New research: Earth probably had water from the very first day

Genesis says that there was plenty of water on Earth from the beginning. Image courtesy of NASA.


Joel Kontinen

”Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” This is how Genesis describes the birth of our planet.

Astronomers who believe in the Nebular Hypothesis or some other natural explanation of how the solar system was formed have assumed that in the beginning Earth was too hot for liquid water.

The origin of the Earth’s oceans has been a mystery for astronomers. They have suggested that comets might be a plausible source of water. However, the water on comets differs considerably from the water we find on Earth. Asteroid impacts cannot solve the riddle, either, since their elements differ from those on Earth. For instance, they have more platinum than we have.

Nora de Leeuw, a chemist at University College London, and her colleagues made a computer simulation of Earth's birth process. They conclude that dust particles could be able to cling on to water at 630 degrees Celsius ( 1,166 degrees Fahrenheit). They thus suggest that there could have been liquid water on Earth from the very beginning.

Recently, they published their research results in the journal Chemical Communications.

Although the basic premise of Leeuw and her colleagues probably differs considerably from that what Moses wrote in Genesis, their research brings up serious weaknesses in naturalistic origin hypotheses and suggests that Moses knew what he was writing about when he said that there was water on earth at the very beginning:

” And God said, 'Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.' And it was so. God called the dry ground 'land,' and the gathered waters he called 'seas.' And God saw that it was good. ” (Genesis 1:9-10).

Source:

Shiga, David. 2010. Earth may have had water from day one. New Scientist 2785 (5 November).

Moses and a strong wind: a new explanation of the Red Sea crossing

Moses by Jusepe de Ribero in 1638. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

Climate scientist Carl Drews and colleagues recently published a paper in PLoS ONE, discussing how the Israelites under Moses could have crossed the Red Sea without getting their feet wet.

Exodus is an intriguing description of what God can do. Drews and colleagues tried to find a naturalistic explanation of how the Israelites, who had been enslaved by the Egyptians, were able to reach safety.

Exodus describes the method Jahweh used as follows:

”Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the LORD drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided, and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left.”

Drews used computer simulations to find out how the waters could have parted. He concluded that if a powerful east wind blowing at slightly over 100 kilometres (over 60 miles) per hour blew for twelve hours, it could push the waters back so that Israel would be able to cross the sea.

Drews brings up the report of a British general who in 1882 witnessed a powerful easterly wind that pushed the waters apart. According to Drews, it could have opened a land bridge for a few hours.

Commenting on the study in USA Today, Ken Ham, the CEO of Answers in Genesis, says: ”The parting of the Red Sea was a miracle. It was an extraordinary act of God. Yet, God used a force of nature — wind — to bring about this miracle. But there is no need to come up with a naturalistic explanation of a supernatural event."

In any case, God rules over nature. He could freely choose how He would lead His people to freedom. The Book of Isaiah, for instance, states:

” 'I am the LORD, your Holy One, Israel's Creator, your King.' This is what the LORD says— he who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters, who drew out the chariots and horses, the army and reinforcements together, and they lay there, never to rise again, extinguished, snuffed out like a wick: 'Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!' ” (Isaiah 43: 15-19).

It is good to remember that God not only did great deeds in the past but that He also works in our time.

Source:

Rice, Doyle. 2010. Study seeks to explain the parting of the Red Sea. USA Today (20 September).

The Earth’s Watery Origin

Genesis records that our planet had plenty of water from the beginning. Image courtesy of NASA.



Joel Kontinen

According to the naturalistic model of origins, Earth began as a dry planet and got its water as comets crashed into it.

However, recent research takes issue with this view. Maria Schönbächler at the University of Manchester, Richard Carlson of the Carnegie Institution and colleagues looked at the silver isotopes of meteorites and Earth rocks and concluded that our planet had to have water at a very early stage.

They believe that palladium-107, which has a half life of 6.5 million years, decayed into silver -107 very early in the history of our planet and that Earth got its water much earlier than previously assumed.

This study, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), was published in Science last week. Although it pays lips service to the idea of millions of years, it actually gives support to the Genesis model.

3500 years ago Moses already knew things about the Earth that scientists discovered recently. He wrote in Genesis:

”And God said, ’Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry ground ’land,’ and the gathered waters he called ’seas.’ And God saw that it was good.” (Gen. 1:9-10)

Sources:


Silver Tells a Story of Early Earth: Water Here Since Planet's Very Early Days. National Science Foundation Press Release 13 May 2010.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116934&org=GEO&from=news

Water Was Present During Birth of Earth, Study of Silver Suggests. ScienceDaily 14 May 2010.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100513143457.htm

Easter programme interprets the plagues of Egypt as natural catastrophes

Jusepe de Ribero: Moses (1638). Image courtesy of Wikipedia. In the National Geographic version, Moses must have lived over 300 years.




Joel Kontinen


Easter almost always inspires the media to invent naturalistic explanations for biblical miracles. While the hypotheses have often been intriguing, they have by no means been credible. The speculations included Jesus walking on an ice floe, Moses getting his visions under the influence of a psychoactive drug, and the discovery of Jesus’ ossuary or bone box.

This year, it’s the turn of Moses and the plagues of Egypt. A group of scientists suggest that they can be explained by natural causes.

National Geographic Channel produced a programme that explained the plagues as a series of natural catastrophes. The speculations began with the (assumed) balmy climate during the reign of Rameses II.

This was followed by sudden drought that brought Oscillatoria rubescens algae into the Nile. The water turned red (the first plague). The algae drove frogs onto dry land (the second plague), and when they died, gnats and flies flourished (the third and fourth plagues).

The insects spread diseases to both animals (the fifth plague) and humans (the sixth plague).

Next, the researchers had to resort to a volcano eruption on the Greek island of Thera (now known as Santorini) that caused sudden climate change and brought hail (the seventh plague), locusts (the eight plague) and darkness (the ninth plague). This part of the scenario is slightly more credible than the preceding elements.

National Geographic explains the final plague as a fungus that contaminated grain. The earliest grains were given to the firstborn who died first. There is no need for God or His judgements in this model.

Although God can use natural phenomena to judge nations and individuals, it is not plausible to explain away everything by appealing to naturalistic causes.

Furthermore, the NG scenario includes a minor miscalculation. The volcano on Thera erupted 300 years before the time of Rameses II who lived in the 13th century B. C. so in this version the most severe plagues came first and they must have continued for three centuries.

Moses must thus have been over 350 years old when he led the Israelites out of Egypt. According to the Old Testament, he died at the age of 120.

In the 18th century it became fashionable to doubt the Scriptures, but this often resulted in absurd explanations. Thus, for instance, Jesus was said to have walked on an ice floe on a lake that has never been known to freeze.

While NG’s Easter programme might be somewhat more credible than walking on ice in the sub-tropics, the Book of Exodus provides a much more logical explanation for what happened when God used Moses to liberate the Israelites from slavery and oppression that according to Exodus 12:40 had lasted for over four centuries.

Source:

Gray, Richard. 2010. Biblical plagues really happened say scientists. Daily Telegraph (27 March)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7530678/Biblical-plagues-really-happened-say-scientists.html

Freud and Darwinian Just So Stories

Moses by Jusepe de Ribero (1638). Image from Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

It is no secret that just so stories thrive in Neo-Darwinian explanations of the past. Based more on imagination than data, they get their name from Nobelist Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 collection Just So Stories for Little Children.

Recently, I read Sigmund Freud’s book Moses and Monotheism (1939). The Father of Psychoanalysis was not averse to similar tales, either.

In Moses and Monotheism Freud’s attempts to build a “general theory of monotheism”. He tries to convince his readers that Moses was actually an Egyptian who succeeded in turning the Israelites from polytheism into following his monotheistic religion. Unfortunately, Moses was killed in the desert but according to Freud his fame lived on in the history of Israel.

Some details in Moses’ life that Freud mentions are plausible and obviously correct, such as his Egyptian-sounding name (Mose) and the brief period of monotheism in Egyptian history under Akhenaten or Amenhotep IV during the 18th dynasty.

But most of Freud’s ideas would not merit the use of the word theory in its scientific sense. Like so much else in Freudian thinking, his attempt to explain the birth of monotheism amounts to pure speculation.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) admits that he borrowed some concepts from Charles Darwin whom he obviously admired. In an earlier work called Totem and Taboo (1912) he formulated a scenario about the birth of religion.

In Moses and Monotheism Freud says, ”From Darwin I borrowed the hypothesis that all men originally lived in small hordes; each of the hordes stood under the rule of an older male, who governed by brute force, appropriated all the females, and belaboured or killed all the young males, including his own sons.” (p. 168).

His view relied on the evolutionary idea that religion gradually evolved from a simple beginning towards a more institutionalised form. This, however, is not supported by any evidence. The data is more supportive of the biblical view of monotheism degenerating into polytheism.

Fortunately, Freud was bold enough to admit that his view was only a hypothesis. It does not merit being called a theory since it basically is just another just so story.


Source:

Freud, Sigmund. 1939. Moses and Monotheism. Translated by Katherine Jones. New York: Vintage Books.

Moses on Drugs: A Brave New Theory or Extremely Bad Science?

Moses by Jusepe de Ribero in 1638. Image from Wikipedia


Joel Kontinen

It has become easy to predict when Easter is coming even without looking at a calendar. Each year we get to hear about some new astounding discovery and the authors of the sensational find get their moment of fame and occasionally some extra money, also.

This time last year the Discovery Channel announced “the archaeological discovery of the century”. The find turned out to be a commercial for the documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus. Filmmakers James Cameron and Simca Jacobovici bypassed the peer review process and took their evidence (two empty ossuaries or bone boxes) straight to the media. At the end, almost all serious scholars dismissed the discovery as mere hype with little if any substance behind it. There was no hard evidence that the boxes had ever contained the earthly remains of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

In 2006 it was the Jesus Walked on Ice hypothesis that was actually published in a scientific journal. The idea of anyone walking on an ice floe on a lake that obviously never freezes is rather bizarre.

For a change, this year’s hype is about the Old Testament. Benny Shannon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem published a 24-page paper in Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture in which he suggested that Moses’ experience at Mount Sinai was caused by drugs. The paper, Biblical Entheogens: A Speculative Hypothesis is an updated and a more detailed version of his 2002 paper Entheogens: Reflections on ‘Psychoactive Sacramentials’, which was mostly about shamanism and the use of psychoactive plants in various non-Christian religions, such as the use of hallucination-inducing plants by some native American tribes, but it also included a discussion on Moses and his Sinai experience. The present paper focuses more on Judaism and the exodus.

Nothing in the biblical text about the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai even hints of any kind of hallucination. Shannon acknowledges this. However, he says that two plants, Peganum Harmala and Mimosa hostilis, which now grow in the Sinai Peninsula can potentially cause hallucinations. Shannon tries to see parallels between some of the details (such as fire) in the Exodus text with for instance the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the use of LSD but it seems that he is jumping to unwarranted conclusions.

Professor Shannon is honest enough to disclose that his “finding” is based on his presuppositions. He reveals that he does not think that the Mount Sinai event (i.e. when Moses received the Law) could be historically reliable or that it could be a myth so for him the only remaining alternative is that it was the result of a hallucination caused by a plant growing in the Sinai Peninsula.

While it is true that some religions do use drugs that produce hallucinations, Shannon’s hypothesis seems to have nothing to do with real science and everything with his own past.

Shannon acknowledged that in 1991 he tried ayahuasca, a tropical plant that causes strong hallucinations, during a religious ceremony in Brazil. This seems to be the only real reason for supposing that Moses might have experimented with something similar.

It might be good to keep in mind that the novelist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), whom Shannon mentions in his new paper and who is remembered for his Brave New World (1932), admitted experimenting with mescalin and LSD. But this does not necessarily mean that Huxley produced all his literary works under the influence of drugs. The case for Moses’ use of drugs is even weaker.

There is an expression known as March Madness. In this case, it seems to have more to do with professor Shannon, his past and his bizarre hypothesis than with Moses. His Brave New Theory turns out to be extremely bad science.


Sources:

AFP News: Moses was high on drugs: Israeli researcher. 4 March 2008.

Shannon, Benny. 2002. Entheogens. Reflections on ‘Psychoactive Sacramentals’. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9:4, 85-94.

Shannon, Benny, 2008. Biblical Entheogens: A Speculative Hypothesis. Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture, 1:1, 51-74 (March 2008).