Sir
Bishop Moagi Khunou’s letter “Much agreement between Bible
and true science” (The Star, January 21, copy below) is a classic piece on how religion
deals with pesky facts.
First, if you don’t have a good response, denigrate your
opponent’s views as “hackneyed and discredited” without refuting them.
Then, profess Special Knowledge. Your opponent is deluded, as indeed are many
Christians, but you know better.
In fact, denigrate anyone likely to disagree: They are
“casual or simplistic minds”, not “serious students”.
Knock down some straw men and deliberate misunderstandings
of your opponent’s position, throw in a few apparent “facts”, a casual lie like
a deathbed conversion of Darwin, skirt around anything difficult, and you’re
done –what could be easier?
Only a believer is qualified to criticise the Bible? Hardly. Reading the Bible with an open mind
is one of the surest routes to atheism
Let us confront what the Bishop avoided:
I was refuting Mr Lee’s claim that the Bible is “the
infallible and inerrant Word of God”. I
showed that it is not inerrant (error-free) as it has serious mistakes, and not
infallible (incapable of error) as it has been modified over time. I said nothing about whether God personally
wrote the Bible, one of the Bishop’s straw men.
There are plenty of professing Christians who believe that
the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, including about 30% of US citizens:
They are called “Young-Earth Creationists”.
However the Bishop is welcome to believe that a Divine Space Opera took
place between the first two verses of Genesis.
Let’s also ignore that in Genesis 1, God creates plants
first and man last, after all other animals, but in Genesis 2 He creates man
first.
What we can’t ignore is that in Genesis 1, God creates day
and night on the first “day”, and then it was evening and morning (a literal
day –not an “age”). Plants are created on the third day, and the sun, moon, and
stars on the fourth day. Thus we have
day and night proceeding before the creation of the sun. The earth is supposedly older (much older,
the Bishop claims) than the sun, which is itself two days older than Adam. Please try to reconcile this with science!
The Bishop claims that there is agreement between the Bible
and “true science”. “True science” is a
tautology: If it’s not true, it’s not science.
No doubt the Bishop only regards as true the parts of science that don’t
contradict his myths.
There is a big difference between a Bible written by
fallible men, and science done by fallible men.
Science is self-correcting.
Experimental results –facts– are checked against the proposed
model. There is stringent peer
review. Scientists compete for the best
explanation that fits reality.
Hypotheses that do not work are discarded.
Religious books, on the other hand, are not rewritten when
they prove inaccurate. The believer is
not encouraged to check that his beliefs match reality. Instead he is called upon to believe
ever-more absurd things in order to demonstrate his “faith”.
For example… If all the eight-million-odd species on earth
were on Noah’s Ark and got off on Mt Ararat, isn't it strange that we find
marsupials only in Australia? The Bishop
seems to believe that they ran and swam (or built boats?) all the way there
without any being left behind!
Continental Drift, coupled with evolution, is a much sounder
explanation.
Note how the Bishop skirts the genealogy of Jesus. “The Saviour had to be born in the house
of David” –what nonsense is this? Does
the Bishop know how babies are made?
Matthew 1-16 deals only with the male line: Either Joseph is Jesus’s genetic
father, in which case Jesus is the “son” of David, the “son” of Abraham –but not
the Son of God– or, if God inseminated Mary, then Jesus can be claimed as the
“Son of God” but he has no family tree, and the “prophecies” are false.
Of course the Bishop has no answer to the 500-year
difference between the conflicting so-called genealogies of Jesus in Matthew 1
and Luke 3. If God “inspired” Matthew
and Luke, he “inspired” at least one of them to lie.
We can find biblical phrases that can be shoe-horned into
agreeing with modern science after the fact.
Nevertheless, the Bible has been used, and continues to be used, to
suppress science and human rights. One
thinks of church persecution of Galileo and Copernicus, the “Creationism”
rampant in the US, and persecution of gays in Africa.
According to Wikipedia on “Deathbed Conversion”, Charles
Darwin did not “surrender to the wisdom of God in the end”. Deathbed conversion stories should be taken
with a pinch of salt. It is claimed that
Christopher Hitchens too had a deathbed conversion: He called for a priest, and
converted him to Atheism.
