Answers to everything, according to God, according to Answers in Genesis’Chief Ministry Officer

Martyn Iles (L), Ken Ham (R), Ark Encounter in background. From Vision Christian Media

Abused women should submit to their husbands. Also, it is ungodly to be concerned about the climate, because rainbows. Such, at least, is the advice of the leader-in-waiting of the world’s largest and most influential Creationist organisation.

When people tell you what they are, believe them. In the 2021 Facebook posting attached below, still available [1], Martyn Iles tells us exactly what he is, and since, in May this year, he became Chief Ministry Officer at Answers in Genesis, the $28 million dollar a year concern that runs Kentucky’s Creation Museum and Ark Encounter and has its own private jet, we ought to pay attention. All the more so since the announcement just one month ago that he is now the designated successor to founder and CEO Ken Ham [2]. So here are his answers to the burning questions of our times, given in full to avoid the risk of quote mining, with my own commentary just in case there is any ambiguity about what is being said. And he saves the worst till last, when he explains exactly how it comes about that people disagree with him, and how we should look on such disagreement.

The answer to gender identity – “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” [Gen 1:27]

I share Iles’ concerns about the use of extreme clinical procedures, but for the very opposite reason. I do not believe in rigid gender roles, and think that people should be free to live as they wish, subject to the rights of others, without the need for mastectomy or castration. Iles, on the contrary, thinks that gender roles are God-given and rigid (more on that below), and that for that very reason people should stick to the roles that they were born for.

The answer to sexual orientation – “And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man… Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” [Gen 2:22, 24]

It is difficult to know what to make of this.

How is this even meant to be an answer to someone who feels romantically attracted only to members of their own sex? But I fear that Iles will be unmoved by the observation of homosexual behaviour in numerous animal species, because he does not consider that we share a common origin with them.

The answer to racism – “since [God] himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth…” [Acts 17:26]

This on the face of it is unexceptionable. All humans share the same deep ancestry and deserve the same respect. However, as so often with Iles, there is a hidden agenda; Answers in Genesis is opposed to any kind of action to compensate groups that have been the victims of racism, on the grounds that such action is itself discriminatory and racist.

The answer to abortion – “God said to them, ‘Be Fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…’” [Gen 1:28]

Here as elsewhere (see e.g. the next item) Iles cuts through all the usual arguments by introducing a Bible verse, imposing his own interpretation on it, and using this interpretation to tell us what God wants. No need for further discussion. In this particular case, however, most of us would think that the commandment referred to has been more than fulfilled already.

The answer to climate alarmism – “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” [Gen 8:22]

Notice the question-begging language. However, he is not just attacking what he regards as excessive concern over the climate crisis, but denying on the strength of this verse that such a crisis could possibly exist in the first place. And this is the verse now quoted on every conceivable occasion by all the major creationist organisations, who are united in their opposition to fossil fuel reduction policies. None of them, however, seem to quote the parallel verse [Gen 9:11];

“I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Both verses are very limited in what they promise, the second one explicitly so. Nothing here to promise stable or temperate conditions, or to absolve us of our own responsibilities. Drought and failed harvests play a prominent role in later chapters of Genesis, while in a biblical exhortation to look after what has been provided for us, Leviticus 25:4 says that every seventh year the land itself needs to rest and recover.

The answer to abuse – “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her… Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” [Eph 5:22, 25]

This is presented, not merely as the recipe for domestic harmony on Iles’ terms, but as “the answer to abuse,” i.e. guidance on how people should behave when such harmony has completely and dangerously broken down. To tell an abusive husband to love his wife may be well-intentioned, though he will probably reply that he really does so already. To tell an abused wife to submit to her husband is to ask her to behave as so many women tragically do; to accept the completely unacceptable, at risk to her happiness, her health, and, all too often, her life. And when Iles says “submit,” he really does mean submit [3].

The answer to historic wrongs that cannot be undone – “forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” [Col 3:13]

We are dealing here with a question that is the subject of much recent debate. What obligations if any do those of European descent owe to the peoples whom they have abused or enslaved, and whose land they have stolen? The answer according to Iles is very simple. The victims should simply forgive those who have wronged them, and the problem will disappear. I should mention, to put his opinion in context, that Iles is a white Australian [4].

The answer to life – “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” [John 3:16]

I’m not sure how this verse would actually prove useful to anyone faced with major decisions. However, I note that this is the only verse he quotes from the Gospels. It is indeed relatively rare from creationists to quote the Gospels, apart from this one verse, and even rarer for them to quote any of the actual words attributed to Jesus [5].

But how does Martyn Iles describe those who disagree with him? The final section of his post tells us:

The contemporary answer for every one of these issues is Cultural Marxism… divisive, angry, vengeful rebellion and power-grabbing between warring identity groups.

God’s answers bring peace and contentment, if only we’d submit to them, and stop running away from them.

So, for Iles, disagreement is Marxism, just as for Tim LaHaye it was humanism, and for the creationists of the McCarthy era it was Communism. If we only listened to God’s answers to these questions, all the conflicts between different interest groups would immediately disappear. Any assertions that things may be a little bit more complicated than that are “divisive, angry, vengeful rebellion and power-grabbing.”

Rebellion, of course, is the gravest of all possible sins in his theology. It is the sin of Satan, from which all others follow. But Iles’ way of looking at it does raise an interesting question. If homosexuals, assertive women, proponents of reparations to historically disadvantaged groups, and those concerned about environmental degradation, are all into the business of power-grabbing, just who is it that they are grabbing power from?

***

1] The Facebook page is here, and I am commenting on the entry for 19 May 2021, screenshot below (fair use claimed), which can also be retrieved by keyword search (Iles is so prolific that I expect some culling is unavoidable. However, the Facebook page, like the Answers in Genesis website, is out of order, difficult to search, and with numerous duplications.)

2] Some of us wondered when Ken Ham took him to his bosom how soon Iles would upstage him, just as Ken Ham, decades ago, upstaged Henry Morris and the Institute for Creation Research, but I don’t think we expected things to start happening quite so quickly. It might also be significant that while on the Answers in Genesis website, Iles is described as Chief Ministry Officer of Answers in Genesis, on his own Facebook page Iles describes himself  as “Answers in Genesis Chief Ministry Officer (USA) Managing Director (Australia).”

3] Iles, Facebook, 6^th June,

A word like “independent” is a direct assault on God’s design for women… A woman who prizes strength in independence is a woman rebelling against her nature.

4] As Iles puts it on his Facebook page, entry for 4^th September,

[R]econciliation is a once forever act. Warring parties are reconciled through repentance by the one and forgiveness by the other. That is when the past is treated as if it never happened, and a new day dawns. New wrongs may be addressed, but past wrongs may not.

The ‘reconciliation’ movement is far from that model. It is a grievance movement, pouring [sic] over sins of the past, resisting forgiveness. This opposes God’s very nature.

5] One exception is Matthew 25:41, “‘Depart from me, you who are cursed…”, Freely quoted in connection with the severity of God’s judgement, but never in its context about clothing the naked, visiting prisoners, that kind of thing.

This article was first published in 3 Quarks Daily

Creationism and climate – birth of a new pseudoscience

The usual creationist nonsense is just tedious. But creationist “climate science” is toxic, disastrous in its implications for policy, and frighteningly well-connected politically

Major event	Date (using Ussher)1
Creation	4004 BC
Curse	4004 BC (Day 10 after creation)
Global Flood	2348 BC
Tower Babel	2242 BC
Egypt began	After 2242 BC but prior to Abraham going to Egypt (Genesis 12)
Call of Abraham	1922 BC
Ice Age peak	1848 BC (500 years after the Flood)
Time of the Judges (Moses was first)	1491 BC (God appearing to Moses in the burning bush)
Time of the Kings (Saul was the first)	1095 BC
Split kingdom	975 BC
Christ was born	~4 BC

Timeline of major events, according to Answers in Genesis

We are all too familiar with creationist life science (theory of kinds) and creationist Earth science (Flood geology). As I explain in an article at 3 Quarks Daily, recent decades have seen the emergence of a creationist climate science, which is a direct attack on the “secular” climate science of climate change. Creationist climate science rejects, as it must, the palaeoclimatology that helped establish the existence of positive climate feedbacks, and from this draws the inference that our present concern about human effects on climate is unbiblical, unscientific, and exaggerated. This fits in directly with the agendas of the organisations opposing fossil fuel restraint, and even involves some of the same people. We need to pay attention.

Science and politics at the Creation Museum

Repost of https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/08/science-and-politics-at-the-creation-museum.html. This piece also appeared at https://rightingamerica.net/science-and-politics-at-the-creation-museum/, with book authors’ comment: “Below is Dr. Paul Braterman’s review of Righting America at the Creation Museum. For us, the best part of this generous review is that Braterman covers and understands all parts of our argument. More than this, we appreciate his scientific interventions, and we absolutely agree that we should have included Henry Morris’ biblical racism in our book.”

Do we really need 230 pages of at times closely argued text, followed by 70 pages of footnotes, just to tell us about Kentucky’s intellectually bankrupt Creation Museum and the authoritarian organisation, Answers in Genesis, that brings it to us? The answer, I fear, is yes.

For instance, this book will tell you that Ebenezer the Allosaurus, prize exhibit at Answers in Genesis’s Creation Museum in Kentucky, was donated by the Peroutka Foundation. It will also tell you that Michael Peroutka, in a 2013 speech still available on youtube, states that government schools indoctrinate children away from Christian ideas (a theme that recurs throughout this book), and that this is what they were designed to do. The book also points out that he served on the Board of Directors of the League of the South, whose chairman had defined southern people as white. I recently learned that Peroutka is the official Republican Party candidate for the post of attorney general of the State of Maryland in the November 2022 elections. We had better pay attention.

What does Mt St Helens teach us about Noah’s flood? Almost nothing.

Young Earth Creationists (YECs) argue from the rapid and dramatic events observed at the Mt St Helens 1980 eruption to the conclusion that the Earth’s geological record, as displayed for example at the Grand Canyon, could be the results of the even more dramatic events associated with a biblical worldwide flood. Geochristian, in the post I link to below, dismantles specific examples of this claim, and goes on to challenge the view that the Bible describes Noah’s Flood as a worldwide catastrophe anyway. Illustration: Step Canyon, Mt St Helens; Google Earth via Geochristian

Regarding geology, the YEC arguments derive their rhetorical power from the all-or-nothing thinking that runs through all their positions. They claim that Mt St Helens demonstrates the correctness of catastrophism over geological gradualism. If all this much can happen so quickly, why assume that the Earth’s deep geology really required deep time? If the flowing ash and mud from Mt St Helen’s shows lamination and cross bedding, does that not destroy the geologist’s argument that the lamination and cross bedding of shales and sandstones are the result of slow deposition? If in a matter of days snowmelt carved a canyon in the Mt St Helens deposits, would not the waters of a year-long flood have sufficed to carve out the Grand Canyon? If the Mt St Helens eruption rapidly uprooted and re-deposited large number of trees, could not the Earth’s fossil fuel deposits have been formed in the same manner?

Geochristian discusses each of these claims in detail (spoiler; none of them will stand up to examination). What I want to point out here is how much they all have in common. They all depend on imposing absolute either/or divisions on reality, cherry picking similarities and ignoring differences, and imposing the simplest of models on complex reality. The dispute between catastrophism and gradualism, although repeatedly revived by creationists (see e.g. here https://www.allaboutcreation.org/catastrophism-versus-uniformitarianism-faq.htm ) was pronounced dead by TH Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog”,in his Presidential Address to the Geological Society in 1869 https://mathcs.clarku.edu/huxley/SM3/GeoAd69.html. It’s simply a matter of perspective. Catastrophic events do happen from time to time, but not very often, giving the impression of gradualism over long periods of time. Cross bedding can occur catastrophically, in well-understood special circumstances, but geologists have never had any difficulty in distinguishing between what is found in sudden volcanic outpourings and the completely different wind-blown cross bedding observed in desert sandstones, including ironically the Coconino Sandstone within the Grand Canyon itself. Canyons such as Mt St Helens Step Canyon can indeed form very rapidly in uncompacted sediments, but the Step Canyon is straight, and carved on a steep slope through soft debris, while Grand Canyon has bends and is carved through extremely hard rock by a river flowing over a plateau with, overall, a gentle gradient. And the tree debris from Mt St Helens bears no resemblance, either in texture or in amount, to the world’s coal fields.

Next, Geochristian attacks the YEC interpretation of Genesis. In particular, the word “eretz”, describing the territory immersed in the flood, can mean either the Earth, or a more limited region. Here his motivation is to preserve faith in the text, while rebutting the interpretation that requires the flood to be worldwide. My own approach would be rather different. In the biblical narrative, God sets out to destroy mankind, apart from the virtuous relic represented by Noah and his family. This could hardly have been accomplished by a merely local flood, though one could well argue that the author(s) of Genesis did not make a clear mental distinction between local and worldwide. However, the entire problem disappears if you regard the Genesis narrative (or, rather, fused narratives) in context within a much more ancient Mesopotamian literature, and I argue https://paulbraterman.wordpress.com/2018/11/12/noahs-flood-and-how-to-talk-to-creationists-about-it/ that this is actually more respectful of the text than supernaturalist literalism. However, in my experience discussions between those who do, and those who do not accept a supernatural origin for Scripture are rarely productive.

So why I am I, an unbeliever, re-blogging Geochristian’s material at all? Because as I see it, the crucial gulf is not between religious believers and unbelievers, but between those who are willing to accept reality in all its complexity, and those who prefer to impose their own dogma. And this does not affect only such matters as evolution and the age of the Earth, but such intensely practical matters as conservation, global warming, the regulation of market-based economies, and, right now, our reaction to one particular virus that happens to have mutated and evolved.
h/t Michael Roberts https://michaelroberts4004.wordpress.com/2020/05/19/what-does-mt-st-helens-teach-us-about-noahs-flood-almost-nothing/

 

 

 

GeoChristian

All I got from Mt St Helens (MSH) in the days following its May 18, 1980 eruption was a few pretty sunsets. I was an undergraduate student in my first year at the University of Utah, and most of the ash cloud passed far north of Salt Lake City. MSH became more significant for me a few years later as a geology graduate student at Washington State University, where my research project involved analysis and correlation of Cascade Range tephra (volcanic ash) layers buried at various levels in the Quaternary Palouse Loess of eastern Washington. Some of these tephra layers correlated to ancient eruptions of MSH, dated around 13,000 and 36,000 years ago.

Fortieth Anniversary

Credit: USGS, Robert Krimmel, public domain

Due in part to easy accessibility, the 1980 eruptions of MSH have been studied more closely than just about any other explosive volcanic eruption in history. Geologists have learned…

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Noah, Ham, Canaan; evolution of a myth

Why did Noah get drunk?  What was Ham’s actual offence? Why was it Ham’s son Canaan who got cursed for it? Are all three of them perhaps composite characters? Japhet turns  up in Greek mythology, as well as in Genesis; who is copying whom, and why? These and other questions are discussed in Paul Davidson’s gripping account, The Curse of Ham/Canaan: A Mythological Mystery, re-blogged below.

This is not my usual area, but it happens to be directly relevant to two of my own recent blogs, https://paulbraterman.wordpress.com/2018/11/12/noahs-flood-and-how-to-talk-to-creationists-about-it/ , which he cites, and https://paulbraterman.wordpress.com/2019/04/01/creationism-noahs-flood-and-race/

Two technical comments: Friedman (The Bible with Sources Revealed) regards all the genealogies as intercalations, neither part of Yahwist nor of the Priestly source narrative.

And I have verified the tortured Hebrew grammar of Genesis 10:21 and 10:25, discussed in Paul’s post. This of course does not validate any particular explanation, but it is very clear that there is something that needs to be explained.

Time to let Paul speak for himself:

Is That in the Bible?

One of many puzzling passages that anyone reading the Bible from the beginning is soon confronted with is a story in which the flood hero Noah gets drunk and falls asleep naked—and which concludes with Noah placing a curse on his grandson Canaan. Since this passage was brought up by a commenter recently, I thought I’d look into it more closely.

Part of the reason, no doubt, for the impression of strangeness it leaves on readers is that it is (understandably) almost never preached on in church and may surprise those who remember the tale of Noah in children’s storybook terms, full of cuddly animals and pretty rainbows. When Aronofsky’s film Noah came out in 2014, Jon Stewart’s Daily Showaired a segment poking fun at religious viewers who were irked by the inclusion of a scene in which the titular character got drunk—and who were apparently oblivious to the existence…

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Noah’s Flood, and how to talk to creationists about it

“Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren” Saint Augustine of Hippo, Commentary on Genesis, ca. 400 AD

How do you discuss evolution and Earth science with biblical creationists, in such a way as to lead them to question their beliefs, rather than digging in deeper? This is the central problem for the book that I am now at last writing, and I would greatly value comments.

If we want to engage biblical literalists in meaningful discussion, we need to use arguments that make sense from the literalists’ point of view. As Lakatos pointed out, scientists will not abandon a position, despite anomalies, until a more satisfactory one is offered. Why should the creationist be any different? It is not enough to point to the scientific evidence. It is not even enough to point out that Noah’s Flood, using biblical chronology, would have come just in time to drown the pyramid-builders. We need to do more than simply raise objections. We must offer a better alternative, better, that is, on the creationist’s terms, emotionally and spiritually. Such an alternative, I argue, is what emerges from textual and historical analysis.

It helps, I think, to dispel the myth that religious belief requires belief in a young Earth, and the rejection of evolution, and one way of doing this is to point out that most religious believers, in the West at least, do accept, and have contributed to, the science. Since the early 19^th Century, biblical believers have been among prominent proponents of scientific geology and, later, of evolution. Most Christians belong to denominations that accept the fact of evolution, and there is an organisation, the Clergy Letter Project, dedicated to the celebration of evolution as part of God’s handiwork, a position sometimes referred to as theistic evolution. There are organisations, such as the American Scientific Association, devoted to accommodating religious beliefs to the science, and a large literature on the subject. Creationists, however, are either unaware of this activity, or reject it as incompatible with their more fundamental beliefs.

The creationist argument is simple: the Bible (including in particular Genesis) is the word of God, God tells the truth, therefore the Bible is true. What could be wrong with that, from the point of view of the believer?

Plenty.

However inspired the writers of Genesis may have been, they were of necessity people of their own times, expressing themselves within their own cultural context. This is hardly a novel observation. It goes back at least to Maimonides, 12^th Century biblical commentator and philosopher.

And what a context! The Old Testament text itself refers to many books that are now lost to us. The biblical Flood narrative itself shows signs of being formed from the welding together of two separate accounts written from different viewpoints, while its literary antecedents, and the antecedents of numerous other biblical passages, go back long before the date ascribed to Moses.

Bronze head of Sargon(?), unearthed at Nineveh. Public domain via Wikipedia

You are probably familiar with the story of Moses in the bulrushes, and may have wondered where on earth it came from. Here’s your answer. It is a direct echo of the story of Sargon of Akkad (2270 – 2215 BCE). Sargon’s mother, he tells us, was a priestess, and therefore had no business having children. So she made him a reed basket sealed with bitumen, and placed him in the river, from which he was rescued by a farmer drawing water.

Consider also the Code of Hammurabi, around 1754 BC. This code, and many subsequent cuneiform tablets, resemble in their “If a man…” format the codes of Exodus and Deuteronomy, including the notorious “an eye for an eye”, which the Jews by rabbinical times had reinterpreted as a right to financial compensation for injury. And the part-mythical, part-historical Sumerian Kings List (ca. 2000 BCE) assigns enormously long lives of the pre-Flood rulers, as Genesis does to its pre-Flood patriarchs.

 

 

Hammurabi receiving insignia from a seated god (Shamash, the Sun God, or Marduk); from Louvre stele of the Code, ca. 1750 – 1790 BCE. Image Mbtz own work via Wikipedia

The Flood story itself exists in numerous versions, the oldest ones known to us being the Sumerian Flood of Ziusudra and the Old Babylonian (Akkadian) of Atrahasis, from around 1600 BCE, although the story may by then already have been ancient. We should also remember that our cuneiform libraries are sadly incomplete, and in several key texts the ending is missing. Even so, the resemblance is clear, and sometimes extends to specific details. On one Old Babylonian tablet, the god who warns Atrahasis says that he will send him the animals to wait at his door to be rescued. Compare Genesis 6:20, where two of every sort will come of their own accord to Noah, thus answering the question of how he would have been able to round them all up. The same tablet even uses the expression “two by two”, as in Genesis 7:9, as does another recently translated tablet, the “Ark tablet” from around 1750 BCE, that shows the Ark as an enormous coracle.

Coracle on the Tigris in Baghdad, 1914. Freddy Khalastchy via Wikipedia

Closest to the biblical account among the surviving materials is the story of Utnapishtim, embedded in the Assyrian Epic of Gilgamesh, which I finally got around to reading this year. part of the great library of Ashur-bani-pal that was buried in the wreckage of Nineveh when that city was sacked by the Babylonians and their allies in 612 BCE. Gilgamesh is a surprisingly modern hero. As King, he accomplishes mighty deeds, including gaining access to the timber required for his building plans by overcoming the guardian of the forest. But this victory comes at a cost; his beloved friend Enkidu opens by hand the gate to the forest when he should have smashed his way in with his axe. This seemingly minor lapse, like Moses’ minor lapse in striking the rock when he should have spoken to it, proves fatal.

Enkidu dies, and Gilgamesh, unable to accept this fact, sets out in search of the secret of immortality, only to learn that there is no such thing. He does bring back from his journey a youth-restoring herb, but at the last moment even this is stolen from him by a snake when he turns aside to bathe. In due course, he dies, mourned by his subjects and surrounded by a grieving family, but despite his many successes, what remains with us is his deep disappointment. He has not managed to accomplish what he set out to do.

On his journey, Gilgamesh meets the one man who has achieved immortality, Utnapishtim, survivor of a flood remarkably similar, even in its details, to the Flood in the Bible. This includes the central figure acting on orders from a god, taking samples of all living things into the Ark, sealing it watertight with pitch (which is abundant in Mesopotamia), sending birds out of the Ark to test for dry land when, after the flood, it runs aground, and offering up sacrifice on emergence. In Genesis, famously, we have God pointing to the rainbow as a sign that He will never again bring on a universal flood. In the parallel passage in Gilgamesh, the goddess Ishtar displays her bejewelled necklace and says that she will never forget this time. There is a final element in Gilgamesh that is completely absent in Genesis. Enlil, who was primarily responsible for the Flood, is persuaded by the other gods that he has rather overdone it, goes down into the Ark, takes Utnapishtim and his wife by the hand, and grants them eternal life. (In Genesis, you may recall, Noah goes and gets drunk.)

One dramatic difference between the Genesis story and its Mesopotamian precursors is the length of the Flood; a year, rather than a few days. Another is the shape and composition of the Ark, which changes from a round coracle woven from reeds in Atrahasis to square planking in Gilgamesh to a giant gopher wood longboat in Genesis, although one feature (the use of pitch for waterproofing) remains constant throughout. Then there is the reason for the Flood. In Gilgamesh, none is given, but in other versions we are told that the gods, and especially the ill-tempered and arbitrary Enlil, think that humankind is making too much noise for their comfort.¹ The gods are, among other things, personifications of natural forces, and Enlil as sky god is responsible for storms. In Genesis, humankind is destroyed, by the God who created them, because they deserve it. We can debate the relative merits and degree of realism of these two approaches.

Schoolroom cuneiform tablet, Babylon, describing Baby Sargon in his cradle. From Finkel, p. 254

From very early times, the Israelites must have been familiar with the literature of their powerful neighbours to the East. They would certainly have come into contact with it during the Babylonian Exile. The Book of Daniel tells us (and why should we not believe it?) that selected Judaean youth were given three-year courses in Babylonian language and literature, during which provision was made for their food and wine. A university education, complete with maintenance grant! And we know from the recovered debris of Babylonian schoolrooms that the King List, Sargon, and Gilgamesh were part of the curriculum.

Other interesting things were happening in Babylon around this time. One remarkable tablet seems to describe all the other gods as attributes of Marduk, the god particularly associated with Babylon. So we are told that Urush is Marduk of planting, Nergal is Marduk of battle, Nabu is Marduk of accountancy, and so on through a total of 14 equivalences. If Marduk-worship really was moving in the direction of monotheism, this might help explain the puzzling fact that the Jewish hero of the book of Esther is called Mordechai.

The Flood story may have entered what was to become the Jewish tradition more than once, and from subtly varying sources. The Genesis account gives the strong impression of being the fusion of two slightly inconsistent narratives, using different ways of referring to God.² One of these has Noah taking one pair of each kind into the Ark, while the latter has him take in seven pairs of clean animals, presumably in order to have some available for sacrificing, or perhaps to restore agriculture after the Flood. The degree of distinctiveness of these two narratives, and their dates of composition, remain fertile areas for study and debate.

Thus, placed in context, the Flood story fits into a picture of intellectual and spiritual ferment as people, and peoples, develop their descriptions of the Deity. By contrast, the doctrine of verbal infallibility offers nothing but a single sterile rootless revelation. Genesis deserves better.

Sources: This piece was triggered by reading Sanders’ 1960 translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh. Reading this sent me back to Genesis, and hence to two other books, The Bible [actually, just the Pentateuch] with Sources Revealed,   by Friedman, and The Ark Before Noah,  by Finkel. Friedman is Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia, while Finkel is curator of the British Museum’s collection of cuneiform tablets. Most of the material here derives from these two sources.

1] Sandars interpolated this reason from the Atrahasis Flood story into her translation of Gilgamesh; see her introduction for details.

2] Some readers will recognise these as P (in some authors, E) and J respectively, two of the four sources proposed in the Documentary Hypothesis, for which Friedman lays out the evidence in the work already mentioned and, at greater length, in Who Wrote the Bible?  For a powerfully dissenting view, however, see Rendsburg, “The Biblical Flood story in the light of the Gilgamesh Flood account,” in Gilgamesh and the world of Assyria, Azize, J & Weeks, N., Peeters, 2007, p. 117, open access here (Publication 119), and How the Bible Is Written (scheduled for 2019).

Maimonides image via O Jardim de Epicuro. I would welcome information about its source. I thank Professor Gary Rendsburg for helpful correspondence and access to unpublished material. Some of the material in this piece appeared in 3 Quarks Daily

Meeting creationists on their own terms: understanding the Genesis flood

Maimonides said it best, over 800 years ago. The Divine Teaching is, of necessity, expressed in human language. We don’t believe that God has fingers and hands (Exodus, Isaiah, Psalms, Luke) or goes for walks in gardens (Genesis). I would add that no one takes the commandments in the Bible literally, and when Daesh comes close to following the rules of law laid down in Deuteronomy, we are quite properly appalled. All of this is familiar, but this piece combats biblical literalism on its own terms, shows how it is inseparable from interpretation, and thereby undermines its strongest attraction – the illusion of certainty.

The Logic of Science

In this post, I am going to do something highly atypical for a science blog: I am going to talk about theology. I want to be very clear about why I am doing this and why you should pay attention (regardless of your personal religious beliefs or lack thereof). I have spent a great deal of time talking to creationists, and what I have found is that most of them are concerned primarily with what the Bible says, and they only accept science when it happens to line up with their religious views. In other words, it’s not that the creationists are unintelligent, it’s simply that they have different priorities. As a result, if you initiate a conversation with creationists by talking about the science of evolution, you won’t get anywhere because they think that the science conflicts with their religion, but if you start by explaining why the science

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Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm Responds to Criticism

Last month, Professor Alice Roberts visited Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm, a creationist establishment recommended by Answers in Genesis, and wrote a highly critical report of what she found there. The Zoo Farm has replied on the Bristol culture website, and their response only adds further credibility to her strongest accusations. Since this website does not want to be accused of quote mining, I attach, in full, the Zoo’s statement, with our own comments inserted as appropriate. It should be remembered that the Zoo offers a range of what it describes as educational activities, including “an educational day out” for schools, with price discounts, on-site workshops described as being linked to the National Curriculum, and school and nursery outreach packages.

Professor Alice Roberts, from her web site

Prof Roberts tells of posters in the auditorium and children’s play area, which is presumably where the on-site workshops take place, claiming among other things that there are “30 reasons why apes are not related to man”, that humans were around at the same time as the first tetrapods (was Tiktaalik tasty, one wonders), that rates of radioactive decay were greater in the past, and that these possibilities should be considered as part of “an open, critical approach to explain what we see in the natural world.” She comments

I believe that religious fundamentalism has the potential to ruin scientific education. Apart from obscuring scientific facts, it teaches a way of thinking that is incredibly rigid. The evidence for a (very) old Earth and for evolution is overwhelming.

But believing in these things isn’t like a religious faith – it comes from a belief in evidence…. This [the zoo presentations] is, purely and simply, subversion of science

Intelligently designed; the creationist assault on science; Conway Hall talk draft flier

I will be giving the Sunday Lecture to the Conway Hall Ethical Society at 11:00 on 16th March 2014. Attached is my draft publicity material. Comments and suggestions welcome.

“Creation science” is a 20th century heresy, albeit with far older roots. Its central claim is that beliefs compatible with biblically inspired creationism are in fact scientifically superior to mainstream views on evolution and an old earth. Its arguments for supernatural intervention range from the ludicrous to the highly sophisticated; from “Flood geology” to the origin of biological information; from Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlets to seemingly scholarly works invoking cellular complexity or the so-called Cambrian Explosion. The creationists themselves are not necessarily stupid, nor ill-informed, nor (in other matters) deluded. In all cases, their deep motivation is the wish to preserve the supernatural role of God the Creator, and a particular view of the man-God relationship.

There are several interlocking organisations active in the UK to promote creationism. These include Glasgow’s own Centre for Intelligent Design (closely linked to the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and its notorious Wedge Strategy), Truth in Science, and The World Around Us/The Genesis Agendum, who between them have links to Brethren churches, the Christian Schools Trust, Answers in Genesis, and Creation Ministries International.

I will be discussing the attempts by such organizations to infiltrate the educational system, the inadequacies of official attempts to prevent this, and possible countermeasures. I will also be giving my own views on why creationist arguments are appealing to those without detailed background knowledge, and how we should respond.

Paul Braterman is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at GlasgowUniversity, and former Regents Professor at the University of North Texas, where his research related to the origins of life was funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA’s Astrobiology program. He is a committee member of the British Centre for Science Education, and of the Scottish Secular Society, and has been following creationist infiltration into education in the UK for some years. He is a regular contributor to 3 Quarks Daily, and his most recent book, From Stars to Stalagmites, discusses aspects of chemistry in their historical and everyday contexts.

psbraterman@yahoo.com  https://paulbraterman.wordpress.com  @paulbraterman

Answers in Genesis supporter providing Religious Observance at Scottish “Non-Denominational” School

Calderglen High School, a publicly funded school in East Kilbride near Glasgow, has a seven-member chaplaincy team,   which, according to the School’s website, “provides for the school a rich and key resource for the curriculum”. The team includes three representatives of Baptist churches, three from the Church of Scotland, and one, Dr. Nagy Iskander, from Westwoodhill Evangelical Church. Generally speaking, the Church of Scotland accepts scientific reality, while views within the Baptist churches vary. So what of Dr. Iskander, who holds the balance?

On the school website, he says

I am interested in Science and the Bible and always happy to tackle questions in this area, so please feel free to contact me about any questions regarding Science and the Christian faith.

What he does not say is that he is an out and out supporter of biblical literalism, singled out for praise by Answers in Genesis, and a welcome visitor and occasional speaker at Ken Ham’s Creation Museum in Kentucky, where you will learn that the fossil record is a result of Noah’s Flood, and that “Biblical history is the key to understanding dinosaurs.” You will also find on the AiG web site recorded lectures by Dr Iskander, in which he states that belief in the literal truth of Genesis is foundational to Christianity. As for the relationship between Science and the Bible, Dr. Iskander had this to say to his local newspaper, on the occasion of Answers in Genesis’ Scottish Conference this month:

Both the creationists and evolutionists have the same facts – we have the same earth, the same geological layers, the same fossils – but when we examine the facts we might come to different conclusions, depending on our starting point.

And in case you are charitable enough to see some wriggle room here (note that weasel word “might”) for reconciling science with Dr. Iskander’s view of religion, consider this, from his statement to a reporter from the [Glasgow] Sunday Herald:

Creation according to the Christian faith is a supernatural act of God, so it will not be repeated and we can’t test creation in the lab. Evolution needs to take place over millions of years and we cannot test that either. My view on this is we should mention everything – we should examine all the evidence and all the facts and have an open and civilised discussion about all of this without excluding one or the other.

In response, I cannot improve on the words of my friend Roger Downie, Professor of Zoological Education in a letter he sent to the Sunday Herald (published 16 June):

Your quotation from Dr Nagy Iskander illustrates why creationists should not be let near science classes. He said ‘Evolution needs to take place over millions of years and we cannot test that…’ On the contrary, evolution through Darwin and Wallace’s process of natural selection is happening all the time, sometimes quite quickly. Since Dr Iskander is said to be a surgeon, I would hope that he is fully aware of the evolution of the antibiotic resistance that has made hospital procedures so risky. Science advances through the testing of hypotheses and the accumulation of evidence. Both medicine and biology have greatly benefited from this process. I presume Dr Iskander’s medical practice is based on such advances, rather than the superstitions of previous times.

It is perhaps unkind to describe pre-scientific views as “superstitions” when considered in the context of their time. But to put such views forward today in the name of religion, as serious alternatives to scientific knowledge, brings religion itself into disrepute.

Who appointed Dr. Iskander to his position with the school? Were they aware of his Young Earth creationist views? What do the school’s own teachers, including both the science teachers and those who teach about religion, think of his role, and does he have any influence over their teaching? How often does he address the school, and on what subjects? Are parents notified of his views and influence? Do he and his fellow members of the Chaplaincy Panel receive any payments or reimbursements from the school? And does the school obtain any materials from a company called Christian Schools Scotland, of which he is a director?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but intend to find out by addressing a Freedom of Information request of the school. I will let you know what they say.

PS: Today’s small country viewing here is the Cayman Islands, population 55,000.

Illustration: Humans living peacefully before the Fall with vegetarian tyrannosaurs. Public domain photo of actual exhibit, through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Creation_Museum_10.png