God The Ignorant Biologist

Jacob's lambs

Of all the passages in the Bible, even allowing for the nonsense about thinking with your heart and breathing 'life' into things, there is one passage which shows the author was utterly ignorant of basic biology. If this was a creator god then it is no excuse that we hadn't discovered basic genetics in the Bronze Age when this stuff was first made up; any decent intelligent designer should understand how its creation works.

That passage is:

Origin of the Adam & Eve Myth

A pair of Old Testament scholars at Holland's Protestant Theological University, Amsterdam & Groningen believe they have found the origins of the Adam & Eve myth in the Hebrew Bible. It is a version of an old Canaanite myth based on the original Canaanite pantheon.

Dr Marjo Korpel and Professor Emeritus J.C. de Moor claim to have found the evidence on Ugaritic clay tablets of a 13th-century BCE story about the gods who lived on the slopes of Mount Ararat, in modern-day Turkey, in the 'vineyard of the great gods', identified with the Garden of Eden.

The top god was El the creator god and amongst the lesser gods in the pantheon or Elohim (children of El) were Adam and his wife. El is, of course, the Hebrew, Christian and Muslim god whom Arabic speakers still call Allah.

Unreasonable Faith - Robert G. Ingersoll

Why is Robert G. Ingersoll not better known in America, or the rest of the world, for that matter? He wrote and spoke with such power and passion, and regard for truth and honesty above all, that his writing is a joy to read, more lyrical even than that of Thomas Paine and worthy of Christopher Hitchens at his best.

Here he is delivering a 'Thanksgiving Sermon'. This is a cut-down version; the full sermon can be read here.

A THANKSGIVING SERMON.

MANY ages ago our fathers were living in dens and caves. Their bodies, their low foreheads, were covered with hair. They were eating berries, roots, bark and vermin. They were fond of snakes and raw fish. They discovered fire and, probably by accident, learned how to cause it by friction. They found how to warm themselve — to fight the frost and storm. They fashioned clubs and rude weapons of stone with which they killed the larger beasts and now and then each other. Slowly, painfully, almost imperceptibly they advanced. They crawled and stumbled, staggered and struggled toward the light. To them the world was unknown. On every hand was the mysterious, the sinister, the hurtful. The forests were filled with monsters, and the darkness was crowded with ghosts, devils, and fiendish gods.

These poor wretches were the slaves of fear, the sport of dreams.

Was Jesus a Fundamentalist Extremist?

Expulsion of the Moneychangers from the Temple,
Luca Giordano (1632–1705)

Reading all three so-called 'Synoptic Gospels', Matthew, Mark and Luke, they all agree that Jesus' arrest, trial and crucifixion followed closely after the 'cleansing of the temple' when Jesus allegedly drove the moneychangers out of the temple. Was this in fact the violent terrorist act of an extremist leading a bunch of dissidents in an attack on the Jewish authorities who ran Judea under Roman suzerainty and who were de facto the local government of the day?

There is no hard evidence that Jesus ever existed at all, and certainly no contemporaneous eye-witness accounts of anything associated with his life and death exist and even the two historians living and writing at the time (Philo-Judeus and Justus of Tiberius) are entirely silent on the matter, so it's hard to make a case for the stories of Jesus being based on

Maths For Christian Students

Inspired by the introduction to the two-volume Biology for Christian Students, I thought I would produce a little maths primer for Christian students based on the same principle. Creationist homeschoolers will find it especially useful.

The introduction to the Christian biology book, written by creationist Stephen S. Pinkston and publish by Bob Jones University, states on page 1:

1. 'Whatever the Bible says is so; whatever man says may or may not be so,' is the only [position] a Christian can take..."
2. If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.
3. Christians must disregard [scientific hypotheses or theories] that contradict the Bible.

Silly Bible - Lot of Nonsense

Albrecht Dürer Lot Fleeing with his Daughters from Sodom (1498)

The biblical story of Lot is another strange tale with no obvious reason for being in the Bible, at least so far as morality tales go. In fact, it shows the god of the Hebrews in a very poor light, overly obsessed with what humans do with their genitalia but having a low regard for women and no problem at all with incest. It also portrays it as far from omniscient, unsure of what justice means and easily persuaded by a mere human but then capriciously changing its mind and killing innocent people anyway simply for being there at the time.

We also see how the person writing it had difficulty holding a thought across more than a couple of paragraphs.

I have already written about the nonsensical account of God telling Abram that he was going to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and Abram bargaining God down from fifty to ten as the number of righteous people to be found in the cities to prevent him killing everyone, innocent or guilty.

There doesn't seem to have been any such attempt to find ten righteous men though and God sets about killing everyone anyway. To accomplish this he sends two angels to the city and they end up at Lot's house, where a mob comprising all the men of the city gather outside demanding to be allowed in to bugger the angels.

More Bible Blunders

Some time ago I wrote about Thomas Paine's debunking of the notion that the Pentateuch was written by Moses, as though supposedly writing about his own death and burial in a secret place wasn't enough. Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason, written in 1794 showed that the Bible refuted that argument itself. First we are told in Genesis that:

And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan.

Genesis 14:14

Then later on we discover that it wasn't actually called 'Dan' until much later; before then it was called 'Laish'.

Origins Of The Exodus Myth

With so many to choose from, it's difficult to decide which of the various folk tales, invented 'histories' and origin myths that have found themselves bound up in the same book and presented as the inerrant word of an omnipotent god is the silliest, but one of them has to be the tale of Hebrew enslavement in Egypt and subsequent escape.

It was obviously written by someone who knew little or nothing of the geography or politics of the time and place the tale was set, so we have the idiotic notion of the 'Israelites' escaping from Egypt by crossing the Red Sea to Sinai - which was also in Egypt. That's like 'escaping' from the USA by crossing the Hudson River from New Jersey to Manhattan or escaping from the UK by crossing the Bristol channel from England to Wales. The author also has the 'slaves' building the Egyptian city of Raamses - which wasn't started until some 120 after the traditional date of the Exodus.

Around the Bend with Ken Ham

2 January 2013: Astronomers have determined that the Milky Way may contain as many as 400 billion exoplanets, with almost every star hosting at least one planet.

"We'll find a new earth within 20 years" | Around the World with Ken Ham

Signs that Ken Ham may be beginning to panic at the thought that science could soon find evidence of life on another planet emerged recently with this desperate attempt to harness his fundamentalist audience in a bid to stop NASA looking for it, dismissing it as a waste of money which is bound to fail. His panic can be gauged from the horrible muddle he gets into with his argument where he inadvertently 'proves' that there isn't non-human life on Earth either.

He also showed his traditional propensity for making things up, even about the Bible, and relying on his ignorant audience not checking.

The Sacred Conclusion

Most theists will deny that they do it but it's usually easy to demonstrate that religious beliefs are not based an objective assessment of the evidence but on a received conclusion which is then protected and reinforced by highly selective cherry-picking of the evidence which is often heavily weighted whilst contradictory evidence is minimised, ignored or dismissed on spurious grounds.

'Evidence' can even include assumed evidence such as that 'list of eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus', 'all those fulfilled prophecies in the Bible which have been independently verified', or, in the case in point, 'all the historical names, places and events' mentioned in the Bible.

Nothing wrong with these as examples of evidence, of course, apart from just one thing - they are all false. There are no authenticated eyewitness of the life of Jesus; there are no fulfilled prophecies in the Bible which can be independently verified and there are no historical names, places or events in the Bible which give it an authenticity as a holy book.

Silly Bible - The Fishy Tale Of Jonah

It's sometimes fun to read through the Bible and work out which of the tales in it is the least plausible, the most pointless, the least well thought out, etc.

A strong contender for all three of these is the story of Jonah. It must rate alongside the Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel stories as the silliest and, given that the Tower of Babel tale actually tries to explain why different people speak different languages so has some point to it, like Noah's Ark, the tale of Jonah doesn't actually offer anything by way explanation for anything we can observe.

Nor is it any more plausible because the scientific evidence shows that it couldn't have happened, although, to be fair to whomsoever made up the Jonah myth, at

Stone Age DNA Refutes Another Bible Myth

Stone Age DNA shows hunter-gatherers shunned farming - life - 24 April 2014 - New Scientist

Some fascinating data emerged recently which is causing us to re-think a basic assumption about the early history of modern humans and how major changes in technology and political organisation spread. It should also cause creationists to reassess their creation myth if only that were permitted.

It had been assumed that agriculture spread from it's origins somewhere in modern southern Iraq because the idea was obviously so good that it was adopted by neighbouring peoples. In other words, the spread was assumed to be the spread of agricultural cultural rather than a spread of agricultural people.

Now a detailed study of the genomes sequenced from a small number of skeletons of early Stone Age people from Sweden has shown that hunter-gatherers were more genetically distinct from those of early Stone Age farmers from the same area than modern Scandinavians are from Italians. If the spread of agriculture had been cultural we would expect to see no significant difference. The study was conducted on the genomes of four skeletons from Stone Age farming settlements and seven coastal hunter-gatherer communities. Earlier isotope studies on the bones had show distinct differences in diet. It thus seems highly likely that it wasn't so much the idea of agriculture which radiated out from the Middle East, but agricultural people, who replaced the local hunter-gatherers.

So, what we have here is another little conundrum for our creationists friends.

Of course, as you might expect, it's hard to map reality onto their favourite creation myth if only because they don't appear to have allowed for a hunter-gather phase at all. This was very probably because the myth originated in people who were unaware of a hunter-gatherer past so saw no need to mention it, but let's overlook that little problem because, as we will see, there are some much bigger ones for them to worry about.

According to the creation myth, the small number of people who survived the Great Genocide Event when their god drowned everyone in a fit of pique because it loved them (work with me on this one!) must have been agriculturalists because they had already mastered the art of building huge, ocean-going liners and could travel the world collecting up all the different species from distant lands.

Then, within no more than six generations when a population of 50-60,000 would have been going some, were able to have a dedicated workforce concentrating on building a tower so high it could reach above the stars and so began to alarm God himself. This could only have been done with a vast agricultural support system to provide the builders and those producing the building materials with enough food and other necessities like clothes and tools without growing it or making them themselves.

This is simple, basic economics, stemming from the simple fact that the same person can't be both building a massive tower and tending to his garden, making things or foraging for food in the surrounding countryside. So, we know the Ark survivors were, or were certainly very soon and within six generations, fantastically productive agriculturalists. (Remember we are still in the creationist fantasy here, not the real world. Any resemblance to reality is purely incidental).

Now, as Pontus Skoglund of Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues have shown, a population of hunter-gatherers came from somewhere and spread from the Middle East into Scandinavia in advance of the agriculturalists and they were genetically very distinct from the agriculturalists who followed them. Taken in isolation, this study probably wouldn't mean much and could be explained away as sampling error. However, this is not the first study to reach this conclusion - similar results have been found in Germany and elsewhere.

Abstract
Prehistoric population structure associated with the transition to an agricultural lifestyle in Europe remains contentious. Population-genomic data from eleven Scandinavian Stone-Age human remains suggest that hunter-gatherers had lower genetic diversity than farmers. Despite their close geographical proximity, the genetic differentiation between the two Stone-Age groups was greater than that observed among extant European populations. Additionally, the Scandinavian Neolithic farmers exhibited a greater degree of hunter-gatherer-related admixture than that of the Tyrolean Iceman, who also originated from a farming context. In contrast, Scandinavian hunter-gatherers displayed no significant evidence of introgression from farmers. Our findings suggest that Stone-Age foraging groups were historically in low numbers, likely due to oscillating living conditions or restricted carrying-capacity, and that they were partially incorporated into expanding farming groups.

Skoglund, P., et al; Genomic Diversity and Admixture Differs for Stone-Age Scandinavian Foragers and Farmers
Science 24 April 2014. DOI: 10.1126/science.1253448

The question then is where did these hunter-gatherers come from, and hunter-gatherers moreover that were from a very different genetic line to the agriculturalists who, presumably, were the descendant of Noah and his family? How did this genetic diversity arise so quickly, what with evolution being impossible and no new information being able to arise because it's forbidden by the Second Law of Thermodynamics or Information Theory, or whatever the currently fashionable creationist reason for declaring it impossible is?

Or, if impossible evolution occurred at the warp speed normally offered up to explain this apparent rapid genetic diversity in post-Flood living things, why do we see no transitional forms with genomes intermediate between that of the hunter-gatherers and the subsequent agriculturalists?

And, if we forget for a moment that the Ark survivors must have been agriculturalists already and say some of them must have given rise to the hunter-gatherers while others went of to discover agriculture, there wouldn't have been enough agriculturalists to even consider building that enormous tower, because we would be looking at a local population of a mere few thousand at the most, not nearly enough even to do the building, let alone to sustain an economy capable of supporting such a huge economically non-productive workforce.

I wonder how many creationist can solve this conundrum and how many of those who can't will accept that this little bit of science utterly refutes their biblical creation myth. Anyone prepared to bet that the answers to both these will be as close to zero as makes no difference?

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Spare A Thought For Poor Old Judas

Judas Iscariot. Gabriel von Max. Prague National Gallery

As it's Easter and the time for good-will to all men... now don't start... just because it's not Christmas there's no reason to bear ill will, is there? Anyway, in this season of goodwill to all men, is it not time someone spoke up for poor Judas Iscariot - possibly the most maligned man in all literature.

You may recall that the character of Judas makes his appearance in the stories about Jesus in the Bible but only seems to play any significant part towards the end of the tale, when his role suddenly become absolutely critical to the plot, only to be maligned and vilified for playing his allotted role later on. Although, as we shall see, this maligning of Judas seems to be a much later addition to the story, added moreover by someone who hadn't been following the plot too closely. Not only that but the later addition seems to have become muddled too.

If Only Noah Had Known About Evolution!

Noah's ark on the Mount Ararat, Simone de Myle 1570

Tree of bird life could solve Noah's Ark problem - life - 27 March 2014 - New Scientist

One of the many absurdities in the Noah's Ark myth, several more of which can be found in No Way Noah!, is the sheer impossibility of providing an ocean-going sea-worthy wooden boat large enough to house something like 19 million animals of all shapes and sizes, many of which require highly specialised environments, together with enough food, to last something over a year.

Creationist pseudo-scientists who make their living trying to explain away these absurdities have no option but to fall back on an almost equally absurd version of warp-speed evolution so they can reduce the numbers to mere few thousand from which all the species have evolved in the last few thousand years, apparently with no one noticing all the new species popping into existence every generation. We're expected not to notice that they also tell their credulous followers that evolution is impossible but holding two diametrically opposite views simultaneously has never been a problem for creationists.

Now scientists have suggested a way we could, should the need ever arise in the future to take the world's species into protective custody to prevent the extinction of life on Earth, whilst not needing to take a pair of every single species. What we would need to safeguard is the DNA of all different species, not in test-tubes but in living members of those species which are the most evolutionarily distinct. From these, we could, theoretically reconstruct other related species.

You could increase the amount of evolutionary diversity that is currently protected by 25 per cent by expanding the reserve system by 5 per cent.

Laura Pollock, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

For example, we would not need to save a pair of every wild cat but nor would it work to save, say, lions, or tigers because these have close relatives, so most of their DNA would survive their extinction. What we need to do is to preserve the main limbs and major branches of the evolutionary tree of life rather than the terminal twigs. Losing a species which is closely related to several others, such as the lion, would merely remove a twig from the tree. Conserving an evolutionary distinct species with few living relatives however will conserve more of the DNA from further down the branch for the same effort.

The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has been running the Edge of Existence Project since 2007. This seeks to identify key endangered and evolutionary unique species and to rank them into an order of priority for conservation. At the moment, effort tends to be concentrated on a few high-profile species, often at the expense of a higher priority species according to this ranking.

Now, Walter Jetz of Yale University has ranked the world's birds in terms of evolutionary distinctness using genetic data from 6500 of the 10,000 species combined with data on threats and population size to produce a list of just 100 priority species. He has also shown that concentrating on just 113 sites could conserve 60 percent of the most endangered evolutionary unique species.

Jetz has used the ranking to point to species that should be protected. For example, the highly distinct shore plover (Thinornis novaeseelandiae) lives only on the tiny Chatham Islands, near New Zealand. Just 250 are left. Focusing on plover habitat would preserve 14.46 million years of evolution for each 10,000 square kilometres conserved. In contrast, the ostrich is the 10th most distinct species, but as it has a large range only 0.05 million years would be preserved per unit area.

Andy Coghlan, Tree of bird life could solve Noah's Ark problem, New Scientist, 27 March 2014.

It's a beautiful irony that, had the Bible's authors had the least inkling of evolution or DNA and how it allows species to be arranged in a tree of life, they could have made their absurd tale just a little more plausible by explaining that Noah had reduced the number of species to conserve by doing just what conservationists are now doing. They would have had to explain how Noah had then reconstructed all the other species by careful bioengineering of course but at least their daft notion would have been just slightly less implausible.

Unfortunately, they had to try to force-fit the story into what little they knew and understood, and the prevailing superstition of the orthodoxy they were selling, and so ended up with a story so implausible that only children and scientifically illiterate, gullible adults could believe it.

'via Blog this'

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Evolving Bible! It All Adds Up!

I found this cartoon by Ruben Bolling on PZ Myers' Phayingula blog the other day. Apart from wickedly satirising the absurdity of Bible literalism, it illustrates another neat little point that hopefully also embarrasses Bible literalists. It shows us how the current version of the Bible came about by an evolutionary process.

The particular piece of Bible nonsense I'm referring to here is from Ezra 1:5-11.

Then rose up the chief of the fathers of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests, and the Levites, with all them whose spirit God had raised, to go up to build the house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem. And all they that were about them strengthened their hands with vessels of silver, with gold, with goods, and with beasts, and with precious things, beside all that was willingly offered.

Also Cyrus the king brought forth the vessels of the house of the Lord, which Nebuchadnezzar had brought forth out of Jerusalem, and had put them in the house of his gods; Even those did Cyrus king of Persia bring forth by the hand of Mithredath the treasurer, and numbered them unto Sheshbazzar, the prince of Judah. And this is the number of them: thirty chargers of gold, a thousand chargers of silver, nine and twenty knives, Thirty basons of gold, silver basons of a second sort four hundred and ten, and other vessels a thousand.

All the vessels of gold and of silver were five thousand and four hundred. All these did Sheshbazzar bring up with them of the captivity that were brought up from Babylon unto Jerusalem.

Ezra 1:5-11

I wonder just how many people will read that passage and not actually add the numbers together to see if there really were 5,400 vessels? Let's be generous and exclude the twenty-nine knives and assume we really are counting the vessels, in this case the chargers and the basons.

Peace On Earth - The Christian Way

In this season of peace and goodwill to all mankind - if you believe the Christian propaganda that is - I thought it might be instructive to look at how the Bible defines peace.

To take the gospels at face value, Jesus seems more than a little muddled about peace. In the Sermon on the Mount according the Matthew (and that might be significant as we shall see) he says

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

Matthew 5:9

which seems scant reward for all the good work real peacemakers do - unless you are ultra-Jewish Matthew that is. Matthew bends over backwards to make it look like Jesus was the Jewish Messiah - the future king come to save the Hebrews and restore them to their rightful place as Yahweh's chosen people who will one day rule the world. The 'children of God' in this context are the Jews. The peace Matthews has Jesus recommending is the peace of Jewish rule over all mankind.

So what is this biblical peace exactly?

Peacemakers at work

For that we need to delve into the Old Testament. Peace, in biblical times was not the absence of military force but something imposed and maintained by it. Here's Yahweh telling the Hebrews how to make peace:

When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.

And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.

And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath given thee.

Deuteronomy 20:10-14

So the peace Matthew has Jesus talking about in the Beatitudes is the peace of total surrender and servility; the peace of accepting second class status in a conquered state; the peace of abject slavery and submission to a foreign master.

And this 'peace' is the reward for capitulation. The alternative is death for every male and the women and children and everything in the state being taken as the possessions of the conquerors. The peace bought by paying off the protection racketeer.

And those who make this peace are Yahweh's chosen ones.

But then Jesus himself seems confused about whether peace is a good thing. He's in no doubt that his mission is not to bring peace to the Earth by cessation of all military activity and by turning swords into ploughshares, but to conquer it. Only then will there be peace.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

Matthew 10:34-36

And there we see the same demand for total surrender backed up by implied threats of terrible retribution. The language is a little more poetic but the message is the same. A few lines later on we even see what any Christian extremist worthy of the name could present as an argument for suicide bombings and martyrdom:

He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

Matthew 10:39

So much for Jesus' view of peace and how it should be achieved.

What does Paul have to say about it?

Paul seems to regard peace as merely freedom from anxiety or even just freedom from fear of what Yahweh might do to you. The notion of freedom from military activity or the threat of it seems not to have occurred to him or those who write the epistles in his name. Peace is a selfish concept; something one achieves for oneself, not something one tried to achieve for others.

For example:

Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

Romans 5:1-2

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For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.

Romans 8:6-7

So, when Christians quote Luke's angels and wish you 'peace on Earth and goodwill to all men', the peace they are wishing you is the peace of the slave who has surrendered freedom and even surrendered intellectual integrity in favour of faith and accepting their dogma without question. Significantly, these same people have never been slow to impose this 'peace' the same way the god of the Hebrews told them to impose it on others.

Abject submission to evidence-free superstition and to those who use it and the threat of an imaginary deity to impose their will and control on others is about as far from mental peace as I can imagine getting.

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The Silly Bible's Failed Prophecies.

Ask almost any Christian fundamentalist for one single proof that the Bible is the word of God and they will almost invariably trot out the accepted dogma that there are proven prophecies in the Bible which only a god could have inspired and they confirm the Bible's inerrancy.

Asking them for examples of these often results in indignant flounces and abuse, however, because, quite simply, there are none. There are a few statements which, at a stretch, parallel later events, usually events which were entirely predictable anyway - a bit like prophesying that there will be an earthquake in Japan or that the Caribbean will suffer a devastating hurricane sometime soon.

Very many of them are only 'confirmed' later in the Bible and have no extra-biblical evidence, like the alleged birth of Jesus, which apparently also prophesied he would be called Immanuel - a name by which he was never ever known in the Bible. The New Testament 'confirmation' of Old Testament 'prophecies' were written by people like the author of Matthew specifically to make it look like Jesus was the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy to suit a Jewish cultic agenda.

I have even had it claimed that the prophecy about Jesus returning, which is attributed to Jesus himself, is really a fulfilled prophecy because it will be fulfilled at sometime.

God's Haemorrhoids or The Grapes of Wrath

God's Haemorrhoids

>Here's a strange thing.

It seems the Old Testament god was not only paranoid about his little design error with foreskins, but he also had a fascination with haemorrhoids.

We discover this in a rather silly story which the priest obviously made up to deal with the fact that the 'sacred' Ark of the Covenant was actually empty. They had claimed it contained the stone tablets on which Moses had supposedly written one or other version of the Ten Commandments, and the staff of Aaron. In other words, some magic stones and a stick.

The problem was that it was just an empty box, as we shall see by the fantastic tales they made up to stop people looking in it.

It starts in 1 Samuel 4 where we are told of a battle between the Israelites and the Philistines which was going badly for the Israelites (maybe Yahweh was distracted that day), so they went to get their box of magic stones and a stick and took it to the battle, thinking it would turn the tide. If Yahweh had been indifferent to the battle, what on Earth they thought a magic box would do remains a mystery, but the Bible is rarely strong on logic and is set in a magical fantasy world where things like that work.

How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People

A stone axe from near Shanghai, eastern China. May show a form of primitive writing.

Photograph: AP

Inscriptions found in Shanghai pre-date 'oldest Chinese language by 1,400 years' | World news | guardian.co.uk

This article in today's Guardian got me thinking about how ridiculous the Bronze Age origins myths in the Bible are and how easy it is to refute them by just looking at the world today.

For example, in Genesis we read about a worldwide flood which only a single family survived. It is inconceivable that the details of this and the names of Noah and his family, the people who saved the world and from whom we are all descended, would have been forgotten in just a few generations.

So Why Aren't Any Mountains Moving?

Amazing claims are made for the power of faith. Sadly, all of them are nothing more than claims.

Take for example the claim made by the author of Matthew about Jesus when, for some unexplained reason he found it necessary to boast about his marvelous abilities:

Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away.

And when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, How soon is the fig tree withered away! Jesus answered and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done. And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.

Matthew 21:18-22

This is a strange tale if it's about an omniscient god in human form because it implies that Jesus had to go and look to see if the fig tree had any fruit and was the sort of person who would punish even trees when they disappointed him, rather like a petulant child. In Mark's version (Mark 11:20-24) he even has to go back next day to check that the curse has worked! Clearly this is a tale from before Jesus had been mutated into a god and was still merely a human. But that's not the main point of this blog; I dealt with that unlikely tale in God Hates Figs!

The point here is about the difference between reality and metaphor.

Challenge any Christian to prove that 'Faith can move mountains', like Jesus unequivocally implies here. Jesus doesn't restrict it to people with special magical abilities and only boasts that he could do it is he so wished because he doesn't have any doubts. You just need to pray for it to happen and it will happen - allegedly.

Except of course it doesn't.

Has this ever been done by anyone? If not, why not? Are there no Christians who have enough faith? Even the thousands who have died as martyrs? Not any of the saints or Popes or founders of new Christian sects? How about asking your pastor to move a mountain? How about just a small pebble? The excuses should be interesting but Jesus says it's doubt preventing it. Ask him/her what doubts exactly? Why did no martyred saint burned at the stake ever manage to pray the fire out or beheaded saint ever manage to make the axe-head fly off the handle?

Was Matthew (and Mark who tells a similar tale, though Mark's account, which Matthew mostly copied anyway, needed a whole night for the curse to work) just over-egging the pudding when they wrote down these tales? Were they just setting us up to be told it's our fault when prayer doesn't work because we don't have enough faith, like the rogue trader or con artist who blames his victims for being so gullible?

Cue 'metaphor!'

The normal response to these sorts of questions about specific, testable (and so falsifiable) claims made in the Bible, if the 'out of context' excuse isn't deployed - and it's difficult to see how this can be taken out of context - is to claim it's a metaphor.

A metaphor for what, exactly? A metaphor for faith/prayer alone being able to produce something else equally unlikely? If so what and when? What unlikely event has ever been shown to have happened because a Christian with enough faith prayed for it to happen? If this can be done so easily (Jesus doesn't place any limitations on how often or for what purpose it can be used - 'And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive') why don't Christians solve all the world's problems, cure all disease and disability, and remove all want and squalor with prayers?

Do they perhaps think these are good things?

Could it be that Matthew was just making a false claim or reporting a false claim made by Jesus; an empty boast intended to mislead and deceive? It's manifestly untrue to claim the faith can move mountains otherwise we would see it being done, and the Christian who did it would gain immediate worldwide fame, would be guaranteed a sainthood and would probably found a new 'one true church'. Even Jesus could only boast about doing it, apparently!

So, if you're a Christian who believes in the literal truth of the Bible, that Jesus would never exaggerate or lie and you have no doubts that the Christian god exists and is exactly as described in the Bible, prove it. You don't need to move a mountain, just a pebble, with prayer alone. Go on! Make something impossible happen in front of witnesses.

'...all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive' - Jesus. Is that true or not?

If the truth sets you free, what do lies do?

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