua

It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 5:6
Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. But Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world's oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
This verse says that A.I. was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
"And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants." 12:4, 13:12
Judges

"The stars in their courses fought against Sisera." Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
"As the sun ... goeth forth in his might." The sun, according to the Bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Samson rips up a young lion when "the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him." Later, when going to "take" his Philistine wife he notices a swarm of bees and honey in the lion's carcass (a Divine miracle -- or just rotting flesh, flies, and maggots?). 14:5-8
1 Samuel

"The pillars of the earth are the LORD's, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
Saul was a foot taller than everyone else in Israel. 9:2
"So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain." 12:18
After Jonathan's first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with "a very great trembling." 14:15
Goliath was ten feet tall ("six cubits and a span"). 17:4
2 Samuel

"He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels."
Since a shekel is about 11.5 grams, Absolom's hair weighed 2.3 kilograms! 14:25-26
"Ishbibenob, which was of the sons of the giant" 21:16
"Saph, which was of the sons of the giant" 21:18
There ... was a man of great stature, that had on every hand six fingers, and on every foot six toes, four and twenty in number; and he also was born to the giant." 21:20
"These four were born to the giant in Gath." 21:22
"The earth shook and trembled; the foundations of heaven moved and shook, because he was wroth." 22:8
"The foundations of the world were discovered ... at the blast of the breath of his nostrils." 22:16
Israel had 1,300,000 fighting men in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.46 million active duty soldiers in 2010.) 24:9
1 Kings

When Solomon was annointed king the people sang and shouted so loudly that it caused an earthquake! 1:39-40
This verse implies that the value of π is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 7:23
God creates droughts by causing "heaven to shut up" as a punishment for sin. 8:35
"And his hand, which he put forth against him, dried up ... And the man of God besought the LORD, and the king's hand was restored him again."
Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4-6
After killing the "man of God" for God, the lion hung around with the ass and the carcass on the side of the road for a few days. 13:24-25, 28
God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings

God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha's bald head. 2:23-24
Another miracle birth! (And another boy)
Elisha and God make an old woman pregnant. 4:16-17
Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child's mouth, his eyes on the child's eyes, and his hands on the child's hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
Elisha can do all the tricks of Jesus (raise the dead, heal the sick, etc.). Here he cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
Elisha makes an iron ax head swim. Neat trick, not even Jesus did that one! 6:6
"Elisha ... telleth the king of Israel the words that thou speakest in thy bedchamber."
Elisha is clairaudient (acquires psychic knowledge by auditory means). 6:12
A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
"Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered." 20:7
Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that's quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles

Some creationists believe that this verse (and Genesis 10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means "division"), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
"The earth ... shall be stable, that it be not moved." It doesn't spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
According to this verse David's army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5
David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today's market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles

Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of π is 3. (The actual value isapproximately 3.14159.) 4:2
Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
A half million soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the Bible, Asa, with God's help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than "seeking the Lord.") 16:12
God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
God gave "all the kingdoms of the earth" to King Cyrus. (OK, that might be a bit of an exaggeration.) 36:22-23
Ezra

"In the house of the rolls ... in Babylon"
This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
"I went out by night by the gate of the valley, even before the dragon well."
According to creationist writer, Derek Isaacs, "Ancient Jewish tradition, apart from the Bible, taught that a dragon was somehow attached to the well, either in reality or in spirit. More than likely, that story arose from an actual dinosaur living in the region, or even at some point, living inside the well itself." Dragons or Dinosaurs?: Creation or Evolution?, p.163
Esther

"Haman thought in his heart." Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job

"Which shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble."
The earth rests upon pillars and doesn't move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
"Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not."
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
"The measure thereof is longer than the earth."
What is the length of a sphere? 11:9
Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
Job is the brother of dragons. 30:29
"By the breath of God frost is given." 37:10
God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it. 38:13
God has snow and hail stored up to use later in time of trouble and war. 38:22
"Out of whose womb came the ice?" Gosh, I don't know. Was it Glinda, the Good Witch of the North? 38:29
"Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?"
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
"Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee?" The unicorn referred to here is probably not the single-horned mythical creature, but rather a wild ox that was mistranslated in the KJV. 39:9-10
Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
"The eagle ... seeketh the prey.... Her young ones suck up blood."
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: "Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor." 40:15-16
"Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?" 41:1
"His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about."
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms

"The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins."
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
"My reins also instruct me in the night seasons."
The Psalmist's kidneys (reins) instruct him at night. 16:7
The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
"The foundations of the world were discovered ... at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils." (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move -- unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
"Thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns." 22:21
"Try my reins and my heart."
Jesus will search your kidneys 26:2
"He maketh them also to skip ... like a young unicorn." 29:6
From his seat in heaven, God can see the whole earth and all its inhabitants.
(He sits directly above the earth, which is a flat disc below him.) 33:14-15
Diseases are sent by God to punish sin. 38:3
"Thou hast sore broken us in the place of dragons." 44:19
"I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. ... The world is mine, and the fulness thereof."
God takes credit for the entire creation. Preadators, prey, parasite, and host: God purposefully designed them all. 50:11-12
According to the psalmist, snails melt. But they don't, of course, they simply leave a slimy trail as they move along. 58:8
"The earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God: even Sinai itself was moved at the presence of God." 68:8
"I was pricked in my reins."
("Reins" means kidneys in the Bible.) 73:21
God is so strong that he can break the head of dragons and of leviathan. 74:13-14
"Thou has set all the borders of the earth"
A spherical earth has no borders. 74:17
God holds the earth up with pillars. 75:3
"He rained flesh also upon them as dust, and feathered fowls like as the sand of the sea."
See Numbers 11:20-32, where God sends quails to feed the Israelites until it literally came out their noses. 78:27
Another reference to "the foundations of the earth", implying that the earth is fixed and does not move. 82:5
"I will make mention of Rahab"
Rahab is a sea-demon or dragon from ancient Jewish folklore. 87:4
"Thou hast broken Rahab [the sea monster] in pieces." 89:10
"The dragon shalt thou trample under feet." 91:13
"The world also is established, that it cannot be moved." 93:1
"The world also shall be established that it shall not be moved." 96:10
"The Lord ... who healeth all thy diseases." God heals all diseases. Medical science is unnecessary. 103:2-3
"God ... who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain" (The earth is stationary and does not orbit the sun.) 104:5
"The waters stood above the mountains."
Noah's flood covered the highest mountains, just like it says in Genesis 7:20. 104:6-7
God gives the lions their meat. The cruelty and brutality of nature are all part of God's plan. 104:21
"In wisdom hast thou made them all." (God purposely designed the brutality and cruelty of nature.) 104:24
God is offended by those who make things with their hands or invent things with their minds. 106:39
"God ... turned the rock into a standing water, the flint into a fountain of waters." 114:7-8
"The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works." Then why do nearly all animals die painful deaths from starvation, predation, or disease long before they reach adulthood? 145:9
God "satisfiest the desire of every living thing." But in nature few needs are met and few desires are satisfied. Life is short, hard, cruel, and painful for nearly every living thing. 145:17
"He calleth them all by their names."
God knows how many stars there are and knows them all by name. That's pretty impressive since there are 100 billion or so galaxies, each containing about 100 billion stars. 147:7
Even the dragons praise the Lord. 148:7
"Praise him in the firmament of his power." 150:1
Proverbs

"Lean not unto thine own understanding." Don't try to understand things; just accept whatever the Bible and your religious leaders tell you. 3:5
"Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding."
A special anthem was composed from these words for Darwin's funeral at Westminster Abbey. 3:13
"How can a man ... understand his own way?"
Humans can't figure things out on their own. 20:24
"As he thinketh in his heart"
In the Bible, people think with their hearts not with their heads. 23:7
"Yea, my reins shall rejoice." ("Reins" is the Bible's word for kidneys.) 23:16
Ecclesiastes

"The sun also ariseth"
Although this verse is interpreted figuratively today, it was taken literally by virtually all Christians until the Copernican revolution, and was used by the Church to condemn Galileo for teaching the heliocentric heresy. 1:5
"The place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again."
Good description of the water cycle. 1:7
"He hath made every thing beautiful."
Everything is beautiful in its own way. Parasitic worms, cancer cells, bubonic plague. You just have to look at it from God's eyes. 3:11
"No man can find out the work that God maketh."
Science is impossible. We can learn nothing at all about the natural world. 3:11
"That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?"
Who can find out? We can by using science! The earth, ocean, solar system, galaxy, and universe -- nothing is too deep or far away for science to discover and explore. 7:24
"Then I beheld all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun: because though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it; yea farther; though a wise man think to know it, yet shall he not be able to find it."
Oh, I think science has done a pretty good job of finding things out over the last four centuries or so. 8:16
"Thou knowest not ... how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child."
Actually, this is pretty well understood by modern embryology. 11:5
Isaiah

"When he ariseth to shake terribly the earth."
(Earthquakes happen when God gets angry.) 2:19, 21
"He has stretched forth his hand against them ... and the hills did tremble." (God makes earthquakes when he gets angry.) 5:25
"He [God] ... will hiss unto them from the end of the earth."(The earth is flat and has an end.) 5:26
"Neither doth his heart think so"
In the Bible, people think with their hearts not their heads. 10:7
"The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb...." I wonder what will become of the spiders. Will they be more friendly toward flies? And will the parasitic wasps find another way to feed their larvae? Or will they continue to feed off the living bodies of caterpillars? 11:6, 65:25
"And the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den." A cockatrice is a serpent, hatched from a cock's egg, that can kill with a glance. They are rare nowadays. 11:8
God will gather up the people of Judea "from the four corners of the earth." In the Bible's view, the earth is flat with four corners. 11:12
The moon produces its own light and the earth does not move (except when God gets angry and shakes the heavens). 13:10-13
When God gets really angry, he causes earthquakes. 13:13
Dragons will live in Babylonian palaces and satyrs will dance there. 13:21-22
Out of the serpent's root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent." What ever happened to these fascinating biblical creatures? 14:29
"The foundations of the earth do shake ... The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard."
(Earthquakes are all a part of God's wondrous plan.) 24:18-20
God will punish the leviathan ("that crooked serpent") with his own sword and will kill the sea dragon. 27:1
Natural disasters (earthquakes, storms, fires, tsunamis) are caused by, and are a sign of, God's wrath. 29:7
Among the many strange creatures mentioned in the Bible that no longer seem to exist is the "fiery flying serpent." 30:6
"The light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold." Well, this is one prophecy that will never come true. Since the moon has no light of its own, but only reflects that of the sun, it could never shine like the sun. And the sun will not, at least not while there are humans to see it, shine 7 times as bright as it does now. 30:26
"The LORD shall cause his glorious voice to be heard, and shall shew the lighting down of his armwith the indignation of his anger, and with the flame of a devouring fire, with scattering, and tempest, and hailstones." 30:30
"The host of heaven shall be dissolved ... and ... shall fall down."
The stars will dissolve and fall from the sky. 34:4
"And the unicorns shall come down with them." 34:7
Dragons and satyrs may not seem real to you, but they did to the author of these verses. 34:13-14
"In the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes." 35:7
God makes the sun move backwards 10 degrees. Now that's a neat trick! 38:8
The earth is a flat disc that God looks down upon from his throne in heaven. 40:22
God made the stars, presumably all at once on day four of creation, and "not one faileth." But new stars are being formed today and old stars are dying, just as they have been doing for the last 13 billion years or so. 40:26
Dragons and owls will thank God for irrigation. 43:20
God set the earth on foundations so it doesn't move, his hand is as big as the universe, and the stars stand up straight when he calls them. 48:13
God cut Rahab (the sea monster) to pieces, wounded the dragon, and dried up the sea. 51:9-10
Bad people hatch poisonous cockatrice eggs. Whoever eats the eggs will die, and when the eggs are crushed a viper hatches out of them. 59:5
"Neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee." Of course the moon doesn't give off light, but only reflects the light from the sun. 60:19
Immortal worms: "Their worm shall not die" 66:24
Jeremiah

"The showers have been withholden, and there hath been no latter rain."
Droughts are punishments from God. 3:3
"The Lord ... placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it: and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it."
Tell that the families of the 230,000 victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. 5:22
"The stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle [dove] and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming."
One of the earliest references to bird migration. (Many stork, dove, crane, and swallow species are migratory.) 8:7
"I will send serpents,cockatrices among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you."
A cockatrice is a serpent, hatched from a cock's egg, that can kill with a glance. They are rare nowadays. 8:17
God will make Jerusalem an uninhabited "den of dragons." 9:11
When God gets angry, the earth trembles. (That's what causes earthquakes.) 10:10
Judah will become a desolate den of dragons. 10:22
"O LORD of hosts ... that triest the reins [kidneys] and the heart." 11:20
The wild asses "snuffed up the wind like dragons." 14:6
"I try the reins [kidneys]." 17:10
"O LORD of hosts, that ... seest the reins [kidneys]." 20:12
The earth is set on foundations and does not move. 31:37
Jeremiah predicts that humans will never again live in Hazor, but will be replaced by dragons. But people still live there and dragons have never been seen. 49:33
"Nebuchadrezzar ... hath swallowed me up like a dragon." 51:34
"Babylon shall become heaps, a dwellingplace for dragons, an astonishment, and an hissing, without an inhabitant. They shall roar together like lions: they shall yell as lions' whelps." 51:37
"The sea is come up upon Babylon: she is covered with the multitude of the waves thereof." 51:42
"I will make drunk her princes, and her wise men, her captains, and her rulers, and her mighty men: and they shall sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake, saith the King, whose name is the LORD of hosts."
God will force the Babylonians to get so drunk that they die from alcohol poisoning. 51:57
Lamentations

Ostriches are not cruel and inattentive parents, as this verse implies. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 4:3
Ezekiel

"The firmament ... the terrible crystal, stretched forth over their heads above." 1:22
Ezekiel proclaims that the world (which is flat and has four corners) is ending. 7:2, 6
The firmament is over the heads of the cherubim. 10:1
"Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers."
This is the only clearly symbolic use of "dragon" in the Bible. 29:3
God "will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon shall not give her light." To Ezekiel, the sun is just a little light that can be covered with a cloud, and the moon produces its own light. 32:7-8
God will get so angry that his fury will come up in his face so that even the fish, birds, beasts, and bugs will shake when they see him. God will throw a tantrum, toppling every wall and mountain. 38:18-20
Daniel

The third year of the reign of Jehoiakim would be 606 BCE, at which time Nebuchadnezzar was not yet king of Babylon. It was 597 BCE that Nebuchadnezzar invaded Jerusalem for the first time (without actually destroying it). By that time Jehohiakim was dead and his son, Jehoiachin, was ruling. 1:1
The stone became "a great mountain" that "filled the whole earth." This could only be possible on a flat, disc-shaped earth. 2:35
Daniel's tree is tall enough to be seen from "the end of all the earth." Only on a flat earth would this be possible. 4:10-11, 20
"Belshazzar the king"
Apparently, the author of Daniel knew of only two Babylonian kings during the period of the exile: Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, who he wrongly thought was the son of Nebuchadnezzar. But Nebuchadnezzar died in 562 BCE and was succeeded by his son, Awil-Marduk (referred to in the Bible as "Evilmerodach" [see 2 Kg 25:27 and Jer 52:31]). In 560 BCE, Amel-Marduk was assassinated by his brother-in-law, Nergal-shar-usur. The next and last king of Babylon was Nabonidus who reigned from 556 to 539, when Babylon was conquered by Cyrus. It was Nabonidus, and not Belshazzar, who was the last of the Babylonian kings. Belshazzar was a the son and viceroy of Nabonidus. But he was not a king, and was not the son (or any other relation) of Nebuchadnezzar. 5:1-2,11,18,22
Darius the Median is a fictitious character whom the author perhaps confused with Darius I of Persia, who came to the throne in 521 BCE, 17 years after the fall of Babylon. The author of Daniel incorrectly makes him the successor of Belshazzar instead of Cyrus. 5:31
To Daniel, the stars are small objects that can fall from the sky and then be "stamped upon." 8:10
Joel

On "the day of the Lord" there will be earthquakes, the sun and the moon will be dark, and the stars will no longer shine. 2:10
"The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood." These "signs" were a lot more impressive before the causes of solar and lunar eclipses were understood. 2:31
"The sun and the moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall withdraw their shining." 3:15
The Lord will roar and the heavens and earth will shake. 3:16
Amos

God destroyed the Amorites who were a race of giants as tall as cedars and as strong as oaks. 2:9
"Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion."
Other translations have "Pleiades" instead of "seven stars." In any case, the Pleiades is an open star cluster that contains thousands of stars, not just the "seven stars" that are easily visible from earth without a telescope. And the constellation Orion is a collection of stars that happens to form an interesting, but temporary, pattern when viewed from earth. It was not purposefully designed by anyone or anything. 5:8
"Shall not the land tremble for this?"
(Earthquakes are a punishment from God.) 8:8
"I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day." 8:9
God will "cut them in the head" and "slay the last of them with the sword." Any that try to escape by diving to the bottom of the sea will be bitten, at God's command, by a sea-serpent. God will set his "eyes upon them for evil, not for good." 9:1-4
Jonah

"The LORD sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest." 1:4
God makes "a great fish" to swallow Jonah. And Jonah stayed in the fish's belly for three days and three nights. 1:17
"Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days' journey." That would make it about 60 miles in diameter -- larger than Los Angeles! 3:3
Micah

The earth is set upon strong foundations and therefore does not move. 6:2
Nahum

"The clouds are the dust of his feet." 1:3
Whirlwinds, tornadoes, earthquakes, and fires are caused by God and are signs of his anger. He dries up oceans and rivers, melts mountains, and throws stones. 1:3-6
Habakkuk

The Chaldeans' horses were faster than leopards and more fierce than wolves. 1:8
God measured the earth, scattered mountains, and made the hills bow down. 3:6
"The mountains saw thee, and they trembled." 3:10
"The sun and moon stood still in their habitation." This verse apparently refers to Joshua 10:12-13, where God makes the sun stand still. 3:11
Haggai

A whole lot of shaking going on.
God will shake the heavens, the earth, sea, and dry land. He'll shake until "the desire of the nations" comes and his house is filled with glory. 2:6-7, 21
Zechariah

According to the horses of different colors, "the earth sitteth still, and is at rest." 1:11
"The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the LORD, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth."
God set the earth on firm foundations. (So it doesn't move.) 12:1
On the day of the Lord, the mount of Olives will be split in two and half the mountain will be removed. 14:4
Someday there will be a day that will have neither day nor night with a bright sunny evening. 14:7
Malachi

God hated Esau and gave his inheritance to the dragons. 1:3
Matthew

When was Jesus born? 2:1
"The star ... went before them."
If the star "went before them," leading them to Bethlehem, then it couldn't have been a star or any other astronomical object or event. But Matthew couldn't have known that. Everyone at the time thought that stars were just little points of light a short distance above the earth. It'd be no problem to have one hover above a particular place for a while. 2:9
Herod kills all boys in and around Bethlehem that are two years old and under. Such a massacre would certainly have been noted by contemporary historians. Yet not even Josephus, who documented Herod's life in detail, mentioned this event. 2:16
"He had fasted forty days and forty nights."
The Science of Starvation: How long can humans survive without food or water? 4:2
The devil kidnaps Jesus and takes him up to the top of the temple, and then to the top of "an exceedingly high mountain," high enough to see "all the kingdoms of the world." I guess the earth was flat in those days. 4:8
"Behold the fowls of the air...." Jesus says that God feeds them. But, if so, he does one hell of a lousy job at it. Most birds die before leaving the nest, and the few who manage to fly soon die painful deaths of starvation, predation, or disease. If God is caring for them, pray that he stays away from you. 6:26
Speaking of the birds, Jesus asks: "Are ye not much better than they?" This is meant as a rhetorical question, but the answer is far from obvious to me. I guess to Jesus, though, birds are not worth much compared to humans. So you can do whatever the hell you want with (and to) them. 6:26
Peter's mother-in-law was sick with a fever. Jesus healed her by touching her hand, so she could get back to serving them. (Peter's mother-in-law? The first pope was married?) 8:14-15
Jesus and his disciples were crossing a lake in a boat when a storm came. Jesus was asleep, so his chicken-shit disciples woke him up. Jesus rebuked them for having little faith and then calmed the winds and the waves. All of which was to show, what? That weather is sent by God and can be controlled by faith? 8:24-26
Jesus heals a paralytic man by forgiving his sins. (Paralysis is caused by sinful behavior.) 9:2-6
"Thy faith hath made thee whole."
If you have enough faith, you will never get sick. (Illness is caused by sin and lack of faith. Medical science is unnecessary.) 9:22
Jesus heals two blind men. (Or was it their blind faith that healed them?) 9:27-29
Jesus heals a "dumb man possessed by a devil." (Those who cannot speak are possessed by a devil.) 9:32-33
"Jesus went about all the cities and villages ... healing every sickness and every disease." 9:35
Jesus gives his disciples "power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness." 10:1
Jesus tells his disciples to perform all the usual tricks: "heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, and cast out devils." 10:8
Jesus heals a withered hand. 12:10-13
"Great multitudes followed him, and he healed them all." 12:15
God is involved in the death of every sparrow. He sees to it that they each die painful deaths of starvation, predation, or disease. But don't worry. God will do the same for you. (He thinks that humans are worth much more than sparrows.) 10:29. 31
Jesus casts out a devil from a man who was blind and dumb. (Those who are unable to see or hear are possessed by devils.) 12:22
"Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly."
12:40
"An enemy hath done this."
Some Christians believe that the natural evil in the world (predators, parasites, pain, death) is due to Satan, not God. 13:28
Jesus is incorrect when he says that the mustard seed is the smallest seed. And since there are no trees in the mustard family, mustard seeds do not grow into "the greatest of all trees." 13:31-32
"Jesus ... saw a great multitude ... and he healed their sick." 14:14
"They sent out into all that country round about, and brought unto him all that were diseased ... and as many as touched were made perfectly whole." 14:35-37
Jesus cures an epileptic "lunatic" by "rebuking the devil." (Epilepsy is caused by devils.) 17:15-18
"The blind and the lame came to him in the temple; and he healed them." 21:14
The end of the world will be signaled by wars, famines, disease, and earthquakes (6-7). And that's just "the beginning of sorrows" (8). Next believers will be hated and killed by unbelievers (9), believers will hate and betray each other (10), false prophets will fool people (11), iniquity will abound and love wax cold (12). But hey, if you make through all that, you'll be saved (13).
Only one more thing will happen before the end comes: the gospel will be preached throughout the world (14). Well, that and the abomination of desolations will stand in the holy place (15), many false Christs and false prophets will show great signs and wonders (24), the sun and moon will be darkened and the stars will fall (29), the sign of the son of Man will appear in the sky, everyone on earth will mourn, and then, finally, the great and powerful son of Man will come in all his glory (30).

Oh, and all these things will happen within the lifespan of Jesus' contemporaries (34).

Or maybe not. Jesus was talking about things he knew nothing about (36). (See Mark 13:32.) 24:3-51

"The moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven." Apparently, Jesus believed that the moon produces its own light, and that the stars are lights held in place by a firmament only a few miles above our heads. 24:29
Jesus believed that Noah's flood actually happened. 24:37
When Jesus was crucified, there was three hours of complete darkness "over all the land." And when he died, there was a great earthquake with many corpses walking the streets of Jerusalem. It is strange that there is no record of any of these extraordinary events outside of the gospels. 27:45, 51-53
"And behold, there was a great earthquake." 28:2
Mark

Peter's mother-in-law was sick with a fever. Jesus healed her by touching her hand, so she could get back to serving them. 1:30-31
Jesus heals "all that were diseased" by casting out devils. 1:32-34
Jesus heals a paralytic man by forgiving his sins. (Paralysis is caused by sinful behavior.) Notice that Jesus didn't just heal him, he forgave his sins, which is something only God is supposed to be able to do. 2:3-12
Jesus heals a man with a "withered hand." 3:1-5
"He [Jesus] ordained twelve, that they should ... have power to heal sicknesses, and to cast out devils." 3:14-15
Jesus is incorrect when he says that the mustard seed is the smallest seed. (The smallest seeds are found among the tropical, epiphytic orchids.) 4:31
"He arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm." 4:39
"A certain woman ... had an issue of blood twelve years...."
So this is where all those phony faith-healing stories came from! Notice that the doctors made her condition worse, but she was instantly cured by faith. 5:25-29
"Thy faith hath made thee whole." If you have enough faith, you will never get sick. (Illness is caused by sin and lack of faith. Medical science is unnecessary.) 5:34
"And they cast out many devils, and anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them." 6:13
Jesus walks on water and calms the sea. 6:48-51
"Whithersoever he entered, into villages, or cities, or country, they laid the sick in the streets, and besought him that they might touch if it were but the border of his garment: and as many as touched him were made whole." 6:56
Jesus puts his fingers in a deaf man's ears, then spits and touches his tongue. This immediately cured his deafness. 7:32-35
Jesus cures a blind man by spitting in his eyes. 8:22-23
Jesus' spit did not completely cure the blind. So Jesus tried again. He put his hands on the man's eyes and, this time, the blind man "saw every man clearly." 8:24-25
Jesus heals a boy with "a dumb spirit" by saying, "Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him and enter no more into him." (Sounds like a script from Monty Python, doesn't it?) But how could a deaf spirit hear the words spoken to it? And how could a dumb spirit cry out? 9:17, 25-26
Immortal worms: "Where their worm dieth not" 9:44, 46, 48
"But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female."
Jesus believed that sex and Adam and Eve were created "from the beginning." But the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, the earth 4.6 billion, sex a billion years or so, and humans (depending on how you define "human") for a couple million years. 10:6
"Jesus said unto him, Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he received his sight." 10:52
"The beginnings of sorrows."
The end of the world will be marked with wars, famines, and earthquakes. (Thank God for that helpful hint!) 13:8
"In those days ... the moon shall not give her light, and the stars of heaven shall fall." Of course this is nonsense. The billions of stars will never fall to earth and the moon does not produce its own light. 13:24-25
When Jesus was crucified, there was three hours of complete darkness "over the whole land." It is strange that there is no record of this extraordinary event outside of the gospels. 15:33
Luke

When was Jesus born? 2:1
Being forty days ... And in those days he did eat nothing."
The Science of Starvation: How long can humans survive without food or water? 4:2
The devil takes Jesus to the top of a mountain and shows him "all the kingdoms of the world." I guess the world was flat in those days. 4:5
Jesus cured Peter's mother-in-law (by "rebuking" her fever) so she could get back to work serving them. 4:38-39
The people brought all their sick people to Jesus, and he cured every one of them. 4:40
Jesus cures a man with leprosy. 5:12-13
Jesus cures a paralytic by forgiving his sins, thereby proving that he is God (since only God can forgive sins) and paralysis is caused by sin. 5:18-25
Jesus heals a man with a withered hand. 6:6-10
Jesus heals people that are "vexed with unclean spirits." 6:18
"The whole multitude sought to touch him: for there went virtue out of him, and healed them all." 6:19
Jesus cures the centurion's slave. 7:2-10
"And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak." 7:12-15
Within a single hour, Jesus cured people of various plagues, evil spirits, and blindness. 7:21
Jesus stops a storm by rebuking the wind and waves. 8:23-24
Jesus heals a woman "having an issue of blood." It's the usual story: none of the doctors could cure her, but the faith hearer (Jesus, in this case) could. 8:43-44
"Thy faith hath made thee whole." If you have enough faith, you will never get sick. (Illness is caused by sin and lack of faith. Medical science is unnecessary.) 8:48
Jesus brings Jarius' dead daughter back to life. 8:49-55
Jesus gave his disciples authority of all devils and to cure diseases. 9:1-2
"He [Jesus] ... healed them that had need of healing." 9:11
Epilepsy is caused by devils. 9:39
Jesus cures an epiletic child by rebuking an unclean spirit. 9:42
Jesus tells his disciples to do two things: heal the sick and say the kingdom of heaven has come upon you. 10:9
People who cannot speak are possessed with devils. 11:14
"Some of them said, He casteth out devils through Beelzebub the chief of the devils ... and others ... sought of him a sign from heaven."
A reasonable hypothesis (assuming devils exist) and a fair request (assuming a god exists). 11:15-16
"If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out?"
Jesus believed the Pharisees could cast out demons, too! 11:19
Jesus says it is impossible to get rid of unclean spirits. If you manage to evict one, he'll soon return with seven others "more wicked than himself" and you'll be worse off than you were before. So just learn to live with whatever unclean spirits that are currently possessing you. 11:24-26
Jesus thinks that eyes can be evil. 11:34
Jesus heals a woman with "a spirit of infirmity" by casting out a devil. (All illness is caused by devils.) 13:11-16
Jesus heals ten lepers. 17:12-14
Jesus believed the story of Noah's ark. He thought it really happened and had no problem with the idea of God drowning everything and everybody. 17:26-27
Jesus also believes the story about Sodom's destruction. He says, "even thus shall it be in the day the son of man is revealed." This tells us about Jesus' knowledge of science and history. 17:29-32
Jesus heals a blind man. 18:35-43
"And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars." 21:25
When Jesus was crucified, there was three hours of complete darkness "over all the earth." It is strange that there is no record of this extraordinary event outside of the gospels. 23:44-45
John

Jesus had remote viewing skills. 1:48-50
"The wind bloeth where it listeth."
Jesus says that no one knows which way the wind is blowing. But, of course, he was wrong about that. The direction and speed of the wind are easily measured. 3:8
"If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?"
Good question, Jesus! He was wrong about creation in Mk 10:6, wrong about the flood in Lk 17:26-27, and wrong about the smallest seed in Mt 13:31-32. So why would anyone believe him when he talks about heaven in Jn 3:16? 3:12
Jesus heals a nobleman's son. 4:46-51
Whoever enters a pool after it is stirred up by angels will be cured of "whatsoever disease he had." 5:4
Jesus cures a paralytic man. 5:5-9
Jesus believes people are crippled by God as a punishment for sin. He tells a crippled man, after healing him, to "sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." 5:14
The disciples ask Jesus about the cause of a man's blindness. Was it because he or his parents sinned? Jesus said neither had sinned. The man was born blind so that Jesus could show off his powers by curing him of his blindness. 9:1-3
Jesus spits on the ground, mixes his spit with the dirt, and rubs the muddy spit on (or in?) a blind man's eyes. Then he told him to wash in the pool of Siloam. After that, the blind man could see again. The Bible doesn't say whether it was the holy spit, holy mud, or holy water that did the trick. 9:6-7
"Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."
Jesus was wrong about seeds. If a seed dies, it dies. It only produces a new plant if it stays alive (in a dormant stage) until it germinates. Dead seeds bring forth no fruit. 12:24
Acts

"Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?"
This verse was used by a Dominican friar to discourage the use of Galileo's telescope. (Notice the pun on Galileo's name in "men of Galilee".) 1:11
"The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood."
It happens with every solar or lunar eclipse. 2:20
Peter heals a lame man. 3:2-7
"Spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began"
The prophets have spoken "since the world began," which means that humans have been around since the creation of the world. 3:20
"When they had prayed, the place was shaken."
The first prayer-caused earthquake. 4:31
The sick were healed just by touching the shadow of Peter. 5:15-16
Peter heals a man with palsy. 9:33-34
Peter raises Tabitha from the dead. 9:36-40
Sick people are oppressed by the devil. 10:38
Paul heals a crippled man. 14:8-10
After only two years of preaching, everyone in Asia had heard the word of the Lord! 19:10
Sick people were cured by touching the handkerchief or apron of Paul. And the evil spirits when out of them." 19:12
Paul is bitten by a poisonous snake and yet lives. The "barbarians" who were shipwrecked with him thought he must be a murderer since he was bitten; but then they changed their minds and thought him to be a god since he didn't die. (The snake story is especially interesting since there are no poisonous snakes on Malta, and there is no evidence of their existence in the past.) 28:3-6
By praying and touching the sick people of Malta, Paul cures them of their diseases. 28:8-9
Romans

The existence and nature of God are self-evident; thus, unbelievers are "without excuse." 1:20
The Religious Right often uses Romans 1:21-25 to condemn environmentalists. 1:21-25
Paul claims that before Adam sinned death did not exist. But, of course, death didn't enter the world a few thousand years ago because of Adam's sin. Death has been a part of life since life first arose (on this planet, at least) a few billion years ago. 5:12
"The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now."
Some Christians use this verse to show that we live in a sin cursed world. (But others disagree.) 8:22
Paul says that everyone, even in his day, had the gospel preached to them. Even the Native Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders? 10:18
1 Corinthians

Those who eat and drink unworthily often get sick and die. (And then go to hell.) 11:30
"In Adam all die."
Nothing died before Adam sinned. 15:22
Paul shows his ignorance (and God's) of biology by saying that only dead seeds will germinate. Actually, a seed must be alive to germinate. 15:36
"All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another of beasts."
This verse is used by Creationists to argue against both evolution and any attempt to create "human-animal hybrids" or "chimeras." 15:39
"The first man Adam"
Young Earth Creationists use this verse to support a literal reading of Genesis. "If we cannot believe in the First Adam, why believe in the Last [Christ]?" 15:45
"And afterward that which is spiritual."
Asa Gray, the foremost American botanist in the 19th century and close friend of Charles Darwin, used this verse to support the idea that the Bible is not inconsistent with human evolution. 15:46
2 Corinthians

"As the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty"
Paul believed the silly talking snake story in Genesis 3. 11:3
Ephesians

Satan is the "prince of the power of the air." Until modern times Christians believed that Satan was responsible for storms and droughts. 2:2
Colossians

"For by him were all things created.... All things were created by him, and for him.... And by him all things consist." Including guinea worms? 1:16-17
1 Timothy

"For Adam was first formed, then Eve." Young Earth Creationists use this verse to show that Paul believed the creation story in Gen 2:18-22. 2:13
"Science falsely so called"
Avoid science, especially that which disagrees with Paul.
This verse is often used by believers to justify the rejection of any idea, scientific or otherwise, that contradicts the Bible. 6:20
Hebrews

God set the earth on a foundation; therefore, it does not move. 1:10
"Whose voice then shook the earth: but now he hath promised, saying ... I shake not the earth only, but also heaven."
When God speaks there are earthquakes (and heavenquakes). 12:26
James

James says that, even in his day, all beasts, birds, serpents, and sea creatures had been tamed by humans. 3:7
If you are sick, rely on the power of prayer. It works every time. 5:14-15
By praying, Elias was able to keep it from raining for three and a half years. 5:17
"Eight souls were saved by water."
God drowned everyone on earth except for Noah and his family. This verse is used by young-earth Creationists to show that New Testament writers believed the Old Testament stories. 3:20
2 Peter

"God ... spared not the old world, but saved Noah."
Young Earth Creationists use this verse to show that the New Testament authors believed in the flood story. (So you should too.) 2:4-5
1 John

"Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world."
Don't love nature, or study it, or try to protects it. 2:15
Revelation

"Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him." This could only happen on a flat earth. 1:7
"Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." God created parasites, pathogens, and predators for his very own pleasure. One of his favorite species is guinea worms. 4:11
The sixth seal is opened and there is a great earthquake, the sun becomes black, and the moon red, the stars fall from heaven, and mountains and islands move around. 6:12-14
"And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth...." To John, the stars are just little lights a few miles away that can easily fall to the earth. 6:13
John "saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth." Well, I guess that settles it: the earth is flat and square-shaped, or at least quadrilateral in shape. 7:1
An angel threw the censer down to earth, causing thunder, lightning, and earthquakes. 8:5
"And there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters." In the Bible, stars are just little lights that can fall to the ground from the sky. 8:10
The fourth trumpet smites one third of the sun, moon, and stars. 8:12
"I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth." 9:1
"There were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail." 11:19
The dragon's tail smacks down to earth one third of the stars. To the author of Revelation, the stars are just little lights that can fall to the ground from the sky. 12:4
The seventh vial: voices, thunders, lightnings, earthquakes, hail. 16:17-21
"And there was no more sea."
For an old sailor like me, this verse, if it were true, would be one of the saddest verses in the Bible. 21:1

............

Science To The Rescue

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The presence of observable and falsifiable scientific evidence is perhaps the most compelling reason we can conclude that the Bible is not free from error. Because this evidence clearly yields certain conclusions that are contradicted by direct statements from biblical authors, we can safely say that the Bible is an imperfect book containing flaws of human origin. Due to the overwhelming amount of scientific errors the book possesses, you should have great comfort in deciding that there was no divine inspiration or intervention involved during its creation. Furthermore, the vast categories of errors contained in the Bible demonstrate that the mistakes are not confined to a single author or field of study, a realization that should question the foundation and intent of the book as a whole. We’ll focus considerably on the first chapter of Genesis, astronomy, and biology because each of these topics unmistakably contributes to the faux pas of apologetics.

“The Beginning”
Anyone with a decent background in natural science who undertakes an impartial but critical look at the first chapter of Genesis should have no trouble denouncing its claims as rubbish. At best, the author has offered a poorly constructed allegory for the creation of the universe; at worst, and far more plausible, Genesis 1 is a total fabrication. This section will of course demonstrate why the creation account in the opening chapter fails miserably to be scientifically accurate.
Early in the creation, God allegedly separated the waters into two distinct bodies so that land could appear between them. He called the water below seas and the water above sky, which he presumably held aloft by the use of a firmament (Verses 6-10). While the NIV translated this verse using expansion, the Hebrew word utilized by the author is raki’a, which the KJV more accurately translated as a solid body.
Why is the KJV translation more in line with the author’s intent? First, it’s the primary use of the word. Second, it reinforces the aforementioned idea of a sky ocean because a solid protective layer would be required to suspend the water if there truly were an ocean above us as the Bible suggests. Third, it complements the known widespread primitive beliefs. Take the mindset of an ancient Hebrew for a moment by ignoring any contemporary understanding you have of the world. You can glance at the sky above and observe that it’s the color of water, while, periodically, water falls from above. With no further evidence to consider and no further understanding of this phenomenon, the perfectly logical conclusion would be that there’s a mass of water in the sky. If this is true, it certainly follows that a solid body, a firmament, would be necessary to contain this oceanic reservoir. Perhaps windows even open in the firmament to allow rainfall (Genesis 8:2).
Although the pursuit of knowledge has proven these outdated beliefs untrue, we are far richer in scientific understanding than our Hebrew predecessors and should not scoff at the author for his proposal. We now know that the sky is blue due to the scattering of a particular wavelength of light passing through the atmosphere at a certain angle, not because there’s an ocean in the sky. While we cannot fault the author for believing this ancient hypothesis, we can conclude that his guess on the properties of the sky was incorrect. Already, a critical analysis has demonstrated the Bible to be scientifically inaccurate and undeniably imperfect.
God allegedly created the sun and moon on the fourth day of the creation (14-19), but this curious statement creates a plethora of troubles because God had already divided the day into lightness and darkness as his first creation (3-5). How can there be night and day without the sun, the only appreciable source of light for our planet? Again, we must take the probable mindset of the author to understand his position. Look into the sky away from the sun. It’s unreasonable to conclude that the earth is bright at its distal boundaries just because the sun is shining, unless you have solid evidence to the contrary, because the light originating from this enormous ball of fire appears to stop very near its edges. Besides, everyone knows that the horizon is luminous well before and well after the sun is in the visible regions of the sky. Thus, there’s no solid reason to conclude that the sun has anything to do with creating the illumination, only that it accompanies the somewhat concurrent periods of lightness. In fact, the Bible explicitly states that the sun and moon are merely symbols “to divide the day from the night” (14). In the biblical world, however, God controlled morning and evening by this mysterious force called light (3-5), an entirely different entity created much earlier than the sun. We now know that the sun is the determining factor between morning and evening, yet the Bible clearly proclaims morning and evening existed prior to the sun’s creation.
In addition to the sun gaffe, the scientifically ignorant author commits the mistake of listing the moon as a light (16). If we were to be rigidly technical about the Bible’s claim, this verse is another scientifically erroneous notion because the moon merely reflects illumination from the sun. Isaiah and Ezekiel also make this mistake in their prophecy accounts (30:26 and 32:7, respectively). Again, we often take our modern knowledge about the universe for granted, yet such a gift was completely unforeseeable to the ancient Hebrew.
Another problem arises from the sun not appearing until the fourth day when you consider that plants suddenly appeared on the third day (11-13). While it’s definitely possible, even very likely, for plants to survive without the sun for a single day, many apologists have attempted to rectify the obvious timeline problems in Genesis by altering the meaning of a day. Once they consummate this amendment, they’ve created a timeline in which the plants exist without sunlight for however long these “days” are to them. In most cases, a biblical day must necessarily be no less than a period of millions of years in order to be congruent with scientific data. While the general Hebrew term for day, yom, doesn’t necessarily mean a twenty-four hour day, we still understand it to be a short time period based on every contemporaneous instance of its use. Millennia simply do not qualify using this unbiased criterion. Furthermore, the author provides us with the precise definition of yom in every creation instance: morning and evening. Naturally, we’ll revisit these creationary intervals in the upcoming Thousands Or Billions. For now, let’s return to the problem of the plants thriving without the sun’s existence.
Most vegetation requires sunlight to undergo photosynthesis, the process of using light energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into nutrients. I wouldn’t bet on plant survival much more than a month without the sun. While it’s true that the biblical creation has this mysterious light existing prior to the arrival of plants, the only thing we can conclude about its existence is the probable lack thereof. The sun, on the other hand, is fully compatible with plant life. Once again, this obtuse blunder can be justified by the limitations of the ancient Hebrew’s knowledge because he obviously wasn’t aware that plants were feeding off sunlight for their survival.
As one final minor point on plants for now, God says he has given us every plant for food (29). However, we’re now aware of plants with qualities poisonous enough that make us avoid physical contact with them. Such disturbingly reckless advice hardly seems to be the kind likely given out by an omniscient deity.

The “Heavens”
God allegedly created the stars on the fourth day (16), but what were they, and what was their purpose? Biblical authors believed that stars were small sources of light contained within the imaginary firmament covering the earth. In other words, they exhibited no divine inspiration, whatsoever, telling them that stars were actually unfathomably enormous gaseous spheres seemingly countless miles away. In short, the authors’ celestial hypothesis was incorrect on location, number, and size. Verification for the location part of this position is quite easy to demonstrate. After God made the sun, moon, and stars, he “set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth” (17). So along with the sun and moon, the stars are apparently housed in this imaginary physical boundary separating the sky ocean from the open air above earth’s inhabitants.
The Bible also remarkably claims the outdated belief that stars were extremely small in size. After the disclosure of their location in the firmament, and after God tells Abraham several times that his people would be as numerous as the stars (which is also impossible, yet it’s claimed to have been fulfilled in Hebrews 11:12), the next clear reference to size and position of these celestial bodies is found in the book of Isaiah. Here, the prophet speaks of exalting a throne “above the stars of God” (14:13). Likewise, Job says, “behold the height of the stars, how high they are” (22:12). Stars are not high; they are distant. One would expect these two divinely inspired individuals to make this distinction in their records; instead, they boldly demonstrate that they shared the popular yet erroneous belief that God fixed the stars at the sky’s apex.
The book of Psalms states that God tells the number of stars and calls them all by their names (147:4). That’s quite an impressive accomplishment considering scientists estimate that there could be as many as 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in the known universe. If God truly told anyone how many stars surrounded our planet, the ridiculous firmament belief should have ceased without delay.
Daniel speaks of a vision that he had concerning a giant goat’s horn knocking the stars down to the ground where the goat “stamped upon them” (Daniel 8:8-9). Passing comment on the vision, we can also be decidedly certain that Daniel believed stars were tiny lights hanging above the earth. Otherwise, how could his monstrous goat stamp upon them? More importantly, how could someone divinely inspired write something so blatantly preposterous? In the New Testament, Matthew and Mark both record Jesus foretelling of an era when the stars shall “fall from heaven” (24:29 and 13:25, respectively). Jesus, a supposedly perfect human being who was supposedly the only son of a supposedly perfect god, wasn’t immune to scientific ignorance either.
Revelation was the grandiose vision of John, yet another man who God allegedly inspired, but John also thought that stars were bright objects of insignificant size directly above the earth. In this record of his dream-like hallucination, he claims to see Jesus holding seven stars in his right hand (1:16). While John may have seen what looked like seven stars in Jesus’ hand, this is not what the text clearly states. The passage unambiguously says Jesus was holding seven stars in his hand. Thus, John’s statement is certainly in error. In addition, John mentions a dream in which “the stars of heaven fell unto the earth” and compares this event to a fig tree shaking off its leaves (6:13). Furthermore, he describes a great star falling into “the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of the waters” (8:10). If a star were to “fall” to our planet as John indicates, it would annihilate the earth upon impact because these bodies are generally hundreds of times larger than our world. Finally, John sees a dragon swing its tail around, consequently knocking a third of the stars in the sky down to the ground (12:4). There’s no need to discuss how enormous such a hypothetical tail would have to be in order to accomplish this impossibility. After all, Revelation was only a vision. On the other hand, we must expect Christians to accept that this man had a unique foreknowledge of humankind’s imminent future. In other words, these ridiculously fantastical events must remain futuristic certainties to biblical apologists. At this point, we can safely say that anyone attempting to harmonize the scientifically determined position, size, and number of our celestial neighbors with a literal interpretation of the Bible is veraciously wasting his time.

Zoological Pseudoscience
The ancient Hebrews apparently didn’t have abundant knowledge of the animal kingdom, and the supposedly omniscient deity neglected to grant them with such insight before they started working on his timeless declaration to the world. Following Noah’s flood, the Bible says that all terrestrial and marine life would have fear and dread toward humans (Genesis 9:2). That’s simply not the case because there are vast numbers of animals, ranging from pets to fearless predators, that have no fear whatsoever toward humans. This erroneous complication was simply a matter of the fallible author’s confined knowledge. While the animals inhabiting Mesopotamia may have very well been scared of humans, this prospect doesn’t alter the clear connotation of the biblical text.
Later in Genesis, Jacob successfully alters the color patterns on lambs and goats so that he could differentiate the stronger ones from the weaker ones. He purportedly accomplished this feat by placing peeled tree branches in front of the mating livestock (Genesis 30:37-39). Following his absurd achievement, an angel of God visits him in a dream and praises him for his work in genetics (Genesis 31:11-12). As someone with a thorough background in human physiology, I hold the opinion that this is easily the single most embarrassing error contained between the Bible’s covers. Peeled branches have absolutely no effect on an organism’s appearance; DNA does. As an extremely quick summary of the topic, the general rule is that half of an offspring’s DNA comes from each parent with the more dominant type being physically expressed. The specific genes in the DNA sequence are the determining factor for the animals’ colors. Of course, such advanced understanding was way beyond the scope of the ancient Hebrew. Divine inspiration obviously doesn’t resonate from this passage either.
The story of Moses relaying God’s commands to the people also drops the ball when you consider which animals the almighty deemed unclean. He says hares are not clean enough to eat because they chew their cud (Leviticus 11:6 and Deuteronomy 14:7). I’m not sure where he gets this impression because it’s the exact opposite of reality. The obvious solution to this problem is that no all-knowing deity told Moses anything of the sort.
The book of Job depicts ostriches as birds that bury their eggs in the earth so that they can depart and leave them unattended (Job 39:13-16). It’s sufficient to say they’re biblically painted as careless parents. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Ostriches are extremely meticulous about how they take care of their offspring. Even the father helps out, which is the overwhelming exception in the animal kingdom. This is another example of a flat-out error that often goes shunned by biblical apologists due to the absence of a reasonable response.
A more popular story centered on zoological blunders is that of Jonah being swallowed by a fish and living inside its stomach for three days (Jonah 1:17). Even if we ignore how strange the story might seem, we can still conclude that the author lacked the knowledge of gastric juices and bile acids more than capable of digesting a human body.
The New Testament doesn’t offer any enlightenment on the animal kingdom either. James declares that every kind of animal has been tamed (James 3:7). Although James asserts nearly the exact opposite of the earlier Genesis authors, perhaps due to a widespread effort to tame all wildlife over the preceding few centuries, he runs straight into the same problem: limitations of an individual human perspective. Like the earlier writers, James probably never ventured too far outside of Mesopotamia. If he had taken the time to make this journey, he would have eventually realized that there were other animals yet to be discovered, let alone tamed. James’ premature proclamation hardly seems consistent with what I would consider a divinely inspired statement.

Anthropological Pseudoscience
Once again, we return to the Pentateuch (a.k.a. Books of Moses, Torah, or first five chapters of the Bible) to find additional scientific errors, this time committed with regard to human beings. Let’s begin with a consistent problem throughout the Old Testament: population growth. The first such example takes place during the post-flood era when the population inexplicably mushrooms from eight to a million plus, counting the women, in only a few hundred years (Exodus 1:5, 38:26). By the time the events of 2 Samuel are said to have been taking place, there were well over a million men in two armies alone (2 Samuel 24:9). Not only is this exceedingly accelerated for a believable population growth spurt, the living conditions were not exactly primed for such a magnificent, logarithmic eruption of life. Furthermore, there’s no reliable archaeological evidence that there was ever a number remotely close to that many people living simultaneously in the Middle East until just very recently. The numbers were certainly exaggerated, as are many details of centuries-old stories handed down via oral tradition. A common apologetic argument used in response to this problem will cite God’s supposed tendencies to allow miraculous growth rates (Genesis 15:5, Exodus 1:7), but what actual evidence do they provide to support this explanation? As it stands, simple ignorance or an oversight by the error-prone author created this obvious difficulty.
Genesis 5 and 11 contain chronologies for the first important people in the Bible, as well as the number of years each person lived. The average lifespan is about eight hundred years with Methuselah taking the cake at 969. People simply do not live that long, especially considering the treacherous conditions necessarily burdened thousands of years ago. To answer this dilemma, biblical defenders will simply quote where the spirit of God left man to end his longevity (Genesis 6:3). However, there’s a realistic approach to solving this curiosity. We know from other ancient religions that their own important figures also have extremely abnormal lifespans, sometimes reaching into thousands of years. Due to the accompanying stories behind this consistent practice, historians are easily able to conclude that the founders of these religions commonly stretched the lifespans of individuals whom they wished to exalt as having increased importance. In other words, the incredible ages of these biblical characters are nothing more than the product of folklore resulting from someone’s wishful thinking.
The Book of Esther accommodates the story of a man who thinks with his heart (6:6). While this appears to be a symbolic meaning, much like how we say people think either with their heads or with their hearts, it’s important to realize that people originally believed thought originated from within the heart. During Egyptian mummification, morticians often removed the brain from the corpse, leaving the heart with the deceased individual due to its perceived over-importance. Even the Egyptians certainly shared the same erroneous belief as the technologically inferior Hebrews. The Bible could have easily distinguished itself from other religious texts by establishing some reputable authenticity with such an advanced declaration, but it conveniently failed to do so.
Yet again, the Bible fails to improve upon a field of science when it moves into the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all believed that the inabilities to speak and hear were the result of possessions by evil spirits (9:32, 9:17, and 11:14, respectively). This is an interesting and quiet creative hypothesis, but one we currently know is not true. The inability to speak is usually due to a physical abnormality in the region of the brain known as Broca’s area, while the inability to hear is typically due to physical trauma of the inner ear. If these regions don’t operate properly, the affected individual lacks the auditory and phonetic capacities made possible by a normal physiology.
Matthew also believes that blindness is a result of the devil’s inhabitance (12:22). Again, you don’t need the unverifiable nature of this wild claim explained to you. Damage to the optic nerve or detachment of the retina usually causes blindness. No devils or demons have ever demonstrated their involvement in this impairment. Luke purports that a woman’s crippled nature is also due to possession by a devil (13:11). While there are multitudes of unfortunate factors that can cripple a person, spiritual possession has never proven to be one of them. Luke and Matthew commit an additional medical error when they claim that devils cause seizures (9:39 and 17:15, respectively). Suffice to say, devils, demons, evil spirits, or any other fiendish creatures have never been known to cause seizures. These violent neurological events are the result of some physiological abnormality, such as a brain tumor, or an imbalance in electrical activity. When radical epilepsy manifestations are observed, however, it’s certainly understandable how a person with limited knowledge of human physiology could leap to the erroneous and fantastic conclusion that a demon might have possessed the individual in question. The Hebrew god once again fails to distinguish himself from the countless other ancient gods because his writers weren’t the least bit scientifically believable.
In every instance of alleged demonic possession I mentioned, Jesus cured the people suffering from these ailments via exorcism, the act of casting demons out of the body. This heavily implies that Jesus also thought evil spirits were responsible for these conditions. Because Jesus himself even says it was through God that he casts out demons (Matthew 12:28 and Luke 11:20), one could even insinuate that he’s obviously relying on the ignorance of the crowd to further his stature. Otherwise, the stories of exorcisms could very well be nothing more than fabrications.
The take-home message about these purported exorcisms is that they could not have happened if we are to believe the means by which they occurred unfolded exactly as recorded in the Gospels. Even if the perceptions of the authors served as the basis for the exorcism claims, the text is still incorrect and, therefore, unreliable. Thus, the Bible has once again demonstrated its own hilariously fallacious nature.

Further Scientific Nonsense
Another embarrassing tale of biblical nonsense is the construction of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. According to the bogus legend, everyone on earth spoke the same language when the erection of the tower began. Because the people of earth had a great desire to catch a glimpse of God, they built this supposed tower intending to breach the sky. As God didn’t like the possibility of people spotting him, he confused their languages to prevent the architects from understanding one another. Unable to continue construction, everyone with different languages went separate ways.
This story is unfeasible for many reasons. The first problem with the incredulous account is the incongruency of the common language theme. We know that many different languages existed centuries before the story’s setting around 2500-2000 BCE. Not only that, but another Pentateuch author had said Noah’s sons separated according to their own tongues in the previous chapter (Genesis 10). At the very least, we have a major timeline discrepancy in need of an acceptable resolution. Furthermore, the notion that nineteenth century man had the architectural knowledge to build a tower even a mile high is ridiculous. To fathom that a group of ignorant ancient Hebrews could make an equivalent accomplishment is ludicrous.
Interestingly, no divine inspiration is available as a possible excuse for the illogical story because God wasn’t siding with his people on this occasion! If he didn’t wish for the people to see him, he wouldn’t have provided the means for them to do so. Of course, the most obvious blunder is God’s supposed fear of us actually reaching him in the sky. To suggest that an omniscient god would destroy a building because he felt he was in danger of humans catching a glimpse of him is an equally ludicrous proposal. The aspects of this story once again go back to the ancient Hebrew belief that God eternally resided on top of a dome covering the earth. Since an omniscient deity would know that the people could not possibly reach him, he would not have stopped the tower’s construction for the specific reason provided by the Bible. The story cries of a myth.
We also have fanciful tales about giants roaming the earth during the Pentateuch era. There’s a lot of room for interpretation here because the exact nature of these mysterious giants is unknown. However, we understand that the Bible has them living both before and after the flood (Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33). Some Christians have argued these giants are the dinosaurs, but this proposed explanation fails to be consistent with the “flood caused the dinosaur extinction” hypothesis offered by others in the same crowd. While the text is most likely referring to a race of people, archaeologists have found no reliable evidence that these creatures existed. Given the track record of the Bible thus far, it’s reasonable to conclude that the Genesis giants are, at best, an exaggeration of an otherwise normal species of life.
Jesus also commits another scientific blunder when he declares the mustard seed to be the smallest seed of the earth (Mark 4:31). There are, in fact, many seeds smaller than the mustard, such as the South American orchid, but the Hebrews were obviously ignorant of most everything outside of their homeland. Had God presented this bit of information to the author of Mark, it seems unfeasible that the writer would portray Jesus as a man so careless with his diction. This example is clearly another biblical error on the growing accumulation that arises from the same limitation of divinely uninspired perspective.

The Tentative Verdict For Science Versus The Bible
The suggestion that the Bible is lacking a scientific foundation is nothing less than a colossal understatement. The Bible has failed fair, impartial, and universally applicable tests in multiple fields of science. If God truly is the inspiration behind this purportedly divine declaration to the world, he shows absolutely no interest in its understandability or accuracy in astronomy, cosmology, zoology, botany, anthropology, geology, ecology, geography, physiology, and several other disciplines not covered in this chapter. In fact, the Bible handicaps those who use their “God-given” talents of reason and logic to settle blatant biblical problems. Nothing can be more detrimental to the authenticity of a statement than contradictory phenomena that we readily observe and experience. With no other evidence to consider, these natural manifestations should always override what we might hope and think to be correct explanations for unignorable discrepancies. Such is the power of science and reason. They are the impartial pursuit of an answer to a question, not the search for supplements to a predetermined answer.
.....

See, cut and paste is fun! But it isn't an argument. Sheer volume means nothing. The Urantia Book is bigger than the Bible, does that make it more authoritative?
"God" is the original deus ex machina. --Maksutov
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Re: Science is a tool that can be abused!

Post by _The CCC »

Sam Harris shouldn't be your go to guy. He's never heard of test tube babies.
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Re: Science is a tool that can be abused!

Post by _Maksutov »

The CCC wrote:Sam Harris shouldn't be your go to guy. He's never heard of test tube babies.


Indeed. And he's totally neglected the theory of Jesus being an alien hybrid after Mary was probed in a UFO. :wink:
"God" is the original deus ex machina. --Maksutov
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Re: Science is a tool that can be abused!

Post by _SteelHead »

Somewhere in those two walls of text I expect to find "the Fonz" on a pair of water skis.
It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener at war.

Some of us, on the other hand, actually prefer a religion that includes some type of correlation with reality.
~Bill Hamblin
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Re: Science is a tool that can be abused!

Post by _Maksutov »

SteelHead wrote:Somewhere in those two walls of text I expect to find "the Fonz" on a pair of water skis.


Something like an Easter Egg, eh? That would probably kick off a whole new cult. :lol:
"God" is the original deus ex machina. --Maksutov
_Maksutov
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Re: Science is a tool that can be abused!

Post by _Maksutov »

LittleNipper wrote:
Maksutov wrote:
What is the difference between GOD and God? Or do you just have a flaky caps key?

The only way that you could know that God "knows all the answers" would be if you knew all the answers too. Is this theist humility again? :lol:
God is omnipotent --- according to the Bible which the Messiah verified as valid. I sometimes use GOD when I refer to the Triune Godhead. But I do tend to use either interchangeably.


How do we know that the Messiah could validate it? He never demonstrated it to us.

How do we know that he was the Messiah? Not everyone in his time was convinced of it and the Jews don't believe it, and they came up with the concept.

Do you really believe that you can heal blindness with muddy spit?

Do you really believe that mental illness is a demon that can be transferred from a human into a group of pigs?
"God" is the original deus ex machina. --Maksutov
_Maksutov
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Re: Science is a tool that can be abused!

Post by _Maksutov »

LittleNipper wrote:
The CCC wrote:If you have to posit God onto science to make it work. It is no longer science but religion.


Science is a means to an end. Science allows people to diagnose diseases and develop cures. Sciences enables man to create mechanical transportation. Science helps man understand weather patterns to increase predictability. However, to ask for GOD for help in understanding is not either unreasonable or silly. God already knows all the answers.


Religion doesn't get to define science. Which religion would you use? Do we use Christian Science? That's useless. Do we use Jewish Science? Muslim Science? Vedic Science? No, just science as defined by itself. You can't expect the people of 3000+ years ago to have known this stuff. Why do you limit yourself to their understanding? Do you use Biblical modes of transportation, medicine, communication? Obviously not, you're on the internet.

The Bible tells us nothing about our own bodies and about the universe we live in. It tells us about the ideas and the stories of a small group of people who lived in a tiny part of the world thousands of years ago. You have nothing about all of the rest of the world, all of the rest of the people, all of the rest of the universe. You're generalizing and extrapolating far beyond anything reasonable and verifiable. At best that's fantasy; at worst, illusion.
"God" is the original deus ex machina. --Maksutov
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