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God would be an atheist...
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April - July 2008: This site is being renovated - apologies if some links do not work. To return to the home page, click here Column 3: How did the koala get to Australia? The holes in Noah's Ark By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 773 Publication date: February 20, 2005 In the original version of this column I wrongly claimed that no turkey could fly. My apologies for the mistake. In this version the turkey has flown off but the basic principle remains. Creationists believe that human beings were created by God within the last 10,000 years. Most are convinced that the Bible is absolutely true, despite the fact that it is full of inconsistencies and frequently contravenes both common sense and science. 45% of Americans are creationists [1] – a resounding testimony to the failure of school boards across the nation to teach simple facts and elementary reasoning. Many things prove creationism wrong, but none more simple than the koala and other animals only found in Australia. How did they get there? Let’s start with Genesis, chapter six, verse five. There we learn that "man" was wicked and his heart was continually evil. That’s a surprise, given that verse four is pretty complimentary about the human race, talking about mighty men of renown. There are no details as to what wickedness was in men’s hearts, but whatever it is – mass murder or masturbation – God is pretty upset about it. Not one for half measures, God decides to kill everybody. He’s omnipotent, so he could cause the whole human race to die immediately and painlessly. But because he’s a sadist, he chooses mass drowning instead. To pile on the agony, he makes it rain for forty days and nights so he can watch thousands, perhaps millions, of people despair and panic as they climb onto rooftops and scramble up mountains, to spend their last moments watching their evil children and wicked babies die. Noah, however, God’s favorite, escapes with his wife, their sons and their wives. God tells him to build a boat to save either two (Genesis 6:19) or seven (Genesis 7:2) of every species from the Flood. At this point Noah is 600 years old, equivalent to someone in his late 40s today. Young enough, it seems, to cut down enough trees to build a vessel 148 yards long, 25 yards wide and 15 yards high without the assistance of power saws, cranes or other modern construction equipment. He probably had some help from his family and he may have contracted some men on God’s death list, even though they were busy plotting evil. And how did Noah motivate them to build a boat that would save his life but not theirs? “No, no… there isn’t going to be a Flood. I just want to give the wife something to look at while she’s washing dishes.” Having built the Ark, Noah then rounds up all the animals, birds and insects and loads them into the boat. It’s not clear if he walked and swam the thousands of miles to the furthest reaches of the planet to collect them or if they were all living nearby. If the latter, we assume that God maintained micro-climates and mini-ecologies where each species from polar bears to hippos, rattlesnakes to duck-billed platypuses could survive - a trick he seems to have forgotten. Anyway, it rains a lot and it takes about a year before the waters subside enough for everyone to get off the Ark and stretch their legs. More questions present themselves. If the earth was totally flooded, all plant life would have died; how did one olive tree survive? What did carnivores eat, both on the boat and after they got off? Assuming the two lions were hungry and the only two antelopes in the world pranced by, did the lions pounce or did they say - no, please, we'll starve for a year or so while you two mate, produce enough offspring to continue the species, and then we'll eat you? And how did everyone get home? Plenty of species live far from Mount Ararat, where the Ark came to rest. Which brings us to the koala. How did it make its way from Turkey to Australia, especially without the fresh eucalyptus leaves they need every day? How did the sloth make its way back to South America? And what about all the other animals and insects that are only found on islands and continents thousands of miles from Ararat? Creationists’ response to every objection is “God did it”. During the flood he placed all the animals in suspended animation. After it, he planted fast-growing seeds everywhere and flew everyone back to their natural habitats. Which leads to another question. If the Bible really is the word of God, why didn’t he mention these miracles? Was he suffering from Divine amnesia? The real issue here is not creationism or evolution but the inability of the average American to distinguish fact from fiction and make reasonable deductions from the available evidence. Is it my imagination, or is that failure reflected in other aspects of the nation’s life? 1. Gallup News Service
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If God existed, he would... If God existed, he would be an atheist. Looking for... sex? drugs? Jesus? Search this site FOOD FOR THOUGHT "Today belief in God is crazy, pointless and sometimes downright harmful, but that wasn't always the case. Religion helped us evolve from primates dominated by short-term instinct into human beings capable of forming sophisticated societies." The evolution of religion "The United States prides itself on championing freedom and in enshrining the pursuit of happiness in its constitution. It is ironic that so many Americans espouse a moral code whose impact is to restrict both freedom and happiness. America needs moral values, but values that respect and honor every citizen." What moral values? "In 2002, seven women were ordained priests. Wasn’t that great, especially since the Church has a problem recruiting young men to the priesthood? So what was the Pope’s response to these people who wanted to serve God? He threw up his hands in horror at the fact that the seven had the spiritual, but not the physical, balls to be priests and excommunicated them." Men only |