h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've gathered a few simple examples from the bible which, to me, make no sense:

Part 1
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According to the bible, God created man, called Adam, and took one rib from the side of Adam to create woman, called Eve. God never created any more people but these two. Then A. and E. angreed Him by not following His commandments, and they were expelled from 'paradise'.

Then something happens: they have two sons, named Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel, leaving only one son! Never does the book say that A. and E. had more children. Yet, some time later, the world appears to be filled with many tribes of people. How did this occur?

Did Cain bonk his mother? In that case Eve must have been the first whore, setting the example for her daughters, which were both Cains sisters and his daughters at the same time.

Or did Cain bonk some ape which miraculously appeared to be compatible?

Anyway, whatever the case, if all the people were born from this one pair of humans, then how is it that they weren't all sickly, insane morons? We know that if you mate with someone who is too closely related to you, you are likely to have very unhealthy offspring.

The only conclusion is, there were many more people, and Creation is a lie.

Part 2
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Noah was told to build his Ark, and to gather a pair of each kind of animal in existence. Knowing how many different animals exist, that ark must have been at least the size of one of our major cities. With simple wood, that would be impossible to build. Especially, since the tribes of that time lived in barren places such as deserts where wood was not that common.
Anyway, even if we accept the Ark, then all animals were there, a pair of each, and Noah and his wife, and their sons with their wives.
Then the Flood comes, the world is destroyed, and when the waters disappear we start anew. A few people, all related to eachother, and only a pair of each of the different species of animals.

And we know what happens after that... The world becomes (over-)populated once again. This is the second instance where we logically should have fallen into nothingness. How did we escape?

These were questions that bothered me already the first time when I read the bible by myself, and I was about 8 or 9. About ten years later, I decided that such inconsistencies can not be Gods truths, and since God himself has always refused to answer my prayers, I knew that he was not a true God. He was a fantasy, created in our own image by men before me. Since that time I've effectively been an Atheist.

Surely, Christianity was essentially just another provincial middle-eastern religion until it managed to get a lucky ride to a wider audience by clutching on to the coat-tails of the Roman empire, and was as ignorant of the rest of the world as one would expect an entirely human-created religion to be.

For example, the 'worldwide' catastrophe of Noah seems quite possibly to be a faint memory of a small regional disaster, possibly one caused when the Black Sea was rapidly raised by several hundred metres to its current level, as the level of the Mediterranean rose and breached the previous natural dam across the Bosphorus. To someone living in that small area, it might seem like *their* world was disappearing under water, but the 99.999% of the world population anyone already living above global sea level wouldn't even have got their feet wet.

The biblical version is so full of logical holes, it would be hard to write a more ridiculous story if you tried. The animals could never have been gathered, fitted into the ark, kept apart, fed, cleaned, *or* put back where they came from. Predators would have died out, as would most plants and saltwater life. All resulting humans would presumably have shared Noah's language and religion. The effects of the inevitable genetic bottleneck would have finished off many other species with the next disease outbreak (and how come so many animals were evil, and had to be killed in the first place.)

If God could surmount all these problems with his mighty powers, why didn't he just levitate the animals, stick them on a temporary mountain (or create a little *less* water), teach them to swim or breathe underwater, or just kill all the ones he *didn't* like. If it only took him a day or two to create them in the first place, why not just kill everything and start again from scratch, rather than messing around for months with a boat.

It bears all the hallmarks of a story passed down the generations, being embellished at every turn until it carries no more than a faint echo of reality.

Part I: The Bible does say that Adam has more kids, in Gen 5:4 - "Adam lived 800 years after the birth of Seth (his third son), and he had other sons and daughters." What gets me, though, is that they say "Cain had relations with his wife and bore..." and talk about Seth and his wife... but where did they come from? Obviously they were having sex with their sisters, and as such were inbreeding like the royal family... so we can assume all of the third generation of man looked like Prince Charles.

Part II: A lowly shepherd from a landlocked village has enough shipbuilding knowledge to build a bigger all-wooden boat than man has ever been able to build since... that sort of length requires iron strapping to reinforce the keel. But this is the best part... after the land is dry, Noah celebrates thusly: "The Noah built an altar to the lord, and choosing from every clean animal every clean bird, he offered holocausts on the altar." Since there were only two of each at this point, we can assume that this act drove every clean bird and animal to extinction.

Apparently it's not just me who finds such weird holes in the bible.

I believe I'm starting to miss a bible around here. Maybe I should buy one for these studies. Two would be better. One in English and one in Dutch. The Dutch version would be easier for me to casually read and understand, but the English one would be perfect for quoting here without having to translate

I absolutely recommend you have one handy. Nothing works on xtians so much as when you use their own bible against them. Then use the Skeptic's Annotated Bible (link on the FFFF homepage) to find the juicy parts easily.

Thanks for the hint, but I think I'd rather find some juicy stuff myself. I'd like to be original, even if it was only once

"Since there were only two of each at this point.."

Ahem. Seven of each. (Gen. 7:2.)

Thank you.

TRiG.

Yet another of the many and fun-filled contradictions that make the Bible a comedy and a headache at the same time, then.

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/twos.html

The Noachian Flood:

EVERY mythology the human race has preserved contains a flood myth.

This is not to say that the Biblical flood occured, but it does say something about

i)human fear of death by drowning;
ii) how commonplace floods are - look at New Orleans recently. What if this had happened to a preliterate civilization or to one of the first cities, whose survivors would not have known what we know about hurricanes and weather patterns, but who DID know that everything they had was gone and who would have been traumatised by it. Every myth has to start somewhere, after all, and oral transmission over following generations would fix it as part of that people's mental furniture. Even today, there are still people who are inclined to blame it on a vengeful God who is vexed that His people have proven sinful in His sight!

But the clincher, when it comes to disproving the literal Biblical flod, is that you can extrapolate from the Bible that the floodwaters covered the Earth to a depth of ten feet above its highest point.

To cover Earth to a depth of Mount Everest plus ten feet would need an estimated fifteen times the total amount of water that exists in the Earth's ecosystem. So if the Biblical account is true - where did the extra water come from and where did it go to afterwards?

Does *every* mythology include a flood?

Even assuming that is the case, I'd add a couple of extra points for consideration:

iii) The extent to which mythologies are copied from earlier ones. The biblical and related mythologies are probably copied from pre-existing tales, and it's possible that a handful of actual serious floods have spawned tales which ended up in numerous widespread mythologies.

iv) The fact that [argicultural] peoples tend to live where floods are most common, or sometimes simply inevitable - flood plains are often very fertile. Small-island peoples may well have experience of tsunamis or storm-driven flooding from the sea.

"after the land is dry, Noah celebrates thusly: "The Noah built an altar to the lord, and choosing from every clean animal every clean bird, he offered holocausts on the altar." Since there were only two of each at this point, we can assume that this act drove every clean bird and animal to extinction."

Noah must have been amassing and somehow confining his two-by-two animals a long time before the Ark was finished, and then they were afloat for forty days, and then after landing on Ararat must have been confined for a while whilst the flood waters receded.

Plenty of time for the "fast-breeders" to generate a lot more than two animals, methinks! Which begs the question: in forty days two rats or mice could raise a litter to near-adulthood, esp. if the female was already pregnant on boarding. So the Ark would have finished with a lot more animals than it started with? (And to FEED that many animals for forty days: doesn't that require a specialist knowledge of animal husbandry (ie, to know, for instance, pandas only eat Chinese bamboo. Is that readily available in Palestine?) combined with another Ark, at least as large, for the food stores needed? Also, the mucking-out involved, esp. of large pachyderms such as elephants and hippos... no wonder the poor bloke got rat-arsed on landing!)

At least he wouldn't have needed to take any fish or sperm whales or dolphins aboard, though....

Also, what of animals like bees who do not pair-bond? What did Noah do here, take one queen and the thousands of drones swarming to mate with her?And bees cannot survive as individuals outside their hive?

The key word here is "clean." By this he means all the animals which have been proclaimed as fit to eat by Levitical texts (which have yet to be written, but I digress). So the only things he killed were food animals, which explains why, for example, pigs (unclean) still walk the earth, while cows, deer, and oxen (or all cud-chewing, cloven-hoofed animals) are extinct.

One reason why *many* peoples have myths about floods, is because when the last ice age ended there were enormous floods all over the world. Something like 15-20m sq miles of continental shelf disappeared under the sea. It would be more surprising if there were no folk-memories of this, than that there are.

Weren't the 'clean' animals supposed to have been taken on board in greater numbers than the unclean?

"Weren't the 'clean' animals supposed to have been taken on board in greater numbers than the unclean?"

Erm. See post 7.

This is one of those bits where they say things which are totally contradictory, and your interpretation basically depends on which one you're inclined to believe.

We have 6:20 -

"Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive."

This indicates a strict two each, including two specific mentions of animals which are clean: fowl and cattle.

Then comes 7:2-3 -

"Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth."

This is in direct contradiction with 6:20, particularly in regards to fowl.

Finally, 7:8-9 -

"Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth, There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah."

Now, this is the part that tells what exactly got on the boat. In the first two passages Noah is receiving instructions, and they're contradictory. If we say that Noah had to make a decision on which order to follow, it appears he followed the first one. Hence, there were only two of each beast, clean and unclean.

Another interesting thing that just occurred to me, though... the rules governing clean and unclean animals were to follow Noah by several generations. We're applying Mosaic law that hasn't even been created yet. All of the references to clean and unclean animals are anachronisms.