Genesis Falsified

A Critique of the Account of Creation Posited by the Book of Genesis

There are a great many people who take the biblical book of Genesis as a literal document, detailing the events responsible for the origin of the universe, our planet, and  our species.  In fact, this belief is quite common, held by millions of Americans to this day.  In some circles, it has become fashionable.  The various schools of creationism fall along a continuum between these two positions.  Young earth creationists take genesis quite literally, to the extent of postulating that nearly every geological event has an explanation in the so called “Noachian” flood.  These are religious views, however, and not shared by the scientific community.  The vast majority of the scientific community do not see the biblical account of creation described in the book of Genesis as a meaningful source of scientific hypotheses.

From a the perspective of a contemporary scientist, to take the Book of Genesis as a scientific document, as creationists have done, is misguided for a variety of reasons.  

One reason is that the book details supernatural events.  Contemporary science seeks to explain phenomena based upon reproducible, repeatable, and potentially comprehensible patterns.  Supernatural explanations, very common in ancient and medieval cosmology, are no longer considered to be valid science.  We no longer consider it fruitful to explain a phenomenon in terms of forces that are inherently beyond our understanding.  Supernatural thinking gets us nowhere.  

Another reason is that, in order to be a good scientific hypothesis, it should be possible, at least in theory, to demonstrate that the notion is wrong.  This notion of falisifiability is central to contemporary science, because it allows us to put our notions of reality up to the test and see which ones hold up.  The book of Genesis, being a religious doctrine, is also unfalsifiable.  It is central to a great many divergent religious doctrines, and as such, will not be abandoned by its adherents.  Any potential test of validity by such an adherent will be explained not as a failure of the supernatural, but as a failure of the investigator or the investigation.  The rules must be rewritten because the belief cannot be abandoned.  Unfalsifiable notions, “Truths” that must be accepted regardless of the facts, violate the fundamental tenets of contemporary science. 

Objectivity, and the lack of it among its proponents, is another reason for rejecting Genesis as a scientific document, or at least rejecting any hypothesis test conducted by believers.  The religious doctrines surrounding the biblical book of Genesis police its validity.  To deny the reality of the events described therein is believed by some to carry the potential for terrible supernatural punishment in the afterlife.  That, in and of itself, virtually guarantees that the document cannot be taken as any kind of scientific evidence.  By its very nature, it motivates any believer to create hypothesis tests that appear to confirm its validity.  The scientist cannot be objective, or even skeptical, without a substantial threat to their view in the eyes of the creator.  

I think it quite possible that this fear of supernatural punishment is the motivation behind earnest attempts by those few scientists with creationist beliefs to demonstrate the validity of the biblical account of creation, and to persist in such attempts despite an almost complete disconnect between the events detailed in the book of Genesis and any modern scientific understanding of our solar system and our universe 

Would it be a useful exercise to consider the book of Genesis to be a scientific document, generated several thousand years ago by the mind of god acting through the oral and literary traditions of humans, full of potentially testable hypotheses, each potentially confirmed by astronomical, biological, physical, and anthropological discoveries made since then?  Are there testable hypotheses in Genesis, waiting for the right observation?

Perhaps we should take the Book of Genesis as a scientific hypothesis, formulated approximately four thousand years ago, and see how well it holds up to the scientific observations we have conducted since then.  If there is a strong correspondence between its predictions, and later observations, we can conclude that it has some validity.  Maybe we have found scientific proof for the existence of god.  If there is little or no correspondence, we must be reasonable and toss Genesis into the scientific trash heap.   

From the onset, the Book of Genesis gives the clear impression that the Hebrew conception of the universe was thoroughly thoroughly anthropocentric, quite small, and subject to laws and mechanisms that were quaint even by the standards of the more literate societies of the time.  I take these lines from a New American Bible, St. Joseph Edition, but the more famous King James Edition translates the same passages somewhat differently.  This issue, translation from ancient Hebrew, presents its own difficulties, which I will discuss later.

Though variously translated into English, the oft-quoted first line of Genesis reads as follows:

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind covered the waters.”

This line reveals the ancient Hebrew conception of the ocean as a wasteland.  Being landlocked, mostly nomadic, pastoralists, they knew of no life that could exist under the ocean, and viewed a dark world filled with ocean as a hostile, primordial, place.  From an anthropological point of view, it would be sensible to hypothesize that he Hebrews borrowed and adapted their model of cosmology, and their origin myth, from their neighbors.  In fact, many elements are held in common between Genesis and the Babylonian story of Earth’s origins.  This is exactly the sort of thinking I am trying to avoid here, however.  We are to take the book of Genesis literally, an accurate account of God’s creation transmitted to the minds of the ancient Hebrews, perhaps about 3000 BCE.  

From the first line, we can draw two of predictions;

PREDICTION  ONE: At its origin, the earth was totally and permanently dark.  It harbored an ocean and an atmosphere.  

PREDICTION FALSIFIED:  Nobody was there at the origin of the earth, but the current scientific model for the formation of the solar system is well-supported by several lines of astronomical and geological evidence.  Solar systems, including our own, form from the collapse of interstellar clouds of gas and dust.  Stars are forming today, and telescopic observations of some of them, such as Vega, have indicated that rotating disks of dust, laced with debris, are condensing into planets as I write this.  The best evidence we have indicates that earth aggregated together from millions of tiny grains of dust, which formed larger objects called “planetesimals”.  The aggregation of these particles released an enormous amount of heat, through the radioactive decay of elements, and the initial surface of the earth was molten for a period of time sufficient to allow the heavier elements to sink the bottom.  As large objects formed from these smaller dust grains, the Earth was bombarded by objects, ranging in size from grains of sand to mountains, more or less constantly.  Early in the process, the earth must have developed a hydrogen atmosphere, which was blown off by radiation from the sun, and replaced a few million years or more later with a new atmosphere, and ocean, resulting from outgassing of volcanic gasses.  The vulcanism, and to a lesser extent, bombardment by meteors, continues to this day.

     

This sounds like the stuff of a great creation myth, but curiously, genesis says nothing about this.  On one hand, it is very likely that early in its history, after the crust cooled, the earth developed a very impressive ocean.  It is possible that large continents did not form until hundreds of millions of years later, and the extensive vulcanism must have given rise to irregular and unstable weather patterns.  However, a young sun shown in the sky, and there was never a time when the earth existed without a sun.  From the perspective of current science, an ocean, or an atmosphere, without a sun, is completely impossible.  Without a sun, the atmosphere would freeze.  So would the oceans.  The earth would go careening into space, and there is no chance that it would be part of a solar system with other planets, in regular coplanar orbits, as we observe them today.  If you take this passage literally, you have to count this as a falisfication of the Genesis model, which fails to mention dust clouds, planitesimals, outgassing, radioactive elements, or anything exciting like collisions with asteroids and protoplanets.  Even if we are to discard these events, since they have not been directly observed, Genesis is completely wrong in its postulation of an earth without a sun.

PREDICTION TWO: The earth was here at the beginning of the cosmos.

PREDICTION FALSIFIED:  Many diverse lines of evidence suggest that the Earth and the solar system are approximately 4.5 billion years old.  Other lines of evidence, too numerous to mention, suggest that the universe is older, approximately 12 billion years old.  The big bang model of the origin of the universe is supported by several lines of evidence, including a pervasive, universal red shift in the spectra of distant galaxies, indicating that the universe is expanding and has been continuing to expand for a very long time.  The oldest stars, and galaxies, we can see, are 10-11 billion years old, something we can infer from their red shift.  Astronomers have dated globular clusters in our galaxy at close to that age.  Generations of stars came and went before the origin of the sun, these generations seeding the universe with the heavier elements from which our planet is built.  Contemporary astrophysics has determined, quite conclusively, that all of the atoms in the universe heavier than hydrogen and helium, come from the centers of exploding stars.  The bible says nothing about the big bang, the origin of subatomic particles from more exotic high-energy states that existed early in the universe’s history, its progression from a hot place full of exotic radiation and strange particles to a cooler place full of the types of matter and energy we experience today.  Genesis says nothing about other solar systems, or how the galaxy coalesced from clouds of early gas and protostars.  Yet, these events are well supported by contemporary astrophysics.  We can measure the microwave background resulting from the big bang.  We observe a shift in the spectrum of distant galaxies because the universe continues to expand, billions of years after its origin.  Even if it turns out that the dominant paradigm in astrophysics, the big bang theory of the origin of the universe, is subverted, we must conclude that genesis is falsified simply because the bible states something that is flatly wrong.  The universe did not begin with the earth, it was here before.

The next line is even more famous than the first:

“And God said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.  God saw how good the light was.  God then separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night’.  Thus, the evening came, and the morning followed-the first day”

PREDICTION:  Day and night, as we experience them on Earth, are a fundamental attribute of the cosmos.

PREDICTION FALSIFIED:  Day and night are a subjective phenomenon.  The ancient Hebrews were unaware that the Earth was a sphere, and that when night occurs, light from the sun is effectively blocked by the mass of earth underfoot, and that when day returns, it is the rotation of the earth, bringing the viewer into sunlight, that causes this.  As I type this, during the day, it is night in Bangalore.  I can email friends in Moscow and verify this firsthand.

Next Line.

“Then God Said, ‘Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters, to separate one body of water from the other.”  And so it happened.  God made the dome, and it separated the water above the dome from the water below it.  God called the dome ‘the sky”.  Evening came, and morning followed-the second day.

PREDICTION:  The Earth has a dome over it, a physical object that makes up the sky.  Above this dome is water, somehow held back by this dome.  The major bodies of water on earth have somehow been separated from it.  

PREDICTION FALSIFIED.  The sky is not a physical piece of architecture.  It is a gaseous envelope.  There is no vast ocean of water just beyond the sky.  In fact, the clouds of water vapor we can easily observe from earth make up a very small proportion of the water on the earth, much less than the ocean.

It is quite clear at this point that, to take the book of Genesis seriously as a scientific document, one has to reject nearly every aspect of our understanding of the Earth, its shape and size, the nature of its atmosphere, and its age.  Genesis predicts an essentially flat earth, with a dome over it, and an ocean of water above a physical dome.  Many aspects of our everyday lives contradict this.  Anyone who has seen a satelite weather forecast has had an everyday experience that contradicts Genesis.  Even as this account was being passed from one generation of Hebrews to the next, the Greek scientist, Animaxander, was demonstrating that the Earth was indeed spherical.  From a scientific perspective, Genesis has been falsified for nearly three thousand years.

The next line reads:

“‘Let the water under the sky be gathered into a single basin, so that dry land may appear.’ and so it happened:  The water under the sky was gathered into its basin, and dry land appeared.  God called the dry land ‘The Earth’ and the basin of water he called ‘The Sea” and he saw how good it was.”

PREDICTION:  The continents of the earth result from the spontaneous formation of an ocean basin.  The oceans receded from the continental land masses.  

PREDICTION FALSIFIED:  There is no geological evidence for this, in fact, available evidence suggests that the contemporary continents, as we see them, are composed of lighter crustal material that effectively floats upon the Earth’s mantle.  The ocean basis could not have been excavated from them.  Geologically, they are composed of different minerals, and are recycled by tectonic activity as new ocean basin is pushed up from the Earth’s mantle and older basis in subducted beneath the continents.  There is no excavation activity we can observe, nor is there any evidence that such events ocurred in the past.  What evidence we have suggests that the continents originated as patches of crustal material called “cratons”, which have gradually accumulated area as smaller expanses of continent, island chains and the like, have been brought into contact with them by tectonic activity.  Mountains can be pushed up by tectonic activity, this process continues to this day, and new continental material can take shape as sedimentation erodes these structures and forms new sedimentary rock, but no process excavates the ocean basins so that dry land can form.  It is becoming apparent, at this point, that the originators of this document had a very limited knowledge of geography.  There is no single basin called “the sea”, in fact, there are many ocean basis on the earth, and many lesser bodies of water.  Not all bodies of salt water occupy deep basins, for instance, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf are quite shallow, relatively speaking.  Huge bodies of fresh water exist, with no apparent origin so far.

Next line.

“Then God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth vegetation: every kind of plant that bears seed and every kind of fruit tree on earth that bears fruit with its seed with its seed in it.’ And so it happened:  the earth brought forth every kind of plant that bears seed and every kind of fruit tree on earth that bears fruit with its seed in it.  God saw how good it was.  Evening came, and morning followed-the third day.

PREDICTION: Angiosperms, and most likely gymnosperms as well, were created by a supernatural power, after the origin  of land, but before the later appearance of the sun.  

PREDICTION FALISFIED:  There is no evidence of a sudden appearance of gymnosperms, worldwide, before the origin of other life forms.  The fossil record contradicts this in the most unequivocal way.  Life existed for millions of years before the first terrestrial plants, and the first plants did not bear seed or fruit, they produced spores.  Various aquatic forms of vegetation existed before these plants, for hundreds of millions of years, and before that, photosynthetic prokaryotes.  Curiously, the biblical book of Genesis does not provide an account of the origin of life.  The first living organisms mentioned are sophisticated photosynthetic life forms, interdependent with fungi, bacteria, and insects for their survival.  It is not clear when insects originate, and it seems obvious to any reader versed in ecology that the originiators of the document lack any understanding that vascular plants, in order to produce fruit, generally require insect pollinators.

How much farther do I need to go?  There is a second, contradictory creation myth coming up soon.  A good theory does not contradict itself.

It has always been my belief that to take the biblical account of creation as literal truth is laughable from a scientific perspective, but unfortunate from a religious perspective as well.  Genesis was written by a variety of authors, entirely unknown to history, many from nonliterate societies, spanning a considerable amount of time.  It is a nuanced and complicated document, originally written in an ancient language very different from the english of the King James Version of the Bible, and conceived by authors with the limited and idiosyncratic perspective of ancient nomadic and agricultural peoples.  

Though it has been evolutionary biologists who have taken the brunt of the attacks by creationists, it is easy to demonstrate that a literal interpretation of the biblical story of creation runs contrary to our contemporary understanding of astronomy, physics, mathematics, chemistry, history, anthropology, and just about every other science.  It should also be obvious that to take genesis as literally true is to assume that the majority of human beings who occupy the planet, as well as nearly all of those who have come before, are simply wrong in their own religious or scientific beliefs.  If Geneis is literally true, the Hindu account of creation clearly must be wrong, as must be every Native American, Polynesian, or African account of creation.  God is a male entity, an we live in a universe in which one small group of tribal peoples, living in a narrow window of time, has been favored over all the humans who have lived before or since.

From a theological perspective, it is nonsensical to imagine that a document of such subtlety, containing loaded passages and mysterious contradictions, was intended by a supernatural power as a literal account of anything.  I have read the bible a few times, but I do not pretend to be a theologian.  It is clear, however, that  the various authors, both those that transcribed ancient oral traditions, and those late authors that collected written material into a single account, rejecting books and passages that did not fit established doctrine, were not literal thinkers, and intended their document to be strange and full of interesting allegories.  Religious books must maintain a sense of mystery to them.