And God Said ...

A spooky bit of Science.

That's Felix Whatshisname's balloon; the man who jumped out 24 miles up. Don't tell me that's got something to do with the Bible?

I said this was a spooky bit of science and you'll probably think it's even more far fetched but ...

... do you remember this?

Er, possibly? It's a map of the sky showing radiation stuff that proves that we had a big bang ...

Big inflation!

... OK big inflation; a beginning, something from nothing, just like the Bible says.

Absolutely, but why is it speckled.

I guess because it's got lumpy bits in it.

And those lumpy bits of matter sort of clumped together to form stars and, eventually, planet Earth. Remember, stuff condensed like steam on a cold window.

So it's lumpy - so what?

Well it shouldn't be lumpy. All the calculations, all the clever maths, points to a nice smooth inflation.

But if there weren't lumps we wouldn't be here talking about it! Now that is spooky.

But it gets even spookier. To investigate the lumps, they sent a balloon up ...

click on the picture to see it enlarged

... and they did even more tricky calculations ...

..and found that the lumpiness was caused by sound waves!

Sound? Where from? Space is empty!

Go on, what does the bible say?

Surely not? That's really weird!

Then God said, “Let there be light”

Then God said, “Let there be a dome ..."

Then God said, “Let the water come together ..."

Then God said, “Let lights appear in the sky ... "

Then God said, “Let the water be filled ..."

Then God said, “And now we will make human beings"

Are you telling me that the lumpiness is scientifically proved to be the Voice of God?

I couldn't claim that; not yet at least. BUT, yet again, it shows that the people who wrote the Bible down seemed to have a pretty good idea about things which would not be discovered for another 4000 years. If nothing else it IS spooky.

Can we have something nice and simple please. My brain is hurting even more!

Yes. On Tuesday a simple little poem!

Cool!

 Next Bible Blog : Tuesday 23rd October 

What a Difference a Day Makes!

Six Days or 13.7 billion years?

What a difference a day makes
Twenty-four little hours
Brought the sun and the flowers
Where there used to be nought

And so the whole universe was completed. By the seventh day God finished what he had been doing and stopped working. He blessed the seventh day and set it apart as a special day, because by that day he had completed his creation and stopped working. And that is how the universe was created.

Well, you said you'd try to get out of this one.

I've got a questions for you.

Do I see a trick question coming?

Not at all; a very factual question. When Mrs Armitage next door had her baby girl last year what did you pop through the letter box?

A card, of course.

A what was the picture on the card?

It was a stork, carrying a baby.

Why?

You wouldn't send a picture of mum in the delivery room, would you? Best wishes, Mrs Armitage, glad to see you successfully had sex with Mr Armitrage! Its just a simple baby-ish picture to show where kids come from without the messy bit.

So how would you explain the hugeness of the origin of the universe to people who knew nothing of modern cosmology? You would use a simple picture.

Six days?

And another question: how long is a day?

I'm sure that '24 hours' must be the WRONG answer!

The planet Venus rotates slowly, so a "day" there is about 243 days on earth! Plenty of time each day, then, for homework!"

Plenty of time for playing MP3 tracks!

Out in the universe a "day" could be any length you could imagine.and certainly any length that an infinite God might choose! Even the bible says:-

A thousand years is like a day in God's sight

There's no reason for "God days" to be the same as "earth days". If there is a God then he is outside of space and time. That's what "God" means. So God could, in theory, have created everything instantly. That's what it would seem like to us. God doesn't need days!

I'm beginning to understand.

And one last thing. What does the Bible actually say? And not what you think it says.

"On day one God created light", doesn't it?

Evening passed and morning came—that was the first day.

Evening passed and morning came—that was the second day.

Evening passed and morning came—that was the third day.

O K, I get the point. But I never really noticed. From evening to morning is one night, not even 24 hours. Now I am confused. I never realised ...

And those are the words used in ancient Hebrew as well. There is not the slightest reason to think that the words of Genesis Chapter 1 were ever meant to be taken literally. People in the past have chosen to take them literally, perhaps because it was easier for them to understand. Remember, time is irrelevant to an infinite God.

My brain hurts!

And how about this for a spooky thought? An infinite God could have created the whole universe right now in the last second. He could have put all history and scientific discovery in the brains of humans so we think it's old and we think we know stuff.

That's ridiculous.

How would you know if he did? And there's something even more spooky ... but that can wait until Sunday.

 Next Bible Blog : Sunday 21st October 

Nature or Nurture? Chance or Plan?

I'm getting more and more confused

And I'm not surprised.

People say that Darwin explained everything; but he didn't. Now we've got Darwin and genetics to think about. And their ideas don't match up.

And neither can explain everything. Neither debate explains how a sea cucumber might sprout a couple of eyes!

Or even why giraffes have long necks.

Come on, that's easy; it's so they can reach tasty stuff high up in trees.

Really? Have you ever seen a Giraffe drink? A long neck is a disadvantage here!

Ouch! That looks painful! O.K. What do you believe, Mr Clever?

Simple answer or complicated answer?

Simple per-lease!

The Bible wasn't interested in how God made the world, plants and you and me. The writers, probably around 4,000 years ago, had no knowledge of modern science; but they were keen to show that the beginning of life, the universe and everything was part of a grand plan and not a freak accident.

But they didn't really understand the plan. Anyway, I don't feel like a freak accident.

Correct.

So they had a good guess?

Which turned out to be a remarkably good guess. Believers would say that they were "in-spired"; that an infinite God breathed the ideas into mens' minds.

As in "re-spiration" and "ex-spired"? A bit far-fetched, isn't it?

How else do you explain it?

GOD : The earth was formless and empty.
SCIENCE : It all came from nothing - the singularity.

GOD : Let there be light!
SCIENCE : Within seconds of the big bang the universe was full of photons - light.

GOD : Made a dome to separate the earth from the sky.
SCIENCE : Eventually stars and planets condensed to form solid masses.

GOD : Let the earth produce all kinds of plants.
SCIENCE : Simple plant life forms and develops.

GOD : Made the sun and the moon. He also made the stars.
 SCIENCE : An oxygen-rich atmosphere develops; clear blue skies. Universe "appears".

GOD : Let the waters be filled with many kinds of living beings.
SCIENCE : Animal life (fish and stuff) begins in the sea.

GOD : Let the earth produce all kinds of animal life.
SCIENCE : Land animals and, specially, man and woman.

You might just begin to convince me that God fits in there - somewhere; BUT the Bible has got one thing so wrong that I just can't accept it.

And what's that?

God created the universe in seven days.

No way! 13.7 billion years.

Well, then, we had better think about hat the Bible actually says ...

You'll have difficulty getting out of this one!

 Next Bible Blog : Thursday 18th October 

Discovering Darwin's Designs (2)

So Bishop Ussher messed it up by stating that the world was created by God in 4000BC.

A crackpot idea.

It's easy to blame someone with hindsight, but his opinion was good enough for the science of the day. The fact the Ussher's dates were then printed in many bibles made them look "official"!

Which they never were! That made the problem worse.

So when this bloke came along, about 100 years after Ussher ...

... the aggro started getting a bit bitter and twisted. He was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. Born 1707, Died 1788.

What did he say?

He said a lot about a lot. He's famous for the "Buffon Needle Problem". If you have well over 10,000 needles and you drop them one-by-one onto a table marked out with straight lines, you can actually calculate pi.

Don't tell me needles have got something to do with the Bible

Absolutely nothing, but I thought you might be interested. Anyway, his particular claim to fame is that he said that the earth was about 75,000 years old, not 6,000. Because of this, he was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church and his books were publicly burned.

Nice people these Christians!

Our next guest is this man:-

Jean Baptiste Lamarck. Born 1744, Died 1829 He suggested that animals changed; got more "clever" and complicated over many many years. Animals, he said, learn to adapt to their environment and this changes them permanently.

So Darwin wasn't the first to talk about evolution? Or the first to to upset he Christians?

Lamarck caused a real kerfuffle! Some Christians did not like it at all. It might suggest that God didn't create all living creatures. Blasphemy!

But, surely, things do change, don't they?

Of course they do, and it's daft to say they don't! It's always been daft to say they don't. Anyway, off goes Darwin on "The Beagle" and starts writing down what he sees.

I'll bet Darwin didn't look like that, even on the voyage.

But it was when he saw people and animals that were very different from those he recognised, that he started thinking. The picture is of a  resident of Tierra del Fuego; the bottommost tip of South America. And we've all heard of his time at the Galapagos Islands ...

Here he studied the animal life very carefully. It seemed that animals in the Galapagos Islands were similar to animals elsewhere; but in some ways different. He wanted to know 'Why?' and 'How?'

Something to do with finches?

So when he got home, he started thinking very hard indeed. For example, he looked at different shapes and sizes of birds.

Each of these finches has a slightly different beak, because, suggested Darwin, each of the varieties eats a different sort of food; so their beaks have changed. They have adapted to their particular needs.

So it's not looking good for the Bible and Creation.

That's what so many people think; but perhaps such people don't really know what the Bible actually says. We'll do a bit of hard thinking on Thursday!

Thinking? That's too hard!

When I look at the sky, which you have made, at the moon and the stars, which you set in their places; what are human beings, that you think of them; mere mortals, that you care for them? Yet you made them inferior only to yourself.

 Next Bible Blog : Thursday 4th September 

Discovering Darwin's Designs (1)

So did Charles Darwin believe in God?

Actually, for most of his life he did; but he did begin to think that God might have, sort of, set the universe running and then sorting itself out and making itself better. He did stop believing in God when his daughter, Anne Elizabeth, died at the age of 10.

She is buried in the graveyard of Great Malvern Priory. Her dad had taken her there to drink the "healthy waters". He was heart-broken when it didn't work. 

That must have been tough for him. So it was then that Mr Darwin set out to prove the Bible was rubbish?

NO, NO and a thousand times, NO! He knew that his ideas would upset some people and he was saddened by that. But most Christians thought he was simply explaining how God created, not disproving it.

For Darwin, it all started with an invitation to take a trip on a boat.

HMS Beagle

Captain Robert Fitzroy's Second expedition

set sail 27th December 1831.

Returned to England 2nd October 1836

Its five year mission was to seek out new life and civilisations, to boldy go where no man had gone before.

The route of Darwin's voyage on "The Beagle"

[click on the image to enlarge]

Darwin's job was to keep a careful record of all that they saw on their epic journey. It was exactly what he saw that started him thinking about how animals change and where different species have come from.

So this is where all the arguments started?

Not really. We need to go about 200 years back in history. The problems probably began with this man.

James Ussher, Bishop of Armagh (in Ireland). Born 1581, Died 1656

Lived at the time of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I.

He was a real "brain box"!

He calculated the God had created the world in the night before 23rd October 4004 BC!

A bit out; if the 'big bang' happened over 13 billion years ago. What a wally!

That's unfair. Many great thinkers came up with similar dates; they simply added up the ages of the people mentioned in the Bible; and it all made sense. Well, it made sense to them.

The great Isaac Newton came up with a date of approx. 4000 BC. Remember, all science was pretty basic then.

The first paragraphs of Bishop Usshers book. This is a translation into English. Like most clever people of his day, he wrote in latin. Sometimes the letter "s" was printed to look like "f"; "firft" is "first" ; "funday" is "sunday"!

This is the same passage with modern English letters and spelling:-

In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth, which beginning of time according to our chronology, fell upon the entrance of the night preceding the twentythird day of October in the year 4004.

Upon the first day, therefore, of the world, or October 23rd, being our Sunday, God, together with Highest Heaven, created the Angels.

Then having finished, as it were, the 'roof' of his 'building', he fell in hand with the foundation of this wonderful fabric of the world.

He fashioned this lowermost Globe, consisting of the deep; and of the earth; all the choirs of Angels singing together and magnifying his name.

And when the earth was void and without form, and darkness covered the deep. On the very middle of the first day LIGHT was created.

Everyone thought that his ideas were so good that they started printing his dates on the pages of the Bible; e.g. Noah entered the Ark in 2448BC as above from fbb's Family Bible. So everyone started believing that the Bish's dates were part of God's Holy Book. So they must be right. It would be blasphemy (like really bad swearing!) to think any other way. In fact they were simply the opinion of one man, not "holy" at all.

So it was the Bish who wrote that the earth was only about 6000 years old, and not 13.7 billion years?

That's right. So when people came up with different ages for the earth, some strict Bible experts started getting a bit shirty. We will think some more next week 'cos fbb and Mrs fbb are very busy with a Harvest Festival service and lunch on Sunday. Apologies.

 Next Bible Blog : Tuesday 2nd October 

the Science of Creation [4]

But what about God creating humans?

But animals first, remember?

Then God commanded, “Let the earth produce all kinds of animal life: domestic and wild, large and small”; and it was done. So God made them all, and he was pleased with what he saw.

Go on; show me some really weird animals!

O.K. You asked for it!

Thylacine (extinct)

Aye-aye

Colugo

Glis-glis

Bilby

Dugong

Human

The wierd human is Carl von Linné [Linnaeus], born 1707, died 1778. He invented the system for naming all living creatures. In his system, the thylacine is (was!) "thylacinus cynosephalus", the glis-glis is "myoxus glis", the human is "homo sapiens"; that means "wise man".

So man is just a clever monkey, right?

In fact, that is one of the most misleading pictures that have even been drawn. As usual, various clever people don't agree completely but a simple explanation might be that man [homo sapiens] and the family of apes might, ages and ages ago; millions of years ago, have had "ancestors" in common.

The pink arrow illustrates the idea that the branch of evolution (or the branch of creation!) that leads to humans branched very very early indeed. That's the most modern theory.

After all, although we've all got some of the same bits; but a very large number of different bits!

One expert has said that humans have more bits in common with a hedgehog than with a gorilla. Remember, none of the modern theories that try to explain where we come from have ever said than man was descended from the apes!

Anyway here is a version of the man-to-ape picture as above.

 It suggests that mankind has not "evolved" very much. We have become "monkeys" sitting in front of a computer!

 Don't look at me like that - I don't spend FOR EVER on my laptop!

Anyway... Doesn't the Bible say that God created man specially?

Oh, yes!

And now we will make human beings; they will be like us and resemble us. They will have power over the fish, the birds, and all animals, domestic and wild, large and small.” So God created human beings, making them to be like himself. He created them male and female, blessed them, and said, “Have many children, so that your descendants will live all over the earth and bring it under their control. I am putting you in charge of the fish, the birds, and all the wild animals.

And doesn't Darwin's evolution thing show that the Bible is all wrong anyway?

Aha! The great "evolution versus the Bible" debate! Probably the biggest and most pointless argument since the Church burnt people at the stake for saying that the earth was in orbit round the sun and was not the centre of the universe!

And this is the man at the centre of the argument!

Charles Robert Darwin, naturalist and geologist. Born 1809, Died 1882

I thought he had a huge beard?

That's typical of the problem with Darwin. So many people think they know about Darwin, what he thought and what he wrote. But so often they are repeating things that other people have said about Darwin; things that are either half-truths or often completely wrong.

Like what?

Like when Darwin published his famous book, almost all the Churches and Christian groups though it was absolutely wonderful; they didn't object at all.

That's not what I've been taught at school. So was Darwin wrong or right?

To answer that, we need to know much more bout him and the people that had similar ideas to him.

 Next Bible Blog : Thursday 26th September 

the Science of Creation [3]

Life has Landed

and humans represent a very small selection of vertebrates, which in turn makes up only about one hundredth of all the living creatures on earth.

Then God commanded, “Let the water be filled with many kinds of living beings, and let the air be filled with birds.” So God created the great sea monsters, all kinds of creatures that live in the water, and all kinds of birds. And God was pleased with what he saw. He blessed them all and told the creatures that live in the water to reproduce and to fill the sea, and he told the birds to increase in number. Then God commanded, “Let the earth produce all kinds of animal life: domestic and wild, large and small" and it was done.

But surely, everything evolved. Nothing to do with God?

 1  is algae, descended from that primeval slime - the very beginnings of life.

 2  is a sea cucumber; an animal but not much more than a tube; with food in at the front and poo out at the back. It has no eyes, and some varieties live in the deepest and most inhospitable parts of our oceans.

 3  is a squid, descended from prehistoric creatures and still looking much like its ancient ancestors.

 4  is a coelacanth (pronounced 'seal-a-canth') and that is a prehistoric creature!

Ugly brute; but what's this go to do with evolution?

On December 23rd 1938 this fish was discovered. It was an unknown species and a powerful purple colour. The woman in the picture (Marjorie Courtnay-Latimer) took it to an expert who realised that it was a coelacanth which everybody thought was extinct!

In fact, fossil records suggest the the first coelacanths appeared 410 million years ago! That makes it the oldest fishy species still surviving.

It certainly looks a bit prehistoric.

The problem is that none of these creatures has "evolved" much since, well, almost for ever. Everything has not evolved!

So living animal life began in the sea. Are you telling me that a fish walked up the beach, grew legs, started to breathe air and became a land animal? That's simply not believable.

You are absolutely right, clever teenage person. The most likely explanation is that some form of life moved from sea on to land. But no-one really knows why or how or what it was It is quite hard to imagine how a fish could decide to breathe air normally and move on to land. Why would it want to? Some people have suggested that Land Animals and Sea Animals developed at the same time.

So where does all this leave us?

It shows that, although the Bible version is very simplistic, it does suggest a progession from sea to land. And that progress is under the control of God. It may not be technically right, but, astoundingly, considering when it was written, the basics are "spot on".

But that's not evolution is it? God doing it?

Unfortunately things are not that simple. As we shall begin to see next time. The fat bloke is away this weekend so you'll have to wait a bit longer.

 Next Bible Blog : Tuesday 25th September