I'm also curious as to what makes the Parkers (or the review writer) think that

Records of ancient peoples that show evidence of abilities in art, science, business, and technology

For a good, child-friendly book to counter this claptrap, I suggest Jay Hosler's _The Sandwalk Adventures_ (info at http://www.jayhosler.com/Sandwalk.html). It's got the audacity to counter creationist arguments using a metaphor that involves no less than Charles Darwin himself.

The premise is that a follicle mite named Mara who lives in Charles Darwin's eyebrow discovers that her host is not, in fact, God, whereupon she makes the dual mistakes of getting Darwin to explain evolution to her AND trying to spread this knowledge to her blissfully ignorant follicle mite friends. Hilarity ensues.

It's actually a pretty good primer on Darwin's theories, and counters a bunch of the awful science that's taught in elementary school. Fun for the whole Evil Secular Humanist Family!

-- Ed

Boy, that plot synopsis sounded a lot better in my head...

I also realize I forgot to flog Hosler's _Clan Apis_ (http://www.jayhosler.com/clanapis.html), which makes the life cycle of bees a lot more interesting than you'd think it would be.

-- Ed

Books like these can get away with being sloppy because they deliver exactly what buyers are looking for: Superficially convincing arguments. Validation through bullet points. Sunday school talking points. Ammunition for school board meetings.

I find solace in the frequency with which I see volumes like these turn up in the great grey bins of unsorted, unloved, mostly-likely-doomed books at the Goodwill Thrift Outlet.

Can only refer (as I have done in the past) to one of my favorite books, "Biblical Dinosaurs," a sort of Burgess Shale variant creationist text -- it posits that the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel were, in fact, dinosaurs.

Those who doubt the existence of such an prime example of Unintelligent Design may go at once to abebooks.com and order:

Baker, Ronal J.
Biblical Dinosaurs
Klamath Falls, OR: Ronal J. Baker, 1988. Spiral binding/softcover. Very Good/No Jacket. Signed by Author. 4to - over 9e" - 12" tall. 324 pgs. + appendix. Bookseller Inventory #6998
Price: US$ 8.00 (Convert Currency)
Bookseller: Basin Book Trader, Klamath Falls, OR, U.S.A.

God bless us, everyone!

I haven't looked through the other things in TNH's post yet; this sort of thing gives me a headache right in the backs of eyes after a while.

That certainly puts The Malacia Tapestry in a whole new light.

My goodness. Perhaps we should be taking the "Land Before Time" series a lot more seriously.

Does Baker explain how the Judah-bipeds replaced the Israelite-saurs? (A branch in the family through secret wives of Solomon? Or maybe Rehoboam-saur is cursed by a wood Dryad, for his children to be bipeds forever after.)

I haven't picked up the Darwin one yet, but it's on the 'eventually' list -- world enough and time problem, there. Iirc, I found out about these because the tart (http://www.sequentialtart.com) pimped both as very nicely done educational graphic novels (there's that phrase again) once upon a time.

Away in their "stranger than fiction" mind set
The Answers in Genesis crew felt regret;
The list of their arguments held to be true
Was shorter by far than the list to eschew.

Computers at NASA that found a long day
Were found to be fiction, but Grigg's quick to say
That Joshua did battle while God slowed earth's spin --
No effort's too great when you're slaughtering sin.

What Einstein and Darwin believed in the end
Turned out to be lies they could not recommend
To all the dear children trained by Ham's machine
Who find disillusionment by age fifteen.

Besides, all you need is Nellie the Apatosaur to lean against the starbord side, and the whole Ark flips.

That's when I started to worry, because the period we are living in looks just almost exactly like theirs, except for some insignificant surface details.

(Naming the dinosaurs reminds me of what may have been the only memorable joke I saw in Larry Welz's underground comic "Cherry Poptart." In a story called "Cave of the Bear Clan," the Cherry character -- hairstyle like Pebbles Flintstone, of course -- is engaging in a popular form of non-procreative sex. Watching nearby, a bearded primitive caveman is inspired, and says, "I -- I think I'll call it [and here he uses one of the few four-syllable words that 99% of the readers would know]!" Okay, I guess it wasn't all that funny, but in its context, it was real Algonquin Round Table material.)

Some friends and I once spent a long while debating whether or not that site was real or a parody. We eventually gave up the discussion sometime around the thousandth time we moused over the kanga-jew's ears to make them wiggle. Put beside a disembodied spinning lamb's head, what is authenticity, really?

T Rex, hyena of the Jurassic.

Pardon the horn-tootin', I've been waiting for a good time to disseminate that entry to a broader audience...

It trips me out. The literalists say they have all the answers, when according to the Bible in which they purportedly believe it's made repeatedly clear that faith is about learning to accept that one doesn't have all the answers. Bueller?

I suppose it's gauche to edit the editor, 'specially after so much time has passed, but the subjective clause "I recommend" is inadvertently repeated in the sixth graf of the post.

I make that sort of mistake on about every third or fourth post.

That's almost all due to one Jack Horner, a serious and accomplished paleontologist who finds the "controversy" a useful source of publicity (adn thus funding).

It's very hard to find a non-volant terrestrial vertebrate specialized as a scavenger, though all predators will scavenge given the opportunity. (consider what was discovered about hyaena hunting habits after infrared cameras got cheap).

The consensus about tyranosaurids is certainly 'predator'; there are no other large predators known from that ecosystem, and the herbivores all got larger, presumably in response to having a larger tyranosaurid to deal with as the local apex predator.

-l.

"Land of the Lost" and "The Flintstones" get praised for their scientific accuracy. Except that T-Rex was a vegetarian and really wouldn't have eaten any Martians.

You're welcome. I have a certain amount of Pavlovian conditioning about that theory due to one of the mailing lists I hang out on getting it pretty regularly, to the despair of a number of the theropod workers there, so I hope I wasn't overly abrupt.

That's swiped from Peter Dickinson's The Flight of Dragons. And I've just discovered that there is a Rankin-Bass adaptation of that book which also, apparently, incorporates Gordon Dickson's The Dragon and the George. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Anyway. One question about the Noachide flood for which I'm sure They now have a stock answer, but which still should appeal to anyone who has anything even remotely approaching an open mind: If the Flood killed all of the dinosaurs, what killed all of the hundreds of thousands of known aquatic species, like trilobites and fish?

(unless you redefine the word "day" to mean anything you want it to mean, in which case scripture can be read to be consistent with everything else)

Am I the only person ever to have said something like this? Or has this idea come up elsewhere?

I've been reading Marcus Borg's "Reading the Bible Again For The First Time: Taking The Bible Seriously But Not Literally." He makes the distinction between "natural" and "conscious" literalism in interpreting the Bible. A natural literalist believes the Bible is literally true, taking the truth of the Bible for granted. Conscious literalists take nothing for granted; they insist on the literal interpretation of the Bible in the face of all contrary evidence -- as he writes, "it requires 'faith,' understood as believing things hard to believe."

(No, Erik, you're not the first to think about the order of creation. Borg talks about the creation story,.essentially saying the whole Bible, rather than being God's direct revelation to humanity, is humanity's response to the experience of God, and no one ever intended Genesis to be a scientific account of creation.)

Most modern literalists are conscious literalists -- they have to work at their belief, much as Darwinian literalists have to work at their belief in natural selection. Both sides require "faith" (as defined above) to sustain their beliefs. I think the only natural Bible literalists left in the Western world are children and people raised in sheltered circumstances. As a born-again Christian who finds literalism repugnant, I sometimes just want to give these people a good shake and say "God gave you BRAINS, you idiot! Open up and USE them!"

Merry Christmas.

Lee

For those who may doubt, here we go -- as currently available from our friends at abebooks.com:

Radka, Larry Brian
Historical Evidence for Unicorns
Newport, DE, USA: Einhorn Press, 1995. Soft Cover. Very Good. Used. Signed by Author. 152 pages, B/W Photos & Illustrations. Clean, tight & bright, authors inscription on reverse of front cover. Contents include: Ancient Evidence-Sumerian, Egyptian, and Babylonian Unicorns; Godly Evidence-The Assyrians and the Unicorn Hunt; Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Indian Unicorns; Medieval and more recent confirmations of Unicorns; The Unicorns that still Exist Today; The Hebrews; The True Biblical Unicorns. ISBN:0930401816 Bookseller Inventory #004792
Price: US$ 45.00 (Convert Currency)
Bookseller: Timeless Books, Sedona, AZ, U.S.A.

The author as you see employs pagan belief in support of Biblical theory, but hey, whatever works.

I'll further note that the price requested is as ridiculous as the book itself(I found my copy in the dollar bin at the Strand).

This fall, the Park Service also approved a creationist text, 'Grand Canyon: A Different View' for sale in park bookstores and museums. The book by Tom Vail, claims that the Grand Canyon is really only a few thousand years old, developing on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. At the same time, Park Service leadership has blocked publication of guidance for park rangers and other interpretative staff that labeled creationism as lacking any scientific basis."

I may regret this, but just what do you regard as a "Darwinian literalist"?

The real question is, why weren't all the fish (and presumably other aquatic species) also killed by the pH change caused by salt and fresh water mixing.

Coral is another puzzler.

In the end, all I'm trying to say is that those who see things in black and white are rarely correct. My faith leads me to believe in an intelligent creator who is still at work in the world, and my eyes lead me to also believe that in some form evolution works and the earth has been here for billions of years, not just a few thousand. And if God does exist, and if he or she is powerful enough to create a universe, humans make a grave mistake in setting limits on what God can do.

While it is undoubtedly the case that, inside someone's head, there is no way to tell the difference between fact and belief, this is not the case outside people's heads.

So while inside their heads, there are certainly some people who might be called "Darwinian Fundamentalists", that isn't a proper description of everyone who uses (nor most of the people who use) the toolkit evolutionary biology provides to explain the diversity of life.

For one thing, it's explicitly a part of the toolkit that you don't have to believe it; it should work, and does work, in the complete absence of belief.

Rather like how there are Young Earth Creationists making a living as oil exploration geologists; geology as a science operates independently of their belief. And since natural selection also works in computers and in vats of DNA that are being used to solve problems rather than code for living proteins, we can be pretty comfortable that it's not a case of crypto-geological belief in the first example.

For another thing, there has been a very determined effort ever since The Origin of Species was published to find something in the observed diversity of life which natural selection is inadequate to explain. Some of this effort has been made by people who actively loathe natural selection as an explanation, who certainly do not believe it, or who believe it to be necessarily false. Yet, as a toolkit, as a mechanism of explanatory power, natural selection continues to work when those people who despise, detest, and distrust it use it, too.

So far, the effort to find something natural selection is inadequate to explain has not succeeded.

Which is all the answer one can get, in a universe which comes with error bars; "not yet".

The 747 objection either misunderstands or mis-represents (probably mis-represents in the case of the 747; the objection had a lot more plausibility in the early 1800s when it was a watch in a field and an argument for intelligent design) what is actually claimed for the explanatory power of natural selection.

Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable has a good chapter on that objection, if either you or your son is interested.

One of these days I'll read some Dawkins. Thanks for the reference.

It's not my intenet to turn this into a debate over theism versus pure randomness, which I think is beyond the original point of the posting...

Lee

Any attempt to understand creation requires imagining limits on what God might do, since in discerning what He has done, we dismiss all the possible things we've learned He didn't do. A friend once told me how, as a child, she'd asked her fundie parents whether God could make a four-sided triangle. They'd automatically replied that God can do anything, and maintained that position through several rounds of questioning. It was a major blow to her faith.

I knew immediately what I would have told her if I'd been in her parents' situation: That while God could do anything, when he made this universe he decided against having four-sided triangles in it.

...

I'm been thinking about this some more.

People are of course free to believe in any and all varieties of literalism, if that's their pleasure; but those who do should give up this campaign to force rational secular thought to give them its blessing.

Personally, I believe that if God wanted us to have a User's Manual that's both true on a word-by-word basis, and explains everything -- the creation of the universe, the geological formation of our planet, the origins of biological life, the advent of *us*, the existence of sin, death, and evil, the diversity of human languages, the origins and many exciting adventures of His earliest worshippers, not to mention which of them begat which others and how long they lived, plus the history of a series of covenants between God and His Chosen People, and all the rules and commandments He told them to follow -- the whole shebang, moral and natural philosophy with history thrown in -- He'd have given us a document with a higher wordcount, and dawdled less over the specifications for candlesticks.

If you take Genesis and Exodus together, their total wordcount is only a bit over sixty thousand words. That's the length of a short paperback novel -- say, 176 or 188 pages. (The next three books of the Pentateuch, Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy, make a slightly longer paperback novel, 224 or 240 pages.) A hypothetical text the length of Genesis-plus-Exodus that does everything the Creationists say would be a miracle big enough to make the dry-shod crossing of the Red Sea look trivial.

Genesis and Exodus are a series of stories, interspersed with genealogical chronologies and chunks of moral instruction. If every bit of incidental natural science mentioned or implied there were perfectly accurate, bookstores would still not shelve that 188-page Genesis-and-Exodus paperback in the science section, because that's not the kind of book it is. That's not what it's about. Its focus is on the stories and commandments and what they mean, not the bits of incidental worldbuilding detail you get along the way.

What the literalists are demanding is that those incidental worldbuilding details carry the impossible expository burden of encapsulating a universally comprehensible and straightforward system of natural science. I'm not saying they think the document is intended to teach science; I'm saying they expect that the text will always be responsive to scientific questions.

On top of that, they want the text to be responsive in such a way as to make sense to all people in every age of the world. If I hadn't balked earlier, I'd balk here. Language doesn't do that. Natural language won't hold up under that many stresses coming at it from that many directions. A literally accurate account of creation that was comprehensible and satisfactory to one age must needs be inadequate or inscrutable to another. And yet, the text doesn't change. We'd have to either conclude that the account of creation was devised for the people of one era but not for others, or that it wasn't intended to be read in such a fashion. I prefer the latter, since the former has catastrophic implications for the relationship of God to man, and makes the Bible unapproachable by any but gnostics.

If you want a clear example of this problem, see Joshua 10:12-13, where it says the sun and moon stood still while the Israelites were whaling on the Amorites. It's obvious from the rest of the story that the intended meaning is that time slowed down or stopped: the sun ceased to move in the sky. Pick one:

(a.) Copernicus and all the astronomers since him have been wrong, and the sun really does rotate around the earth.

(b.) The sun used to rotate around the earth, but at some point God hit the "switch modes" button on His cosmic orrery, and after that the earth rotated around the sun.

(c.) Thousands of years' worth of listeners and readers would have been deeply and pointlessly confused by a stipulation that on this occasion the earth, moon, and sun ceased to move in relation to each other; and anyway, celestial mechanics weren't the point of the story.

The first two readings are absurd. The third is obvious and commonsensical. Trouble is, the third reading isn't strictly literal, and the latitude of interpretation it implies is beyond what literalists and creationists are willing to accept in the interpretation of other episodes. And then there's the even less literal fourth reading:

(d.) As in (c.) above, plus: The point is that it was one of those moments when God is with you, time seems to stand still, and you can accomplish feats you have trouble believing when you recollect them afterward.

The fourth is what makes it a story worth telling and remembering. Without it, the incident is trivial, fodder for some scriptural equivalent of Ripley's Believe It or Not.

I don't like reading conventions that coax dumb, irrelevant meanings out of complex texts. I also dislike interpretive systems that pretend to rigor and simplicity, but only work when applied selectively.

And anyway, what's the point? Suppose that every word and implication about natural law in the book of Genesis were proved to be literally true. How would that matter? It still wouldn't be the point of the story; and what the story means about us and our relationship with God would still be a matter of faith.

>>Any attempt to understand creation requires
>>imagining limits on what God might do, since in
>>discerning what He has done, we dismiss all the
>>possible things we've learned He didn't do. A
>>friend once told me how, as a child, she'd asked
>>her fundie parents whether God could make a
>>four-sided triangle. They'd automatically replied
>>that God can do anything, and maintained that
>>position through several rounds of questioning.
>>It was a major blow to her faith.

>I knew immediately what I would have told her if
>I'd been in her parents' situation: That while God
>could do anything, when he made this universe he
>decided against having four-sided triangles in it.

I would have tried explain that the triangle shape is a physical thing, but that people made up the word "triangle" to describe it.

So asking whether God could make a four-sided triangle might be asking whether he could just turn a three-sided thing into a four-sided thing ((yes)), or it might be asking whether God could suddenly intervene and change all the human dictionaries to give the word "triangle" a new meaning. ((_Science-fiction writing people_ have certainly dreamed up stories like that about things or words changing without us noticing; but those are stories written by people. God hasn't done that yet, that we've noticed. ))

The "stone so heavy he can't lift it" conundrum may open up other logical and physical issues. This is a thought I posted to rasff, a couple of years ago, on the stone lifting paradox.

It92s just as well that you92re not, Lee, since 93pure randomness94 is not, and never has been, the Darwinian model.

I suppose this is true in a literalist sense; but I think it's more accurate to say that they want all people in every age of the world to have thought (or be thinking) like them -- the notion that there are differences and that's ok clearly terrifies some literalists -- if only because that could mean it would be reasonable for the world around them to change.

You're very sympathetic in explaining Joshua; as one who doesn't hold with any theisms, I read this as literalist [but] propaganda. Which is an interesting reflection on the above; people still say what they will to cast themselves as the favored of the universe, but the parameters of what will be believed have been somewhat tightened. (Yesterday, the sun stopping; today, vague apparitions?)

I like to tell myself I've outgrown atheism's common arrogance of believing all other vision is clouded. (Although when asked I usually call myself an agnostic, or a militant agnostic if I've just been confronted with another reactionary !@#$%^&&*!.) Certainly theism is a pervasive meme, accepted by people far more acute than I ever was. It just doesn't make sense to me....

C.S. Lewis wrote about this, speaking of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" to be shot in New Zealand.

Lewis was addressing the question of whether God could cause an immortal angel not to have existed, and otherwise change the past. We discussed changing the past in another thread.

An anguished mother had written Lewis, saying that her son had been in a battle on the front lines in WW I. By now, she said, he was either alive or dead. But was it okay for her to pray that her son, even if dead, had not have died?

I'm oversimplifying the point of a fascinating essay, but Lewis suggested that it's okay to pray for anything, but that God doesn't so much set limits on his own omnipotence, but makes an aesthetic choice to only do what is good and beautiful.

That leads to a question about whether there is an essential Good that God chooses to do, or only that Good is what God does. I've been reading Medieval Jewish Theology on this sort of question. There are the Jewish Philosphers most influenced by pro-science Islamic philosophers, the ones influenced by anti-science Islamic philosophers, the ones influenced by Aristotle, and various combinations.

This all leads to Baruch Spinoza, who was the Jewish (or technically ex-Jewish) philosopher who most influenced Albert Einstein's theology.

And let's not go into what Newton believed, because that's what Neal Stephenson got a $1,000,000 advance for 3 volumes to play with. Whcih my books would do too if they promoted me because they gave me a megabuck, whoops, wrong thread.

Original question rephrased: did God have any choice as the the value of "pi" or "e"?

My 14-year-old college sophmore son is way past me mentally. He recently asked me if the universe could have a different mass than it does, I said of course. This led to a discussion of Physics as a constraint on God (for those who believe), which he found fairly silly. Then I asked him "did God have any choice as the the value of 'pi' or 'e'"?

He smiled broadly. "GOOD question!" Then he was silent for a long time.

"Well," he said, "if pi is the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle, the God could make it different, by curving space. But I don't think he had any choice on 'e'."

"Hah!" saith I. "But e to the power of (pi times i) = -1. So if he had no choice on e, he had no choice on pi."

This led to a long comparison of the various metaphysics of Mathematics (Idealism, Formalism, Contructivism, etc.). Now I know less than I did before, as we got ourselves slightly confused.

The wonderful novella "Luminous" by Greg Egan hinges on the possibility that more than one possible arithmetic can be embedded in this universe, which would give slightly different answers to some calculations, and maybe the stcok market. There is a boundary in space between our math and the other math. We mess with it. The boundary starts moving toweards us...

Of course, it didn't help that a certain religious literary work reads like science fiction anyway. But well do I remember the whacky ideas I used to come up with just to explain away certain inconsistencies.

So in this hypothetical curved spacetime where ? != 3.1415926535..., there still would "exist" the number that is the limit (as radius goes to zero) of the ratio of the area of a circle to the square of its radius; and that number has to be equal to the one we compute as ?.