Let us for a moment, grant the unseen heavenly forces with a free pass to shirk the aforementioned responsibility to provide evidence for the extraordinary claims they make. Let us assume now that a simple book will suffice, as opposed to any actual supernatural evidence. It is a fact that Jehovah threatens you and I with death should we fail to believe in him and act on said belief. Given that his book, the Bible, is to be our only direct communication from him, would it not be reasonable to expect that he would give us enough detail within that book to form the belief he requires to prevent him slaughtering us? The answer must surely be affirmative.
The uncomfortable reality, however, is that an examination of the Bible's opening chapter, Genesis 1, will leave our scalps read-raw from befuddled scratching. Genesis 1 claims that God created day and night, as well as plant life, before he created the sun.
What explanation would Jehovah's organisation give to this puzzling account? Well, according to the book Insight on the Scriptures, "apparently, a swaddling band of cloud prevented the sun from being visible from Earth up until Jehovah removed it in verse 14". The crux, if you'll excuse the pun, of their explanation is that one must visualise the account as if it is being told from the perspective of an observer on the Earth.
This is a lousy and altogether unsatisfactory explanation for a number of patently obvious reasons. Firstly, what band of swaddling dust? The account in Genesis mentions no such dust. One cannot simply invent a cloud of dust in order to make the story make sense. Especially when one has claimed that the story in question was written by a perfect being who demands we believe in him, and is 'pitching his opening gambit', so to speak. But, for the sake of argument, lets (for the moment) grant the notion that this band of dust did indeed exist,and that the sun was not visible from the Earth before it was removed, AND let us grant the notion that the story is written from the perspective of an observer here on the surface of our fair planet.
The account still makes no sense. The complex ecosystem of plant-life simply could not exist if the sun's light were to be obscured to point that an observer on Earth could not see it. For the same reasons as why certain plants only grow in tropical climates, a swaddling band of dust would outright prohibit the existence of our planet's foliage. Now, you may wish to argue and invent yet more "get-out" clauses for the creator in his half-baked creation account. However, you would still have to account for the fact that he deliberately recorded the first chapter of his own life-story in a manner which is incongruent and virtually irreconcilable for a person with a basic understanding of photosynthesis. And then he threatens to destroy those who do not believe in him. This is simply inexcusable.
There is yet another headache symptomatic of this 'dust' explanation. If the Moon too was only visible once this dust band was removed, then the dust must have extended all the way inside the Moon's orbit. If the dust was as opaque as would be required to obscure the Sun and Moon, then when the sun's light shone on this sphere of dust which closely surrounded our planet, the whole thing would glow and reflect the sunlight. This would make it near impossible for an observer on Earth to make any kind of day-night distinction, because during the day, the Sun's light would be blocked to the extent to which the disc of the sun was invisible. During the 'night', the dust surrounding the Earth would reflect so much light that an observer would be able to see almost as clearly as he would have in the 'day'.
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| A band of dust within lunar orbit would glow to the observer below. |
The frustration is only exacerbated by the addition of dinosaurs to the already uncomfortable creation story as told in the Bible. It is an unfortunate fact that the Bible makes no direct mention of dinosaurs. Now before we launch into a knee-jerk defence of the Bible, providing it with yet another set of get out clauses (we're still only on its opening page) let us first understand what the dinosaurs mean to the creation story.
The stock answer for "what about the dinosaurs" would be, "well, Jehovah must have had a purpose for them. Perhaps they were created to tame the Earth?" Well, let us think about that seriously and critically fora moment. First of all, think of the overall ecosystem of which the dinosaurs formed a part. As every school-child knows, the dinosaurs were certainly not teddy bears; most of them were terrifying, carnivorous killers who boasted inches-long razor teeth. It is also awkwardly common knowledge that the dinosaurs lived over a period of time from 230 million to 65 million years ago. This means that there were over 100 million years of dinosaurs being born, living, and dying. Not just dying, mind you, they often died horribly. If they weren't ripped apart by the jaws of a predator, they died of cancers, abscesses and infections. In fact, they had the full range of diseases that we have today- the diseases that the Bible claims are a result of Adam's sin!
Below is an example of a Dental infection more than 200 million years old from a Labidosaurus fossil.
The overriding issue is that we have not even got more than a page into the Bible, our sole means of testing the legitimacy of God and Christianity as a whole, and we are already having to make a great deal of embarrassing mitigations and quasi-explanations to make the story fit with observed reality. Would this really be the case if the book in question was indeed divinely authored? Clearly the answer must be a resounding, "no".
The list of awkward inconsistencies grows with each word penned in the so-called divine record, so let's examine a few more from the creation account. We are now presented with a plethora of shoehorned distinctions between phrases in the account which are "figurative" and phrases that are literal. For example, creating the sun, moon and stars was literal but the time periods (days) stated are figurative. The talking snake is literal, but his punishment (crawling on his belly) was 'figurative'. Why is it that this arbitrary distinction always seems to be made to excuse the parts of the story that are clearly nonsense?
For example, we know now the age of the universe, some 13.75 billion years. We also know the age of the Earth, around 4 billion years old. We know that plants and animals have been in existence for most of those 4 billion years. Make no mistake; up until our scientific prowess endowed us with the ability to calculate and confirm these facts, creationists (including Jehovah's Witnesses) would have firmly believed that the Earth was created about 6,000 years ago as Genesis seemingly implies. However, once our civilisation developed the mental and technological capacity to discover the true age of the planet and species on it, the 'days' are suddenly relegated to a status of 'figurative', in order to make the account still make sense. Once we discovered photosynthesis, the "swaddling band of dust" is concocted by creationists to account for why the sun is apparently made after the plants.
To drive the point home even farther, let us now explore a
brief history of the universe according to the scientific observations mankind
had made. As we explore, I will endeavour where possible to explain not only what we know, but how we know it. The reason this exercise will be useful is that it
by spending some time objectively walking through the universe you will quickly
see how nonsensical the Genesis account is when juxtaposed against reality.
In the early part of the twentieth century, an astronomer
named Edwin Hubble made a series of (at the time) remarkable observations about
the universe. From his observations, Hubble pioneered the idea that the
universe was full of galaxies just like our own Milky Way, and that these
galaxies lay at distances unimaginably far away from us. In 1929, he took that
discovery a step further. Hubble carefully observed the galaxies, and
calculated the speed and direction in which they appeared to be moving,
relative to Earth. Puzzlingly, they all without fail fit a trend which few had
expected; every single galaxy was moving away from us. Not only was each galaxy
in the sky moving away from us, but the further away the galaxy was, the faster
it was moving. It was as if the whole universe was expanding away from us at an
alarming rate. In subsequent years, this observation was conclusively confirmed,
and we now know that every single galaxy is moving away from every single other
galaxy as the universe expands. It obviously follows that, if you rewind time,
the universe would shrink down to a point. This was our first clue as to how
the universe began.
Around the same time as Hubble was blazing his scientific
trail, another perhaps more famous scientist, Albert Einstein, was blazing one
of his own. Einstein was churning out scientific theories at an astonishing
rate. One of the invaluable products of Einstein’s work was the greater
understanding of how electromagnetic processes, in particular light, operate in
the universe. Using Einstein’s theories, we can predict the path that light
will take from any given point in space to another point, and, importantly, the
time it will take to get there. This is because light has a finite speed,
around 186,000 miles per second. Another way of describing the speed of light
is “one light-year per year”. This seems like a foolishly obvious statement to
make, but I shall make it anyway. To reiterate, it takes light exactly one year
to travel a light-year. So, for example, the nearest star to Earth, Proxima
Centauri, is about 4 light-years away. So when we look up at that star, we are
seeing it as it was 4 years ago, as it has taken light 4 years to travel the
distance from the star to our eye-ball. What does this have to do with the
universe?
Well, this ability to ‘look back in time’ affords
astrophysicists with a tantalising opportunity to see what the universe looked
like in the past. Using equipment like the appropriately named Hubble Space
Telescope, we have observed stars and galaxies as far as 12 billion light years
away. Given that the universe is about 13 billion years old, we are now
qualified to make some strong scientific statements about the universes origin
because, in a way, we can almost ‘see’ it for ourselves. What does this look
back in time reveal? Well, the observed objects fit in perfectly with the Big
Bang theory. They contain all of the chemical compounds in the exact quantities
we would expect if the universe had bust into existence, with simpler elements
existing first. This is an important point, because it throws a missive spanner
into the machine of the Genesis account.
If the universe were created, then there would be no logical
reason to expect that elements would be distributed in this way. The
distribution and ratios of elements in the universe is exactly what you’d
expect to see of an unguided explosive start to the universe, not a measured creation event.
This unguided, explosive origin theory can be cemented as
reality as opposed to the creation account with one final flight through
scientific history. After Hubble made his observations, and the Big Bang became
an increasingly plausible theory as to the origin of the universe, scientists
began to suggest ways to conclusively test whether such an explosive origin was
really the case. The most concrete test was proposed in 1948 by two scientists-
Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman. They postulated that if indeed the universe had
an explosive origin, then we should be able to observe the ‘after-glow’ of said
explosion, but due to the age of the universe that after-glow would have cooled
to the point where it could only be detected as background microwave radiation at
a certain temperature. It was over a decade later, in 1965, when two scientists
named Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson built a radio telescope which was actually intended for
experiments in communication and astronomy. However, they stumbled across a
strange background glow of radiation at very near the temperature Alpher and
Herman predicted over a decade earlier. They had inadvertently stumbled across conclusive proof of
the Big Bang – they were looking at the afterglow of the explosion that gave
birth to the universe.
So, we know now that, 13.7 or so billion years ago our
universe burst into existence in a violent manner. It has, over time, cooled
and expanded, and formed complex structures like stars and galaxies. How, if
unguided, do these objects form? Well, there are entire books and fields of
study devoted to stellar formation, planetary formation, and astrophysics in
general. But to sum up a long story, the process occurs through a yo-yo between
gravitational collapse and explosive nuclear fusion. In the very
early universe, the simplest particles interacted with each other through
nothing but gravity and nuclear forces. Due to the gravitational attraction these particles felt to each other, they quickly formed ‘clumps’, which in turn attract still more particles. Eventually,
the ‘clump’ weighs so much that the atoms inside fuse together to form heavier
atoms, releasing an enormous amount of energy. This process is called nuclear
fusion, and is how stars work. These early stars would grow and grow, forming
heavier elements through fusion. When the star dies, it releases these elements
back out into the universe, often in violent explosions called ‘supernovas’. This
is where all of the complex, heavy elements in the universe come from. You and
I, the rocks and metals beneath our feet, everything is made from what was
originally star dust. We know this because we can observe the process happening
to this day. Ironically, the picture on the cover ‘creator’ book published by
Jehovah’s Witnesses is a photograph of this exact process happening, unguided
and independent.
As time moved on, the stars became gravitationally attracted to each other, forming clusters of stars- the earliest galaxies. This process repeats itself over time and we end up with the complex structure we see today, over 13 billion years later. Around each star, clouds of particles collapse under gravity into planets, moons, asteroids, and comets. Again, this happens due to gravity, with no external guiding force. We know this because we have observed it happening thought the universe. It is probably wise of me to state that this in no way relates to the ‘swaddling band of dust’ proposed by the insight book, as the dust formed by planetary formation would have disappeared over a billion years before even microbes existed on the planet, let alone the plant-life.
The evolution of the cosmos is, in essence, a simple tale of two characters: cooling and time. Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state at the time of the Big Bang. Fast-forward a few billion years (time) and the universe has cooled (cooling). Given those two things, time and cooling, the universe has formed complex and sometimes beautiful structures with no supernatural intervention. In a way, this is a lot like a snow flake. If you had no idea what a snow flake was, you’d be excused for thinking at first glance that it was artificial due to its complex and often beautiful appearance. But the snowflake is simply a product of time and cooling. Take some water, and cool it over a few minutes, and the snowflake will form naturally, based on nothing other than random chance and atomic forces. The same is true of the universe; you may be excused for at first thinking that the apparent complexity and beauty precludes it from being anything other than a direct creation. However, we have had the ability to look back in time, and find that this is simply not the case. It is a product of nothing other than time and cooling. You may say “aha! But where did the big bang come from?” but all you've done by that statement is reduce god to nothing more than a 'cosmic detonator'- certainly not someone who deliberately created things separately, and in the order described in Genesis 1.
It is easy to see why, on reflection, the Genesis account
comes across as a myth. The process described by science which we have just
investigated is the antithesis of what is recorded in Genesis. There could
be no way that a creator would record Genesis 1 so shoddily, knowing that we
would be able to observe all of the processes we have discussed. The assumption
that there is a creator is a bold one, especially when, to quote Christopher
Hitchens, “the universe works perfectly well without that assumption”.
Surely if the book was truly of divine authorship, our basic observations of the universe would tie in seamlessly with the account, without the need to make excuses for why the account is not a work of fiction. Especially as Jehovah threatens to kill us if we do not acknowledge him. Again, what is more likely, that 6,000 years ago a talking snake derailed our civilisation, or that it is a nonsensical Jewish myth which gives a laughable explanation for why snakes don't have legs?
It is safe to say that the "inspired record" is not off to a good start, if it's job is to convince we modern humans that Jehovah is real and is the true, perfect loving God he claims to be. And this alarming trend only worsens in the ensuing chapters, and the Bible as a whole.
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