(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

Bishop James Ussher actually did quite an impressive feat of calculation, careful and thorough, to arrive at his creation date of 4004 BCE. Once he had got the year of creation fixed, Ussher was able to provide precise dates for other key events in the Bible:

2348 BC – Noah’s Flood
1921 BC – God’s call to Abraham
1491 BC – The Exodus from Egypt
1012 BC – Founding of the Temple in Jerusalem
586 BC – Destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon and the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity

Although creationists take Ussher’s work as correct, this causes problems for them. For example, since Noah’s flood in 2348 BCE supposedly wiped out everything (except those living things that could swim or float or were saved in the Ark), according to Biblical literalists, all history must be compressed within the last 4,500 years, even less time than the commonly used figure of 6,000 years.
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

Bishop James Ussher arrived at his creation year of 4004 BCE by going backwards, starting by first fixing the date of the earliest event in the Bible that could be corroborated with other historical sources. This occurred after the capture and taking into exile of king Jehoiachin of Judah by Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BCE. The death of Nebuchadnezzar in 562 BCE (the date of which was known from other sources) is reported in the Bible to have coincided with the 37th year of exile of Jehoiachin, as stated in the Bible in 2 Kings 25:27. (Note that the dates are sometimes off by a year or two because of the differences in the calendars in use at that time.)

From that fixed reference point he worked backwards using the Bible alone, first by adding up the years that the successive kings ruled the divided kingdoms, the southern one of Judah and the northern one of Israel, and then going further back using the famous ‘begats’ in the Bible which gives a genealogy that goes back to Adam. For example, Genesis 5 gives the chronology from Adam to Noah, and then after a lot of stuff about the flood, Genesis 11 gives the genealogy from Noah to Abraham.

It is interesting that in addition to saying how long each person lived, it gives the crucial information as to the age of the person when his eldest son was born, without which Ussher’s calculation cannot be done. I am intrigued as to why the authors of the Bible put in that gratuitous piece of extra information, which is not an obvious thing to do, unless they wanted to create a timeline.

It is interesting that from Adam to Abraham, there is an unbroken line of males. The youngest age at which any of them had their first son was 65 but Noah is the clear record holder for the oldest father, his oldest son being born when he was 500! The oldest man ever was Methuselah who lived to the age of 969, though he had his first son when he was a mere child of 187. Oddly enough, after Noah, although the men still lived for hundreds of years, the age at which they became fathers for the first time drops suddenly to the early thirties, until it gets to the father of Abraham who was 70.

Although the genealogies say that sons and daughters were born, only males are named. As far as I can tell, after Eve, all the women who are born are nameless until we get to Sarah, Abraham’s wife, about 1,800 years later.

Ussher’s choice of the Hebrew Bible to obtain his chronology may have been influenced by the fact that this particular Bible gives a nice round date of 4000 BCE for the year of creation. The then current belief was that the world would last only 6,000 years, this being the interpretation of the six days of creation in Genesis combined with the statement in Psalms 90: 4 that “For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night” and the New Testament statement (2 Peter 3:8) that “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” Thus according to his chronology, Jesus was born 4,000 years after the creation and the world would end in 2,000 CE (also called the Anno Domini or AD calendar), which provided a nice symmetry, no doubt showing that god was a careful planner.

However, that rounding of dates had to be adjusted because the creator of the CE calendar had made a mistake. When corrected, it was noted that King Herod had begun his reign in 37 BCE and died in 4 BCE, so Jesus had to have been born sometime during that period because the New Testament says Jesus was born during Herod’s reign. Ussher fixed Jesus’s birth year as 4 BCE and this required the shifting of all the dates by 4 years, moving the year of creation to 4004 BCE.

Wikipedia has an summary of how Ussher managed to pin point the very day when god created the world.

The season in which Creation occurred was the subject of considerable theological debate in Ussher’s time. Many scholars proposed it had taken place in the spring, the start of the Babylonian, Chaldean and other cultures’ chronologies. Others, including Ussher, thought it more likely that it had occurred in the autumn, largely because that season marked the beginning of the Jewish year.

Ussher further narrowed down the date by using the Jewish calendar to establish Creation as beginning on a Sunday near the autumnal equinox. The day of the week was a backward calculation from the six days of creation with God resting on the seventh, which in the Jewish tradition is Saturday — hence Creation began on a Sunday. The astronomical tables that Ussher probably used were Kepler’s Tabulae Rudolphinae (Rudolphine Tables, 1627). Using them, he would have concluded that the equinox occurred on Tuesday October 25, only one day earlier than the traditional day of its creation, on the fourth day of Creation week, Wednesday, along with the Sun, Moon, and stars (Genesis 1:16). Modern equations place the autumnal equinox of 4004 BC on Sunday October 23.

Ussher stated his time of Creation (nightfall preceding October 23) on the first page of Annales in Latin and on the first page of its English translation Annals of the World (1658).

You can read the first page of his book (a revised edition with the English updated to be easily intelligible to the modern reader) here. Sometimes one hears that he fixed the time of creation as 9:00 am but that claim was made by someone else before Ussher and has been mistakenly attributed to him.

I have to admit that I kind of like Ussher’s calculations. The fact that it is totally wrong and that to take it seriously now is to live in an alternative reality does not diminish his achievement.

POST SCRIPT: How to choose your religion

Looking for a religion but not sure which to pick from the wide variety of choices? GrrlScientist has put together a nifty little flowchart to help you out. (via Pharyngula)

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

Long time readers of this blog may recall a series that I did that dealt with the Bible as history. I argued that there was little or no evidence to support any of the major events described in the Bible. While Biblical literalists believe that everything in the Bible is true as both history and science, other Christians and Jews are willing to concede that the story of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and Noah’s flood are fictional, merely creation myths generated by the authors of the Bible who were trying to make sense of the world without the insights and knowledge that modern science provides.
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

Some readers may have noticed that I write god with a lowercase initial letter instead of the more conventional way as ‘God’. Once in a while commenters take me to task for this, saying that it should be capitalized because it is a proper noun and wonder if I write it my way in order to gratuitously poke believers in the eye.

It is a deliberate policy of mine to do this but not in order to have a dig at believers, though I am surprised they care about this, especially since it does not seem to bother god at all (at least he has not told me anything so far). I do it because I am trying to change the conventional practice. I look on the word ‘god’ either as an explanatory concept or theory (like evolution) or a generic name, like cat or giraffe, and not as the name of a specific being. I am hoping that my approach will catch on and the practice spread. Of course, I know that I am fighting an uphill battle on this one. The publishers who put out my work have their style manuals that currently require them to capitalize the word. But I am hoping this will change with time.

After all, it used to be the case that third person pronouns for god also were capitalized as He and Him and His, but only the very religious do that anymore. At an earlier time all nouns (not just proper nouns) were capitalized. You can see for yourself that Isaac Newton’s classic book Opticks (1704) followed that old practice. But that is no longer done in English and I see no reason why my approach should also not become standard. For the moment, I have to be content to advance the cause by using this style on my blog.

The problem is that there are many gods around, so just saying god does not specify which one you are talking about. At least the Hindus do us the courtesy of giving each of their various manifestations of god a name like Krishna, Vishnu and so on. So do the Greeks with Zeus and Thor and the rest of the gang, and the Egyptians with Ra and Horus and Isis and the rest. The Old Testament god of the Jews has the name Jehovah/Yahweh. The name Allah is simply the translation of the words ‘the god’ in Arabic and was the name of one of the desert jinns worshiped by the people of the region and chosen by Mohammed to be the one and only god (Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, p. 225). At least in the western world it has come to be seen as the name of the Muslim god, so there is no ambiguity as to who we mean when we refer to Allah.

But Christians have not given their god a name. You would think that at some point during the past two thousand years someone would have noticed this deficiency and said, “Hey! How come only our god does not have a name?” and they would have rectified the situation. But that has not happened.

It is also not clear how many gods Christians have. For example, Christians have an ambivalent attitude to their relationship to the Old Testament god Jehovah. They often refer to ‘the god of the Old Testament’ in contrast to ‘the god of the New Testament’. So are they the same god or different gods? The problem is further confounded because Christians have more than one manifestation of the NT god and it is not clear to whom they are referring when they simply say god. This is the famous paradox of the trinity, the three-way split of the father god, the son god, and the spirit god. So which one of the four gods is being referred to when Christians use the term god?

The official Christian line is that the OT god is the same god as the other three gods (father, son, spirit) but in practice the connection is highly tenuous and often easily abandoned by them. If you speak with a Christian, he will initially that say he believes in the entire Bible and in one god but if you then ask him how he can justify the appalling crimes committed by the god in the OT (the genocide of Noah’s flood, the torturing, the commands to his followers to deliberately massacre people, the commands to stone people to death for all manner of transgressions), he will quickly disavow Jehovah and say that the god they worship is the god of love of the New Testament. So does that mean that the NT god is different from Jehovah? Or did Jehovah also have a come-to-Jesus moment and change his nature from a ruthless and bloodthirsty tyrant to a nice guy?

All kinds of ambiguities arise when Christians simply use the generic word god without specifying which one they are referring to. But I have a solution, and that is to give each of the Christian gods a name. The OT god remains Jehovah. For the father god I suggest the name Melvin because it is a good name, worthy of an omnipotent and omniscient deity. The son god is of course Jesus. For the spirit god, I suggest the name Harvey.

Some may object that the spirit god already has a name, the Holy Spirit. But that’s not much of a name, is it? It is more a description. It would be like calling someone Tall Guy with Grey Hair or Blonde Woman with Glasses. It doesn’t seem polite somehow. I think the name Harvey is better.

Christians can then reframe their deep theological questions by asking whether Jehovah is the same as Melvin and/or Jesus and/or Harvey, and how the last three could be the same entity even when they are each separately present simultaneously. (See, for example, Luke 3:21-22.) They are unlikely to arrive at an answer because the nature of the question is the same as the proverbial number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin, but at least the question under discussion would be clear.

I hope the naming system I suggest sticks. That would also solve the issue of when god should be capitalized.

POST SCRIPT: Mr. Deity and the trinity

Even Melvin and Jesus have trouble figuring out how the two of them relate to each other in the trinity. And that is even without Harvey to complicate the picture. Harvey is quite a mysterious figure, never seen or heard, whose actions cannot be easily traced back to him. He’s like a secret agent.

As Voltaire said, “The son of God is the same as the son of man; the son of man is the same as the son of God. God, the father, is the same as Christ, the son; Christ, the son, is the same as God, the father. This language may appear confused to unbelievers, but Christians will readily understand it.”

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

This year’s International Blasphemy Day was on September 30. As the (no longer active) website created to propagate this said:

International Blasphemy Day is not just a day. It is a movement to dismantle the wall which exists between religion and criticism.
…
The objective of International Blasphemy Day is to open up all religious beliefs to the same level of free inquiry, discussion and criticism to which all other areas of academic interest are subjected.
…
International Blasphemy Day is a movement, not just a day, to remind the world that religion should never again be beyond open and honest discussion or reproach.

As usual with anniversaries and other commemorations, I forgot all about it until it was too late. But today’s post can be considered my belated contribution to that celebration.

The idea of free speech is something that everyone approves of, or at least gives lip service to. But when they hear speech that criticizes something that they personally cherish, then some people become willing to chip away at that right. That is a big mistake. The best way to combat speech that you disapprove of is not to abridge that right but to use more speech.

No rights are strictly absolute. All rights, however noble in concept, have inherent limitations as soon as one is part of any social community, because one person’s right should not be allowed to encroach on the rights of others, and free speech is no exception. As far as I can tell, the only restriction that the US Supreme Court has placed on free speech is when it creates a clear and present danger to other people’s safety, that threatens their rights to life and liberty. The classic example is the one that denies one the right to falsely shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

But there are always people who want to try and restrict free speech even in cases where there is no danger of immediate harm to others. For example, governments love to invoke ‘national security’ as an exception to free speech because that allows them to prevent the reporting of all their lies and mistakes and crimes.

Other attempts at restricting of free speech come in the form of seductive concerns about civility, arguing that speech should be restricted even if it merely offends people, simply because it expresses ideas that some or even most people find abhorrent. Hate speech legislation that restricts the rights of people to say despicable things against those they dislike is one such example. People who indulge in anti-gay, anti-women, and anti-minority rhetoric may be saying things that we despise and find positively hateful but that is not, by itself, sufficient to suppress their right to do so.

It becomes trickier when speech is used to actively incite violence against the people. People should not have the right to create an imminent danger to others, but defining ‘imminent danger’ and drawing the line between that and hateful, but legitimate, speech is not easy.

But of all the attempts at restricting free speech, are there any more obviously fatuous than the attempts to stifle criticisms of religion by creating laws against blasphemy? After all, blasphemy is aimed against god, the allegedly supreme being, the master of the universe, king of kings, lord of lords, the almighty who knows everything and can do anything. If his feelings are so sensitive, why on earth would he need our puny laws to protect them? He can just smite us with his preferred smiting weapons like floods and earthquakes and hurricanes.

The United States can be justly proud of the fact that unique among countries (I think) its constitution guarantees the right of free speech to everyone. And yet, in an appalling move, the Obama administration is supporting a UN movement backed by conservative Muslim countries to pass an international blasphemy law. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley writes about the growth and use of such laws around the world:

Around the world, free speech is being sacrificed on the altar of religion. Whether defined as hate speech, discrimination or simple blasphemy, governments are declaring unlimited free speech as the enemy of freedom of religion. This growing movement has reached the United Nations, where religiously conservative countries received a boost in their campaign to pass an international blasphemy law. It came from the most unlikely of places: the United States.

While attracting surprisingly little attention, the Obama administration supported the effort of largely Muslim nations in the U.N. Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to free speech for any “negative racial and religious stereotyping.”
…
In the resolution, the administration aligned itself with Egypt, which has long been criticized for prosecuting artists, activists and journalists for insulting Islam.
…
The public and private curtailment on religious criticism threatens religious and secular speakers alike. However, the fear is that, when speech becomes sacrilegious, only the religious will have true free speech.

Muslims in particular seem to think that their religion and their prophet should be protected from anything that they consider insulting, and they often threaten or even carry out violent attacks against those who are alleged to have offended their religion. But Muslims have no more right to be protected from statements they dislike than any other group. They can revere their prophet and their god as much as they want but it is absurd for them to expect the rest of us to do so or to not make fun of them for their irrational beliefs. Their running amok in 2006 when the Danish newspapers published cartoons of Mohammed is an example of what happens when people become too accustomed to thinking that their particular sacred cows should also be sacred to everyone. (I wrote about the cartoon controversy and the hypocrisy on all sides of that issue here and here.)

The true intent of blasphemy laws is to pander to the dominant religious bloc in a country and to preserve the protected status of at least some religious beliefs because people know deep down that religious beliefs have no rational basis and that if they are exposed to sustained criticism, the whole structure will fall apart.

POST SCRIPT: CNN and Christopher Hitchens on the UN move

You have to sit through Lou Dobbs’ anti-UN rant, his nativism, and xenophobia though. This report was back in February, before the Obama administration’s support for the move was announced in October.

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

Some time ago, I had a detailed critique of Francis Collins’s book The Language of God. Collins is a distinguished biologist who has done very good scientific work and successfully headed the massive Human Genome Project. However his book revealed the power of religion to turn its followers’ brains into mush when they discuss god and religion. It was an appalling exercise in logical fallacies and question-begging, using the common bait-and-switch argument style of arguing that since we have not yet explained how the world began, that meant that believing in the whole Jesus-god story was rational.
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

Some of the most powerful evidence for evolution comes from the geographic distribution of species, because we find the widest range and the strangest species in Australia, Madagascar, the Galapagos, and other isolated landmasses, some of them quite small islands.

Small but isolated regions turn out to be good breeding grounds for producing new species. When some members of a species get isolated from other members and their gene pools cease to mingle, then they start to diverge from each other. This is why one sees new species proliferating on islands or other forms of isolated areas due to separations caused by mountains or lakes or deserts. The appearance of the new species in these isolated areas is explained by requiring specimens of the ancestral species somehow making it to the remote location and reproducing there. The pattern that emerges is of the new species being different from, but sharing common features with, the parent species from which they originated.
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

In the previous post, I examined some of the ways in which young Earth creationists try to deal with the scientific evidence arrayed against them. In this post, I will look at how they deal with geology, which poses the biggest challenge to their belief that the Earth is 6,000 years old.

For example, they know that they have to deal with vast amounts of scientific data that puts the age of the Earth and the universe in the billions of years. For example, the rings of trees, the slow rates of sedimentation and erosion, the layering of soils, radiometric techniques that depend on the many different half-lives of radioactive elements, the rate of mutations in DNA, rate of continental drift, the switching of the magnetic fields at the undersea geologic faults due to continental drift, and fossils are all used to build a network of clocks that can date even very old events. All these clocks are constructed by calibrating them using known events and other clocks, once again showing the interconnectedness of science.

It is with the age of the Earth that the young Earth creationists face their biggest challenge because apart from the true believers, nowadays everyone else takes an old Earth for granted. Even the media, always solicitous of the sensitivities of their religious viewers when it comes to evolution, do not bother putting on a phony balancing act by suggesting that some people disagree with the scientific consensus of an Earth that is billions of years old.

But the creationists try to provide their followers with at least some reason to defy science. When it comes to challenging the ages of things as established by science, what the creationists do is seek out anomalies here and there in the radiometric results (and these can always be found because there are often confounding factors that prevent clean analysis in some cases) and then argue that all the dates for things and events cannot be trusted. They are using the same bogus argumentation as ‘Where is the missing link?’, where they pick on something they think is a weakness (whether it is or not) and then argue for throwing out the entire theory. So be prepared when talking to a creationist for them to quote some obscure result where, for example, radiometric dating suggests that something whose age is known was found to be wildly off.

As for geologic evidence, in the early days people could see that things like the creation of mountains and valleys and gorges and cliffs required some explaining, unless one assumed that they always existed. The popular scientific view of that time was that they were due to a series of large scale catastrophic events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the like, that caused massive changes to occur rapidly. This model had the generic title of ‘catastrophism’. People like paleontologist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) who advocated this model were not necessarily religious and the age they arrived at for the Earth was in the millions of years, which was quite an achievement, given how inconceivable such large time scales must have been to them, and that religious beliefs of that time pinned the value in the thousands of years.

In the early nineteenth century, during the time just prior to Darwin going on his famous voyage of discovery, catastrophism went into decline and the idea of ‘uniformitarianism’ took hold, which held that most of the major geological features could be explained by the slow and steady accumulation of very small changes. Of course this meant that the Earth must be much older than previously thought and new estimates by people like Charles Lyell ranged in the hundreds of millions of years. This advance had a major impact on evolutionary thinking in general and Darwin’s in particular. It helped him develop his idea that, just as major geological changes came about by incremental growth, small changes in organisms could, over a long time, also lead to major changes such as the creation of new species. And the much older Earth meant that there was enough time for those changes to have occurred. So again we see the interconnectedness of science, advances in geology leading to advances in biology, and the two needing to fit together.

To counteract this, what the young Earth creationists try to do is resurrect an extreme form of catastrophism, in which there was just one major event, Noah’s flood, that was responsible for pretty much everything that we see in the Earth’s features.

The creationists have been forced to concede some points. For example, they have been forced to accept that there was originally just one big land mass and that plate tectonics caused the break up and drifting apart of what we now call continents. (This raises the interesting question of why the Bible makes no mention of such a major event.) In order to make continental drift consistent with a 6,000 year old Earth, they have to argue that the speed of the moving continents reached orders of tens of miles per day or feet per second (i.e., at the rate of a brisk human walker), rather than the accepted range of 2-10 cm/year. Of course, this ‘continental sprint’ theory conveniently happened a long time ago, during Noah’s flood, and the continents then slowed down to their present slow rate, which is why we (conveniently) cannot detect these high speeds now.

They also need to assert that the reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field had to occur rapidly as well, flipping multiple times within the forty days. Though they are coy about how frequently it switched, a back-of-the-envelope calculation gives about once every hour! Of course sprinting continentals and magnetic fields run amok require that they try to construct a wholly different model of the Earth’s core to try and deal with all these problems, resulting in them further losing contact with mainstream science (and reality).

For the acceptance of these alternative realities by their followers, they have to depend on two things: Their ability to create faux-scientific theories that look and sound impressive enough to fool the naïve, and the ‘no one was around to see it then so how can we know for sure which theory is true’ fallacious argument to cast doubt on accepted scientific theories.

Next: The worldwide distribution of species

POST SCRIPT: Cherry picking health care comparisons

The health industry and its supporters know that if comparisons are made on the basis of aggregated data, the US compares terribly with other countries in the developed world. So what they do is try and divert the discussion by picking on one or two items in which the US looks relatively good and fixate on it. It is like the tactics used by creationists in opposing evolution, with their “Where are the missing links?” red herrings.

When a health industry shill tries this tactic on Al Franken at a Senate hearing, he knows exactly how to respond.