I hand out a geological timeline in my introductory biology course, and I expect the students to learn it. It’s a busy little sheet of paper. But have you ever wondered what the old earth creationist timeline would look like?
The young earth creationist timeline would be a fraction of pixel high.
The intelligent design creationist timeline would be the same as the one above, except god would be diddling creation imperceptibly and invisibly throughout. At least it gives the old man something to do.
[nitpick]That first entry in the right column should read “God always existed but wasn’t doing anything that we are aware of.”[/nitpick]
Make it as simple for the creationists as possible, and just as brief:
The reason for it all: A god.
I wonder if god felt that lunchtime, Pre-Sausage, was rather dull. I know that I personally wouldn’t have wanted to live a pre-sausage universe. Perhaps there was some divne depression in those times? Shouldn’t the philosophers be working on this question?
lol…God is a lazy sob, isn’t he?
If not lazy, he’s at least one hell of a procrastinator! And I thought I was bad……
Wait. Why isn’t this the Young Earth Creationist Timeline?
No doubt…god is a lazy good for nothin lazy bones…leaves it all to his deluded followers to make it up as they go along…and cannot be arsed to confirm or deny nothing…epic fail really…waste of energy…and not particularly bright or caring!…in fact a bona fide …Git!
I’d love to see one of these where a number of creation myths were put up side by side.
Now hold on a minute — how do you know God wasn’t following the advice of former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for all eternity, until he finally got tired of it? Could be, you know. Would explain a lot . . .
Science Pundit (#1): I’m pretty sure that YECs believe the Bible to be the complete and infallible word of their creator. If it weren’t complete, how would they calculate their ridiculous timelines? And the first line says “In the beginning,” so he couldn’t have been doing anything before that.
As far as the sausage goes, if man was created in god’s image, wouldn’t there always have been at least one sausage? (Yes, horrible joke, I’m aware.)
Perfect. It’s just perfect.
Though, if I were god, I would have invented Bacon very early in the process…
@ P.Z.
Please include the following in the bottom left:
“God begins existing as a mental representation when one or more rather average hominid species start naively personifying nature.”
Rather unwieldy but, I submit, rather accurate too.
Sub-pixel. Best way to describe a creationist.
In plain unadulterated language to theists…’Fuck off with this idiocy’…life is to short!
*groan*
That was actually painful. Well done…
Science Pundit, the bible clearly shows that God, if he was doing anything, wasn’t doing it in this universe:
So, because nothing existed before God made the universe, all God could do was, well, mental masturbation…
(He also didn’t have a kazoo)
@TSP:
[nitpick]That first entry in the right column should read “God always existed but wasn’t doing anything that we are aware of.”[/nitpick]
No, that’s not a nitpick, because the creotards wil ltake it and scream, “See! The evilutionists are wrong about EVERYTHING!!!!”
(Feel free to imagine the mouth frothing at they scream this line. But you are right; it should be corrected.)
Holy shit that’s funny.
159
—– or 0.002544
62500
That’s how many pixels the YEC timeline is.
The old earth creationist timeline is the one on the left, also correctly labeled science. The one on the right is the YEC timeline. Thanks PZ, for highlighting the difference.
@#8 i think i already proposed that theory and everyone got pissed off
@ my attempt to write 0.002544, the number of pixels comprising the YEC side, as a fraction:
FAIL
Palm to forehead.
I love the pixel thing. That’s awesome. It always amazes me to think just how long 13 billion years is and this makes it just a little bit easier to comprehend.
That was a nice attempt at snark there, Heddle, but you know full well that sarcasm works best when the brush stroke isn’t so broad as to be innacurate.
So Heddle, does the Big Bang translate to “Good Sneezed” in OEC?
Look how he spends his time, forty-three species of parrots! Nipples for men!
If I were creating the world I wouldn’t mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o’clock, Day One!
Rev. BigDumbChimp
Not sneezed. Farted. See Family Guy clip.
Or it could be that during that timeless void bible-god was masturbating, and only ejaculated about 6000 years ago.
I’ll see what I can do. I was already writing a script for a video about all the things that Christianity stole from other religions. It should be pretty easy to expand on it from there. This should be fun.
Which begs the question, where did/does god pinch a loaf? If all those souls in heavens have mouths, they have anuses too and all that goes in between. Are there loggers who cut down trees for paper mills in heaven? Bidet’s with a sewer system? Angelic plumbers? Does one lose one’s genitalia upon entering the Pearly Gates? If not, does one need condoms in paradise or are all the “little swimmers” ghosts too? Why would one still carry his own block and tackle if he can’t procreate? Do the she-angels lose their nipples and become seamless like Barbie™? Who makes the robes for an afterlife or is Heaven one giant nudist colony (bring your own towel!!!)? This creationism/afterlife stuff is complex. (wanders off in a daze)
To be fair, between 10 BYA and 5 BYA (a third the length of the chart), there’s not much difference between the two…
Gif
God = the original superfluous man.
And to think that I once taught catechism in a Catholic school (years, years ago, but not visible on the above timeline; I was young then) and drew on the board a timeline for events since the start of the universe. I had to write “not to scale” next to it because otherwise I wouldn’t have room to mark any events in human history. At least with Catholic students I didn’t get any guff about “6000 years” when I labeled the line with “billions”.
I think you got it! For all those billions of years before 6000 years ago, God was just masturbating, but he couldn’t knock one off. That’s why he was so pissed through the Old Testament! And the reason we don’t see him anymore is because he got tired and took a nap without cleaning up his mess!
He does exist!
I thought I heard kazoo music. I also thawt I sawr a puddy tat.
Oh, I can’t wait for this…
@E.V., I would think that since there seems to be a, at least not-uncommon??, view of biological processes as being “dirty,” then presumably god, who is perfect, wouldn’t ever do something like defecate? I dunno*. That provokes still another question, though: down here on Earth, was there defecation before The Fall?
*I gotta tell ya, too, that I think this was the first time I ever contemplated the Christian God taking a dump. It’s going to be a minute before I can even venture through the images spawned by rest of your comment…
But I always know where my towel is, so the nudist think isn’t a big deal.
I’ve got it! All those aeons of time when God was twiddling his thumbs? All the souls who ever existed and will ever exist were hanging out with him as little amorphous blobs and pestered him to no end, so the all-knowing ever present deity decided to create the earth (with major overkill on all the background design) and stuff those souls into meat suits with amnesia where they would be forced to compete to see if they would be tortured for ever and ever or get back into heaven. Ahh, another brilliant plan by God!
#8 – It is the YEC timeline. It says so at the top of the chart.
The OEC timeline would have God starting the universe 13.7 BYA, and the lines would be identical down to about “all human evolution”, where he suddenly steps in and says “this variety of hominid that’s been evolving for so long…this is made in my image. This species is now capable of all sins against me. Congratulations.”
I’ve just started Neil Shubin’s “Your Inner Fish” and am in constant amazement at the evolutionary process. I have a question, though, that may seem pretty dim, but this timeline (the good side of it anyway) shows that evolution kinda snowballed at the end up to present day. Why is this? And are we still experiencing this “roll” we’ve been on?
Nothing is pre-sausage. Sausage is eternal.
So God is a pig?
that’s one long LoL
This was kinda lame…
Then I guess, you really can’t make creationists or IDiots interesting so it’s a moot point.
In other news, did anyone see this:
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/04/15/2009-04-15_yankees_fan_sues_nypd_kicked_out_of_stadium_for_using_restroom_during_god_bless_.html
I have to hope that there is way more to this than the story suggests.
The first part of the movie Zeitgeist does that.
Aah, God’s Work is truly magnificient indeed.
…LAME.
Mississippi, Texas, or possibly Alabama ;)
Doesn’t seem like there is anything more to it. I hope he wins millions from those pricks.
With all the references to towels and sneezing, I was reminded of the Great Green Arkleseizure – http://discordia.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Green_Arkleseizure
Exactly as with sausage, you wouldn’t have wanted to see just how, or of what, the universe was made.
Then there’s Eddie Izzard’s take on the Beginning (some naughty language bits):
In the Mormon Mythology, God does have something to do. He’s up there begetting spirit children with his many angelic, blonde, angel-like wives. These are the kids waiting to be born on earth, and if they don’t find their way into a good Mormon family, they end up in an ungodly family. This is one of many reasons why Mormon women on earth have so many kids — if they don’t have ’em they’re denying the little ones a chance to grow up in a godly household.
Mormon men are also busy in the CK (Celestial Kingdom) after they die. They get more than one wife there and can be interactive with same.
Yeah. What I meant was that I was hoping the article misreported what happened and that they weren’t really the pricks they appear to be. Probably too much to hope for.
Claudia83 @ #37
I think things did pick up once sexual reproduction came about, but some of the squished-ness of the timeline is because we’re focusing on the peculiar type of endothermic land-fish that we are, so we keep picking up the differentiation of smaller and smaller groups that we came from*. If we were self-aware, tool-using squid, we’d be a lot more interested in molluskian evolution, and all those chordates would get ignored.
* Birds are an exception, and the dinosaur extinction, but birds are still our cousins and food sources. So are the land plants, for that matter.
I remember this story when it was first reported (after the arrest, before the lawsuit). The Yankee management really are the pricks they appear to be. There are many similarly outrageous occurrences at Yankee Stadium.
But back to the YEC’s…
This is pretty close to what I was taught in catechism. That the garden of eden story was a metaphor for God not creating Man out of “whole cloth” but just endowing him (after evolving naturally) with “consciousness”, thus seperating us from the animals. That is what the whole “knowledge of Good and evil” is about. Animals do not know good and evil, they just are. Only Man has the concept good and evil and that is what distinguishes us from the animals. (at least that is what they taught me in catechism).
I never sausage a thing!
And my opinion of our species drops yet another notch.
Huh. One of the events that precipitated my slow rise from the depths of Christianity* was a visiting Jehovah’s Witness that told me animals have no hope of an afterlife because “they have no lifeline with god.”
*I realize that there is debate regarding whether JWs are classified as Christians. I don’t see that as material here. It certainly wasn’t to my young childhood self during that particular conversation.
Good question. Not entirely clear.
For the first few billion years, the earth was reducing and free oxygen was absent. The photosynthetic prokaryotes produced it, life. For 2 billion years, the earth rusted as free oxygen was soaked up by iron and other minerals.
The first eukaryotes were single celled and came much later. It was only after oxygen was abundant and eukaryotes started forming colonies that metazoans got going.
Some scientists claim that life is getting better at evolution and it is speeding up. Don’t know if there is any data on that or if it is only a conjecture.
quasar sounds too much like quesadilla and makes me hungry
Have you been driving on I-95 near the North / South Carolina border recently?
But according to the bible, god didn’t give “the knowledge of good & evil” to people. People chose that for themselves at the suggestion of a talking snake and god punished them for making that choice. So the catechism you were taught says that people were just animals before they ate the apple that the snake was actually god?
God need’t be an “old man”. Such an infinite, immaterial non physical entity would be incomprehensible and unfathomable, and hence meaningless even to discuss, let alone twiddle thumbs.
Old Earth creation doesn’t have to be based on Judeo-Christianity either. It could simply refer to a creative agency that underpins reality and explains the universe, and its contents, etc…Creation is the expression of physical laws that underpin the cosmos, and that need explanation..
Notice something interesting – there isn’t a third column, to explain the deity. Or a 4th, to explain the explainer, and so on!
Ooooh!! It’s a POLL!
Take our Poll
Oh my ‘God’
Should sports fans be allowed to move around during “God Bless America”?
Yes. A paying fan should be allowed to move around whenever – except when in danger.
No. It’s disrespectful and shouldn’t be tolerated.
I don’t care. I never go to sporting events.
Way to ruin the joke, Captain Obvious.
Mormons, some Catholics and many Christian Fundies (y’now, the people that buy into Creationism) believe in the literal bodily resurrection of the person in the hereafter. We’re just having a good time at their expense.
Ricky Gervais’ version is really good too.
No, I just expressed myself badly (as usual). The point is that the whole story is a metaphor. What we wee tauht is that there was no literal “serpent” or “tree” or even “garden”. In the story, God didn’t give us the knowledge, but did give us the freedom to choose to acquire that knowledge. Regardless of the details the point is that it is that knowledge that seperates us from animals.
A very tiny fraction. Looked at the other way, if 6,000 years was a single pixel high, the whole linear time graph for 15bn years would need to be 0.41 miles high (assuming 96ppi). At least it’d keep the creationists busy… scrolling.
Peter K #360 wrote:
Right. An incomprehensible thing of that sort would of course be beyond anything in our human experience — especially anthropomorphic qualities such as being an agent, or forming things creatively for purposes.
“Creative agency?” Dang, something familiar and anthropomorphic accidentally snuck into the non-Judeo-Christian God Who’s Nothing at All like an “Old Man.” But just take out that part, and God is looking much more unfathomable again.
Which is a good thing. I wouldn’t know what to do with a God that didn’t satisfy a reasonable expectation of Total Incomprehensibility. God has to be really, really BIG to impress the sophisticated, and not trip on science.
You did not express yourself badly, but I did since I used the same metaphor to try to express my objections. Let’s see if I can do better.
If I understand correctly, the “metaphorical meaning” of the story seems to be that knowledge (which distinguishes us from the other animals) was not given to us by any god, but that we took that knowledge for ourselves, and god has been royally pissed at us ever since for doing so. I certainly agree that what knowledge we have we got without the help of any god, and that, if there were a god, it would not like it that we had achieved any knowledge. What I can’t understand is why any religion would teach such a thing, since it makes a god both unnecessary and inimical to our best interests?
I like to read the expulsion from the Garden as an allegorical myth of the rise of agriculture. The Garden is the idyllic life of the hunter-gatherer or the pastoral nomad. The knowledge represented by the fruit is settled agriculture.
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
–Genesis 3:17-19
I was little when my mom went through a JW phase, but it seemed that they didn’t consider themselves christian. Kinda weird, but they do believe all the weird jesus shit, so they kind of are.
Margaret’s Cat @67:
I could be that I am mixing my catechism with my own interpretation (it has been a long time since 7th grade) but I do clearly remember that my priest at the time was what I would call quite liberal. There was no denying evolution or science in any way. Genesis was taught as metaphor; divinely inspired but still a purely human interpretation in the language of the time. There was also very little emphasis on God’s “anger” at man for having eaten the fruit and more on the knowledge itself. The expulsion from the garden was not so much god punishing us to die as now we had the knowledge that we would die. Sin is not so much doing “evil” as much as knowing that an act is “evil” (for example, nakedness was fine with God and Adam and Eve until they ate and realized they were naked).
As I try to explain it, it gets more convoluted and contradictory, which is why I am an atheist today, but essentially what we were taught was not to get too wrapped up in the details of the Eden story. It is clearly fiction meant to convey how we are different from animals. How original sin originated if Eden isn’t literal, I don’t remember.
Yeah. I was very young, and there’s a lot of distance between me and that memory, but I certainly don’t remember the guy giving me any impression that the JWs were something that my parents and I should be viewing as different (except of course for the obvious difference that they were right…).
I am always amazed that those who believe “in the word” can imagine an infinite afterlife, but lack the imagination to think of an infinite existence prior to their own.
I also remember being dumbfounded when my sister told me that she only believed the earth was 6,000 years old. What, if anything, can you say to answer this?
#7 I’d love to see one of these where a number of creation myths were put up side by side.
I don’t know, if you put the Hindu cosmology in there, you are looking at one LOOOOOOONG web page. Just for the current cycle:
“We are currently believed to be in the 51st year of the present Brahma and so about 158.7 trillion years have elapsed since He was born as Brahma.”
If she weren’t my sister, then I might ask her if she also believed that the world was flat, or perhaps if she believed that the sun went around the earth.
SteveM
Ah. I kind of like that. It’s a very non-religious interpretation of the myth, since it makes god superfluous, but it does make some sense as a purely human myth.
That’s the key part. The whole rest of the Xian myth falls apart without original sin. Hmmm. Actually a god who temporarily sacrifices a part of himself to himself to appease himself doesn’t make any sense even if there somehow was “original sin.”
I guess I’m not up to the mental gymnastics required for religious apologetics.
Josh,
The toilets in Yankee Stadium were open at all times during a game. The cops/security didn’t stop people from going to and from the toilets even during the playing of the national anthem. I’m more willing to believe the cops saying the guy was drunk and rowdy than him claiming the cops wouldn’t let him take a piss during the playing of “God Bless America.”
That seems like a much more plausible event to me as well. I really hope it was him.
Sorry to break it to you folks but you can make sausage out of meat other than pork. I’m fond of beef sausages and especially venison and red wine ones.
Wouldn’t red wine sausages be rather runny?
MosesZD, April 17, 2009 9:02 AM
Roger, Francis, or Kevin?
For everybody wondering what God was up to for 13 billion years or more before creating the universe, the answer is really very simple. He was waiting for the paperwork to go through.
blueshifter @73,
That’s nothing compared to Scientology:
MC@75: That’s where they lost me, too. I asked the priest, right then, “if the Garden is a metaphor (wondering to my precocious self why they don’t call it a ‘myth’) then what is Original Sin?”
The answer I was given, “We are each born with the potential to do evil , and that is what Original Sin is.” That was one of the signposts on my road to hell, because, like the word ‘myth’, I knew what the word ‘potential’ meant, even in seventh grade, and it was, as far as I was concerned, beyond the realm of reason to believe in anything but a kinetic form of Original Sin (seeing as that is why I’d go to hell even if I was a good person all my life).
As is so easily and often pointed out here, the metaphysics is nonsensical if you try to approach it logically. If the Garden was a metaphor, then why isn’t Original Sin a metaphor? Why isn’t God Itself a metaphor?
By ninth grade, I was an ardent deist.
John Morales, April 17, 2009 8:02 PM
I see; according to that bit of Scientology you quoted, thetans are not evil, monstrous creatures, but victims of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and more in need of counseling and medication than nuking. I see now that my decision to make myself a Thetan sanctuary was the right one, and that more people should do it.
For anyone interested, here’s Wikipedia’s own graphical timelines for the left hand scale:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_of_the_Big_Bang
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_of_the_Stelliferous_Era
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_of_our_universe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_from_Big_Bang_to_Heat_Death
Egads TheSciencePundit @ #1!
I made this timeline weeks ago and have checked it quite a few times and still missed this bleeding obvious typo. Damn. My observational skills just weren’t intelligently designed well enough.
A worthy nitpick. The original version has been corrected.
@Peter Morris
You’re welcome! :-)
Thank you Becca and raven! I endeavour to do some research on those tidbits once I’m finished reading this book.
Your timeline is inaccurate because of two reasons. The creationists timeline believes that the universe only existed for 6,000 years as opposed to 4.5 billion years, as evolutionists would have you believe.
Secondly God is outside of the dimension of time itself since He created time. Before the first second of time passed, there was an absence of time itself since God hadn’t created it. God is not bound by time. He is at every point in time all at once, since God can do that sorta thing, since, well, He is God. So if you think He was just sitting there waiting for infinite amounts of time to pass by that would be inaccurate because then that would put a limit on what God is able to do.
Pete said…
I hope that was meant as a poe. But for now I’ll assume you’re not a poe.
According to science (geology, astrophysics, etc.) the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. The universe on the other hand is at least 13.7 billion years old according the the available evidence, about 9.2 billion years older than the planet. It’s even there in the timeline chart that you are criticizing. Saying that evolutionists say the universe is 4.5 billion years old is clearly wrong/ignorant/stupid (take your pick). Even a child can understand the difference between the age of the planet and the age of the universe.
By the way… evolutionary theory says nothing about how old the Earth or the universe is, it only deals with changes in species over time. Other fields of science have independently made the determination the the respective ages. But, Hey! What do you know! It just so happens to be compatible with the also independently derived evolutionary timeline! What a remarkable coincidence! ;)
If the evidence for the age of the Earth was that it formed too recently, then that would be a problem for evolutionary theory. In fact the uncertainty about the age of the Earth in Darwin’s time was one of the biggest arguments against evolution. It was only when other fields of science began to realize that the Earth was much older than previously thought, that it ceased to be an argument against evolution.
I would strongly recommend learning something about what evolution and science actually are, especially before making comments on this blog. Unless you enjoy being made to look foolish, that is.
Just to help you out…if your information about science and evolution comes from creationists or “ID advocates” then you are being lied to, and are only being taught propaganda. If they refer to science as “materialistic” (as opposed to “naturalistic”)… you are probably being lied to. If they refer to evolution as “Darwinism” then you are probably being lied to as well (although there are some uncommon exceptions in that case).
Yeah sure… got anything to back that up with? You know, like evidence? Of course not, you’re just making up what ever fits your presuppositionalism (or you’re playing the poe). Sorry, but making baseless assertions won’t cut it with any moderately objective person, let alone here.
Obviously the point of the timeline, is to humorously show the shallow view of the YEC view of the universe and the evidence that contradicts it, versus the greater scope of time of the scientifically derived view of the universe.
I love it!!! It should be required in all science classes!
You know, there actually are Creationist timelines, and I was somewhat disgusted to discover when I went to vote last November that there was one in the very room I was voting in (my polling place is a church, blech).
I think you should devote equal pixels/time to presenting the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s creationist timeline.
None of those are correct, of course. You really want to know the real story instead of wasting your time ? Take a look at the Vedas.
@95: Blasphemer.
Sorry this only highlights ignorance.
Professing themselves to be wise – men became fools –
Talk about close minded intolerant fools –
Yep when those creationists start claiming they know exactly how things went down, they are fools.
Well Don, how open minded are you to the concept of god not existing, since there is no physical evidence for one (out of thousands imagined by man, much less Yahweh)? Look in the mirror before you complain about other people.
I feel sorry for all of you.
OH NOES!!!
Will you pray for us?