Intrigued, I recently dug out the family Bible and started to reread the beginning of Genesis. The results were very revealing. Right on the first page I read something that is clearly impossible. Verse 16 informs us that "God made two great lights, the greater one to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament to give light upon the earth". Since (-as far as I am aware) the YEC has not disputed the speed of light, the Biblical claim of the stars giving light upon the earth cannot be true since they are located thousands and millions of light-years away. Consequently, in 2013 the "lesser lights", apart from the odd itinerant meteors and comets, would consist solely of the light emanating from the moon and the planets of our solar system. Apart from this, the sky would be black!
Whatever the lame justification, what the Bible says has got to be true because God says it is. Continuing on, we then learn of the magical saga of Adam and Eve, the talking serpent and the forbidden fruit, the consumption of which had dire consequences.
"Don't stretch Adam -and take that thing away from my ear!"
Turning just one page, we come upon another inexplicable statement. After God made Adam and Eve,we are told that they bore two sons Cain and Abel. In the first recorded case of sibling rivalry Cain soon disposed of his brother, which naturally did not sit well with Adam who placed an identifying mark upon him, although there was only himself and Eve around to see it. Consequently Cain left home and dwelt in the land of Nod on the East side of Eden. Who named these locations? It had to have been either God, Adam, Eve or Cain -but I digress. Cain apparently took unto himself a wife who bore him a son, Enoch. Where did the spouse come from? Even if Cain possessed the characteristics of Earth's first "chick magnet" the available pickings were very slim indeed. There was only Eve his mother -or assuming that she had also borne a daughter, his sister. Whichever choice he made it was incest, plain and simple, but what the Bible says has got to be true because God says it is.Whilst on this subject we fast forward to Chapter 19 to learn something of the severely put-upon Lot who had the misfortune to reside near Sodom. One evening, two angels dropped by and agreed to have supper with him. However, before they could begin, a group of the local militant gay community dropped by and demanded that Lot should bring out his two visitors so that they might "know" them. The two visitors, who clearly had received some divine martial arts training, smote the men who were at the door with blindness. That seemed to work just fine.
However since God was very wroth with the Sodomites and was about to overthrow and rain his customary fire and brimstone package upon the city, the angels suggested that Lot and family should evacuate immediately. As they fled, his unfortunate wife looked behind her to get a glimpse of the divine devastation. That proved to be an unwise move as she was promptly turned into a pillar of salt! Don't you hate it when that sort of thing happens? Ultimately Lot headed for the hills and dwelt in a cave with his two daughters. These two females took pity on their father and since their Mother had become non-operational, took pity upon him, and on two consecutive nights plied him with much wine, took him to bed and had sex with him. Incest again. As a result, they both became pregnant and after the fullness of time, bore two sons, Moab and Ben-ammi.
We are told later that Lot "perceived not when they lay down nor when they arose"; -sounds reasonable, right? This must be one of the most ridiculous stories I've ever heard. We are expected to believe that despite his total lack of subsequent recall and in a virtually comatose state, without any stimulation, be it erotic, voluptuous, emotional, or any other form of mind/genital interface, he managed to rise to the occasion and then continue to the point where he discharged his responsibilities to such good effect that he hit the "motherlode" -twice. Again the entire episode beggars belief. Nevertheless what the Bible says has got to be true because God says it is.
Lot's daughters putting their moves on their Dad!
Having closed the book on incest let's backtrack a bit to one of my favourites -Noah's Flood and the Ark of Chapter 6. Before smiting Sodom, God had been increasingly wroth with the way that people were conducting themselves and decided to carry out a massive cull. Since "Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord" he was directed to build an ark of gopher-wood sealed with pitch inside and out. He was even given a detailed design spec. which called for (in Imperial units) a vessel 450 x 75 x 45 feet in size which must have placed a major demand on the supply side of the regional gopher-wood and pitch market! Into this structure, examples of all the male and female wild-life species on the face of the earth would be housed. In addition there would be seven examples of some creatures which would be used as food for the crew. Somehow Noah was mysteriously able to persuade all these creatures to join him at the dockside and placidly enter the ark "the self same day". Then as is widely known, it rained for forty days and nights but it was not until one year later that they were able to disembark.There are many estimates of the number of species involved, ranging from one million to thirty thousand -depending upon how the directive of "every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort" is interpreted. Even when accepting the ludicrously lower figure, the idea of all these creatures arriving at the point of departure and then embarking on the allotted day defies all reason. Without GPS or even a map, they were able to walk, fly, hop, flap, crawl or slither their way from their country of residence to an a obscure venue in the Eastern Mediterranean region. They were then sufficiently docile to permit Noah and family to guide them their respective living quarters. Indeed throughout the entire period of 24 hours they would need to have entered at a rate of 21 species (42 creatures) per minute.
Noah must have done some intensive research to ensure that sufficient food was on board consisting of all the various food groups necessary to sustain 60000 creatures (30000 pairs) for one year -not to mention the huge problem of disposing of all their generated waste. Naturally there were no cooling nor refrigerating facilities. After one year's incarceration, the interior of the craft would have been decidedly rank, particularly after the 40 day rain period when everything was shut in! Finally there would be additional problems created by the animals exercising their instinctive carnal desires, with the subsequent increase in population compounding the misery.
It could be expected that upon release, there would be a huge proliferation of wild life in the region around Mount Ararat, a phenomenon which even after 4000 years would be evident. However, there have been no sightings of tigers in Turkey, elephants in Greece or polar bears in Saudi Arabia. As if by magic they all returned from whence they came. This was a daunting trek for the indigenous creatures of the Galapagos -or the penguins of Antarctica who faced an exhausting waddle across equatorial Africa, to say nothing of the crossings of the Timor and Tasman seas which confronted the kangaroos and kiwis respectively.
As for the human population, "every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground", However, Noah's sons had been permitted to take their wives with them which were necessary to begin the begatting process necessary to repopulate the Earth. They were certainly effective, managing to effectively re-prime the pump to the extent that by the advent of Chapter 19, the population had rebounded to point where, together with the the apparent upsurge in gay lifestyle in Sodom, the circumstances had become sufficient to make God wroth again.
"Thank goodness that's over. Now where do we go from here?"
Perhaps more than any other example, this illustrates the lack of sophistication of the primitive desert dwelling scribes. Clearly they assumed that the entire world was situated in the Eastern Mediterranean and environs. We are told that to them, the world was essentially a giant shallow dish above which the firmament was akin to the hanging roof of a circus tent. Since within this region there existed but a very small fraction of total global wild life, what they purported to have happened could have achieved some credibility with the uneducated populace. However the YEC insist that all creation occurred simultaneously so the scribes' writings are intended to reflect a present day global situation.Several religious and other sources around the world claim the historic existence of a flood. Certainly after the Ice Age the amount of melt water would have had a major effect on sea levels. However this is dated as being around ten to twelve thousand years ago which of course the YEC's insist never existed. It must be of considerable solace to them that even with its obvious contradictions and impossible situations, what the Bible says has got to be true because God says it is.
However right from the outset, the absurd proposition of the ark story is apparent. Verse 19 of Chapter 7 informs us that "all the high hills which were under the earth were covered". This infers that to cover Mount Everest, the water would need to be more than 29000 feet deep! If one assumes that the new sea level ambient pressure -even at 29000ft above normal sea level would still remain at 14.7 psi presumably oxygen (or lack of it) would not be a factor. However, temperature would be, and for all diverse species to survive at the likely sea level temperature for the duration would be extremely unlikely.
All the above is recorded in the first 19 chapters of the first book in the Bible. It is sufficient to affirm -to me at least, that like other accounts from other sources, it is nothing more than a creation myth similar to "The Epic of Gilgamesh" from which the Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark stories probably originated. This assumption is even endorsed by The Conservative Movement of Judaism, which is of the view that these stories had a common source that progressively diverged in subsequent re-tellings.
There seems little point in continuing. I rest my case.
