Drowned cities and drowning mythology

Yesterday, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces by Claude Debussy, The Drowned Cathedral, and I started to wonder what legend had given rise to the piece.  After a little bit of digging, I found out that Debussy got his inspiration from the Breton legend of the mythical city of Ys, built on the coast of Brittany behind a seawall.  Princess Dahut the Wicked tempted fate by engaging in all sorts of depravity therein, despite the warnings of Saint Winwaloe that God was watching and would smite the ever-loving shit out of her if she didn't mend her ways.  (Okay, I'm paraphrasing a bit, here, but that's the gist.)  Anyhow, Dahut wouldn't listen, and one night a storm rose and broke through the seawall, and the ocean flowed in over the city.  Dahut's father, King Gradion, escaped on a magical horse with Dahut riding behind him, but Winwaloe shouted at him, "Push back the demon riding with you!"

So Gradion did what any good father would do, namely, he shoved his daughter into the sea, which "swallowed her up."  The sea also swallowed the rest of Ys, which kind of sucked for the inhabitants, given that it wasn't really their fault that the princess was a little morally challenged.  As for Princess Dahut herself, she became a mermaid, and is still hanging around to tempt sailors into jumping into the ocean to their deaths.  And according to legend, on windy days, you can still hear the bells of the drowned cathedral of Ys if you stand along the shore of Douarnenez Bay.

The Flight of King Gradion, by Évariste-Vital Luminais, 1884 (in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Brittany, France) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Kind of a cool story, in a ruthless, Grimm's Fairy Tales sort of way, even if Winwaloe and Gradion, not to mention God, do come across as pro-patriarchy assholes.  And whatever else you think, you have to admit that Debussy's piece is gorgeous (go back and give a listen to the recording of it I linked above, if you haven't already done so).

What I haven't told you, yet, though, is the other thing I found out while looking up the Legend of the Drowned City of Ys...

... which is that he über-Christians are now using the story to support creationism.

I'm not making this up.  If you don't believe me, check out the page called "Submerged Ruins" at the site Genesis Veracity Foundation.  Here's how they launch the idea:

Have you ever seen a map showing the bronze age port cities of the world? You certainly have not, because the darwinists will tell you sea level at circa 2000 B.C. was little different than today, yet the presence of hundreds of submerged ruins’ sites from the Gulf of Chambay to Bimini, and from Cornwall to Nan Madol, certainly belie that notion, with most of the submerged ruins worldwide in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, right where you’d expect them to be, where Sidon, Peleg, Javan, Tarshish, and Atlas plied the waters, building their port facilities, now submerged since the end of the Ice Age.  Here is a partial list of the submerged ruins worldwide, with pictures where available, to be soon updated as more photos will undoubtedly roll-in from interested “submergie” aficionados, so help out if you can, hard as it may be for a darwinist to do, but certainly not for a soon-to-be ex-darwinist, we shall see.

Well, I've never known a "Darwinist" to make any definitive statement regarding the sea level staying the same.  Most "Darwinists" are pretty well-versed in science, meaning they know all about ice ages and interglacial periods and sea level fluctuations, as opposed to creationists, who think that the entire world was flooded and that afterwards the water just "went away," presumably through some kind of giant floor drain in the Marianas Trench.

Anyhow, we soon get to the legend of Ys, in a single-sentence paragraph that should win some kind of Olympic gold medal in the Comma Splice Event:

Submerged ruins have been reported off Cornwall’s Isles of Scilly, in Cardigan Bay, off Tory Island, and off the Brittany coast of the Kingdom of Ys, also known as Keris, all these submerged ruins part of Atland as it’s called in the ancient book Oera Linda of the Frisians, that empire was also known as Atalan, don’t bet against Avalon, the story adapted two thousand years later.

What on earth does this have to do with the bible, you may be asking?  Well, the writer is happy to explain with another single sentence:

So the popular notion that the empire of Atlantis was some continent-sized island now submerged way out in the Atlantic ocean is proven ridiculous, because that empire was demonstrably a vast ice age maritime empire of the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic coastlines, which comports with the biblical timeline, that the Ice Age ended circa 1500 b.c. at the time of the Exodus of the Jews out of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, their patriarch having been Canaan, the father of Sidon (Posidon).

So, I was thinking, "Wait.  Is he talking about Poseidon?  Like, the Greek god?  Because, you know, polytheism doesn't exactly square with the traditional interpretation of the bible, right?"  But in fact, yes, that's who he's talking about... and he claims that Poseidon was mentioned in the bible:

Plato wrote that Posidon [sic] (Canaan’s son Sidon, Genesis 10:15) bestowed ten districts of atlantean empire governorship to his sons, one son Atlas having gained the kingship of the district of the concentric canal ringed city of Atlantis, his namesake (along with the Atlantic ocean and the Atlas mountains), that legendary capital city of Atlantis where the worship of Posidon [sic] was centered and practiced for perhaps forty generations until the Ice Age ended (when the sea level rose to consume 25 million square miles of coastal real estate worldwide).

Except that in the bible, Sidon was Noah's great-grandson, and was born after the Flood.

Oops.

But creationists never let a little thing like facts stand in the way of their conclusions.  He finishes up his explanation, if I can dignify it by that name, thusly:

Very important to remember is that Noah’s Flood did not cover today’s mountain ranges (contrary to what the bibliophobes mockingly insist), because the global flood of Noah’s day totally covered and obliterated the low mountains of the pre-flood supercontinent Pangea [sic], those mountains not having been formed by tectonic plates crashing together by runaway plate tectonics as was the case for the orogenies of our current mountains ranges formed at the close of Noah’s Flood.  So now when skeptics come to comprehend the solid science confirming the global flood vividly described in the book of Genesis, solid science here http://detectingdesign.com/fossilrecord.html, the reasons to believe all of the Bible become even more apparent, much to the darwinists’ woe.

Yup, I have to admit that reading this made me experience some significant woe, but not for the reason he probably thinks.

Is it just me, or do the creationists seem increasingly desperate lately?  The evidence for evolution, the antiquity of the Earth, and the accuracy of paleontology just keeps mounting, and yet they continue to flail around, like a drowning citizen of Ys trying to cling to anything in order to stay afloat.  They've shifted their tactics from "The Bible Says It, I Believe It, and That Settles It" -- which is an inherently unarguable position -- to looking at the actual evidence.  And that moves the game solidly onto our turf, because evaluating evidence is what scientists do.

So I suppose sites like this, however they are kind of an embarrassment to read, are actually a good thing, because it means that on some level, the biblical literalists are sensing that they're losing.

And in celebration, let's indulge in a little more Debussy, shall we?  How about his orchestral work, The Sea?  That seems a fitting way to end this discussion, doesn't it?

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Timey-wimey travel

A lot of us here in the United States would love to have a crystal ball and find out what's going to happen in the next few months.  After all, using logic to predict the direction our government is going is a seriously losing proposition.  As a student of mine put it, "I keep thinking things can't get any weirder.  Then they do."

So allow me to put all your worries to rest.  We now know what's going to happen.

Because a time traveler from the year 2030 has come back to tell us all about it.

His name is "Noah."  Why exactly he decided to come back here is a matter of conjecture, since he claims that we can't change anything he's predicting, as it's in his past.  But there are two things that he says will happen that are a little eyebrow-raising.

First, he says that Donald Trump will win re-election in 2020.  This is a little hard to fathom because I would have thought it'd be a little difficult to run the country from a prison cell.

Second, he says that in 2028, Yolanda Renee King, the granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., will be sworn in as president.  This is kind of weird for a completely different reason, which is that she will be only twenty years old at the time.  Currently, you have to be 35 years old to run for president, so this would be a serious change in policy.

On the other hand, the cadre of Old White Men has fucked things up pretty badly, maybe it's time to let the Young People of Color have a chance.

Anyhow, Noah says an amendment to the Constitution will take care of the age issue.  Hard to imagine that getting any kind of traction in Congress, but five years ago, I'd have said the same thing about the likelihood of Congress looking the other way while a sociopathic serial adulterer used the presidency to line his own pockets.  While Billy Graham's son, of all people, called said sociopathic serial adulterer a "Man of God."

So things have to be pretty weird for me to say "no, that couldn't happen" any more.

As for Noah, he says he's not trying to change anyone's mind about anything.  "This is not an opinion, this is a fact from the future that actually happens," Noah said.  "I’m not here to persuade anyone to political opinions."  And apparently, time travel itself isn't all that much fun.  "I have many body implications and things all over myself," he said, "and I step in this giant dome and these things fire up and basically a large electronic weight basically pushes you through time.  It feels like if you got electrocuted."

Which brings up a series of questions, the most important of which is: what the fuck is a "body implication?"  I'm guessing he meant "implant," but who knows?  Eloquence doesn't seem to be emphasized in the schools of the future, if Noah is any indication.

In any case, time travel sounds pretty uncomfortable to me, making me wonder why he did it in the first place.  I mean, if he can't get us to change our ways and avoid the future he's predicting (because we can't change anything that's going to happen), what's his motivation?  From what he's saying, it sounds like pretty much everything is a Dr. Who-style fixed point in time.

So unless time is actually a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, I'm not really seeing the point.

Noah says he has proof, though, and he brings out an x-ray of his hand with a blurry blob on it that he says is an implanted device that is critical for time travel.  Because clearly that wouldn't be easy to fake, or anything.

Anyhow, that's today's dip in the deep end, thanks to a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who alerted me to the claim.  Predictably, I'm unimpressed.  This is hopeful in that it means there's a good likelihood that Trump won't be re-elected.  As far as the rest -- the Constitutional amendment and Yolanda King being elected in 2028 -- I guess we'll have to wait to find out.

Like I said, weirder things have happened.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Impossible.  Kaku takes a look at the science and technology that is usually considered to be in the realm of science fiction -- things like invisibility cloaks, replicators, matter transporters, faster-than-light travel, medical devices like Star Trek's "tricorders" -- and considers whether they're possible given what we know of scientific law, and if so, what it would take to develop them.  In his signature lucid, humorous style, Kaku differentiates between what's merely a matter of figuring out the technology (such as invisibility) and what's probably impossible in a a real and final sense (such as, sadly, faster-than-light travel).  It's a wonderful excursion into the power of the human imagination -- and the power to make at least some of it happen.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

TechNoah

I try to avoid simply writing day after day about people saying loony stuff, but sometimes I just can't help myself.

That's why today we're going to consider a scientist in Turkey who believes not only that Noah's Ark and the Great Flood were real, but that a 500-year-old man and his kids were able to build a gigantic boat by themselves because they had access to nuclear power, drones, and...

... cellphones.

I wish I was making this up.  Yavuz Örnek, who is a lecturer at Istanbul University, admitted during an interview on a talk show that the traditional account was unlikely, but then takes the position that the whole thing becomes plausible if you assume something even less likely.

There were huge 300 to 400-meter-high waves and his [the Prophet Noah’s] son was many kilometers away.  The Quran says Noah spoke with his son.  But how did they manage to communicate?  Was it a miracle?  It could be.  But we believe he communicated with his son via cellphone.

And as far as how the Ark survived the forty-day-long storm, he said it was "built of steel plates" and was "powered by nuclear energy."

Then there's the problem of how Noah got two of each of the nine-million-odd species on Earth on board, not to mention keeping the carnivores from doing what carnivores do:

But Örnek has that part solved, too.  He says that the usual picture of the Ark as filled with lots of animals is incorrect; instead, Noah just collected gametes from each species, and stored those.

This brings up a couple of questions:

1. Does he really think that prior to the Flood, Noah went all over the Earth, finding animals, and obtaining sperm and eggs from every single species?  Like, he went to Australia and jacked off a wombat?  Because, um, that's kind of a disturbing image.
2. What happened after the Flood?  Because if all the animals were gone -- drowned in the flood -- having stored sperm and eggs wouldn't do you much good, as there'd be no (for example) female wombats left to incubate the embryos even if you could fertilize the eggs in vitro, rendering your wombat handjob a little useless.

But don't worry about that, Örnek says.  "I am a scientist," he reassures us.  "I speak for science."

As Hemant Mehta points out over at the wonderful site Friendly Atheist, this was hardly the first time that the host of the show, Pelin Çift, had to listen to so-called experts spouting off bizarre theories.   While interviewing Turkish theologian Ali Riza Demircan last year, she collapsed into helpless laughter when Demircan explained that there were certain kinds of sex that were forbidden to devout Muslims, including "oral sex in advanced dimensions."

Whatever that is.  Although I have to admit it sounds like it could be fun.

Then there's theologian Mücahid Cihad Han, who in 2015 was being interviewed and said that people shouldn't masturbate.  A caller to the show told Han that there was nothing wrong with masturbation, even in Mecca during Ramadan.  Appalled, Han told the caller that if he jerked off, he'd "find his hands pregnant in the afterlife."

Which would mean the vast majority of us guys would be saddled with hand-babies in heaven.  Or hell.  Or wherever we're going to end up.

But back to Yavuz Örnek, he of the steel-plated nuclear-powered Ark filled with tubes of eggs and sperm, wherein the captain can communicate with the rest of the crew via cellphones.  What gets me about all this is that saying this stuff doesn't get him laughed out of the country, or at least out of his university.  To be fair, it's not that much weirder than what the American young-earth creationists claim, and they're still widely regarded as intellectually respectable.  (Hell, the whole faculty of Liberty University believes that stuff.)

In any case, all of this proves that there's no idea so completely ludicrous that you can't embellish so as to make it way stupider.  And it also means that, as unlikely as it seems, we have a creationist who is even more ridiculous than Ken Ham.

Which, honestly, is kind of a miracle in and of itself.

Flood rock of ages

I've tended to shy away from posting about creationists lately.

For one thing, I've said all I really intend to say on the subject, and it's extremely unlikely that either of us is going to change our mind significantly.  We come at knowledge from different angles, ones that really aren't reconcilable, so argument would be a complete waste of time.

For another, it's not like they've had a lot of new developments to contribute.  The bible doesn't change, sort of by definition, and any scientific discoveries are automatically ignored if they don't support young-earth creationism.  (Which, of course, is 99.9% of them.)

But every once in a while there's something that's so crazy, so off the deep end, that it almost seems like an inspired self-parody.  And I figure that anything that gives my readers a laugh, even if it's a rueful one, is worth writing about.

Which is why the article called "They Are Digging in the Wrong Place!" by Bodie Hodge that appeared over at Answers in Genesis is the topic of today's post.

It starts out in the usual fashion, that is, "you evolutionists sure are dumb."  He opens with a quote from the historical documentary Raiders of the Lost Ark, wherein a creepy Nazi guy ends up digging in the wrong place because he only had half of the inscription needed to decode where the Ark of the Covenant was buried.  Thus far, I was kind of yawning, because it seemed like it was more of the same-old, same-old.

But then he veers off into the aether with an argument that is as amusing as it is bizarre.

Um, Noah?  I think we might have a problem with the lions.

He explains that the big mistake we evolutionary biologists are making is that we're looking for fossils in the wrong place.  He correctly states that paleontologists look for proto-hominid fossils in strata dating from the Pleistocene and Pliocene Epochs, and for connections between dinosaurs and birds in strata dating from the Cretaceous Era and Paleocene Epoch.  So far, so good.  But then he said that this is wrong, because we're using the wrong timetable, and I'm not just talking about shortening everything up to fit in 6,000 years.

With no further ado, allow me to present Hodge's timetable of geological strata:

	Rock layer	Timeline
1	Recent	Post-Flood
2	Pleistocene	Post-Flood
3	Pliocene	Post-Flood
4	Miocene	Flood
5	Oligocene	Flood
6	Eocene	Flood
7	Paleocene	Flood
8	Cretaceous	Flood
9	Jurassic	Flood
10	Triassic	Flood
11	Permian	Flood
12	Pennsylvanian	Flood
13	Mississippian	Flood
14	Devonian	Flood
15	Silurian	Flood
16	Ordovician	Flood
17	Cambrian	Flood
18	Precambrian	Pre-Flood

And yes, he's saying what it looks like he's saying.  The Pre-Cambrian Era was before the Great Flood, so presumably dates from the time of Adam and Eve and company.  From the Pliocene on are strata formed after the Ark touched down on Mount Ararat and the wombats waddled their way from the Middle East back to Australia.

And everything else -- all other rock strata -- were formed in forty days during the Flood.

Hodge writes:

Biblical creationists presuppose the Bible’s truth and subsequently the true history of the earth—including Noah’s Flood.  Evolutionists have presuppositions too, albeit, false ones, but presuppositions nonetheless.  This is why when evolutionists look at Flood rock they unwittingly believe that the rock was actually laid down slowly and gradually over long ages.  I suggest they have been indoctrinated to believe such stories as gradual rock accumulation over millions of years which has never been observed or repeated.  Thus, the concept of millions of years is not in the realm of science but interpretation.

Yup, the creationists have presuppositions, all right.  They include the idea that the physicists, biologists, chemists, astronomers, and geologists -- who all agree on the Earth's age at about 4.5 billions years -- are wrong, and a bunch of illiterate Bronze-Age goat herders in a benighted desert east of the Mediterranean Sea are the only ones in the history of the world who got it right.

Okay, I know even commenting on this is a waste of time. Hodge is right about one thing (the only thing in the article that was within hailing distance of the truth, actually); we science-types have assumptions of our own.  Or, more accurately, one assumption, namely, that science works.  After that, we go where the data and evidence take us.

Which, trust me, is nowhere near "Flood Rock."

So I hope you got a good laugh out of Hodge's argument.  I did, too, although it did ring a bit hollow, as there are still people trying to shoehorn this nonsense into public school science curricula.  Which would mean that we have turned public schools into a place where students will find indoctrination into a mythological worldview instead of quality science education.

Talk about "digging in the wrong place."

Rock wars

Because clearly the news hasn't been surreal enough lately, today we have: an Australian geologist is suing the U. S. National Parks Service because they denied him the right to remove thirty pounds of rocks from the Grand Canyon in an attempt to prove that the biblical account of the Great Flood is true.

The geologist -- although how in the hell you'd get a Ph.D. in geology and somehow still be a young-Earth creationist is beyond my comprehension -- is named Andrew Snelling.  Snelling is a bit of a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia; regular readers may recall that he's the guy who (among other things) claimed that Beowulf shows that dinosaurs coexisted with humans and that an Allosaurus skeleton proves the six-day creation story.

So Snelling is a bit of a Johnny One-Note with respect to scientific inquiry; if it doesn't have something to do with the Book of Genesis, he's not interested.  And now he wants to show that the Grand Canyon was formed during the Great Flood, and is convinced that if he can only get his hands on some rocks, he'll be able to show that to the world.

"It’s one thing to debate the science, but to deny access to the data not based on the quality of a proposal or the nature of the inquiry, but on what you might do with it is an abuse of government power," said Snelling's lawyer, Gary McCaleb of the Alliance Defending Freedom.  Which is a little disingenuous; no one "debates the science," because people like Snelling aren't arguing from a scientific stance.  When you thump the cover of a bible and say, "I don't care if this was written by a bunch of superstitious Bronze-Age sheep herders, every word of it is true, regardless of any evidence to the contrary," you are not engaging in science, you are engaging in circular reasoning.  And once you're there, no scientific argument in the world is going to convince you otherwise.

Snelling, of course, doesn't give a rat's ass about any of that.  All he wants is any kind of evidence that seems to support his belief.  Candida Moss over at The Daily Beast said it well:

Dr. Snelling... is looking for evidence of a Flood, not evidence of mass extermination; and he is looking for evidence of excess water on the earth caused by rain, not the underground or heavenly pools of primordial waters that caused the flooding.  This kind of research is not just bad science; it’s also predicated on poor reading comprehension.

Because, says Moss, even the biblical account of the Flood is rife with internal contradictions, so the idea that it's literally true is literally... impossible:

Sure, the animals did go onto the Ark “by twosies twosies.”  God tells Noah to assemble a pair of each kind of animal, but then a couple of verses later he tells Noah to bring seven pairs of the “clean” kinds of animal and one pair of the “unclean” kinds of animals.  That doesn’t rhyme at all, but it’s important because at the conclusion of the story, just before the rainbow, Noah goes and sacrifices a number of the clean animals to God.  And, if Noah didn’t have seven pairs of animals, he would have saved all those species only to engage in an ad hoc mass extinction project. 

The Flood does last for “forty days and nights.”  But it also lasts for 150 days and nights.  And while the Flood is caused by rain, it is also caused by the opening of primordial floodgates positioned above and beneath the earth.  Not only is this confusing, it does mean that scientific efforts to prove the historicity of the Flood should also have to explain where all of the water above and below the earth is.  And, for this purpose, an underground reservoir probably isn’t going to cut it with one’s fellow scientists. 

All of these inconsistencies make for pretty difficult reading, which is why Christian tradition has plumped for a streamlined version that cherrypicks certain details.

Then, there's the problem that there is exactly zero evidence of a giant flood and a mass extinction.  You'd think there'd be some evidence of this -- a sedimentary rock layer at the same depth, all over the world, with millions of fossils of a wide variety of organisms.  Including, presumably, humans, since one of the cheery aspects of this supposedly edifying story is that the all-loving god drowned every human on Earth, including infants, for some unspecified "wickedness," leaving only the family of a 600-year-old man from whom all of us are presumably descended over and over and over again, thus adding rampant incest into the mix.

Interesting that this is one of the most commonly-told tales in children's Sunday school classes, isn't it?

Anyhow.  My inclination would be to give Snelling his rocks and tell him to go away and have fun playing with them.  He's not going to be able to prove anything with them that any reputable scientist would accept, nor will he find anything out from them that could change his own mind (further indicating that what Snelling is engaging in is not science).  I know it's against National Park Service rules to let anyone take away anything from the park, but consider the upside: it'd keep Snelling and his cronies quiet for a while.  And I think that's well worth bending the rules for.

The Texas flood fossils

I get really fed up with the media.

I make a significant point in my Critical Thinking classes that there is no such thing as unbiased media -- that even the decision of what qualifies as news introduces a bias into reporting.  Add to that the slant that every news source has, and it underscores how important it is to take what you see, read, and hear with a big ol' pinch of salt.

But still.  There are times that poor reporting just pisses me off.  Take, for example, the story that appeared on KCEN-TV, out of Temple, Bell County, Texas last week, wherein we find out that a man in Tyler, Texas has found some fossils in his back yard that were deposited during the biblical Great Flood.

Tyler resident Wayne Propst was poking around in his aunt's front yard when he found some fossilized shells.  He cleaned them up with a toothbrush, then called a "fossil expert" named Joe Taylor who confirmed that they were from the time of Noah.

Propst was thrilled.  "From Noah’s flood to my front yard, how much better can it get?...  Now all I got to do is go in front of my aunt's house and pick up something from back when it all began.  I don't even have to search anymore.  What's really interesting to me is we're talking about the largest catastrophe known to man, the flood that engulfed the entire world."

Yes, and we're also talking about an event that left behind no geological evidence whatsoever, and therefore almost certainly never happened.  But don't let that stop you.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Propst's aunt, Sharon Givan, who owns the property where the fossils were found, was equally excited.  "To think that like he says that we have something in our yard that dated back to when God destroyed the earth.  I mean, how much better could anything be," Givan said.

Which brings up what is, to me, the most troubling thing about the whole Noah's Ark story.  This is supposed to be an edifying tale, right?  About a guy who listened to god and he and his family got saved from destruction?  But what the religious seldom focus on is that according to the bible, everything else on Earth died.  Animals, plants, infants, children, people from other cultures who had no part in what was happening.  It is, honestly, one of the most unpleasant stories in the entire bible (and there's a lot of competition in that regard).

I got in a discussion with a biblical-literalist Christian about this one time.  How, I asked, can you justify the death of little babies because god decided that everyone but Noah's family was too wicked to live?  How can babies be "wicked?"

And she said -- no lie -- "God knew that the babies would grow up to be evil just like their parents, so he killed them to wipe out the evil in the land, root and branch."

Which is one of the most flat-out amoral statements I've ever heard.  Genocide?  Including women, children, and infants?  No problem, as long as god says they deserved it.  My general impression is that a god who operates on that kind of basis would hardly be worthy of worship.

But I digress.

The contents of this story should not really surprise anyone who lives in the United States.  There is still a strong thread of fundamentalism here, especially in the southern states, and young-earth creationism is alive and well (and the fight against teaching it as science in public schools is ongoing).  But why in the hell is it considered news that a guy believes in Noah's Ark?  We don't have news stories with titles like, "Hoboken Woman Still Getting Messages From Magic Unicorn."  (Although I have to admit, I'd read that article.)

The worst part is the last line in the article, which says, and I quote: "For the record, we have not independently verified if the rocks are in fact historic."  Meaning what?  You're gonna send a reporter down to look at the fossils and say, "Okay, they look like they're from the Great Flood to me?"  You haven't radioisotope dated them yourself?  You are unaware that fossils are, in fact, old?

Or that you're considering, heaven forfend, asking an actual fucking paleontologist to weigh in on this?

I know that a lot of media has devolved into clickbait and/or pandering to the whims of whoever wails the loudest, but is it too much to ask that we expect that news sources at least attempt to present real news stories in as unbiased a manner as they can manage?  The media gets away with this bullshit because we as consumers tolerate it.

It's time to demand more from our newspapers, radio and television news, and online media.  When you see or hear a story like "Tyler Man Says He Found Fossils From Noah's Flood," write or call in to let them know that it's unacceptable.  There always will be trash news sources -- I doubt The Daily Mail is going anywhere soon -- but the only way things will change is if we start letting the powers-that-be know that we expect more.

A visit to the holy construction site

Is it just me, or is Ken Ham sounding a little... desperate these days?

I suppose it's understandable.  Just last year his discriminatory hiring practices lost him $18 million in tax write-offs for his Ark Encounter project, and that's gotta sting.  He's challenged the decision in court, but seems unlikely to win given that he has made a practice of only employing fundamentalist Christians like himself, and the project's website states right up front, "The purpose of the Ark Encounter is to point people to the only means of salvation from sin, the Lord Jesus Christ, who also is the only God-appointed way to escape eternal destruction."

So not much wiggle-room there.  And with the funds drying up, Ham has to start being a little creative with revenue-producing strategies, or the Ark is likely to founder on the rocks and sink.

Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat (Simon de Myle, 1570) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So now, Answers in Genesis, Ham's website, is promoting a new money-maker -- you can visit the site where the Ark Encounter is going to be for only $20 a head ($10 if you're a member of the Creation Museum).  Here's how it's described:

Visitors will have the thrill of witnessing firsthand the historic construction of Noah’s Ark, being built according to the biblical proportions described in Scripture. Our guests will safely observe the Ark from a viewing spot just outside the actual hard-hat area.  It will be their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see an Ark being built, which will become the largest timber-frame building in the world... 

From this vantage point, Ark visitors will be able to watch the crews assemble the support towers this month, and over the next few months see the placement of lumber and timbers in sections called bents (or “ribs”) on the Ark foundation.

Who could resist that?  $20 a person to see a construction site!  People must be elbowing each other out of the way to be the first for a vacation opportunity like that.  Can't you just hear the conversation in the car?

"Daddy, when are we gonna get there?" 

"Soon, son.  Pretty excited, aren't you?" 

"Yeah!  I can't wait to see the concrete posts!  And the steel I-beams!  And piles of dirt!  This is gonna be the best vacation ever!  I'm so glad we cancelled our plans to go to Disneyland!"

*Dad grins at his son proudly* 

So, yeah.  Thrill-a-minute.  I bet they'll make nearly $20 off of this promotion.

You know, what gets me most about all of this is that Ham et al. are spending millions of dollars, employing a crew of hundreds of workers, and taking years to accomplish building an Ark in order to prove that a five-hundred-year-old man and his three sons did the same thing using only hand tools and the materials available in the Middle East in the Bronze Age, like "pitch" and "gopher wood."  Whatever the hell "gopher wood" is.  But you have to wonder if Noah ran into the same sorts of problems that Ham has:

"Hey!  I'll let you see the pile of lumber that we're building the Ark from if you'll give me twenty shekels!  Another ten and you can come visit the kangaroos we just brought back from Australia!  For only fifty, you can be a Gold Star Donor and have your name inscribed on one of the timbers!  For a hundred, I'll... hey, wait, where are you all going?  Get back here!  I mean it!...  I hope you like drowning!  Bastards!"

So that's the latest from the Forty Days And Forty Nights crowd.  The sad part is that there are a good many people with more money than sense who are backing the project, so I'm guessing that Ham will eventually build the thing and pronounce it a triumph for the biblical literalist viewpoint.  He certainly seems determined to keep going -- come hell or high water.

Saying no to Noah

There are times when I want to tell people, "Stop.  You are making it way too easy for me."

I would almost like it better if the loonies had stronger arguments, you know?  Make me work for my posts.  Stop me in my tracks with some actual logic or evidence.

Sadly, that rarely happens.  I won't say "never;" I have more than once posted retractions or corrections.  And I live in hopes that the wingnuts will eventually start adopting the scientific method as their modus operandi.

But I don't see it happening any time soon.  Instead, we still have daily examples of what my father used to call "shooting fish in a barrel."

The latest example of fish-shooting has to do with the reactions to the soon-to-be-released Darren Aronofsky biblical epic Noah, starring Russell Crowe and Emma Watson.  (Watch a trailer here.)  The movie is due in theaters on March 26.

 [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You would think that the staunch Christians would be tickled pink that Hollywood is putting a biblical story on the Big Screen -- they certainly loved the gruesome Passion of the Christ, not to mention classics like The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Ten Commandments.

But no.  The site Christian News published an article called "New 'Noah' Film Starring Russell Crowe Flooded With Controversy," which described the reactions of Christians who have been allowed to pre-screen the movie.  "Earlier reports of the film expressed disapproval that Noah was depicted as being centered on an environmental agenda, and that Aronofsky viewed Noah as the 'first environmentalist,'" author Heather Clark writes, implying that Christianity and environmentalism are somehow antithetical.  "Noah is also stated to be tormented with guilt for surviving the flood while others perished."

Well, yeah.  I'd guess he would be.  But it only gets weirder from there.  Angie Meyer-Olszewski, an entertainment publicist, was interviewed by Fox411 and said, "You can’t stray from the Bible in a Bible-based film without upsetting a percentage of the Christian faith base.  Interpretations may vary, but if the story changes, even a little, it’s deemed offensive.  When a studio releases a movie that’s biblical, they are playing a game of religious roulette."

But no one had a stranger, or more bizarrely ironic, reaction than our old pal Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis.  In an interview with Newsmax, Ham said, "In the movie, it seems Noah is a far cry from the Noah of the Bible.  He's angry, even crazy.  It makes a mockery of Noah's righteous nature and is actually anti-biblical...  Noah was a preacher of righteousness, (but) this just isn't the case in Hollywood's version.  He's a delusional, conflicted man, more concerned about the environment, animals, and even killing his own grandchild than he is with his family and his relationship with God."

Ham then went on to say, in a quote that I swear I'm not making up, "Sure, after watching the film, people could be directed to read the true story for themselves in the Bible.  But in this day and age, young people have a hard time deciphering reality from fiction and don't often take the time to form their own educated opinions."

*irony overload*

The last quote prompted atheist blogger Hemant Mehta to say, "He didn't really just say that... did he?"

Then noted evangelical wackmobile Ray Comfort weighed in, because things weren't surreal enough.  "I wouldn't encourage a soul to pay Hollywood to make any movie that undermines the credibility of the Bible, and this one certainly does," Comfort said.  "Do it right -- according to the script in the Scriptures -- and we will support it in the millions, as we did with Ben-Hur."

Ah, yes.  I do remember the famous chariot race scene from the Gospel of Luke, don't you?

And if this weren't enough, we now have word that the movie is being banned in Muslim countries, thus far Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, with Jordan, Kuwait, and Egypt expected to follow suit.   The reason -- it is an insult to depict any of Allah's prophets (of which Noah is considered one), and the movie "contradicts the stature of prophets and messengers... and antagonizes the faithful."

Well then.  This just shows, once again, the truth of the South African proverb, that there are forty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense.  I mean, really; do they expect that a movie is going to follow the "script in the Scriptures" to the letter?  If it did, it would be, what, fifteen minutes long?  And have no character development or, frankly, plot.  But there you have it; I guess you can't please everyone.  And it's not like it's the only biblical epic you have to choose from, if that sort of thing floats your, um, ark.  The Jesus's-life movie Son of God is already in the theaters, and seems to be generating better responses from the faithful, for what it's worth.

As far as director Aronofsky's feelings about the controversy surrounding Noah, the media depicts him as upset by it, but I honestly doubt he is.  The kerfuffle over the movie's biblical accuracy, and whether it should be viewed by the devout, is keeping it in the media -- which is exactly where Aronofsky wants it to be.  I predict it'll be a roaring success, at least for the first few weeks.  Irish poet Brendan Behan said it best: "There is no such thing as bad publicity."

Drowned cities and drowning mythologies

Yesterday, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces by Claude Debussy, The Drowned Cathedral, and I started to wonder what legend had given rise to the piece.  After a little bit of digging, I found out that Debussy got his inspiration from the Breton legend of the mythical city of Ys, built on the coast of Brittany behind a seawall.  Princess Dahut the Wicked tempted fate by engaging in all sorts of depravity therein, despite the warnings of Saint Winwaloe that god was watching and would smite the crap out of her if she didn't mend her ways.  (Okay, I'm paraphrasing a bit, here, but that's the gist.)  Anyhow, Dahut wouldn't listen, and one night a storm rose and broke through the seawall, and the ocean flowed in over the city.  Dahut's father, King Gradion, escaped on a magical horse with Dahut riding behind him, but Winwaloe shouted at him, "Push back the demon riding with you!"

So Gradion did what any good father would do, namely, shove his daughter into the sea, which "swallowed her up."  The sea also swallowed the rest of Ys, which kind of sucked for the inhabitants, given that it wasn't really their fault that the princess was a little morally challenged.  As for Princess Dahut herself, she became a mermaid, and is still hanging around to tempt sailors into jumping into the ocean to their deaths.  And according to legend, on windy days, you can still hear the bells of the drowned cathedral of Ys if you stand along the shore of Douarnenez Bay.

The Flight of King Gradion, by Évariste-Vital Luminais, 1884 (in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Brittany, France)

Kind of a cool story, in a ruthless, Grimm's Fairy Tales sort of way.  And whatever else you think, you have to admit that Debussy's piece is gorgeous (go back and give a listen to the recording of it I linked above, if you haven't already done so).

What I haven't told you, yet, though, is the other thing I found out while looking up the Legend of the Drowned City of Ys...

... which is that he über-Christians are now using the story to support creationism.

I'm not making this up.  If you don't believe me, check out the page called "Submerged Ruins" at the site Genesis Veracity Foundation.   Here's how they launch the idea:

Have you ever seen a map showing the bronze age port cities of the world? You certainly have not, because the darwinists will tell you sea level at circa 2000 B.C. was little different than today, yet the presence of hundreds of submerged ruins’ sites from the Gulf of Chambay to Bimini, and from Cornwall to Nan Madol, certainly belie that notion, with most of the submerged ruins worldwide in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, right where you’d expect them to be, where Sidon, Peleg, Javan, Tarshish, and Atlas plied the waters, building their port facilities, now submerged since the end of the Ice Age. Here is a partial list of the submerged ruins worldwide, with pictures where available, to be soon updated as more photos will undoubtedly roll-in from interested “submergie” aficionados, so help out if you can, hard as it may be for a darwinist to do, but certainly not for a soon-to-be ex-darwinist, we shall see.

Well, I've never known a "Darwinist" to make any definitive statement regarding the sea level staying the same.  Most "Darwinists" are pretty well-versed in science, meaning they know all about ice ages and interglacial periods and sea level fluctuations, as opposed to creationists, who think that the entire world was flooded and that afterwards the water just "went away," presumably through some kind of giant floor drain in the Marianas Trench.

Anyhow, we soon get to the legend of Ys, in a single-sentence paragraph that should win some kind of Olympic gold medal in the Comma Splice Event:

Submerged ruins have been reported off Cornwall’s Isles of Scilly, in Cardigan Bay, off Tory Island, and off the Brittany coast of the Kingdom of Ys, also known as Keris, all these submerged ruins part of Atland as it’s called in the ancient book Oera Linda of the Frisians, that empire was also known as Atalan, don’t bet against Avalon, the story adapted two thousand years later.

What on earth does this have to do with the bible, you may be asking?  Well, the writer is happy to explain with another single sentence:

So the popular notion that the empire of Atlantis was some continent-sized island now submerged way out in the Atlantic ocean is proven ridiculous, because that empire was demonstrably a vast ice age maritime empire of the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic coastlines, which comports with the biblical timeline, that the Ice Age ended circa 1500 b.c. at the time of the Exodus of the Jews out of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, their patriarch having been Canaan, the father of Sidon (Posidon).

So, I was thinking, "Wait.  Is he talking about Poseidon?  Like, the Greek god?  Because, you know, polytheism doesn't exactly square with the traditional interpretation of the bible, right?"  But in fact, yes, that's who he's talking about... and he claims that Poseidon was mentioned in the bible:

Plato wrote that Posidon (Canaan’s son Sidon, Genesis 10:15) bestowed ten districts of atlantean empire governorship to his sons, one son Atlas having gained the kingship of the district of the concentric canal ringed city of Atlantis, his namesake (along with the Atlantic ocean and the Atlas mountains), that legendary capital city of Atlantis where the worship of Posidon was centered and practiced for perhaps forty generations until the Ice Age ended (when the sea level rose to consume 25 million square miles of coastal real estate worldwide).

Except that in the bible, Sidon was Noah's great-grandson, and was born after the Flood.

Oops.

But creationists never let a little thing like facts stand in the way of their conclusions.  He finishes up his explanation, if I can dignify it by that name, thusly:

Very important to remember is that Noah’s Flood did not cover today’s mountain ranges (contrary to what the bibliophobes mockingly insist), because the global flood of Noah’s day totally covered and obliterated the low mountains of the pre-flood supercontinent Pangea, those mountains not having been formed by tectonic plates crashing together by runaway plate tectonics as was the case for the orogenies of our current mountains ranges formed at the close of Noah’s Flood. So now when skeptics come to comprehend the solid science confirming the global flood vividly described in the book of Genesis, solid science here http://detectingdesign.com/fossilrecord.html, the reasons to believe all of the Bible become even more apparent, much to the darwinists’ woe.

Yup, I have to admit that reading this made me experience some significant woe, but not for the reason he probably thinks.

Is it just me, or do the creationists seem increasingly desperate lately?  The evidence for evolution, the antiquity of the Earth, and the accuracy of paleontology just keeps mounting, and yet they continue to flail around, like a drowning citizen of Ys trying to cling to anything in order to stay afloat.  They've shifted their tactics from "The Bible Says It, I Believe It, and That Settles It" -- which is an inherently unarguable position -- to looking at the actual evidence.  And that moves the game solidly onto our turf, because evaluating evidence is what scientists do.

So I suppose sites like this, however they are kind of an embarrassment to read, are actually a good thing, because it means that on some level, the biblical literalists are sensing that they're losing. 

And in celebration, let's indulge in a little more Debussy, shall we?  How about his orchestral work, The Sea?  That seems a fitting way to end this discussion, doesn't it?

Builders of the lost ark

New from the "I Wish I Were Kidding" department, today we have a story that as much as $37.5 million in taxpayer-funded rebates could go to the building of a theme park in Kentucky called Ark Encounter whose goal is to prove that the story of Noah's Ark is "plausible."

You may have heard about this before.  In fact, regular readers of Skeptophilia might recall that I mentioned it in a post a year ago, but in the context of a project that seemed doomed to fail because of lack of investment.  Well, to misquote Twain, rumors of its demise were great exaggerations.  A story in Reuters yesterday indicates that plans for the theme park are indeed going forward, and the application for the tax incentives -- set to expire if they are not claimed by May 2014 -- will be refiled if good Christians don't step up to the plate with donations.

Patrick Marsh, the design director for the park, says that the point of the attraction is to show visitors that Noah could actually have had two of each terrestrial animal on Earth on a 500-foot-long wooden boat for forty days.  (Well, actually, it may not have been two.  Genesis 7:2 says that Noah needed seven of each "clean beast" and two each of the "unclean beasts;" only six verses later, we're told that it was two of everybody.  Since both verses are the unchanging, infallible word of god, we're forced to the conclusion that 2=7, which should definitely be worked into public school math classes next year.)

The current estimate for the number of animal species on Earth, just for reference, is (at a low estimate) five million.  That's ten million animals, if you believe Genesis 7:8 and not Genesis 7:2.  Idealizing the Ark as a rectangular solid, 500x100x100 feet in its length, breadth, and height respectively, that comes to five million cubic feet.  So each animal on the Ark, including the giraffes, gets exactly 0.5 cubic feet in which to stretch its legs.  Oh, yeah, and don't forget that these people believe that the dinosaurs were on there, too.  You'd think that just having one brachiosaurus on board would be enough to kind of cramp things, wouldn't you?

Remind me again about how this is plausible.  I keep losing that point.

Marsh says that there could be some ways of getting around this objection, however.  "If you start with a wolf, you can basically generate all of these dog-like kinds," said Marsh. "As for large animals like dinosaurs, Noah could have brought them on as eggs or juveniles, to save room."

Wait, now, hold on just a moment.  From wolves, we could "generate dog-like kinds?"  I.e., starting with a wolf, and given some ecological selective pressures, we could eventually end up with a hyena, a fox, a chihuahua?  Hmm, Mr. Marsh, I think there's a name for this process.  I've forgotten what it is just now... give me a moment, I'm sure it'll come to me.

Oh, but a giant wooden boat is not all Ark Encounter will have!  Since the whole message of Noah's Ark was that the all-knowing, all-seeing god produced humans who became so unexpectedly wicked that he had to press the "Smite" button and start over, the theme park will also have a mock-up of a pagan temple, with pagan ceremonies done in a "Disneyesque" way, whatever that means.  There will also be a "Ten Plagues" ride.  ("Hey, Dad!  Let's do the 'Ten Plagues ride' again!  I loved when the rollercoaster cars slowed down in front of the 'Killing of the Firstborn Children' display!")

I know you think I'm making this up, but I'm not.  In a direct quote that I am not nearly creative enough to fabricate, Marsh said, "You want everyone to have fun and buy souvenirs and have a good time, but you also want to tell everybody how terrible everything (was)."

What I can understand even less than I get why anyone believes that this obviously mythological nonsense is true, is how the public tax incentives for this project don't violate separation of church and state.  How are the ACLU and various atheist and secular humanist organizations not challenging this in court?  Maybe there are actions going forward which I haven't heard about, but at the moment, most secular legal groups seem to be just watching and waiting.

As for Marsh, and Ark Encounter senior vice president Michael Zovath, they are completely unapologetic about what they're doing.  "If somebody wants to come into Kentucky and build a Harry Potter park and teach all the fun things about witchcraft, nobody would say a word about it - they'd just think it was so cool," Zovath said.  "But if we want to come in ... and build a Biblical theme park, everybody goes crazy."

Yes, Mr. Zovath, that's because everyone knows that Harry Potter is fiction, whereas you seem to be under the mistaken impression that the bible is fact.  My guess is that if someone tried to set up "Hogwarts" in Kentucky, and was making claims that they were actually teaching kids to cast spells and to ride brooms, there would be a bit of a hue and cry.

So, anyway, that's the latest from the Bronze Age mythology = literal truth crowd.  I keep thinking that people have to come to their senses eventually and realize that these folk-tales-become-fact are no more plausible than the idea that earthquakes are caused by Midgard's Serpent having bad dreams, but the biblical literalists just won't go away.  In any case, I'd better wind this up.  I've got to finish up the drawings of my suggestions for the "Cattle Disease" and "Rivers Turning to Blood" features of the "Ten Plagues" ride.