An examination of the claims of conservative Biblical creationists reveals logical and doctrinal inconsistencies upon consideration of the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark as literal history in the Bible.
As an example of such doctrinal inconsistency you can consider what is called the law of God concerning incest, as recorded in such priestly documents as Leviticus in the Torah, that punish, with the death penalty and burning at the stake, sex between close relatives. This can be contrasted with the claim, also found in the Bible, that with God there is no change, no shadow of turning, that God is the same, yesterday, today and forever, and therefore morality is not dependant on circumstance, a commonly heard argument from conservative apologists, but rather morality is not culturally dependant or relative to time or place, but permanent, fixed and unalterable.
Therefore, these timeless and eternal laws of God would include the following selection of a long list of Torah regulations from the book of Leviticus, which, to summarize, punish with the severest legal penalties, any kind of sexual contact even remotely incestuous.
"None of you shall approach any one near of kin to him to uncover nakedness. I am YAHWEH ...
You shall not uncover the nakedness of your sister, the daughter of your father or the daughter of your mother, whether born at home or born abroad.
You shall not uncover the nakedness of your son's daughter or of your daughter's daughter, for their nakedness is your own nakedness.
You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife's daughter, begotten by your father, since she is your sister.
You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's sister; she is your father's near kinswoman.
You shall not uncover the nakedness of your mother's sister, for she is your mother's near kinswoman.
You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's brother, that is, you shall not approach his wife; she is your aunt.
You shall not uncover the nakedness of your daughter-in-law; she is your son's wife, you shall not uncover her nakedness."
(Leviticus 18:6)
Conclusion? Now Adam and Eve were the first human couple and they had children, sons who obviously either slept with their own sisters, or who had sex with their mother, producing more ‘near kinsmen' who slept with their own close relatives, etc. Abraham also married his own sister, according to Genesis. So morality changes according to circumstance (ironically this is the conservative creationist argument - to summarize, it was different back then because of such and such a reason. Thus, with God not being the same yesterday, there once was a time when morality was different than it is now ‘after the law' and incest was once okay. In order to maintain inerrancy of the Bible and a literal interpretation of its mythological histories, some Bible verse must become errant and impossible to interpret literally. Either the history in the Bible is not history at all, but rather mythological polemic, or the passages used to refute moral relativity are erroneous, as the Bible itself testifies.
Further logical inconsistencies are revealed when considering the story of Noah's Ark. There is no way that two (or seven) of every species in the world (including dinosaurs) could have fit onto Noah's Ark. The Ark, when we translate cubits to modern measurements, was said to have measured about 450 feet by 80 feet by 50 feet. Around where I live house lots are pretty close to being about 100 feet deep and 50 feet wide, so to put this into perspective you can imagine the ark being about the size of the yards of five of your neighbors and about two or three homes high. Now try to imagine cramming two of every animal on earth into the yards of your five neighbors, assuming that they could be stacked on levels about three high, and keep in mind that this would include two of every dinosaur, which as we know, roamed the earth with humans, according to creation science, and certainly two Brontosaurus, and two Tyrannosaurus, and so on, would take up a considerable amount of space in the yards of your five neighbors, and there remains two (or seven clean) animals of every other species on the planet that would also have to be crammed into our theoretical ark, along with their food and provisions, and of course, Noah and his half dozen relatives would have to shovel the manure and so on of all these animals. The Ark story could be interpreted for its meaning as a religious myth but it doesn't sound probable as history.
Creationists get nimble at this point and suggest that first, in a speculative addition to the text, that the animals no doubt went into hibernation during the ark voyage, needing no food and requiring no shoveling of manure, and also introduce a further speculative addition to the story by insisting that it was not required to take two of every animal, but rather just ‘two of every kind'. For example, you have wolves and foxes and so on, and these are of the ‘canine kind' so you would just have to pick one type and leave the rest. This forced interpretation violates the literal meaning of the Biblical passage, unless creationists invent a new pseudo-scientific category in the animal kingdom called ‘kinds', allowing them to then squeeze these arbitrarily defined ‘kinds' onto the Ark, an acknowledgment that any other attempt to literally interpret the Bible is logically ridiculous.
Having arbitrarily created a new classification in science of biology (the ‘kind') thus shaving down the number of animals in the world to something that might fit onto Noah's Ark (the only rational behind the creation of this new system of biological classification), nevertheless problems in logic still remain. Now the ‘canine kind' eats the ‘rabbit kind'. Two canine kinds would have had the two rabbit kinds for lunch, and would have been satisified for a day or two, and then would have been forced to polish off the squirrel kind, and then the deer kind, just to make it through the next week or two. We know that interbreeding of, say, the squirrel kind, would have quickly produced a bunch of bad tempered, cross eyed, kink tailed squirrels (assuming of course that our two squirrels had the chance to interbreed with all their close relatives before being devoured by the always hungry canine or cat kinds...)
We have lots of problems here, but they can be ‘solved' (not scientifically of course, but solved in terms of apologetics) by introducing wild and unprovable speculations. It is not the task of conservative creationists to contribute something to science, but only to convince you of the correctness of conservative theological propositions. For example we could speculate that, through an act of divine fiat, the canine kind did not require food for years. This is not science, nor could such speculations ever qualify as a valid scientific theory requiring ‘equal time' in the classrooms of the nation. For example one could inject the unsupported pseudo-scientific and unprovable religious dogma of ‘biogenetic deterioration' into what will purport to be a scientific debate, adding that this corruption of the genetic code resulted as a ‘consequence of the fall in Eden' to explain how, originally the incestuous humanity, and the incestuous squirrels could all freely interbreed without producing bad tempered, kink legged offspring. We will graciously ignore the inconsistencies in religious doctrines concerning the unchangeable nature of both morality and God for the time being, to avoid introducing further logical inconsistencies and making things any harder than they already are. Due to the (religious dogma) of the genetic curse, of course this interbreeding could not go on forever due to the deterioration of the genome that resulted from Adam and Eve who ate the apple in Eden. Etc. This biogenetic deterioration only got worse after the time of Noah's Ark and the flood, as you can tell by the shorter life spans recorded in the Bible. All of this is speculative and it is a common tactic of Creation Science to exploit the difficulty people seem to have in distinguishing between a speculation and a valid scientific theory. This speculative theory will be contrasted with the the scientific theory of evolution and the claim will be made that one 'theory' is as valid as another. This technique contributes nothing to science, and is unlikely to win over many scientists, because this is politics mixed with religion and is not science, and for this reason it has no place or right to ‘equal time' in a textbook on biology, or in a classroom. Creationists use a top down approach to science, the outcome first being decided, followed by research, while true science begins at the bottom, gathering evidence with rigorous honesty, always subject to peer review, and as such scientific theories are working models of reality and much more than simply speculative opinions. Propping up a single literalist interpreetation of certain Bible passages contributes nothing to science, but certainly lending a helping hand in the field of fundamentalist evangelization...
A Unified Field Theory
The Unified Field Theory
is also available as a zip file -> unified.zip
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