The Easter Bunny – easier to believe than the Bible

I often mention that the biogeography of life on Earth confirms evolution while falsifying the Bible at the same time. I keep hoping that some creationist will challenge me.

Alas, they lack the intellectual curiosity (or integrity) to do so. I need to raise that specific topic myself.

First of all it is important to note that this subject does NOT involve fossils. Neither does it involve the dating of rocks. All it takes is the form of evidence most highly favored by creationists - eyewitness accounts.

Consider my favorite example - Gila Monsters. Eyewitnesses have observed that they exist in one place only - the deserts of North America.

Gila Monsters are slow moving and cold blooded. They are also very poisonous. They are not very aggressive so they rarely attack humans, but their venom is as toxic as that of a coral snake. That means it is very toxic indeed.

The obvious question that comes up for Biblical literalists is:

How and why are Gila Monsters ONLY found in the deserts of North America?

The Bible says that the only living land animals were on the Ark immediately after the flood. The Ark came to rest in the area around Mt. Ararat which is in Turkey.

That raises the first question about Gila Monsters. The area around Mt. Ararat is a desert. Why would Gila Monsters – or any desert animal - migrate anywhere else? It you get off the Ark and see an ideal climate, why wouldn't an animal stay RIGHT THERE? How would a dumb animal even know that there were other places that had an ideal climate for them?

**IF** they did decide to migrate, why would they go all the way to North America? There are many deserts much closer. The Sahara Desert, for example, is just a hop, skip and a jump away, relatively speaking.

**IF** they did decide to migrate to North America (and clearly the questions are becoming outrageously absurd and even funny), how did they get to North America? They can't swim. There is no land bridge.

Some creationists say that there was an Ice Age immediately after the flood. That opened a bridge to the Western Hemisphere. While such a bridge would work quite well for animals like Mammoths, how would an animal like the Gila Monster use it? The Gila Monster is cold blooded. It couldn't possibly survive a trip of thousands of miles through ice and snow where none of its food was around.

Other creationists say that humans brought such animals with them as they travelled. But that is clearly preposterous as well. Humans might bring animals that benefit them when they travel - such as cattle, horses, chickens, dogs, etc. But Gila Monsters provide no such benefit. They are also potentially quite dangerous since they are poisonous. It makes absolutely NO sense for humans to haul them around.

Most importantly, Gila Monsters are FAR from the only problem for the Bible account created by the biogeography of life.

In fact there are an estimated 12 million species of animals on Earth. Nearly every one presents a biogeographical problem for the Bible account. There are even some 650,000 species of beetles. Nearly every one lives in a small ecological niche.

How did that happen?

Even the biogeography of freshwater fish is unexplainable. With a bit more than a year to swim wherever they wanted, why is nearly all species of freshwater fish confined to very small geographical areas? Over a year, piranhas could have swum to Africa. Certainly they could have swum to Central America. Why did they decide to stay only in the Amazon River basin?

There are ALL of these questions. Literally MILLIONS of them. Yet no creationists can present even hypothetical answers that aren't completely ludicrous.

Contrast that with the Easter Bunny. Rational people don't believe in the Easter Bunny. Why not? Because the hypothesis raises so many questions for which there are not even hypothetical answers.

How does the Easter Bunny visit so many homes in a short time period? How does the Easter Bunny carry so many eggs? I'm sure that we could all come up with other questions.

Those questions don't have even hypothetical answers. But the questions about the Easter Bunny, as numerous as they are, still are MUCH smaller than the questions without even hypothetical answers that the biogeography of life on Earth raises and that the Flood account cannot hope to answer.

Therefore, it is easier to believe in the Easter Bunny than it is to believe in the Bible.

Q.E.D.

More unanswerable questions about the Bible

I posted the text below on another forum. It represents a set of unanswerable questions relating to the Passover. I thought that I would repeat them here as well. Surely no Biblical literalists on this forum will be able to answer the questions either.

Consider the Passover and the associated plagues. The Passover is actually the Tenth plague, of course. Yahweh inflicts it, as well as the nine previous ones, on the Egyptian people because of the hardened heart of the Pharaoh who would not release Moses and the Jews from slavery.

Surely just about everyone is familiar with that story. In summary for the Passover itself, God tells Moses to take the blood of one-year-old male lamb that is without blemish and that was slaughtered during twilight and use it to coat the doorposts and lintels of their homes. God then kills the firstborn in every house that is not so marked.

But it, along with the other details of the Exodus, raises many questions.

1. If God can see into the future, he MUST have known that the first nine plagues weren't going to have any effect. So why does He do things like bring boils and locusts? He MUST enjoy causing pain, pestilence and other ills. That's the only possible explanation.

2. Why is an omnipotent, omniscient God unable to tell a Jewish home from an Egyptian home without such a gruesome ritual being performed? Why did a bunch of lambs have to die needlessly?

3. Why did all of the Egyptians have to suffer? Only the Pharaoh had a "hard heart". Why did the others have to lose their firstborn children?

4. Why did God harden the Pharaoh's heart in the first place? That's a form of deception. Here's Exodus 4:21

"The LORD said to Moses, 'When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.'"

God hardens the Pharaoh's heart and then kills all of the firstborn children because Pharaoh's heart is hardened? How does that do anything but focus all of the blame on God Himself?

Those actions are ONLY explicable if God is cruel. Of course that's a necessary conclusion ONLY if the story is literally true. If it nothing but a myth - which all rational people would believe - then God can continue to be perfect (though undoubtedly angered by the fact that some people insist that he really has such a flawed character).

Maybe you prefer that God is incompetent instead? After all any mortal human could come up with a better solution than God's in a couple of minutes.

The most obvious - don't harden the Pharaoh's heart in the first place. In fact make his hearth sympathetic to Moses and the Jews. Problem solved; no one dies.

Or, since the Egyptian army is keeping the Jews enslaved, disable the army. Put the army members into temporary comas then waken them after the Jews have crossed the Red Sea. Or destroy their weapons. Here again – problem solved; no one dies.

There are probably 1000 other solutions where no one dies.

God couldn't think of ANY of them?

The solution to this conundrum is simple - don't insist that these myths are true.

**IF** you do insist that they are true, then you are obligated to answer the questions that I have asked. Otherwise you are implicitly agreeing that God is cruel, deceptive and/or incompetent. If you cannot provide answers then you are risking your soul because you are advocating a belief system that really does portray a God who is cruel, deceptive and incompetent.

Moreover, saying "God moves in mysterious ways" doesn't work if you insist that the Bible is inerrant. **IF** God moves in mysterious ways then God could have moved mysteriously and inspired the stories in the Bible to be read as parables rather than as true stories. In other words, if God does indeed "move in mysterious ways" no one can trust anything that they read in the Bible.

Total expected answers from Biblical literalists:

ZERO.

ZIPPO.

ZILCH.

NADA.

NONE.

That's why **IF** Hell exists, creationists are surely destined to spend an eternity in the worst parts of that place.

Flood Stories

Recently a creationist used the presence of many flood accounts in various cultures around the world as evidence for the flood story in the Bible.

As was pointed out to him, if the accounts are different then we would expect them to refer to different floods. They can only be used as evidence for the same flood if they are identical or at least very similar.

Most creationists don't pay any attention to that obvious requirement.

But at least one does. The Northwest Creation Network (NCN) analyzes 35 flood accounts at
http://www.nwcreation.net/noahlegends.html.

First it should be noted that 35 is a relatively small number of myths to include together. The evolutionary reference support web site talkorigins can find more than 300 different cultures with flood stories . Some cultures have more than one story. So the NCN is analyzing some 10% of the available stories. A cynic might believe that they chose only to hand-select those with the closest similarity to the flood account in the Bible.

Moreover they select the "Babylon - Gilgamesh epic" as one to compare to. Most historians believe that account forms the basis for the Biblical account. Surely any objective analysis should not include an alternative that skeptics say was the original source for the Biblical story. Regardless of whether or not the skeptics are right, surely creationists should be able to provide support for their claims without including necessarily controversial examples.

In order to systematically compare the stories to the flood account, the NCN lists these six criteria along with the total number of accounts (out of 35) that each story matches the account in the Bible:

Criterion..............# of Matching Stories
Destruction by Water..........35
God (Divine) Cause............18
Warning Given.................17
Humans Spared.................35
Animals Spared................24
Preserved in a Vessel.........32

The criterion "Destruction by Water" is really a given if you are accumulating flood stories; it could hardly be called a FLOOD if it didn't destroy something with water.

Similarly having "Humans Spared" is sort of a given. It would be difficult to explain how the story even survived – or how there could be an audience for the story – if all humans were killed in the flood.

It is a bit striking that only 32 out of 35 of the accounts had people preserved by a vessel. If you have a flood – which is a given – and humans survived – another given – there are not very many methods of surviving besides using a vessel of some type. You could run to higher ground, but then that would contradict one of the key points of the Biblical account.

The other criteria (God as the cause, Warning Given and Animals Spared) have, under the circumstances, rather low percentages of similarity with the Bible.

Creationists will point to some stories that seem to have an uncanny similarity to the Biblical account, even in far away places.

For example, the Western Australian Aborigines have a tale that specifically mentions a man named "Noah" as well as an "Ark". Aren't those similarities unlikely to be merely coincidence?

Indeed it is not a coincidence!

What we find is that this tale became a part of Aboriginal culture only after Christian missionaries started to educate the native Australians. So the story is obviously nothing but a modification of the tale they learned from the Bible, not the result of an actual observation of past events.

In summary, examining a hand-picked list of creation stories from around the world and eliminating the elements that are necessarily present in any flood story, only a bit more than half of those elements are similar to the Biblical account. If anything, such a poor record of coherence with the Flood Account in the Bible emphasizes the differences rather than the similarities. That's especially true since a GLOBAL flood would be remembered by EVERY culture on Earth! ANY culture that lacked such a matching story would be difficult for creationists to explain. Since effectively NO cultures have such a story the Biblical flood account can't be true. It's as simple as that.

The bottom line - flood stories tend to refute rather than support the Biblical flood account.

The Biogeography of Life

In order to attempt to argue against my claim that the biogeography of life on Earth confirms evolution while falsifying the Bible, a creationist referenced the web site at http://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/v13i12f.htm. I challenged him to pick one specific claim made on that site and we could discuss it.

I never received a response. So I examined the web page. I discovered these facts:

1. The author concedes that creationism offers NO explanation for the biogeography of life.

2. The author misrepresents science in his claims.

3. The author misrepresents what his evolutionary sources say.

In other words, the author has to resort to lying to make his points.

Furthermore, the end result is that we see just a bit more of the MOUNTAIN of evidence supporting evolution.

First of all the web site tries to relate the creationism/evolution debate to a legal case. In particular the site says this:

"American courts do not require that you prove someone else committed the crime. You do not need to suggest an alternative to prove you aren't responsible.

"We simply present evidence against evolution, showing that evolution could not be responsible for the origin and diversity of life on Earth. We do not need to prove, or even suggest, any other explanation."

That is a silly, juvenile claim which is wrong for multiple reasons.

The discussion on evolution and creationism is supposedly a SCIENTIFIC discussion. In science you present evidence to SUPPORT a claim. Science doesn't work by simply falsifying other hypotheses.

Science is about presenting a hypothesis that is testable and potentially falsifiable. Then you perform the indicated tests and see if it can be falsified.

Scientific hypotheses shouldn't have to make ANY references to other hypotheses. If you defend creationism merely by attacking evolution, you are NOT doing science.

Therefore this is nothing less than a concession that, indeed, creationism has NO explanation for the biodiversity of life. It also a concession that creationism is simply the God of the Gaps argument. Any philosopher will point out that the "God of the Gaps" is a fallacious logical argument (also called a "false dichotomy".)

Moreover, the analogy used on the web site is completely backwards. It is correct when it says that someone defending themselves in a court of law doesn't have prove that someone else did it. The person defending themselves only needs to focus on THEIR OWN defense.

If that is true and if the analogy is valid, then the web site should indeed focus on ITS OWN DEFENSE. In other words, it should be all about creationism and the Bible and shouldn't need to mention evolution at all!

So the argument is wrong for both scientific and logical reasons.

Then the web site says this:

"When evaluating a scientific theory, the proper procedure is to examine all the evidence for and against the theory, then make a decision."

That is an incorrect summary of the scientific process. The web page is effectively saying that science is about looking at the preponderance of the evidence. If, for example, you have five pieces of evidence for a hypothesis and one against, then you accept the hypothesis.

That's wrong and not how science works.

Even one piece of valid evidence against a hypothesis falsifies it. It is almost irrelevant how many supporting pieces of evidence have been found.

Of course that is a stricter set of rules than the web site implies. Nonetheless evolution fully stands up to
that criterion.

The web site then refers to Jerry Coyne's book titled "Why Evolution is True" and says this:

"The biogeography argument really boils down to this: Kangaroos could not have gotten from Noah's ark to Australia. Therefore, the Bible is false, which means evolution must be true."

That is totally and absolutely incorrect.

If evolution could not explain how kangaroos and other marsupials got to Australia, it would be discarded. Plain and simple. That would be true regardless of whether or not the Bible could explain it.

The author of the web page claims that Coyne does not try to find support for the biogeography of life on
Earth, including how marsupials got to Australia. That is a complete and total lie.

On page 102 of his book - the one that the author of this web site is referring to - Coyne says this:

"As for how the marsupials got to Australia, that's part of another evolutionary tale, and one that leads to a testable prediction. The earliest marsupial fossils, around eighty million years old, are found not in Australia for in North America. As marsupials evolved, they spread southward, reaching what is not the tip of South America about forty million years ago. Marsupials made it to Australia roughly ten million years later, where they began diversifying into the 200-odd species that live there today.

"But how could they cross the South Atlantic? The answer is that it didn't yet exist. At the time of the marsupial invasion, South America and Australia were joined as part of the southern supercontinent of Goindwana. This landmass had already begun to break apart, unzipping to form the Atlantic Ocean, but the tip of South America was connected to what is now Antarctica, which in turn was connected to what is now Australia (see figure 21). Since marsupials had to go overland from South America to Australia, they must have passed through Antarctica. So we can predict this: there should be fossil marsupials on Antarctica dating somewhere between 30 and 40 million years ago.

"This hypothesis was strong enough to drive scientists to Antarctica, searching for marsupial fossils. And, sure enough, they found them: more than a dozen species of marsupials (recognized by their distinctive teeth and jaws) unearthed on Seymour Island off the Antarctic Peninsula. This area is right on the ancient ice-free pathway between South America and Antarctica. And the fossils are just the right age: between 35 and 40 million years old."

Coyne includes a couple of additional paragraphs and also some pictures (such as figure 21 referenced above). Surely that is an adequate and complete evolutionary explanation for how marsupials ended up in Australia. It even includes a testable hypothesis - i.e. a SCIENTIFIC hypothesis - that was tested and confirmed. NONE of that explanation refers to the Bible, even indirectly.

Obviously the creationist web site is completely fraudulent.

Was evolution a significant and essential factor in guiding Nazi thought?

The web page at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/a_contest_gets_a_winner_common.php has the argument shown below that Hitler was NOT influenced by Darwin. The author of the argument even counts the words in Mein Kampf to help make their point. The post begins with an answer to the question posed by the subject of this post.

------------------------

No. First of all, as has already been established courtesy of searching through Mein Kampf in detail, Hitler's assorted eructations on nature reproduce well-known creationist canards, including the static species fallacy, and Hitler also asserted that fertile, viable hybrids were impossible, which is manifestly refuted by this scientific paper (among many others):

Speciation By Hybridisation In Heliconius Butterflies, by Jesús Mavárez, Camilo A. Salazar, Eldredge Bermingham, Christian Salcedo, Chris D. Jiggins and Mauricio Linares, Nature, 441: 868-871 (15th June 2006)

Also, even an elementary search of Mein Kampf reveals the following statistics. The number of instances of key words are as follows:

"Darwin" : ZERO

"Almighty" : 6

"God" : 37

"Creator" : 8

Hitler was inspired by the anti-Semitic ravings of one Lanz von Liebenfels, who was a defrocked monk, and whose magnum opus bore the Pythonesque title of Theozoology, Or The Account Of The Sodomite Apelings And The Divine Electron. This was in effect a warped Biblical exegesis, which rewrites the Crucifixion story, and also contains a mediaeval bestiary replete with instances of Liebenfels' florid imagination.

Additionally, the Nazis placed textbooks on evolutionary biology on their list of seditious books to be burned, as illustrated nicely here, where we learn that in 1935, Nazi guidelines with respect to seditious books included:

6. Schriften weltanschaulichen und lebenskundlichen Charakters, deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklärung eines primitiven Darwinismus und Monismus ist (Häckel).

Translated into English, this reads:

Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel)

The evidence is therefore conclusive. Nazism was not inspired by evolution, and indeed, much of Hitler's own writings are creationist in tone. The Nazis destroyed evolutionary textbooks as seditious (much as modern day creationists would love to), and the Nazi view of the biosphere is wholly at variance with genuine evolutionary theory, involving fatuous views of race "purification" by the establishment of monocultures that are the very antithesis of genuine evolutionary thought, which relies upon genetic diversity.

Why Evolution is true

I found this paragraph on pp. 222-223 of Jerry Coyne's book "Why Evolution is True". I found it quite striking and absolutely true:

"Every day hundreds of observations and experiments pour into the hopper of the scientific literature.
Many of them don't have much to do with evolution - they're observations about details of physiology, biochemistry, development, and so on - but many of them do. And every fact that has something to do
with evolution confirms its truth. Every fossil that we find, every DNA molecule that we sequence, every
organ system that we dissect supports the idea that species evolved from common ancestors. Despite innumerable possible observations that could prove evolution untrue, we don't have a single one. We don't find mammals in precambrian rocks, humans in the same layers as dinosaur, or any other fossils out of evolutionary order. DNA sequencing supports the evolutionary relationships of species originally deduced from the fossil record. And, as natural selection predicts, we find no species with adaptations that benefit only a different species. We do find dead genes and vestigial organs, incomprehensible under the idea of special creation. Despite a million chances to be wrong, evolution always comes up right. That is as close as we can get to a scientific truth."

How could creationism not be dishonest?

An excellent video is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpeHrkbx9LU

It proves how dishonest creationists are. The video isn't too long - going 11 minutes. The video is of an
evolutionist named AronRa replying to claims that it is evolutionists who are dishonest.

As just a single example of what is on the video, the claim is made that there are only two types of creationist arguments:

1. Blind speculation, asserted as fact, but without any supportive evidence whatsoever and can never be disproved.

2. Erroneous claims, often repeated as true despite the knowledge that they have already been disproven.

There is NO third category.

He's right.

That's why we KNOW that there is NO scientific evidence supporting creationism.