Essay:"Disproving god and claims in the bible"

In the Beginning . . .

The Christian biblical creation account is one of the only creation stories still believed to this day. It states that in six 24-hour days God created everything we know. He first created light on the first day. Second he made the heavens and the earth. On the third day he created land from the earth. Day four he created the plants, day five he created animals. Finally on the sixth day he created humans. This is all tied up into a neat little bow with the Garden of Eden, a place where there is no evil or suffering and everyone gets along. All you have to do is eat, have sex and populate the garden. No organism has thorns or chemical agents to hurt anyone, no one has to work. There is a tree in which no one can eat from, the Tree of Knowledge. So God made this irresistible fruit full of information, and it tastes good too...sounds pretty hard to resist. So what does God do with it? He puts an ultra sneaky snake with it. In this scenario, it looks like God is setting us up to fail, because his designs wouldn’t work if we didn’t fail. (Why create the tree of knowledge in the first place? There wouldn’t be any risk of anyone eating it if it didn’t exist.) If we didn’t eat the the fruit, the amount of people would add up and the earth would to encased in animals, plants, insects, and humans. The planet would look like this after about 10,000 years:

Before this so called “original sin” every species ever to live was supposedly eating plants. That sounds pretty unlikely. Most carnivores won’t eat plants even if they are starving to death, let alone survive and thrive on them. Carnivores simply can’t eat leaves, their teeth aren’t able to chew it enough, and they don’t have the right chemicals to break it down. Even if they do accomplish that great feat they don’t have the right gut-stuff to digest non-soluble fiber. No carnivore can break that down. Even herbivores can’t break it down completely, they still need help from bacteria. Even if they do some how manage to do all this they still have to use what they digested. Plant fiber has to be broken down into glucose for an animal to use, carnivores can only break down simple carbohydrates, proteins, and fat not complex carbs like celloluse. It’s the biological equivalent of trying to run a diesel engine on gas (or vise versa). It simply doesn’t work, there are no explanations that doesn’t require God stepping in and doing “magic”. All the creationists are starting to realize that was a little far fetched, but the rest of the creation account is still sound, right? A different but related element is that at one point ALL species were supposedly alive and existed together at one point in time. If this was true we would see it in the fossil record. After the eating of the Smarts Apple, things started to die off and the fossil record would show at the very bottom layer all species, including but not limited to: Humans, Dinosaurs, Trilobytes, single-celled organisms, birds, fish, HIV/AIDS, and Tapeworms. If we look at the fossil record we don’t see this, ANYWHERE, and we have have looked. Back before the theory of evolution, everyone believed the Genesis creation story. So, naturally early geologists went looking for evidence to back it up. They went all over the earth looking for fossils and recording the other fossils around it and they found that anywhere you look the fossils (if undisturbed, their order can be changed by erosion and weathering) You will find this order:

What the fossil record shows is that as time increases so does complexity and diversity. This is the OPPOSITE of what the Bible says (which is that there is a decrease of species not a increase). No one could figure out why until Charles Darwin in 1859 made a link between the steady increase in complexity and diversity and the steady increase in number of different finch beaks in the Galápagos Islands. Many creationists say that evolution is unscientific, but the opposite is true. Evolution states that when an organism replicates its cells there is a small chance that a ray of radiation hits the RNA before it copies itself and causes a change in the DNA code. The DNA code now governs the animal’s appearance, size, shape and other characteristics. The mutation might be good or bad depending upon what it changed. If it is bad, it will stop the organism from surviving or reproducing (fish that can only breathe air). Creationists will say that Darwin only saw “micro-evolution”. A new species is one thing but a whole new family or genus is something completely different. But that is the best part about evolution. Over time, certain parts get evolved that aren’t needed to survive, just reproduce. For example, the peacock. This bird, for those who don’t know, has a large array of feathers that actually hinder the bird’s flight. We also see this in other parts, such as the eye. Almost every living thing on our planet has an eye. Is that because they were randomly made by a God, or because a billion years ago, the very basic, simple eye-like cells that sensed and differentiated light and lack of light gave plants an edge at getting in the sunlight? If we look back at the fossil record, we will notice that the most complex organisms at the time are only slightly more complex. Don’t be fooled, there is no big jump, it’s infinitesimal changes every generation. We also have more evidence than that, we have the genetics to use too. When we first mapped the human genome, we saw that most of our genes are no more complex than other organisms, we just had more of them. More chromosomes, the coiled up DNA inside the nucleus. Instead of just one or 10 we have 26. We are using the same genetic “alphabet” (same four bases) as all life on Earth: A, C, G, T. It’s like asking a 1st grader and a professional writer to both write a murder-mystery book. Assuming that they have both unlimited time and resources, the professional writer will always produce a better, longer, and more complex book. They used the same 26 letters of the English alphabet. The pro writer just has more, better put together letters than the 1st grader. The same is true in evolution, only instead of a writer writing it we have nature choosing the best gene combos for survival. This system is able to produce everything from cheetahs that can run 70 mph, to water bears that can survive years without water. But the whole theory of evolution would be blown out of the water if we found out that the earth was less than 10,000 years old (along with the rest of modern science).

The True Age of the Earth

How old is the earth? Well that’s an age-old question. What is the answer? Back in the middle ages an archbishop used known dates in the Bible to estimate the age of the Earth and he figured it was about 6,000 years old. Most people at that time were creationists and they ate it up like candy. When Charles Darwin wrote “The Origin of Species” he figured that the earth would have to be much older; somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 million years. Good scientific reasoning. When geologists tried to date the earth, they tried many different ways like soil deposits and sedimentary rocks but the rate at which these processes happen varies widely, so they needed something more steady and constant. Enter Madame Curie, a famous chemist that worked with radioactive elements like uranium and radon. She and her colleagues found that the energy being emitted (radiated), they named it radiation. They observed a phenomenon that they named a half-life. A half-life is the amount of time it takes half of the radioactive element to decay. Since it’s expotential decay the graph looks like this:

Since half decays it just gets infinitely small, but still there. There are about 10 trillion trillion molecules in one teaspoon of water. It would take 10,000,000 half-lives for all of that to decay (if it was radioactive). Uranium is a common element in the earth’s crust, found in uranium ore (you can buy it online!). Its common isotope is Ur238 , it takes 4.47 billion years for half of it to decay. When Ur238 decays, it decays into Pb203. When the solar system was young the stuff that would make up our solar system now was all plasma orbiting around the sun (plasma is a state of matter above gas the electrons just freely float around to form a kind of “soup”). When radioactive elements are in a plasma state, they are filled with energy and don’t decay. This resets the radioactive clock. Once the plasma forms gas and dust one of the next things formed was zircon crystal. Zircon is a crystal that is very opposing to lead (it gets repelled like a magnet). This keeps lead from contaminating the sample. The zinc in ZrCr3 sometimes get replaced by uranium. then they find zircon crystals and put them in a mass spectrometer (it uses magnetic fields to break bonds and reduce compounds to their base elements then find amounts of all the elements in the sample). When Clair Patterson first did this in the 1950’s, the mass spectrometer gave him these numbers

parts lead to uranium 1.01565/1=x/4.47 A little bit of simple algebra and we know that the age of the earth is 4.54 billion years old.

Sinking Noah’s Ark

One of the most infamous stories in the the Bible is that of Noah’s Ark. It’s an easy story to understand, the animals walk two-by-two into the Ark. It rains for 40 days and nights, water covers the earth up to Mt. Everest. The water drains away and the boat lands on the top of a mountain range in the Middle East. After that everyone gets out and repopulates the earth. Plot-wise it seems like an interesting story, but is there any truth behind it?

The Ark

According to the Bible, it was about 450 ft. long and 100 ft. wide. It was also only made of Cypress wood and pitch. Based on those constraints we will see if this is possible. This boat could have been built in ancient times if Noah had limitless resources, time, a hundred thousand skilled workmen, and a few civil engineers. Without skilled workers and civil engineers I doubt he could have made a seaworthy boat at all or in a timely fashion. But Noah didn’t have endless resources and time. So, could he even had made one at all? The largest known wooden boat was the Wyoming built in the early 20th century by the New England shipbuilders, whom are among the best in the world. They have been doing this 300 years. They, unlike Noah, had steel and a steam engine (for bailing). It featured a triple interlocking hull, 90 steel cross beams for support, and a highly trained 14 man crew. When they first launched it in 1909 and the crew found that it was extremely unstable, it moved in every direction. The boat wasn’t really used but sank on rough seas one day. How could this boat sink in rough waters, built by experts and modern materials, but not the Ark, built by a drunk and his family using only Cypress wood and pitch. And Cypress isn’t even a good wood for use as a building material. Compare. The top being Cypress and the bottom being pine oak, a common oak in the midwest U.S..

Cypress Janka Hardness: (2,270 N) Modulus of Rupture: 13,860 lbf/in2 (95.6 MPa) Elastic Modulus: 1,713,000 lbf/in2 (11.81 GPa) Crushing Strength: 6,750 lbf/in2 (46.6 MPa) http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/softwoods/cypress/

Janka Hardness: 1,820 lbf (8,100 N) Modulus of Rupture: 13,700 lbf/in2 (94.5 MPa) Elastic Modulus: 1,730,000 lbf/in2 (11.93 GPa) Crushing Strength: 7,850 lbf/in2 (54.1 MPa)

Noah maybe could have built the boat given plenty of time and resources, but it wouldn’t be seaworthy.

The Animals If we give Noah the benefit of the doubt and say he built a solid boat. How would all the animals work? Well 2 ways 1. bring all the species of the world, which a low estimate is 10 million or 20 million total. That number is way too high, so that couldn’t work. 2. we could have all the “Kinds” (which is basically a family) of animals which everyone boat would equal 16,000 individual animals.I think that noah could fit all those animals, If they all within 100 ft of the ark, but noah would have to get all the families of the world. Noah would not be able to do that. We will again give noah the benefit of the doubt and say that he got all those animals from their habitats and got them on the boat, but we still run into another problem, food. Noah would need A LOT OF FOOD, not only that, but specific to each animal. He would have to feed 16,008 animals for 2-12 months. The nimitz class aircraft carriers have about 3200 people, They have to port every 3 weeks to refill food. and they can’t eat fish or other sea life, because some families require plants or other non-sealife and they will be dead. even if noah gets all this food how will he keep it from decomposing. Many large predators need fresh meat, not salt preserved or pickled. Humans won’t invent refrigeration for a few thousand years. So noah would need to bring more prey for the predators to eat, then he would have to bring more food for those animals, thus increasing the total storage necessary to pull this off. Yet again we will give noah the benefit of the doubt and yet again we run into more problems. Poop.Noah would most likely build a 3-d lattice of support beams then make those beams into walls and floors and have a boat full of stalls. which could be done in theory (but probably not in practice). An horse needs its bedding to be changed at most every 3 days. So noah and his family would have to work around the clock cleaning stalls and replacing bedding, Noah would die for exhaustion in a few days but we will give him the benefit of the doubt and say that hes got that covered, but we run into another problem, bedding. Best case scenario they are at sea for 2 months. So 60/3=20 20*5=100 100*16,000=16,000,000 Ft.3 of bedding. if the boat is 450 ft long, 150 ft wide and 100 ft tall is only 6,750,000 ft3 not even enough room for all the bedding. Again we will give him the benefit of the doubt, But we run into another problem, work. We will reduce the amount of animals that need their bedding changed to 5,000 less than half. We have to to get all of the stalls done in three days. I can do about 3-4 per hour so 72 to 96 per day working around the clock. Best case scenario, 288 no where near 5,000. They would have to do on stall in 1 min and 9 secs to get in time and this is working 24 hrs around the clock, they would be dead before they even finished the 288. Even if the managed to do all that they still have many more problems to come.

The Water

In the bible it says it rain constantly for 40 days and nights and it rains enough to cover the top of the tallest peak. It would have to rain almost 30 inches per hour which, again is impossible. The most rain ever to fall in a hour was in Holt, missouri where it rained just over 1 in one hour. We need 30x that. But the bible also metions water from the great deep, but if we look at the water distribution on the earth:

We see that most of the water is in the ocean. There is simply not enough water on earth to flood it so high, but what if a comet hit earth. Comets are made mostly of ice. This could happen however unlikely, but the comet would have to big so big that the water that melted would be the lease of noah’s problems. The comet destroy life on earth, then flood the earth. Lets say that god takes care of that and floods the earth after the water is there where would it go? I suppose it could go into the earth’s crust and turn it into quicksand, but then after the boat rotted or they food? The water couldn’t just couldn’t evaporate and disappear because it would the it would rain down as water in a few days. It would be there for forever but there are more problems yet to come! After the Flood we will for one of the last times give noah the benefit of the doubt and saw that he was able to save the animals from the flood and they safely got back to land, but as soon as the animals get off the boat there is nothing to eat. All the vegatation would have been destroyed in the flood. So the food chain would be destroyed since there are no producers and the enviroment would be nothing like it was before the flood so they couldn’t bring plants to replant after the flood. Some animals would simply die because of the lack of their natural habitat. Animals like the clown fish rely on other animals in their habitat to provide sheilter. Even if they were to find food, they would still have trouble reproducing. Since there are only 2 of each family of animal. If one those animals were to die, refuse to mate with the other or no be reproductively sound, then we would lose families. Noah also has the problem of inbreeding which means that animals that breed with their offspring then the offspring have a greater chance of mutation and are more likely to have genetic problems like in humans downs sydorm or sickle cell anemia. this produces bad genetics and poor animal health.

The Fish and Aquatic life

Most people overlook the fish as a problem because they can thrive in water, but there are still problems. When the comes in the story(where ever it comes from) it would mix with the sea water and cause a half salty half fresh mixture that Freshwater fish nor salt water fish could survive in. There are some animals like the bull shark that can “breathe” both salty and freshwater. They might survive, but would later die because of the lack of food would cause they to die and the lose of thier natural habitat. because were they lived before is now 30,000 ft under the sea. Every winter at the poles(not to be confused with polsish people) the aratic and anartic freeze more water than in the summer. Since salt water cannot freeze it gets concentrated into about a thrid of the amount of water it was previously dissoved in. This water is a lot denser that normal water so it sinks to the bottom of the ocean and then moved to the eqautor via deep sea ocean currents. This super salty water called brine keeps the ocean at a relatively even and low tempreture which prohibits the growth of a centian species of bacteria that produce hydrogen sulfate gas that is dangerous to ALL life on earth, it is also is better at trapping heat thatn carbon dioxide. It will cause a expodiional rise in the tempreture of the earth and causes more of these bateria. A positive feedback loop. The Flood would stop this cycle and kill all life on earth then irreversably ruin it. The other problems seem like a minor inconvence to noah come paired to this.

False Hopes

Jesus was in no doubt ahead of his time. His docturine about no violence, love everone as yourself was 1000’s of years aheah of his time. He was a good man(or who ever wrote his scribe), but there is one big problem. His message of heavan and hell hurt people to this day

The Hell House In Richard Dawkins’ documentary ‘The God Delusion’ named after his groundbreaking book The god delusion. He goes Around the globe pointing out the bad things religion does. One of the most distrubing is the hell house. This a place at churchs act out if “sins” such as getting an abortion or sleeping with the same sex are commited. Many people don’t see that as morally wrong. They use this as a way to keep people in the church and use fear. Fear of hell. Religion teases people the notion of Heaven. They their children that other children, thier friends are going to hell even if they arn’t the same sect of christanty. They tell their children that their children that people that they care for are going to a place of infinite torture for and pain all because they arn’t the same type of christain they are. Though this place can’t seen or touched or even makes sense they believe and the fear is real to them. Parents place rediculus rules like no sex before marriage or hate gay people, then mentally abuse them with the notion of hell. Hell (as the bible describes it) is a place that most bad people don’t deserve to go. Even Hitler doesn’t deserve to go to hell for enetey maybe just 100 years of infinte pain and torture. But some religious people don’t believe people go to hell or don’t believe in hell all together. Why would Heaven hurt people?

False Hopes: Heaven

The idea if heaven is a nice one. Not having to worry or hurt, be cold or hungery, always be happy and just worship god. It sounds nice, but is probobly too good to be true. Modern Neuroscience has found out that our brain isn’t anything special, it’s just more effeicent than the other brains in the animal kingdom. We, as a species like to think we are something better than animals, Human. But, we are biolologically the same as the other primates, just less hair and more brain. We see this when we went pampered like we are today. When humans are stranded in the wilderness and need to play wilderness survival, we see we behave similarly to other great apes. Modern Neuroscience also tells us that our brains like computers run on eletricty (on a basic level they also need oxygen, sugar, elecrolytes, an immune system, and water.) Just like a computer our brain wears out, Its parts get old and break then it cant control the body and it dies. The brain needs the body to process stuff and turn it in to stuff it can use the. The body relies on the brain to tell it how it can get. The brain uses proteins to turn sugar into ATP, then ATP into eletricty. The Brain has cells called neurons, these neurons can form up to 4 connections with other neurons and then they “fire” to each other. Memories are formed by a certain sequence of neurons firing. Think of it as a sentence like: The ducks live on that pond. that fires and certain chain of neurons and you will remember that for a little bit and the more you fire those neuron the longer you will remember it. After a certain amount of time has passed then you will forget and that will be that. Once your brain is biologically dead then you forget all the stuff you ever knew. Your personally, First kiss, First kid, etc. All the energy that kept those neurons firing has dissapated and is unsable. So this “soul” that religion talks about doesn’t really exist. It is a notion from a pre-sciencfitic age. So how could your soul continue on into the afterlife if the electric signals in our brain dissipate, they contain all our memories. So when the lights go out, they stay out. Sorry folks it all just wishful thinking. Let’s switch gears here and think logically about heaven. Why would an all loving god need heaven, why couldn’t he just live do here with us and make everyone happy and we would all worship him. Many christains argue that god can’t do the the impossible make heaven on earth, but they arn’t thinking critically. If god is all powerful and some people are loving, kind, generous, merciful, etc. and some people arn’t then why can’t god make all people all the good stuff that i just stated above. It says that he was able to make all the animals get along just fine. The only reason religion needs heaven is so there is a reward for believing. There is also a place for people that reject religion: hell.

False hopes: Prayer