I have gazed into the heavens and seen no throne," said a Professor of Earth Science as he quoted a renowned astronomer. I am not particularly surprised. I as much expect to see a throne through a telescope as to see a giant turtle supporting the Earth. I don't believe such a throne to be visible through simple optics.
To be fair, some Earth Science Professors acknowledge that if the wind is right on a bay of the Red Sea, it will part. A meteorology professor even asked that I consider the possibility of Noah's Flood. I have. That is why when I see its veracity thrown out the window on the first day of another class, I get concerned. Religion is important in many students' lives. I believe science and religion can be reconciled.
Let's consider the age of the Earth, as we were encouraged in an earth science class. There are shells on mountain tops, Everest even. The shells were hypothesized by some to be remnants of Noah's flood. Leonardo DaVinci noticed mud embedded in these shells. Seashells on a seashore are filled with sand, mud is carried away by wave action. Shells in rivers have mud. There are no rivers at the top of a mountain. Therefore, the mountains had been raised.
In the Bible, all of creation was six days, the seventh being rest. A passage says one day with the Lord is one thousand years. Little surprise someone put forth the idea the Earth was 6,000 years old. By another method, tracing back the genealogies of Adam and Eve, apparently it was calculated the Earth was formed in 4,004 BC at 8 A.M. Laughs arose in the classroom. Looking at the amount of uranium that has converted to lead within the first meteorites to strike the earth, and knowing the half-life of this process, has allowed for the date of 4.6 billion years to be established.
Here is the irony. What is six days? It is an analogy for time. What happens next in the Earth Science class? We get another analogy for time, the classic one with the months of the year where humans, around for 200,000 years, have only been on the planet the last second of the year that the Earth has been around. We thought of our own analogy. A brick three inches high is a year. Travel at sixty miles per hour up an elevator in a building of such bricks and it takes 150 years.
Well, six days is another analogy, but maybe not calibrated as precisely. A thousand was a larger number than in the realm of human dealings. Practically, maybe it just means more than one could contemplate. Could anyone back then conceive of a thousand years any better than we can 4.6 billion years? Of course, the natural world held lots of thousands. Grains of sand, for instance. And with grains of sand, we get a glimpse at the nature of Biblical analogies. They are vague. When Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac he was stopped, and God said his descendants would number as the sand on a beach. How much sand? It is not precise, it is a metaphor. A metaphor alluded to in Contact, shown in Spaulding last week. Jodie Foster is hurled through a wormhole to heaven, and her father says that many souls have arrived there as he lets sand sift through his fingers back to the beach.
Beyond the loose time element, it checks out. First there was a void, then light. Possibly Big Bang. No note of Bang noise, but, in space, no one can hear you scream, the saying goes. Next comes photosynthetic organisms. Another day finds fish willed into the seas, and birds to the air. Only on the next day are land animals mentioned. Wait a minute. This is a discontinuity. Creatures crawled before they flew.
Yes, it's true, but then dinosaurs are also considered birds. Ask Robert Baker, who claims they are warm blooded. Maybe they were controlled by gigantothermy. Anyway, there is no dispute that a furcula was found on a skeleton of a velociraptor in Mongolia last week. This equates velociraptors with birds. A furcula is a wishbone, found in the first flying dinosaur, Archeopteryx and modern birds. It is a necessary to anchor heavy flight muscles. A keeled sternum also helps. I learned this lesson at a high price. I tried to recreate an Archeopteryx for an animation film for God knows what reason. The reconstruction failed miserably, and the cursed head, all that was left, I threw in my Suburban which later burned up on the road with most of my possessions.
So when you enjoy a turkey dinner are you really savoring dinosaur? Jack Horner, consultant to Steven Spielberg and the man that inspired the character of the paleontologist, says a turkey is a turkey, but a very close relative of a dinosaur. Early birds and dinosaurs are indistinguishable in the absence of feather imprints. So I don't boycott the movie Jurassic Park. After seeing it, I loved it, and it is the one movie I have brought my grandpa to see. His first in years. He slept through the shrieks.
So the consensus in the class became Noah's flood didn't happen. Multiple floods wear down mountains. Well, there was just one giant flood, after which the rainbow was insurance against another.
Considering the flood ... maybe the whole of their known world, which was just a small fraction of the globe, flooded entirely. Pineapple connections off the West coast of the United States sometimes stream moisture all the way from Hawaii to inundate California. Forty days? They may have collected all the animals they knew of. Could happen. People might have died en masse except for those on the Ark. Rumors are that the next Indiana Jones film is banking on it. Indiana Jones is one of the few better than Jurassic Park.
Other science in the Bible? Driving through North Dakota a preacher on the radio mentioned that when one is born, the very hairs on their head are numbered, suggesting genetics. From there he went apocalyptic. The first cells. They were too complex to spontaneously form. Some working in the Earth Science department claim that amino acids organized within the pores of self replicating clays. And so life was breathed into the clay ...
A lot of hints. That is the beauty of it. The book "The Bible Code" would have us believe the organization of the letters themselves is an imbedded pattern. As in the movie Contact, "within the message itself is the means of decoding it." The Bible Code people claim to have predicted the assassination of Yitzak Rabin. Despite the historical errors of interpretation, it is still a Good Book.
