The missing day

Can I make the not-very-earthshattering observation that if you are explaining evidence supporting a belief, your argument is not made stronger by lying about it?

Especially if that belief is that your own personal religion is not only superior morally, but one hundred percent true?

I'm referring to a story of dubious provenance that has been showing up all over the place lately, mostly on Christian apologetics sites, and then forwarded by people who (1) don't understand how science works, (2) don't know how to do a Google search to check for accuracy, or (3) would prefer something sound good than be correct.  Or all three.  I ran into it via the site Calvary Pilot ("Piloting Souls to the Cross"), but other versions I've seen are substantially similar.  Here are a few excerpts, edited only for length:

For all you scientists out there and for all the students who have had a hard time convincing these people regarding the truth of the Bible – here’s something that illustrates God’s awesome creation and shows He is still in control.

 
Did you know that NASA’s space programmes are busy proving that what has been called ‘myth’ in the Bible is true?  Mr. Harold Hill, President of the Curtis Engine Company in Baltimore, and a consultant in the space programmes, relates the following incident: "One of the most amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts and space scientists at Green Belt, Maryland.  They were checking out the positions of the sun, moon and planets out in space where they would be 100, and 1000 years from now. We have to know this as we do not want a satellite to collide with any of these in its orbits."

So we're off to a flying start, with the claim that NASA has to be very careful to make sure that satellites in orbit around the Earth don't collide with the Sun or Neptune or anything.  You can see how that could happen.

Computer measurements and data were run back and forth over the centuries when suddenly it came to a halt, displaying a red signal, which meant that either there was something wrong with the information fed into it, or with the results as compared to the standards.  They called in the service department to check it out, and the technicians asked what was wrong.  The scientists had discovered that somewhere in space in elapsed time a day was missing.  Nobody seemed able to come up with a solution to the problem.

Which brings up the awkward question of how you'd discover that a day was missing.  Were the technicians sitting around, monitoring the satellite transmissions, and suddenly one of them got this horrified look on his face and said, "Wait... where the fuck did I put last Tuesday?"  Then all of the other technicians and engineers and physicists and so forth all start searching under desks and in storage closets and behind garbage cans and so on, but to no avail.  Last Tuesday is definitely AWOL.

Finally one of the team, a Christian, said: “You know, when I was still in Sunday School, they spoke about the sun standing still…”  While his colleagues didn’t believe him, they did not have an answer either, so they said: “Show us.”  He got a Bible and opened it at the book of Joshua where they found a pretty ridiculous statement for anyone with ‘common sense’.  There they read about the Lord saying to Joshua: “Fear them not, I have delivered them into thy hand; there shall not be a man of them stand before thee.” (Joshua 10:8).  Joshua was concerned because the enemy had surrounded him, and if darkness fell, they would overpower him.  So Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still!  That’s right – “And the sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is this not written in the book of Ja’-sher?  So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hastened not to go down about a whole day.” (Joshua 10:13).

The astronauts and scientists said: "There is the missing day!"

So there was much rejoicing.  But then one of them pointed out that it wasn't a whole day that had been found -- it was only 23 hours and 20 minutes. Which left forty minutes unaccounted for, "which could mean trouble 1000 years from now."  Why it isn't trouble now, I have no idea, but concern for our distant descendants sent the NASA folks back on a search for the missing two-thirds of an hour.

And you'll never guess where they found it.

The Bible.  See, I told you you'd never guess.

As the Christian employee thought about it, he remembered somewhere in the Bible which said the sun went backwards.  The scientists told him he was out of his mind, but once again they opened the Book and read these words in 2 Kings.  Hezekiah, on his deathbed, was visited by the prophet, Isaiah, who told him he was not going to die.  Hezekiah asked for some sign as proof. Isaiah said: “Shall the sun go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?”  And Hezekiah answered: “It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees; nay, but let the shadow return backwards ten degrees.”  Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord, and He brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.” (2 Kings 20:9 -11).  Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes!  Twenty-three hours and twenty minutes in Joshua, plus 40 minutes in 2 Kings accounted for the missing day in the universe!

Which would have been the cause for even more rejoicing, if the whole thing hadn't been made up.  I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist (a real one,  I mean, like they have at NASA) to find the story eye-rollingly ridiculous, but it has been so widely circulated -- I've seen it three times on Facebook just in the last week -- that it actually has a Snopes page dedicated to it.  In it, we find out that Harold Hill was the president of Curtis Engine Company of Baltimore, but that's pretty much the only thing in the story that is true.  First off, Hill wasn't a NASA consultant.  It turns out that Hill was an evangelical Christian with a fairly loose interpretation of the word "true," because he'd read about the "lost day" legend in a book by Harold Rimmer entitled The Harmony of Science and Scripture and decided that the story would carry more punch if he claimed he'd witnessed the whole thing happening.  He embellished his account -- adding, of course, accolades such as "NASA consultant" for himself -- and repeated it many times in public speeches.  He even devoted a whole chapter to it in his 1974 book How to Live Like a King's Kid, apparently because by then, he'd told the tale so many times that he actually was beginning to believe it.

John Martin, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still over Gideon (1816) [Image is in the Public Domain]

And now with the amazing bullshit conduit that is the internet, the story has roared into life again.  What's funny, though, is that the claim is so ridiculous even Answers in Genesis is saying Christians shouldn't use it as an argument for the Bible having a scientific basis, and heaven knows AIG isn't exactly an exemplar of factual accuracy.  Snopes writer David Mikkelson says about it:

To those who've given over their hearts to God and the Holy Word, this is a deeply satisfying legend.  Faith is, after all, the firm belief in something which cannot necessarily be proved, a quality that can leave believers (especially those who find themselves in the midst of non-believers) feeling unsatisfied.  As steadfast as their certainty is, they cannot prove the rightness of the path they tread to those who jeer at their convictions.  And this is a heavy burden to shoulder.  A legend such as the "missing day explained" tale speaks straight to the hearts of those who yearn for a bit of vindication in this life.  Being right isn't always enough: sometimes what one most longs for is sweet recognition from others.

Which may well be the case, but doesn't take away from the problem of a devout follower of a religion that considers "Thou shalt not bear false witness" as one of its fundamental teachings passing along a story that is essentially one long lie.  It makes me wish that as a corollary of the ninth commandment, Yahweh had seen fit to add, "And this meaneth that thou shalt spend five minutes and do a Google search before thou postest this shit on Facebook."

So anyway.  No, NASA is not spending its woefully tiny budget paying scientists to verify the Old Testament.  There's no evidence whatsoever of a "lost day," because against what clock would you be able to verify that time had stopped three-thousand-odd years ago?  I'd be much obliged if the people who think that God is going to bless them if they pass along this nonsense would just stop already.  Thank you.

****************************************

Species, types, and the "No True Scotsman" fallacy

One of the most frustrating of logical fallacies is the No True Scotsman fallacy.

It gets its name from an almost certainly apocryphal story, in which a serial rapist and killer is being pursued by the police in Glasgow, and a Scottish MP encourages the police to search amongst the immigrant population of the city.  "No Scotsman would do such a thing," the MP said.

When the criminal was caught, and turned out to be 100% Scottish, the MP was challenged about his remark.

"Well," he said, drawing himself up, "no true Scotsman would have done such a thing!"

The crux of this fallacy is that if you make a statement that turns out, in view of evidence, to be false, all you do is shift your ground -- redefine the terms so as to make your original point unassailable.

Very few other fallacies have such a capacity for making me want to smack my forehead into a wall as this one.  Someone who commits this fallacy can't be pinned down, can't be backed into a corner, can't receive his comeuppance from the most reasoned argument, the most solidly incontrovertible evidence.  The dancing skills of a master of the No True Scotsman fallacy are Dancing With The Stars quality.

All of this comes up because of an online discussion that I read, and (yes) participated in, a couple of days ago, on the topic of the demonstrability of evolution.  Someone, ostensibly a supporter of evolution but seemingly not terribly well-read on the subject, was using such evidence as the fossil record as a support for the idea.  A creationist responded, "The fossil record, and fossil dating, are inaccurate.  You evolutionists always think that bringing us a bunch of bones and shells proves your point, but it doesn't, because no one can really prove how old they were, and none of them show one species turning into another.  You can't show a single example, from the present, of one species becoming another, and yet you want us to believe in your discredited theory."

Of course, I couldn't let a comment like that just sit there, so I responded, "Well, actually, yes, I can.  I know about a dozen examples of speciation (one species becoming another) occurring within a human lifetime."

Challenged to produce examples, I gave a few, including the ones that I described in an earlier post (Grass, gulls, mosquitoes, and mice, February 9, 2012), and then sat back on my haunches with a satisfied snort, thinking, "Ha.  That sure showed him."

Well.  I should have known better.  His response, which I quote verbatim: "All you did was show that one grass can become another grass, or a mosquito can become another mosquito.  If you could show me a mosquito that turned into a bird, or something, I might believe you."

Now, hang on a moment, here.  You asked me for one thing -- to show one species turning into a different species, in the period of a few decades.  I did so, adhering to the canonical definition of the word species.  And now you're saying that wasn't what you wanted after all -- you want me to show one phylum turning into a different one, in one generation?

I sat there, sputtering and swearing, and not sure how to answer.  So I said something to the effect that he'd pulled a No True Scotsman on me, and had changed the terms of the question once he saw I could answer it, and he'd damned well better play fair.  He humphed back at me that we evolutionists couldn't really support our points, and we both left the discussion as I suspect most people leave discussions on the internet -- unconvinced and frustrated.  So I was pondering the whole thing, and after taking my blood pressure medications I had a sudden realization of where the confusion was coming from.  It was from the idea of a type of organism.

Most people who aren't educated in the biological sciences (and I'm not including just formal education, here; there are many people who have never taken a single biology class and know plenty about the subject) really don't understand the concept of species.  They think in types.  A bird is one type of thing; a bug is a different one.  If you pressed them, they might admit that there were a few types of birds that seemed inherently different.  You have your big birds (ostriches), your medium-sized birds (robins), and your little birds (hummingbirds).  I've had students that have thought this way, and when they hear I'm a birdwatcher, they seem incredulous that this could be a lifelong avocation.  Wouldn't I run out of new birds to see pretty quickly?  When I tell them that there are over 10,000 unique species of birds, they seem not so much awed as uncomprehending.

The phylogenetic tree of birds (Class Aves) [credit: Dr. Gavin Thomas, University of Sheffield, UK]

I suspect that the source of this misapprehension is the same as the source of the general misapprehension regarding the antiquity of the Earth and the origins of life: the Bible.  In Leviticus 11, where they go through the whole unclean-foods thing that eventually would be codified as the Kosher Law, they split up the natural world in only the broadest-brush terms; you have your animals that have hooves and chew the cud, various combinations of ones that don't, creatures that have fins and scales and ones that don't, insects that jump and ones that don't, and a few different classes of birds (which, to my eternal amusement, includes bats).  And that's pretty much it.  Plants were sorted out into ones that had edible parts (wheat, figs, olives), ones that had useful wood (boxwood, cedar, acacia), and ones that had neither of the above (thorn bushes).  And these distinctions worked perfectly well for a Bronze-Age society.  It kept you from eating stuff that was bad for you, told you what you could build stuff from, and so on.  But as a scientific concept, the idea of "types of living things" kind of sucks.  And yet it still seems to live on in people's minds, lo unto this very day.

So, anyway, that was my brief excursion into that least useful of endeavors, the Online Argument.  It gave me a nice example of the No True Scotsman fallacy to write about here.  And it really didn't affect my blood pressure all that much, but it did make me roll my eyes.  Which seems to happen frequently when I get into conversations with creationists.

****************************************

The odds of creation

In today's contribution from the Department of Specious Statistics, the owner of a biblical timeline business and self-proclaimed mathematician has stated that she has calculated the likelihood of the biblical creation story being wrong as "less than 1 in 479 million."

Margaret Hunter, who owns Bible Charts and Timelines of Duck, West Virginia, stated in an interview, "I realized the twelve items listed in the Genesis creation account are confirmed by scientists today as being in the correct order, starting with light being separated from darkness, plants coming before animals and ending with man.  Think of the problem like this.  Take a deck of cards.  Keep just one suit—let’s say hearts.  Toss out the ace.  Hand the remaining twelve cards to a one year old child.  Ask him/her to hand you the cards one at a time.  In order.  What are the chances said toddler will start with the two and give them all to you in order right up to the king?"

Not very high, Hunter correctly states.  "Being a mathematician, I like thinking about things like this," she says.  "Moses had less than one chance in 479 million of just correctly guessing [the sequence of the creation account].  To me, the simplest explanation is Moses got it straight from the Creator."

Righty-o.  This just brings up a few questions in my mind, to wit:

1. Are you serious?
2. Maybe you "like thinking about mathematics," but you seem to know fuck-all about science.
3. There's a town called "Duck, West Virginia?" 

I have to give her one thing; she got the odds of toddler-mediated correct card-ordering right.  For any twelve different objects, the number of possible combinations is 12!  (For non-mathematicians, this isn't just me saying the previous sentence excitedly.  12!, read as "twelve factorial," is 12*11*10*9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1, or 479,001,600.)

 

However, the major problem with this is that we can all take a look at the events in the biblical creation story, and see immediately that Moses didn't get them right.  Here, according to the site Christian Answers, is the order of creation:

1. the Earth
2. light
3. day & night
4. air
5. water
6. dry land
7. seed-bearing plants with fruit
8. the Sun, Moon, and stars
9. water creatures
10. birds
11. land animals (presumably birds don't count)
12. humans

One immediate problem I see is that there was day and night three days before the Sun was created, which seems problematic to me, as the following photograph illustrates:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

But of course, the problems don't end there.  Birds before the rest of "land animals?"  Plants before the Sun and Moon?  The plants are actually the ones on the list that are the most wildly out of order -- seed-bearing plants didn't evolve until the late Devonian, a long time after "water creatures" (the Devonian is sometimes called "the Age of Fish," after all), and an even longer time (about 4.5 billion years, to be precise) after the formation of the Sun.  Humans do come in the correct place, right there at the end, but the rest of it seems like kind of a hash.

So even if we use Hunter's mathematics, we run up against the unfortunate snag that if putting the twelve events of creation in the right order has a 1 in 479,001,600 likelihood of happening by chance, then the likelihood of putting them in the wrong order by chance is 479,001,599 in 479,001,600.  Which is what happened.  Leading us to the inevitable conclusion, so well supported by the available hard evidence, that Moses was just making shit up.

You know, I really wish you creationists would stop even pretending that this nonsense is scientific.  Just stick with your "the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it" approach, because every time you dabble your toes in the Great Ocean of Science, you end up getting knocked over by a wave and eating a mouthful of sand.  And it's becoming kind of embarrassing to watch, frankly.  Thank you.

**************************************

One of the characteristics which is -- as far as we know -- unique to the human species is invention.

Given a problem, we will invent a tool to solve it.  We're not just tool users; lots of animal species, from crows to monkeys, do that.  We're tool innovators.  Not that all of these tools have been unequivocal successes -- the internal combustion engine comes to mind -- but our capacity for invention is still astonishing.

In The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, author Ainissa Ramirez takes eight human inventions (clocks, steel rails, copper telegraph wires, photographic film, carbon filaments for light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips) and looks not only at how they were invented, but how those inventions changed the world.  (To take one example -- consider how clocks and artificial light changed our sleep and work schedules.)

Ramirez's book is a fascinating lens into how our capacity for innovation has reflected back and altered us in fundamental ways.  We are born inventors, and that ability has changed the world -- and, in the end, changed ourselves along with it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Holy genome, Batman!

A couple of days ago, a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an email that said, "You think you know genetics, Mr. Smarty Pants?  Get a load of this."

He included a link to a site called Gostica: The Spiritual Path, in particular a post called "The Scientists Are Shocked: First Scientific Proof of God Found."  And in it, we hear that passages from the bible have shown up...

...in the genetic code.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christoph Bock, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, DNA methylation, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I'm not making this up.  I would strongly recommend your taking a look at the actual site, but not while you're drinking anything, because I will not be responsible for coffee sprayed all over your computer screen.

The fun starts, in fact, with the very first phrase of the first sentence: "Linguistic professors at Bob Jones University, long noted for its intellectual rigor..."

Intellectual rigor?  The school that has been nicknamed "The Buckle on the Bible Belt?"  The school whose biology program description states, "One of the benefits of studying biology at BJU is that you’ll get a top-notch science education from a thoroughly Christian perspective.  In addition to strengthening your faith in the reliability of the Bible, this perspective will also help prepare you to understand modern secular interpretations of science and apply a biblical worldview to them."?

The school whose behavior code explicitly forbids its students to wear denim skirts, have "fauxhawks," access an "unfiltered internet," or listen to "Rock, Pop, Country, Jazz, Electronic/ Techno, Rap/Hip Hop or the fusion of any of these genres"?

And in any case, who the hell wears denim skirts anymore?

But I digress.

So the "intellectually rigorous scientists" from Bob Jones University started looking at pieces of DNA, including "transposons and retrotransposons" (Ooh!  Big words!), and this is what they found:

[They] began to attempt to translate the decoded segments that W.I.T. was providing.  The structure was notably and demonstrably human in nature.  The coding language found, which utilized sequences of twenty-eight independent values, fell easily into the incidence range of known alphabets.  Sequences of independent connected values likewise mirrored the structure of word composition in human languages.  The Linguistic and Philology team at Bob Jones began an extensive comparison of the quizzical script found in the “Junk DNA” with the catalog of every recorded human language; hoping to find similar lingual threads so that they could begin to formulate translations of the message laying hidden in the DNA.  Professors were rocked with sheer awe when they found that one existent language, and one language alone, was a direct translatable match for the sequential DNA strands.

And guess what that language was, and what it said? You'll never guess.

The Language in the “Junk DNA”, the DNA that scientists had for years discarded as useless, was indistinguishable from ancient Aramaic.  Even more amazingly, as linguists started to translate the code within the human genome, they found that parts of the script it contained were at times remarkably close in composition to verse found in the Bible.  And at times contained direct biblical quotes. 

On the human gene PYGB, Phosporomylase Glycogen, a non-coding transposon, holds a linguistic sequence that translates as “At first break of day, God formed sky and land.”  This bears a stunning similarity to Gen 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  Gene Bmp3 has a Retrotransposon sequence which translates to the well-known 1 Cor 6:19 “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?  You are not your own.”  This is repeated over and over throughout the entire sequence of human DNA: embedded equivalent genetic code of ancient Aramaic that seems to translate as the word of God to his people.

Righty-o. Where do I start?

The first problem with this is that the "language" of DNA is composed of four letters (nitrogenous bases), A (adenine), G (guanine), C (cytosine), and T (thymine). So if that was the actual language of God, he'd be pretty much limited to saying stuff like "ACT TAG CAT GAG GAG GAG," although to my ears that sounds more like a pronouncement from Bill the Cat than it does like something the Divine Creator might say.  In any case, it's not really possible to spell out English using the DNA alphabet, much less ancient Aramaic.  Even if you make the allowance that maybe the "linguists" were using some kind of correspondence between the letters in Aramaic and the amino acid sequence coded for by a gene, you still only have twenty letters, not 28 as the article claims.

So what the amazingly rigorous researchers at BJU seem good at is making shit up and then lying to the media about it.  But this didn't stop them from shouting their findings from the rooftops:

Matthew Boulder, chief linguist for the project and professor of applied creation sciences at Bob Jones University, issued this statement: “As for the evidence- it is there and it is, to my view, undeniable.  The very word of God, elegantly weaved in and out of our very bodies and souls, as plain as day.  And the beauty of it, that God would lay down the words of truth in our very beings, shows his love and The Miracle.”

"Professor of applied creation science." Which is right up there with "Professor of applied unicornology" in terms of scientific validity.

So to the reader who sent me the link, all I can say is thanks.  I did read the whole thing, and also the internal links that went to the BJU "research," so you can't say I didn't give it my all.  Throughout I was torn between guffawing and slamming my forehead repeatedly against my computer keyboard.  I hope that's the reaction you wanted.  But I do wonder what my own personal DNA spells out.  Maybe a passage from The Origin of Species, you think?

*********************************

Back when I taught Environmental Science, I used to spend at least one period addressing something that I saw as a gigantic hole in students' knowledge of their own world: where the common stuff in their lives came from.  Take an everyday object -- like a sink.  What metals are the faucet, handles, and fittings made of?  Where did those metals come from, and how are they refined?  What about the ceramic of the bowl, the pigments in the enamel on the surface, the flexible plastic of the washers?  All of those substances came from somewhere -- and took a long road to get where they ended up.

Along those same lines, there are a lot of questions about those same substances that never occur to us.  Why is the elastic of a rubber band stretchy?  Why is glass transparent?  Why is a polished metal surface reflective, but a polished wooden surface isn't?  Why does the rubber on the soles of your running shoes grip -- but the grip worsens when they're wet, and vanishes entirely when you step on ice?

If you're interested in these and other questions, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for you.  In Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, materials scientist Mark Miodownik takes a close look at the stuff that makes up our everyday lives, and explains why each substance we encounter has the characteristics it has.  So if you've ever wondered why duct tape makes things stick together and WD-40 makes them come apart, you've got to read Miodownik's book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The missing day

Can I make the not-very-earthshattering observation that if you are explaining evidence supporting a belief, your argument is not made stronger by lying about it?

Especially if that belief includes the idea that your own personal religion is not only superior morally, but 100% true?

I'm referring to a story of dubious provenance that has been showing up all over the place lately, mostly on Christian apologetics sites, and then forwarded by people who (1) don't understand how science works, (2) don't know how to do a Google search to check for accuracy, or (3) would prefer something sound good than be correct.  Or all three.  I ran into it via the site Command the Raven, but other versions I've seen are substantially similar.  Here are a few excerpts, edited only for length:

For all you scientists out there and for all the students who have had a hard time convincing these people regarding the truth of the Bible – here’s something that illustrates God’s awesome creation and shows He is still in control.  

Did you know that NASA’s space programmes are busy proving that what has been called ‘myth’ in the Bible is true?  Mr. Harold Hill, President of the Curtis Engine Company in Baltimore, and a consultant in the space programmes, relates the following incident: "One of the most amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts and space scientists at Green Belt, Maryland.  They were checking out the positions of the sun, moon and planets out in space where they would be 100, and 1000 years from now.  We have to know this as we do not want a satellite to collide with any of these in its orbits."

So we're off to a flying start, with the claim that NASA has to be very careful to make sure that satellites in orbit around the Earth don't collide with the Sun or Neptune or anything.  You can see how that could happen.

Computer measurements and data were run back and forth over the centuries when suddenly it came to a halt, displaying a red signal, which meant that either there was something wrong with the information fed into it, or with the results as compared to the standards.  They called in the service department to check it out, and the technicians asked what was wrong.  The scientists had discovered that somewhere in space in elapsed time a day was missing. Nobody seemed able to come up with a solution to the problem.

Which brings up the awkward question of how you'd discover that a day was missing.  Or even what "there's a day missing" means.  Were the technicians sitting around, monitoring the satellite transmissions, and suddenly one of them got this horrified look on her face and said, "Wait... where the fuck did I put last Tuesday?"  Then all of the other technicians and engineers and physicists and so forth all start searching under desks and in storage closets and behind garbage cans and so on, but to no avail.  Last Tuesday is definitely AWOL.

Finally one of the team, a Christian, said: “You know, when I was still in Sunday School, they spoke about the sun standing still…”  While his colleagues didn’t believe him, they did not have an answer either, so they said: “Show us.”  He got a Bible and opened it at the book of Joshua where they found a pretty ridiculous statement for anyone with ‘common sense’.  There they read about the Lord saying to Joshua: “Fear them not, I have delivered them into thy hand; there shall not be a man of them stand before thee.” (Joshua 10:8).  Joshua was concerned because the enemy had surrounded him, and if darkness fell, they would overpower him.  So Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still!  That’s right – “And the sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.  Is this not written in the book of Ja’-sher?  So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hastened not to go down about a whole day.” (Joshua 10:13).

The astronauts and scientists said: "There is the missing day!"

So there was much rejoicing.  But then one of them pointed out that it wasn't a whole day that had been found -- it was only 23 hours and 20 minutes.  Which left 40 minutes unaccounted for, "which could mean trouble 1000 years from now."  Why it isn't trouble now, I have no idea, but concern for our distant descendants sent the NASA folks back on a search for the missing 2/3 of an hour.

And you'll never guess where they found it.

The Bible.  See, I told you you'd never guess.

As the Christian employee thought about it, he remembered somewhere in the Bible which said the sun went backwards.  The scientists told him he was out of his mind, but once again they opened the Book and read these words in 2 Kings.  Hezekiah, on his deathbed, was visited by the prophet, Isaiah, who told him he was not going to die.  Hezekiah asked for some sign as proof.  Isaiah said: “Shall the sun go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?”  And Hezekiah answered: “It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees; nay, but let the shadow return backwards ten degrees.”  Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord, and He brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.”  (2 Kings 20:9 -11).  Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes!  Twenty-three hours and twenty minutes in Joshua, plus 40 minutes in 2 Kings accounted for the missing day in the universe!

Which would have been the cause for even more rejoicing, if the whole thing hadn't been made up.  I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist (a real one, I mean, like they have at NASA) to find the story eye-rollingly ridiculous, but it has been so widely circulated -- I've seen it three times on Facebook just in the last week -- that it actually has a Snopes page dedicated to it.  In it, we find out that Harold Hill was the president of Curtis Engine Company of Baltimore, but that's pretty much the only thing in the story that is true.  First off, Hill wasn't a NASA consultant.  It turns out that Hill was an evangelical Christian with a fairly loose interpretation of the word "true," because he'd read about the "lost day" legend in a book by Harold Rimmer entitled The Harmony of Science and Scripture and decided that the story would carry more punch if he claimed he'd witnessed the whole thing happening.  He embellished his account -- adding, of course, accolades such as "NASA consultant" for himself -- and repeated it many times in public speeches.  He even devoted a whole chapter to it in his 1974 book How to Live Like a King's Kid, apparently because by then, he'd told the tale so many times that he actually was beginning to believe it.

John Martin, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Over Gibeon (1816) [Image is in the Public Domain]

And now with the amazing bullshit conduit that is the internet, the story has roared into life again.  Snopes writer David Mikkelson says about it:

To those who've given over their hearts to God and the Holy Word, this is a deeply satisfying legend.  Faith is, after all, the firm belief in something which cannot necessarily be proved, a quality that can leave believers (especially those who find themselves in the midst of non-believers) feeling unsatisfied.  As steadfast as their certainty is, they cannot prove the rightness of the path they tread to those who jeer at their convictions.  And this is a heavy burden to shoulder.  A legend such as the "missing day explained" tale speaks straight to the hearts of those who yearn for a bit of vindication in this life.  Being right isn't always enough: sometimes what one most longs for is sweet recognition from others.

Which may well be the case, but doesn't take away from the problem of a devout follower of a religion that considers "Thou shalt not bear false witness" as one of its fundamental teachings passing along a story that is essentially one long lie.  It makes me wish that as a corollary of the ninth commandment, Yahweh had seen fit to add, "And this meaneth that thou shalt spend five fucking minutes and do a Google search before thou postest this shit on Facebook."

So anyway.  No, NASA is not spending its woefully tiny budget paying scientists to verify the Old Testament.  There's no evidence whatsoever of a "lost day," because against what clock would you be able to verify that time had stopped 3,000 odd years ago?  I'd be much obliged if the people who think that God is going to bless them if they pass along this nonsense would just stop already.  Thank you.

*****************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that has raised a controversy in the scientific world: Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human, by Madeleine Böhme, Rüdiger Braun, and Florian Breier.

It tells the story of a stupendous discovery -- twelve-million-year-old hominin fossils, of a new species christened Danuvius guggenmosi.  The astonishing thing about these fossils is where they were found.  Not in Africa, where previous models had confined all early hominins, but in Germany.

The discovery of Danuvius complicated our own ancestry, and raised a deep and difficult-to-answer question; when and how did we become human?  It's clear that the answer isn't as simple as we thought when the first hominin fossils were uncovered in Olduvai Gorge, and it was believed that if you took all of our millennia of migrations all over the globe and ran them backwards, they all converged on the East African Rift Valley.  That neat solution has come into serious question, and the truth seems to be that like most evolutionary lineages, hominins included multiple branches that moved around, interbred for a while, then went their separate ways, either to thrive or to die out.  The real story is considerably more complicated and fascinating than we'd thought at first, and Danuvius has added another layer to that complexity, bringing up as many questions as it answers.

Ancient Bones is a fascinating read for anyone interested in anthropology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology.  It is sure to be the basis of scientific discussion for the foreseeable future, and to spur more searches for our relatives -- including in places where we didn't think they'd gone.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Infinite stars, important dust, and light's vacation home

I get the oddest emails sometimes.

I guess it's an occupational hazard.  Some of them are very earnest, trying to get me to see the error of my ways and just believe in (circle one: homeopathy, astrology, auras, psychic energy fields, ghosts, Bigfoot, chakras, god).  Others are angry at me for not believing in any of the above, and call me all sorts of names, sometimes giving me anatomically-impossible suggestions as a bonus.

The most puzzling ones, though, are when someone simply sends me a link.  What am I supposed to do with this?  Is it an appeal to believe whatever the website is claiming?  Is it a suggestion for a future blog post?  Is a link to a malware site that will destroy my computer?  Or is it a case of trolling -- sending me something intended to raise my blood pressure to near-aneurysm levels?

I got one of those types yesterday -- an unsigned email from an address I did not recognize, with a link to the site "Scientific Proof of the Bible."  Clearly I couldn't see a site with that title and not click the link.  If the individual who sent it was fishing for skeptics, (s)he hooked one on the first try.

The site has the following header:

The Bible is estimated to have been written between 1450 B.C. and 95 A.D.  This chart shows scientific facts and principles referred to in this ancient Bible, but not actually discovered by humankind until later centuries.  Dead sea scrolls, historical documentation, and word of mouth all confirm the authenticity of the Bible.  Since people had no official knowledge of these scientific facts until more than a thousand years after the Bible was written, is this scientific proof that the Bible was inspired by God?

There follows a list of scientific facts and claims, the Bible verse that allegedly predicted them, and the year that the scientists finally discovered them (proving the Bible right after the fact, is the implication).  For instance we have "Light is a particle and has mass (a photon)," which I think is supposed to be some kind of description of the wave/particle duality of light (I'm being generous, here).  The scientists discovered this in 1932 (says the website), but it had been predicated thousands of years earlier, in Job 38:19.  So I looked up Job 38:19, and it says: "Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof?"

Well, I don't know about you, but as far as I can see, that has fuck-all to do with photons and wave/particle duality.  Other than the mention of the word "light," that is.  And it implies, incorrectly, that light dwelleth somewhere, as if light hath a vacation home in Palm Beach or something.

So I thought, okay, maybe that was just a bad example.  So I tried "An infinite number of stars exist," which was supposedly predicted by Genesis 15:5.  Here's Genesis 15:5: "And he brought him [Abraham] forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be."

Well, the number of Abraham's descendants isn't infinite.  In fact, it isn't even close to the number of stars in our galaxy alone (currently estimated at about 300 billion).  So this one isn't so much irrelevant as it is simply wrong.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

So then I looked at "Dust is important to survival," allegedly discovered by scientists in 1935.  And it's true, I suppose; dust storms carry minerals out over the oceans, and have a great effect on oceanic productivity.  But the quote that allegedly should have told those silly scientists all they needed to know about the phenomenon millennia ago is Isaiah 40:12, which says, "Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of Earth in a measure, and weighed out the mountains in scales, and the hills with a balance?"

Well, I certainly haven't, but the preceding verse seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with dust being "important for survival."

Then we have "Radio astronomy (stars give off signals)," which brings us back to the Book of Job -- Job 38:7, to be specific.  And that verse is: "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."

By this point, I was thinking, "Oh, come on. Is that really the best you can do?"  Because a lot of the rest of them were patently ridiculous -- like claiming that it took scientists until the 19th century to realize that blood was necessary for life, that oceans have currents, and that thunder and lightning were related (hell, my dog figured that last one out).

Oh, and supposedly it wasn't until the 17th century that the scientists realized that both a man and a woman are necessary to make a baby.

How exactly stupid do these people think that scientists are?  I mean, I know that sometimes we nerds can be a little hopeless in the romance department, but even we understand how sex works.

So at this point, I kind of gave it up as a bad job.

I guess I should be, in a way, heartened; that the biblical literalists are feeling threatened enough even to try to create a list like this means that they're recognizing the inroad that rationalism is making.  But man, you'd think if they were going to try to craft a cogent argument, they could manage something a little more convincing.

Of course, this still doesn't answer my initial question, which is whether the person who sent it to me meant it as a suggestion, a criticism, or a dubious attempt to anger me into a coronary.  I'm taking it as the first-mentioned, which is at least the nicest of the three.  And if the person who sent it reads this, please let me know in the "Comments" section if I'm right, just to satisfy my own curiosity.

But do try to avoid any anatomically-impossible suggestions.  Those are kind of off-putting.

*****************************

Being in the middle of a pandemic, we're constantly being urged to wash our hands and/or use hand sanitizer.  It's not a bad idea, of course; multiple studies have shown that communicable diseases spread far less readily if people take the simple precaution of a thirty-second hand-washing with soap.

But as a culture, we're pretty obsessed with cleanliness.  Consider how many commercial products -- soaps, shampoos, body washes, and so on -- are dedicated solely to cleaning our skin.  Then there are all the products intended to return back to our skin and hair what the first set of products removed; the whole range of conditioners, softeners, lotions, and oils.

How much of this is necessary, or even beneficial?  That's the topic of the new book Clean: The New Science of Skin by doctor and journalist James Hamblin, who considers all of this and more -- the role of hyper-cleanliness in allergies, asthma, and eczema, and fascinating and recently-discovered information about our skin microbiome, the bacteria that colonize our skin and which are actually beneficial to our overall health.  Along the way, he questions things a lot of us take for granted... such as whether we should be showering daily.

It's a fascinating read, and looks at the question from a data-based, scientific standpoint.  Hamblin has put together the most recent evidence on how we should treat the surfaces of our own bodies -- and asks questions that are sure to generate a wealth of discussion.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Religious expression in science class

Did you hear about Ohio House Bill 164?

It's been called the "Student Religious Liberties Act."  It contains four provisions:

• It requires public schools to give students the same access to facilities if they want to meet for religious expression as they’d give secular groups.
• It removes a provision that allows school districts to limit religious expression to lunch periods or other non-instructional times.
• It allows students to engage in religious expression before, during and after school hours to the same extent as a student in secular activities or expression.
• It prohibits schools from restricting a student from engaging in religious expression in completion of homework, artwork and other assignments.

It's the last one that made me sit up and take notice.

Despite being an atheist, I have no problem with public schools allowing religious groups to meet on their property, as long as there's no statement (overt or implied) that students are required be there.  I don't really have a problem with provision #2 except that it's ambiguous -- who is leading the religious expression?  If students want to say a prayer before an exam, no big deal.

If the teacher leads the class in a prayer before an exam, big deal.

Eastman Johnson, A Child at Prayer (1873) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Likewise, #3 is no real issue as long as there's no coercion.  But #4?

Just hang on a moment.

So what you're telling me is that my biology students could "engage in religious expression" in their homework, to the extent of saying the Earth is 6,000 years old and life was whooshed into existence by a Big Dude in the Sky?  That they could claim radioisotope dating doesn't work?  That they could state that the Grand Canyon was formed in a big, worldwide flood, and the only survivors were a 700-year-old man and his family who rescued two of each of the nine-million-odd species on Earth, conveniently dropping them off in their ancestral homelands afterward?  And all the water just sort of "went away?"

If an administrator told me I had to do that, my response would include the word "No," but the rest of it would be barely printable without a "strong language" warning.

Teachers are under no obligation to coddle students' erroneous beliefs, whether or not they come under the heading of "religion."  If a kid comes in and tries to convince me homeopathy works or that vaccines cause autism or that there's a secret code in our DNA implanted there by Ancient Aliens, I am abrogating my duty as a science teacher if I don't (gently and kindly) show them why they're wrong.  That's what science is about -- using the tools of inference, logic, and evidence to figure out how things work.

If your wild imaginings, fears, or wishful thinking lead you to an answer that is demonstrably wrong, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to pretend you're right just out of some misguided sympathy.   And I don't care particularly where the aforementioned wrong stuff came from.  It could come from Monster Quest or from Chariots of the Gods... or the Bible.  The source is completely irrelevant.

What matters is that science is about figuring out the truth, not about making us comfortable.

There are folks who might think my fury about this is an overreaction, that provision #4 just guarantees that students can put religious imagery or references into art, personal essays, and so on.  This is nonsense; students have always been able to do that.  (There was a claim zooming around the internet a while back about a kid who had turned in a paper saying her biggest inspiration was Jesus, but the Evil Secular Teacher wrote in red ink "Remove Jesus Please!" and gave her an F.  The illustration was obviously photoshopped, and the whole story made up, but that didn't stop a lot of extremely religious people from posting indignant screeds about how the United States was going to hell.)

No, provision #4 is yet another attack on science teachers, an attempt to shoehorn Genesis and the Great Flood into the classroom.  It's a sneaky way to protect kids who claim there's doubt about evolution (there isn't), that there's no evidence of the Big Bang (there is, plenty of it), and that plate tectonics is false (it's not), allowing them to write down blatant falsehoods in a discipline that is supposed to value the truth, and still not be penalized for it.

It is, simply put, another attempt to destroy the separation of church and state.

Oh, and I didn't tell you the worst news: Ohio House Bill 164 passed.

By a margin of 61 to 3.

I can only hope that the fight's not over, that this legislation will generate lawsuits about constitutionality, but it does demonstrate the fact that the people who would love to see the United States become a fundamentalist theocracy aren't giving up.

***************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Trick or tract

Halloween is this Thursday, so you know what that means: pumpkin decorations and skeletons and ghosts everywhere, candy of all kinds for sale in the stores, people excitedly coming up with creative costumes for parties and trick-or-treating, and the extremely religious telling people that indulging in any of the above will doom them for all eternity.

This time the harbinger of fire and brimstone is none other than Ken Ham, who runs Answers in Genesis and is most famous for "Ark Encounter," a museum (to use the term loosely) in Grant County, Kentucky that has as its mission convincing people that a book documenting the beliefs of a handful of Bronze-Age sheep herders is the best resource we have for understanding science.  According to Ham, here's the way it all went down:

• The Earth is only about six thousand years old.  Any evidence to the contrary is either flat wrong or was put there by Satan to fuck with us.
• In a matter of a few weeks, Noah built a boat capable of holding two of each of the nine-million-odd species on Earth, using only hand tools and materials he could find in the desert.   [Nota bene: The Ark Encounter itself, supposed to be a modernized replica of the Ark, took several years and a few million dollars to finish.  And that was using huge work crews equipped with power tools.]
• The dinosaurs died because they missed getting aboard the Ark.  Oh, and before the Fall of Man, the dinosaurs were all peaceful herbivores.  T. rex, apparently, used his Big Nasty Pointy Teeth to munch on carrots.
• It rained enough to cover the entire land surface area of the planet, and after forty days all the water just kind of went away, presumably down a big drain in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean or something.
• Afterwards, the kangaroos, dingoes, and wombats hopped, skulked, and waddled their way back to Australia unaided, conveniently leaving behind no traces of their thousand-mile journey.

But other than that, it makes complete sense.

Looks to me like there's an issue here with the lions.  Maybe they're gay lions, I dunno.  But even though I applaud them for coming out of the closet, it would still be problematic with respect to rebuilding the lion population, post-Flood.

So anyway, we're already on shaky ground, reality-wise, with Ken Ham weighing in on pretty much anything.  That didn't stop him from giving the devout some suggestions on how to deal with the upcoming Day of Evil.  "One way you can make the most of this once-a-year opportunity is by giving gospel tracts to children and/or their parents," Ham said.

Yeah, that'll make you popular in your neighborhood.

He also recommended buying (from his online store -- of course) some "million-dollar bills" printed with a picture of a T. rex on one side and a picture of the Ark on the other, with edifying messages such as:

• Have you ever lied, stolen or used God’s name in vain?  If so, you’ve broken God’s law.  The penalty for your crimes against God is death and eternal hell because God is holy and just.
• If you have engaged in lust, this is the same as committing adultery.  God sees you as guilty of sin.  The penalty of sin is death and eternity in hell.
• We broke God's law, but Jesus paid our fine.  Proving He satisfied God's justice, He rose from the dead.  Now God as Judge can legally dismiss our case!

Now wait a moment.  "Legally?"  What does that even mean in this context?  Isn't the whole point of the Bible that God can pretty much do whatever he damn well pleases, and we humans just have to suck it up and deal?  Seems like if God wanted to forgive us, he would have just done it, and not gone through the whole nasty crucifixion business.  So that "Jesus paid our fine" thing has never made a scrap of sense to me.  It's kind of like if your brother pissed your dad off, and your dad spanked you.  Then he says to your brother, "You're forgiven now."  When you understandably object to all of this, your dad says, "Well, I had to spank someone, right?"

In any case, I wouldn't throw away your bags full of Snickers bars and replace them with gospel tracts.  For one thing, it seems like a good way to get your house egged.  Second, warning trick-or-treaters about the dangers of lust seems to me to be targeting the wrong audience, even if you think lustful thoughts are evil, which I don't because that would mean that 99% of humanity is destined for eternal hellfire.

So have fun with your costumes and scary decorations and whatnot.  Honestly, it seems a lot more sensible than all the stuff Ken Ham is trying to get you to believe.  And that's even if you account for the gay lion couple.

************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a really cool one: Andrew H. Knoll's Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth.

Knoll starts out with an objection to the fact that most books on prehistoric life focus on the big, flashy, charismatic megafauna popular in children's books -- dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Allosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, and impressive mammals like Baluchitherium and Brontops.  As fascinating as those are, Knoll points out that this approach misses a huge part of evolutionary history -- so he set out to chronicle the parts that are often overlooked or relegated to a few quick sentences.  His entire book looks at the Pre-Cambrian Period, which encompasses 7/8 of Earth's history, and ends with the Cambrian Explosion, the event that generated nearly all the animal body plans we currently have, and which is still (very) incompletely understood.

Knoll's book is fun reading, requires no particular scientific background, and will be eye-opening for almost everyone who reads it.  So prepare yourself to dive into a time period that's gone largely ignored since such matters were considered -- the first three billion years.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support 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.

"Gotcha" proselytizing

A frequent reader and commenter on Skeptophilia sent me a note a few days ago, with a link and the cryptic comment, "Gordon, I think you need to take a look at this."  At first, I was a bit puzzled, because it looked like the link was to my own website -- but underneath the link was an explanation that the individual had discovered the link by accidentally mistyping the website address as skeptophilia.blogpsot.com.  (Bet it took you a while to notice the misspelling, didn't it?  It did me.)

So, anyway, I clicked on the link, and was brought to a website that says it's going to "PROVE that the Bible is the Word of God."

Vincent van Gogh, Still Life With Bible (April 1885) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

To say that I found this a little alarming was an understatement.  Had someone gone to the lengths of purchasing a website name one letter off from mine, to catch off guard the unwary (and possibly uneasy) skeptics and agnostics who thought they were going to visit a site devoted to rationalism?  I've been the target of negative comments before, from angry believers in everything from homeopathy to hauntings, and certainly have gotten my share of hate mail from the vehemently religious contingent who are bothered by the fact that I am an atheist who is completely, and confidently, "out," and am unapologetic about teaching evolution in my biology classroom.  But this seemed kind of out there even for those folks.

Fortunately, my wife, who is blessed with a better-than-her-fair-share amount of common sense and a good grounding in technology, suggested that I try typing in SomethingElse.blogpsot.com.  So I did.  I first tried the address for my fiction blog, but put in the deliberate misspelling for "blogspot."  It brought me to the same place.  Then I tried "CreationismIsBullshit.blogpsot.com."  Same thing.

So apparently, the owner of this ultra-fundamentalist website, with its babble about the Rapture and Armageddon and the literal truth of the bible, had just bought the domain name "blogpsot.com," so that any time anyone makes that particular misspelling in heading to their favorite blog, it takes them to that site.  I was relieved, actually; the thought that someone would go to all that trouble to target me in particular was a little alarming.  (And evidently the fact that on the homepage of the "blogpsot" site, there is a link for "The World's Biggest Skeptic" is just a coincidence.)

However, you have to wonder if the person who owns the site really is laboring under the mistaken impression that this is an effective proselytizing tool.  Can you really imagine someone who is trying to check out the latest post on his/her favorite blog on, say, sewing, and lands here -- and then suddenly goes all glassy-eyed, and says, "Good heavens.  I get it now.  The bible is true, the Rapture is coming, and I'd better repent right now."

No, neither can I.

And when you think about it, the door-to-door religion salesmen that periodically show up in our neighborhoods are the same kind of thing, aren't they?  A little less covert and sneaky, that's all.  But they're trying to accomplish the same goal -- catching you off guard, getting a foot in the door, spreading the message.

Although, for the good of the order, I have to admit that the Mormons who showed up last year while I was stacking firewood were pretty cool.  When they found out in short order that I was a poor prospect for conversion, they shrugged and smiled and we chatted for a while about other stuff, and then they offered to help me stack firewood.  Which I refused, mainly because they weren't really dressed for yard work, but it was an awfully nice gesture.

Anyhow, my previous comment about its being an ineffective tool is probably irrelevant, really.  It's like spam emails.  If you send out a million emails, and your success rate is 0.1%, you've still made money, because of the extremely low overhead.  Same here; you get unsuspecting drop-ins, people who thought they were going to read a blog on cake baking or fishing or chess, and suddenly they find they're on a "gotcha" proselytizing webpage.  Most of the target individuals say no, or hit the "Back" button -- but the fraction of a percent that don't are your payoff.

The whole thing pisses me off, frankly, because it's so sneaky.  Even if it wasn't targeted at me specifically, it just seems like a skeevy way to get converts.  But to a lot of these folks, how you convert people is unimportant -- the essential thing is to convert them in the first place.  If you can grab people when their rational faculties are not expecting it, all the better -- because, after all, rationality is the last thing they want to engage.