Creation Muesum

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Is this seriously an argument? People thinking that Bronze Age tribal sheepherders in the desert with a direct line to God, a God who couldn't be bothered to contact the astronomers in Babylon or China, knew more about the way the universe operates than Hawking or Krauss?

REALLY!?!

These same "direct line to God" sheepherders got Mendelian genetics absolutely backward, with the story of the man from whom Israel gets its name became wealthy enough to Be Somebody, in Genesis 30. Such a simple thing which, even though it's simple to understand once explained, to be fair nobody knew until Gregor Mendel published his paper on genetics in 1866 (and which was mainly ridiculed and ignored for another 35 years after that) in an obscure journal.

So it's no shame on the Bronze Age tribal sheepherders who didn't know that; we've only really known it for about a century. But if they had a direct line to the Creator of the Universe... it's a little hard to understand why they wouldn't have known that the story of Laban's flocks and Jacob's "cleverness" in making the sheep mate in front of striped sticks was total bollocks.

The shame comes when you don't recognize what this means, in terms of using the Bible stories as a shield against learning new information. The only reason I've ever seen for people to suggest that scientists, who have confirmed evolution through millions of experiments in the past century and a half, with each new type of evidence falling seamlessly in line with the other types (when we discovered rapid DNA scanning technology, in 1985, for instance, there was no reason for that data to back up what other scientists had said; it could have destroyed the Theory of Evolution utterly-- it should have, if it had been wrong all along), is that they have a comfortable mythology to which they'd rather cling.

As I have said before and will probably have to say again, this is why you see Christians who are top-level evolutionary biologists and cosmologists (my own physics professor was a Christian, and he spent almost as much time trying to get me to come back to the church as he did helping me with my differential equations) but never the other way around. (Edit: I mean non-Abrahamic-religion Creationists.)

It's easy to run, in a cowardly fashion, to the one spot you know the scientist will say, "Well we have some ideas but we don't know", rather than to face the MOUNTAIN of evidence for things we do know.

There are basically only two things we don't know: the very first microsecond of the universe and what the exact process was that caused life to emerge on this planet. And those are really the only two things you ever see Christians asking us about. Why?

Because you all know that, anywhere we're not forced to admit "we don't know yet", you get trounced by a mountain of fact that disproves your mythologies. Sure, from time to time you'll try to throw shade on some process we do understand, because some Creationist told you there are "problems" with it (like Carbon dating), even though those "problems" are well-understood and accounted for (and accepted 100% by honest Christians... just not Creationists who've sworn to ignore all evidence that conflicts with their presuppositions, as documented above). No scientist, Christian or atheist, starts with any proposition that cannot be falsified-- proved false.

And that makes all the difference.