Creation - is it real?

This text was emailed to me by someone around two years ago and is really fun to print out and give to those nuts that keep banging on my door trying to convert me to be a "believer"

I am not sure where this list came from (an atheist friend emailed  it to me) and it was to good not to post!  but obviously it is someone's work, so If they find it or want me to remove it or just add their name to it and credit them with this excellent work then obviously I will do just that! Thanks. Hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

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OK a few of the things.......................

Geology Even before Darwin, it was geologists who began to establish that the Earth is much older than old Jim Ussher said it was. And modern geology stubbornly refuses to yield up proof of a universal flood, or the recent and coeval existence of all creatures, living and extinct. Charles Darwin Well, duhh....       Physics ...has all those embarrassing laws, like decay rates of isotopes, the non-decaying speed of light, the refraction of light to produce rainbows, etc., which have to be ignored, twisted, or denied to defend Genesis. The Scientific Method Creationists detest it so much that they've apparently invented their own, improved version, with the following highly logical rules: Take as a given fact all those parts of the Bible we tell you to. Use not the null hypothesis; make no attempt to disprove any creationist hypothesis; report not any negative findings. Quote as authoritative anything a fellow creationist writes, regardless of his qualifications or subsequent discrediting of his methods or results. Misquote or quote out of context famous "evolutionists" so that they appear to admit evolution isn't real. Don't waste your time with actual laboratory or field experiments.  All the answers are in the Bible.   Each Other! Old-Earth creationists think the Young-Earthers are too zealous and dogmatic even for them. Young-Earthers know the Old-Earthers and Multiple-Catastrophists have given in to "liberal" (if not to say Satanic) influences. Some years there are multiple "Ark-hunting" expeditions to Turkey, each of which thinks the others are obstructing the progress of "Bible science". The Holy Bible That old Book persists in saying things that the creationists, who claim to take it as literal truth, have to admit are metaphorical (like the "doors" in the firmament that let the rain through). That means, of course, that they have to arbitrarily decide which parts are literally literal, and which are only metaphorically literal (and can't they twist the English language!). I've never yet read a justification for who gets to make that determination and how, so I'll summarize it thus: Everything is literal except things that even we creationists can't stomach.

Even worse, the "scientifically accurate" Bible reveals not a single fact about nature that wasn't commonly known at the time. If only it had revealed the atomic structure of matter, or the inverse square law, or the existence of bacteria--or even the heliocentric solar system!

Still doubt that creationists hate the Bible? Ask several if they've ever read it--all the way through, cover-to-cover. 97% of the time the answer will be no. They're sure every word is literally true, and the divine message of God, but somehow they've never quite found the time to actually read the thing. Is this irony thick enough yet?

Bats

Somehow, quite perversely, they changed from "fowls" to mammals between the time Moses (according to literalists) wrote the Pentateuch and now.

The Human Mind

...just to be ornery, has moved from the heart, where it resided through New Testament times, into the brain.

Stars

...somehow have grown a lot bigger and moved much farther away, so that by now it seems foolish to expect a sizable fraction of them to fall to Earth, as predicted in Revelation.

The Earth

...on the other hand, to test Man's faith in the literal veracity of scripture, has shrunk to become much smaller than the sun, and has taken to circling the latter, instead of vice versa, as originally established. Furthermore (confirming its sinful nature), it has floated up off its pillars or foundations, lost its four corners, and become a silly ball, on which there just is no possible mountaintop from which one could see all nations of the Earth.

Plate Tectonics

Since this is such a new development in geophysics, creationists don't seem to have much to say about it yet. (They haven't been told yet that they can't believe in it.) Though they may not have heard it excoriated from the pulpit yet, it surely makes them uneasy, since it just doesn't jibe with young-Earth or Flood geology.
Update: Creationists seem to have missed the boat on the plate tectonics question.  Since it was around for a number of years without being denied by creationists, by the time they got around to considering it, it was too late to deny (if it was wrong, why didn't they say so from the start?).  So recently I've seen several creationist attempts to somehow work plate tectonics into their fantasy, and even use this ultimate account of an ancient and evolving planet as proof of a recent creation!

Original Thought

Creationism is about believing without question a particular intArial" size="3">...has inexplicably changed its value from a nice, neat 3 (reflecting the trinity, no doubt) in Solomon's time, to a messy 3.14159... today. Despite some legal attempts in some state legislatures to return it to the divine purity of 3, pi has hardened its heart and refused to conform to the biblically prescribed norm.

Universal Gravitation

Although "just a theory", universal gravitation continues to be, well, universal. It holds true in all places, under all conditions, so it renders the brainless quip about evolution being "just a theory" a bit specious, at best.

Micro-organisms

Why did they have to show up? They're never mentioned in the Bible at all, so creationists have to do some creative rewriting of Genesis to account for their day of creation, and their presence or absence on the Ark.

Ice Ages

Very inconvenient! They have to have occurred since the Flood, since, according to creationists, the surface of the Earth was reworked by the Flood (to create, for instance, the Grand Canyon practically overnight), which would have messed up all those marks of glaciers on the landscape. That means mile-thick ice sheets had to advance and retreat again and again, across half the Northern Hemisphere, with the speed of freight trains. (As with plate tectonics, some creationists seem to have abandoned complete denial of ice ages [even though they're never mentioned in the Bible {How could the true history of the world miss those?}], and acknowledged a single ice age, which had to have occurred within historical times.)

The Sky

...has evaporated. In Adam's time it was clearly a solid dome, a "firmament", which could separate waters above it from those below on the Earth. By Noah's time it was still solid enough to have windows in it that had to be opened to let the rain through. I think that creationists that try to rationalize (weasel) their way out of this one by calling it "poetic metaphor" have given in to the godless materialists! The Bible really is literal, in the true sense of the word. The sky was a hard firmament with windows in it--but some time since then it evaporated. Anybody who says different is a mealy-mouthed evolution-sympathizer.

Fossils

...have always been a thorn in the side of creationism. First of all, extinct creatures shouldn't even exist in a perfect Creation, since their very extinction implies that they were not so perfect. And there are so darn many of them, of so many different kinds. Every excuse they come up with for why there even are fossils of extinct organisms makes creationists look silly. And the very fact that they've come up with so many different, mutually exclusive explanations would seem to indicate that, essentially, they're clueless. I have personally been offered all these sound, creation-scientific explanations of what fossils are and how they got there:

• Dinosaurs were too big to go on the Ark, so they got buried in the mud of the Flood. (How about extinct smaller creatures--and what about the "fact" that Noah collected pairs of all animals?)

• Extinct creatures were on the Ark. They died out later. (How many seismosaurs, T. rexes, mastodons, and megatheria can you fit on the head of a pin? And why rescue them if their immediate future reads "extinction"?)

• Fossils never were animals. They're a hoax by Satan and/or materialistic science.

• Fossils never were animals. They're a hoax by God to test your faith. (And I will go to hell for falling for a trick pulled by the Almighty Himself? Doesn't that seem just a bit petty?)

Transitional Fossils

...can't possibly exist, since nothing ever gradually evolved into anything else. Less sophisticated creationists handle the issue by merely spouting the slogan "There are no transitional fossils". They heard that from a good born-again fundamentalist, so it must be true--no further research necessary. The few who are vaguely aware of the vast range of fossils that have been found, including beautiful examples of transitional series, merely draw lines: everything on that side of the line is ape, and everything on this side is human. If another fossil turns up with features exactly between the two, no problem--just assign it to one side or the other. No matter how fine the gradation, creationists will never admit seeing transition, because they know ahead of time that it can't exist. Amusingly, however, in series such as the hominid line leading to us, different creationist "experts" draw the line between ape and human in different places!

Human Embryos

...especially very small ones, actually have tails and gill slits. So do all mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, and fish embryos. One would almost think they are related somehow. Thank goodness for modern Creation Science, which has taught us how to ignore, deny, or find some rationalization (anything at all will do) to explain away this and all other evidence of evolution.  (Yes, Ernst Haeckel fudged his diagrams of embryos to emphasize the similarities among the youngest ones.  But he didn't make up the tails and gill slits.  They're there.  Look closely at some of your favorite fetus photos.  Quit writing me about this until you've done your homework.)

Unusual Babies

...with such birth anomalies as being born with a tail, or covered with fur. Tails are more common than most people realize, since they are, of course, surgically removed immediately, and often the child himself is never told. For furry people, refer to the famous Mexican family, several of whom are circus performers. These would, of course, be some of the "throwbacks" which creationists assert must, of course, occur if evolution is real. But since evolution is, of course, not true, the good creationist, upon being presented the very evidence he demanded, will, of course, not be fazed in the slightest.

Of course.

A small footnote: back in the good old days, when everyone was a literal-creationist, and religion was science (known as the Dark Ages, with good cause), such babies were identified as the spawn of Satan, and killed instantly, along with their mothers, who were, naturally, witches.

DNA

Nasty stuff. It's really a shame that it had to turn up and confirm predictions of relationships made by evolutionary theory perfectly. And what a dirty trick to have human DNA fit right into the distribution, right next door to the chimps'! It's just not fair. It almost looks like Someone arranged the whole thing just to make evolution appear to be true. Worse yet, this ultimate blueprint for building entire human beings turns out to be just plain chemicals, with nothing magical or even particularly unusual that sets humans aside from other living things. And those geneticists can even tinker with the stuff, and build new creatures. They can replace defective genes in people, and even put human genes into pigs. Why wasn't something put into Leviticus to forbid such ungodliness?

Their Own Coccyges

...when examined closely via X-rays or a prepared skeleton, look disturbingly like the vestigial remnants of tails. They certainly serve no purpose nowadays (or very little--the few muscular attachments they still have could easily be re-engineered onto a less vulnerable structure), and if you've ever broken yours, you've probably wondered why we were Created with such a useless source of potential agony. (Besides, coccyx sounds downright obscene.)

Their Appendixes

Same problem as the coccyx, only it's even more likely to cause the average creationist great discomfort, and occasionally death. The scientifically literate, when cursed with appendicitis, might bewail the incomplete evolution that has left him with a useless and sometimes dangerous abdominal organ. Perhaps the creationist praises his Creator for blessing him with a "cross to bear". (Part of the Improving the Gene Pool Project:  If you're a young-Earth creationist, the next time you have an attack of acute appendicitis, or better yet a ruptured appendix, rush with it to the nearest Peter Popoff Healing Crusade.  Stay away from those modern "doctors", who actually think we're mammals.)

Honesty and Moral Behavior

...among evolutionists. It must really irk creationists that the great majority of us "evolutionists" are basically upright, moral folks. We shouldn't be, because belief in evolution "destroys our faith in the Bible", so naturally we have "no moral guide" and "no fear of eternal damnation", and since "we think we came from monkeys", we see ourselves as "animals with no eternal souls". I'll confess it right now: my basically upright, honest, cleanly-lived life is all a sham. I'm part of the One World Government Evolutionist Conspiracy (OWGEC), and my apparent morality is merely a deception to lure unsuspecting young creationists over to the Dark Side! (And yes, I've signed Satan's black book, I have a barcode on my left arm [just like "Dr." Kent Hovind says] with which I pay for groceries, and I am in personal email contact daily with the Antichrist.  I admit all that, so accuse me of something original.)

Ribs

...human ribs, that is, present a real problem. I've been told, on good authority (by creationists, whose scientific authority is the Bible, and what could be more authoritative?), that men have one less rib than women, because one of Adam's ribs was removed to mold into Eve. My creationist informant has generally become confused upon being asked if that means one less pair of ribs, or just one rib missing from one side. Then my instructor in human origins becomes red in the face and defensive, if not to say hostile, when asked if he has ever actually counted ribs on male and female human skeletons, living or deceased. None that I've met have ever actually tried this simplest of scientific experiments, which could go a long way toward proving a testable prediction of creationism. (For members of the Republic of Texas Militia: men have exactly the same number of ribs as women.)

NEWSFLASH: I've just been informed by a rock-solid creationist that the latest discovery of "creation science" is that men used to have fewer ribs than women, but they don't anymore! Perhaps creationists have unearthed a whole bunch of ancient skeletons, with all the males being short a rib. An appeal: PLEASE reveal this evidence to the rest of the world, so that we all can be brought into the Light of True Bible Science! (Dang, I posted this back in '98, and not a single creationist has written me about that archaeological Shocking Proof of the Genesis Story!  I so wanted that one tangible piece of evidence that would prove that evolution is a sham.)

LATEST NEWS from Joseph Armstrong in Australia: I don't supposed men (gasp) evolved the extra rib? Is this a classic case of cretinist "micro-evolution"?

Viruses

Viruses hardly fit into the creationist's view of the world at all. In the first place, nothing even remotely like them is even remotely alluded to in either Testament. About the only "biblical" disease that anyone can remember is leprosy (a bacterial disease), and there's no clue that any of the writers that mentioned it knew that it was caused by any sort of micro-organism. Egyptian cattle suffered a "murrain"-- with no apparent cause other than a divine curse. A blight on crops is mentioned in a place or two, which, if it were naturally caused, might be a viral disease, but again only the disease is mentioned, not any organic cause. Then there are the "emerods" (hemorrhoids) with which God afflicted some folks he was miffed at. I have been told both of the following by "creation scientists":

• The Devil created viruses.

• Viruses are not in the Bible because they are "imperfect".

But the really disturbing thing about viruses is that they occupy the twilight zone between living and dead, a zone that would seem ought not to exist in a creation in which creatures were "given life", or have "the breath of life". Of course, the creationist may arbitrarily assign them to either the "living" or "dead" category, but either assignment is a forced fit. Can they be alive if they don't move, breathe, eat, excrete, or metabolize at all, and can even be crystallized, like other non-living chemicals? Can they be dead if they can self-replicate (reproduce) using the same basic methods as other living things, parasitize other creatures, and are made of nearly the same proteins and nucleic acids as we are? Evolutionary theory doesn't demand that there be a sharp distinction between living systems and nonliving molecules. That's the premise of abiogenesis, which creationists insist on lumping in with evolution, so what the heck... we'll take it. Evolutionary theory can also explain where viruses came from, or why they exist. The fact that there are presently several tentative explanations in no way threatens the structure of evolutionary theory; we're perfectly happy with hypotheses until the preponderance of evidence clearly favors one over all others. In evolutionary theory (with abiogenesis) there should be some hazy area between living and nonliving, and viruses are dwellers of that twilight zone.

The Cause of Cancer

And who wouldn't hate that? But I don't mean the carcinogens that set it off, like tobacco tars, asbestos, or ultraviolet light; I mean the root cause that makes it possible for things like those to start cancers growing. And that cause turns out to be evolution in action! A cancer starts when a carcinogen, or sometimes just a random accident, causes a mutation in a gene of one cell. That mutation "switches on" genes that are normally "off", and makes the cell start reproducing wildly, as though it were an embryonic cell, and not a dedicated part of an adult body. A mutation is one unit of evolution. In this case it is harmful, but the ability to mutate is so valuable to DNA--it lets it adapt to new conditions--that that mutability cannot be given up, even if it sometimes produces fatal cancer. It is perhaps significant (it makes evolutionary sense) that cancers in people are very rare until after their peak reproductive years.

The Hair on the Backs of Their Necks

...which stands up at the very thought that their children might actually be exposed to an evil-lutionist at school. When they stop to think why the hair on the backs of their necks should stand up, at that or any terrifying situation, the only explanation that makes sense is that it's a vestigial reaction inherited from our mammal ancestors. Other mammals' hair rises in response to "hair-raising experiences" as a defense. It's a warning sign of aggression, and may make the animal look bigger and fiercer. We've apparently given up that signal, maybe in favor of words or other body language. About the only trace left is that creepy feeling about nape of the neck and scalp, which is almost impossible for others to see.
(suggested by Ron Tolle)

The Order of Creation

...is a bottomless can of worms for literal creationists, especially if one takes literally and in their most obvious meanings both Genesis 1 and 2, which don't match in many particulars. But consider just a couple of minor difficulties in the first chapter. For one, the light of day is created before the sun from which it comes. If we assume it was some divine form of light, requiring no material source, then what need of the sun? In the same curious order were plants created before the sun, which is needed for photosynthesis (especially confounding to the day-age folks).
(suggested by Ron Tolle)

Goosebumps

(the bumps, not the books [although many creationists hate those "occult" books, too]) Goosebumps were obviously "created" to erect and "fluff up" the hair or fur on a hairy or furry mammal ancestor, thereby improving its insulation value against the cold. Since most of us nowadays have so little body hair as to render it useless for insulation purposes, Goosebumps are another vestigial reaction whose tool (fur) is no longer with us.

• A creationary epiphany: since God wouldn't create a useless bodily function, goosebumps were originally useful. Adam and Eve had FUR! (For folks who have stockpiled food and weaponry in anticipation of the Coming Race War, an epiphany is a sudden realization of a great truth.)

 

Insects

...which have so many generations of nasty babies so often that in just a few years they can change. Those ugly boll weevils, for instance, develop resistance to pesticides; and those filthy peppered moths in England (Darwin's home--coincidence? I don't think so.) change the shade of their camouflage. Evolutionists want to call those piddlin' changes "evolution"--which just shows that they don't even know what the term means. So we creationists have to tell them that "evolution" means apes popping out human babies. You'd think them evil-utionists'd have that straight by now. (For folks who trust Rush Limbaugh to ever get any facts right: the above is sarcasm.)

Footprints

...especially human ones, which creationist "investigators" keep discovering in the same strata as dinosaur bones or footprints, and paleontologists keep demonstrating are nothing of the sort. It's been my experience that creationist authorities (oxymoron) usually end up admitting that they weren't really human prints after all.  But they are somewhat lax in passing that information on to their flocks of True Believers., with the result that your average grassroots creationist is under the impression that the fossil record is replete with human footprints, clear back to the beginning (suggested by Floyd Waddle). (To my knowledge, there are NO "manprints" in mesozoic strata that are claimed as such by the main creationist organizations.  It's only a few fringe crackpots that continue to make those claims, and embarrass the "mainstream" creationists, who have to eventually denounce them.  Your pot has to be SERIOUSLY cracked to get even your fellow creationists to admit you're over the top.)

Craters

Creationists have to hate those pesky asteroid craters which are found all over the planet, throughout all geological strata. The Bible is strangely silent on such devastating impacts as Meteor Crater in Arizona, the Ring Lakes in Quebec, and that biggie that likely dusted off the dinosaurs and created all that beautiful beachfront property on the Yucatan peninsula (suggested and borrowed nearly verbatim from Jason Bowes). (The Tunguska explosion or its aftereffects were noticed worldwide, and it didn't even leave a crater! Why wasn't the Chicxulub event, with a 170 km crater, which had to have caused worldwide devastation, at least noted in passing by some biblical patriarch or another?)

Planets

Anybody notice that in the last few years astronomers, using improved techniques and instruments (like Hubble), have begun to discover other planets around other suns? Have we noticed that several of those solar systems are at several of the stages of planetary-system evolution hypothesized for the evolution of our own system? To further increase the squirm factor for our reality-challenged fellow citizens, perhaps they would be kind enough to locate the passages in the "scientifically accurate" Bible which acknowledge that there are, in fact, other worlds. (Or even that the moon is a world upon which men could someday live, and not just a "lesser light" hung in the sky).

"In our image"

That's how God made man, according to Genesis, and therefore according to creationists. But every moderately bright 8-year-old immediately comes up with two questions which are never satisfactorily answered. If any answers are offered, they are usually cobbled-up rationalizations from outside the Bible. Generally, the kid gets the message that he's better off not asking such things.

The first is whom the One and Only God meant by "our"--but that's really a theological question, not related directly to creationism. The second question, however, is right on target: If man was made "in [God's] image", then Adam must have looked just like God--right? But wait--it gets more confusing. Man is immediately referred to as "them", so maybe it's not just Adam who looks like God. Then to further confound literal-minded youngsters, "...in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." If God is male (the assumption of 97.83% of all creationists), then how could a female be made in His image?

Let's grant the general creationist assumptions (correct me if I'm wrong): God is male; men are made "in [His] image" in only a general way (maybe even Adam didn't look exactly like Him); and women were made with necessary differences to enable reproduction. Still a load of embarrassing questions arise. Much has been made of Adam's navel, and why he would have one, having never been attached to a placenta. I want to know if God has one. I want to know if He has a digestive tract. If so, why? Does He eat? If so, what, and why would He need to? Does He excrete? Where? What happens to it? Does He have lungs? Why would He need them? Does He have sweat glands? And naughty stuff: does He have genitals? Why would He need those? Does He even have two legs, and feet, and toes? Why would He need them, unless He's bound by gravity, as we are?

Childish questions? Of course, but only because they arise from a literal (i.e., childish) reading of Genesis. But the point is profound: either God has human-like organs and glands and body parts, or He doesn't. If He does, why, and what does He use them for? If He doesn't, then made "in [His] image" has no literal meaning. (For those creationists tempted to inform me that the human soul was what was made in God's image, let me save you the trouble and thank you ahead of time for backing up my point: the phrase has no literal [physical] meaning.  I would point out that a great many generations of Judaeo-Christians have taken the phrase to mean physical resemblance, and that most fundamentalist believers still do.  Ever see a painting that showed God with anything but a human form? Let me also direct you to the section of Exodus wherein Moses is covered with God's hand, and then allowed to view His backside.  Note also numerous other biblical references to God's hands, face, and other apparently human-like body parts.  One of my favorites is Jacob's wrestling match with God, in which Jacob didn't recognize the Lord of All Creation until later, and God couldn't win until He cheated by using magic!)

Faith

Albert Chan points out that...
Creationists hate faith. They count on evidence, words, logic, and arguments to uphold their views. All this reflects how weak (or even absent) their faith is. "See, we can prove that evolution is wrong, so that automatically means that the Bible is correct." This implies a notion that [Genesis] is correct... just because evolution has (in their minds) been "proven" wrong. But then it follows that the Bible can in principle be proven wrong. (Something which can be proven right can in principle be proven wrong.) If [creationists] argue that they do have faith, and that the Bible is right regardless of the validity of evolution, then why on earth would they care about whether evolution is right or wrong?

Wisdom Teeth

Steven Gay reminds us that wisdom teeth are a bit of a problem for modern humans--and any parts of our bodies that serve no purpose, are in the way, or are just more trouble than they're worth are a bit of a problem for creationists to rationalize. Why would a Master Creator give us more teeth than will fit in our jaws? I don't think I know anybody who has had all four third molars grow into place with the others and serve as useful chewing teeth. In some people they never erupt. My top two grew out, but having no bottom ones to work against, they were useless for chewing. A great many people simply have to have them removed or suffer severe dental problems--because modern jaws are just too small to accommodate third molars. Wisdom teeth make sense as evolutionary leftovers (probably in the process of evolving away entirely). What sense can creationists make of them (especially if one lives to the biblically promised threescore and ten)? (Thanks to the folks who have written to me to tell me that they have all four functional third molars.  All have noted that they and their dentists recognize that they are rare exceptions.)

The Last Little Piggy

...the one who went, "Wee, wee, wee!" all the way home. (For those with deprived childhoods, I'm talking about little toes). They're one more body part that is in the way, all too easily injured, and, when you stop to think about it, useless. We don't use them in walking. In parts of the world where people go barefoot most of the time, little toes missing through accident or disease are quite common, and don't hinder the person's mobility at all. Think we need them for balance or something? Our cloven-hoofed fellow mammals get by with two toes on the ground. Horses manage to be mighty fast with just one! Predatory mammals generally put four down. Do we need the extra because we're bipedal? Ostriches are on their feet all day and can outrun anybody I know--how many toes do they use?

Think about it: other primates have prehensile toes. Kids notice right away that monkeys really have four hands. A fifth digit is pretty useful if you're scrambling through branches (and secondarily manipulating objects). Our little fingers are truly useful and probably in no danger of disappearing. But we quit climbing in trees with our rear "hands" and they became feet--which explains why they have useless fifth digits.

And while we're at it...

Doggie toes

What is that thing hanging off the back of your dog's lower leg? It's his "dewclaw", and it's entirely useless. On some dogs it's so much in the way that it's surgically removed. It's not a result of selective breeding, either. Cats have 'em, wolves have 'em, tigers have 'em. What would it possibly be except a now-useless fifth toe, in the process of disappearing through evolution?

Lower Back Pain

Kate Harrop-Allin asks the perceptive question:
Why should this condition afflict such a huge percentage of the adult population (I read somewhere that more working days were lost for this than for almost any other reason) when we were supposedly "created" in our present bipedal form?

Other associated problems with our relatively recently-acquired bipedalism (that other animals don't seem to have trouble with):

• extreme difficulty in childbirth

• varicose veins

• arthritis

....... all of which indicate that we evolved, and quite recently too, from an animal that was predominantly quadrupedal.

Humility

I have determined, after extensive surveying, tabulation, and data analysis, that the average creationist in the U.S. earns $21,387.29 in family income; owns 1.2 cars, 1.8 TVs, and 2.3 kids; and has, at some point in his life, answered to the name "Bubba". He has less than one year of college. Yet he knows more about paleontology than Bakker or Horner or Currie (or he thinks that what they know is wrong--same thing). He knows more about the definition of evolution than Gould or Dawkins. He knows more about biology than Dobzhansky or Mayr. He knows more about cosmology than Hawking, Smoot, or Witten, and more about human fossils than Johanson or the Leakeys. He knows more "true" geology than geologists, more physics than physicists, more astronomy than astronomers--and more about everything than atheists like Asimov or Sagan.

Humble, they're not.
(Boy, does this one put some creationists' shorts in a twist--especially the "Bubba" part! As Hamlet might say, methinks they protest too much [for members of "Christian Identity" churches, that means I'm hitting uncomfortably close to the truth].  Interestingly, not one of the hostile emails has challenged the substantive point.)

Truth

This isn't about the things creationists are just wrong about, like how old the Earth is, but about things that I suspect a good many know are not true, or gross distortions of the truth. The general one is that there is a great debate among scientists about whether species have evolved. A joyous update is that only a few die-hards still believe in the Big Bang. There are plenty of other amusing examples:

• human footprints alongside dinosaurs

• human artifacts found among dinosaur bones

• a geological column that is almost never in the "proper" order described by geologists

• proof from all over the world of a worldwide Flood

• the "NASA computer" that revealed the "extra day" when the sun stopped to give the Israelites more time to conquer Jericho

• the deep hole geologists drilled and then had to fill in hurriedly when they heard the screams from Hell

• Darwin's "deathbed recantation" (the "Lady Hope" story)

Nothing seems too silly or too obviously wrong to pass along. (I've even read things by creationists that justify "lying for Jesus" if it helps save a few more souls!)

Their own eyes

...defeat them doubly. First, creationists trot out that old saw about how nothing as complex as an eye could evolve in stages, since a half-eye is no good at all. Darwin himself trounced that one roundly by merely observing that there are creatures alive today with eyes in all "stages of development", from a few light-sensitive cells, to a cup-shaped receptor with no proper lens, to eagle eyes far sharper than ours. Other creatures seem to get along fine with half-eyes and even 1/100 eyes.

Then for the final insult, human (the pinnacle of creation) eyes are clearly an engineering mistake! The retinas are inside out. The nerves and blood vessels come out through the light-sensitive area of the retina, producing a blind spot, then spread over the front of the light-receptor cells, so that light has to get past the fibers into the receptors. Why aren't the nerves and capillaries behind the receptors, where they would be out of the way and there would be no need for a blind spot? Squid eyes are arranged just that way. Since ours aren't, one is reminded of the maxim that evolution has to work with the materials at hand, adapting systems already in place, with results that often seem jury-rigged or needlessly complicated. Would an Ultimate Engineer make such an obvious blunder, especially having got it right in creatures created earlier?

Thermodynamics according to Isaiah

The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is the Bible, Isaiah 30:26, describing Heaven: Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold as the light of seven days. Thus, Heaven receives from the moon as much radiation as the Earth does from the sun, and in addition seven times seven (forty-nine) times as much as the Earth does from the sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the moon is 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the sun, so we can ignore that. The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stephan-Boltzmann fourth power law for radiation, we have (H/E)⁴ = 50 where E is the absolute temperature of the Earth, 300 K (27 C). This gives H, the absolute temperature of Heaven, as 798 K (525 C)! (For old-fashioned Americans, that's close to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Your kitchen oven won't get nearly that hot.)

The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed. However, Revelation 21:8 says: But the fearful and unbelieving... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone. A lake of molten brimstone (or sulfur) means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6 C (above that point, it would be a vapor, not a lake). We have, then, that Heaven, at 525 C, is hotter than Hell, at less than 445 C.

So who says that the Bible has no accurate and useful scientific data?

(suggested by Austin Rosenfeld)

Authentic Degrees and Credentials

Isn't education a pain? It seems that creationists are more prone to getting their science degrees from non-accredited (or just plain fake) religious institutions rather than genuine, accredited schools or universities. Sometimes that's too much of a pain, so they go to a degree mill. Fifty bucks and an SASE, and you're a Ph.D., ready and qualified to refute evolution!

Their Third Cousins

One of the more idiotic quips I've heard (more than once, I'm sad to say) from creationists is, "If humans evolved from apes, then how come there are still apes around?" I can't speak for the creationists' immediate ancestry, but mine runs something like this: one of my great-great-grandfathers was named Ross. Among his offspring, one married a Thompson and produced children who were Thompsons. One of those children had children of her own who were neither Rosses nor Thompsons, but Icenogles. An Icenogle daughter produced me, who am none of the above, but a Riggins.

Thus, Rosses gave rise to descendants who are no longer Rosses. Some have become Rigginses. But some Ross descendants are still Rosses! There are still Rosses around, even though some of their descendants "evolved" into Rigginses, and a lot of other "species".

This isn't biological evolution, of course, but the principle is exactly the same: an ancestor can produce descendants which are very like itself (of the same species), while at the same time having other descendants which have become something else. The existence of descendants which have varied widely doesn't mean the original type has ceased to exist, or that there wasn't, in fact, a common ancestor. That's as true of anthropoids and Homo as it is of your ancestors, you, and those third cousins who retain the ancestral name that your branch of the family no longer uses.

Carnivores

One of the more bizarre creationist notions is that before the "Fall", all creatures lived in perfect harmony, and all ate plants (it seems to have something to do with death not existing until Adam bit the fruit). Thus we have an idyllic Eden, with herbivorous cheetahs, eagles, rattlesnakes, wolves, tarantulas, and presumably tyrannosauri and velociraptors. Indeed, the lion could lie down with the lamb.

But then there's me and my dumb questions: Unless the carnivores evolved really rapidly after the "Fall", they came originally equipped as they are now--with claws, incisors, fangs, web-spinning apparatus, etc. What need would an herbivorous rattlesnake have for venomous fangs? Why would a cheetah need blazing speed, unless to run down impala--and why would the impala need to be fast unless to escape speedy cheetahs? Why would those infamous peppered moths have needed camouflage? Why would a skunk need its stink, or a porcupine its quills? What sort of grass did a tyrannosaurus eat with its steak-knife teeth? No matter how hard I try, I can't imagine without amusement a black widow trapping what--berries?--in her web, then envenoming them until they quit struggling! A bison is "designed" as a herbivore, and has been one for a long, long time. Your housecat is plainly "designed" as a meat-eater, and would clearly have a devil of a time trying to graze for a living.

Our Founding Fathers

...because they make creationists appear, shall we say, less than intellectually competent when they toss out a howler like, "George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were creationists!" It makes one want to knock on their heads and call out derisively, "Helllooo! Anybody home in there? In what year did Washington die? When was Origin of Species published?" Old George didn't know about germs, either. (Even Charles Darwin accepted the standard creation model of his day--until he learned better.)

Flat-Earthers

Oh, yes, there are still some around, and they make young-Earth creationists uncomfortable, because their risible, crackpot notions are based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. In fact, they take the Bible even more literally than most creationists, assuming it means what it says about corners, foundations, and pillars of the Earth, and that mountain from which one could see the whole Earth. When we laugh at flat-Earthers, and can hardly believe such nuts are still around--we're laughing at them for having the same belief system as young-Earthers: take-no-prisoners biblical literalism.

Chemistry

Chemists, being somewhat familiar with how elements and molecules combine and recombine non-randomly, haven't risen up as a body to declare the chemical origin or subsequent evolution of life to be a flat-out impossibility. Now why do you suppose that is?

Dendrochronology

That means tree-ring counting. Dendrochronologists, by matching patterns in annual growth rings, can establish a sequence in living, dead, and long-dead trees in certain areas of the world. That can be a very reliable dating technique for, say, a beam used in an ancient shelter. But this archeological specialty must be completely useless and unreliable, since in some areas ring sequences extend back through the supposed date of the Flood, showing no evidence of same, and indeed way past the usual young-Earth creation date. One of the conundrums of creationism is that the Earth was apparently created complete with evidence of a past that never happened, including tree rings, other annual layering phenomena, fossils already in the ground, and light from distant stars already most of the way here--revealing cosmic events that never really happened!

Varves

Those are annual layers deposited in lake beds. In some places they are clearly distinguishable because of varying colors and compositions of materials deposited in different seasons. We can see them form, over a few years, so we know exactly what causes them and that they do, in fact, represent one year per layer. The problem, of course, (and darn near everything, it seems, is a problem for creationists) is that there are lakes in the world with many times the 6,000 annual varves that could have been laid down since the Creation.

P.S. Annual ice layers in Greenland and elsewhere are also Satanic deceptions.

The Nobel Prize Committee

...is seemingly blind to the enlightenment brought to the world by "creation scientists". Is that because "creation science" would overturn so many "preconceived notions" of the "scientific establishment", with its "deeply-rooted prejudice against all things Christian"? I don't think so, Tim. I'll wager, conservatively, that at least half of all Nobel prizes go for discoveries that overturn, radically modify, or greatly improve upon older concepts. Science rewards the finding of better answers, not hiding from them.

I would like to know, quite seriously, when the last time was that ANY biblical-literalist-creationist won a Nobel prize in ANY field. Also, has anyone ever won for any work that patently supports a major creationist principle, as opposed to the "evolutionary" view of the nature of the world?
(Another one that my creationist emailers have been strangely silent on.)

Their Own Fingers

The problem is, there are five. That puts us firmly in the mammal "family" (layman's term). All other mammals have five digits per limb, or the vestigial remains thereof, or we can trace the gradual shrinkage and loss of digits through the fossil record (as with horses). But the principal remains: Mammals have five digits--even when there's no good reason. Why should whales have the bones of exactly five digits buried in their flippers? Why should bats have wings seeming awkwardly stretched over exactly five fingers? "Similarity of design"? Oh, come on. The "Designer" found more efficient ways of making aquatic fins and wings for other creatures.

Same old song: the commonality of five digits among the mammal family makes sense only if we are all descendants of a five-digited ancestor. Some of us mammals have good use for five digits, some have already got rid of a few, and some of us are still stuck with useless ones (like dolphins). Remember, that's what a family is: descendants of a common ancestor.
-suggested by Kjetil Furnes

Snake Hips and Whale Pelvises

No, I haven't finally gone around the bend. Although there's not a trace left on the outside, boas, pythons, and blind snakes all have completely useless vestigial hipbones buried in their bodies. So do whales. Now why would an as-is Creation ex nihilo include creatures with functionless bones that really look like the evolutionary leftovers of lost limbs?
Sandy Petersen adds the following: Pythons and boas actually have tiny vestigial claws on either side of their cloacas, which are [associated with] their useless hips. So you can pick up any python (I suggest a small one, like my family's pet ball python), turn it over, and SEE the tiny useless claws that would never ever be there if snakes had been designed "from scratch".

Chicken Legs

The lower part of a chicken's legs are not covered by fur, hair or feathers. What's there? Scales. Is this a sign of their evolutionary past when they evolved from their reptilian ancestors? I think this solves the chicken or the egg riddle: the egg came first in the form of the chicken's ancestors.
-verbatim from Jim Lobach

Male Nipples

My grandfather, down on the farm, used to have a quaint expression, usually leveled at some lazy individual: as useless as the tits on a boar. Creationists, think hard and send me a carefully reasoned answer explaining why God would create both boars and men (and all other male mammals) with useless nipples (which can even be dangerous--men can get breast cancer). The simple biological-evolutionary answer is that as embryos we are all structurally female first, including proto-breast tissue. Only later in fetal development do the male hormones kick in and modify the feminine genital structures into the masculine. But we men are left with useless breast tissue and nipples, which never get the hormonal signal at puberty to develop into functioning organs. The whole thing seems a messy and cobbled-up system for producing two sexes. Why in Heaven's name would a Designer worth His salt come up with so inefficient a system, with useless (and sometimes dangerous) parts left over? (Evidence of our heritage: in some of our more "primitive" relatives gender is changeable throughout life. Some species of fish and reptiles can switch genders without the help of a Danish surgeon. They just respond to environmental cues.)
-suggested by David Pickering...but hey, I was thinking of it too!

Beetles

Does God have a beetle fixation? Why else would He create so many different kinds? Maybe He loves them more than man. After all, can a beetle sin?
--Noah Riggins

The Efficacy of Science

Funny how science gets it all RIGHT when you want a computer, medical science to eliminate smallpox or treat your "erectile disfunction", anti-lock brakes to save your life--but all evolutionists--using the scientific method you take advantage of all day long--are wrong.
-Rob Mickus
To which I would add this further note: evolutionary biology gets it right when you want improved corn yields, a vaccine ready for this year's flu strain, or the discovery of new oil fields--but we must keep that a secret from the kids, or at least teach them that magic is an equally valid explanation for how things got to be the way they are.

Libraries and Schools

John has also realized that creationists hate libraries, because they allow curious people like him to find the resources they list, which have been terribly misquoted. That also makes him think they hate schools, that taught him to read and use the library to get information.

The Power and Majesty of God Almighty

...and His subtlety. They will only allow God the minuscule, infant universe described by the writers of Genesis (or Moses, if you prefer). They can't stand it that God has been working on this version of the universe for something like 14 billion years, and His workshop is so inconceivably huge that it seems silly to imagine the Earth and its dominant species to be the center of God's attention. They won't allow Him to work His miracles of life patiently, subtly, using the gradual, majestic power of evolution. My hypothesis is that creationists, having short attention spans themselves, just can't allow God three billion years of patience and attention to Earthly life. Instead, all they'll allow Him is one *POOF* magic, all-in-one creation, barely 6,000 years ago. (This attention-deficit difficulty may have something to do with the fact that hardly any of them have actually read the whole Bible.)

1,000 Pennies

Ten bucks worth of pennies is all it takes to show how fast a little selection can turn randomness into perfect order. (For fans of those tiny Chick Publications comic books: This is an analogy. If you don't know what that is, stop now.)

Randomly scatter the pennies on a table. Apply a little "natural" selection (after all, you're not supernatural): pull out all that come up heads and set them aside (they will "survive"). Flip all the tails again. Save the heads. Repeat until "perfect order" is achieved.

How many "generations" will that take to "evolve" the race of pennies from evenly mixed to pure heads? Nine or ten, with average luck. Make it slightly more realistic by giving the "favored race" (Darwin's term) just a slight survival advantage: save just two or three each time. You can still have all heads in less than an hour. All it takes is "random replicators" (Dawkins's term) and a bit of selection pressure. The point is, a random system can become very organized, very fast, with just a little selection pressure.

Tornadoes, Junkyards, and 747's

It used to be a pocket watch argument that "proved" evolution can't happen. Now that lame creationist analogy has apparently evolved to demand that it be possible for a tornado to assemble a 747 out of a junkyard before we can admit the possibility of evolution.

What the creationist always conveniently leaves out of the analogy is the power of NON-random selection on repeated events. Allow a little leeway here for differences between mechanical assembly and natural systems (chemistry and life). Have the tornado roar through repeatedly, several times an hour (representing the speed of chemical reactions, or of cells multiplying). Allow selection pressures to "favor" parts or accidental assemblies that could function as part of a 747 (they're allowed to "survive", i.e. not torn apart). Let the experiment run a few million years and you will have your wide-body jet.

Admittedly, that's still a pretty lame analogy, but it represents evolution way better than the creationists' single windstorm. This would make it even closer to evolution: Don't demand a specific product at the end (like a plane or a human). Instead, "favor" any chance assembly that would be useful for any purpose. Allow assemblies to reproduce with occasional random changes. Select the most useful. Hey, that is evolution. Give it some time and you will have some amazingly "well-adapted" and useful mechanisms. Granted, the chances of one being a 747 are effectively zero (unless it was intentionally selected for), but no biologist I know of ever claimed that evolution "intended" to produce a person.

Their Own Lack of Faith

(Watch 'em deny this one vehemently.) The reason creationists so rabidly deny evolution is that they have so little faith in the value and truth of the Bible that if one tiny detail is shown to be wrong, then the whole rest of it can't be depended on, either. In other words, their faith is so weak that it will fall apart if one tiny brick is knocked out of their feeble structure of faith (I call this the Jenga Principle). Real faith, like a solid structure, can tolerate a brick or two loosened. Indeed, a real structure and real faith are strengthened by the replacement of a weak or defective brick with a new, stronger one (like replacing the shoddy myth of a 6000-year-old Earth with the grandeur of 4.5 billion years of Earth history).

"Balanced Treatment"

A recent creationist plea is for "balanced treatment" in the classroom: "Let us present creationism along with evolution, so students can make an informed choice. That's only fair isn't it?" (The spirit of fairness doesn't seem to prompt them to invite biologists to present a "balanced treatment" of evolution at revival meetings, though.)

OK, let's go along with it. In 9th grade biology let's do evolution on the first day of the school year--then we'll proceed to "alternative theories of origins" and "intelligent design theories". Tuesday we'll cover the Algonquin creation myth, Wednesday the Shinto, Thursday the Yoruba, Friday--Mayan. Next week it's Pawnee, Inuit, Mogollon, Hindu, and Zoroastrian. We'll get to the Hebrew adaptation of the Babylonian (as recorded in Genesis) the third Thursday in May (if we don't have a fire drill).

One of the Big Lies of creationism is that there are only two alternatives, and that by "defeating evolutionism" (sic), the only possible remaining alternative is the Genesis myth. (Those of us who have Seen the Truth know that the TRUE creation account is that preserved since the Beginning by the !kung bushmen of South Africa.)

The Order of Becoming a Creationist

After years of intensive research, I have all but given up hope of finding a biologist, geologist, physicist, astronomer, paleontologist, or whatever, who--through his actual field or laboratory research--came up with such overwhelming evidence that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, or that new species never evolve--that he came to the inescapable conclusion that it was all created recently. Then he looked around for who knew that all along. Then he became a fundamentalist Protestant.

As I said, I've nearly given up searching for such a rare species. I suspect I'm more likely to find a biblical unicorn. It never happens in that order. A person FIRST becomes a fundamentalist--either raised that way or converted--THEN learns what he is supposed to believe about the history of Earth and life.

Europeans

My buddy A. Fuchs (and several others) informs me that despite creationist fantasies that only a handful of atheists and die-hard "naturalist" scientists still believe in evolution..

in fact, there is no term like 'creationist' in our public debate, and I'm not sure if it exists in our language (German).  ...On most of our TV news shows they have something like 'joke of the day', or the most unbelievable event and so on. That's where I first heard that both creationism and evolution has to be taught in some states of the US. It's quite surprising for Europeans (also if they visit the US) that there are so many nearly uneducated people [in the US], but on the other hand, you have the world's best scientists over there.

How come ?

I wish to heaven I knew, my friend.

Inconvenient Biblical Laws

Andrew I. Kapust wonders why creationists don't keep kosher, as he proudly does. I accuse them of picking and choosing among Old Testament laws and pronouncements.  Anything they like, like the six days of creation, or "Thou shalt not kill" (mainly as applied to fetuses) is the inerrant word of God. However, most of the other 394 laws (like not wearing cotton-polyester blend fabrics, keeping the SABBATH [Saturday] holy, punishing rapists by forcing them to marry their victims, etc.) they have been excused from observing by Jesus. I can't seem to find the list in the New Testament, however, that details exactly which laws can safely be ignored by fundamentalists.

Blind Cave Fish

...and other cave critters that still have vestigial but absolutely useless eyes.  Evolution can be that sloppy, but can a perfect Creator?

-Donald Wilson

The Lord's Honesty

Don also recalls a verse in the Bible which he paraphrases as:

"God is not man, that He should deceive." Wow! What's with all the confusing fossils and distant light rays?  I grew up being taught that they were put there to test my faith!  I would expect an omnibenevolent deity to be less of a jerk than that.

-Donald Wilson

 

The Missing Laws

David from Alaska asks:

Why wasn't "Thou Shalt Wash Your Hands" or some such included in the Big Ten [or even way down the list]?  Or maybe "Thou shalt not dirty the open sore." Either would have saved a tremendous amount of suffering over the centuries.

Snowflakes

OK, the appearance of life had to be miraculous, since it increases order (decreases entropy), and that violates the second law of thermodynamics (not!).  In that case the formation of every single snowflake that has ever existed (imagine how many!) must be a discrete miracle, and not a natural process at all, since a snowflake is much more "orderly" and contains more "information" than the vapor or droplets from which it forms.  A more likely answer: neither is miraculous and neither offends the thermodynamic sensibilities of nature.  Everything in this world that works, works by temporarily and locally reducing entropy.  Maybe the real miracle was performed by God when He designed a universe with natural laws that permit such wonders as snowflakes to form and hummingbirds to evolve, without His constant tinkering.

suggested by Tony Leff

 

Convergent Evolution

And once again, from down under:
Convergent evolution. I'm thinking specifically of Thylacinus cynocephalus [AKA the Tasmanian wolf]. Here we have a marsupial with all the outward appearance of a member of the dog family, a placental group. Plus all those cute little marsupial 'mice' running around in the outback. [Why would God invent a whole new "wolf" when He had perfectly good ones already?  These sure didn't "microevolve" from two of the dog "kind"!]

Something like the wetas of New Zealand must give them fits, too. Since there were no land mammals until the Maoris introduced rats, these insects related to grasshoppers and katydids grew to outlandish proportions to fill the niche that small mammals take up elsewhere.

Or maybe God was just in a puckish mood and decided to create somethin' reeeeaal ugly!

-David Bailey

 

Insulin

Edward Oleen passes on this tidbit: All the human insulin available for diabetics today is made by genetically engineered E. coli bacteria (whose native country is your colon--eewww)! What does that have to do with evolution? Real human genes were spliced into bacterial DNA using recombinant techniques, so the nasty germs now churn out authentic human insulin.  Kind of sounds like the stuff that makes us human and the stuff that makes germs germy is the same kind of stuff, and is almost as interchangeable as tinkertoys.  Maybe it shows that we're closely enough related to our own intestinal bacteria that we can stick a bit of human being into them without their minding terribly.

Big Numbers

Millions, billions...especially as applied to years, light-years, species, etc.  They seem determined to limit the universe to a comfortable human scale.  Really big stretches of time, especially, seem to scare the pants off them.  Strange, when they insist God is eternal.

The Definition of Christian

Every dictionary I can lay my hands on defines Christian (n.) as "one who professes belief in Jesus as the christ" or words to the same effect.  Not a one of them defines Christian as "one who believes in the literal truth of Genesis, especially as regards the creation and flood accounts". (Who would have thought that the ranks of lexicographers had been so infiltrated with atheists and satanists?) If you've ever been around fundamentalists for long, you've run into statements like, "I don't believe in evolution, because I'm a Christian."  If you've ever said anything like that, here's some unpleasant news: it's NOT because you're a Christian.  It's because you're a literalist-fundamentalist, and you're in the minority even among Christians.  As a matter of fact, most of the Christians in the world are people whose beliefs you would find abhorrent, and a great many of whom accept evolution.  They include many millions of Catholics, not to mention Episcopalians and other mainline Protestants, Mormons, Orthodox, Coptics, and many hundreds of denominations other than Southern Baptist and Pentecostal. (If you want to really reveal your ignorance and prejudices, ask someone if he is a Catholic or a Christian!)

creationist ¹ christian!

Creationist Scientific Research Projects

They apparently hate them, because they're seldom, if ever, attempted.  There are multiple reasons for that, including the facts that few creationists have a clue about how to design and conduct legitimate scientific research; doing one is probably sacrilegious, since the answer is already in the Bible, and testing it shows a lack of faith; and (I think this is the big one) they are very afraid of that most common of research outcomes: negative results.

In order to help my creationist friends (it's amazing how many have offered to pray for me), I have compiled a brief list of research projects to demonstrate the truth of recent creation as detailed in Genesis.  It should be the duty (mission? ministry?) of every dedicated creationist to conduct this research in a sound scientific (that means replicable, peer-reviewed, and published in recognized journals) manner, because we all want the truth, especially if our eternal souls depend upon it. (Although one could argue that creationists don't want the truth--they want the answer they know is right ahead of time.)

Their Own Hemoglobin

 If hemoglobin were designed by God, it was designed to have far too much affinity for carbon monoxide. This great affinity has resulted in countless deaths.
    Carbon monoxide is a colorless and odorless gas. This is, if anything, an even nastier bit of "design". At the very least, carbon monoxide could have been given a smell to help warn us (unless the Designer was constrained by the laws of chemistry--surely no impediment). It remains one of life’s traps for the unwary, with its victims often being infants in poorly ventilated winter homes. Or perhaps it is just one of evolution’s quirks, a chance attraction which natural selection has not eliminated because there is too little selection pressure against it. Evolution can play seemingly malicious tricks (think about it: the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning is such a recent development in our evolutionary history that we have acquired no ability to detect it), but could a Perfect Designer?
(suggested by Roger Scott)

Pseudogenes

Pseudogenes (also known as junk DNA) were discovered in 1994. They are remnants of genes that no longer function but continue to be carried along in DNA as excess baggage. Pseudogenes also change through time, as they are passed on from ancestors to descendants, and they offer an especially useful way of reconstructing evolutionary relationships. The more remote the last common ancestor of two organisms, the more dissimilar their pseudogenes will be. When the pseudogenes of a human and a chimpanzee are compared, the differences are relatively few. Slightly more differences are present when comparing the pseudogenes of a human with those of a rodent. Yet  more disparity is evident between the pseudogenes of a human and those of, say, wheat. This is compelling evidence for an evolutionary origin of Homo sapiens.
(from Steven Mahone)

Vitamin C

Roger Scott has discovered that God is a dog’s best friend:
    Humans must have vitamin C in their diets. Without it they will develop scurvy and eventually die from vitamin C deficiency. Apparently we have a pseudogene for producing vitamin C. Dogs, on the other hand, have the real thing. Their copy of the gene actually works, and they do not need vitamin C in their diets. They make it themselves.
    Roger believes this shows how much more God loves dogs than humans. Being omniscient, God knew in advance that sailors on long sea voyages would suffer terribly, but did nothing about it. God made sure that dogs on these voyages would not suffer. Ships’ mutts were looked after, but not the sailors.

The Genesis 1 & 2 Resolution

Paul Murray has recognized a solution to some of the Genesis 1 & 2 conflicts--but not one that creationists are likely to welcome:
    [In Paul's words] Genesis 1 and 2 do not conflict, provided that you remember that Moses and the partiarchs were polytheistic heathens, just like their heathen neighbors. They believed that the world was inhabited and animated by "spirits", much like most native religions do. They claimed that their particular god was better than all the other gods (much as people today will cheer for their home-town football team), but that does not mean that they were monotheists. The wording of the First Commandment in Ex 20 makes that plain ["thou shalt have no other," not "there is no other"]. Jehovah was to be number one god, but that's all.
    As to "the order of creation", many people have noted that the word translated "God" changes from "Elohim" [a PLURAL] to "Jehovah" in Gen 2:4. Some take this as evidence of Gen 2 being a second account. I say: the two tell a single story.
    Genesis 1 describes how the spirits created the world and mankind; the spirits (or "Elohim"--plural) made their own people after their own image--that's why races of people look different. The spirit who created the Hebrews made people that looked like himself, the spirit who created the Egyptians made people that looked like himself, etc.
    Genesis 2 zooms in to one among the Elohim, named "Jehovah", and his little eugenics experiment in the Garden of Eden.
    See? Doesn't it all make perfect sense? The name of God changing from the plural "Elohim" to "Jehovah" in Gen 2:4 is not an artifact, it's actually a meaningful and important distinction. Gen 1 is talking about the gods in general, Gen 2 about one particular one. [In other words, the Bible is right, even where creationists DON'T want it to be. -RJR]
    So enough of this "Gen 1 & 2 contradict one another" business! It's total nonsense - there's a perfectly reasonable explanation.

A Deck of Cards

Ever hear impossibly-large numbers quoted as the odds against a cell or a particular DNA molecule having formed "by accident" to create the first living thing? It's an example of the propensity of creationists to entirely miss the point and set up a specious straw man, ripe for destruction. Ronald Stearns suggests the following to help them see where they are missing the point:
    One demonstration that has worked well for me in illustrating the difference between a priori and a posteriori calculations just uses a deck of cards. Give someone a deck of cards, ask him to shuffle it, and then read off the first 26 cards.  After your subject does that, jump at him and question his veracity.  "You don't really expect me to believe that sequence is what you pulled up, is it?  The odds against getting exactly that sequence is 2 x 10⁴¹-to-1 against!"  Then, of course, explain that what the odds were before the exercise is irrelevant, because what is important is that SOME sequence occurred, and that the idea is to understand what that sequence actually was, not what the chances were of obtaining that sequence.  If your subject has kept the stack of cards intact, then you can show that you have the evidence.  It also looks a lot like a set of geological strata, and you can show that it remains valid even if you take the stack and slide it around, twist it, and fold it a bit, [to provide an analogy for how] geologists really can still unlock the story of geological history, with a lot of work.

The Tower of Babel

Along with Noah's Ark and several other patently silly stories (in the light of modern understanding), that creationists purport to love, I suspect that they wish they didn't have to defend such myths as the Tower of Babel. Werner Guilford asks the following:
    The bible story of why humanity speaks thousands of different languages ranks right up there with the story of Santa Claus and the stork bringing the children.  A nice bedtime story for the kids, were it not for the tendency to blame a vengeful deity.  Somebody has to set the record straight and absolve God from all responsibility in this case. Let's give it a try.
    To start with, we have to make the fairly safe assumption that the Babylonians at that time were not the most stupid people on the face of the Earth. The assumption is safe, since they managed to have an empire, albeit a modest one, had a written language, kept books, etc. So, if they were not
stupid, then:
- Why did they want to build a tower and waste a tremendous amount of resources to peek into the living room of a god they didn't even believe in?
- Why would they build a tower in the lowlands when they could get ahead by starting on the top of a mountain a few hundred kilometers north?
- Why try building a huge tower in the lowlands [except perhaps for defensive walls] where every brick had to be made from mud, ?
- Finally, why would any god not just have a tremendous belly laugh at the futility of his subjects? [And why has God not responded similarly to modern skyscrapers--or are we expected to believe that the pile of mud bricks was way higher? And why would God even care, unless He actually did live just a few hundred feet overhead, and a human who reached His home could seriously challenge His supremacy? RJR]
    Well, at least we can answer that question. There is absolutely no humor in the Bible (or any other religious text that I know of).  It's tough being a god--you are not allowed to laugh.
And Eric Goodemote adds the tag-line:
It's quite odd that the Chinese, in their 8000 year recorded history, failed to mention [the collapse of the tower] in any of their chronicles. Perhaps they were too busy cleaning up after the global flood, which they also forgot to mention.

Digitized Natural Selection

Computer scientists (and the big corporations that pay them), have started doing what nature has been doing all along. To arrive at some good-enough solutions to some practically intractable problems (the kind that would take a Cray supercomputer the probable life of the universe to solve--like the absolute best design for a new airliner), they teach a computer to try a bunch of random solutions. Most will be worthless or impractical. Some will work a little better than most. The best ones are allowed to produce "offspring" with random modifications. Most of these won't be improvements, and many will be worse than the "parents". A few may be slightly better, however, and they will be allowed to reproduce for another "generation". Continue this for enough generations, and the end product will be a decent solution. It probably won't be the theoretical best (a quality which couldn't be determined without solving the original unsolvable problem), but it will be workable.
    This is exactly analogous to natural selection, so of course "it can't possibly work" since "random mutations can only be harmful". Sorry, but it works so well in nature that it has produced hummingbirds and eagles, and so well in the R & D department that it is being used to design aircraft!

The Two Great Lights

Chris Hobson has a few quibbles regarding the "two great lights" created early on in Genesis, which everyone understands to mean the Sun and Moon:
The Moon is in fact not a light at all, but merely reflects the light of the Sun. It was also created in order to "rule the night", but actually spends half of the time in the daytime sky, where it is more often than not invisible. It is not really all that great in astronomical terms, either, being a mere 2,159 miles in diameter. The sun does qualify as a light, but again not a very great one, being a tiny, insignificant little star, just 865,000 miles in diameter. Betelgeuse is 250,000,000 miles in diameter and 15,000 times brighter than the Sun, Rigel is 60,000 times brighter than the Sun. [If the Sun is "great", then what term should be applied to stars like those? RJR] Genesis 1:18 states that one of the purposes of these heavenly bodies is "to separate the light from the darkness" which I thought God had already taken care of in verse 4. So in conclusion, of the two great lights, neither of them is great [compared to objects in the same category] and only one of them is a light. This is not very good going for a book which is claimed to be literally true and scientifically accurate.

The Whole Silly Flood Story - This is a big fun section!

Creationists are probably more defensive about the Flood than any other part of their mythology.  One indication of that is the fact that the seminal work of modern creationism (oxymoron) was called The Genesis Flood.  The Flood story apparently required lots of explanation and justification if anyone were to take creationism seriously.  An instantaneous supernatural creation by an omnipotent God is somehow easier to swallow than the cobbled-up mish-mash of legends that became the biblical Flood story.  Consider a few minor difficulties and childish questions:

Were pairs of every species living on Earth taken aboard the Ark?  All living and extinct species?  All 50 billion or so species that have ever lived on Earth?  Or only land animals and birds that couldn't survive by swimming for several months?  We're still talking many millions of species.  And while we're at it, why does my Bible state clearly and unambiguously that two of each kind of animal were taken aboard, then immediately afterwards it seems to correct itself by informing us that seven of each "clean" animal were boarded, and then immediately after THAT it insists that two of every kind were loaded?  How did Noah know which species were clean several thousand years before God imparted those laws to Moses?  And if Noah knew about "clean" animals, why wasn't that knowledge passed down through the generations?  Is it possible that the whole business about "clean" animals necessary for sacrifices was tacked on later by a bungling editor who forgot to check the context for obvious contradictions?

OK, how about "kinds": two of the dog "kind", two of the antelope "kind", two of the elephant "kind", two of the diplodocus "kind", ad finitum?  That certainly cuts down on the crowd, but then we need a definition of what a "kind" is.  Creationists can't seem to manage a consistent definition of "kind", even among themselves. Some, after thinking about it long and hard, arrive at a definition of "kind" that is indistinguishable from "species".  But that doesn't solve the problem of way too many animals.  Others want to define "kind" as inclusively as possible to solve the space problem.  But then incredibly supercharged evolution is required after the Flood to expand each "kind" into the thousands (in some cases) of species belonging to that "kind".  Whatever the solution, 99+% of all species of animals became extinct, either between the time of creation and the Flood, or during the Flood, or immediately thereafter.

One must then wonder about an incredibly inept or wasteful creation in which virtually all animal species were doomed to extinction within a couple thousand years.  Having dared to broach the subject of a God who seems less than omniscient (didn't He know all this was going to happen ahead of time?), consider also limited omnipotence.  Why would God need a lengthy Flood to destroy miscreant humans?  Why destroy billions upon billions of other living things?  Why not simply snap His fingers and make all the bad people disappear? (Note to creationists who are seriously bent out of shape by these "sacrilegious" questions: this is not an attack upon the qualifications or abilities of the Almighty, but upon YOUR risible notion of Him and what He has done.)

Did ALL those people deserve brutal and terrifying deaths?  The children?  The two-year-old little girls?  The newborn infants?  The unborn fetuses?  Why don't creationists get all exercised about the murder of those unborn?  And of course there's Noah and his kin who, of all the human race, deserved to survive.  That would be the same Noah whose first crop after the Flood was wine grapes.  In celebration of all the blessings bestowed upon him, he got drunk as a skunk and lay around naked.  Then when his thoughtful son Ham tried to help him out by covering his bare butt, Noah cursed him and his descendants forever (and God, apparently, backed up that curse [and biblical literalists have used that as a justification for slavery and segregation of blacks {whom they imagine to be "Hamites"}, among other atrocities]).  Was that mean drunk the best of the human race that God could come up with?

Then there's the rainbow. If you want to hear some really creative additions to Genesis, ask a young-Earther how there could be no rainbows for a couple thousand years, until after the Flood. 

You may get some truly bizarre planetary climate models, involving such things as water soaking up through the ground to keep plants alive (let's see--if there is so much water underground that it soaks UP to the surface, isn't that what we call a bog?  Some paradise!), or a "vapor canopy" that watered the Earth with a kind of fog, then fell as the Flood rains. If you think conditions on Venus are hellish, try modeling the atmospheric conditions on an Earth with all the gigatons of ocean water added to the atmosphere! If Adam's descendants were protected from such incredible temperatures and pressures (the natural physical result of such super-greenhouse conditions) by some sort of miraculous intervention, then again this is not creation science, just creation magic. (I've heard creationists attribute the mythical long life spans of Old Testament notables to such atmospheric conditions.  I invite them to try it for themselves to see if it promotes longevity.) But the purpose of the rainbow is what really puzzles me. God states (and repeats--Noah must have been a slow learner [or chronically drunk?]) that the rainbow signifies a promise by God that He will never flood out the whole Earth again. Most creationists I know are dead certain that God WILL destroy the Earth (and soon!), but just not with water next time (most seem to favor fire, but personally I expect it to be peanut butter [extra chunky]). But wait--if God reserves the right to destroy all mankind, then what's the point of promising not to use water again? We won't be drowned again, but burnt to cinders? Thanks a lot.

And yet more rainbow nonsense: God states multiple times that it will be in a cloud, He will "set [His] bow in the cloud". Rainbows aren't formed or seen "in clouds". They appear when the sun shines on raindrops and is refracted back at the proper angle to the viewer. They are often seen against a backdrop of clouds, but they are not in the clouds. As a matter of fact, the rainbow doesn't even exist where it appears to be! It's an optical illusion that's "in" the light reaching viewers at the proper angle from sun and rain. You can fly a plane through the exact spot where a ground viewer reports seeing a rainbow. You won't see anything around you but water. You can also make your own rainbows with a garden hose in full sunlight--no clouds required at all. One more: God states unequivocally that the rainbow is to remind Him of the no-Flood clause. If God has such a faulty memory that He needs such cosmic post-it notes, we're in BIG trouble.
 

Noah's Ark

...just refuses to be found. Or it's been found too many times, in completely different locations. A dozen different people claiming to have found the Ark in a dozen different places is even more embarrassing than not finding it at all. For some reason that escapes creationists, it just won't be found and stay found.  (More than one creationist has claimed to have "found" the Ark.  Such a claim is always followed by a book, a paid lecture tour, and maybe a film--all designed to relieve the gullible of the burden of extra cash.  Then a few years later another "explorer" "finds" a whole other Ark somewhere else, and runs the whole con again with a fresh crop of easy marks.)

Size of the Earth

...has obviously expanded greatly since Noah's day, when he could, in a short period, collect pairs of all animals and birds from all over the world, without the benefit of modern air transport. Then after the Flood, the critters all had to migrate, at the double-quick, to their present habitats in Tasmania, the Galapagos, the coasts of Antarctica, Patagonia, the American Southwest, or wherever. It's clear the Earth was no more than a few hundred miles across, probably flat, and with no inconvenient oceans like, say, the Pacific.

The Slow Rate of Evolution

Having some time ago abandoned the completely silly proposition that Noah could actually have accommodated pairs--let alone sevens--of every animal species on Earth aboard the Ark, creationists have fallen back upon the rationalization that he collected not species but "kinds". They never, of course, clearly define "kind", because any such definition would create more problems in biological classification than it solved (and reveal how little they know about species diversity). 

Be that as it may, if a pair of the bovine "kind" walked off the Ark a few thousand years ago, they have had to evolve into all 24 present species and uncounted varieties of wild and domestic cattle since then. (Creationists: you really don't want to know how many species of the bat "kind" there are. And don't even think about beetles.) Creationists, then, are in the awkward position of believing in a much faster rate of evolution than is possible in nature, while detesting the term itself, and generally refusing to call diversification-since-the-Ark evolution (Lord, how they hate that word)!

The Number of Species in the World

There are just way too many of them! There are so many that we still don't even have a solid estimate of exactly how many--but five million is at least the right order of magnitude (counting only living species--throw in the extinct guys and you're way into the billions). That's so many that creationists have given up trying to stuff them all into the Ark (see above). A vanishingly tiny percent are even mentioned in the "scientifically accurate" Bible. Whole orders and phyla are left out. Of the few mentioned, there seems to be some slight confusion over such seemingly simple things as whether a bat is a bird or mammal, how many legs a grasshopper has, and who chews cuds and who doesn't (see the parts about the dietary laws handed down to Moses). There's even embarrassing mention of creatures unknown to science, such as unicorns.

My humbly-offered solution: Since the Bible is "scientifically accurate", then when it was written there were just a few hundred species! They could all fit onto the Ark.
After the Flood (take your pick):

• They speed-evolved into the millions we have now.

• God made a whole bunch more, just to test our faith in Holy Scripture.

• Satan made a whole bunch more, just to ruin our faith in Holy Scripture. (I vote for this one, since I've been told recently by several good creationists that Satan invented evolution! [Then it would, in fact, be real, wouldn't it, regardless of who invented it?])

Elephants

In the Sunday School stories, most of us imagined one pair, or at most two African and two Asian, on the Ark; and we assumed those few were Noah's biggest problem. But he could probably have wedged them in somewhere, among the handful of other large mammals always shown in the picture books. Somehow the elephants were always waving their trunks over the side, and the giraffes poking their heads up over the deck house. Then we grew up (most of us) and found out that there used to be things like mastodons and woolly mammoths. As a matter of fact, if we did just a little research, we could have found out that there are some 160 species of probiscideans, living and extinct, many of them wildly, grotesquely different from modern Jumbos. Then the problem arises of whether or not all those guys were on the Ark. All 160 species, with their months of fodder, obviously could not have been aboard, especially if we realize that other large mammal "kinds" also have myriad extinct species. As I see it, there are several explanations. Choose your favorite from the list below:

• 158 of God's perfectly-created elephant species had already died out before the Flood.

• Only one pair of the elephant "kind" (are they "clean" or "unclean"?) were aboard, and immediately afterward evolved into 160 different species, 158 of which immediately became extinct.

• 158 species were simply left off the Ark, and got killed and fossilized by the Flood--and Genesis is just exaggerating about all beasts being aboard.

• There never were more than two species of elephants--all those fossils of extinct ones, including whole, frozen mammoths that modern people have actually dined on--are merely a trick of Satan.

• All animals were on the Ark, just like Genesis says. Shut up and don't ask.

Thanks to Oren Grossman for informing me that there are actually three species of living elephants, including the smaller African bush elephant. Thus creationists only need to account for 157 instant extinctions... but have to accommodate at least six pachyderms on the Ark!

Deep-sea Fish

One of the ways that creationists try to weasel out of the volume of water needed for Noah's Flood is to say that the Earth was much flatter then--the oceans were shallow, and the mountains were more like low hills. Therefore, much less water was required to flood the entire planet. All the mountains were raised after the Flood (or towards the end of it), and the oceans became deeper, allowing the water to drain off (creating the Grand Canyon in the process). This raises two embarrassing questions :

• How did Noah's Ark land on top of Mt. Ararat (about 9000 feet high) if the water was never that deep?

• Where did the deep-ocean fish come from--those hideous monstrosities that are all mouth, teeth and luminous lure and can only live at incredible depths and pressures? Super-fast evolution again?
  -(suggested by Adrian Barnett)

...to which I would add a corollary question: How, during a worldwide flood when seawater and freshwater would be pretty much thoroughly mixed, would ANY fish survive? I've had enough experience with aquaria to know that darn few freshwater fish species can tolerate saltwater, and vice versa. A flood of the whole Earth consequently would kill off all but a few brackish water species, capable of surviving rapid changes in salinity. Since the oceans and lakes are jam-packed with species exquisitely sensitive to even slight changes in salinity (they DIE), today's fish have to have evolved since the one-world-ocean of the Flood. Sorry, I just don't believe in evolution--not the lightning variety that creationism demands!

The Land Down Under

Ed Vinson asks just how far it is from Mt. Ararat to Sydney, and which of Noah's sons got stuck with herding all those numbats, wombats, platypi, and wallabies down there without mixing any rats in. G'day, Mate!

Koalas

They live only in Australia. Their diet is so restricted--to a few subspecies of eucalyptus--that they're threatened now by destruction of the only kinds of trees they will eat. It's also hard to imagine them migrating. Over many generations they might slowly spread through an area--but travelers, they ain't.

And when they did migrate over 9,000 miles, in a tiny herd from Ararat to New South Wales, eating a convenient trail of long-disappeared eucalyptus (which took how many years after the Flood to grow?), they left no trail of koala fossils behind.

A suggestion for creation "researchers": instead of wasting endless hours combing through the writings of real scientists to find phrases to yank out of context that make them seem to doubt evolution--instead of that, put together a real research expedition! Find us that bee-line trail from northern Turkey to Australia. Find us those fossilized eucalyptus leaves, koala footprints, and koala bones. While you're at it, it would be lovely if you turned up a few kangaroos, giant moas, marsupial lions, Tasmanian wolves, and platypuses along that superhighway to the South Pacific.

Enjoy yourselves in Afghanistan.

Gonorrhea

It is a strictly human disease. Did the Good Lord bestow the gift of gonorrhea on Adam, or was it Eve? Who carried it onto the Ark? Why would God instruct Noah to carry any disease organisms or parasites onto the Ark? One of Noah's family had to have been infected, but they were the only people worthy enough to be saved on the whole Earth. Which one had the clap? Why would He create anything so nasty anyway?
-suggested by Noah Riggins

Noah and His Ancestors

John Hoppner points out that creationists must be a bit miffed at Noah and his ancestors for cremating their dead, because that destroyed all of their evidence of having human remains intermixed in the fossil record.

Sloths

... reside in the tropics of Central and South America, which is quite a distance from western Asia, where Noah assembled the animal passengers for the Ark. Sloths generally move while hanging upside down from tree limbs. They can't travel very fast. And just how did they cross all of those treeless deserts on the way (to say nothing of the ocean)?

A corollary: How did any South American animal make it from the Ark? Certainly not via the Atlantic -- there is no island chain that could have constituted a land bridge. The first mammals to cross the Atlantic were Vikings.

It is possible to move across the Pacific, and there is fossil evidence that indicates that such migrations did occur (but not, sadly, of modern sloths). So, obviously, after the Flood subsided, the llamas, vicunas, nutrias, etc. (and yes, sloths), trotted along what is now known as the Silk Route until they reached the east coast of Asia, skirted around the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk, continued northward to the agreeable climate of 65 degrees north latitude, crossed the Bering Strait to the Seward Peninsula of Alaska, clambered through the Canadian Rockies, continued southward along the coast of California, the rain forests of Mexico and Central America, and the Panama isthmus, until they reached their destination. The journey, at the most moderate calculation, was at least 16,000 miles and covered an incredible variety of terrains and climates. It is rather curious that to date no vicuna remains have been found in Alaska or Siberia; but those areas are pretty big, after all, and they have lots of unexplored territory -- maybe some dedicated creationist will undertake a mission there to dig something up.

Come to think of it, there is a continent more remote even than South America. Will someone explain how Noah was able to obtain a pair of penguins? Well, actually, more than one pair, because at the last count the number of penguin species was -- oh well, you get the point.
--Josh Silverman

Cute Little Bunny Rabbits

... because they give the lie to the creationist "proof" that there are just the number of people alive today that there would be if we had started repopulating the Earth after the Flood.  The short answer is, if you hold to the creationist logic, the whole visible universe would be one squirming mass of rabbit flesh by now.

Ted Krapkat has improved upon my argument by applying the creationist logic directly to the human population:
If we create a simple formula using today's population of ~6 billion, and figure in the starting population (8 individuals), and the starting time (4360 YBP), we get an annual growth rate of about 0.0047. Since that IS what happened, according to creationists, and it IS the only possible explanation for today's human population then...
(a) At Christ's death there were only about half a million people in the whole world!
(b) At the time the Israelites entered Canaan, (about 1180 BCE) we get a world population of 2024! By the time you divide that up between Egypt, Canaan, the rest of the world, and Israel, that leaves maybe 6 or 7 people for the Israelite army!
(c) If we go back to the time that the Jews were expelled from Egypt, in 1560 BCE, we get a world population of only 340 people!
(d) In 2300 BCE there were only about 10 people on Earth! How did fewer than a dozen people build the pyramids?

Real Flood Evidence

Yes, I'll admit it, there is evidence of the biblical Flood. It just doesn't turn out to be quite as reported in Genesis. First, all the genuine evidence of a worldwide inundation a few thousand years ago could, with $2.39, get you a cup of Starbuck's. There are seashell fossils on Mt. Everest, but plate tectonics has a little something to do with that. Mysteriously, there aren't any shells on plenty of much lower mountain ranges, which happen to be igneous or metamorphic rocks, unlike the former marine sediments that became the Himalayas.

Now for more local floods: There is genuine archaeological evidence of one or more real, catastrophic floods in the valleys of the Fertile Crescent (where the myth originated). To tribes who thought Sumeria was pretty much the whole world--or all of it that mattered--it would have seemed that their whole world was indeed flooded.

Recently, another possible source of the legend has been recognized. Thousands of years ago a sort of natural dam at the Bosporus gave way, allowing seawater to rapidly pour into a huge basin and lake north of Turkey (the region near Ararat! hmm...), flooding out thousands of square miles of fertile land, villages, and cities. The result is the Black Sea, where even now marine archaeologists are finding the drowned communities on the former lake shore.

 

 

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